Bitcoin Now Worth More Than Twitter | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin Now Worth More Than Twitter

mattermark.com

113 pointsnickfrost84 comments

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Bitcoin is a currency. Twitter is a company. The comparison doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

The US dollar is now worth more than Microsoft.

US government debt is now worth more than the US dollar its worth is measured in

Of course it is. If it was worth less than the US dollar, Obama would've paid it out of pocket change by now.

Dramatically disagree with the premise.

I'd like to see someone put a value on owning the global reserve currency over the next 30 years (in a nation that owns 43% of all global private wealth, which is mostly accounted for in USD; with a global economy powered by commodities almost exclusively priced in dollars).

US Government debt is worth maybe 1% to 2% of what the USD is really worth today. I don't believe you can account for a currency's realistic worth while ignoring all the assets primarily or solely denominated in that currency, to say nothing of the immense leverage / power / economic benefits that the global reserve status brings along (that alone is blatantly worth more than all US Government debt).

My comment was half tongue in cheek, but it's still accurate.

US government debt has to be paid in USD, it doesn't matter what other assets they own, that can only be used to buy USD. Unless you barter with bondholders and have them accept these other assets? But that misses the point, we all know the situation is manageable, but it's an interesting idiosyncrasy nonetheless.

Yes, but the Universe is worth more than US! Got you.

Coin offerings are the new stock. Venture Capital is now investing in both:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/introduction-initial-coin-off...

So actually, they are now comparable.

Bitcoin is not a blockchain-based VC company. Bitcoin simply uses a blockchain. They are not comparable.

They are comparable to investors. Investors have to choose whether to put their money into Company A, Company B, or Coin C. To make this choice, they are comparing companies with coins.

Take your blinders off. You are getting disrupted.

This was an unfortunate title to an otherwise not so horrible article. It really didn't press the comparison too hard.

What? Sorry to rain on your common-sense parade, but the article says: "twitter is a useful measuring stick here, as it is a company of intense worth that is hard to value."

I don't know what that means. But after exploring Mattermark's website I'm not clear what they offer their users for $500 a month. Anyone use Mattermark and can offer insight?

They seem to scrape publicly available data about companies, organize it and offer an API?

They also have some sort of "Mattermark Score" for companies they track. If they don't know the difference between a currency and company, I'd be curious to know what this score involves too.

"What's wrong with comparing apples and oranges? They're both fruit!"

At about $14B, the market capitalization of bitcoin is still somewhat less than the $30-40B market capitalization of IPv4 address space.

Not sure if you're just being sarcastic, but I actually find that to be an interesting comparison.

Not sarcastic, but both numbers are somewhat meaningless since the prices depend on having only a small proportion of the stock being traded.

Ok so I suppose you're referencing what I found to be interesting about your first comment: you can compare IPv4 to Bitcoin in terms of artificial scarcity, which you're also saying makes it a somewhat meaningless comparison.

I'm not saying it's a meaningless comparison; I'm saying it's a comparison between meaningless numbers.

Ah OK I see. I think what's so interesting to me about comparing bitcoin to IPv4 is that the latter is an artifact of artificial scarcity based on history rather than deliberate design. I'm sure others have noticed this parallel before, of course.

I'm not sure I understand your comment. Is most of the Gold in the world traded? The same for currencies and stocks. Unless I'm missing something.

No, most of the gold in the world is not traded; but I don't remember ever hearing people talk about the "market capitalization of gold".

Most stocks have a rational basis for their price beyond mere scarcity: They pay dividends, or are expected to pay dividends eventually. Newly IPOed startups are something of an exception to this rule (lots of people chasing a small number of "hot" shares) and it's not surprising that they often have mythical market capitalizations.

You're half right, but you ignore market dynamics. Silver Tuesday [0] is a good scenario where the value of a precious metal was inflated due to the behavior of market participants and not an intrinsic value of the material.

There is a rational basis for everything's price but scarcity and signaling making up huge components of that rationale.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Thursday

Here, from Warren Buffett:

http://fortune.com/2012/02/09/warren-buffett-why-stocks-beat...

> Today the world’s gold stock is about 170,000 metric tons. If all of this gold were melded together, it would form a cube of about 68 feet per side. (Picture it fitting comfortably within a baseball infield.) At $1,750 per ounce -- gold’s price as I write this -- its value would be about $9.6 trillion.

He then goes on to say why he doesn't care for it: it's not a productive asset.

But someday we're going to run out of Bitcoin!

