Ask HN: Why is Bitcoin suddenly so popular? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why is Bitcoin suddenly so popular?

42 pointsforkLding59 comments

Taking a look below at price, you can see that 1 bitcoin is worth around $4400 US dollars.

https://www.coindesk.com/price/

I remember a time when they were giving out free bitcoin at hackathons and conferences etc.

For a casual outsider and a passive market speculator, whats going on with bitcoin and maybe the rest of cryptocurrencies, what are they seeing that we can't?

And any clues as to whats with the recent surge in East Asian interest of bitcoin?

https://www.coindesk.com/annyeong-bitcoin-south-korea-canada-changing-crypto-market/

Note that I've tried googling but a lot of the urls are before May 2017 and are trying to explain about Bitcoin's peak at ~$2000 which is not helpful much.

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It's a classic speculative bubble. People are making bets to position themselves for a situation where Bitcoin will be worth a lot in the future, but the valuation is untethered from any intrinsic value.

The surge becomes self-sustaining, in that as news stories of easy wealth spread and more speculators bundle into the market, it fuels more demand from new participants looking to get rich quick. This is not sustainable in the long run, and as soon as the crowd gets spooked all the dumb money will bail out very quickly, leading to a very fast crash.

The Gladwell book "The Tipping Point" is a good read about how ideas and fads take hold in societies. It's more a function of the way information spreads than about any secret knowledge about Bitcoin. Nobody can predict the future, but Bitcoin speculation is an attempt to gamble on it.

There's an investment adage that's something like "When your barista's telling you to invest in something, it's time to get out". Have had a number of non-tech/non-finance friends ask about how to invest money into Bitcoin lately, which is a signal to me that Bitcoin is becoming dangerously overheated.

Take a look at http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/515b40886bb3f7bd490... from the South China Seas bubble in the 18th Century. The first half of that curve look familiar? Guessing we will see a lot of Newtons in the not so distant future...

(Still, I have some crypto as part of my investment portfolio, about 2% of my net worth... you never know...)

I'm not sure if a South China Sea bubble in the 18th century can really be used as a valid comparison here.

We're talking about the rise of a self-contained, decentralised currency and transactional system, all rolled into one. It literally has blatant potential to be a game changer, 100%.

In saying that, I wouldn't be surprised if it all falls apart in the short term.

British trade in the 1700-1800s was a big deal too. Didn't mean people made money from the bubble company.

Few revolutiinary technologies generate sizeable returns overall. Railroads and airplanes are a classic example of technologies that changed the world and produced poor-to-negative returns.

There is a direct and educational correlation that can be drawn between South China Seas, tulip bulbs, stocks in 1929, dotcom stocks, Beanie Babies, subprime housing, Bitcoin, etc.

Time and time again some financial instrument has become unmoored from it's intrinsic value and lax regulation allows speculative money to pour in, some early adopters get rich, the financially naive jump on the bandwagon without understanding the underlying instruments, they get spooked and the entire thing plummets back to it's fundamental value (which may well be zero) leaving some with fortunes and some with nothing. Bubbles appear to be a natural occurrence in a lightly regulated market economy and typically follow a very similar pattern.

I think that Bitcoin can be both a speculative bubble and a potentially world-changing technology. The dotcom bubble is a fine prior example - huge classic speculative bubble, also radically changed how we are all now living.

Define 'intrinsic value' though.

I don't think shininess counts.

I'll give it a shot. The intrinsic value of a good is the value of the utility it provides.

For BTC this would be the value as a payment network and a means of facilitating transactions. Its value as an investment would not count.

> Its value as an investment would not count.

Why not?

If you buy a business, it will generate wealth. If you buy a bitcoin, it will generate....what, precisely?

Gold is often used as a comparison, but gold doesn't generate anything either. And gold will generally lose value compared to an investment in a productive asset.

> Gold is often used as a comparison, but gold doesn't generate anything either. And gold will generally lose value compared to an investment in a productive asset.

And I don’t understand why we have this gold comparison. Compared to a productive asset, gold won’t be generating any value. But gold’s value in the first world is at least somewhat in lockstep with inflation, where Bitcoin is all over the place and can’t be used as a hedge like gold can.

