Bitcoin value surges past $30k | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin value surges past $30k

bbc.co.uk

37 pointsabhi375 comments

As it stands right now bitcoin market cap https://www.coingecko.com/en is at $600 billion, not near the top most valuable public companies yet and not sure what coinbase will be priced at

the better question is in what currency will coinbase (or) similar successors be priced in?

Dollar of course. No one cares about Bitcoin or Ether or Ripple or Litecoins or Kittycoins or ... aside from their value in $$$. They are not currencies, they are speculation objects.

I wonder what will happen the next time we have a prolonged global network outage (ie. days, weeks). The next time we have a major kinetic conflict, for example...

Since Bitcoin will "fork" in each network partition, and everything will work ... fine, within each partition -- right up until the moment the network is repaired, and all but one of the "forks" simply disappears.

I think most people will be surprised that this is the correct behavior.

This is something; just not "money".

or the forks continue divided and a exchange value begins to form between them ... if one side of the partition has been less productive then the value eventually transfers to the other fork and the mining gradually slows down and continues or stops at sometime.

By the way how well do you think the other monetary systems will fair under such conditions you describe?

This “big” problem is solved by avoiding unnecessary global consensus, when agent-to-agent consensus is all that is necessary.

See the Holo / Holochain projects.

Last time it happened in Egypt, the government was overthrown and the leader had to resign.

With Bitcoin, you have to shoot all the Bitcoin satellites _and_ stop the internet to do what you propose.

Denial of your opponent’s access to the battlefield is “table stakes” in the next war.

I assure you — all terrestrial and major satellite up/downlinks will cease within minutes of the next major conflict starting.

Well, in case of a global thermonuclear war I think we'll have bigger problems than some transactions being reversed.

You don't have to work nearly that hard to cut off internet access to many countries. Satellites are relatively easy to destroy if you're willing to ignore the debris it creates.

Undersea cables are easy to cut. Land based lines are easy to cut. Unless the locations of these cables are well hidden (which I don't believe they generally are), you could easily severe all of a country's internet connections in a couple of days.

> Satellites are relatively easy to destroy if you're willing to ignore the debris it creates.

I agree, but someone here made a good point in the last thread about this: in a couple of years, they plan to have 42,000 StarLink satellites active. That’s a lot of very capable missiles.

Sorry I’m not quite following. I understand if groups are isolated from each other we will have different forks of Bitcoin running around the world, but why would a fork disappear? Wouldn’t the separate partitions merge into one network again?

Surprise!

Nope. Correct behaviour is that the longest chain “wins”; all others disappear along with all their transactions.

The forks don't "disappear", but they get overruled since the consensus has shifted to the majority opinion of the ledger. Thus all of the transactions on a local fork (that doesn't become the majority) are wiped out -- including possibly deposits in exchange for cash.

For most people this is not as bad as you might expect. Transactions on the losing chain can be replayed on the winning chain as long as they haven't been double-spent.

> This is something; just not "money".

It's a store of value. From what I gather, people are using it to protect their money against inflation.

That's probably not going to happen; we have satellites broadcasting the bitcoin blockchain: https://blockstream.com/satellite/

But is anyone receiving? It would be interesting to test it.

What's the attack vector there presuming only Blockstream runs the satellite?

Price action is boring.

I'd rather see usecases for cryptocurrencies linked here, not the same article every time Bitcoin surges above an arbitrary number.

The only use-case for crypto is that it fills in the gaps in demand that the global banking system creates. There are a lot of people who are left out or kicked out of the banking system, but they still need financial services, so the demand remains.

e.g. An IPO is too expensive, so a company pursues an ICO. Or a family in Venezuela needs money so they receive bitcoin. Or college kids wants to buy LSD so he sends the payment with bitcoin. Or a paedophile wants to buy child porn, so he pays with bitcoin. etc.

The second use-case for crypto is as a commodity investment for its first use-case.

I think the drug and pedophile examples are in poor taste because, unfortunately, people have been purchasing both illicitly long before the introduction of cryptocurrency.

All money is amoral. It changes hands without judgement.

