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Comment by granaldo | Hacker News Reader

The case of bitcoin being safe haven is probably only apply in the long term. It's quite obvious the price is heavily speculated now.

As we speak market sees extreme volatility and we have a bit of green positive https://www.coingecko.com/en Do not imagine it lasting again due to sheer speculation and negative sentiment.

Once it cools off, bitcoin will probably test it's attribute as safe haven again only when the stocks and bond market gets hit in isolation. Even now we do not see increase in gold price yet

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> The case of bitcoin being safe haven is probably only apply in the long term. It's quite obvious the price is heavily speculated now.

There is no "safe haven" on the long run, it has been a cycle of pump and dump schemes, no more, no less. and it will continue, Right now the exchanges are dumping their crypto and buying fiat.

An investment vehicle as volatile and unregulated as Bitcoin cannot be a safe haven. Bitcoin has lost more than 60% of its value in 4 weeks. It's rife with scams, fraud and exchanges that just steal people's money pretending they were "hacked".

Bitcoin is too easily replaced to be a long term store of value. It relies purely on public sentiment. Whereas things like precious metals at least have utility and no easy substitutes.

> Bitcoin is too easily replaced to be a long term store of value. It relies purely on public sentiment. Whereas things like precious metals at least have utility and no easy substitutes.

But bitcoin has utility, in case of hyperinflation, capital controls, asset protection etc.

Imagine if you are a Chinese billionaire who wants to move some of his wealth out of China, you buy bitcoin for Yuan in China, sell a futures contract to someone to cover yourself from the price fluctuation, and there you go.

Why is that not a legitimate use of bitcoin?

> But bitcoin has utility, in case of hyperinflation, capital controls, asset protection etc.

It really doesn't, and in a blatantly obvious way. All it has is propaganda pushed by those who are personally invested in doing the pumping as part of a pump-and-dump scheme.

So your argument is "no it ain't"? I don't really understand your argument.

Are you doubting the part that people are using it for fleeing capital controls in China or for asset protection or how they were using it during Venezuala crises?

I think there are only BTC/USD futures. It might make more sense to directly buy USD. Also, is the long position actually hold by a bank or just some random person? In the latter case there'd still be a liquidity risk...

I don’t know if anyone’s measured this, but what percentage of gold’s value can be attributed to its intrinsic utility in industry (say as a conductor) vs thousands of years of people using it to hoard value?

Until now Bitcoin has hardly been used for any transactions of things with a publicly acceptable value. There was a period of time when it was used for questionable items but even that's not the case anymore. I don't really see the point for Bitcoin at the moment and why anyone is planning to use it to facilitate exchange of goods in a large quantity - which is ultimately what money is for. So if that's not going to happen, even most of the current price is just bubble IMHO.

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