Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by BEEdwards | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

BEEdwards

called it worthless.

https://www.news.com.au/finance/money/investing/warren-buffe...

View on HN

He and munger have been saying that almost every year now.

Don't they often say it about gold, too?

Yes, their point is that if you buy a cashflow negative asset you are now stuck having to figure out how to sell that asset to the next person. If you buy a cashflow positive asset the opposite situation happens. You don't have to convince anyone of anything.

This is why I hold Bitcoin. I expect it to be widely desirable someday, and will gain much value in the meantime. This is the nature of money itself.

I hold beanie babies because I expect them to be widely desirable again someday. This is the nature of collectibles.

Yes, money is a form of collectible. I don't think this is the criticism you believe it is.

I don't think value exists in the way you believe it does.

Value is always, and in all cases, subjective. So what makes Bitcoin users subjectively value Bitcoin? Because it's truly decentralized. Its decentralization is what makes it scarce, neutral and uncensorable. There are no insiders, founders or companies to attack. It's also digital, so it can be transferred at the speed of light.

This decentralization made early users speculate that it could be worth something for its unique properties. That jumpstarts the network effect. More people using it means even more people will start to value it. This is a positive feedback loop.

The incentives are obvious. The feedback loop will continue toward global adoption. But you seem very skeptical, so tell me, what is going to break this feedback loop? What is going to kill Bitcoin?

Nothing will kill Bitcoin, just like nothing killed beanie babies. They both will exist for a long time.

But the world is finite, there is a limited number of people who have a limited amount of money with to speculate. Maybe the Bitcoin pumpers will convince some of that money to move away from other speculative investments and into Bitcoin and the price will go up, but there is a limit that will be hit eventually, then you have to deal with the reality of a negative cashflow asset.

Are you ignoring scarcity? Beanie Babies can be made and remade, and fixed, and resold, and counterfeit, etc. There’s no law that prevents the manufacturers from just pumping out millions of beanie babies.

Bitcoin on the other hand is a finite resource. It stops at 21 million. It can never go higher than that. New shitcoins are birthed everyday, but they are not Bitcoin.

There is no law that prevents 51% of the node operators from forking the Bitcoin code. Even if there was, scarcity isn't the same thing as value. My kids art work is incredibly scarce compared to Bitcoin. I can copyright it so that no one can copy the only original that I own. But that doesn't mean it is going to go up in value.

You are not informed. Forking is not the issue. There have been forks before. Rewriting the chain history (which is extremely difficult by the way) is the issue.

like equities? from a macro level, dividends on the s&p500 is like 1.3%, so the difference between productive and nonproductive assets isn't very high, not nearly as high as it once was. munger and buffet come from an era when dividends were still 4.5% or higher. those days are over, with the sky high valuations we have now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com