Hacker News Reader

Comment by danuker | Hacker News Reader

But Bitcoin has "exploded" in the past, crashing 70%+ several times, yet each time it had a higher and higher floor. How do you explain this?

View on HN

Just like amongst stamp collectors, a certain group will simply never sell. They'd rather never get a cent for they collectibles than sell at a price lower than what they feel would be "appropriate". Trade activies in irrational markets like that lie somewhere on the spectrum between the extremes of rational trade and belief affirmation ritual.

And some collectors just collect and don't really care about the money.

Yea this is what decriers don't explain. I may not view at as a strong currency for which it was intended but it's undeniable it has become a store for speculative value that isn't going away anytime soon.

There's a lot of trash in the crypto world but also some valid projects.

I don't know how you equate "speculative value" with "valid projects". Bitcoin has value because people are long on crypto. "Long" has an end date - just because it's 50 years instead of 10 years doesn't mean it's not coming.

If there's less crypto being issued than fiat, and demand were constant as a % of people's wealth (which I admit is a big if), then crypto is bound to go up.

There is no end date to government currency debasement.

This is to say that if demand outpaces supply, price is going to go up. However, this is true of any asset. So why mention specifically 'crypto', as if there was something magical about 'crypto' that means it's bound to go up?

My point is yes, it is true of any asset. You might as well own cans of beans. But the purpose is to stave off the effects of monetary expansion while staying liquid. Cryptocurrency is in a special niche in that parameter space.

While other assets are bound to provide long-term returns greater than inflation (for example, stocks and bonds [1]), cryptocurrency can not surpass inflation long-term, but it still does so while demand is growing. In addition, even after it reaches a stable demand (which I reckon will be in 5-10 years, with market saturation), it will be a means of diversification (like gold is currently).

[1] - https://totalrealreturns.com/

Except gold has value. Crypto does not.

I don't think I'm following you. You're using technical terms such as 'parameter space' in the wrong context. Maybe you want to sound clever, but you aren't making a lot of sense.

Well yes - but the assumption is that demand will drop as more people realize crypto has no long term viability as real financial infrastructure.

The supply of crypto isn't limited because people can just mint new chains. And of course, the more the number goes up on a chain the less attractive it is to actual users as opposed to holders.

Network effects dictate that value concentrates in the most popular chains. The top few will always dominate.

> The supply of crypto isn't limited because people can just mint new chains.

It is silly to lump all crypto coins in a single bucket. BTC is very different than DOGE or SHIB. I guess your parent post was about BTC supply being limited.

Interesting you say that, because it's actually very similar to Doge (though of course, dissimilar to Shib, because shib is an ERC20 token on Ethereum)

So you also think that The Starry Night in MOMA is worthless because you can buy a very similar one on Etsy for $65? https://www.etsy.com/listing/1317189452/starry-night-by-vinc...

I didn't say they were similar value, this is a strawman.

But if we're looking at art, and you show me the original Starry night, a print, and then a picture of the kool-aid man busting through a wall, and ask me which 2 are most similar, I'm going to pick the starry nights

> I didn't say they were similar value, this is a strawman.

You actually said that - "Interesting you say that, because it's actually very similar to Doge". Especially when the context was about the value of crypto in relation to supply and demand. Given that you are familiar with SHIB being an ERC20, I am fairly certain you are aware of DOGE's supply being nothing like BTC. And yet you conflate the two. Just for FUD?

Lots of people go base jumping. I can't explain it, and yet they do, in spite of multiple terrible crashes.

I actually thought the Russian invasion of Ukraine would result in more Bitcoin usage and the price going up again.

It could be that people are just holding on. The question is: why is it worth anything at all?

There's a fundamental floor of value where "in the bad old days" I once bought a specialty swiss army knife (a very custom gift; details utterly irrelevant) and I wanted the knife enough to pay middlemen about 20% overall to turn by USD into ... whatever the swiss were using at the time. It used to cost twice as much money to move money around the world than to move a small consumer good around the world. That's just how the world was. Weird to think it would have been half the cost to mail the swiss a gold coin than to transfer money all legally.

Clearly, I didn't think the middlemen provided 20% of value, but I was willing to cough up the cash to perform the overall transaction. If a cheaper money transfer option existed I'd never have used the middlemen, whom provided nothing of value to me for their 20% charge. Cheaper options do exist now...

There's a lot of hand waving, but if you trust paypal, which you probably should not, the cost of moving money internationally has dropped to about 5% and the cost of currency conversions has dropped to 4%. I would assume they double dip and converting USD in USA to swiss whatevers in Switzerland would cost about 9%. Then of course there are withdrawal fees and so forth stacked on top.

Anyway, lets say you can turn and burn bitcoin in "somewhat less than an hour" so simply divide total international daily transaction volume by twenty five or so and that seems a reasonable starting point for a store of value. If the price gets too high making it cost more to use BTC than paypal, then the BTC transaction volume would seem to drop until prices drop and people start using BTC again.

Obviously for various UI and enduser reasons I would not expect all international trade to flow over either BTC or paypal or the legacy banking system, but "enough" should be there to support the BTC price at some level.

Don't forget crime and startup business.

I ordered equipment for a company from a European seller , and because I wasn't a VC backed technology startup, instead focused on physical goods- there was no army of people to help me set up an international bank for my company. So what I did was drop them some bitcoin. Just getting the wire approvals would've taken longer.

That's fair. Buying things overseas is much, much simpler. I wonder what the value of that would be if BTC were to only be valued on that basis.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com