Bitcoin's First $1k Weekend Since 2017 Marks Nine-Month High | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin's First $1k Weekend Since 2017 Marks Nine-Month High

bloomberg.com

132 pointspseudolus163 comments

“If you're partying about Bitcoin's price, here's a timely reminder that everything you think you know is a lie”

https://twitter.com/prestonjbyrne/status/1127364374451163136...

While this could be true, I take such tweets with a grain of salt. What I noticed throughout the years is that every time someone makes a claim about Bitcoin, they are wrong. Bankers, CEOs, traders...all of them.

I'm not so sure that works here. It's not like there's a certain timeframe, where if it passes, X was wrong.

The possibility of added regulations is pretty much a persistent risk. It's like saying, "look an earthquake didn't happen. The geologists warning of possible disaster were all wrong."

There is no timeframe, but Bitcoin is 10 years old and, trust me, there were enough claims within this time period to come to such a conclusion. Say geologists predict that an earthquake should happen within a year, but then it actually happens in 10 years. Were they right or wrong? In my opinion, wrong. Now what if it happened in year and a half. Were they right in this case? I say yes, they were. Same with Bitcoin. Here is an example (the CEO of JPMorgan Chase):

https://ei.marketwatch.com/Multimedia/2018/10/31/Photos/MG/M...

Aside: does anyone else get a "something went wrong" error when clicking on a link to a tweet like this one? If I reload it will usually work correctly. Only happens to me on mobile but it's plain old chrome on Android, flagship phone. No adblockers or plugins. Probably happens to me about half the time I click on a link to a tweet like this. Seems like it triggers a (defective?) ratelimiting feature maybe.

Yeah this is all being driven by tether collapsing which is driving up prices on bitfinex and people trying to arbitrage the price difference before bitfinex goes bankrupt. They’re also printing tether like crazy again.

Not saying you’re wrong, but HN comments were the thing that convinced me not to buy bitcoin at $1

Perhaps since you didn't buy you could have a unique perspective. Imagine you bought at $1 and made $10s of millions of dollars - whether from any value or work actually being done, or whether it was just the effect of a global, decentralized Ponzi-Pyramid-like scheme. Imagine you don't sell all of it because, well, now you're set for life - or in a better position than you were before - so you're happy to promote whatever cryptocurrency you hold, in hopes it goes up further in value. Imagine then instead you bought it anywhere from $5000 to its peak $19,000+ value. Imagine how desperate and how incentivized you may be wanting or working towards increasing the positive perception and therefore demand of whatever cryptocurrency. Now imagine this army of "HODLers" that seems to mostly be tied to ideology and greed over there being any seemingly useful consumer use case that's better than non-cryptocurrency alternatives. Then understand that as this army of HODLers grows, they will influence and lobby or inject themselves further into regulatory bodies (regulatory capture) in order to try to force (even subtly) the rest of society to adopt cryptocurrencies, in order to try to legitimize them - however in reality it's in order to transfer wealth an unnecessary and unreasonable amount from late adopters weighted towards the earliest adopters, so they can realize their "gains" - to exit from the Ponzi-Pyramid scheme.

Edit: The initial downvotes didn't don't convince me that the pro-Bitcoin et al holders aren't part of a Pyramid-Ponzi scheme, however they were certainly expected to happen in this thread.

If you're not familiar with indoctrination - which is belief guided by others with similar bias and blind spots - even Fred Wilson, USV partner - USV who's early investor in Coinbase (etc) acknowledged the problem of ideologies/orthodoxy (yet blind to it himself it seems): https://avc.com/2019/04/orthodoxy/ -- Bitcoin/cryptocurrencies is religion with members tied together with a financial incentive.

Tether has maintained $1, tether redemptions are smooth, bitfinex premium over market has returned to ~0% and was even at a discount during the push up through $7200. There are serious problems ahead for Bitfinex legally, but bitfinex is not leading the price action and is certainly not driving up prices.

Source: Work in the space every day at an algo/automated prop trading and market making firm.

Just to make sure I understand, is this the hypothesis?

- People want to exit their position in USDT.

- It is easier/faster for them to exit to Bitcoin than to USD (because of their banking situation or KYC issues.)

- This increases the demand for Bitcoin and drives the price up.

I really don't understand this.

If it was true that there were problems with Tether; there would be a run on the bank.

And there would be a point where people were blocked from getting real USD for Tethers.

But if I buy 100 USD worth of Tether; then can I go to Tether the company (or something) and exchange it to real USD which would be transferred to my USD bank account?

