Hacker News Reader

Comment by hanniabu | Hacker News Reader

I love how people will always find a reason to remain cognitively dissonant. At first it was just people doing illicit activity, then it was only a tulip bubble, then it's just that retail investors are playing the greater fool. Not that there's financial professionals advocating for it you say that they just want your business. At what point do you consider you may be wrong? What will you say when banks start holding Bitcoin reserves? What will you say when countries are holding Bitcoin reserves? Serious question, because with the way people on HN are acting, it seems like your heads will remain in the sand for eternity.

View on HN

Bernie Madoff ran a ponzi scheme for 30 years and had the entire financial industry and regulators like the SEC fooled the entire time.

The temporary fad of personal computing still seems to linger around, though.

Usually, when someone makes a wrong prediction, it doesn't have huge consequences. But if you knew about Bitcoin early on and didn't research or understand it and wrote it off, your opportunity costs are pretty significant.

It doesn't matter how many use cases or rationales people give, they are still going to be stuck on the negatives. You'd expect HN to understand that everything has tradeoffs, both pros and cons. Is Bitcoin perfect? No! It needs to improve costs and speed through L2, it needs to find ways to reduce energy consumption and use green energy as much as possible, we need to make sure that the money flowing in things like Tether is legitimate. There's still lots of work to be done and it's still just 12 years into it's existence, so you expect price volatility and lots of hype as people are learning and investing into it.

This isn't a case of who's right or wrong. The success of Bitcoin is entirely based on belief, which doesn't have a right or wrong answer, particularly this early in its history.

Bitcoin is successful if enough people agree to believe that it is valuable. And that's the period we're still in now: trying to determine if this thing is valuable and by how much (hence the price volatility).

I mean, that's a poor man's excuse because you can say that about anything. USD is only worth something because enough people believe it is, same with gold, same about anything worth value.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com