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Comment by aphextron | Hacker News Reader

We're in a world where nothing means anything anymore. Stock valuations are meaningless. Take Alibaba for instance. What exactly are you getting when you buy a share of BABA? Voting rights? Dividends? Liquidation value? Nope, none of that. You're getting a meaningless piece of paper that hopefully everyone else agrees is worth something in the future.

How about Chewy. 30 billion market cap for a random ecommerce site running a multibillion dollar loss for 5 years? Sure why not. Or Quantumscape. 20 billion for a battery company with zero revenue that doesn't even have a factory? Of course. Money is a complete fiction now. In this environment, if the investing class agrees that Bitcoin is worth $35k, then it is.

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Might as well through TSLA into the absurd valuation sphere...PE ratio north of 1000 and projected to be >100 for at least the next 3-4 years. Competitors with PE ratios of 10-40 that produce 50X the vehicles...TSLA market cap higher than the top 9 car makers combined. Musk went from being worth 27B to 185B in a year. The valuation makes no sense...sure long term they could be a giant, but so many other car companies are producing electric vehicles and new battery technology now their competitive edge in the space may not last long.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/14/tesla-valuation-more-than-ni...

> Money is a complete fiction now

It always has been:

http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/steven-pinker-on-money-as-a-...

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/money-as-a-social-...

Yes and no.

But today all the advance financial tools are making money into a clay, and people wielding those tools can shape it however they like.

Reading about relation of USD to european currencies back in post war (pre- and post- Bretton Woods system) was eye opening to me.

But without those 'tools' money, while still fairly virtual were more concrete. Coins were made of valuable metal, you could take it and melted it down.

Yes. The economy is broken. Democracy is broken. Journalism is sort of broken. Healthcare is broken. What a world we live in.

EDIT: I even forgot about the climate.

Frankly, I think the only thing that is broken are the people who are quick to write off something as "broken". It's been this way in software engineering for a long time, too.

The economy just has a lot of technical debt. Plans to clear it in the next sprint however without a management change clearing by starting over isn’t on the cards

Now I don't know where you live, but please don't speak for the entire world because of your own personal experience. I've experienced both good and bad of all of those things, and some places are excellent at all of them. The world has its bright spots.

Yeah pretty much. In a world where the following scenario is actively working all bets are off really.

Buy BTC convert to renBTC (skip this by just buying renBTC on an exchange if you can) Put in keeperdao and earn ~19-30% APY. Claim profits as ROOK convert to renBTC put them back into keeperdao and compound keep your exposure to BTC.

On a personal note I was a doubter for a long time. Now not so much given the money printing of the past year. The past year every time I read about NFTs I think they are stupid. This is why I’m forcing myself to research and experiment with them as I don’t want to let my doubts about things get in my way again.

You're conflating financial value and the abstract concept of value. Financial value is really just a function of supply and demand. Food and clean water may be a lot more important than megayachts, but they're also also far more abundant than megayachts.

It happens that maximizing financial value also does a good job of improving people's lives, so we treat as truth. Right now, we're starting to see this fall apart as certain valuations stop making sense and certain negative externalities start coming to light. That said, I still think in general, valuations tend to be more right than they are wrong.

This has always been the case for all items of value. You might just consider some of those things "meaningful" if people have been valuing them for a very long time (like coins or other physical items which represent a standardized currency) or if the reason people value them is closely tied to features of nature which we aren't likely to change in the imminent future (like requiring scarce things such as food and shelter to survive). But at the end of the day, people are still choosing to value those things and that is all there is to it.

From the article: If Bitcoin's market capitalization were to match that of gold, it would be worth over $500,000 a coin. This is why some investors are so bullish on Bitcoin.

Perhaps it's more accurate to say that investors are increasingly bearish on the dollar.

That has nothing to do with the dollar. If bitcoin were to match the market cap of gold irrespective of any money printing, it would be $500k a coin. Which is to say that people consider Bitcoin to have properties similar but superior to that of gold.

It’s very arbitrary. Silver or palladium are more similar to gold than Bitcoin, but no one even tries to compare the er... “market caps” of the mined metals to each other.

It would be just as easy to say that Bitcoin had properties similar to Copper and try to back a valuation out of that. Either comparison borders on silly.

It's not arbitrary; gold (unlike copper) has been money for 5000 years.

And unlike copper, the United State's dollar was backed by gold for a majority of the 20th century while most other currencies were pegged to the dollar.

And finally, unlike copper, there’s $8-$10 trillion dollars worth of gold being used as a store of value globally.

Bitcoin has all of the core attributes of gold with the addition of being digital and having a fixed supply.

It only makes sense to compare bitcoin to gold.

These are all inevitable consequences of artificially cheap debt due to USD "printing". The Cantillon Effect has weird consequences. Bullshit companies can be worth billions, and people will rationally flee the dollar (into e.g. BTC).

Bitcoin has a much more plausible value proposition than most of these bullshit companies. Conflating the anomalously high value of BTC with the anomalously high value of companies is a category error. http://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2018/10/bitcoin-and-bubble-theo... https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2013/04/bitcoin-is-...

When and how was this ever different?

Isn’t it how trade works since the early days of humanity? We value things, whether it’s sea shells, sheep or a legal entity in 2021 with 10,000 staff and exchange it for what we think it’s worth?

I think the point is the horizon of payoff has previously been a lot more confined. A company was worth a multiple of earnings for example - because you were fairly confident that it would continue to earn, and if necessary could pay out dividends (and shareholders could vote to make that happen). That has gone out of whack in the past, but those were bubbles, and corrections happened.

The current environment started around the 1970s. We went from industrial capitalism to financial capitalism. We are at the end of the debt cycle and most of the worlds governments keep trying to re-inflate it instead of unwinding the mess.

Always has been.

Illusion of wealth

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