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Comment by matte_black | Hacker News Reader

I disagree. Buying can be 100% rational as long as you believe some other fool down the line will buy it off you. As soon as the supply of irrational buyers dries up it’s game over. But that doesn’t look like it will happen anytime soon, just look around!

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It is as rational as playing roulette. Most of people buying at this point probably can't articulate what they are buying, just that it's probably going to be be worth more money soon. I had to sell my BTC on Sunday, I am waiting to get back in when the exuberance flips around and everyone says it's dead.

As a rational actor, buying Bitcoin right now is basically buying a bet that people will continue to be irrational long enough for me to make a good profit and get out. I don’t know how much faith you have in the market, but I predict the irrationality will continue until at least the stock market crashes and causes people to take a cold hard look at just what exactly it is they are doing. By the time people wake up, every rational actor better hope they’ve made their exit by then.

Sure I understand that. For BTC at least I am not sure I agree the rally will last as long as the stock market rally. I think we'll probably see a decent amount of selling in January when the gains are moved forward to the new tax year.

Litecoin is another animal. I think we'll continue to see a lot of what we're seeing now. People seeing a low price (compared to btc), sad they missed out on cheap BTC and dreaming this one is going to $15k.

Seeing as how dreamers are basically the only reason Bitcoin rose to $20k, I see no reason why the trend wouldn't replay itself with Litecoin. Great time to buy IMO.

Well one thing is Litecoin has a much larger supply (3.24x according to Coincap). In terms of market cap & supply as of today a $15k Litecoin is equivalent to ~$50k Bitcoin. The market cap of Litecoin alone would be 0.84 Trillion. It's possible I suppose but I think you'd need some pretty serious institutional buying (or gaming of the system which only lasts so long).

I think that would put a price target of Litecoin at somewhere around $4000-$5000. Not bad considering it's current price today.

Until people actually run nodes to the same distribution of bitcoin, it will always be a reduced security option, and therefore won't command the same price.

The price commanded is whatever the maximum you can get away with selling it to a fool would be, distribution be damned.

The bitcoin price isn't controlled. Supply and demand.

and even then, crypto could be seen as a better store of value than the traditional market so even a bear market might not negatively effect the crypto space or at least not to the same degree as stocks

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory

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