$1k, $10k, $100k. Watching this nonsensical hype at every stage left me in disbelief. Funny thing is after all these years I’m finally realizing there’s no reason whatsoever why it couldn’t hit $1M, $1B, or go back to $1.
Anytime we see a dollar symbol we assume something has value like a traditional asset, tied to tangible or measurable things like material costs, a company’s quarterly earnings, etc. But cryptocurrencies are totally different. This thing’s dollar value per unit wildly fluctuates literally hourly, because it’s based purely on human emotion and speculation.
There is an upper limit on the aggregate value of money - somehow related to the amount of stored value in the economy. On the other hand, there is no lower limit on the value of a dollar.
If bitcoin reaches $1B it will be through some combination of dollar depreciation and bitcoin appreciation.
>no reason whatsoever why it couldn’t hit $1M, $1B, or go back to $1
Not entirely true. The value is driven by number of people invested x average amount they have invested. Most of the historic increase has been as the number of people involved increased. Currently that's probably in the 100 - 200 million people range. It could 10x from here to $1M per bitcoin but is unlikely to go to $1B or $1.
What do you think the number of people and average amount they have invested is based on? I’m saying it’s based purely on emotion and speculation. It could be a sunny day so people feel good and put more money into Bitcoin. That’s quite different from egg prices skyrocketing after chickens get bird flu or stock price skyrocketing after an amazing earnings report or the dollar skyrocketing because of a fast growing economy.
It's changed in fairly predictable ways - the number of people grows fairly stably and the price goes in roughly four year waves, up something like 5x or more then down 85%. So there's emotion and speculation but in a kind of consistent way in practice.
The amount of money flowing into it has been a real shock.
I too played with bitcoin many years ago, mining on my CPU. Like a sucker I got rid of it because it clearly was not useful at its stated purpose.
Why have we created an economy where this kind of speculation is rewarded so highly, while it contributes nothing back to society? It's nonsensical.
But once you accept that finance is kind of ridiculous (and completely decoupled from any meaningful work in the real world), you can see that there is no limit to how high it can go.
I'm failing to understand the proposition behind bitcoin.
From what I remember, the amount of BTC is finite, so eventually we will run out of new BTCs, and by then, most will be held by big institutions and some individuals who didn't want to sell, and it will become yet another luxury commodity like diamonds or gold. Hence, the entire premise of "Bitcoin is the future of money" is kind of stupid, unless it's money for the ultrarich/lucky, because it's not available to the common folks.
And even if it was available to the common folks, how do you expect to live in a world where your currency changes value drastically from day to day? Isn't that a characteristic of a defaulted state/currency?
But let's say it's not the money of the future, but rather a speculative investment that is "not tied to greedy institutions". How does one sell 10 BTC and cash it out, bypassing the "greedy banks"? Last time I checked, most reputable exchanges are somewhat regulated, and in any way, getting a sudden $1M won't go unnoticed by the government.
So yes, I am failing to understand the premise of bitcoin. It seems to fail on both as the currency of the future, as well as unregulated investment instrument.
Ok, so let's say you buy 1 Bitcoin today and then we end up in that future.
Now 21 million minus one ultrarich lucky guys hold one Bitcoin and one stupid poor guy (you) holds one bitcoin? Or would it make you part of the ultrarich lucky club?
Sorry, I'm not sure if I understand your question/statement.
What I wanted to say, is that in its current form, bitcoin IS money for some ultrarich people who have enough of it AND are able to access a commerce world where you can actually buy stuff with it without converting it to fiat currencies. Because last time I checked, I can't buy milk with BTC in my local supermarket, but I bet I can buy some luxury/illegal thing that cost absurd amounts of money (for the common folk) with BTC.
Therefor, the mantra of "Bitcoin is the future of money" that's being pushed by BTC/crypto enthusiasts, is false. It MIGHT be a form of money for people who have lots of it, but not the common folk, doing everyday purchases.
the mantra of "Bitcoin is the future of
money" that's being pushed
I don't see that mantra used in the context of Bitcoin's market cap.
In the concept of value, the aspects of Bitcoin that are relevant is that it has a broad ownership strucure, is finite in supply, is easy to store, validate and transfer.
As the financial system is set up right now, Bitcoin has a lot of potential to reduce friction. For cross-country payments as well as for buying coffee:
Speed, fees, finality.
But the lightning network will have to mature first. We will see if the global financial system evolves faster than the Bitcoin ecosystem. I would expect Bitcoin's ecosystem to evolve faster.
The fact that Bitcoin's blockchain is unusable without unofficial, unreliable and slow L2 chains is kinda evidence that it doesn't have much potential left. If you're a serious country considering using Bitcoin, why even use Lightning at all when you could use a fundamentally better-designed currency? Why invest in Bitcoin if it's already breaking?
It is only unusable for small transfers. Considering it is at only 10% of the Gold market cap - which is even more unusable for small transfers - I think it would even have a lot of potential left without L2s.
As for Lightning being unreliable and slow - I don't see a technical reason for it to stay this way.
What do you consider a "better-designed currency"?
Its a tradable financial asset.
You are indeed right that it cannot be money. As finance people were saying from the very start. The whole point of money is that its possible to influence its price.
When I said luck, I meant people who were among the first to either mine or buy (at an affordable price) whole Bitcoins and held them until this day.
It's fine that common folk can buy fractions of BTC, but these amounts won't change their lives. And anyone who can afford to buy >= 1 BTC today, is already wealthy (or stupid).
That's the irony of it all isn't it - since it's bound to traditional currencies for it's valuation, it's essentially the same thing as a traditional currency except you can't inflate it by printing more of it.
The banks are in on it this time. You can buy crypto on Fidelity, starting with as little as $1. Whether that's better or worse than buying SP500 or QQQ or Tbills on their platform is for you to decide. So pay your taxes on $10 million, you'll still have 5 left.
So, the question one has to ask is, why aren't banks and "serious" institutions now behind bitcoin? If it is a scam/fad/etc?
The story of Cryptocurrencies reminds me a bit of Linux: "it was a cancer to society" until it was not. And now everyone is adopting it and corps have fucked it with their "open core" offerings.
I myself think that the use case of "trustless store and transfer of value" has a LOT of more attraction to what detractors see.
BTC was "advertised" as either the money of the future, which it is not, or an investment instrument that allows you to bypass government restrictions, which again, it is not, at least not for the common folks.
At this point, it's just a very volatile investment/speculation instrument.
