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Comment by rubatuga | Hacker News Reader

This has happened so many times, that it's not really news.

So Bitcoin is a shit currency because it constantly loses 75% of value?

I don’t understand Bitcoin proponents. They’re the biggest cheerleaders of the idea that Bitcoin is the worst possible Currency one could ever have.

Alternatively, if it’s constantly losing 75% of value, it’s also the worst possible store of value it can have.

So it’s neither a good digital dollar nor a good digital gold. According to Bitcoin proponents. So what is it actually good for? According to your own defensive statements?

I believe that it is good at advancing asic technology? not really sure of much else.

Bitcoin is good for immutiabity and irrocovibility. is this worth trillion? likely not but it's something. . this is why scammers like it so much even if it can be traced, because you cannot reverse it or seize it easily (if you don't make mistakes like exposing your seed/key).

Given a long enough time horizon, bitcoin is a great store of value. The returns are unbeaten in 5 year, 10 year and 13 year (that's how young bitcoin is) time horizons.

As for what it is good for - what else is a permission-less medium of exchange? Regardless of price, the fundamentals of bitcoin stands true.

Being young and having no track record does not inspire confidence.

He said on a board that's mostly about young people without track records coming up with new businesses and tech :)

Touché

> So what is it actually good for?

Among other useful properties, digital currency allows individuals to move their money across borders without anyone asking them where it came from, where it is going and taking a cut. Seems like a very useful thing to have in today's world, no? Seems like something that will become increasingly useful in the near future regardless of your particular jurisdiction...

Is it worth $60k USD or even $20k USD? I don't know. There has been a lot of speculation and hype in this space and with the relatively low liquidity it is not that surprising to see crazy spikes. But there is a fundamental value greater than 0 for Bitcoin, and you cannot dismiss that in good faith.

>Among other useful properties, digital currency allows individuals to move their money across borders without anyone asking them where it came from, where it is going and taking a cut.

A.K.A. Money laundering. Got it.

Or sometimes, your government just decides your money doesn't actually belong to you [1]. But sure, we can call it "money laundering", if it makes that boot taste better.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/russia-ukraine-latest-news-...

>we can call it "money laundering"

Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck...

With a permanent publicly readable record as well!

Government seizing your money because they don’t like the political purpose you used it for is stealing and authoritarianism.

Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck…

That is not money laundering.

Sure sounds like it qualifies in the US.

https://www.irs.gov/irm/part9/irm_09-005-005#idm139929132514...

""" transfers [...] a monetary instrument or funds from a place in the United States to or through a place outside the United States [...] to avoid a Federal or state transaction reporting requirement. """

I guess if you lived in Russia, Iran, Lebanon, Venezuela or Argentina you'd be licking gov boots all day right?

Unfortunately in order for it to be accessible for a person to actually use it, the exchange takes a cut anyway, unless they're running the exchange solely from the goodness of their heart. Which as a business, it isn't. So instead of paying the established middle man who supports eg Western Union, the cut goes to the Bitcoin exchange middleman instead.

Eg, the easiest way for a US person to buy Bitcoin is through Coinbase who will gladly charge you a fee, which is entirely justifiable because they're facilitating the transaction. Without them there's no transaction. So Coinbase takes their cut, same as everybody else in the system.

It’s worth what someone will pay for it, which at the moment seems to be in the 20k range.

Tomorrow? Who knows.

This is not even true. Not at all.

Because bitcoins don't exist as physical objects. They are fully virtual. So you need to make money virtual in order to buy them. So you need to connect to the banking system eventually. You can add middlemen, sure, but it's unavoidable.

And then you arrive to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31462909

So you cant trade labor or anything physical for bitcoin?

That's just the middlemen. Where does the bitcoin come from?

One could argue that fiat is fluctuating by 75% constantly :)

I agree, it needs to work as a currency. This is why Bitcoin Cash is the real Bitcoin. BTC was co-opted at the repo level and the block size was stifled. This is how Bitcoin should work: https://www.reddit.com/user/chaintip/

It's useful to dodge regulations.

Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing depends on the regulations and who passes them. Americans and Europeans are likely to have a very different perspective on this from, say, Russians.

> This has happened so many times, that it's not really news.

Did it, though?

Coindesk shows BTC right now trading at 18100$, way down from it's 2-month peak of 32k and year-peak of 66k.