Money is just paper. It’s the system behind it that gives it meaning. The banking system is not amoral, it does not want you to use its money for illegal activities.

Cryptocurrency has no morals, the system behind the money is all machine. You don’t sign an agreement that says you won’t break laws when you create a Bitcoin wallet, for example, but this is something that happens when open a bank account.

Good point. But money does not equal finance nor banking, it's just the medium in which they operate. Signup for a cryptocurrency exchange and you will need to sign a similar document to your bank's, where you agree to provide your real identity and are informed as to the legal limits of the cryptocurrency you can purchase. To me, buying something illegal with a bitcoin you bought on a legal exchange, is no different than buying something illegal with a hundred dollar bill your withdrew from your bank account.

Money doesn't commit crimes, people do.

I think a lot of coinsceptics don't own much cryptocurrency. Once I began to have more BTC in my wallet than USD in my bank account it suddenly became more convenient to make purchases online with the BTC.

Just like we have the pound, yen, yuan and dollar, I don't think any cryptocurrency will ever become the One World Currency. But when it works, it works. Just my 2 cents ...

Store of value to protect against inflation is a huge value proposition. Of course, it's still volatile now.

Here's another use case: https://lightning.engineering/pool

When i read news like this, I think of the guy who bought a pizza for 10,000 Bitcoin in the early days.

Hope he had thousands of more bitcoins for himself.

Well 10.000 bitcoin was, back then, not worth more than a pizza...

Just think, if he didn't buy that pizza. It might not have acheived it's current price.

If no one bought any physical goods back then, then it may not have caught peoples attention, and may not have taken off.

Is there any conceivable good reason for the value to have tripled in 3 months, or is this a cycle of FOMO hysteria just like last time?

Maybe I'm just not paying as much attention this time around but it seems much quieter than peak 2017.

Because it is early 2017. Everyone seems to get lost in the huge peaks and valleys and miss the slow growth due to supply impacts. Why did it go up in 2017? IMO the halving in july 2016. Same reason it is going up now, it halved in may 2020 and we are just now seeing the impact.

FOMO and the US giving cash out like crazy. Paypal also has a bitcoin option so that probably opened it to more users too.

The same reason it always goes up. Supply < Demand.

Historically low interest rates, QE, huge deficits. Same reason the stock market and real estate are going up as the economy tanks from a pandemic. Finance is completely decoupled from reality at this point. It’s like a big MMO.

Interest is at all time low in europe, and people are getting COVID cash. The ECB is also "creating" cash to ensure the euro is stable....

So if you have a lot of euros on your account not making any money, you either go to the stock market (Thats why its going up, especially the visible stock such as Tesla) and things like Bitcoin...

The problem is, at some point it will come back down again, and a lot of people will lose money.

Its all network effects, and people talking to each other about bitcoin and stocks and people jumping in... It starts to look like 1930 again.

It is obviously the latter. For those who want to double their profits when it was at $10k - $19k.

What comes up must come down. Question is when?

> What comes up must come down

Famous quote with lots of counterexamples. Peter Lynch provides multiple conterexamples to many similar stock market quotes in an interview.

There's a direct correlation in the last 3 months between billions of printed tether and btc price. In the last few months they printed 11 billion fake dollars. Click "3 months" here and look at the charts of tether market cap (how much they print) vs Price (BTC), it's an exact correlation:

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tether/

The rate of production of new BTC was reduced in the last halving in May, so demand is chasing less supply. https://digitalik.net/btc/sf_model

Is there any conceivable good reason for the value to have tripled in 3 months, or is this a cycle of FOMO hysteria just like last time?

I doubt money from MicroStrategy, Mass Mutual, Square, hedge funds and other corporate treasuries are due to FOMO…

Maybe people don't want to leave all their savings in USD because with all the stimulus money, there will be some inflation?

Can someone recommend me a good site to trade Bitcoin options on?

The upcoming Coinbase IPO (or DPO?) will be fun to watch if this bitcoin price rally continues.

