Bitcoin hits $1T in market value
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
Cryptocurrency proponents are trying to get ahead of this by reframing Bitcoin as the people's currency, or an opportunity for average people to get rich while sticking it to evil governments. It's interesting to watch people with $1000 of Bitcoin in their Robinhood accounts feel like they're on the winning end of this deal when they see their $1000 investment go to $1300 in the span of a week.
So much of the investment frenzy is driven by "what if" scenarios where Bitcoin takes over the world and that $1000 investment eventually makes early adopters millionaires in the new Bitcoin world order. The problem with that hypothetical endgame is that reallocating the world's wealth according to how early someone went all-in on a cryptocurrency gamble (and how much capital they had to invest at the time) would create inequality at unimaginable scale, not to mention completely disconnecting wealth from societal value creation. Our current market-based system isn't perfect, but a hypothetical Bitcoin economy would be downright absurd. If we end up with a crypto economy, it won't be underpinned by a currency where people switched over at values ranging from $0.01 to $1,000,000 per coin.
Yes. So what? I don't think the typical Bitcoin proponent is the kind of person to get outraged at Pareto distributions. They are against governments, they don't hate wealthy people just for being wealthy.
> The problem with that hypothetical endgame is that reallocating the world's wealth according to how early someone went all-in on a cryptocurrency gamble (and how much capital they had to invest at the time) would create inequality at unimaginable scale, not to mention completely disconnecting wealth from societal value creation.
How is that different from having invested in Amazon, Google or Apple in the early 00's?
Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies) does bring value to our society as a store of wealth that's not easy for governments to control.
The problem here is equality. People invented and see bitcoin as a "store value" because they want to protect themselves from the inequality being forced upon them from governments printing fiat. As so, your idea that people:
>don't get outraged at Pareto distributions
is in contradiction to
>Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies) does bring value to our society as a store of wealth
After all, if people weren't outraged at Pareto distributions why would it matter to them to store their wealth?
To reiterate, the greater point being made is that bitcoin ultimately won't solve anything regarding inequality. Adopting bitcoin isn't going against the man, it's just shifting who the man is from being "the government/FED" to "crypto exchanges/peddlers/other earlier hoarding crypto entities". With time people will come to hate such authorities just as they've come to hate the government. I mean just look at how people hate on mature big corps like Google these days, when many gave it fonder thoughts during it's earlier days... Bitcoin will be no different.
My personal take on this is that it's a temporary state of affairs. You might draw an analogy to the wild west of the Internet in the past, or e-mail. As Bitcoin goes mainstream, if it does, you will see familiar institutions built on it including fractional reserve banking that honor all the comfortable consumer things if you remain within their system.
It's funny how people keep saying this as if it's true. 99% of the market isn't buying crypto to "store value". This along with the idea that somehow it's a great currency bcs "no gov't" etc. is also a lie no one believes. Most of the market isn't actually making real-world transactions or storing value but somehow other people will start doing it in the future for some reason so gainz etc.
Right from birth, one person is destined to be poor while the other destined to be a millionaire.
Also please note most millionaires in the world are self made, with over 80%. Of the other 20% most made it to millionaire status before receiving an inheritance. Also note the people you most worry about, the ones who get money young, usually plow through it and leave nothing for their children.
Unless someone was born into poverty and fought their way out, I don't count them as self made. No doubt these people exist, but it would never be 80%.
There's also a stronger social safety net in many countries that are poorer than the US, where you certainly don't have to worry about not getting to college (if you have good enough grades) due to family income.
Binary categories such as "self-made" vs "not-self made" fit poorly in the real world and suffer due to each individual having a different threshold of self-madeness. For some people it means not having directly inherited a lump sum, for others it means having made every single cent without outside help.
But the key thing is if he'd failed, he had a cushion to fall back on. Had Microsoft gone the same way as many other computer companies, he could be confident he wouldn't end up on the streets.
You cannot just state one thing from the side of later comer, and later switch to the side of early comer. That way you are saying 2 things...
The first was recognizing that that inheritance mostly came from the labors of someone and they have a right to do with their money as they see fit. The second is acknowledging that the person who didn't work for their wealth usually squanders it so don't waste time being jealous of them.
So focus on being the person who creates wealth for themselves and try to educate your children so they will have good money habits later on in life and will squander less of what you leave them.
I'd be more sympathetic to inheritance if the primary source of taxation was wealth.
You have no evidence for this claim, it's just a profusely fantastic image that cleaves to your political bias.
I understand why you'd want that, fairness is a strong human instinct, but I don't see where it has any bearing on the likelihood of this future occurring.
