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Comment by mikece | Hacker News Reader

So... move assets to Bitcoin or not?

Bitcoin has, thus far, marched pretty much in lock step with the stock market. There's little reason to think that's going to suddenly change.

If you bought when SVB announced problems last week you'd be up 25%

And if you bought a few days before that you'd be at 0%

Sure, and if I'd played 03 10 24 46 63 04 in the PowerBall on Monday I'd be a millionaire. It's not a great long-term banking strategy, though.

The alleged promise of Bitcoin in various uses like an inflation hedge during economic turmoil have not borne fruit.

And if you bought bought regional banks at the bottom a few days ago you'd be up 500% on shares alone.

If you want to gamble, might as well buy real banks instead of fake banks anyway.

Why did you decide to do your comparison against that totally arbitrary point in time? Basically, anyone can play the game you're playing. Objectively, from its All Time High, BTC is down 70% - and has moved in lockstep with other over-valued meme stocks.

I can't even --

I rarely buy stocks or crypto but when there's bad news on banks I buy crypto and when people are crazy negative about something I tend to invest there too. For example when the airlines crashed during Covid in the US. It's a pretty simple strategy but I'm green most of the time :)

Might not be the best place to ask. The commitment here to the legacy banking system is titanic.

I didn't realise the feature set of crypto currencies had superceeded that of banking systems.

Why would it need to?

Banking systems need on average 10-15 years to crumble under the weight of their own corruption. Crypto can do it in 4, which seems like a fairly dramatic improvement in efficiency.

In the case of crypto, you might be confusing crumbling with weeding out. The long lived scams from traditional finance have a shorter shelf life there.

Wait... failing quickly (and more often) is a good thing?? This is the future of finance?

Move fast and break things, indeed.

I'll take long term stability.

At least the customers/depositors in SVB are being made whole. Investors are screwed.

Crypto is pretty much the opposite, just a bunch of rugpulls and missing money, customers screwed

Took me a second, but rofl -- comment of the day (even if I disagree)

Titanic…

An unfortunate metaphor. Judging from the first sentence I assume it’s pre-iceberg-Titanic we’re talking about.

It is funny that the knee jerk reaction to the FDIC guaranteeing all depositors at SVB is to panic and run to bitcoin.

I think the "run" to bitcoin can be mostly attributed to people bailing on stablecoins as there's no guarantee they can be converted to dollars. If your stablecoin can't be cashed, but can be converted to BTC, then BTC looks better by comparison.

What's the point of converting BTC to dollars anything? I thought bitcoin was the future. I mean you don't see a lot of people fretting that we can't convert dollars to Zimbabwe bucks. Why are crypto people so hung up on convertibility to the fiat dollar?

And the people who comment "BTC is up 30% since SVB" are making their argument centered around $USD value of BTC.

Whatever happened to "1 BTC = 1 BTC" do they not teach that to kids these days?

My theory is that BTC and "the crypto space" are mostly about dollars. They use FOMO talk (future of finance) to disguise that they really just want to sell you garbage and collect USD.

I remember several years ago someone in finance posted here about how they were looking into ways BTC could be packaged into a traditional security that could be bought/sold in TradFi. After spending a year on it, he and his team came to two conclusions.

1) KYC made it really hard to do

and

2) everyone they talked to was more interested in getting USD than holding onto BTC

Point 2 stuck out to me. No one wants BTC. It's about get-rick-quick and cash out to USD.

That's why everyone talks about the price of BTC relative to dollars. It's all that really matters to them.

If my theory is correct, then the shuttering of the major on/off ramps between USD and BTC will force crypto into an endgame followed by a crash.

The endgame is probably when people need to raise capital because their business ventures in the real world are crashing and burning, and they actually take the available exits and drain the cash out of the system. Blocking offramps may actually do the ecosystem a favor (similar to coinbase always suspending withdrawals whenever crypto goes down).

Agreed.

When that happens we're going to finally see what a bitcoin is truly worth.

In some ways answering that question is the very favor the ecosystem has needed all along.

We're not yet at the point when crypto does look a lot safer than bank deposits. But we might get there soon.

In Canada, we most certainly are.

What? Canada had one of the safest banking systems in the world and didn’t need bailouts in 2008? Now crypto seems safer, why?

For one thing, the government can’t freeze the accounts of its opposition, like Trudeau did with the trucker protest.

Sure they can, and did.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgmnpd/the-freedom-convoy-bi...

Many cryptocurrencies even build the functionality in directly. Tether, for example, can blacklist tokens: https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/11/10/tether-freezes-...

We’re talking about future bitcoin world, not the past.

> Many truckers now can’t cash out their donated bitcoin due to financial sanctions, with some of the bitcoins being seized from NobodyCaribou by the authorities.

”What are you saying, that I can convert bitcoin to dollars with impunity?”

“No, Neo - I’m saying that when you’re ready, you won’t have to.”

If you want to say something's not possible, the fact that it happened in the past is something you have to reckon with. What changes in "future bitcoin world" prevent these seizures?

Expanded with details. If a fully functioning, sufficiently-decentralized crypto economy can be bootstrapped (meaning go to gas station, fill up your car, all with bitcoin), the government no longer has this ability.

There is no one on earth who can “freeze” a bitcoin wallet, and beyond that point it’s put up or shut up.

Spoiler alert: In the US, thanks to our second amendment, the government will shut up in such a situation.

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