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Comment by rwaksmunski | Hacker News Reader

It is worth that based on current market cap although with slippage it’s likely worth less as dumping it all at once would be a fire sale.

* but im sure you’re just making a snarky comment so people know you think bitcoin is dumb.

Liquidity also matters: if they tried to convert those bitcoin into dollars what are the odds that they’d find anything like buyers at the $1.5B range without causing some market upset?

This is why the parent used the word “slippage”.

I think it’s insufficient: that normally refers to someone using a market order and getting a small bit off of what they expected but, especially lately, I wouldn’t rule out an attempt to cash out something in the billion range causing much greater volatility because people are worried about more hacks or fraud coming to light.

If you have a better idea what it's worth than the market does, you should be out there making money through arbitrage instead of making snarky comments on the internet

in the famous words of Keynes, the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. I fully believe the intrinsic value of the entire crypto sphere is zero dollars, what I'm less sure about is when its followers are going to figure that out.

When you're betting on changes in market price you are betting on the beliefs of others about that price, the beliefs about those beliefs etc., not the intrinsic values of goods or services. (another important insight from the economist)

You think there's no intrinsic value to decentralized currencies?

probably not except for crime which seems to be the only place where currencies like that have tangible benefits. Everywhere else you can replace a blockchain with a database and your system is probably 50x faster and simpler. A trustless system where you can lose your entire live savings because of one bad line of code with nobody to roll the transaction back is useless

Given the environmental cost I'd say that the value of bitcoin is quite literally negative. 0 is generous.

> "Worth"

Just like some paintings are worth $1.4 million. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/10/15/shredded-ba...

Bitcoin is significantly more liquid than paintings.

Exactly. You could dump 1.4M worth of BTC in literally a second.

https://en.macromicro.me/charts/29435/bitcoin-production-tot...

If electricity and computing power has a price, then so does bitcoin. Whether that's a waste or not is another question.

> If electricity and computing power has a price, then so does bitcoin.

If bitcoin was worthless, electricity and computing power would still have a price. People just wouldn't use electricity and computing power to mine bitcoin.

There are lots of other coins that can be mined and yet are worthless.

"price" != "worth"

If someone is willing to pay that price, then that's what it is worth to them, simple as that. That's what market is there for.

As hinted by "price" != "worth," price and value ("worth") have specific economic meanings. A quick search will give you the Econ 101 explanation of these terms, so you can understand the difference:

- https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesfinancecouncil/2018/01/04...

- https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/061615/what-differe...

- https://keydifferences.com/difference-between-price-cost-and...

I'm not going to argue terms with you, I'm not an economist. But I do hope that rwaksmunski also harumphs the term "net worth" when used by more respectable publications than cited cryptoslate.com, because I would argue "worth" of bitcoin is closer to money in whichever sense of the word than "net worth" is when usually mentioned.

what something costs to produce != worth

Yes, LTV is wrong.

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