> BTC was "advertised" as either the money of the future, which it is not
You keep casually dismissing it as money. Give it about 2 years and you’ll realize you were incredibly wrong about this take. Between country adoption, lightning, infrastructure, integrations - bitcoin is already there now but it will become undeniable in roughly 2 years time.
I remember when people used to first talk about Bitcoin on HN back in early 2011 or so. The price was only $2 then. Congrats to anyone who had some and held onto it this long - personally I sold off mine in 2015 (big mistake in hindsight).
Yep I was here when the whole HN mania was so against BTC. I was firmly bogleheads and was still a broke phd student. In hindsight if I just gambled with little money I have I might be set for life. But Don't know if I could have held till 100K.
If you are feeling regret, don't. Very few people anticipated such a significant increase. Any profit is a good profit. Even investments that seem highly promising can end up in bankruptcy. This is one of the few that managed to succeed.
Naw man not everything is luck. People have been talking about $100k Bitcoin for what feels like forever now. When the stock market rolled back two years of gains and Bitcoin moved similarly, those who understood what they were looking at made big plays. What happens long-term now that it has hit that mythical price point is less clear.
I couldn’t care less about crypto, but just for fun I bought 1 BTC in 2016. Still own it, and likely will never sell, but boy I wish I bought a lot more instead of my index funds, skipping one monthly contribution in VTI back then would have mostly set me up for life instead of just having a nice but inconsequential $100k bonus in my portfolio :-)
Congrats to the people who held through thick and thin, I speculate (my own opinion) that we will likely not see 80% drawdowns anymore due to all the institutional money that flew in, just “standard” 40-50% dips. Fantastic to witness, an asset class out of thin air.
It seems we are truly ducking poor here in the EU. My parents have been running a farm for 40 years in the Netherlands and they’re doing well financially. Still, $100k is not inconsequential for them!
HN is a bubble of very rich folks compared to the vast majority of the global population. It's easy to fall into the trap of how people here talk about money, like a US$ 150k salary is too low, or like having less than US$ 300k in savings makes you poor.
Just remind yourself this place is an extreme outlier whenever you hear someone here treating life-changing sums of money for 90-95% of the global population as "inconsequential".
Is this true? The few net worth government statistics I can find from a quick google search point at median net worth, excluding house equity, to be significantly higher than $1k, so I wonder what I am missing. Is the implication that a person with $100k in their 401k still cannot cash flow $1k in an emergency? Totally happy to be educated.
Would love to see some data, as anecdotally, living in the Bay Area, I cannot at all relate to your comment given the massive amount of wealth virtually anyone I know has. People routinely drop $1k on a couple of mid-tier restaurant dinners around here (restaurant prices show that a drink these days is $25, crazy, good thing I stopped consuming alcohol), which I do understand is an outlier. Thanks.
> When faced with a hypothetical expense of $400, 63 percent of all adults in 2023 said they would have covered it exclusively using cash, savings, or a credit card paid off at the next statement [...] 37 percent of adults [...] would not have covered a $400 expense completely with cash or its equivalent
Thanks, very helpful! I am still puzzled how this data reconciles with the median net worth figures that are also produced by the federal government (too lazy to google again).
The world is split into two kids of people: the ones that have managed to take advantage of the massive financialization of the world, and the ones who haven’t.
> the ones that have managed to take advantage of the massive financialization of the world
This group is further split into two kinds of people: Those who had an opportunity to take advantage of the massive financialization of the world, and those who weren't afforded that opportunity.
The world was even more divided in the past. When I went to China in 1983 the GDP per capita per year was $285. Even adjusted for inflation they were poor. No more really. Trade and the internet have leveled things up.
My comment sounds overly cynical but I fully agree with you, there’s been so much progress in getting people out of poverty world wide. Yes there’s a big gap in wealth but it’s probably the smallest it has ever been on average, and way more people have their basic needs met than ever before.
I cry every time I think about the fact that I managed to CPU-mine 50 btc, and sold it for nothing.
Still, I did get a payout from the mtgox disaster and its a decent amount really, considering I put in less than 100$ from the start. Just far from life-changing amount, more like "ok, this gets us a nice vacation trip!"-money.
I still have the postcard from Japan from the legal proceedings!
There's a ton of things I could regret.
BTC price going up makes the counterfactual very easy to imagine in rough outlines, and thus more and more appealing.
But that's a fool's errand. There's absolutely no guarantee that in all the alternate timelines where you had not sold you would be better off now. Even with all the extra money. Windfalls tend to cause problems for lottery winners for example.
I mined 12 BTC from my gaming computer dual-booting between Linux/Windows that I also used for SETI@Home and Folding@Home, I ran the miner just for fun as I thought it was another distributed system doing computations and was fascinated by that concept at the time.
They were lost when I had to re-install Windows to play games and formatted the whole hard drive. I don't think much about it because it's so long ago but I'd have enough money to start realistically considering to retire...
>>Congrats to the people who held through thick and thin, I speculate (my own opinion) that we will likely not see 80% drawdowns anymore due to all the institutional money that flew in, just “standard” 40-50% dips. Fantastic to witness, an asset class out of thin air.
There was some person who invested $30 everyday in BTC since 2017, and has $1 million right now.
The tweet had gone viral on Twitter.
BTC bull/bear cycles have taught a lot of people many things about regular investing.
Like what this person did is called DCA(Dollar Cost Averaging).
>>>>Cheers to the next 10X in 8 years, $1M in 2032!
Seems like showing up everyday is all there is to success. Mostly. Every once in a while, someone makes it big due to luck/help. But showing up everything is all.
I sometime use the word invested in the context of Bitcoin, but I don't really think of it as an investment. I don't know what a better word to use would be though. I think calling it gambling is needlessly antagonistic.
I don't know if I would even consider buying an NFT of a pointless thing gambling. There is a misguided expectation that just because it has a price tag it has value. The actual perceived value(as in market price) increasing reinforces that viewpoint, but it is an artifact of a pool of misguided people that has not been exhausted.
The point is, these people have an expectation of an increase in value. For most gambling there are two categories. The most skilled wins, and the House wins. There is no rising tide raising all boats. Believing that simply getting on the bandwagon of gambling will make you money is outright delusional.
'Investing' in NFTs, I feel is distinct because it relies on the sincere belief of a false premise. Participants believe that neither skill nor luck is a requirement and just being in the game is sufficient.
Coming back to Bitcoin, I think there are multiple levels of expectation based upon multiple premises. The premise that Bitcoin, one day, replaces money. I don't think you can say this is outright false, merely quite unlikely. Others believe that Bitcoin will, at least, retain it's value. This premise is on sturdier ground but also not certain.
