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Comment by bllguo | Hacker News Reader

This is a farce. There's only been negative news today and yet prices jump higher than ever. There's no conceivable way this doesn't end badly. I guess people are gambling on being lucky enough to exit before then.

Edit: removed unnecessary hostility. If you have money to spare on a high risk gamble like this then by all means. But in general there's just no way everyone jumping in is fully aware of the risks.

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I suspect some of the money that chased dotcom stocks in the 90's is chasing bitcoin and alt coins. There hasn't been a stock bubble since the 90's, so I guess bitcoin fills that need to speculate, that the stock market is not providing.

I wonder if my stock market portfolio has any real exposure to Bitcoin tanking.

Have a look at NVDA and AMD -- crypto mining is most of the reason why they went up so much.

This is provably (and factually) incorrect.

Crypto mining has been a portion but in no way “most of” the reason NVDA and AMD have risen. Machine learning, AI, and self driving are completely reliant on the products provided by the aforementioned.

I would think miners are purchasing ASICs now, not GPUs.

There are coins that can't be mined on ASICs and they're only profitable to be mined on GPUs - Ethereum and zCash are 2 examples, but there are many more.

Indeed we are.

You definitly are not speaking on behalf of everyone...

I've got friends and colleagues who don't even know how to setup their mobile phone wanting to buy in to BTC. They are actually managing to do it because of the proliferation of new, simple, exchanges. What makes matters worse is they have no idea what a wallet is - leaving everything in the exchange.

>There's only been negative news today

Maybe that's part of it. Things seem dire for a lot of folks now (even if they aren't) so a little short-term game or gambling high isn't so bad.

It's the first in a new asset class that provides things that never existed before, mainly being the ability to quickly transact value over great geographic distances and national borders with zero interference from third parties. The value of that is extremely underestimated by most people, and shouldn't be so hard to grasp. Analogous examples are the Internet and Google, which provided very straightforward and simple value propositions that most people did not get, could not predict, and decried until they actually grew to enormous and important positions in society. Cryptocurrency is very possibly in the same vein, making valuations like this seem less absurd.

I wish I had the time and motivation to go back over the last 6 years and create a timeline of people making the same tired statements as yourself. The same types of statements were made when it hit 10 dollars.

the only problem is that btc is broken and it's become a "store of wealth". digital gold if you will.

> quickly transact value

Well now it takes hundreds of minutes, in which time the value of your bitcoin has changed, given its current volatility.

I remember a time when my modem had to dial up to internet, and everything was slow. And I remember that whatever you searched on google, there was at least 1 porn result in the top 10. I also remember when electric cars were not nearly as good as gasoline cars.

Technology advances. If you're stuck looking at what is inferior now, you will not see what is possible in the next few years.

You are talking about a technical problem, which can be fixed.

Not all technical problems can be fixed.

Sure but that's a general statement not applicable to the current situation. There are already known technical solutions to the scaling problem. The issue is social, i.e. getting everyone to agree to a protocol upgrade, not technical.

Kindly note I made no claims about whether bitcoin is or isn't novel technologically. Or whether it has a purpose. I said it was irrational that prices increase when the only news is negative. You're clearly being emotional about this.

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