Bitcoin Crushes $9,000 on Growing Signs of Mainstream Adoption | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin Crushes $9,000 on Growing Signs of Mainstream Adoption

cointelegraph.com

30 pointsromanhn43 comments

if you have 9k dollars and you don't need to spend it on something, and you want to save, what are your options, keep it cash, will only loose its value (maybe less in US but in other countries yes with 7% inflation), you would pay bank fees, and the money would do nothing, buy gold, is complicated, you need to make a contract, again pay fees to hold it for you, buy real estate, is to little money, buy stocks, is complicated, which stock, 90% of countries don't even have a stock market, invest it in a business, again.. you don't have time, is complicated, which business etc., art/wine/collectives, to little money, you need to store it, research, etc,

So tell me which is a better investment/store of value 9k money, at this moment?, without needing weeks of research and paperwork and fees, etc.

An ETF tracker?

What country are you in?

It didn't exactly "crush" $9,000. It just nervously touched it, and then fled back.

CoinTelegraph is generally garbage.

yeah not exactly an impartial source

Serious question: why would one buy Bitcoin except for holding on to it? That seems like a very unhealthy reason imho...

That's all there is to it at this point. Other cryptos are vastly better if you actually want to do anything with it.

Indeed, 7 day moving average of confirmation time is currently 107 minutes. This has gotten as high as 440 minutes, making Bitcoin utterly useless as a transactional currency. It's basically just e-gold now.

Of course, the reason the Bitcoin confirmation time is so high is because it's processing more transactions than every cryptocurrency except Etherium...

Ethereum is fast too, and what it comes down to is the fact that the majority of people who use Bitcoin today are invested in it as an investment and not as a currency. Which means any efforts to fix the problem are met with pitchforks because it could disrupt the market and kill the value of their gold.

One might buy it, to sell it to a greater fool before the price crashes

Money laundering and terrorist financing are two potential uses (risks) explored by the Financial Action Task Force in this report: http://www.fatf-gafi.org/media/fatf/documents/reports/Guidan...

Money laundering and terrorist financing can be done and is done with fiat currencies too.

Bitcoin is also not a private coin, ledger is public and anyone can analyze the flow of money.

The only private coin I know of is Monero (XMR). Analyzing Monero ledger is like looking at random data, there's no amounts, there's no receivers, there's no senders. Everything is fully, by default, encrypted.

Even receivers can't know who the sender was.

mixers can hide the trail

How does a private coin work with blockchain tech? If you can't know who the sender and receiver are how can you verify transactions?

There's an optionable Payment ID you can attach (also encrypted), so receiver can confirm that the payment received was for a particular purpose.

Let's say payment id is user id + product id, so receiver could easily confirm that transaction was from a particular user for a particular product.

I'd take pay in bitcoin as payment for work anytime over last 5 years because of stupidly high cost of international money transfers. Unfortunately nobody wanted to pay me like that because apparently it was harder for accounting.

Would you have spent it?

If I didn't have money and I needed it then definitely.

Use Bitwage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AecPrwqjbGw

For me, buying BTC is buying out of fiat. Being able to have autonomous control of the currency I have the private keys to. I've been thinking lately: the rich invest their fiat into stores of value, while paying the poor in fiat which is soon to be worthless. This reinforces the current inequality

Just plucking some thoughts from the aether of my mind. I'm currently holding because I can't spend, but technologies are going to be emerging which enable Steam et al to efficiently accept BTC, & I don't feel BTC is something to be sold-- only spent

The growth rate will stabilize once the market settles on what the true value of this currency is. Then it'll just be a non deflating store of value which is also liquid

Thank you for the detailed answer. I have some follow up questions.

How can it settle on a value when there is a limited amount of Bitcoins

Also, why would you spend it if it can double in value 2 months later?