People don't enjoy having a high number in their accounting system, they enjoy being wealthy. If, say, African central banks start purchasing BTC, and India joins them, early adopters will cash out at whatever value makes them feel like they got their money's worth. Some people will only trade for real property. Some are in a position to hodl until they can buy a whole cruise ship or whatever.
Or they could lose it all when BTC crashes to the natural value of any completely hypothetical asset, which is zero. This still seems more likely to me than central banks taking up a position in BTC, but sadly, I lack the ability to predict the future.
Is it really that different from buying the first iPod, and thinking to yourself, "y'know this is a brand new Apple, I'm putting a few thousand bucks into their stock"?
It'll be interesting who's left "holding the bag" once its the end of the MLM-ponzi scheme of who you can convince to buy into it - save regulatory capture somehow forcing the rest of society to buy into it.
That's what happens, some little scheme gets too big to fail, so the taxpayer bails it out. Those that are in the schemes win, those that felt the scheme was stupid lose.
I remember seeing adverts on the London underground for icelandic banks offer 5% more than any other savings account. I chuckled and thought "surely nobody's that gullible".
There were many. Both individuals, who got bailed out by me (the taxpayer), and many councils (who lost money which belonged to the taxpayer)
For 20 years I laughed at these various get quick schemes. Then I realised that they don't fail. Profits are privitised, losses are socialised, and they taxpayer always loses.
When you realise that, you have to look at dodgy schemes in a whole separate light. Sure bitcoin is stupid, but as it gets larger and larger the chance of it failing without bailing out large institutions reduces, meaning the chance of me riding on the coattails increases.
Yes, the former is just straight up gambling, the latter is investing in a company that makes good products.
40% of the US can't afford a 400$ emergency. Someone who had arguably more than that has improved their position from hodling... by 400x.
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/US/10-americans-struggle-cover-400-em...
What you are left with now is all the people who bought the bitcoin after it had already been pumped and dumped, and they aren't willing to sell it for less than they bought it for.
This means that the perceived value of the asset is now based on the notions held by millions of people who are holding and don't want to sell.
You haven’t seen something in the process of overtaking the market cap of gold—approximately $10 trillion.
The first trillion takes the longest; the next trillion will probably happen in far less time.
I doubt the guy who sold the 5000 btc pizzas still have them.
It's massively deflationary, which is a terrible thing for a currency.
https://mobile.twitter.com/GregSchoen/status/702616488117616...
Who lamented making $400 instead of $13k back in 2011. Those coins would today be worth about $95m, but there's no way he'd have kept them -- same as the buy who bought the pizzas (or the guy who sold them)
This guy was bored of $14/coin, it wasn't moving
https://twitter.com/rockerest/status/91885405368098816?lang=...
So he took the loss (in July 2011 they were at a peak, jumping from 77 cents to $15 in 3 months)
Had someone found an old laptop with the coins, they'd have been looking for it in the 2017 craze (ala Big Bang Theory) and sold then.
Bitcoin is currently 3 times the peak in December 2017.
Where else can the average person make 6x's their money. And, it has already made plenty of average people. Millionaires.
Same thing with stocks. It kills me to hear of people talk about how they "lost money" when a stock they own comes down from a temporary high price. No, you only lost money relative to your hypothetical self who sold at the top of the stock's price.
Go to Vegas, bet on red three times.
Or, if you don't want to get on a plane during a pandemic, trade on margin.
I don't know anyone that prices anything in just BTC (it's all BTC converted from USD or whatever, because anything else would be madness) - and I don't know anyone that doesn't peg their bitcoin to what they'd get if they sold it for "real money".
Which makes me think any endgame isn't going to be the utopian, governmentless, money-freedom future I keep hearing promised.
Please find a contemporary (don't look to someone selling alpaca wool socks in 2010 and 2011), stable priced product line in BTC. Anything that I can be confident I will pay +/- 5% of the same BTC for over a 3 month period (I'm deliberately selecting a short period, most currencies are stable for 12+ months at a time when used to price goods and services).
As I understand it at some point there will be no new bitcoin left to mine, and it will just be available as a store-of-value currency -- if I have the concept correct. And the early adopters will be financially rewarded for helping to get it off the ground as they spend their BTC away into circulation.
It's all fun and games until you don't pay taxes, or you try to pay taxes using currency not recognized by the government.
Well, you see, you actually can pay taxes with Euros. In Europe. The USA isn't the only country in the world.
Let's say you are Swiss and are trying to buy something from Amazon and everything is priced in Euro - you also have to convert all the prices in your head. Is the Swiss Franc not a real currency anymore?
