Comment by mellavora | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mellavora | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> Crypto is in another winter cycle. We've seen this before. The interest rate/inflation story had a part to play in that but this is a normal market cycle for this sector.

Curious. What do you see as the forces which drive a crypto market cycle? What is a normal crypto market cycle?

As an illustration, Ray Dalio talks about short-term debt cycles as driving the economy; where the debt is (hopefully) linked to investment in activities which increase the economic outputs.

Or a business cycle is "business cycles are marked by the alternation of the phases of expansion and contraction in aggregate economic activity,... the aggregate measures of industrial production, employment, income, and sales, which are the key coincident economic indicators used for the official determination of U.S. business cycle peak and trough dates."

For crypto, I don't see anything more than simple supply/demand, and it is really unclear what drives that besides pure speculation.

If it is just driven by speculation, then what makes for "normal market cycles" in speculation?

> If it is just driven by speculation, then what makes for "normal market cycles" in speculation?

Miners are rewarded in BTC for keeping the network secure, and they sell these BTC to cover operating costs. Every four years, the mining rewards are cut in half (per the consensus protocol). Miners have less coins to sell, which results in a supply shock. The price floor between these supply shocks is ostensibly determined by economic activity outside of speculation. This has resulted in a repeating four-year market cycle. Of course this pattern will only continue until it doesn't. You can search "halving" or "halvening" for more info. https://www.investopedia.com/bitcoin-halving-4843769

Miners being rewarded in BTC doesn't explain anything about the underlying value of it that would explain a boom-bust cycle, miners are just performing the validation task but there is nothing else driving demand for BTC except for speculation. No real usage for real-life transactions, no real usage as a currency.

What exactly would drive demand for BTC except for speculation?

Parent specifically asked about the four-year market cycles and I answered that specific question.

To your more broad question, BTC demand outside speculation is driven by economic usage, despite HN's doubts. If it wasn't for that, I'd be asking the same question about its value. If you're open-minded and interested in learning, I've written up answers to that question several times. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31932743

You mean the comment where your first two contentions (about Ukraine donations and PornHub only accepting crypto) are shown to be wrong in the first two comments that appear for me? Sorry to be snotty here, I guess. But the days when I can drive ten minutes and pay for groceries or a pizza or cat food or socks in crypto are not here. What besides porn, drugs, and I suppose donations should I be spending on with crypto as a US citizen today?

Re: Ukraine. My article was March 23, the second article is Apr 28. So suppose they got back online a month later, that doesn't mean they've always been online. Just like if GitHub is online right now, it doesn't mean they've never had any downtime.

> He noted that since “the national bank is not really operating, crypto is helping to perform fast transfers, to make it very quick and get results almost immediately.”

That quote is pretty unambiguous. At least for a time, Ukraine benefited from a financial system with no central point of failure.

-

Pornhub probably offers different payment methods depending on your jurisdiction. I don't know much about that industry, I was just quoting a thread from the day before where a few people confirmed.

-

You're right that in a first world country, with reliable infrastructure, paying for uncontroversial products (note uncontroversial != legal), BTC will have more friction. Even if BTC is wildly successful, I'll be happy never to buy socks with it. But there's lots of adoption in other countries, and for fringe products like the ones you listed plus VPNs, "water pipes", etc.

And why are you asking for use cases "besides" these? That's the problem with these threads. Someone says "no use cases", then I list some use cases and cite my sources, then the next reply is "actually those don't count, please give me even more use cases!" Posting in these threads is exhausting.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com