If you are reasonably sure that it's a bubble, you should be shorting, right?

Shorting a bubble also involves timing the peak and decline, I don't feel confident in my ability to do that (or anyone's tbh). I'm not knowledgable enough about Bitcoin markets or how shorting works to make a rational decision - it'd be a pure bet.

First time round I got into Bitcoin and was able to time the peak right (by luck) and made enough for a few nice dinners, should've held onto them though.

This time my strategy is just to buy and hold - my hypothesis being that there is a small chance Bitcoin/crypto will form the basis of a new economic mode - if it isn't and it crashes to zero, I'm only in as far as I can lose my stake completely (or lose my nerve and cash out what's left which is also highly likely). I am a very boring and amateur investor. I am the dumb money :)

Is anyone else having this feeling (and I'll immediately add the disclaimer that I mean "irrational gut feeling with no factual back-up") that the current cryptocurrency hype is going to end similar to the information superhighway hype of the nineties, with a lot of disappointments, a few big new players, and then a kind of "revival" a decade later where we get it right?

Again, I have no evidence to back this up, I just have a feeling that spectacular mistakes will be made, things will crash and burn when idealism can no longer paper over the parts where naive hopes cannot be reconciled with harsher realities, learn from that, and then get it right the second time around.

EDIT: Note that this is basically a criticism of human nature, not of cryptocurrencies

I have been thinking the exact same thing, but once again based on nothing other than a hunch and following lots of altcoin stuff from the sidelines.

Doesn't mean I don't regret throwing some BTC away when they were worth cents!

There is no doubt the pets.com equivalent of ICO startups that won't deliver anything of value. On the other hand, the googles, and Amazons of the crypto world are being built today and if they provide enough value they will survive when the liquidity tide washes away.

That bitcoin survived MtGoX espectacular crash and kept growing in value after that shows some resilience. I'm not sure other pure financial bubbles survived middle-of-the-way crashes before the final definitive crash.

That said, I believe there will be a lot of disappointments regarding expectations of bitcoin sparking a revolution. My belief is that it will be "only" one more tool among the several financial tools that exist in the world.

I had forgotten about MtGoX, good point.

It may be that cryptocurrencies are going through this boom/bust/rise-from-the-ashes cycle on a much shorter timescale. After all, software development is much faster than setting up internet infrastructure and adoption. So what used to take decades to get right might now take years.

Plain bubble. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_bubble Non-speculative use is all but nonexistent. ICOs are a bad excuse whitepaper attached to a tradeable ERC-20 token. There is no actual economic productivity there, just money going into a whirlwind.

I'm getting emails from friends whose retired parents are being targeted by crypto hucksters. My brother sent me an email this morning which was a glaringly obvious scam a friend of his had fallen for and was trying to get him in on.

I thought the bubble was bad a few months ago, right now it's clearly in batshit insane territory. What they're "mining" is the money from normal people who shouldn't be going within a mile of cryptos, and it'll be a bloodbath. The 2017 bubble is so much bigger than the 2013 bubble.

Are you saying dotn hodl?

Japan is a huge part of this. Since the government approved btc as a currency, Peach Airlines has started taking bitcoin, huge chains of convenience stores like FamilyMart have been accepting payments in bitcoin, etc.

It's still a tiny portion of total commerce but an absolutely massive jump from previous bitcoin usage.

Also, bitflyer, a bitcoin exchange, is running TV commercials in Japan (Source: I live in Japan, I've seen it first hand)

> Since the government approved btc as a currency,

i.e., regulated it in any way at all; specifically, they said exchanges could trade BTC and ETH.

> Peach Airlines has started taking bitcoin,

no, they ran press releases saying they may well by the end of this year probably.

> huge chains of convenience stores like FamilyMart have been accepting payments in bitcoin, etc.

no, one of their payment processors added a bitcoin option; there's so far no evidence of non-negligible usage.

You're inadvertently parroting speculative bitcoin hype here. The general rule with all bitcoin (and blockchain) media coverage is that there's always much less to it than there appears.