You could think of this as skill-based form of gambling if you think that the skill is in the ability to more accurately determine the truth of the premises. That puts it in the same field as a high risk investment though.
I agree with your points but I think that the attributes of gambling you described can also be applied to bitcoin pretty well:
- The most skilled wins: btc participants probably believe they're appying skill (with a heavy dose of luck) to know when to get in and get out of bitcoin. after all $1 million in btc is only useful if at some future time you can do something with it ("cash out").
- Believing that simply getting on the bandwagon of gambling will make you money is outright delusional: this sounds like a pretty accurate description of crypto "investing" as a whole.
> The premise that Bitcoin, one day, replaces money
If that happens, how many btc will it take to buy a toyota? Nobody knows. Sure, USD may be worthless one day, or it may take $1 billion USD to buy a pencil. But (most) crypto investors weren't "investing" in USD before, the were using it as a stand-in for things of real value.
Congrats to the people who held through thick and thin, I speculate (my own opinion) that we will likely not see 80% drawdowns anymore due to all the institutional money that flew in, just “standard” 40-50% dips. Fantastic to witness, an asset class out of thin air.
they said exactly that in 2018, 2021, and 2022 too
It’s way higher than I ever thought it’d be. I sold mine at $800 so maybe I’ve got some sour grapes here, but all this reminds me of the book “Devil Take The Hindmost.”
I got something like 30k XRP for free. Then I traded that for one BTC and got 300. I could now have 100k, but oh well I never was true believer. And I am still too sceptical even with stock market...
You're talking about mania that lasted, at the very most, three years.
Is it really that intellectually honest to compare tulips, which can be grown everywhere, by anyone, with "something" that has been designed, on purpose, to have a diminishing issuance rate?
Satoshi made it very clear, in the very first Bitcoin block, that Bitcoin was a middle finger to politicians ever printing more money to bail out the banks.
Housing went up for a long time and then what happened in 2008? That wasn’t a 2-3 year mania. Everyone thought houses were “safe as houses.” The stock market rally in the 90s went up until it didn’t in the .com crash. I’m not comparing btc to tulips, I’m comparing it to things that went up a lot and then went down fast. And if you come back with “btc is different” I’ll respond with “that’s what everyone says about everything else before it crashes.”
I just don't understand why you'd choose Bitcoin over gold. Gold, like Bitcoin, was criticized for just being a stupid store of value, but that wasn't completely true as it undoubtedly had some utility in the economy. Worst case comes and the market crashes, you know there's at least someone somewhere buying. What does Bitcoin get you over gold? The same "it's scarce and therefore valuable" narrative so you can store your wealth there, but it's not got the intrinsic value of gold. If the market crashes, you can't sell Bitcoin to someone to make jewelry or false teeth.
If you want to argue that people could theoretically discover a lot more gold or bring in an asteroid one day full of it, okay, but then why not just by land then? Even better than gold, there's a potential for some income too. Or why not just go with something that's equally as scarce like vintage wine? You literally can't make anymore wine of a particular year; it's inherently scarce.
- easy to store (but both gold and BTC are dangerous to store at home from the security standpoint)
- easy to buy and sell
- BTC is actually limited (capped). There's no practical limit to the amount of gold. You're always one tech breakthrough away from gold becoming very common - read the history of aluminum, they used to make jewelry out of it.
- impossible to counterfeit. Even banks struggle to detect counterfeit gold
- gold for payments is completely impractical, BTC has Lightning network that seems to work.
But how much of the price of gold is its intrinsic worth? A fake gold ring made of some alloy can look and feel almost exactly the same as a real one, but as soon as you find out that it isn't real gold it suddenly loses 99% of its value - maybe it's not magnetic or it is slightly the wrong shade, but the value of gold isn't assigned for not reacting to magnets.
Only 11% of gold is for industrial purposes, so I think that if the thousands of years of cultural association of gold with wealth suddenly disappeared and people decided it was a bad investment, then it would be basically worthless.
there is intrinsic in the context of where we are as humans, that's why saying that there is intrinsic worth is correct. Humans need to eat, intrinsically. I guess partially it depends on whether the word 'intrinsic' still applies.
it's the only useful definition because what else would ever be useful just for its own sake? There has to be a reference point and the moment you have one, it's technically not intrinsic anymore. So we can't do that.
Indeed, when I wanted to send $2000 across the US-Canada border in 2021, I found to my surprise that doing so with BTC within Coinbase was the cheapest option.
It HAS a physical tie: it is the energy spent to run the chain, which is, however, backward to gold being a material. And it's not to the advantage of the owners, but of the miners.
I can easily see a catastrophic scenario out of this: a downward spiral of value happens for XY reason, and then a halving happens. That makes the mining of it suddenly highly costly, which makes it uninteresting, or less and less profitable to mine, which renders the chain slower and less popular, etc.
However, I think that the popularity of Bitcoin is still on the rise, and we won't see such a downward spiral before many halvings (20 years? That's a lot of GWh lost to useless computing...)
You're forgetting about difficulty adjustment. Every time mining gets more expensive large number of miners drop out. This causes the difficulty target to drop. The remaining miners then start mining more blocks and profits rise. As a system it has built-in economic incentives to keep in in homeostasis.
You can’t store $100m of gold in your brain and transit through an airport with just a sneakers in your backpack. If you happen to need this, you’ll realize how revolutionary bitcoin is.
as an extreme example consider holocaust survivors who managed to escape with jewelry or gold as a "store of value". Then those who managed to escape but the family member with the gold did not. With bitcoin, it could be written down or even committed to memory by your entire family
I was there, anon... I was there 11 years ago when the $100k Bitcoin was proposed... One had only to outstretch their hand and all the Bitcoins would be yours. But the coins, it seemed, had a will of their own. The fearful and the weak were the first to fall to its power. I watched grown men cry out as their fortunes vanished in an instant, lost to the abyss of forgotten passwords and the fiery maw of exchange hacks.
“It is but numbers on a ledger,” they said at first, dismissive of its allure. Yet the numbers grew, and their hearts darkened with greed.
I remember the great split—the Hard Fork Wars. Brothers turned against brothers, chains rent asunder, each claiming to be the true heir of Nakamoto's vision. But it was a war without banners, fought not with swords, but with hash rates and cryptographic fire. Many were the tokens that fell, discarded like the leaves of autumn, their worth reduced to naught.
I saw the rise of the altcoins, a thousand pretenders clamoring for a place in the sun. "To the moon!" they cried, their banners bright and hopeful. But most found only ruin, their holders wandering the barren wastes of forgotten wallets, muttering of rug pulls and false prophets.