Does it work that way?

If not then how does Tether maintain the price of one USD to one USDT?

Tether has never been convertible back to dollars through Tether directly unless you are dealing with astronomical sums - they make no claim (and maybe never have?) of convertibility on their web site.

If the average person with a few thousand dollars of Tether wants to get out, they need to first get that value to an exchange that supports real US Dollars. In order to do that, they likely have to do an intermediate sell to some other widely held and accepted coin or token (Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP), since most exchanges that seem to deal with Tether do not deal with USD, and vise versa.

If there were a run on Tether in particular, one of the effects you might expect to see is prices of the most widely traded coins going up in price on crypto-dominant exchanges, and the price of those same coins going down in exchanges with free (as in low friction) convertibility to cash withdrawals. This particular effect would only be one of many though, so the signal might not even be noticeable above the noise of the markets. You can imagine that Tether being proved to be insolvent or a fraud in enough people's eyes (and also close enough to insolvency to spread panic: fractional reserves with illiquid holdings [at best], insolvencies, and outright Ponzi schemes [at worst] can last far longer than you might expect), would cause a lot of other additional, and probably larger, market movement.

Tether is $1. If there was some massive sell pressure it would go under parity fast. Printing tether wouldn’t help. So how exactly is it collapsing?

> If there was some massive sell pressure it would go under parity fast.

This isn’t necessarily true. Tether could use their reserves to buy up the demand and keep the price stable, all the way up until they run out of reserves (I think it’s uncontroversial that they are not 1:1 backed by USD now, right?)

Right, and for as long as tether is able to buy back usdt for $1 it is incorrect to say tether is collapsing.

Perhaps it should be called "cockroach-coin," because it has survived again and again and again.

Bitcoin's price rose from $1 to $29 in its early years, then dropped to $2 in 2011... and Bitcoin survived. Price then gradually rose from $2 to $269, and subsequently dropped to $68 in 2013... and Bitcoin survived again. Price then rose from $68 to $1147, and then dropped to $177 in 2015, and Bitcoin kept on surviving. Price then rose from $177 to $19891 (wow!) and promptly dropped to $3625 in 2018, and yes, Bitcoin survived yet again. Price is now at around $7200.

Tensions escalate between the US and China, Bitcoin survives. North Korea launches new test missiles, Bitcoin survives. Venezuela's economy implodes, Bitcoin survives. The conflicts in Syria and Iraq escalate in unpredictable ways, Bitcoin survives. Geopolitical crises flare up. Entire economies implode. Nations may cease to exist. Bitcoin somehow keeps on surviving.

I wonder, could Bitcoin have greater staying power than most nations and currencies in history?

> Could Bitcoin have greater staying power than most nations and currencies in history?

"The average life expectancy for a fiat currency is 27 years, with the shortest life span being one month." [0]

[0] http://www.resourceinvestor.com/2011/01/23/time-different-do...

Nearly all the times when a fiat currency "dies", it does so by people simply converting all their money into its replacement. More often than not, there's even a nominal equivalence between the old and new currencies. Describing this process as "death" is just sensationalist.

The cases where a fiat currency disappeared and left its holders without nothing are so rare that they make it into high-school history books.

That's surprising and quite alarming, I would've expected it to be at least a century

There aren't many (any?) century old fiat currencies so no way that would be the average.

Clearly that's the case, but I didn't expect it to be.

> Bitcoin appears to have greater staying power than most nations and currencies in history.

I would not make that statement so soon. Bitcoin has only existed for 10 years. Most nations and currencies, at least in recent history, have lasted for much longer than that.

> at least in recent history

That's precisely the weak point of your argument. Give it another 20-30 years and let's then count again how many currencies are still as strong as they were or merely still exist. The USD is in a special place since it's the default currency for worldwide exchanges, so what matters is all other currencies out there.

Agree! I edited this sentence so it would be a question, which better reflects what I actually intended to write.

Ten years down, millennia to go.

Countries and currencies cease to exist regularly. Here's an incomplete list of countries that have disappeared in recent history:

https://www.thoughtco.com/missing-countries-1435425

NO currency has survived a millennia.

Almost all currencies backed only by their governments, and not by physical gold, are at most a century old.

Not true. The pound sterling has been in continuous use since around 800 CE.

That's a ship-of-Theseus fallacy.

The pound sterling of 2019 is more related to the American dollar of 2019 than it is to the pound sterling of even WWII, nonetheless 800CE.

