It's always amazed me how anti-crypto and behind the times (about bitcoin) this forum has been. Remember your imagination for the possibilities of the early web and computers.
Hacker news has changed a lot since the time I joined. I came from /. And osnews . And initially it was strongly pro business . Now it has became more "liberal " and pro open source.
Somedays it really looks like I'm gonna see here AARP ads any time soon!
The community is aging and getting out of touch with the market without even realizing it
Also see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26041057 - HN wants it’s mp3s, so why doesn’t it want it’s money?
The discourse that I would LOVE to see here is HOW to make it better. Is BCH really better? Is XlM? even XRP.
Like when databases are discussed, we get interesting points for Postgres or MySQL or even Mongo. That's the constructive view.
Same with TypeScript for a long time as well, and then there was a magical turning point somehow that the entire zerg all of a sudden discovered static typing was actually useful.
For one of the best sites for discussing the latest happenings in the computer software world, crypto has somehow been consistently rejected as useless when it beats other stores of value in almost every metric.
Crypto has value simply because it is better at storing value than the mediums that came before it.
Which metrics you selected so crypto beats following in "almost every metric"?
- real estate
- gold
- $ in cash
- $ in a bank account
- stocks
- Land - Can't send it.
- Gold - Physical so more difficult to store, secure, send, and verify.
- Cash - Easy to manipulate by the government. How many trillions printed for coronavirus? I wouldn't hold too much of it.
- Stocks - Cant send it. More shares can be created by the board of directors.
Crypto is made to do one thing - store value, and do it well.
Does it really do it well when your "investment" can fluctuate between $5000 to $40K?
Anyway... despite the theoretical limitations of cash, hard currencies in practice have proven much, much more stable than Bitcoin. There hasn’t been hyperinflation in any of the major hard currencies (USD, CNY, GBP, EUR/D-Mark, CHF) since the invention of the fiat system.
You can argue that cash can be manipulated and is therefore a worse store of value than Bitcoin but it simply isn’t backed up by concrete evidence in reality
Still, overall damage seems far lower than risks of mistakes, hacks, crashed and scams overrunning crypto. Maybe it is not true for super experts, but for average person loses on inflation will be far lower than overall damage from various dangers present in BTC and other.
Especially given that you can sell it for something used locally and send that? (there is no need to store value and send something using the same method).
Is this a serious claim? The last one and a half months have seen extraordinary speculation in cryptocurrency markets, even by the standards of cryptocurrencies. Lots of wealth is being produced; relatively little is being stored.
Something being a desirable investment vehicle usually makes it an undesirable store of value: a store of value should be stable and predictable, not subject to significant changes in any direction.
> Which means easy to store, and highly resistant to manipulation and inflation.
These are, again, negative qualities in a store of value. A good store of value is inflates and deflates exactly as much as required to retain its backing value. Inflation means loss of value; deflation represents a liquidity risk when exiting the asset.
More generally, this is an indictment of the cryptocurrency community's basic financial literacy. You can't just call a speculative instrument a "store of value" because every who bought into it in the past two months has seen a positive return; that's just not what it is.
> Huge investment firms diversifying into crypto
> this is an indictment of the cryptocurrency community's basic financial literacy
I suggest that maybe it's you who lacks basic financial (and econ) literacy, not investment firms or the "cryptocurrency community"
> You can't just call a speculative instrument a "store of value" because every who bought into it in the past two months has seen a positive return
No, everyone who bought BTC at _any point in the past_ and didn't sell are seeing positive returns. This is the definition of a good store of value. You are conflating SoV properties with volatility. They are orthogonal. SoV is a long-term play.
No, it isn't. Apart from the fact that countless people have lost their shirts to BTC (it's down 6% today! There are losers today!), an asset whose value rises in unchecked proportion to the real economy represents a fundamental liquidity risk: everybody is going to want to sell, but nobody is going to want to buy.
That is why cash is the canonical store of value: not only does it not change (much), but you can exchange it without undermining the value itself.
BTC's liquidity has been increasing and will continue to increase in the future, so it's just a matter of time.
And you are again conflating SoV with volatility. Todays cash (USD) is not volatile but it's a terrible SoV. That's why no one is storing their wealth in USD and flee to harder assets (stocks, bonds, gold, and BTC).
Highly recommend this video for how investment firms think about BTC and SoV and how you should too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlXqfibqb38
Sure, if you want to trust an exchange. But try setting up and running Bitcoin Armory and see how 'easy' that is
> exactly because it is a good store of value
I wouldn't consider highly volatile currencies a "good store of value".
> and highly resistant to manipulation and inflation.
Far from it. An exchange goes tits-up and BTC plummets, and then everyone else follows. It's super susceptible to coordinated pump and dump schemes. Holding any crypto can get you red-flagged by the IRS, and if you don't admit to it most legit exchanges will rat you out. (Better for non-Americans, I guess...)
One of my favorite things to do every now and then is pull up CMC and see just how many coins' performance is a fraction of BTC's. Its funny because at BTC's most volatile times nearly the entire chart is red or green.
Personal pet peeve -- "a lot" is not synonymous with "exponentially." Crypto's market cap is decidedly sublinear on a logarithmic chart.
> exactly because it is a good store of value
If I pre-mine a trillion units of a cryptocurrency and sell one to my dog for $1 then it has a trillion dollar market cap. Whether or not it's a good store of value is a separate claim which needs independent proof.
> easy to store
So long as you never make any mistakes. Mt. Gox did a decent job at storing crypto for awhile ;)
> highly resistant to manipulation
So long as we pretend that Elon's tweets didn't impact dogecoin by >50% and that more broadly a form of word-of-mouth popularity doesn't affect the general public's chance of investing in crypto.
Funny how all of those things are not supply constrained, so they seem to be at a disadvantage from the start. But we'll see.
You're literally supporting the argument of the person you're replying to without even realizing it.
Disproportionately high returns indicates a highly volatile asset, and it's just as likely to go the other way, resulting in staggering losses.
These are not markers of a good, long-term storage asset class.
Would you want to be paid in a currency that regularly changes value 5-10% day to day?
The idea behind gold, silver, property, etc as value stores is that they remain valuable regardless of what the currency does. If your value store is the currency itself you might as well just hold the currency.
Someone had better remove the vast majority of the world GDP which is in financial markets.
You can't just throw out grand concepts and wish for magic now; there needs to be a lot more reflection on the technologies people introduce. Are they sustainable, in that they can maintain their original purpose? Do they increase the attack surface of people, groups and societies greater than the benefit? Do they require skill and vigilance beyond the average person to use safely?
I don't think optimism and "it will all work out" is a rational position any more.
Possibility of cryptocurrency: becoming "fuck you" rich in a year without doing any work.
Yeah, you have a point; crypto does have amazing potential.
Possibility of crypto: getting free overnight air shipping on 50-pund bags of weed
That's how most SF tech startups appear to the average blue-collar person.
It's all about perspective.