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Comment by exstudent2 | Hacker News Reader

That's a pretty condecending opinion to take while Bitcoin reaches its multi year high and Eth and DAO are at all time highs. Maybe it's people who don't understand disruption and technology who shouldn't be in charge of their investments? Not really though since no one should concern themselves with anyone else's investments...

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All time highs are kind of a sign of a bubble, and say nothing about the liquidity of any investments or the time value of the return you can expect from them.

By all means don't invest then. It's pretty presumptuous to think people who see things differently need to be "educated" though (as the OP is attempting to do).

I think it's a natural pushback to the over-the-top evangelicalism of the crypto-cultists.

FYI it's fairly easy and cheap to short BTC now if you really believe this.

Where? The first hit on a Google search is a Quartz article from three years ago.

Bitfinex

That's an uninsured, international exchange. At the rate exchanges are "hacked", why would I ever trust them enough to put my money into it?

IG Index has bitcoin as an instrument. The spreads are terrible though so I wouldn't recommend it. If it was easier to short DAO tokens I'd think about it.

Damn. Should have more than just thought about it.

I imagine the few people sitting quietly with >1k btc understand quite well the problem of liquidity, that it's impossible for them to sell of such large quantities without crashing the market and taking huge losses, their only choice if they want to cash out is to slowly trickle it out without disrupting the market.

For everybody else, whose potential trading volume is very small relative to the total btc supply pool, btc is just like any other security.

Liquidity is a problem, but not at the 1k BTC scale. 24 hour volume was 300k BTC yesterday, so moving 1k BTC over a day shouldn't cause a market crash.

Even moving a small amount of counts can affect the market, because there is no real anonymity: people watch the large wallet balances and large known holders for signs of coins moving to e.g. an exchange.

Tulip bulbs were once at an all-time high as well, much like the people who bought them.

look how downvoted you are!

Truth that conflicts with the HN hivemind is regularly greyed. Best to see what the top voted comments in cryptocurrency-related posts say, then do the exact opposite.

That's been a successful strategy for me. I'm still up on DAO even after the drop :)

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