Not really. It’s just a matter of changing times and prices. Pounds and pennies have been a thing for 1200 years. What they buy has changed dramatically.

And additionally the American dollar is not the same as it was pre bretton woods, or pre federal reserve, etc.

The ship of Theseus isn't a fallacy, it's a thought experiment.

And lost 99% of its value!

So let’s go down the list of some of those currencies:

1. USD ~ is markedly different post breaking from gold standard so 40-50 years

2. EUR - created 1999

3. Russian ruble - post fall of Soviet Union.

I mean what’s the standard here? One way or another maybe the longest running one is the British pound but even then, one can easily argue like with the USD that breaking from the gold standard is a different currency altogether. But if “age” is what we’re talking about, it has to be closing in to what the Euro was at on 2009!

Bitcoin miners pollute just enough (or take away just enough green energy capacity) to tip the earth over the edge. Bitcoin dies along with everyone else.

It's a hyperbole, but seriously, while Bitcoin may survive politics, it must die. Let a non-POW cryptocurrency please replace it.

You could say this about mining any other commodity. Modern mining is literally converting fuel into some metal or mineral.

For instance: There's only a finite amount of gold, and until recently (electronics), it had no real applications aside from looking nice. Yet gold has been mined for millennia, historically with slaves (sadly this is still the case in parts of the world) and now with machines. The economic use stems from this, and as gold has always been sort-after, it's desire (value) probably won't change anytime soon. While you can't wear bitcoin, I don't see it disappearing either.

If you could summon gold from the ground in a more efficient way, would you?

Bitcoin mining is meant to be inefficient - why not try for a better way with similar guarantees?

Of course you would, this is the same reason ASICs have come onto the market.

I'd say the inefficiency is one of the smartest moves in the design of Bitcoin. Not only does it counter Moores law, it also provides a scarcity; the more bitcoins that are mined (so there must be a demand for them), the harder mining becomes (limiting supply) - Adding inflation into the mix.

Had they just dumped 21 million Bitcoins into the market, it would have never taken off, and it would have probably been written off as a Ponzi scheme.

While you may not like the social or environmental impact of Bitcoin, it is hard to deny there is some brilliance in its design (like how the coins become the product of their own transaction logs).

wouldnt making gold mining more efficient just mean that you would mine more of it eventually taking the same amount of overall energy use?

Not really, because most of your costs aren’t energy.

Agreed. And I see the same counterpoint being trotted out for a case against EV vehicles. "Cobolt mining bad!" but I suppose oil drilling and fracking isn't?

The difference is that Bitcoin is far more energy intensive than real mining.

Source?

Here’s one: https://coincentral.com/bitcoin-mining-trumps-gold-mining-en...

Amusingly, when I search for the energy consumption of gold mining, the results are all about comparing it to Bitcoin.

Following the methods of the paper I already see a huge flaw.

They calculated energy per coin using hashpower from 2016-2018, ignoring all mining and coins from 2009-2016. Basically cherry picking their data and ignoring all the coins that were minted with lower hash power.

Surely the current cost of mining is what’s relevant when comparing the two today. Are we also supposed to go back and calculate the energy use for all the gold that was mined centuries or millennia ago?

It's different because the block reward is very biased at the beginning. By 2016-07-09, 75% of ALL bitcoin that will ever exist has already been mined. I doubt that's the same for gold reserves on earth. Furthermore, mining serves a dual purpose of also securing transactions, so for a fair comparison, you'd also need to factor in the costs of securing gold for storage/transport.

But look! https://twitter.com/khannib/status/1116352595537403905?s=19

I agree with your sentiment. Unfortunately, exhortations to "do the right thing" never, ever seem to work.

And efforts to ban or control the trading of a liquid, globally used asset also never seem work. (It would be like trying to ban the buying and selling of, say, US dollars.)

Perhaps the best way to address the very real environmental issues you raise will be with the development and adoption of more cost-efficient, less polluting, more environmentally-sustainable energy production technologies?

> Let a non-POW cryptocurrency please replace it.

I hope this will happen naturally because all the electricity that is expended with PoW needs to be paid for somehow, either through fees or inflation.

You think fiat currencies carry zero cost and zero energy footprint?

I don't think anyone was suggesting it was 0. It is a many orders of magnitude less per transaction though.

They have substantially less, especially on a per-transaction or total value basis.

