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Comment by rawtxapp | Hacker News Reader

Then you would expect people in the EU to not be interested in crypto, yet it's the opposite. You can pull up search volume for "Bitcoin" across the world (using Google Trends), many European nations are at the top.

As a matter of fact, their search volume is higher than US.

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The difference is that those people can honestly see and use crypto as speculative assets, which is fine (if we ignore externalities for a second), not making up use cases.

Once you accept that the future is unknown, you'll see that every asset is a speculative asset, no?

For the longest time, real estate was assumed to be 100% safe until 2008, etc.

Yes but real assets have a lower chance of their value completely evaporating in an instant.

You can also use some of them, like live in a house asset.

Just because the future is uncertain doesn't mean you can't do research to make a reasonable forecast. Typically speculation is specifically buying/selling without any reasoning other than 'I think someone will pay higher for this in the future'.

Many assets don't even have to appreciate. A car is an asset if I have paid it off. I don't expect someone to pay me more than I paid for it unless it is a collectible or I live in the year 2021.

On your last sentence, I don't know who thought real estate was 100%, because nothing is 100% safe as a store of value, but I guess they paid for it in the end.

Then I can say that I've done my research and I think it's reasonable that USD won't remain global reserve currency forever and that it's replacement won't be a governmental currency, but a decentralized one and Bitcoin would be the only reasonable candidate.

Does this mean that I'm not speculating all of a sudden because I've done research and came up with a reasonable forecast?

People won't invest in a reserve currency, they will use it for trade. Anything people are buying and holding is by definition not a reserve currency. You are describing "treasure".

I mean people buy USD through forex markets all the time, the same way that people buy Bitcoin through crypto exchanges. Also, it won't become reserve currency overnight, it's a gradual process and until it happens it acts as a store of value with a huge upside.

Yes, I would say you are not speculating because speculating is simply buying/selling and hoping to profit.

Whether or not your forecast is reasonable or even useful is not within my sphere of knowledge. I can also almost certainly say that the USD wont be the global reserve currency forever, but making decisions based on a forever timeline poses a wide range of risks.

The difference between investment and speculation is pretty established, isn't it? For example https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/09/difference-betwe...

Except that investing in Bitcoin has shown the exact opposite of high probability of failure, yet people still claim speculation.

According to that definition, I am investing in cryptocurrencies.

I often wonder how large a portion of all crypto holders are just FOMO-ing into a speculative asset because the number keeps going up, with no loyalty to the concept of cryptocurrency or its use cases.

> easy electronic transfers within 5 seconds for no charge

This is certainly not the case everywhere in the EU. In Germany for example it usually takes days. Not sure about other countries.

By law it must take at most a single day intra-country, and instant wire transfers are pretty common (though sometimes not free).

In Germany there's SOFORT, it takes litterally the time to click through the interface to transfer money.

I can get money from Germany to Colombia in under a minute via n26 and transferwise. Maybe we're not talking about the same country.

Also amounts > 20000 in a weekend? How much fees do you pay on that?

I've actually never woken up on a Saturday morning and thought shit, I could really use 20000 EUR right now, so I couldn't tell you what the limits are. I've never hit them.

Fees however, are around 1EUR

Maybe on a Friday evening?

Anyway, still seems inferior to nano.

Well sure, I can send money around using third-party services, but the official banking system is not that fast.

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