Comment by IkmoIkmo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by IkmoIkmo | Hacker News Reader

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There's essentially nothing driving the price increase in 2017. Payment processing, remittance, asset-backing, digital identities, micropayments, bitcoin ATMs, VC-backed bitcoin startups, none of these things took off at all in 2017, in fact if anything the exciting years regarding these usecases/infrastructure ventures were 2013-2015.

I bet if you ask 100 people why they bought and if they use bitcoin for anything in particular, 99 will say no. That's why none of this is a real surprise.

On the other hand, apart from appreciation of gold as jewellery (partially because it's expensive) and some industrial use (fraction of the gold industry), in large part gold too exhibits price growth sustained by nothing but a simple cultural notion that it's scarce and valuable. Countries, banks, pension funds etc aren't putting hundreds of billions of dollars worth into stacks of gold bars locked in vaults because of their industrial or jewellery usage, after all. Bitcoin, as little the growth of real-life usecases has been in 2017, may have established itself as an alternative store of value. I don't agree with that myself (just as like I think it's utterly useless to invest in gold as a store of value), but who cares about me.

So it remains to be seen what'll happen the next ten years, maybe it'll still remain as a store of value. I'm no longer buying though. The 'using bitcoin' vs 'bitcoin as store of value' became completely lopsided in favour of the latter, which was the point I cashed out.

And a big piece of gold's value is that it's been a store of value for longer than recorded history.

Hell, if the world went belly up, Mad Max style, there's a good chance that whatever gold you have would be worth even more.

Serious question: what value would gold have in a post-apocalyptic world? If I'm selling something, why should I take gold in exchange for it, instead of something useful, like ammunition or food or water?

If I were convinced the apocalypse were going to happen in the next couple years, I would start storing up ramen noodles, Hersheys chocolate bars, and M&Ms. Cheap to purchase, easy to store, and likely to have astronomic value post-apocalypse.

Those items have little to no nutritional value. I recommend rice and beans instead.

That would be rational. I am assuming that even in a post-apocalyptic scenario, people will not be rational. I imagine people being willing to pay an awful lot for the experience of tasting M&Ms again and for a few brief moments being able to pretend that everything is just like it used to be.

Though now that you point it out, maybe I would rather buy rice and beans so that I could be more useful to people, rather than just maximizing profit. Or better yet, stock up on both kinds of goods.

Because there's an expectation that you can use gold to buy something else you need.

This expectation may not hold, but whatever the post-apocalyptic world settles on first will likely be there to stay for a while.

Ironically, the postapocalyptic world will probably still use US dollars. And when it turns out that not enough physical dollars survived the apocalypse, dollars will be the way credit is accounted, with whatever dollars remain being used to periodically reconcile accounts.

> Serious question: what value would gold have in a post-apocalyptic world? If I'm selling something, why should I take gold in exchange for it, instead of something useful, like ammunition or food or water?

What if the people who want your goat don't have what you want to immediately consume but you know for sure Bob down the street (who doesn't particularly like goats) will trade ammo for gold?

Why would Bob take my gold? More importantly, why would he take my gold and not my dollar bills?

Because Bob knows he can use the gold to buy a chicken from Alice and she doesn't take USD because of the apocalypse?

Or perhaps your goat ate all your dollars...

All the alternatives are perishable. Food and Water last a few days before going bad, making them unusable for trading caravans or well-off settlements (those you will likely buy from).

Ammunition is better, but for something that can be stored indefinitely without great care, it's hard to beat gold.

> Food and Water last a few days before going bad

Not if you take the time to prepare them. Grains will last basically until pests eat them, and water will last forever if you keep it in a sealed container and sanitize it first. Hell, even meat can keep for years if you salt it enough.

Stash gold for a Zimbabwe scenario, lead for Mad Max.

https://mobile.twitter.com/Bitfinexed

This guy claims the increase in price is due to fake money being injected into market.

A lot of conspiracy theory type lingo in those tweet. Really reminds me of they type of stuff I'd see from Trump supporters or other crazies.

I think the most important part of what he's claiming (after removing all the noise) is Bitfinex (largest exchange) keeps producing USDT(supposedly USD backed cryptotoken), which currently is at around 1B$, and there is no bank that's behind this sort of money.

https://medium.com/@untetheredbtc/how-the-tether-usdt-distri...

Dude can't even get his dates correct across a few paragraphs for the "EXTERNAL USD AUDIT" (one of either 02/01/2018 or 6th February 2018) and we are expected to believe them to be credible?

There was a halving of miners subsidy in 2016, that is what drives the price. For some reason the effect is delayed, but it was delayed during previous halving too.

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