Hacker News Reader

Comment by charlesdm | Hacker News Reader

I don't get this. The dot-com bubble ran up to $6.7tn in market cap, in 2000, before crashing down to $1.7tn.

The crypto space, which seems to be shaping into an entirely new asset class, has a $300bn valuation. That's less than the value of Facebook.

The only reason why people are shouting bubble is because people were able to get in from the start, when these coins were 10 cents on the dollar. But when Facebook IPOed after 10ish years, it had a valuation of $50bn. But early angel investors also got in at 10 cents on the dollar.

It could eventually become a bubble, but I don't think think we're even nearly there yet.

View on HN

> I don't get this. The dot-com bubble ran up to $6.7tn in market cap, in 2000, before crashing down to $1.7tn.

And there you have my coarse investment target (probably adjusted for inflation or M2) around which I'll exit

I built a site to calculate how far we are away from that target and what any portfolio would be worth by then (cryptoport.net)

Same here, actually. Probably a bit sooner even.

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. That a bubble has to be bigger before it can be called such? That you feel there's some fundamental value there to provide a floor price in the event of a crash? Genuine question

also the fact that 99% of bitcoin's value is tied up in financial speculation rather than real world use cases, and the remaining 1% is drug dealing.

Gold has close to no use cases (80%+ is store of wealth) and seems to be doing fine at an $8tn global market cap.

Of the potential 21m Bitcoin in existence, 4m are assumed to have been permanently lose. 16m have been mined. That leaves 1m coins left to be acquired in the future.

Is there a timeframe for how long it will take for those 1m coins to be mined? Is it equally likely that the price craters or skyrockets once that happens?

I think the price will skyrocket anyway, because there is a limited supply. In a way, I believe it could be like an epic short squeeze. You have people wanting to buy in (retail + institutional money is coming in) over the next few years.

If you take the example of oil -- once the price of a barrel goes over a certain threshold price, you'll go and explore new wells that were previously not profitable. And you will eventually get more supply after a while. That's just not the case with Bitcoin (and probably Ethereum after next year).

I get what you're saying, but your math is a bit misleading. As far as I know, the missing 4m are a subset of the 16m already mined. That still leaves ~5m to be acquired in the future, albeit rather slowly.

Gold has had many uses in the past and continues to in the present. Sure, there's a load of gold in various national vaults but the fact that gold emerged as a standard for minting coins in multiple independent countries shows that it held some meaningful value.

You can't suggest with a straight face that all the speculation in bitcoin is because of its potential and not because people see the price going up and decide they're going to buy with intent to sell too.

Not sure about everyone else, but I use it for international transactions. It saves me on the conversion rates and whatever banking issues.

Agreed, e.g., try to get R$ out of Brazil

Reply on news.ycombinator.com