Hacker News is still trying to grasp Bitcoin so I feel like Ethereum is going to take another few years to even begin productive discussions.
There are a lot of people on HN who love and support crypto but the arguments are exhausting and you get nothing but downvotes. All of my friends and family I convinced to buy and hold have been texting me how I changed their lives. It’s just so sad to see what this website did to engineers who normally have open minds but were convinced to hate crypto.
But if you are only afraid that the price can fall 90%, then who cares? Let it fall, there is too much hype anyway, to the point it has created great division between coiners and no-coiners. For example, the 2001 stock market crash, it cleared out projects based on fluff and the rest continued to build. I would reckon we would see a similar dynamic now, but probably with faster market cycles.
If it's the latter, it's a self-reinforcing cycle: The price goes up because people buy. People buy because the price goes up.
So what happens when the popular narrative switches? What happens when the price goes down for years at a time and people watch their money dwindle? Will people wait around for the price to skyrocket again? Or will they see their friends getting rich in altcoins or meme stocks or NFT trading cards and sell their BTC to get in on the next hot trend?
So what drives the increase in price? Many reasons. Because it's going up? Sure, that's accounts for some. It's a store of value against a government that printed 22% of all dollars ever created last year? Yeah. In a world that seems increasingly chaotic and unpredictable in places that always seemed stable it is attractive because it's a global store of value that can be tapped if you ever have to flee? Sure.
I think these are just a few reasons why it's going up in value. It's quite scarce and everyone knows the rules and no one controls it. Not a government, a corporation, or a person. So yeah, it can and probably will take hits but I think in the long run it's just a thing that makes a lot of sense to more and more people as part of a well diversified portfolio.
What asset isn't a store of value? Inflation, by definition, is when the price of something inflates. Bitcoin's price is inflating in dollar terms. Someone invested in stocks and real estate is protected from US dollar inflation.
The idea that Bitcoin is the only way to protect against inflation, or even that it's a good way to protect against inflation, is largely a narrative pressed by people who want you to buy more Bitcoin. That is, they want you to inflate Bitcoin via demand-pull inflation. Ironic, isn't it?
> is attractive because it's a global store of value that can be tapped if you ever have to flee?
You really think all those people buying and holding Bitcoin in their Coinbase and Robinhood accounts are doing so because they might flee the country?
Again, the narrative that Bitcoin is a mechanism for fleeing oppressive governments is largely a myth. If someone wanted to get their money out of a country, they don't need to invest in Bitcoin long-term. They just need to transfer in, cross the border, and transfer out.
Let's be honest: Most people are speculating.
> It's quite scarce
It was literally invented out of thin air by programming. The maximum number is finite, but it's ironic to declare a resource scarce when there are thousands of altcoins online, and even multiple forks of Bitcoin.
> I think in the long run it's just a thing that makes a lot of sense to more and more people as part of a well diversified portfolio.
Price goes up because other people buy it because price goes up...
There’s so many good reasons BTC should be in your portfolio that I’d call it irresponsible to not own it at this point.
I do think there are some seriously sour grapes among those that thought they were too smart for it or something and they feel they’ve missed the train. But it’s real and it’s a revolution and people will end up owning BTC indirectly through ETF’s or other aggregate investments. I don’t really care though - maybe it’s just not for everyone.
Could be wrong but I haven’t been the last 8.5 years I’ve been invested as the vision and potential of it is so obvious to me. Of course if I had a dollar for every time I’ve read it’s a fad/tulips/useless/etc (I think the new one is it’s bad for the environment lol) I’d be doing just as well.
Speculators are the driving force which "correct" the price of overvalued or undervalued assets. More speculators mean that assets will reach their "fair price" more quickly. In this way speculators actually reduce volatility and make it harder to manipulate the market.
Keep in mind that speculators are not necessarily in long positions, they could also be shorting Bitcoin (which would be the logical thing to do if you believe there's a bubble).
The reason it's not popular is that the early narrative wasn't "too the moon!" The narrative was that Bitcoin was the currency of the future and that we'd all be using Bitcoin for transactions.
Anyone who actually used Bitcoin at the time could see how there was no chance of it taking off as a payment mechanism. That's still true today, especially with $8+ transaction fees.
The difference is that everyone dropped the pretense of actually using bitcoin and instead went all-in on the speculation narrative. People buy it because the price goes up, and the price goes up because people buy it.
Works great until a down cycle, when everyone rushes for the exits and tells themselves they'll buy back in at a lower price.
> All of my friends and family I convinced to buy and hold have been texting me how I changed their lives.