> "You're inadvertently parroting speculative bitcoin hype here. The general rule with all bitcoin (and blockchain) media coverage is..."

I was in Japan two weeks ago and saw for myself. I was actually surprised about payments being taken in bitcoin when I heard a customer at a FamilyMart talking about it and double checked with the clerks just to make sure I wasn't misunderstanding.

I may have misunderstood the timing with Peach's support, since I wanted to book in NTD (the currency of my bank account) anyway. That said, exactly none of my comment comes from speculative media coverage. It's literally all from first-hand experience interacting with companies as a customer.

I think Bitcoin has been growing in popularity since it began, but we first saw mainstream interest in 2013...then interest waned in the wake of the Mt. Gox disaster. Since then, I think the platform and tooling has matured. You've got exchanges like Coinbase that have developed methods of securely storing Bitcoin and have at the same time made it easy for the average person to link to their bank accounts.

I think Ethereum has come up with a novel use case for Blockchain as a distributed computer (as opposed to merely a distributed ledger). And all the alternative cryptos are trying to show that there are use cases for other protocols, too.

So the competition, the tooling, the ecosystem, all of these are exploding right now. There's a lot of money pouring in, developers are getting excited about it...It feels like a new paradigm, distributed apps have some exciting implications. No one knows what this will look like, but it feels a bit like the early dot com era right now.

Thats actually the part I don't understand, one could argue that VR is in a similar or even more advanced stage than Bitcoin/Blockchain in terms of tooling and platforms simply because of the exposure on a day-to-day basis but we've recently seeing VR die down, VR equipment price cuts to encourage sales and HTC looking for a buyer for its Vive.

In fact one bitcoin is worth almost 6 HTC Vives. I'd argue that there was even bigger interest in VR than Bitcoin specifically and yet Bitcoin has emerged the winner recently.

That's a weird comparison. VR is largely consumer entertainment at a point in time when we have unlimited amounts of it and it requires hardware that most consumers can't afford and lacks content.

Crypto is an investment that provides yield at a point in time where very little can be found, equity markets are overvalued according to many indicators and an increasingly wealthy population in China is seeking investment opportunities not associated with the Yuan that they can't get in any other form.

Crypto has the potential (however likely you think) to completely redefine the world economy via decentralization. A decentralized, unregulated currency that doesn't require intermediaries and can rapidly transfer and store massive amounts of value with relatively limited transaction fees is unprecedented. VR by comparison is largely a mere iteration on existing entertainment systems right now.

I guess what you are saying is right, I based my opinions mainly on the companies backing which technology, it seemed like to me that Facebook, HTC, etc. had a better advantage of turning a technology popular than Bitcoin which is more open-source.

It's, in fact, getting less popular outside of speculation - it's only practical use. Most articles and news are about blockchain technology gaining adoption, not Bitcoin per se, which is obsolete already. What's getting popular is Ethereum, and Ripple which is a far more superior platform with real potential but not as lucrative for speculation.

The "Blockchain" hype is totally being carried by the hype in cryptos, though. And it is hype - there's endless hypothetical proposals, and endless bare excuses for an ICO, and endless pilot programmes that IBM's managed to sell someone on, but there's about 0 being put into production use.

>> but there's about 0 being put into production use

Daimler for example is currently using Blockchain to manage a 100 million Euro loan [1]. They will still use their old tech (faxes and lots of beaurocracy) in parallel on this deal since is there is much at stake, obviously. But it is a nice experiment that will certainly inspire others, if successful.

[1] https://www.daimler.com/investors/refinancing/blockchain.htm...

Literally the subheading on that page:

> Joint pilot project

Hey now. It's also useful for buying drugs.

Drugs and child porn - sure, but that's still a niche. Plus, people finally realized that Bitcoin payments are quasi-anonymous, and the conspiracy theory that CIA/NSA created Bitcoin to catch crooks now makes more sense than ever.

It does use the eliptical curve encryption with nsa magic numbers iirc

[Citation please]

Crtl + f "bubble" => 17 matches

Since no one mentioned it yet - deflation.

