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Comment by spookthesunset | Hacker News Reader

The quickest way to tell that bitcoin is a bubble is when shysters start making breathless posts like yours.

Bitcoin as a populist movement?? No sir. It is pure greed (and probably a healthy dose of good old fashioned MtGox style exchange manipulation) driving this bubble. Nobody buying right now is participating in some kind of mass uprising against the man. They are buying, holding, and praying they can unload their stash onto some greater fool right before the whole thing collapses.

No safe haven asset is as volatile as bitcoin. Bitcoin is over 9 years old. It still can’t, and never will, scale to handle even an order of magnitude less transactions than visa. The blockchain is worthless for almost every application. Bitcoin, at this point, is pure hype.

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Absolutely. It's a good sampling of the spectrum of financial sense to look at /r/bitcoin.

So many people there saying "Hold! Hold! Don't be scared, even if we see a $7,000 correction tomorrow! Hold! Just keep holding!"

through to people criticizing Warren Buffet as a "know nothing", "washed up old man"...

to the conspiracy theory, "The only way the financial big guys can make the price tank is if they can [shock, horror] scare you into selling! [more shock] hold! hold! hold!"

And the occasional, rare bead of sanity, "Please pay your capital gains tax".

Bitcoin is under perpetual innovation:

Here it is yesterday performing a lightning transaction on mainnet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a73Gz3Tvx3k

Here's an implementation of Ethereum smart contracts running as a bitcoin sidechain on mainnet: https://www.rsk.co/

Here's Greg Maxwell discussing scaling while keeping the network decentralized: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHIuuKCm53o

Bitcoin has been taken as a joke for 9 years by anyone unwilling to actually learn about it. It's come a long ways since Mt Gox and is arguably the freest market in existence. There are online exchanges in every major country that run 24/7. You can trade without an exchange at all using localbitcoins.com. Anyone is allowed to participate and no one can manipulate the fundamental rules of the currency.

Keep living in denial.

If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is....

But what can I actually buy with it? It's not really useful for anything.

How is censorship free money not useful for something.

You've got an entire darknet, you've got 80% of the world's population living in areas where censorship resistance is valuable. Chinese wanting capital flight, inflation infested countries looking for an alternative, areas of high political risk and instability.

To say its not really useful for anything is just facetious. Bubble sure, tech isn't there yet sure, no future use cases, now that's definitely not true. Will the use cases be worth 400 billion, that's a better question.

"Will the use cases be worth 400 billion" is not the better question, it is the whole question. For a potential investor in this moment it doesn't really matter if in the end Bitcoin turns out to have a market cap of 4 billion or 0, in both cases they've lost (almost) all that they invested.

Yes, censorship free money is useful for some people for some purposes - but most people in most purposes won't be willing to pay a single cent extra for this feature; if I'm buying a sandwich for lunch, I'm not going to buy it with censorship free money unless that service is better on its own disregarding the censorship issue, and BTC-as-it-is-now is not better in other aspects nor is it cheaper. While a lot of people might want a few such transactions for some special needs, those transactions are the edge cases that constitute a tiny, tiny fraction of the daily global commerce.

> you've got 80% of the world's population living in areas where censorship resistance is valuable

Setting aside the fact that censorship is not a technical problem but a political and societal one, Bitcoin's max transaction rate is so pathetically low that if 80% of the world's population used Bitcoin, they'd be lucky to make a single transaction every 45 years! Bitcoin can't even scale to what would be required to service a single football stadium during halftime.

> To say its not really useful for anything is just facetious

It's useful for anything illegal -- money laundering, drugs, murder for hire, etc. And even then, the traceability, extreme volatility, and long confirmation times make Bitcoin a poor choice for even the sketchiest of mob bosses.

Bitcoin's primary use case is scamming naive, starry-eyed libertarians, an-caps, and goldbugs out of their hard earned dirty fiat.

(source: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(5.7+billion+transacti...)

Newegg takes Bitcoin...... so electronics?

You can also buy fiat currency (dollars, euro, yen).

Throughout November I got several emails a week advising me to invest in Bitcoin and now I even see adverts for Bitcoin on the websites of newspapers. At this point it's obvious it's a bubble. What's not obvious is whether the bubble will burst violently or the true value of Bitcoin will softly catch up with its price.

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