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Comment by dmos62 | Hacker News Reader

I've seen too many sad go-all-in stories to not mention the dangers of gambling.

> average annual return of 350%

That's misleading. The price is currently at the ~35-40% retrace from the high of 20k. What happened so far (for example the rally to 20k) is not an indicator that Bitcoin's value will grow or even be sustained.

I'm not saying Bitcoin doesn't have speculative value, but you have to be already an experienced analyst and trader (in case of day trading) to have a chance at profiting from it. "If it were easy everyone would be doing it" proverb is true. Crypto is much harder than forex for example. Again, unless you really know what you're doing, trading will hardly be more profitable than going to the casino.

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The annual average has been constantly growing - the 20k peak was only several hours long and there are 8760 hours in an year. The 360-day WME gain being consistently in the double figures IS an indicator of BTC's value having no intention to stop growing.

I'm not familiar with WME and Google didn't turn anything up. Sounds like you're talking about a moving average.

Yes. More popularily known as EMA, apologies.

>I'm not saying Bitcoin doesn't have speculative value, but you have to be already an experienced analyst and trader

If you buy and hold for multiple years, on average you will make 350% a year, very similarly to how you would see a certain level of average annual returns from buying and holding on the conventional stock market. The growth is being fueled by the adoption of a new technology.

If you buy and hold during the last 2 years, how much would you make on average per year?

That's why they're average annual returns, and the idea is to hold for multiple years. The same could be said about people who bought stocks and real estate in 2007.

If your solution to making a trade profitable is to hold it longer, then you don't have the right mentality for trading. What chances are of this (hypothetical, I presume) trade turning profitable? If you don't know, or if it's not much better than 50%, you're making a mistake.

When actively trading, profitably is calculated a bit differently, but I presume we're talking about a one off trade.

Most active traders don't beat the market (any market), as they shouldn't provided that the EMH is true. I'm proposing a strategy of long term investing.

s/you will/you would have/ please. Past performance does not guarantee future performance.

That really doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Bitcoin is well known and widely used at this point, even if it hasn’t reached its maximum audience it’s approaching that. Contrast the stock market who’s potential is capped by a combination of fossil fuels and the solar radiation flowing into the earth, which we’re no where near using efficiently, and you can see why they’re not at all in the same category.

Bitcoin's maximum (and future) audience is 100% of world's GDP, so that governments can no longer steal value through inflation (FRB and QE). So far it isn't anywhere near that level yet.

Controlled inflation and QE are good things, that help keep the economy ticking.

Where you see governments 'stealing value', the rest of us see sensible monetary policy.

God save us from idiots who would hand said policy to a handful of software engineers and a self-interested mining cartel.

Right.

And the credit crisis was good because it flooded the market with cheap credit... That did what, exactly?

God saves us from the real idiots - those that think they have all the answers, instead of humbly accepting how little they know, about what they imagine they can design

(Those idiots are unfortunately those that seem to be good at the game of: "heads i win, tails others lose"

> The growth is being fueled by the adoption of a new technology.

What adoption? Adoption appears to have stalled and fallen back, with multiple companies having announced that attempting to accept bitcoin had been a waste of time or even a net negative.

Depends on when you bought. If you bought at 20k, you'd be down quite a bit right now.

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