The total amount of bitcoins is limited. Although the last bitcoin has not yet been mined, the available amount of bitcoin has stabilized, because the bitcoin-mining-process has slowed down and is in parity with the bitcoin-got-lost-process.

Coincidentally, there is a recent post on AVC.com (the VC Fred Wilson's blog) about Bitcoin:

http://avc.com/2017/08/store-of-value-vs-payment-system

Note: I don't have a position or view on this topic either way, just posting it here to see if there are any interesting comments here on it, from which I or others might learn something.

What would happen to the long-term legitimacy of the bitcoin market if corrupt state actors started investing heavily in order to hide money laundering?

It's the network affect. More people using it, the price rises, more people buy, the price rises more, and on and on.

It could be but whats the network effect about? Like I can see a network effect coming out of Facebook for connecting friends, what would bitcoin do thats so powerful, that more people use that the price would rise? Transfer money internationally in a fast and cheap manner?

The more people that are willing to accept Bitcoin in exchange for goods and services, the more valuable Bitcoin is.

That's been less and less, though.

Mainly because of fees. I'd say crypto (as a whole) has had a huge increase in acceptance overall, and with Bitcoin being the easiest to purchase and usually the favored currency to trade alts with, it's natural that it's only grown in popularity.

"acceptance" is a weasel word. It's an asset bubble, where the "acceptance" is for the purpose of speculation in the hope of getting rich for free.

Note the actual comment I'm responding to:

> The more people that are willing to accept Bitcoin in exchange for goods and services, the more valuable Bitcoin is.

Approximately nobody accepts Bitcoin in exchange for goods and services except to buy drugs. Which does count as a use case, but it's a trivial one compared to the speculation; and even drug buyers and sellers are endlessly frustrated by the transaction clogs.

More people accept it and recognize it as a valid form of exchange and means of storing value. The belief networks that BTC is valuable have increased, increasing demand and thus price.

The price increase brings in more people that invest in it (buy it) so the price rises even more - rinse and repeat.

That doesn't really explain it. BTC's popularity skyrocketed in the last 4 months at an extremely rapid rate that doesn't correspond to any long term trend line.

The price was actually comparatively low as of Q1 2017

More people using it? Any proof of that?

https://blockchain.info/charts/my-wallet-n-users

Wallet activity continues to grow

The number of wallets does not equate the number of users.

There pretty much is no way for you or I (a.k.a: people without mass surveillance) to get # of users accurately. The best metrics we can go off of are # of transactions[1] and # of unique addresses[2].

[1]:https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions?timespan=all

[2]:https://blockchain.info/charts/n-unique-addresses?timespan=a...

The correct word here is "effect".

I especially like the way the following video explains the long-term vision of why Bitcoin is valuable. Once you understand the long-term vision, and how Bitcoin's fate is still very much up-in-the-air in some respects and still subject to a lot of speculation and possible government interference, it's not hard to understand that such large short-term upsides and downsides are to be expected. The speaker is Andreas Antonopoulos, a particularly eloquent speaker (IMHO) about all things bitcoin: https://youtu.be/ONvg9SbauMg

Every day Bitcoin survives proofs that it works.

Suddenly?

It jumped ~2000 dollars USD in less than 2 months

https://www.coindesk.com/price/

We have seen that story over and over in the last few years. it goes from 1 to 2, then from 2 to 4, etc...

Its an arbitrary psychological milestone. 5k is a lot of money for a "coin'. Of course the base is arbitrary. I'd argue for the programmers to do a 'stock split" so that new Bitcoin is 1/1000th of old and new price is $5, so it can again go up to 5k.

Well press all on the timeline below:

https://www.coindesk.com/price/

and you will see what I mean.

A huge jump in pricing (~3500 USD) in less than 5 months is a jump in popularity no?

Like individually it seems small, but once you realize the market cap, its pretty big. If this was Apple stock price in the same scale of time (Apple's market cap jumps 350% in 5 months, note that Apple stock price has always been less than Bitcoin so it would be even greater if for Apple), people would be running around screaming and asking why Apple stock suddenly became so popular.

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