Changed their lives how? By revolutionizing the way they pay for things with cryptocurrency? Or by getting in on an investment that went up?
Be warned that the exact opposite happens when Bitcoin goes back down. Look back at Reddit posts during previous crashes for a reminder: Suicide hotline warnings, stories about people losing half of their retirement, and so on.
If the only redeeming quality of Bitcoin is that the price goes up as more people get in on it, it's hardly different than an MLM or pyramid scheme that relies on a constant influx of new money to keep the show going.
Bitcoin is stale, there's no development or innovation happening. It has become a store of value only. The only possible solution that could change that is the Lightning network or other Layer 2 protocols.
There are plenty of other coins however that are doing super exciting innovation. Bitcoin Cash and Nano are some examples. They're actually solving problems and moving the technology forward. And they're being adopted as payment methods as a result.
It makes me incredibly sad to see how many people (especially on HN) have no idea about that, and have adopted an anti-crypto stance like it's some ideological war, constantly citing the same old tired arguments.
Also, I have nothing to do with these awesome cool things, but thanks for giving me credit for them.
Overall though I think the best thing to do is follow the people that are actually getting things done or directly involved. For example Andreas Antonopoulos has been in the scene for a long time and speaks well at various depth from the tech to more abstracted views (https://aantonop.com/). However he's mostly involved in Bitcoin. On the Ethereum side there's a few different resources from Vitalik's blog (main cofounder) to the developer roundup notes, to straight up reading their forum and proposals.
If you're wondering more about the trading side then my personal favorites that don't waste your time or try to sell you stuff are Willy Woo (@woonomic), Plan B (@100trillionUSD), and Benjamin Cowen (Youtube). Will does chain analysis for bitcoin, Plan B develops macro price prediction models, and Cowen covers a handful of assets from a mathematical and risk-adjusted return perspective.
I've been following cryptocurrency since 2009/2010, and I've worked adjacent to the space at one point.
There are plenty of us who were enthusiastic about cryptocurrencies before the narrative moved away from distributed systems and turned into a pure financial play for everyone involved.
> There are plenty of other coins however that are doing super exciting innovation.
The real question is: Why must they be coins?
Why can't they simply develop blockchain technology that doesn't revolve around inventing an all-new currency?
The competition for innovation is fun. The competition for everyone to buy each cryptocurrency on exchanges and then pump it across social media is not.
I'll be excited again when we can stop inventing new currencies left and right and just skip straight to distributed systems for managing our existing cash. I don't want to have to invest in 20 different cryptocurrencies out of the 1000s on the market just to be able to interact with all of the different systems. I don't want to manage my payment methods like investments. And frankly, I don't think the average person cares about the underlying innovation because they just want to speculate.
To make it trustless, provide a proper incentive model, and for security.
> just skip straight to distributed systems for managing our existing cash
That doesn't work. Fiat is tied to nation states and are under direct influence by them. One example is how after Trump's term a lot of countries have been divesting away from having so much of their reserves tied to USD.
The other thing is removal of middlemen and having transparent and predictable inflation. You can't do that with fiat. There's central banks that will always be there. Even if you distribute the processing to remove Visa and the like, you will always have the central banks there.
You really had me where you mentioned exciting innovation. I thought you were going to go into Ethereum, the EVM, smart contracts, DeFi, etc. But then you mention BCH and Nano lol. While I guess you can say there's advancements there over Bitcoin, in the grand scheme of the ecosystem Ethereum is where all the actual innovation is happening.
Because they're enjoying life without private banks? Or because they've realised gains from the bubble? If you "understand Bitcoin" as you claim, you must realise the latter cannot go on forever.
So, as someone who doesn't know much about crypto aside from "it's bitcoin!", please tell me, what advantage do stablecoins/Ethereum provide that fixes the problems presented with bitcoin? I actually want to learn more.
I would be interested to know about the volatility specifically and also if these currencies are less susceptible to a 51% attack or a fork.
Using stablecoins allows you the advantages of the Ethereum network (interoperability with ethereum loan platforms and other smart contracts) without having to be concerned with the price of ETH.
Stablecoins have the same level of security as their underlying blockchain. To double-spend ethereum-based stablecoins you need to 51% attack Ethereum itself.
That being said, there's work being done to lower that and competing blockchains are coming up, that support the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) or at the very least supporting Solidity (which in turn compiles to EVM assembly).
There's a amazing fintech ecosystem being created in Ethereum, with decentralized exchanges, trustable oracles, DAOs, etc. It's definitely worth the look.