Bitcoin layer 2 solutions (i.e. lightning network) don't have this "per transaction" issue, though

Comparisons to Bitcoin's per-transaction energy use is not valid. It could use 100x or 1/100th of the energy and process the same amount of transactions. Transaction throughput is a separate problem.

Petrodollar powers the war machine, so it’s not even close.

How do you compare a traditional transaction to one that is uncensorable by anyone?

Cash is the same.

And how much does it cost to transport cash to some company across the country?

> Bitcoin appears to have greater staying power than most nations and currencies in history.

WTF?

I edited this sentence so it would be a question, which better reflects what I actually intended to write.

This is one of the reasons Bitcoin has won the crypto wars.

Slow and expensive transactions? But it's reliable, only 21,000,000 Bitcoin ever ever.

Fiat cannot say the same.

Here is an anecodete against Bitcoin as a currency. A Friend was buying bulk food from me and for the second time, he insisted on USD instead of Bitcoin. Why? Bitcoin is undervalued.

I had found myself saying the same thing when buying party supplies from a different friend. I asked to pay in USD, because Bitcoin was undervalued. (2019)

Given the recent news about Tether's solvency issues I wonder if this is not partially due to a "run" on Tether exchanges. Back in the day just before MtGox collapsed, when its solvency issues were obvious but it was not yet officially bankrupt, it experienced a run up in the price of BTC (due to BTC being the only means for people to withdraw value from the exchange) and this price increase "spilled over" to other (solvent) exchanges even though in a rational market it should not have.

It is rare that I read a HN comment that just get it completely, outright wrong.

After the Tether news came out. USDT/USD dropped to around 0.97 which is around a 3% discount. The Bitcoin price on Bitfinex had an additional 4% premium, which is what the market has priced the exchange risk to be. [1]

If people wanted to get out of Bitfinex, they had ample time to buy BTC and get out. They can also withdraw USDT to binance, and exchange for BTC on another USDT exchange, such as Binance. In fact, the price had been relatively flat for 5 days after Tether news. If you thought Tether or Bitfinex was insolvent, I doubt very much you'd wait 5 days to make your move. So in fact, this did not cause a run up.

There is no reason why Tether being only 70% backed would cause "a run on Tether exchanges" (what does that sentence even mean?). The truth is, people don't really care if Tether is only 70% backed. Bitfinex makes enough money to cover the shortfall easily. The largest community of Tether holders are not westerners. They are Chinese, they hold USDT to get RMB out of China, they absolutely love Tether. Tether traded at a premium to USD before, during and after the USAG news came out on Chinese OTC exchanges. Bitfinex easily fundraised 1b USD from big Chinese players with the LEO token in about a week.

The market had already decided that the Tether news as a nothingburger. After a slew of bad news "China mining ban", "Tether", "Binance hack", the price continued to run up. When a market discounts bad news like this, it means a fundamental shift occurred, the weak hands who did not believe in the core value of Bitcoin has exited the market and the market is free to move up.

There is a lot of salt about Bitcoin on HN, many missed the run from $10 to $1k, many more missed the run from $200 to $20k, Bitcoin is at a cusp of a run from $3k to ??? and HN will tell you everything to not get on the train.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/MC4obep.png

Probably the correct explanation.

Ultimately those sought refuge in BTC will sell it. There's no new use case, there's nothing else that suddenly makes Bitcoin more viable than it was 10 days ago.

> I wonder if this is not partially due to a "run" in Tether exchanges

Could this be something that's easily measured? e.g., I suppose in this case exchanges using Tether would have a larger than normal price for Bitcoin than usual, for a slightly longer amount of time, compared to the days preceding?

I would be surprised if this information doesn't exist somewhere, and if many people weren't already looking at it for arbitrage purposes, but due to my unfamiliarity in this space I would have no idea where to find it.

There was a several hundred dollar difference until like the last day or so.

I've had my eye on this. It settled around £3000 for some time. Then lately it became far more active, fluctuating between 3 to £4K and on an upward trend...

I do think media coverage (hype) fueled bitCoin exploding (then imploding). It's not a good thing when EVERYONE starts raving about investments.

Bitcoin: 1990s Vancouver penny stocks, modified to use a blockchain instead of mystery mineral deposits.

Why don’t Vancouver penny stocks go on bull markets every couple of years, setting a new all time high with each one?

Inferior marketing.

Decentralized Ponzi scheme.

Most Ponzi schemes end when the people at the center of it cash out and disappear or go to jail, and that's the end of things.

Bitcoin has created the infrastructure to allow new people to take over when the old people cash out or go to jail.