Regardless if the price keeps going up or it crashes again (if enough HODLers don't hold long enough and the industrial complex hasn't kept enough $ billions in reserve to counter when the rush of selling does come) - either way the "army of HODLers" will continue to grow to wait (spreading their positive propaganda they're financially incentivized to do like MLM members) until the next hoard of people get tricked or sucked into the hype - or consciously gamble and their greed is enough to take advantage of other people.

The Coinbase IPO will be a sign of if the people in control of the funds don't understand the complex at all - or they're simply trying to profit off of it not caring about the actual consequences and future outcome; dumb money from financial industrial complex (misaligned incentives due to fees based instead of long-term results based) buying into, perpetuating a global, decentralized Pyramid-Ponzi scheme - trying to legitimize itself by misappropriating terminology and working hard towards regulatory capture, legitimacy.

I took out the money on loss which was stuck in from last 3 years. Better have something than nothing. Idea of trading is only worth doing if done as a full time job.

As a currency, I don't want to use a currency which goes up and down like all these.

Bitcoin is a lot less volatile than you think: https://www.etftrends.com/alternatives-channel/bitcoins-vola...

“In our current volatility research, we compared the 90 day and year to date volatility—as measured by their daily standard deviation as of November 13, 2020—of bitcoin against the constituents of the S&P 500 Index. We found that bitcoin has exhibited lower volatility than 112 stocks of the S&P 500 in a 90 day period and 145 stocks YTD.”

People complaining about volatility are usually comparing against currencies not equities.

Tether has printed almost two billion fake dollars in the past month. Surely a coincidence.

Over 17 billion total last year. A shady company with no proof of actually holding any funds and real proof that they were kicked out of all the banks they tried to use, a court case against them and a text on their own website that says that they are not backed by USD but "some other assets" prints 21 billion fake dollars and everyone is ok with that.

The whataboutism is stunning. The cryptocurrency community doesn’t seem to mind a giant scam at the heart of Bitcoin if you just mutter something about banks and Fed and QE. “Surely real money is much worse, now let’s enjoy the pump”

I think one of the reasons it's allowed to go on is that a lot of exchanges are in on it.

This passage on tether's website specifically:

>tether is always 100% backed by reserves which include other assets and receivables from loans made by Tether to third parties

makes it sound like if you are an exchange, you can ask for a billion dollars of tether and give back an IOU written on a napkin saying you pinky promise you owe them that billion. So tether gives out free cash to anyone who asks and in exchange can print fake money of their own and sell it on bitfinex.

I don’t understand how they can do that? Who trades with them for fake money?

Edit: Just because I say I have a billion dollars doesn’t mean someone will trade a billion dollars worth of anything with me, so who does with Tether?

See my comment below, they probably co-opted a lot of other exchanges on the scheme by giving out billions for IOUs

People who aren't allowed to use real money because no bank will touch them are using Tether.

>Tether has printed almost two billion fake dollars in the past month. Surely a coincidence.

I agree that Tether itself is a risky proposition - in my opinion. I wouldn't buy it.

But prove what you said about 'fake dollars'. And then prove the connection to the Bitcoin price rise that you implied by 'a coincidence'.

I don't believe you can prove this. Because if you could prove it, you would have already done so.

Edit: And I would hope we could correct the title of this post. It's not truly about 'Bitcoin value surges past $30K', it is about 'Bitcoin price passed $30K'

Do I have the power to subpoena these people? I don’t.

The SEC has been working on Tether’s case for a while, though. Recall what happened to Ripple last month when the SEC reached a conclusion on their activities.

>Recall what happened to Ripple last month when the SEC reached a conclusion on their activities.

Yes, Tether seems to be in all sorts of legal trouble, especially in the US, but it is COMPLETELY different from XRP. Why would you even mention XRP/Ripple here? XRP has always been trying super hard to comply with the rules and cooperate with banks and etcetera, though I think it is probably really a kind of scam, IMHO.

But Tether and Bitfinex are always lurking in some kind of dark international space where the law is not clear, they are not like XRP. I hope you can see that, yes?