This means that in less than a year BTC tanked to 27% of its peak year value, and it's tanking even further.

When was the last time you saw BTC lose 48k in value?

When I saw bitcoin tank from 1000 to 500, it's all a matter of scale.

I first got interested right around the Mt. Gox implosion, when it went something like 1200 -> 300.

> When was the last time you saw BTC lose 48k in value?

Not using proportions is pure sensationalist nonsense. >50% drawdowns have happened several times in Bitcoin. So tell us again how this time is different.

The absolute amount matters as well though. It's easy to imagine something that dropped from 1000 to 500 returning to 1000. That's a small rise in value, and if you believe the currency is really a currency you can imagine a "$1000 coin" being useful.

Its harder to imagine a currency or a stock that fall $30000 returning to $60000.

It might be the same percentage, but it's not the same in terms of psychology.

One milli-bitcoin was $60 a few months ago, now it’s $20, a mere $40 drop.

> Not using proportions is pure sensationalist nonsense.

Why did you chose to ignore the reference to BTC being currently at 27% of its year peak in November?

I mean, to ignore the reference to the percentage drop and cherry pick the abs value, you had to read the whole post and decide to ignore everything except the very last sentence.

Ignore? I went a step further and acknowledged its been down more than 50% multiple times! Maybe you are the ignorant one - if you manage to pay close enough attention to read me this time.

One way this is different for BTC/crypto is that it was getting attention in mainstream/"Main Street" culture.

BTC has been acting like it's just another speculative asset for a long time. I bet a lot of Main Street investors will probably not come back to crypto after this is all over.

I suppose it depends on what you consider "main street". I noticed the largest amount of people asking me about cryptocurrencies in 2017, during the last run-up.

> I bet a lot of Main Street investors will probably not come back to crypto after this is all over.

I had similar thoughts in 2018.

The Fed didn't raise interest rates in 2018 like they just did though. The era of free money is over. That has affects on the whole economy, not just crypto. But where conservative main street is content with meager returns, just enough to beat inflation, the promise of crypto, especially for those that missed out on the during the original Bitcoin boom, is ludicrous returns which leads to yacht money.

Myopic. Those people learned the lesson and can change expectations. You can't read minds. The market is primarily emotional and using what people feel now to prove your point long term is the same thinking that causes someone to buy Bitcoin at $69k thinking its going straight to one million usd.

When it starts going up hedge funds will jump in..

> BTC has been acting like it's just another speculative What does that even mean? That makes no sense in the context of what Bitcoin actually is, rather than your straw-man interpretation of other people's incorrect assessment.

As for main street - they will come back just slightly wiser. Don't forget how much of them skipped Bitcoin and went straight to canine and DeFi which is currently unwinding.

Using proportions is misleading. The reasons for drop from 1000 to 500 are different from those for a drop from 60,000 to 30,000.

but not using absolute values is as much nonsense

The absolute values has a huge influence about potential investments (e.g. mining equipment, but also things like storing money in BTC).

EDIT: Uh I got off topic, point is if the absolute value drops blow some vague thresholds it can cause chain reactions. An losing 50% of a small and 50% of a big investment makes a big difference. END EDIT

Plus and most important by now a lot of non-tech enthusiast are in the crypto market.

For example private people tempted by celebrity and YT videos which don't understand the crypto market dynamics.

By now crypto currencies are ironically also somewhat interlinked with stock market due to investors from the stock market speculating on it in various ways.

This has pushed bitcoin so hight, but also this makes the current crash worse then crashes in the early time.

Especially a lot of "innocent bystanders" are affected directly (private person putting savings in BTC) or indirectly (e.g. through fonds).

Furthermore many of them have been bluntly lied to wrt. the risks involved, market dynamics and what technically is provided and isn't.

I.e. besides burning people this crash could also lead to more regulation, potential much more depending on how it plays out.

dec 2017 $19100 -> feb 2018 $6800 -> dec 2018 $3300 -> thats 35% of it's peak value after 2 months and 18% after 1 year. nov 2013 $1130 -> apr 2014 $400 -> jan 2015 $200 -> thats 35% of it's peak value after 5 months and 18% after 1 year. So yes, this happend before ... .

> This means that in less than a year BTC tanked to 27% of its peak year value, and it's tanking even further.

Yes, multiple times: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbZ8zDpX2Mg

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