You forget to mention that a lot of early adopters are actual criminals. Yeah, go make them the rulers of the world. Let's see how this ends.
How is a cryptocurrency with this type of wealth inequality supposed to help the common person?
It's already centralized, thus easy to manipulate. Bitcoin is reproducing the same type of wealth distribution we see in real life. What exactly does btc offer?
I don't understand how one can look at this distribution of bitcoins, where essentially the 1% owns most of it and people conclude that somehow this is different? That this in your favor as a newcomer? To me this looks like if you buy in now, you're going to become a bagholder for the 1%.
[1] https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses....
There are tons of valid criticisms of Bitcoin but this one doesn't amount to much.
As a currency, which is what you mentioned, btc is awful. It's deflationary so nobody wants to spend it, it's volatile so you can get fucked in a transaction by the time it settles, and if you do spend it you have to pay a transaction fee. And where's the upside from all this pain? Nothing, cash is good enough.
If it's a store of value or a stock, then you should be absolutely worried about how it's distributed. Because based on that, it looks a lot like a ponzi scheme to me.
I don't follow this logic.
A ponzi scheme requires new entrants to pay out the previous ones at a higher rate so as to generate promised returns.
I'd expect this to spread out bitcoin ownership as previous whales ducked out while leaving the new entrants to holding the bag.
A high level of BTC concentration, then, would seem to be a counter-argument to the claim it's a ponzi.
What am I missing?
(BTW, I also think the basic analysis is incorrect--a large reason why BTC is concentrated in a small number of addresses is because most people don't hold their own BTC, but rather allow an exchange to hold it for them)
That would be the best it can hope for. But it's very far from that. Just consider that one person (Satoshi) holds ~10% of all bitcoin. Or 2 other people (Winklevii) holding a few %.
The poor distribution is amplified by bitcoin being deflationary and emitting half in just the first 4 years (3/4 in the first 8, etc). A coin with a pure linear emission would at least keep eroding any wealth inequalities.
The thing you can choose is who is doing the capital allocation: Satoshi / Winklewoss brothers / Chamath / Elon Musk / Michael Saylor, or Trump / Biden / Putin / Christine Lagarde.
If you like Biden and Jerome Powell, keep your money in USD. If you like Putin, buy RUB. If you prefer the libertarian crowd, buy Bitcoin. If none of this is good there are socialist cryptocurrencies as well for you to choose from or you can create your own.
That seems like a weird assumption to start at.
A lot of the propaganda I remember about bitcoin is that it was going to help bank the unbanked. What I see about btc is that people will tell you anything to get you to buy. The goalposts get moved and depending on who you talk to: "it's a store of value, no it's like a stock! No it's a currency! No it's the instrument of world peace!"
Every time I go through comment sections it's like a magic 8 ball is coming up with the arguments in its favor.
All I see is that data above, about how heavily centralized bitcoin is. What's the reason to buy into something that's heavily weighed against you?
Fiat currency is the same way. Rather than point a giant network of contracts together in order to create some monster transaction that satisfies a few hundred people evenly, we just agree to respect the unique-but-valueless papers produced by the crazy guy who will imprison anybody who tries to produce those same papers. It didn't have to be these papers; it didn't have to be bitcoin. It just had to be something that had the necessary properties: unique, scarce, lightweight, secure, and, most importantly, used by as many other people as possible.
Why do we give USD value? Because most the population trusts the US government to keep the value of USD stable and we know it is widely used and accepted.
What has happened recently? Most fiat currency supplies have ballooned tremendously. This has undermined the collective view of the storing value over time argument. Bitcoin adoption has increased, which means more and more people recognize it as money and that it has value. Also since the supply is capped, it becomes more apparent that it will be a better store of value than USD.
If you have excess USD, why would you not want at least some exposure to bitcoin over USD?
What's bitcoin backed by?
If 10x the number of people start getting involved and transaction volume increases 10x as a result, will the network use 10x the energy?
But only if it's profitable to miners coming in. Ultimately mining pressures miners into finding cheap sources of electricity. Yes, many just take advantage of subsidies (governmental or environmental) to lower their costs, but as mining difficulty and competition increases inefficient are kicked out.
"Fortunately", most transactions aren't on the chain and are done in exchanges by good old RDBMS-column-of-numbers technology.
Is it Robinhood adding crypto?
Musk tweeted about it on Feb 8th which pushed it up, and then news stories of it hitting 50k, and now 1T, keeps the money coming in.
Stocks are massively overvalued, wouldn't surprise me if people are diversifying too.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-worlds-10-largest-stock...