Hacker News Reader

Comment by wcoenen | Hacker News Reader

Nobody saw Bitcoin coming. (The first block had already been mined at the start of 2009, but there was no real exchange trading until later in 2010.)

View on HN

If someone saw it coming in 2010 they are extremely rich now :)

You forget how hard it is to look after it.

Bitcoin is like fairy dust , nearly impossible to grasp.

Printing the keys and sticking them a safe would have done the trick - but you'd need the foresight to know that not touching it for 10 years is the plan.

That's the gotcha. If bitcoin hits $1M by 2030, the people reading your comment from the 2030 repost of this thread will have a good snicker.

Bitcoin's entire value, literally all of it, is just an index for how widely and strongly felt HODLology is across the globe. The sale of a bitcoin is a cult member leaving, the purchase is a baptism, however transiently intended the purchase is, because the purchase represents the new recruits own belief in HODLology.

Ok I make a prediction here for 2030: Bitcoin won't be at $1M at all, very far from it. Bitcoin will be between $0 and the cost of mining a single coin. Right now, this is around $7,000. Could be similar or less in 2030.

I don't expect it to go anywhere. It seems to have a niche purpose, but will never gain mass adoption.

I make another prediction: By 2030 not a single cryptocurrency will be used mainstream / have replaced fiat currency. The strongest will still be Bitcoin, but it'll be as weak or non-existent for normal people like it is now.

That's a bold prediction,

I predict that gaming could see a huge uptick in crypto-currency usage. Could you imagine a game like Grand Theft Auto or World of Warcraft utilizing a crypto-currency rather than an in-game artificial currency? You could create entire in-game economies with real life value. People could actually make a living by playing games full time as scary as that sounds.

Could you imagine the moral implications of someone robbing you of crypto-currency in a game like GTA or some survival game?

I just think there's some very creative use-cases for crypto-currency that will pop up over the next decade.

As for most proposed cryptocurrency use cases, it's unclear why your example couldn't just be a number in a database maintained by the game's producers.

BTW, people already do make real-world money grinding for WoW gold.

That is the wrong way around. The cost of mining a coin is influenced by it's market value, due to economics and the difficulty adjustments. If BTC becomes worthless, it won't cost anything to mine a coin.

Probably a good strategy is sell when you can retire off of it. Having $10m but not having gambled it for $1bn isn't a loosing position to be in, IMO. Alternatively you could have 4 allocations, sell one in 2020, 2030, 2040, 2050. Or 10 going over the next 100 years (pass them down to kids).

Or they sold it all in the 2013 bubble and now regret it.

(This happened to a friend of mine - he sold it all off to pay-off his student loans before the 2013 bubble peaked - it'd be worth over $10m at the end of 2017).

Or, like me, literally deleted my wallet with 100 ish coins in 'cos I couldn't be bothered finding a USB key.

I though 'oh I'll just mine a few more next week' when I get my new laptop (!!! mining on cpu).

Narrator: He forgot about it.

If you still have the old machine, it's not impossible that the deleted wallet is still on the disk and could be recovered using some sort of undelete tool.

Good thinking. I'll be happy to supply expertise recovering data from old disk images if this is the case :-)

I had something like 20 coins, but it was on a secondary computer that didn’t have backups and was long since recycled. You can believe I spent a few hours digging through all my backups to find the wallet back in 2017... ah well.

Or they lost it all in the Mt. Gox hack... sobs quietly

Or they did what I did - spent it. At the peak I would have had $8 million before taxes had I not turned it into cash to pay for the electricity my CPU was burning to mine it.

Oh well. Good thing I actually enjoy my current job.

and no one really knew about it until it made slashdot on 7-11-2010. Mtgox started trading in 7/2010 and I think I bought my first bitcoin around 5/2011 for $10/each or around there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com