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Comment by agorabinary | Hacker News Reader

This is naive of Buffet when his only evidence of a "bad ending" is the existence of a massive rally. The entire near-future automated economy depends on programmable money. There is literally nothing interesting happening in FinTech right now apart from the crypto space.

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Why should Bitcoin cost so much just because the future may depend on it? That's a good case for why it will continue to exist, but it could also exist and do it's job at $1.00 / btc.

I think it's a couple of things that Buffett is looking at. First, like gold, Bitcoin is not a business and does not produce earnings. Second, people seem to be buying it for no other reason than that they think it'll keep going up. That's usually a good argument for the asset not being a bargain. Third, Buffett is self admittedly not an expert when it comes to tech.

What people are overlooking is that it's really easy to start a new cryptocurrency. There's no reason why the first mover should remain dominant for ever, or even that there needs to be a single dominant global cryptocurrency for all purposes.

This is only a valid argument if it is hard or too expensive to exchange between first and nth mover.

Because the price of any currency is proportional to GDP/velocity, and since it's costly to exchange cryptocurrency with fiat, there's a limit to how high the velocity can go.

The quantity of money is proportional to nominal GDP/velocity (in the quantity theory of money). This doesn't tell you anything about the "price of a currency" in another currency, ie the exchange rate.

So you're claiming that if Bitcoin did $1 trillion dollars worth of transactions in a year, and people held it for a year on average, that wouldn't necessarily imply a total value for all bitcoins of $1 trillion?

The quantity theory of money is concerned with one currency at a time.

The trick in your paragraph above is that you introduced “$1 trillion dollar”. Of course, if you say that the sum of all transactions (in BTC) has a certain USD value, then you’ve brought the exchange rate in (through the back door).

The total value of all bitcoins could still be $10 trillion or $100 billion.

I'm curious how you think that could actually happen. If the value is $100 billion and it changes hands once per year, then that's $100 billion that changed hands, and the GDP is $100 billion. If it changed hands twice, that's a GDP of $200 billion.

Note that I'm not making a price prediction; I'm just saying that if the price is low, and the velocity isn't unrealistically high, then that necessarily means that Bitcoin is playing a minor role in the economy because it trivially implies a low aggregate value of transactions.

Conversely if the price is high, Bitcoin still might be playing a minor role, if the average velocity is very low because lots of people are holding coins for a long time. But for Bitcoin to play a major role in the economy, it would need either a high price or a high velocity, so the aggregate value of transactions is a major portion of GDP.

A really high velocity would require fast and extremely cheap conversions with fiat, so you can hold fiat and convert to/from bitcoin at transaction time.

> Because the price of any currency is proportional to GDP/velocity

wat

> but it could also exist and do it's job at $1.00 / btc.

Probably one of the stupidest comments I've read on here. You display not even a basic understanding of how Bitcoin or economics work.

If I have a successful company with 100 shares. People will want those shares which will drive the price up. To fix the price at $1.00, or to dilute shares to keep the price at $1.00 is just ridiculous.

Who's saying anything about "fixing" a price or diluting shares?

Bitcoin's exchange rate is a function of supply in demand. It could exist and do its job with low demand (e.g. $1.00 / btc) or high demand (today's price). What is the reason for the high demand? The answer is speculation that the price will continue to rise.

The point I was making is that if people were using it only as a only as a currency, then the price very well could be $1.00 / btc. The reason it's so high is because people in large numbers are buying and holding it as an investment, reducing the supply.

Fiat currency is already programmable.

How so?

In various ways. ACH is essentially FTP. Traders execute trades programatically. There's no one standard API, but there are many programmatic ways to move money.

“entire near-future automated economy depends on programmable money”

It also depends on banks and states signing up to that vision. We have seen zero adoption on that front. On top of that, it still does not explain the hundreds of alt coins.

Hundreds of coins and hundreds of tokens. This is the growth phase for crypto, people are trying out new things. Some of these coins and tokens will not be here in 5 - 10 years and some will be used every day by all of us.

Uber would probably disagree that you need permission for anything.

"it still doesn't explain the hundreds of alt coins"

It's open source. How many Linux distros are there?

Isn't there some adoption of ripple among banks? Then again ripple isn't decentralized like Bitcoin.

Banks are rapidly trying to adopt the use of blockchain.

Successful use of blockchain is not the same as successful cryptocurrency.

Agree. Just because banks are using ripple blockchain and ethereum blockchain is being used by apps does not mean their currencies are useful. Nothing explains why Ether is so expensive.

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