Then came the age of DeFi, and the people rejoiced, for they thought they had found a new power—a magic to rival the centralized lords of old. But it was a perilous path, anon, filled with cunning contracts and exploits that devoured the unwary. I saw kingdoms built on leverage crumble in a single night, their rulers cast out into the dark.
And the NFTs! Ah, the NFTs… Each token a promise, a glimpse of eternity, they said. Men and elves alike paid dearly for these fragments of art and culture, yet many were cursed to hold only shadows, their treasures mocked by the uncaring markets.
Through it all, the Bitcoin endured, its ledger immutable, its purpose unyielding. But even it was not free from the grasping hands of fate. I remember the fall of Mt. Gox, the poisoned chalice of FTX, and the whispers of whales who moved the tides unseen. Each event a lesson, each loss a tale of hubris and folly.
Now, anon, as we stand upon the precipice of a new cycle, the wise and the weary tread cautiously. For the Bitcoin, though a gift, is also a burden. Those who seek it must be strong of will and sharp of mind, lest they too fall prey to its power.
I have seen the rise and fall of many. I have borne witness to fortunes made and lost, dreams forged and shattered. And still, the blockchain spins, unending, unyielding, like the great Eye ever watching.
Beware, anon. For the world of crypto is not for the faint of heart. It is a realm of shadow and light, where one must navigate with care, or be consumed by the fire of their own greed.
Makes me really wish I could find that wallet I mined 50 bitcoin into from my laptop back in 2009 and then got bored of because they were essentially worthless.
If you hold long enough and the chain keeps working, then probably yes. However, this 10x return is guaranteed against the dollar and not real value. The gov. is committed to devaluing currency over a long period of time.
This is definitely true but btc buys you more of almost anything else too (btc/X): X is one of s&p500, housing, gold, etc. except maybe $nvda or $tsla. For example the btc chart in dollars looks the same as in gold.
A part of the valuation comes from miners who gets their returns cut by half every ~4 years. They have an interest in having the price (at least) double by then.
How much work have you put into having the value of your house double every four years? How many people are invested in your house appreciating like that? If your house appreciates, do a bunch of bankers and hedge funds also get rich along the way? How many politicians have you taken to lunch and on ski trips with the proceeds from the last time you sold half of your house when the price doubled?
But it has been a bubble and popped/crashed/recovered 4(?) times now - it seem fair to start considering it as a cycle rather than a bubble. I don’t know much about crypto or finance, so maybe I’m completely wrong
I wonder if it is something about it feeling like the digital future. As long as the future never arrives, there's always some potential? Other bubbles were pegged to more well-defined trends?
There's nothing future about bitcoin. It exist today, works well today, you can use it for payments, buy a house and in some places pay off your debt or credit card.
You want to own something? You need to be capable of keeping it safe. If not entrust it to someone who is and hope they don't steal it.
The same goes for everything in life.
The fiat banking system has demonstrated what it does when we trust it with our fiat money. It steals it (through zero-reserve banking aka infinite debasement).
With bitcoin I can audit the wallet they hold for me at any time (public keys) and know that they can't debase it.
I don't believe it is zero-sum.. Or at least, not rigourously. I feel the Market Capitalization of BTC must have been bootstrapped at some extent. It seems impossible to me that the sum total of what people have paid to have their BTCs to be more than $2.02T. In other words, the value the market gives it has given value to BTC out of nowhere.
Each transaction has a buyer and a seller. So in that sense it is a zero sum game. However the total market cap can go up and down and create value out of nothing (just like stocks).
It is really negative sum game. As there is constant drain from mining, in buying and then operating equipment. Lot of that is not recovable and do not actually improve anything.
A transaction is zero sum, the market is net positive. For the market to be zero sum, the market cap would have to be constant. If I buy something from someone for $1 then sell it to you for $2, I gained a dollar and you own a share that's worth $2.
I would have to agree beforehand that the share is worth $2, or else I wouldn't have bought it from you at that price. Somehow the share was already $2 before you sold it to me, but you got it for $1, how come? Your example is nonsensical.
> If I buy something from someone for $1 then sell it to you for $2, I gained a dollar and you own a share that's worth $2.
It's easy to see that this is nonsense: I could buy a widget from someone for $1, then turn around and sell it to my brother for $10000, does that really mean the widget is now magically worth $10000, and we doubled our collective holdings? No, what actually happened is that we together still have that same $10000, plus a worthless $1 widget.
Once again, the trade is within the context of a market and the market values the "widget", Apple Stock, Oz of gold or whatever as whatever people are willing to pay for it. That's how markets work. Individual Opinions are largely irrelevant.
TINA = There is no alternative... to stocks. Lot of people lost money on long term bonds. Short term bonds are at least better than cash. Stocks are supposed to be about investing in an asset. I guess there is kind of an alternative out there.
BTC is not sustainable, that's true. However, the world is now aware of decentralized ledgering tools, and other projects have worthwhile technologies and use cases.
I just wish they would drop the energy consuming ones...
I used it as actual currency not long ago to buy phone credit on Silent Link via the lightning network. So it is possible if quite a niche use case. Silent Link is quite cool by the way - they have an esim that works with almost every network on the planet and the credit doesn't expire.
Yeah, so how can you explain I use it for daily payments here in El Salvador, buying groceries, coffee and pupusas? I need to use fiat maybe once a week, otherwise I pay with bitcoin for everything
And it never will be. There is simply no point to register/log every expense at every gas station in a global, distributed ledger. Actual payments will be done with Layer-2 protocols, such as Lightning or Liquid, which are kind-of separate networks and protocols, but yet rely on the BTC network.
The idea that everyone will run custodial BTC/Lightning wallets is also rubbish. In the future, there will be institutions that do what banks do today: Give out accounts, which are non-custodial wallets like your todays online banking, and settle transfers with other banks in bulk by doing actual BTC onchain transactions.
Average Joe in 2040 will not run his own wallet but use an external service provider - just as Joe is not a member of the SWIFT transaction network, he will not be settling debt with BTC transactions but rather have an "account" and pay with whatever L2/L3 technology we will come up with.
It will be like in the gold-standard days. You had the right to exchange your paper dollars for gold, but no-one ever did. Yet every transaction was backend by gold, just as every L2/L3 transaction will be backed by bitcoin, though no onchain transaction will happen.
The whitepaper shows it was intended to be "peer to peer electronic cash". It did clearly fail at that goal since it has none of the privacy of cash and so on.
You can use bitcoin completely/as anonymously as cash if you wanted to, the same way you’d have to put in a bit of effort to have a completely anonymous cash transaction.