I'm going to describe this in terms of gold; as a metaphor, you can replace gold with any other non deflating asset. There's a limited amount of gold. If you could atomically store your cash as gold yet still pay with it directly through debit, then you don't really need cash. But man does not survive on gold; so you must spend the currency

By settle in value I don't mean settle on a precise fiat price. Because I'm thinking post-fiat. This may be idealistic, I know, but try to think from that perspective. By stable I mean the value of BTC shouldn't double every two months. Unless the goods it buys are becoming twice as cheap due to technological advancement

There may be weird implications of having your mortgage be in terms of an asset that's non deflating, where if the economy is causing wages to go down as cost of living decreases it can become infeasible to pay for one's house in a year. Two things: banks can come up with a bank-coin which should inflate in order to stimulate long term loans, & maybe people should avoid debt. I personally live with my only debt being my mortgage

So maybe BTC isn't a good currency to take out a loan for, but in that case if you can have the bank agree to a dogecoin loan it work outs. I only mention doge because it's an inflating cryptocurrency originally based on BTC, but ideally the inflating currency would be segwit so that one can make atomic payments to that currency with their BTC. Kind of going on a tangent here in this stream of consciousness but the core of this idea is that you can pay with BTC for something in a different unit, currently loans are in the unit of USD, but perhaps in the future loans will be in terms of a 'platonic housing price according to some index' unit

(thinking a bit, really a BTC loan should just have a lower interest rate compared to what we currently have, as that's accounting for inflation)

> Thought many mainstream finance pundits regard Bitcoin as a bubble, the market has not shown any signs of a so-called “blow off top," meaning a sudden and major reversal is unlikely at the moment.

It is hard to take an article seriously when it is built on top of pseudoscience from Investopedia

All "knowledge" about investment in speculative instruments is pseudoscience. You can see it when you compare hedge funds with index funds like Warren Buffet did.

And yet Warren Buffett consistently beats the market.

Yes. Because he is Warrent Buffet. He does that not because he reads the market but because he drives the market.

He, at no fault of his own, is same thing for stocks as penny stock scammers are for penny stock market.

"Growing Signs of Mainstream Adoption" LOL

Bitcoin is unusable for any transactions and has been for some time. That's why the shillers are calling it a "store of value" now.

At this point, apart from investor's demand, what bitcoin is backed by? Did those numerous ICOs actually help to make the market cap sustainable?

No, but they did attract a new wave of speculators to the ecosystem.

Nothing, the only reason to buy it is that people think they'll be able to sell it to someone else for more later. Other cryptos are way better at actually doing things.

Demand is probably almost entirely speculative, which is nothing new. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange is launching Bitcoin futures in a few weeks, which I think contributes to the current run-up.

Bitcoin is backed by same thing art is: scarcity, durability, transferability. Anything with these qualities will appreciate in value as wealth of civilisation grows.

Penny stocks are also scarce, durable and transferable...

Penny stocks are generally not scarce (You can buy a lot of them) not durable (Companies tend to go bankrupt). Gold would be a better analogy.

People can't create new types of gold by taking an open source coin and forking it...

Gold is only analogous to Bitcoin (or any one specific crypto), not the entire phenomenon. People can create new companies and list their stock but that in itself has no impact on stock prices.

bitcoin is nice because, unlike paypal, you don't get locked out have have to verify your phone and email and shit like that. as long as you have the private keys, you can spend anywhere

Also unlike PayPal a transaction takes a few hours instead of a few seconds. Wait, that's not a good thing...

It is instantaneous depending on which platform you are using. Maybe you should bother looking into it.

Platform? Bitcoin is bitcoin, either you use a different crypto (in which case we're no longer talking about bitcoin) or you're using some fluff on top (in which case we're also no longer talking about bitcoin). Have a look at this graph to understand why bitcoin doesn't work as transactional currency https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-confirmation-time

I think he meant how many confirmations they want, 0 confirmations is instant, also unlike paypal you won't get charge-backed.

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