"Peak Bitcoin." Plastered on conspiracy sites everywhere.

Twitter comparisons aside (what's the point?), anyone know what could be causing the surge in pricing for Bitcoin? It was off my radar for a while and all of a sudden it's at $800+.

It's a Christmas miracle.

Could be ransomware. The bitcoin killer app :)

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/22/city-bank...

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted, ransomware infection rates lead bitcoin prices closely.

Ransomware isn't the bitcoin killer app. The bitcoin killer app is assassination markets. ;-)

2 points that I am aware of- attempts in India to rein in the "black" cash economy- which is perhaps 60% of GDP and currently untaxed- so notes taken out of circulation etc. And global jitters about banking and stability in general- I'd blame Trump but he may be a symptom, not a cause.

Unsolicited advice: alt.right religion does not reflect reality.

Speculation is that it's a combination of Chinese investors looking to get out of the yuan and lower supply caused by the recent halving of the mining/inflation rate.

Another possible factor is the upcoming SEC decision about the COIN ETF, on Jan. 10. A Bitcoin ETF could unlock pent-up demand and drive the price to new highs, the same way it did for gold. However, a delay seems much more likely than approval on Jan. 10.

Also Indian, Venezuelan, Argentinian citizens - their currency is not doing well at all.

All true but the volume right now is too low for those to affect the price this much.

What do you reckon it is?

To me the fact that Chinese exchanges are consistently $20 higher indicates that Chinese buying is probably driving the price. But you should always be skeptical when someone tells you a reason for price movements, because the truth is the only people who really know are the people buying and selling.

The Chinese premium means nothing since there is capital controls. Bitcoin has a premium where there is capital controls. It's not related to the volume or demand of BTC itself.

If the premium isn't related to demand or volume then why does it go up every time there's an increase in price and volume, and disappear when volume and volatility are low?

Your confusing the Delta-Premium with the Premium. The premium itself is not synonymous to higher demand. A positive Delta, however, can be.

India: Maybe inside the alt.right's religious fever dream. BTCINR volumes are negligible; USDINR has barely moved. Demonetization remains quite popular, and supermarkets remain as full as before.

Also hacked coins that can't actually be sold by the hackers... So the supply is low but demand is still high.

Do you have any proof of this?

> Also hacked coins that can't actually be sold by the hackers

If that were true, why would anyone bother to hack coins?

Sometimes it's easier to acquire the goods than it is to fence them. Same thing happens in real life all the time; burglars end up tossing what they've stolen because they can't turn it into money.

Over 95% of Bitcoin trade is speculation on Chinese exchanges; the rest is mostly drugs and then ransomware.

The "market cap" of Bitcoin is a meaningless concept - trading is thin enough there's no way you could ever realise the supposed value of a large holding. Single trades can send the price up or down $30.

Do you have any sources on the 95% claim? I know a recent Quartz article entitled "Bitcoin doesn't care what Silicon Valley thinks" stated a similar premise.

Also, I saw you are writing a dismissive book on bitcoin where you refer to the motives behind it as those of cranks promoting libertarian pseudoeconominics. I was hoping for a more objective analysis aside from, "you're crazy if you support bitcoin."

> The "market cap" of Bitcoin is a meaningless concept - trading is thin enough there's no way you could ever realise the supposed value of a large holding. Single trades can send the price up or down $30.

I just checked the charts on Kraken which according to https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/#markets has about 5.4% of the trading volume: https://www.kraken.com/charts. If you want to reduce the price by 30 Euros you'd have to sell coins worth a total of 775k Euros at once (using EUR instead of USD for the comparison, as Kraken's USD volume is only a small fraction of the EUR volume).

Also, according to https://coinmarketcap.com/ the total BTC trading volume over the last 24h was $187M. However, this number only includes exchanges that charge fees (as the volume in exchanges that don't charge fees could be artificially inflated), and thereby excludes almost all of the large Chinese exchanges. The top 3 Chinese exchanges all report volumes of over 3 billion USD during the past 24 hours.

So yes - single trades could definitely bring the price up or down by $30. But in practice most of the traders probably won't be affected by this.

Those trades are probably black market profits, primarily drugs. Or oligarchs, whose circles haven't been penetrated by journalists. (Or, what, overstock.com?)

I imagine Bitcoin would be a lot more popular if it weren't for the moral hazard of providing fungible currency for people trafficking in 9mms and ecstasy.

Afaik the reported volumes on Chinese exchanges are fake. They are much lower if you look at the order books.