Monero (XMR) which is a fork of bitcoin, is much closer to actual cash
Monero is fine. But how can you even use bitcoin anonymously now? Even wasabi and samourai wallet are shut down as far as i know. Seems highly risky to use any tool like that since i dont know what the consequences will be in the future. Joinmarket? I'm sure it is possible but it is error-prone, takes so much effort, time and fees that i see it as a failure
I have used it, but i dont see how it is related to being able to transact privately. As soon as you do anything linked to your name with those coins puchased on bisq, the whole batch is linked to your identity
Arguably, that's exactly what it was designed for.
There was a very contentious split many years ago now (Bitcoin Cash vs Core fork) regarding this point. Until then, it was taken for granted that block size would continue increasing in proportion to transaction volume in order to facilitate such use. This was Satoshi's expectation, and there was little-to-no discussion otherwise. Quite suddenly, a few powerful, well-positioned people (with conflicting interests in the form of their Lightning side-chain solution) conspired to form a consensus of limiting on-chain transaction bandwidth via astroturfing and comprehensive censorship.
Whether they were responsible visionaries with the foresight to avert disaster using a novel solution, or spiteful saboteurs driven by greed and power, is up to the reader. Un/fortunately, they were very successful.
Have a look at the daily volume of trading for Bitcoin, these financial tools are a very small part of this... we are talking $50-100 billions daily. It does contribute, but in terms of scale way less than what you seem to suggest... arguably I would guess that these days the announcements of big purchases move the market more than the actual purchase itself.
People say Bitcoin is worth $100k but what they actually mean is it's worth 100,000 "USDT", because that's the thing you can actually exchange for it.
Are those 100,000 "USDT" worth $100k? Well, maybe. Tether claims every USDT is backed by a US dollar. It just can't tell you where they are or let you audit them. But they're there. Honest.
> And why isn't that being shorted?
How would you short it? Especially given that most crypto trading platforms are going to go bankrupt when it does crash.
Tether is bad but these aren't correct arguments against it. 1. You can easily sell BTC for 100K actual USD and ACH it out on a regulated exchange like Gemini. 2. You can easily sell USDT for actual USD on (IIRC) Kraken. 3. Technically you can short USDT via various means but you won't be able to collect any profits.
> 1. You can easily sell BTC for 100K actual USD and ACH it out on a regulated exchange like Gemini. 2. You can easily sell USDT for actual USD on (IIRC) Kraken.
You can until you can't. As long as people think 1 "USDT" is worth $1, and as long as the amounts you're selling aren't too big, it stays afloat.
> 3. Technically you can short USDT via various means but you won't be able to collect any profits.
How? If my thesis is that USDT is going to collapse and bring down the whole cryptocurrency ecosystem, what can I buy to express that and profit on it?
But those are things that only exist in the crypto ecosystem. The counterparty risk is all wrong-way. Like yes, I can sign a contract with Coinbase that says they will owe me a lot of money when Tether collapses. But when Tether collapses it's probably going to take Coinbase down with it.
If I sell a bitcoin on Coinbase, Kraken, or any of the other highly regulated exchanges, I am sure as shit getting USD and not USDT, which does not exist on the bitcoin chain.
Tether appears to be too big to fail in the crypto world and now crypto is too big to fail in the White House so if you short you are the one who will lose.
Tether admitted they loaned USDT against BTC collateral and they allowed the collateral to be delivered later (basically T+2 settlement). When the order book is shallow this is basically free market manipulation. It's not clear how much loaned USDT exists vs. regular USDT and what effect this has had on the price.
Yup why is flagged? The discussion seems civilized.
It looks like there aren't too many people comparing something that was designed, on purpose, with a fixed supply curve using a diminishing issuance rate and which exists since 16 years with "tulips", a mania that lasted 3 years (and everybody could grow tulips anywhere they want).
I stand my case: Satoshi made it very clear with his message in Bitcoin's genesis block that his invention was a gigantic middle finger to politicians bailing out banks by ever printing more money.
Bitcoin is the antithesis of tulips.
Bitcoin is the "fuck you" to QE / fractional reserve banking / helicopter money / physical bills printing / bonds issuance / etc.
Important to remember that while income and wealth inequality is at record highs, the trillions of dollars injected into the economy are still floating around among the top. People are getting more and more creative with investments (see luxury watches, sneakers, trading cards, collectibles, meme stocks all seeing a significant bump in value in recent years). Bitcoin's price is simply another symptom of this.
What I find new about this recent bull run is that the usual "crypto will upend global financial systems/crypto will change the world" hype is conspicuously missing. All the "Blockchain startups" have basically disappeared. NFTs are worthless. There is little/no VC money going into the space. I think people are finally coming to terms with the fact that it is a speculative investment and nothing more.
> the usual "crypto will upend global financial systems/crypto will change the world" hype is conspicuously missing
That hype is nothing compared to the current hype, the idea that the US Government is going to buy a significant amount of Bitcoin to create a "strategic" reserve.
Every hype cycle gets bigger and bigger even as past ones never amount to anything
Bitcoin is a store of value. Nothing more or less. DAOs and NFTs were just distractions trying to ride the wave. The fundamentals remain strong. It really hasn't changed much in 15 years. The Hacker News comments certainly haven't either. Salty as ever.
By definition store of value means "its ability to purchase other assets in the future without rapidly losing its purchasing power" yet bitcoin has in instances halved it's value. So, no not a store of value.
Meaningless point. All stores of value fluctuate in value relative to each other. Homes and stocks go through periods of doubling and halving in value. Its the entire reason why diversification across asset classes is fundamental to managing your finances.
It’s true that, due to its volatility, Bitcoin is currently not a good store of value, at least in the short term. There’s an underlying truth, though, which is that Bitcoin is a potential store of value. In particular, it has all the necessary qualities of a monetary good, among them durability, divisibility, portability, verifiability, and above all scarcity.
Buying Bitcoin right now involves speculating that others will also see this potential, which is why it’s accurate to describe it for the moment as a speculative asset. The reason buying Bitcoin is a smart bet is that its monetary properties are so good that it has the potential to store a significant percentage of the world’s savings. Once that happens, its volatility will be much lower, so it will be a good store of value. And of course its purchasing power in current U.S. dollars will be much, much higher, which is why it’s a good idea to buy some now.
This is hysterical because four years ago everyone was clamoring on about how the non-fungability of NFTs was the secret sauce to why they’d accrue monetary value.
Taking arguments from the most delusional crypto bros at the time and trying to sell them as something that "everyone" was saying about NFTs in general isn't a way to engage in good faith discussion.
