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Comment by icelancer | Hacker News Reader

I've been hearing this at $500, $1000, $2000, $4000, $5000, and now $6400.

I'm certainly willing to believe anyone at those times. But... everyone's been quite wrong.

I make a weekly purchase of a small basket of cryptocurrency (mostly BTC) and I actually mine XMR with some leftover hardware since it's price efficient currently. No different than hedging your retirement portfolio with commodities and other non-correlated assets with your equities basket.

Cryptocurrency isn't going anywhere anytime soon, that's about the only thing we can say for sure.

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That is terrible logic. The same could be said of any bubble in history. Even though tulips reached $X, they still crashed in the end. The problem is that you can't tell that you're in a bubble while you're in a bubble, especially since bitcoin is an asset that is intrinsically difficult to value (unlike, say, a CDO or less-so a tulip bulb).

I'm worried people will lose money seeing all these gains in crypto and taking statements like yours at face value. Just because someone out there made 50x their initial investment in crypto from times t1 to t2 doesn't mean anybody will make this much money after t2.

Cryptocurrency might not go anywhere in general, but there's no reason coin X on chain Y will be worth anything in 10 years. Miners are already pretty ruthless about switching chains to whichever makes them the most money.

>>That is terrible logic.

Was this foreshadowing? Because this statement absolutely is:

>>The same could be said of any bubble in history. Even though tulips reached $X, they still crashed in the end.

You've neglected to include every other asset appreciation model like the DJIA, NASDAQ, Nikkei, etc, solely to focus on... tulips.

BTC may very well be a bubble, just like real estate (or is it?), but like you cannot tell if you are in a bubble while you're in it, nor can you tell if it IS a bubble either. If you are authoritatively stating that we are in a BTC bubble, your opinion is worse than mine, which is to say it is inconclusive and the person I responded to - had they had any conviction to bet against BTC at $500 or other price points where his same argument was trotted out - would have lost his entire stake, or close to it.

>>but there's no reason coin X on chain Y will be worth anything in 10 years

If you could quote from my comment where I said BTC would be worth anything in 10 years, this statement would make more sense. As it is, you just knocked down a strawman. I specifically said I am willing to believe that BTC will go to zero USD tomorrow. Because it's totally possible that it will.

It just hasn't, yet, and anyone saying that it will has the same amount of information as the people saying it will go to $50,000: None.

Sure, but when speaking in dollar terms, your asset appreciation models (stock indices) represent tangible businesses with assets and revenues in real dollars. That is, if I buy stock in X company, I (theoretically) own a certain share of the total assets of the company. A company is relatively easy to value in terms of real dollars because you can use its total assets, debt, revenue, projected growth, etc. to provide a rough score of its worth. You can assume that when a stock's value increases, the company generally has improved on these metrics in some way.

With Bitcoin, your "asset appreciation model" relies on people continually buying bitcoin at a larger rate to usd. There is no underlying asset (a business) that has intrinsic worth that may drive the price. You could argue that there are some analogues, for example, the mining hash rate or the strength of the blockchain, but the actual value of these is extremely hard to define. That is why Bitcoin may be in a bubble, people may be overestimating how these intangibles may be affecting price; it is hard to say what the value may truly be.

I am not authoritatively stating that we are in a BTC bubble, just that I would be very cautious with bitcoin and think a bubble is likely. Nobody knows what will happen, but we certainly can't say that Bitcoin isn't in a bubble (as you seemed to originally suggested), and in my opinion bitcoin resembles a bubble, though I respect that it may not to you.

Didn't it already have a major correction at 200 and 1000 and a pretty significant one the first time it got around 5000. Yeah, people keep saying that, but it also keeps correcting sporadically. It's not like it's been a smooth ride up from sub $1.

Any advice for newbies looking to mine XMR?

/r/moneromining is OK. Lot of resources to check out there. SimpleMiningOS is a popular operating system that runs a ton of miners.

>I've been hearing this at $500, $1000, $2000, $4000, $5000, and now $6400.

If BTC was the stock market, then it has crashed at one of those numbers. It gradually went from $1000 down to about $200. If the stock market did that, everyone would be in a panic.

Yeah ppl who keep predicting bubble need to hang it up and just admit they were wrong.

It's less about being "wrong" and more about making a falsifiable claim. You can certainly just call something a bubble literally forever: until you die, or until humanity goes extinct, until the heat death of the universe, etc. If Bitcoin stays relevant up to any of those points in time, I'll consider it a success regardless of how many people continued making the unfalsifiable claim that it's a bubble.

The universe is a bubble!

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