Edit: What you're stating as fact is actually only your own opinion, and that has become even clearer when the only evidence you could offer to prove your case against Tether is not even about Tether, but about a totally different organization: XRP/Ripple. So it might be better if you did not comment at this time, because you seem to have no interesting facts to offer us, only your opinions

[I mean that this has little to do with the XRP/Ripple situation]

Just read their website. It used to say that it's backed 1:1 by USD, period. Now it says a lot of vague things, e.g.:

>Every tether is also 1-to-1 pegged to the dollar, so 1 USD₮ is always valued by Tether at 1 USD.

So it explicitly says that it is not backed by USD, but is "valued by tether at 1 USD"

> Every tether is always 100% backed by our reserves, which include traditional currency and cash equivalents and, from time to time, may include other assets and receivables from loans

That passage probably means that they print fake dollars, then buy bitcoin with it, which rises the price of bitcoin, and allows them to claim that their reserves are "fully backed"

I don’t care if it’s a guarantee to be 100k tomorrow, I refuse to profit off crypto speculation. It may seem crazy to people but I like to earn money with effort.

speculating on housing market? buy to let? crazy valued Tesla stocks?

Yep. That's a slippery slope

I would seriously advise people not to speculate on crypto. The biggest use case is selling it to other speculators. That can't be sustainable.

But only wanting to earn money through effort is a ridiculous notion as well. Investing your savings is a good and necessary idea.

On almost all trading platforms, the trading volume is lower than 2017. I think a lot of people just bought coins over the last year, but not really trade, so just the "few coins left" are traded and make the price.

I'd really be interested to see the volume of forex vs. circulation. My intuition is that many more dollars trade hands every day for speculation than purchases, but I could be wrong.

That's a different kind of speculation mind , but I'd be curious to see the numbers. I don't think you're correct.

Also you don't want to hold dollars because unlike bitcoin they're inflationary and decrease in value over time - a necessary attribute for something to work well as a currency and one reason among many why cryto thus far is a failure as a currency.

Crypto is closest to gold in that both are scarce commodities used as a store of value. It's a terrible investment though. Warren Buffett made an interesting comparison between all the gold mined in history vs all the farmland in the US and which is a better investment over time.

Do you say the same thing about stocks? You can make more money with less effort by investing, whether it's crypto, equities, bonds, real estate... (you can also lose a lot more, obviously.)

Stocks are backed by real companies with real products and cash flows.

With Bitcoin, the only way to make money is to sell it at a higher price to someone else later. It’s a purely speculative asset.

What you say is true only in the most basic sense. If you look at the movement of some stocks, there is clearly a ton of speculation. There are whole stocks (and classes of stocks, like some recent SPACs) that essentially move on almost nothing but speculation. Regardless, he said he liked to "earn his money with effort", so I am interested in learning how far that goes...

Purely speculative stocks are traditionally called penny stocks, and brokers go out of their way to advice you against investing in them.

The same caveats should apply to Bitcoin.

My point is that it is not black-and-white. Stocks represent companies with real products and cash flows, but there is also a ton of speculative, bubble like behaviour on top of it. Take a look at a 1 year chart of something like TSLA or NIO and tell me that isn't true.

Buying a share of Tesla gives you equity in the efforts of thousands of smart people, accumulated intellectual property, factories, sales and marketing organizations etc. The shareholder probably expects the generated cash flow to be channeled by Tesla into creating something new, thus expanding the scope of what a share of TSLA represents. Those expectations may be unrealistic, but there is actual growth and invention underlying the speculation.

Bitcoin doesn’t represent any such creative endeavor. It’s the very opposite: an artificial scarcity mindgame that burns fossil fuels to power useless random number generators. It’s a tragedy that intelligent people who could be doing something creative instead spend their energy on greedy speculation around such a dark project.

Bitcoin represents some creative endeavor. Is it over exaggerated? Yes... but you can't say there's nothing there.

I got in early and got lucky. I mined a bunch of bitcoins about 10 years ago and have been selling them off gradually. I take that cash and buy stocks with it.

What's speculation in a guarantee? I thought that speculation is risky, therefore it can't be guaranteed.

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