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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Or, Bitcoin finally got to a place where enough normal retail financial customers are exposed to it that the DOJ can't ignore scams, and by the time the ecosystem is locked down and the get-lambos-quick schemes are foreclosed on, Bitcoin will look about as attractive as it did in 2010.

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Btc value increased not due to scams - neither the scammers nor the scammed ever hold the stuff (that is, off an exchange in a secure wallet), but due to long term holders, to whom it will continue to be attractive until some state goes back on the gold standard, which is not happening.

EDIT:

Also, the number of people to whom btc is attractive is less important than the type of people. It may be that there is never mass adoption of Bitcoin - it is also the case that throughout history most people never had any money at all. And even though most people never had any money, sound money has been extremely valuable nonetheless because most people don't know what to do with money anyway.

Nobody knows why the value of BTC decided to spike like it did last year. Just like nobody knows why it is sliding back down to earth.

It is one of the many reasons it makes a piss-poor store of value.

(Of course the answer to the spike could very well be “somebody fired up the tether printer” plus “super shady exchanges did tons of wash trading/oughright made up fake transactions”.

It is indeed a piss-poor store of value for people who have high time preference, but unmatched for those with low time preference.

There is no insane investment you can't say that about. Those metallic-cover special issue Marvel X-Men comics they used to "limited collector release" in the early 90s will eventually be of enormous value to archaeologists in the future, too.

Although this is a true statement it is not persuasive in that Bitcoin (unlike a special issue comic, or any other rare thing) has specific, meaningful properties (fungibility, divisibility, durability, etc.) that interact with the world according to well known principles (Gresham's Law, Lindy Effect, Theory of Computation, Network Effect, etc.) that must be shown not to apply in order to disqualify it as the best available store of value.

https://tinyurl.com/Special-Pleading

What principle is not being universally applied? Or do I misunderstand?

Many of the ostensible characteristics of Bitcoin you've provided also apply to special-edition 1990s Marvel comics. The idea that a good needs to be "divisible" to be valuable is nowhere supported by evidence and easily rebutted by counterexample. Your argument is essentially handwaving: all sorts of terrible investments are "great for people with low time preference", in that they will have no value in the immediacy, and their only hope of profitable redemption is to hold until some unspecified, unpredictable future date.

Illiquidity is a bad thing, not an generally an indicator that something is an especially good investment.

How could Gresham's Law apply to Bitcoin if it were not divisible? Or are you suggesting that comic books could be considered money (one property of which is divisibility) to the same degree as Bitcoin? Hopefully we agree that divisibility is not an "ostensible" characteristic of Bitcoin, but a "factual" characteristic of it?

Also your tendency to define things in binary terms (liquid/illiquid, value/no value) is troubling.

Why the struggle to pretend not to be able to tell the difference between Bitcoin and limited edition comic books?

I'm not "pretending" anything. I think the difference is illusory, except for the fact that you can actually read the comic book, so it has some marginal real utility.

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