Bitcoin Breaches $34,000 as Rally Extends into New Year | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin Breaches $34,000 as Rally Extends into New Year

bloomberg.com

40 pointsmancerayder27 comments

Bitcoin's price has become a self fulfilling prophecy at this point. There have been so many stories about it hitting 100'000, 50'000, even 500'000, that these current prices seem "low" in comparison. i.e. the voluminous news stories hyping up the price have psychologically anchored a high value bitcoin in many investor's minds.

Also, there is a major, major element of FOMO happening here. People are home, isolated, bored, reading more news, and reading of "Bitcoin Millionaires" etc, and of course, they want in on that action too. It's not dissimilar to what's happening with Tesla.

I made money on this, but the whole thing makes me sad. I feel sad cause I keep thinking, if I gambled more money I could have retired. And that makes me sad because it cheapens the value of work. To think that all the decades of work that I have to put in, I could have avoided by gambling more money. Idk, it feels totally wrong.

It definitely paints a sour picture of the entire economic enterprise, I agree. Stocks feel like that sometimes, too. People are to dutifully follow conservative strategies that minimize risk (as they should, mostly) while a lucky few become independently wealthy. It's odd for sure.

Yes, if you had a crystal ball you'd be rich. And if you had a cure for cancer you'd also be rich. Obviously the lesson here isn't that you can quit your job now and speculate your way to riches, so I'm not sure why BTC (or gold for that matter) going up should have any bearing on the meaning of your work.

There are two ways to look at life - by the quality of your decisions or by the outcomes. It sounds like you're doing the later, which means indexing your happiness to something you can't control. There's a lot of randomness in life, the question is "did I make the wisest decision under the circumstances when I made it?"

Example: Should you take a bet which has a 99.99% random probability to win $100 and .01% probability to lose $100? The smart decision is to take the bet because probabilistically you will win. Even if you get unlucky and lose, the original decision is sound, and if the opportunity to bet comes up again, you should.

Now this example: you and your friend have a choice to pay tuition or buy tuition's worth of lottery tickets. You chose tuition and land in a lucrative but not extravagant career. Your friend buys the tickets and ends up winning a life-changing amount of money. You'd be a fool to regret your decision, back when you made it, odds were overwhelming that whoever bought lottery tickets would end up destitute. The fact that your friend literally won the lottery doesn't make him less of an idiot, and chances are if he keeps making decisions this way he'll fuck up and be worse off than you sooner or later.

That's the analogy for your situation. In fact, there's still a good chance that all the bitcoin millionaires wouldn't be able to cash out and can still crash and burn in a way that makes you much happier with your original decision. Personally, I "sat out" the late 90's dot-com boom and everyone told me I was an idiot and missing out... until it imploded on them.

The part where hard work comes into play is this:

When one understands the value proposition of Bitcoin so thoroughly that they have the confidence to buy a large amount and hold through the bad times.

This takes a tremendous amount of research and confidence in your own ability to discern truth. Then, upon deciding that Bitcoin is worth the risk, one must tolerate derision and scoffing from their peers year after year. Many people in one's life will loudly express their desire for you to fail. It is very alienating. One must often create a completely new life for themselves. This is why revolutionary change is so difficult. The resistance to change is so massive that people will openly hate those who push for it.

That you view it as gambling and low-effort makes it clear you haven't spent a lot of time understanding Bitcoin's value proposition. That's fine, but just know that there are a lot of people who have spent years of their lives researching and working on this technology. It is not gambling to them.

> Bitcoin should eventually climb to about about $400,000, Scott Minerd, chief investment officer of Guggenheim Investments, told Bloomberg Television in a Dec. 16 interview

Wild speculation if you ask me. I don't think anyone can predict where the price is going. These same guys were saying $50k in 2017.

I don't think anyone with any credibility says things like this unless they are either capable of manipulating the price (or know someone who is, and who will), or unless they are trying to hype it for short term gain.

But some people proably ARE manipulating the price. Who are they ?

Tether.

Still? I thought they got shut down. They were in the government's bullseye for quite a while.

Nope, still alive and kicking. Still no proof they're doing something illegal. If there was proof, it wouldn't exist anymore.

If organizations like Bloomberg are going to quote people's price predictions, they should have a way of tracking the accuracy of people's past predictions. Otherwise, this is just noise: of course people holding an instrument want you to believe it will go up. (This isn't crypto-specific; the same applies to equities etc.)

The rule in finance is that if you give a timeframe don't give a number, and if you give a number, don't give a timeframe. This way you are never wrong, and you may eventually be right.

$400K would be justified if Bitcoin replaces gold.

More crazy and wild speculation

I always find it amusing that prominent investors can move the markets with these interviews regardless of the validity of the underlying statement they make (and how they're probably very much aware of this...)

Does anyone understand the market enough to explain who the sellers of bitcoin are? The daily volumes are several times the mined quantity so there must be people/institutions quite willing to part with their coins at their current prices.

Is it - people who had a specific price target in mind and are selling? People who need liquidity? Some other big aspect I am missing?

It's impossible to obtain reliable volume numbers since many exchanges either make them up or artificially inflate them with wash trading.

Can you provide some evidence of regulated exchanges partaking in wash trading? Would be very curious to see.

The ones engaging in wash trading are not particularly regulated...

Unless one has the ability to manipulate the market, I can't see how it's possible to separate actual potential from hype, scams, and other unreliable info.

Every year there's press about someone saying this will be the year bitcoin breaks 100k. Perhaps eventually that will be true, or perhaps it never will.

So if you have just so much money you're having trouble spreading it out across different types of assets, I can't see why people would buy bitcoin. (It is convenient for some transactions, but as an investment it seems more foolish now than ever in the past.)

Hey, dang - why would someone flag a Bloomberg article? I'm curious if it's because cryptocurrency is banned talk here?

Not sure why you expect dang to be able to read peoples' minds as to why they flagged an article. Also crypto talk is not banned here

I'm not dang and it was already flagged when I got here but do we really need threads every day about the price of Bitcoin? Nothing has changed since the last thread... yesterday.

I know Bitcoin is all a hype, but isn’t so anything else? At least for me I can go through the paper and the source code and understand exactly how it works and what its implication are. With other systems this is either simply not available (banking systems) or its too complicated to understand.

Sure it’s hype, but so is fashion, entertainment, art, etc. and we all live off these things.

I don’t think I see the parallel here. Why compare it to fashion or entertainment rather than to currencies or securities or commodities?

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