Comment by tgsovlerkhgsel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tgsovlerkhgsel | Hacker News Reader

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Surprisingly, all cryptos (including BTG) seem to be going up. Normally a 51% attack on any somewhat-known cryptocurrency pushes the price down.

This kinda confirms that BTG being not just susceptible to 51% attacks but also getting hit by them isn't a surprise to anyone.

Edit to add: For anyone not familiar with the space, Bitcoin Gold is one of the many forks of the main Bitcoin blockchain, and one of the least meaningful among the ones commonly known. Here's the map of the main forks: https://i.redd.it/1pvmr98w5x041.png -- the main chain is by far the most known/popular/valuable, followed by Cash and SV in this order, followed by Gold far behind the rest.

Useful metrics are value/market cap, number/size of exchanges supporting it, or hash power. Hash power roughly correlates with value.

A main-chain Bitcoin (BTC) is worth about $8750 and basically the reserve currency of the crypto world (roughly all exchanges will have it), Bitcoin Cash (BCH) about $370 and has 400+ markets (that's as much as Coinmarketcap will show), Bitcoin SV (BSV) about $300 and 154 markets, Bitcoin Gold about $12 and 74 markets. Too lazy to count unique exchanges (an exchange can have multiple markets per coin).

Edit: Exchange listing counts here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22161472

I feel like every attack on these networks that goes from theoretical to real (or that gets demonstrated on increasingly larger scales), will actually tend to cause the market to get more bullish on the ecosystem as a whole.

It’s a kind of de-risking—not in the sense that the particular blockchain, or blockchains in general, are now any less vulnerable to the attack (Sybil attacks generally are like the Halting Problem of open consensus systems—no real way around them) but rather that these attacks, for some investors, go from scary “unknown unknowns” to “known unknowns” that can be quantified in their impact, and thus ROI models can be clarified, making cryptocurrency’s value as an asset class more legible. Legible assets always have a place in a hybrid-strategy portfolio; while illegible assets (like illiquid real estate from the housing crash) almost never do.

> basically the reserve currency of the crypto world (roughly all exchanges will have it)

I would say that that’s more like either Monero or USDC right now: these are the cryptocurrencies people ask for when they just want cash but want to let you pay them in crypto, because you can cash out of crypto entirely in a non-value-losing way pretty well from either (with Monero, because it has low TX fees and fast processing times, so you can get rid of it in seconds; with USDC, because it’s stable-ish for now, so you don’t need to worry on a scale of minutes whether it’ll keep its value.)

Which is similar to what “reserve currency” means in practice for most people (other than banks): it’s the currency they’d prefer to be paid in, and the currency you’ll see them trading in their own currency for in the event that their own currency experiences high volatility.

You are right, I remember talking to Bitcoin core and lightning network developers before the segwit/bitcoin cash fork. They were quite depressed as the social/marketing attacks on Bitcoin core were quite successful in hindering Bitcoin's development by a few years.

At the same time as Bitcoin core won (by market share), now Bitcoin is a state where everybody accepts that Bitcoin won't have any hard forks in the future (even if it would be technically warranted).

For many things change is a good thing, but for creating a new monetary system it's only good if it fixes a huge flaw in the previous one (unlimited money supply and limited international money flow in the case of the current financial system).

Because most cryptos are traded in terms of BTC or ETH, if either of those two go up, virtually all other coins tend to rise as well. I haven't seen altcoins decoupled since 2017.

>Surprisingly, all cryptos (including BTG) seem to be going up

This might be because the "halvening" is this year.

Also all stocks are down due to the corona virus. which is allegedly a reason bitcoin is high.

There is zero rational basis for any movement in cryptocurrencies, and it was spiking at the same time that the normal stock market was hitting record highs.

Rationally, bitcoin should be worth close to nothing.

You mean just like gold?

Gold has intrinsic high value in an enormous number of processes, and is a physically very rare element with very novel properties. Cryptocurrency isn't remotely rare -- one can create a hundred Bitcoin clones in an afternoon -- and has zero fundamental value. It solves no real problem, and is worse at virtually everything than alternatives.

The comparison with gold has always been specious.

If a tiny, tiny fraction of holders of bitcoin liquidated to cash, it would be worth close to nothing overnight.

Gold's intrinsic value is obviously nowhere near its value on the market. Bitcoin does have some intrinsic value too as an international payments system, which like gold clearly is not the only driver of the price. Furthermore I don't see how you can compare the rarity of gold versus bitcoins. What makes one "more rare" or "less rare" than the other? Are we comparing grams to bits, or what?

> If a tiny, tiny fraction of holders of bitcoin liquidated to cash, it would be worth close to nothing overnight.

Being opposed to Bitcoin because you think it's too volatile is a totally different argument than "its value isn't defined intrinsically".

The entirety of mined gold, over the history of mankind, wouldn't fill an Olympic swimming pool. It has become exponentially more difficult to mine, and can't be created outside of alchemy (e.g. some radioactive processes).

Gold has a comparable price to platinum, and is positively cheap compared to rhodium. Gold has been valued by pretty much every civilization throughout history, independently and for the same reasons, even before its unique properties gave it secondary value.

I don't invest in gold, have little of it, and I don't know how this strawman got erected, but gold has a much better case than cryptocurrencies at having a so-called intrinsic value.

On the cryptocurrency side there are literally thousands of active offerings, and the barrier to entry to create one or a hundred more is negligible. They offer incredibly little value (outside of crime), and are largely illiquid with enormous transaction costs at every step. The transaction history of cryptocurrencies if aggregated would be 99.999+% trading and gambling, with a rounding error of transactions for illicit purposes. And a minuscule amount of early-adopter, feel-good "look I used it to buy a pizza" legitimate transactions.

As to your last line, that's another strawman and certainly isn't the argument I'm making. What I am saying is that no cryptocurrency currently in play has any legitimate intrinsic value, and because of that the trading of the same is effectively a game of chicken where everyone waits to see who blinks.

There is a non-zero chance that Bitcoin could crash to effectively $0 in a short period.

> gold has a much better case than cryptocurrencies at having a so-called intrinsic value.

The point is that the intrinsic value doesn't come anywhere close to explaining the price in either case.

And what about cash? That also doesn't need intrinsic value to be worth something.

> On the cryptocurrency side there are literally thousands of active offerings, and the barrier to entry to create one or a hundred more is negligible.

I don't see why the scarcity of one cryptocoin affects the value of the others. Creating a new coin doesn't devalue existing coins.

you're probably right.

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