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Comment by dnautics | Hacker News Reader

Maybe. I'm just an armchair economist. I don't have quantitative evidence, but you can imagine that the overall degree of leveraging can affect the local-in-time price dynamics and push them into a phase change from a flash crash regime to a `bigger problems` regime. The saving grace to date has been that Bitcoin is a fundamentally financialization-resistant technology, but it still lives in and interacts with the real world, which is financialized. That has crept in. Things feel different this time (and there is good reason to believe it could be so), is all I'm saying.

When in the past the cute phrase was, "I knew when to pull out because my shoeshine boy was giving me advice" maybe now it's, "I knew when to pull out because George Soros is in" (as an indicator of leverage participation)

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I'm qualitatively in agreement -- I had day-traded bitcoin many years ago and sold off my last small holdings over the weekend.

I had a forcing function that made the sale timely, but $62k/BTC was close-enough to my ~$100k/BTC target that it seemed silly to try to squeak out the remaining ~50% gain given the downside risk. It is strange no longer holding any cryptocurrency, but it is harder to see the future of crypto, as an investment, now than it was back at $30.

Blockchains are here to stay and the underlying technology is proven, but as a fraction of M1, it is harder to know where the prices might go and which crypto will emerge as the ultimate winner. Alternatively, if crypto is to go through a "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win" experience, I believe we're just beginning the "then they fight you" stage, which may be challenging for investors.

Over all of this is my feeling that, looking with a logarithmic perspective (the only way one should view Bitcoin), there is now a lot more distance for prices, especially of any one currency, to fall than there is for prices to rise. I asked myself the perpetual question, "If markets were to close for the next five years, would I be happier holding BTC or USD at the present price?" The answer was no longer emphatically BTC.

Should disclose my broader views: I would not be surprised if we saw BTC 100k, soon. I am more optimistic now than I ever was that there is an endgame where BTC (or something) is some sort of international reserve currency, but I still think the likelihood is low. I am hoping for an economic system that stops stealing from the poor to give to the rich (I think taxation is about as effective way to redistribute wealth as a band-aid is to stop the bleed of a severe hemmhorage), and Bitcoin could have been (and may still be, with low likelihood) that. Generally pessimistic on "Blockchain tech" that isn't a cryptocurrency, unless a private postgres table with a progressively hashed column is a "Blockchain".

Congrats on getting out in the money. I am not far behind you, let's see if I wind up okay or wind up pulling a Newton

I'm pretty agreed on the latter point -- I do expect that we'll see real regulatory pushback, especially in the US, if the dollar's status as a reserve-currency is ever in question.

Bitcoin just creates a new class of rich people. It's still the using same mechanisms but it is happening faster. Asset has no holding fee and gets more expensive? People speculate with it at the expense of those who will have to acquire it later (the poor).

I'm not arguing to abolish rich people, I'm just saying we should stop stealing from the poor.

In what way are you saying we steal from the poor? How does bitcoin steal less?

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2010/08/26/129451895/how-...

the fed creates 1.25 trillion and makes the assets that the poor seeks more expensive than it would have been if their price were allowed to fall. This is not nominally stealing from the poor, but it's activity like this that steals the value from the earnings of the poor, and steals their economic potential. It's stealing because it's not a voluntary contract and it's a one-sided power move, not a "natural consequence of the universe", like "inflation resulting from an earthquake" would be.

In this case, I am, of course, arguing against my interest, since this activity is propping up the price of the house I bought this year. But the fed does a whole lot of damage otherwise, mostly by printing money and giving it to the banks.

I'm of the same opinion on the inflated assets, somehow the USG (or the Fed?) figured out a way to inject tons of borrowed and printed liquidity into the markets without hyper-inflating the CPI, but inflating assets like equity, real estate, crypto, etc etc some of which (like real estate) can hurt real people - especially the ones whose wage went from $15 to $15 in the last 10+ years.

However, this does not seem like some unforeseen accident or an unfortunate side effect of fiat money, it seems to be a deliberate policy that will not quietly go away if Bitcoin becomes more fashionable. In addition to outright bans (like the ban on gold from '30s to 70s), there are tons of more subtle ways to either suffocate daily Bitcoin adoption if it becomes a threat, or find ways to control it such as KYC, tax reporting, etc at the main exchanges. Also, even if Bitcoin does replace fiat as the medium, the lending regulation will still remain - to lend money to you, anyone needs to first know who you are, calculate your risk, and charge you an APR for that risk, and that will probably remain regulated no matter what is used to move the actual transactions.

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