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Comment by rawtxapp | Hacker News Reader

A lot of the early adopters have either permanently lost their coins or sold it local maximums, very few people would have hold on to it that long. And you can argue that if they had that kind of strong belief, they should receive some rewards for it.

It's like saying by the time a company IPOs, early VCs have benefited the most, while that is true, you could also argue they deserve it because of the risk they took.

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> A lot of the early adopters have either permanently lost their coins or sold it

If the balance of a Bitcoin economy relies on the assumption that certain people have lost their money, something is seriously wrong.

Regardless, a hypothetical Bitcoin economy would require much further buy-in from here, making current holders the early adopters.

> It's like saying by the time a company IPOs, early VCs have benefited the most, while that is true, you could also argue they deserve it because of the risk they took.

The VC analogy isn’t good at all. VCs invest to fund the creation of something. What did early Bitcoin investors fund? More mining and more hype?

From another angle: Imagine if PayPal created a new payment system that used shares of PayPal as the currency. Anyone who wants to use the tool must buy some shares of PayPal, because that’s the currency. And oh by the way, most of those shares are owned by PayPal founders and early adopters, who will gladly sell them at a massive gain.

Is Bitcoin supposed to be a speculative investment? Or a stable currency for a new economy? We can’t just pick and choose from either definition as convenient for the argument.

It was considered worthless at the time so many weren't careful with it. People are going to be a lot more careful when their coins are priced at 44k+.

Doesn’t matter. Most of the coins have already been mined. New entrants must buy from old entrants.

Old entrants that may have bought it because they believed in it pushing it to mainstream.

How do you feel about the government that's about to print 1.9 trillion dollars, therefore devaluing your money?

Bitcoiners bring up inflation as if our only two options for investment are cash under the mattress or buying Bitcoin.

I keep my investments in companies and assets like most other investors. The economic stimulus might devalue the <1% of USD cash I keep around for transactions, but my actual investments will likely benefit from the stimulus. As a bonus, I get to operate in an economy that has been buffered against the effects of COVID.

It’s amazing that Bitcoin proponents only ever want to talk about the USD (or other local currency) value of their Bitcoin, yet they want us to ignore the fact that Bitcoin isn’t the only option for investing cash.

There is no alternative for the monetization of an asset. Gold was the same. Some people believed in it, many didn't, and as it monetized over time those that believed in it early benefited most.

The same is the case with anything valuable that might become money, including the USD, if you consider that it was originally distributed in a manner that was pegged to gold and that gold was monetized in the same way as described above. The idea that you could materialize a money in any other way is unsupported by history.

Gold did not emit half of all supply in the first 4 years. Bitcoin's emission is nothing like Gold's.

>while that is true, you could also argue they deserve it because of the risk they took.

they didn't take any risk though, they just "mined bitcoins", which were more abundant then.

Well if the price increased at 1$, and you didn't sell any, you risked it going back to 0$. From that perspective, there's a risk holding on to it.

Investments are made to fund value creation.

What value did they create?

If the underpinnings of an economy accrue value purely to speculators while devaluing (in BTC-relative terms) actual assets and value creation, it has a major incentive problem.

What’s the one and only thing Bitcoiners want you to do with Bitcoin? Buy. That’s it. Any other use, including spending, is actively discouraged.

The value they created is a currency that's not controlled by a select few people.

1) Not a currency, 2) Debateable that it's value at all, and 3) "controlled by a select few people" is a remarkably paranoid/conspiracy way to frame that central banking is a necessary function of government.

1) I can use it to transfer monetary value, which is good enough for me, 2) the market puts it's current value at 45k$, 3) doesn't change the fact that central planning has created a very fragile economy.

Transferring monetary value at only 7 tps, while burning resources like a forest fire.

Visa is not worried.

@sideburns, Visa is not worried because they are going to start offering crypto payments.

That is not a "risk" in the sense of adverse outcomes. Anyone can throw bitcoins in a wallet and forget about them for 10 years. There is no risk of adverse outcome involved in doing so, and people should not be rewarded it.

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