definitely not a bubble
I lived through the IT bubble and it mostly went unnoticed among me, my friends and family. Literally everyone talks about Bitcoin though. I'm seriously thinking this is a first for humanity and the consequences will be extreme regardless of crash or paradigm shift. It's one for the history books for sure.
Ultimately I am probably lucky that I learned my lesson with "Captain Furball Cheezburger" instead of losing my mortgage when Bitcoin pops.
According to the CIA there is 80 Trillion dollars in the world in soft money. With 21 million Bitcoins, if 1% of all the worlds money was transferred to Bitcoin, each Bitcoin would be worth $38,000.
We are basically half way there. I wouldn't be surprised if it gets that high, but we I don't understand how people think it could keep going past that even theoretically. If someone understands the reasoning behind the $500,000 predictions, I would love to have that explained.
Bitcoin can handle 3-7 transactions per second.
There is less than 2 Trillion in Gold in the entire world. If you divide 2 Trillion / 21 Million (total number of possible bitcoins), you would get BTC of $100,000 equals the market cap of Gold. Not $500,000.
By my math BTC of $500,000 would be 5x the market cap of gold. Would someone explain how my math is wrong?
Thanks for reassuring me that a bitcoin wont ever be worth anything within an order of magnitude to $38,000.
They don't understand it much more than most people understand Bitcoin. Not really. It's all 'buy X and hope the number goes up!', where X is a mutual fund or random company, just like with Bitcoin/Altcoins.
With bitcoin, you have to sign up for/transfer money to various sketchy exchanges that you've never previously used.
You mean click a mouse? Buying a stock in 1999 was a lot like buying a stock now. I don’t recall how fast one could go from account creation to trading, but eTrade has been around for a while. A lot of folks had a 401K account that probably had a trading account of sort as well, so there might not have even been a barrier.
Not saying you might not be right, but buying stocks wasn’t all that hard in the 90s, either.
My dad ruined his retirement fund buying Nextel options that ended up worthless.
Bitcoin is a dumber bubble though.
I've only got in it what I can afford to lose, personally, which isn't a whole lot, but it's still some skin in the game, at least.
Even the rumors show that this is going in the same direction.
This bubble is relatively small in comparison -- so far. The number of companies, the amount of the real economy affected, the sheer pervasiveness in daily life, etc. AOL single handedly carpeted North America with CDs. Internet technology revolutionized so many things it's hard to pick the most important, in the space of about 5 years. The one that still stands out to me personally is how it totally crushed international long distance calling. Hell, it completely revolutionized the _porn_ industry. Bitcoin is no comparison (again, so far).
That was uncalled for. I was very much an adult during the first one.
You are talking about the internet revolution in general and a comparison to blockchains could possibly be relevant but not in this discussion. You didn't trade the internet in the Dot-com bubble, you traded stocks. Bitcoin is different because that's the actual instrument being traded.
My grandfather, who sold cars for a living, called me up out of the blue to ask me what he should invest in after Netscape went public. I was 24 and we’d never talked about the stock market in my life. I had no business experience (I was about to get a lot, it turns out, but had none then) and while I was doing a ton of Internet-related work, it wasn’t making anyone money. Yet suddenly I was an Oracle to a man in his 60’s who really should have been putting his money into the bond market if anything. Instead he invested it in Spyglass, on my half-hearted “well this is a company like Netscape I guess”, and then proceeded to tell me all about how it was doing for the next 5 years. If he were still alive today, I could imagine the same thing happening with respect to Bitcoin (except this time I would tell him I have no idea, and to put his money into something that generates cash).
In general, as compared to the Internet bubble, this year might be Bitcoin’s 1995 (the year Netscape went public and suddenly the Internet went from being something you read about in a magazine to something that could make you rich). The next 5 years were pretty crazy, and Bitcoin has a long way to go to equal it. But maybe it will get there. The only thing is, I think this might be 1995 and 2001 all rolled up together, and I don’t think that will be good for Bitcoin specifically, and maybe crypto currency in general.
Group B is talking about bitcoin a lot to mutually reassure themselves that staying out of it was the right decision (and also a bit to keep others out since all new paper money entering the exchanges weakens their arguments, at least superficially)
I think that defection rates between those groups are already very low and will keep shrinking.
She was still tempted even after I explained the bubble and reminded her that 2000 of our people died last time something like this happened in 1997. A lot of people are going to suffer this time, it's not going to be pretty.