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Comment by bitcoinbutter | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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.

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