Some NFTs/art might appreciate in value, but most NFTs/"art" are worthless on the open market.
Bitcoin has maintained its fundamentals for 15 years. People place value on mature things. Lindy’s law. It’s fair to speculate Bitcoin will be around for a long time to come.
Not all speculative assets are neccesarily securities. Bitcoin's value fluctuates in a way that makes it's store of value absolutely resemble a stock, albeit with fewer legal protections and guarantees.
BTC is volatile but one can argue has more guarantees than stocks. There's no counterparty risk. No company that can go bankrupt or entity that can fail. BTC is property.
Definitely. Value of life is estimated and changes all the time across cultures, in wars, life insurances, technological tradeoffs like cars that kill people but we accept the cost…
There’s no universal, intrinsic value to life. It’s us that give it value.
Thanks.
I agree with you, although question the usefulness of going into what I perceive as a more metaphysical direction. In this sense it is trivial that nothing has intrinsic value. But putting on my more pragmatist hat, I would say that there is a sense in which basic survival is very much universal and unquestionable value. "I don't want to die", "I want to be happy", are pretty much safe assumptions to make across cultures and history (yeah, people commit suicide, hence it is not universal, but still a pretty safe bet and worth to consider 'universal' for all practical purposes).
You could say any currency is just a bunch of numbers, the US dollar isn’t backed by gold anymore and hasn’t been for a long time.
The question is more like: Would you let everyone dictate the value of a currency and leave it decentralized? Or would you rather a government controlled centralized currency.
I'm not sure people care much about the debt repayment thing? If I rack up a bill at a bar, I can technically force them to accept a sack of pennies as repayment, but most people use digital payments like credit cards. At that point it doesn't really matter if my bank account holds USD, GBP, BTC or any other liquid asset, as long as the payment infrastructure can handle any necessary conversions.
There are no assets for digital currencies so the words you're using to describe it are ontologically nonsensical. It's numbers, binary sequences, in databases. The only thing that makes it all work is your belief and faith that the numbers mean something other than the electricity and infrastructure necessary to maintain the databases. The only real assets in the entire scheme are the computers and power plants with the spinning dynamos necessary for maintaining the illusion of "value".
This is why the masses are always dazed and confused. Your water and food are full of poisons but the numbers in databases are what get the most airtime. Bitcoin is the purest distillation of fiat currencies because there is no longer any actual physical manifestation of it anywhere other than whatever paper key you keep on you as a reminder that there is a database with some numbers which you and those like you collectively believe to be "valuable".
The fact that it is not physical makes Bitcoin more valuable. Why? Because I can store millions of it in my pocket. I can move millions around the world in less than an hour. 24/7. No banks or approvals or intermediaries required. I can keep it in my own custody safety. It is easy and fast to exchange. It is easy to validate its authenticity. The supply is fixed and near impossible to dilute. Etc.. Etc..
that is why Bitcoin is valuable. It’s valuable because it stores value with all the important properties I listed above. Those properties are intrinsic to Bitcoin. Say that for any other asset.
If you’re worried about civilization crashing and Bitcoin becoming worthless. Fair enough, you should diversify into guns and toilet paper.
Well, with toilet paper I can wipe my ass. Even a dollar bill will do the trick but I'm not sure what I can do with a number in a database disconnected from the spinning magnets that make it functional.
I'm not here to convince you that bitcoin is worthless because clearly there are enough people who think it is worth more than $100k so you'd be better off convincing those people to offer you services in exchange for bitcoins instead of arguing with a random stranger about the collapse of civilization.
Fiat can be minted easily. Bitcoin cannot any faster than the rate that it is mined. Massive difference. And the key reason why the dollar continually depreciates.
Fiat means faith and that's all you have with bitcoin, faith in the algorithms that make the ledger very hard to mutate without spending the required "effort" to "mint" the entries on the ledger. You can believe whatever you want but as I said previously you're better off convincing people to sell you services for your bitcoins instead of arguing with random strangers on the internet about cryptographic hashing functions.
All of our assets are denominated with depreciating dollars. It’s nice because our assets always look like they’re going up. Of course a big part of that is just the dollar going down.
The US Dollar is quite the meme! If you’re a US citizen and you have an income in any currency whatever, you have to acquire US Dollars to pay taxes with, or else you’ll eventually wind up in jail :)
North Korea makes significant money through crypto because it’s not possible to regulate at the international level.
The US gov has put a lot of effort into controlling the exchange to USD, but that doesn’t put the brakes on the ability to pay anyone in the world with BTC regardless of sanctions.
Yet the dollar is at record highs, and commodities are at record highs, and the stock market is at record highs, and real estate is at record highs, and Bitcoin is at record highs. So who is hedging what exactly?
If commodities are at record highs, then the dollar is at record lows. Just because other currencies are inflating more, doesn’t mean the USD is getting stronger.
> Yet the dollar is at record highs, and commodities are at record highs, and the stock market is at record highs, and real estate is at record highs, and Bitcoin is at record highs.
I'm not even sure what this means and what you're trying to say.
One can compare two things, say bitcoin and dollar. Dollar is at record lows compared to bitcoin. It's at record lows also compared to the stock market, commodities, real estate, etc.
If people don't care about the dollar, then why is "Bitcoin is over $100k" a headline?
You know why it is a headline?
Because the $ symbol in the headline is what people ACTUALLY care about. You don't even need to ask people: simply watch what people do, and you will learn what they care about.
And what they do is they buy nice things, like Lamborghinis, yachts, homes — and they do so using US dollars.
It definitely has utility but it is at the same time overhyped IMO. Some examples of utility:
1. Cross-border transfers without needing permission from banks or identification
2. A fungible digital asset you can hoard and nobody can physically take from you if you secure the keys.
3. If you are a business in a gray or black market industry, you can accept payments from customers online without needing permission from payment processors. Many types of businesses are effectively banned by the banking system.
4. It provides a way to obfuscate your wealth which can help protect against asset seizures. Similar to #2.
These are all true but far and away the dominant use case is long term (10+ year) store of value/dollar inflation hedge- which sometimes implies #2, but many entities are happy to hold on exchanges. Total BTC market cap at $2T- would guess from how relatively little transaction activity there is that at least $1.5T is due to this use case.
It isn't fungible at all since every coin has a history which in some cases makes it unspendable, so it is highly risky to accept transfers without a third party chain analysis report, otherwise i agree
Report which you don't get from centralized exchanges. So you have to trust them and they should somehow be liable for the provenance of what they sell to you.