Cryptos serve primarily as a trading vehicle. This is the most important point. It enables startups to raise capital from a global capital marketplace while allowing traders from around the world to participate. This is unlike any other marketplace. You can't do that with Nasdaq or NYSE as you have to be accredited investors with US bank accounts unless you're savvy enough to work through LLCs.

Andreessen and friends see this too https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/05/10/sec-approves-new-silicon...

Companies that raised money through ICOs are not so much startups as boiler room scams.

If you want to raise money by selling stock to non-Americans, there are European crowdfunding platforms that let you do exactly that. Real companies with actual products[1] have raised millions on these platforms, whereas every ICO ever is stuck in "plausible deniability R&D mode" where they pretend to be implementing their magic-powered whitepaper but nobody actually uses any of the stuff.

[1] BrewDog, Monzo, Revolut spring to mind as UK examples.

Ethereum and Cosmos did ICOs and they have been quite successful, delivering on their promises. Maybe 99/100 ICOs fail but the same can be said about VC-backed startups.

No, 99/100 VC-backed startsup don't fail, and the rate of actual scams in them is FAR lower than in crypto.

Ethereum is basically an ICO pyramid scam, since the only use case for it has been to enable more ICOs.

Anything else has failed miserably because the network can't handle the traffic. Of course they're promising a scaling fix Real Soon Now (see above for "plausible deniability R&D mode").

USDC is a stablecoin backed one-for-one with US dollars, audited by Grant Thornton and operated by Circle and Coinbase, which are regulated and above-board legal cryptocurrency exchanges. As of this writing, $327 million has been converted into it, and any amount of money can be transferred globally within seconds. Over 250,000 transactions have occurred since September 2018 when it launched. This is a legitimate use-case that has been enabled by Ethereum. Wiring money or using ACH is more expensive, slower, and more cumbersome than USDC.

https://www.circle.com/en/usdc

https://etherscan.io/token/0xa0b86991c6218b36c1d19d4a2e9eb0c...

> Wiring money or using ACH is more expensive, slower, and more cumbersome that USDC

Wiring is free and instantaneous for anyone sending moderate sums. Fidelity, for example, does this.

> Wiring is free and instantaneous for anyone sending moderate sums. Fidelity, for example, does this.

What counts as a "moderate sum"? Last time I tried to wire money, every option I could find charged a $XX fee no matter how much I sent.

How long and how expensive is it to wire $10,000,000 from Nigeria to South Korea? With USDC, it takes seconds and costs about 2 cents.

How does one convert $10M dollars in a Nigerian bank account into USDC? That seems like a necessary first step.

I show a legitimate use case other than “ICO pyramid scams” and you move the goal posts. It shows that you have an opinion about cryptocurrency that cannot be changed by logic, and are essentially a troll.

You claim that one can wire 10 million dollars from Nigeria in two seconds. If you’re not even going to answer the most obvious question about how someone could do this, it’s hardly a real world use case.

I’m not sure if you understand how the boring old SWIFT-addressed wire competes here. I haven’t sent 10 million, but hundreds of thousands anyway. It costs no more than $25, is settled within hours, and has all sorts of safeguards that don’t exist in crypto. The funds are immediately available for use rather than USDC which AFAIK isn’t accepted for payment on anything, anywhere.

Define successful.

> It enables startups to raise capital from a global capital marketplace while allowing traders from around the world to participate. This is unlike any other marketplace.

U.S. dollars; forex. Also, not all jurisdictions have accredited investor requirements. For those that do, using a token doesn’t get around them.

A trade vehicle for what though? You're not buying equity or rights to future cash flows. Your investment doesn't reflect the success of the underlying company nor does it even reflect the popularity of the service ("the more people use it the more valuable it will be" argument hasn't been true for any of the increases/dips in price). You're essentially just trading on investor sentiment within unregulated markets with zero consumer protection. Can you make a profit? Sure, but you're not "investing" in startups, you're giving them money.

Or maybe as Buffett said recently "It’s a gambling device... ". Not to knock gambling - it's a huge industry. If the people who play state lotteries bought crypto instead the markets would shoot up.

That is true but at the end all this will be hardly regulated and not an ICO circus. The issue with ICOs was that scammers and unexperienced/naive people came first.

If you raise money through an IPO, do you have any fiduciary responsibility to raise shareholder value? Or can you just fuck off with the money legally?

I imagine its easy to see Bitcoin as useless if you live in the United States.

