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Comment by prepend | Hacker News Reader

I think cryptocurrency is great as a currency. I think it was stupid as speculation or investment.

Digital money is awesome, it being taken over by so many carpetbaggers is not.

I’m looking forward to bitcoin having a stable value for a few years, any value.

Bitcoin has really settled down in terms of price swings over the last year. It did have a major covid crash, but aside from that it's been very stable for the past year.

Keep in mind that the price moves also attract attention, and act as a sort of advertisement of its existence. It wouldn't get any mainstream coverage without the price moves.

It’s definitely better this year, but I don’t want my currency to fluctuate 10%.

On what time scale? Currencies fluctuate 10% all the time over a year.

A typical volatility index measure like VIX( EVZ ?) could be good reference , there are few VIxes which look bitcoin as priced in USD

BitCoin has fluctuated much more than 10% in the last year though: https://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=XBT&to=USD&view=1Y

Certainly much more than USD/EUR: https://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=EUR&to=USD&view=1Y

10% is an underestimate. BTC fluctuates by 50% or more.

Sure tell that to the Zimbabwe dollar, the South African Rand.. the Yen, etc. This is an ideal that doesn't exist in practise for all but a small handful of actual currencies.

I think that supports my point though right. Does anyone think the Zimbabwe dollar is a good currency? I think few choose to use it.

It’s hardly a choice for its country’s people. Governments in developing countries are very big bullies.

> Bitcoin has really settled down in terms of price swings over the last year. It did have a major covid crash, but aside from that it's been very stable for the past year.

lol what? It went from $7000 to $10500 to $4000 to $10400... Blame it on covid if you want but the whole year has been this violent zigzag

that’s at least all in the same order of magnitude! only a couple years ago it was swinging much more wildly than that

But it has nothing on the established fiat currencies, where a >10% change in a year is (rightly) considered a major event

Consider USD/EUR. In 2015 it was 0.9, and currently it's 0.89. It's peak and low was 0.96 and 0.8. That a 10% bandwidth around a stable average.

Over the past year the DAI token on Ethereum has tracked the US dollar better than that, without requiring anyone to hold collateral off-chain.

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/multi-collateral-dai/

Pegging your currency to another currency and claiming it's more stable is cheating and doesn't really solve the problem.

Like the US can stop PayPal from providing financial services, they can too stop banks from storing USD collateral to such parties.

Also I don't agree with your "tracked better than that" claim: DAI/USD has a 15% drop and increase in a few months, about the same as USD/EUR in 5 years.

DAI is not backed by Usd collateral, the collateral is a basket of other crypto currencies.

Yep, from the point of stability that sucks obviously; there are stablecoins though. I still like BTC as a speculator (and I know it's almost nothing more than gambling, but considering coin tossing, dart throwing or monkeys outperform professional stock investors/fund managers (at least there are a ton of articles saying that), it all sounds like gambling), I create a nice living wage doing nothing at all but clicking buy/sell a few times a year. And that is only running on profits (so all money I 'invest' is profits made with btc alone) from when I bought a stack of btc end of 2016 because something seemed to be happening and by golly it was. As long as it works, it works.

Good or bad; whatever works... It's a nice extra on top of my day job.

I bought bitcoin first time when it was below $10. Happy to be stupid and have those thousand percent gains.

Enough people sunk their whole live savings and then some into this. They are less happy than you are.

With any financial instruments there are those for who it is a worse deal than alternative. With Bitcoin you have great volatility, but it has been mostly upwards. If you have made loss you are probably minority of the user/investor base.

For example, the current ATH was nearly $20k, and the current price is $9k. If you were unlucky enough to buy at ATH, you are down to 40%. Thats still not that bad situation - for example with stocks it is easy to find bets where you lose 90%.

Sinking your whole life savings into something is stupid and it's peoples own fault if they do so and lose everything.

Sunk half my life savings in at $16, then doubled down and sunk the rest in when it dropped to $3.

Have now bought a house each for pretty much all my close friends and family members.

Couldn't a gambler say exactly the same thing?

Usually, no.

With gambling the winners is very, very small minority. With bitcoin/crypto practically all people who got in before 2017 have been doing very, very well.

Early Ethereum buyer checking in.

Although, most of my holdings are now BTC & XMR.

XMR or Monero, is the best cryptocurrency IMO.

Ledger is totally opaque. Actually works like cash.

> Early Ethereum buyer checking in.

Hopeful about ETH tokens rising in value soon? ETH 2.0 is coming later this year, which may shake things up one way or another.

I don't know, I'm a little worried about 2.0 as they've delayed it for so long.

Ledger is totally opaque? Maybe I'm confused, but opaque means not transparent. Surely you'd want the opposite?

What ledger is used for tracking cash?

Transparent means people can tell how much money you have, how long you've had it, where you got it from, and where you send it. An opaque chain means outside observers can't really do that. If people have the private key, of course they can, or if they have view keys they can. The the chain is verifiable even while being opaque thanks to the beauty of mathematics.

Of course, that’s reasonable that you would be happy with your luck.

Buying lotto tickets is irrational as well, but the winners are happy. Some speculators end up ok.

As much value has been lost by bitcoin as created (ie, someone bought at $20k and lost at $10k, etc).

I’m glad you made a ton of cash, I hope you can retire. But this volatility is really bad for currency.

> bitcoin having a stable value for a few years, any value

It will still be "that" lottery.

In its current form every major crypto has been "promoted" as "be the first one to get onto my crypto bandwagon and this will make you rich".

And that will also make sure something like this BBC programme - Missing Crypto Queen - keeps on repeating.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07nkd84

Eh, bitcoin isn't really "great" currency. It has some pretty poor properties as currency. Now I understand it's better than nothing. You want currency to slowly lose value. If it goes up in value, than it make no sense to exchange it for goods and services, which is the whole point. Wild fluctuations in price also cause massive headaches.

Why not stablecoins (like DAI/USDC/PAX)? All (but one) benefits of bitcoin and none of the price fluctuations.

I personally prefer not to use fiat currency, because I prefer my purchasing power to go up. Thats why I say no to stablecoins.

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