Probably most CEX don't allocate UTXOs upon buying, but only for withdrawals
It is scarce, novel, transferable, passed critical mass of popularity long ago, uncensorable to some degree for now. That's all that's needed, it makes it better money than perhaps anything else
Its utility is similar to that of cash. But unlike cash it's (1) less fungible (2) much easier to transport (3) harder to secure from theft and/or destruction * (4) value is more volatile than USD/EUR/CAD/AUD (5) incredibly resource intensive to maintain (and growing!).
It's not an equity, it's a currency.
The Bitcoin network is nigh "indestructible" as long as some folks still consider it useful. This delivers credibility towards the faith required to support some value. If its value dropped by 99% tomorrow (maybe from aggressive global legislation and cooperation among governments), it would still function (but perhaps primarily maintained by sanctioned countries).
I think there's significant pros and cons to cryptocurrency in general and Bitcoin specifically. As the emission rate continues to decrease, I suspect its value will stay relatively high relative to what it is now.
EDIT: I said in (3) above that it's harder to secure bitcoin from destruction (than cash) but in some ways it's remarkably more robust than cash. You can make as many copies of the keys securing your bitcoins as you like (and/or use multi-sig). Your home burning down would destroy cash, but if you have a backup your bitcoins are preserved. However this is in tension with "secure from theft".
New coins are minted with every block. But perhaps you mean to suggest that it's "stable" or "predictable." The emission rate of bitcoin is predictable - but this is predicated on the stability/predictability of the community of miners/stakers. It seems extremely irrational now, but if something were to change such that the community decided to drastically increase or decrease the block reward, they could indeed do so if they found consensus.
> its supply is not responsive to price.
While this is probably true, the value of mining equipment is directly related to the exchange rate of bitcoin (and perhaps its recent rate of increase/decrease). This doesn't impact supply, but it does impact the network OpEx.
Well, not just predictable but hard capped at 21M, about 19.8M (or ~94%) of which have already been mined. So in some sense, inflation tax can't exceed ~6% over all time.
(I don't think it's a sustainable model, as security essentially decays over time, unless fees become extremely high which doesn't seem like a great outcome either. But that's another matter...)
There are a few answers to the long-term security budget:
1) We could maintain fees through compression, that is, by making each on-chain transaction representative of many off-chain transactions. This is beginning to happen with the lightning network, and other technologies are in the works to advance this concept.
2) Mining will become more integrated with other industrial and residential processes, which will reduce the cost of security, from a compensation standpoint. Think bitcoin miner water and space heaters in many homes, etc.
3) It's also likely that in the future institutions that rely heavily on bitcoin will voluntarily subsidize security to some extent, for the same reason they invest in vaults for other instruments. Personally I'm planning to start running a lottery miner at home just for the fun of it.
(2) is interesting, but I'm not sure if resistance heaters will remain common in the long term, as heat pumps become more widely available?
Also this seems like a sort of free-electricity scenario (mining with electricity that was going to be used anyway), but I'm not sure free electricity would reduce mining costs? Wouldn't hardness adjust so that it then becomes all about hardware CapEx (assuming amortized CapEx remains significant)?
I figure mining costs are around 1% of the market cap, and can't go that much lower without serious security risks. So the ecosystem needs to fund that in some way, whether it's through inflation, fees, or donations.
With fees, I also worry they'll be too unpredictable. Like there might be enough demand to justify $20B/year in fees, but it's a function of supply as well, and if scaling solutions like Lightning Network work "too well" (with people rarely needing to settle on-chain) we might end up with way lower fees.
Transacting bitcoin via the lightning network is instant.
Capital gains is a matter of policy and is likely to change at some point as bitcoin succeeds.
There is a lot of utility in bypassing the credit card company cartel which have been abusing their position to create a pseudo government to shut down or kill the value of (maybe to make them easier to buy out?) targeted businesses. Or in some cases impose the christian ideology of the owners upon entire countries, most recently japan.
Cryptocurrency when not being used for speculation or investment nonsense has already successfully provided a pressure release valve for abuse by the credit card cartels. It still sucks, and isn't very convenient or good for most transactions or safety. But it works!
It would be more ideal to just regulate the credit card companies properly but that appears to be beyond current government bodies.
There's utility in being able to move both small and large amounts of value fairly easily. Moving value has high utility for criminals and non-criminals alike. There's utility in remittances, in protecting value from unlawful seizure, and protecting value from incompetent bureaucrats hyper-inflating your national currency.
An important point, whichever way you want to interpret it, is that you can now buy Bitcoin exposure via ETFs like IBIT. Those didn't exist in the last run. The upside is they enable more liquid investment, especially to non-native investors (e.g. those that don't know what a crypto wallet is). The downside is it could drive speculation or allow manipulation by big banks and hedge funds.
Important to remember that while income and wealth inequality is at record highs, the trillions of dollars injected into the economy are still floating around among the top. People are getting more and more creative with investments (see luxury watches, sneakers, trading cards, collectibles, meme stocks all seeing a significant bump in value in recent years). Bitcoin's price is simply another symptom of this.
this makes sense. price inflation is out of control . it's like everything is being inflated in the name of scarcity
> it is a speculative investment and nothing more.
Mostly yes. The only true value I see is that Bitcoin is the new Swiss banking. So if you don’t trust your government then you get yourself some Bitcoins. I realized this while reading a book about Swiss banking. It also used to involve elaborate schemes to preserve client privacy.
It's good in some ways - value goes up, independent of governments - but bad in others - too unstable in value for day to day transactions, wages, mortgages and the like.
L1 blockchains, Monad being a recent success. But blockchain = finance. That is what the use case for blockchain is. Anything will be either platforms to host financial assets, the assets themselves (interesting tokens), or applications to trade / lend / lever up on assets. It's protocolized, open-source finance.
Gambling, money laundering, and more gambling. This is just a repeat of all the companies that promised people could get rich using them, then the price collapsed and they all died.
I don’t think we’re real close to a “French revolution”, but an executed CEO today could be a symptom of the situation. (Of course, we don’t know the motive yet. But just the online discourse around it is telling).
To follow-up on my comment of “online discourse” about this: the Facebook post from the company (…deeply saddened…) has 20.6K laugh emojis vs ~4k in sympathy related)
I didn't go to Johannesburg because my friend had gotten car jacked the week before. In my 4 months in cape town I was the only member of my friend group that didn't get mugged (most with guns).
But Clifton and Camps Bay were super nice. One late night I made a sandwich for the security guard my friend's neighborhood had to hire to stand outside with a kalashankof at night, he was grateful.