However, given the inflation South Korea, Iran, Venezuela, and numerous countries in Africa, I find Bitcoin has a real use.

I'm sure many of those citizens do not want to be dependent on a foreign countries central bank for a steady currency.

> However, given the inflation South Korea, Iran, Venezuela, and numerous countries in Africa, I find Bitcoin has a real use.

South Korea doesn't belong in this list at all.

> I'm sure many of those citizens do not want to be dependent on a foreign countries central bank for a steady currency.

What makes you so sure about this? Have you surveyed any of them? Given the amount of US dollars in circulation overseas, the evidence would seem to indicate that US currency is actually viewed as a highly desirable alternative to many domestic ones.

It is but access to hard currency is generally restricted in those countries as their overinflated currencies work only in an artificial vacuum.

Is there evidence of widespread use of crypto amongst non-elites?

I see crypto as more of a competitor for jewelry and other fine assets traditionally used to expatriate familial and illicit wealth from collapsing regimes, than as a mechanism adopted by every day citizens.

For example, how exactly are Venezuelans supposed to participate in crypto when their internet and electrical grids are so unstable?

There were several articles over the past years citing individuals in South Korea seeing bitcoin as an opportunity for a middle class life and in Eastern Europe with the same end goals. some recent updates: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/10/business/south-korea-bitc... https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/business/georgia-bitcoin-...

Illicit wealth in corrupt regimes may be a case of justice over law

The people in these countries by and large have no money to buy bitcoin with. The people in those countries that do have money are mostly corrupt, and they’re the ones that are using bitcoin.

South Korea does not have a high inflation rate. They are averaging like 1.5% [0].

[0]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-southkorea-economy-inflat...

They do however have pretty strict capital controls making it difficult to transfer money out of the country (which is why Bitcoin has historically traded at a premium in South Korea).

Note that lawmakers were increasingly been targeting bitcoin in S.Korea. Foreigners (any foreigners, even ones with Korean visas and/or who are Korean but were born abroad) and minors can't sign up to exchanges anymore, for example.

Bitcoin is really far from stable though. It can easily become worthless just like any other currency that gets inflated away.

Having lived through a hyperinflation, I would not have touched Bitcoin with a ten foot pole. You want a rock stable foreign currency when the times are hard, not something that can push you even lower due to loss of even the minimal resources that you have.

Let’s say that I live in Venezuela, getting paid in Bolivars that depreciate so rapidly that I immediately go to the store to buy as much as possible before prices inflate out of reach. How do I use Bitcoin to improve my life? I just don’t see how it helps.

You sell small amounts at the daily BTC x [venezuela currency] rate? It allows your money to retain its value.

Last I heard (on planet money), the median wage in Venezuela was enough to buy just less than two eggs per day. How much can they spare for investment?

https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor...

What they need is a stable electric grid and local miners selling to local exchanges - that way they can transact directly in Bolivar or barter if the currency ends up becoming completely worthless.

I'm not necessarily saying any of that is practical, but a stable electric grid and internet access is key - perhaps renewable energy and access to the blockstream satellite would be the solution

Not for investment, but for protecting the value from one day to the next, since inflation is 25000%/year.

(I’m just hypothesizing here, would love to hear from someone who knows what is going on)

Is it practical to regularly buy small amounts, given the high transaction costs? And who is selling Bitcoin for Bolivars?

I live in Kazakhstan with crazy inflation and I just store my savings in US dollars. Works fine for me.

I don't think storing your money in a form that requires electricity to use is a good idea if you live in a country that experiences blackouts that last days.

There are other things people in developed countries like US don't see. For example in Argentina (beyond the inflation issues) when you receive payments from foreign customers banks use an unfair USD/ARS rate while doing it via other services using Bitcoin you receive a fair exchange. All this in a legal/regulated way.

This is not true anymore. The number one usage of BTC in argentina is tax evasion.

This is true today and has nothing to do with tax evasion. Tax evasion in Argentina is part of the "culture" and BTC is just another method. The BTC usage in Argentina is very niche.

South Korea does not belong in that list at all.

The inflation rate is also only 1.4% to 1.5%.

nice FUD. South Korea has no problems + Bitcoin is not a steady currency.

Almost $30 billion in 24hr trading volume with $10 billion on bitmex. Higher then when price was $20k.

Wash trading at its finest.

I think bitmex's numbers are fairly kosher though it's leveraged futures trading rather than direct buying/selling of bitcoin.

HN is full of blockchain haters, but the only thing you need to know as a technologist is this:

Cryptocurrency is programmable money.