Right now, it takes an order of $2,440,537 to send the price up $30, and $3,184,447 to send the price down $30.

That's well within the reach of a single trade.

Has been rising last two years, only on your radar now because of the ath

"all of a sudden"?! You have not been paying attention since August 2015 then :) Bitcoin has been on a constant and steady rise for the last 1.5 years, due to increased adoption. No single event explain it. Bitcoin is just getting more and more used, here are more wallets, more Bitcoin companies, more transactions, more remittance done in Bitcoin, etc.

http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/btceUSD#rg60zigWeeklyzczsg20...

Are you seeing more adoption in any number that isn't a vanity metric(number of wallets/accounts) or intentionally vague "revenue is up! (from where to where?)". Traffic across all the bitcoin social groups/forums is still dropping month over month. No vendor outside the darknet is seeing growth in sales(or really any sales). Even the remittance people are simultaneously claiming they are having fantastic success while wondering why they aren't having fantastic success(see coindesk article on it.

4 years later and still we don't have any of the major companies reporting MAU.

Number of trans/block has been very smoothly increasing for many years now - single best indicator of increasing adoption: https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions-per-block?days...

It's increasing but still really low and definitely possible it's increased use within the population instead of increased adoption. That's also like 2.5/second at its peak and even lower when you drop chain transactions.

I am not sure there is any utility in differentiating between these 2 types of increased use. Either way it's increased use, and either way it's good for Bitcoin.

Nowadays the peak trans rate is in fact 3.7/second [2200 trans/block]. The average is 2.8/second [1700 trans/block] - https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions-per-block?time...

Even when you drop chain trans, the trans rate has been smoothly increasing over many years - https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions-excluding-chai...

One of them isn't sustainable as fanatics eventually burn out.

The trans rate grew by a factor 10 over the last 3 years. Surely a non-zero fraction of this growth comes from new users.

If we were seeing real growth surely we'd see at least some signals outside of transaction rate. We also have an ongoing block size debate at the moment and I wouldn't put it past some of the proponents(Ver) to be willing to spend money to artificially inflate block sizes.

There are plenty of signals. Price is rising. Activity on Bitcoin forums is growing (r/Bitcoin users grew from 173,000 to 198,000 in a year, bitcointalk.org activity grew from 5900 posts/day to 6700 posts/day in a year, etc). Bitcoin remittance usage is growing (one example: http://bravenewcoin.com/news/bitcoin-remittances-20-percent-...). Bitcoin trading is increasing (especially in China, look at the volume starting in Q4 2015: https://bitcoinwisdom.com/markets/okcoin/btccny). More wallets are created (not a 100% "vanity" metric, but I agree the number of used or active wallets would be a better measure). More venture capital poured into Bitcoin year after year (https://news.bitcoin.com/venture-capital-all-time-high-new-r...). And more.

If a single metric was increasing this wouldn't be a reliable indicator. However all of the above are growing.

>Price is rising.

Given how much the price is driven by speculation this isn't an indicator of growth of users.

>(r/Bitcoin users grew from 173,000 to 198,000 in a year

And visits dropped every month of the year and are at less than half where they were 2 years ago.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/about/traffic For 2016 the average was around 400k uniques per month and around 3m pageviews per month.

https://web.archive.org/web/20150207080404/http://www.reddit...

For 2015 it was about double that.

https://web.archive.org/web/20150207080404/http://www.reddit...

For 2014 again we see about the same numbers as 2015 and about double 2016.

>Bitcoin remittance usage is growing

Again a bunch of bitcoin companies saying they are doing large numbers while avoiding giving actual figures. SCI is famous for this. Godfreee regularly post on /r/bitcoin about how successful they are and how great their business is while also claiming that giving any numbers would put them at a competitive disadvantage but that they would be releasing a report soon(for ~2 years now he has been claiming to be releasing a report soon).

Also http://www.coindesk.com/why-bitcoins-remittance-disruption-s...

>More wallets are created (not a 100% "vanity" metric, but I agree the number of used or active wallets would be a better measure).

Wallets is a 100% vanity metric because there is no limit to how many wallets a single user to can great. Same with accounts on coinbase.

>More venture capital poured into Bitcoin year after year

At the start of 2015 through to the end of the first quarter it was claimed that 1b in vc would happen in 2015. The year ended with less than half of that with half of that being funds raised by 2 companies.

In 2016 it's dropped back below 2014 levels with 1/3rd of the claimed bitcoin VC going to non-bitcoin companies like Ripple.