Compare that to other more poor African nations, there isn't 1/1000 the tension in the air as there is in SA. The reason for that is the extreme difference in wealth tied to racial tensions.
Because money is power. If you believe in democracy, then extreme inequality is extremely un-democratic. (Note, there is, IMHO, a happy middle-ground: some amount of tolerable inequality, resulting in some amount of tolerable un-democratic-ness)
Money isn't power. Power is power. Money can sometimes be used like power, but not knowing the difference is a recipe for the situation we find ourselves in now.
Money is only powerful as long as it's useful. When the pitchforks come out, dollar bills won't stop them.
Not trying to make assumptions, but it appears he is trying to lean into the "greed is good" line of thinking where vices are actually spun to be virtues. Not only does it allow you to avoid empathy for your fellow man, it allows you to excuse your own excesses as necessary (or even good)
> the usual "crypto will upend global financial systems/crypto will change the world" hype is conspicuously missing. All the "Blockchain startups" have basically disappeared. NFTs are worthless. There is little/no VC money going into the space.
The problem with the anti-crypto absolutists is that they just watched Bitcoin and the entire crypto industry go up once again and they did nothing but complain.
They are real quiet today. No where to be seen this time and probably sulking that they ended up on the wrong side of the trade. (again)
Well done to those who did not listen to their cope.
Nothing ever seems to come of discussing this topic on HN - just the usual cycle of people arguing with each other over whether BTC "ought to" (by what ontological principles?) be worth what it is (or, for that matter, anything at all), or what social impacts it has, etc.
None of that has anything at all to do with the current spot price. That's just an excuse to "debate" the topic again by pulling out the same old arguments.
Several other submissions intended to report the same simple fact were flagged and killed. Why not this one?
Well I mean, is there anything to discuss about the spot price itself? Stocks, bonds, and other assets also regularly reach round, base 10 values, and I can't think of any substance in these events generally worth discussing. Bringing out the usual flame wars seems as good a move as any.
Is there way to quantify how much of the economy these days is "bullshit" (purely speculative assets), and if we are at peak bullshit now as a percentage of total economic activity?
Unless you see gold as bullshit as well. I think it should now be consensus that Bitcoin isn't acting as a transaction tool, but as a store of value, just like gold. There are pros and cons when comparing it to gold as a store of value. But the main thing that keeps up the "value" of Bitcoin is just the belief that "it is a store of value" itself. As long as people continue to believe this, it doesn't need to have traditional value. This is the same as gold. Bitcoin in this sense is even more pure, because gold still has some industrial and consumer uses, while Bitcoin has zero. This belief may or may not persist in the foreseeable future, but it is what it is now. Thinking this is "bullshit" just doesn't really matter.
I'll add that if gold wasn't so impractical to transfer, store and verify we would most likely still be using it as a currency way more frequently (even in our inflatuonist systems, it would likely be seen as a more sound money).
Bitcoin improves a lot on all of these properties while introducing other properties (open/public network, borderless, public ledger, etc.). Its supply/issuance has also been much more stable than Gold ever was (and ever will be if we're to believe the predictions of giant mines and even future asteroid mining).
The entire economy outside of agriculture and real estate is basically "bullshit", if you really think about it. The ratio of bullshit to everything else seems to increase over time, though, as a general trend. It's probably correlated to technology.
Real estate can be speculative as well. A better way to state that might be "things outside of productive assets and services" are increasingly speculative.
The bright side of this that has me excited is what seems to be a growing sense of optimism about the future, driven by AI entering the public conscious, Space X's "rocket catch" etc. There seems to be a growing belief that the future can and will be better, more so than a decade ago.
For countless millennia, humans didn't need anything more except food, some very basic tools, a place to live, and other humans. You could argue that everything since then is layers and layers of bullshit. Bitcoin is just another one.
Humans did also need fuel(wood mostly). Often this was reasonably easy to get. But still involved labour. As such storage of energy that can be released at will do have value think of coal, oil and gas. These as such are not "bullshit".
Water might be other one. But now that is cheap enough, even with desalination.
I'm arguing the general point is shallow and not useful.
IMO BitCoin is designed to fail as a currency with it's mining costs, and a bad idea as an investment since exchanging it is such a house of cards. Never mind that holding any significant quantity invites dangerous people with wrenches.
Agriculture and real estate would not exist in their current forms without the mammoth apparatus of the entire economy surrounding them. Maybe you mean food and shelter are the only non-bull parts of the economy. Nomadic bands might find them bullshittish. And grain stores require soldiers to guard them, soldiers require weapons, weapons require metallurgy, mining, surveying, transport, etc. Pretty soon there’s a whole lot of something but I don’t know that it’s bullshit. It feels more like layers of increasing abstraction away from the source of the value: energy.
Even with nomads, they had territory they could live in or not live in, based on the existence of other tribes. I was clumping that in with real estate. Even animals do this (for example wolves). And obviously in the feudal system land was a big deal.
And yes technological arms races exist but they are often power games between governments, although in some cases a tribe could become a genocide victim if nobody wants to participate in the military effort. So in that case I agree it's maybe not bullshit, but it depends on the behavior of the neighbors.
Energy is a free source of energy from the sun plus it gets stored for free in various ways (such as vegetation). So that doesn't really have to be factored into the discussion.
Honestly, this is just repulsive. Crypto has brought nearly zero benefits to society and has made income inequality even worse. Not to mention the environmental impact.
I don't see how any reasonable person can celebrate this. Ask yourself who is benefiting most from this.
If anything, from my personal experience, "crypto" brought financial resources to minorities, especially PoC in the US. Some of them would never had that chance in the traditional world if you identify to that cause.
Decentralization helps a lot of people who may be under government pressure/being monitored, for example if you’re an anti-government russian journalist, you’d ideally use crypto as they would be able to freeze your assets.
Lots of citizens of sanctioned countries aren’t able to use their credit/debit cards to shop online outside of their country, paying with crypto or even using something like a SolCard fixes that.
It’s also generally convenient, there’s no other realistic and accessible way to transfer any sum of money, whether $10 or $10M, for a $2 fee nearly instantly.
Hopefully this pulls competition away from the space I'm in and back into crypto. The last time crypto crashed, crypto folks flooded into generative media and we kind of became associated with them. I'm just trying to make tools.
Anytime we see a dollar symbol we assume something has value like a traditional asset, tied to tangible or measurable things like material costs, a company’s quarterly earnings, etc. But cryptocurrencies are totally different. This thing’s dollar value per unit wildly fluctuates literally hourly, because it’s based purely on human emotion and speculation.
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