Is it that hard to understand why this is special? Of course there are all the other unique features like independence from the state / banks and smart contracts, and whether you think those are good or bad those are certainly unique features.

But the number one thing is that Bitcoin is a native internet currency, and that’s an incredible innovation.

> Cryptocurrency is programmable money.

That's such a vague expression that it's almost meaningless. I could imagine "programmable money" to mean all kinds of stuff, much of which Bitcoin isn't.

All digital money is in theory programmable. The main difference with Bitcoin is that it's an open platform and you don't need the permission of closed platforms (PayPal, Visa, banks) to operate. Permission can be revoked.

The asset itself is represented purely in code. Fintech companies like Stripe are building value-added features on top of the same banking system that everyone uses, essentially integrations on top of integrations.

A digital asset like Bitcoin is a completely different thing and requires no licenses, permissions, or anything whatsoever to write software that manipulates it.

Requires is doing a lot of work in that last sentence.

There's all sorts of situations where anyone can do a thing, but the government has stepped in and said that only licensed individuals can do it legally. What's to keep the same thing from happening to bitcoin?

> The asset itself is represented purely in code.

You have a checking account at a bank right? What do you think is representing your bank balance?

I'll give you a hint: there's no drawer anywhere with your name on it and $X,XXX.XX inside it.

And banks, payment processors and other fintech companies hire tens of thousands of employees each to maintain business as usual. Considering that bitcoin itself is a ledger and payment processor it makes me wonder if it could be an Avenue to free up human capital in the future for bigger and better things.

Except of course, that the Bitcoin ecosystem also uses human capital to write payment processing infrastructure and attracts people that like to make money by writing trading algorithms, and the "actually we don't need to pay people to secure our storage or monitor our transactions" approach is a bug rather than a feature of crypto exchanges, which is why they lose people's money so often. The unique thing about proof of work isn't the lack of human capital, but the enormous energy requirements

> Cryptocurrency is programmable money. Is it that hard to understand why this is special? [...] the number one thing is that Bitcoin is a native internet currency, and that’s an incredible innovation.

The hate, for me at least, comes directly from that expectation (being a native internet currency), and from the fact that bitcoin completely fails at it - instead it's become an unregulated stock exchange / gambling / get rich quick scheme.

>But the number one thing is that Bitcoin is a native internet currency

Yes but we live in the real world and we are real people. I dont like bugs, hacks or clerical mistakes wiping me out.

Nobody really argues that Bitcoin isn't a neat invention, a nice solution to a mathematical puzzle.

But it has far too many disadvantages compared to existing electronic payments to be practical.

I encourage anyone with this perspective to read Clayton Christensen’s “The Innovator’s Dilemma”.

The book examines cases where the world is moved by disruptive technology - one property is that they are at first derided and dismissed as too limited / impractical / toys, before eclipsing the capabilities of the legacy technology, e.g. the very limited initial hydraulic construction equipment which came to lose its limitations and replace cable-driven alternatives in the 20th century.

I’ve read the book. Just because something is ridiculed, doesn’t mean that it’ll be a success eventually. Sometimes it’s actually just a bad solution.

It was pretty clear that the innovations in that book provided some value. I don’t remember it being a thing that most of them were ridiculed, it’s just that the established alternative represented a much higher revenue stream for the established companies that they didn’t see a point investing time and resources in the alternatives.

The core problem is that the only real value blockchains provide is systems that can be implemented without a root of trust. So by definition it only provides significant value in failed states. But the real solution here is to build functioning states with trustworthy courts that can be the final arbiter in the case of disputes L

On your first point, agreed, and I don’t defend all blockchain projects, or even any particular one, only call to mind that these systems are prone to surprise us with their progress.

If you see no problem in government’s management of currency, and you see no failure of trust in the banks and institutions that preside over it, propped up by regular bailouts, it’s no surprise then that you see no value in Bitcoin.

But mind that cable-drawn construction equipment went out not because it was limited in the good times, but because it had a rare and catastrophic failure mode, of collapsing when the cable would break.

Fiat is analogous - when it fails, it brings about devolution of society and desperation of its people, ala Venezuela. I’m happy Bitcoin exists, if for no other reason than to protect against that.

If you doubt that a transformational aspect will make the limited Bitcoin into something that can serve as a global currency, take a look at the Lightning Network - it’s live and providing scalable, instantaneous and negligible fee transactions now. https://youtu.be/8zVzw912wPo

We are allowed to acknowledge disadvantages and advantages of Bitcoin.