Bitcoin users still get excited when they see it discussed anywhere outside of bitcoin specific forums because there is virtually no one that cares about it outside their bubble.

Pretty much every store online that has started accepting bitcoin that has reported results later on has shown it to be a huge failure. Even bitcoin darlings like Overstock reported that after the initial spike sales dropped off to meaningless numbers. Things like the bitcoin blvd in the netherlands reported something like 1.6btc in total sales amongst all retailers in their first 18 months.

The users that are in the bitcoin space now a days largely fit into one category. People who likely need a lottery win to ever be rich and having seen a few early adopters do just that are convinced bitcoin is their sure thing. So they constantly double down on their efforts and purchases.

People are constantly showing growth on things like coindance while ignoring that once you account for inflation the numbers are actually flat or decreasing pretty much across the board.

It's possible there is some random event that drives bitcoin to be a success in the future and I look very silly for my opinions of the years but there is no real evidence that the new users in bitcoin are outpacing the churn. Though I will happily accept I'm wrong once some of the bitcoin companies start reporting real numbers. We may get our wish as part of the Coinbase IRS lawsuit since Coinbase has already started reporting much lower numbers of US users than they have previously claimed.

Could someone sum up the needed technology stack to do bitcoin mining in 2016?

In particular, is it still in any way possible to build small scale, home-brewed mining operations or the higher barrier of entry means that only the big companies will survive?

https://twitter.com/sowbug/status/414098711505952768

Less concise: don't bother. If you believe the price will rise, buy bitcoin rather than mining equipment and electricity.

Yes, it (buying vs mining) makes sense, thank you.

You can if you have cheap electricity. The biggest downside is that you'll need ASICs, and only one company publicly sells them. Naturally, they are priced such that your margins will be hair thin.

Thank you, I thought there was more choice regarding ASICs, but even then yeah, why would they sell them on the cheap rather than use them?

If you treat Bitcoin mining as a lottery, with your hardware generating multitudes of tickets for every ~10 minute (on average) block, then you can just fire up any old CPU, GPU, or ASIC and wait.

If you treat Bitcoin mining with a short term profit seeking mindset, you will be disappointed.

Worth noting that with a CPU you'd be lucky to average even a penny a year, and that's assuming using a modern CPU at 100% 24/7

Well with real life lotteries I have averaged $0 in about 40 years so a penny a year is a good chance as lotteries go ;-)

You've still got to factor in $200-300 in electricity a year (I'm assuming you're using a computer that you've already paid for). The numbers on the lottery vary, but most numbers I've found seem to put the expected return around 50-60%. So if you buy $300 worth of lottery tickets a year you should expect to get back ~$150, which is slightly better than the ~$0.005-0.01 you can expect from mining bitcoins with just a high end CPU.

This is a startup that provides "valuations" of other startups after all. They sell shovels to the miners who think they are all going to get rich.

Twitter's valuation is becoming a favorite recently. Much like how number of books in Library of Congress, used to be standard for hard disk capacity.

Or rather twitter is now worth less than bitcoin

Not so sure about this line:

"bitcoin is closing the year on a high note, surviving its (expected) mining changes with grace"

Adoption of technical improvements like segwit has become more of a political game than ever with less technical people shouting louder, so much that it's become a joke with parodies like Bitcoin Ultimate.

Well, except, try selling 5% of Bitcoin and see what's gonna happen!

Try selling 5% of the dollar and see what happens.

It will go to near zero on every single exchange. That's how liquidity works. Pretty much never large percentages of commodities/currencies are traded on exchanges.

That's not the point. Bitcoin is being compared to Twitter. If you have majority stock in Twitter, you can probably buy the rest at a reasonable price. Not so with Bitcoin, or any other currency/medium of exchange.

If you sell 5% of Twitter, you won't see much of an action compared to Bitcoin!

If you sell 5% of Twitter stock, it will go to near zero as well.

Another of alt.right's religious gospels is about BTC being the new 'gold'; about how BTC and XAU will rise as the world is set to plunge. I can't speak for the latter, but anyone with a two bit brain can see that BTC much like USD is negatively corelated with gold. It is currencies like CHF and JPY that ironically track XAU!

Are the continous 'alt.right' snarks really necessary? They make your comments seem very condescending.

Legendary creatures with wings that fly high up in the sky are called Pegasus, Unicorns on the contrary does not have wings. Thus when the interest rate go up Unicorns may be separated from Pegasus.

Cryptographies stand to create a better future. A better future should be worth more than Twitter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus

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