Today, someone (me) says: in the future, first world central banks will hold bitcoin as a reserve among the usual things (dollars, euros, gold, ...)
Here's the first post with comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599852
"Well this is an exceptionally cute idea, but there is absolutely no way that anyone is going to have any faith in this currency."
Heh.
Here are my BigQuery queries:
https://bigquery.cloud.google.com/savedquery/1243883842:637b...
https://bigquery.cloud.google.com/results/bq-test-1265:US.bq...
7 years on, the only thing Bitcoin is actually useful for (as in better than the alternatives) is buying drugs.
Same here.
> 7 years on, the only thing Bitcoin is actually useful for (as in better than the alternatives) is buying drugs.
Don't forget ransomware! And actually, it turns out not to be good for those purposes if you care about not having a permanent record of transactions that could potentially be traced back to you at any point in the future.
The real innovation is in demonstrating why financial regulations exist and the various scams that lead to them.
The permanent ledger means that every transaction is stored forever. Unless you want government to know you bought drugs you're much better off using something actually anonymous.
edit: And in come the down votes. Cognitive dissonance is a cruel mistress.
There are lots of places to gamble and lots of people winning and losing all the time, much more often through luck than genius. If some of those people end up fantastically wealthy and rather smug about it it's definitely not the biggest problem for me or my ego.
People who become fantastically successful through skill, determination and creativity, they're a bit more bruising.
Begging the question of whether tulip mania is even relevant in this context, were you going around at the beginning of it or when Apple got listed making snide comments? Yeah. Thought not. But then again, this is """Hacker""" News so critical thinking isn't exactly what anyone would expect. For instance, a significant fraction of this thread is debating whether Goldman Sachs "believes" in Bitcoin. What? Who cares. The significance of them opening a trading desk is people who like to do their gambling with them can now buy Bitcoins. More buyers, more sellers, more volume. But carry on having no regrets.
Oh and, nice cope.
If it bothered you that much, you could have had millions to donate to any charity of your choice.
>I'll probably never be a millionaire
You won't with that attitude.
>There are plenty of points in my career where I could've chosen to make more money by selling something that doesn't work to idiots
You started with airs of the moral high ground and now you're the supposed smart guy to the rest of the idiots. By extension, you're implying Bitcoin buyers are also idiots. The hubris. The gall. The cope.
Donating a fraction of my ill-gotten gains wouldn't make them any less ill-gotten. There would still be real people who'd lost money on the other end.
> You started with airs of the moral high ground and now you're the supposed smart guy to the rest of the idiots. By extension, you're implying Bitcoin buyers are also idiots.
I believe it's worthless. I'm not going to make money selling something I believe is worthless (to the people I'm selling to; I have no problem selling e.g. fashionable clothes to people who put value in that even if I don't personally). If I'm wrong, I'm wrong, and I'll lose out.
> The hubris. The gall. The cope.
People selling things that have actual value don't talk like this. You're sounding like a huckster.
The gains are not "ill-gotten". Slamming people who buy Bitcoin and implying they are somehow morally wrong and that you are somehow superior is disgusting. But that's another moral argument so I guess I could be hypocritical like you except I'm right.
>I believe it's worthless. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong, and I'll lose out.
"it's worthless" "If" "I will lose out" Sorry to break the news but a Bitcoin is worth 9200 US dollars. You are wrong and you have already lost out.
>People selling things that have actual value don't talk like this. You're sounding like a huckster.
It wouldn't matter what I said, you've obviously made up your mind so no matter what, to you, I'm going to sound like a "huckster" and bitcoin doesn't have value and people who buy it for some reason plucked from your imagination have trouble sleeping at night (I mean what?) on and on. I hope that makes you feel better.
They are ill-gotten, since the only actual value Bitcoin produces is to the drugs trade (or similar businesses that rely on evading the rule of democratically-passed law). All the rest of Bitcoin activity is zero- or negative-sum - there's no other value going into the system, so everything else is just moving drug money around.
> "it's worthless" "If" "I will lose out" Sorry to break the news but a Bitcoin is worth 9200 US dollars. You are wrong and you have already lost out.
People sure as hell aren't getting 9200 dollars' real-world use out of it (except maybe the ones who are trading drugs). For anyone else it's a 9200 dollar hot potato - someone is going to be left carrying the can.
> It wouldn't matter what I said, you've obviously made up your mind so no matter what
I'm always open to substantive arguments. "Nice cope" suggests you don't have any.
It seems far more reasonable to assess technology this nascent by the quality of teams working on it than anything else. Unfortunately, that's difficult to do in a rigorous fashion.
Today, someone (me) says: in the future, most cryptocurrencies will trade at ~$1 per coin (BTC, ETH, ...)
Will you sell me a call option?
Similarly, I doubt that GS commodity traders have warehouses full of gold/silver/oil.
It's pretty common for commodity traders to buy commodity warehouse operators.
I do trade bitcoin, with an eye towards holding it for a bunch of years, possibly with leverage, so being right would make me money.