Bitcoin isn't the future, but it sure is the progenitor of what will be used in the future.

The future is the largest, most accepted, universal payment system. To say that Bitcoin won't/can't evolve into this is very nearsighted

It won't. The concepts of bitcoin will be iterated on and polished into something that's actually useful. Bitcoin will not be the future as I said, but an improvement on it will. Something that's actually useful.

Regular money is programmable money. Everything from automated trading of stocks to automatic bill pay from your checking account is programming money.

There's two aspects to blockchain: 1) How the technology can be applied in useful innovative ways to improve people's lives. 2) How the technology can be used as a speculative commodity for people seeking to make easy money.

I think the hatred here is primarily towards the latter aspect.

First, programmable money is not equal to blockchain. What Bitcoin innovation added is being completely open (permissionless) and trustless (under certain assumptions) all this and more but cons like being extremely slow.

I'm not a blockchain hater- I'm a Bitcoin hater. There is a difference.

HN is full of non-technical users who jump on the "blockchain not Bitcoin" bandwagon

This price rise is likely in anticipation of access to exchanges from popular brokers like E-Trade.

Bit annoyed I missed this run up. I think it's been driven by institutional investors like Harvard's endowment fund buying into crypto. https://www.ccn.com/harvard-bought-cryptocurrency-thats-a-ri...

As soon as one or two go many others are likely to copy.

Meanwhile Tether traded 10x its total market cap.

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tether/

Just a heads up, CoinMarketCap has been deliberately dragging its feet on addressing the issue of blatant wash trading to increase volume reported on some unregulated exchanges (especially some coming out of/focused on asian markets).

There are a number of sites working on more reliable volume metrics, one is here: https://messari.io/onchainfx . (edit: it is the "Real 10" 24 Hour Vol column)

What CMC is doing is disingenuous at best, they have a clear conflict of interest, and they are holding back the industry. We should push for alternative sources of information.

Yes, but why isn't every coin trading at 10x its market cap? Many of the same markets that report Tether volume also trade Bitcoin. If you look at relative differences between coins, even if volume isn't accurate, it indicates a very concerted effort to keep Tether propped up.

The wash trading volume has nothing to do with tether (the trades are not even executing against the book in many cases, just reported as trades on the data feeds CMC consumes). Exchanges are using bots to wash trade back and forth on every trading pair to give the appearance of massive volume in an attempt to gain customers. It is very easy to see on charts and has nothing to do with propping tether up, whatever that means.

CoinMarketCap has been asked to exclude these exchanges from their volume reports for a long time and ignores them, most likely due to a conflict of interest (exchanges pay to advertise on CMC for example). Just like someone can create a new token and artificially inflate its market cap, exchanges can be created and artificially report their volume. CMC does nothing to filter this out and it results in a totally misleading view of the crypto markets.

OnChainFX is one example of an attempt to remove those wash-trading exchanges from the total volume reports.

My only reason for the inital reply was to urge people to not use CMC volume reports, there are better options out there that reflect real trading activity.

Yeah CMC sucks. I've been looking at this one more lately: https://www.bti.live/currencies/

Some or most of that volume is fake. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19465606

It seems that median confirmation time is holding up rather well, around ~10min - https://www.blockchain.com/en/charts/median-confirmation-tim...

There's no reason why this would change, as its dependent on the hash rate rather than the transaction rate.

And even if the transaction rate mattered exchange transactions are not the same as chain transactions.

>as its dependent on the hash rate rather than the transaction rate.

Even hash rate doesn't affect it unless there was a recent spike/dip, because the network retargets difficulty (controlling for hash rate) every 2 weeks.

Quite interesting seeing just how much the transaction volume massively dropped off when Dream Market closed down... https://www.blockchain.com/charts/n-transactions

Why is there such a strong difference between weekday and weekend trading volume in Bitcoin? Interestingly this distinction was present in the past, but no longer seems to exist with the latest jump on ~March 24th.

Maybe professional trading firms can't convince their highly-paid trading, development and support staff to work weekends? Nobody wants to be the guy that lost $AWESOME_EMPLOYEE_X to $BIG_COMPETITOR because they forced him/her to work weekends. This would change if more retail investors joined the market, because they're at least as likely to trade during weekends, and if there were enough of them then professional firms would be a relatively small proportion and the effect of their trading hours less noticable.

Look I just want it to stablise already.

Prepare for the new hype cycle.

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