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Comment by paulpauper | Hacker News Reader

Crypto is like the worst investment ever: huge legal risk, does not hedge inflation, not a safeguard in crisis, does not benefit from tech/ai boom, does not generate profits. Only downside, no upside, no strengths, only weaknesses.

the chart is only one direction: down

The obvious weakness of bitcoin relative to QQQ demonstrates this. A daytrading pair trade method that shorts Bitcoin in market hours and goes long qqq would have cleaned house over the past year, including a huge win yesterday. i was running this and made a lot.

Who goes against the fed. government and wins? big tobacco couldn't do it. neither could the auto industry.

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This is true when it’s going down and false when it’s going up. Do the same analysis of previous years during bull crypto markets and does this hold up?

bitcoin's performance since late 2017 lags QQQ. the rolling 5-year returns have gotten way worse. Much of the gains were from pre-2018. many people five years ago were predicting six-figures by now, nowhere even close.

Huh? BTC is up 56% YTD, QQQ is up 34.5%. Over five years BTC is up 300%, QQQ is 100%. Over life BTC is 7850% while QQQ is 570%. Today QQQ is up 0.12%, BTC is up 0.95%.

I don’t know which slice you want to compare but general holds of BTC have outperformed QQQ significantly, even today it’s done better while it’s two largest exchanges have been sued by the SEC.

bitcoin peaked at 20k in 2017. it is only up 30 percent to 26k. QQQ is up a lot more. over 5.5 years of weak performance. The major problem with bitcoin are the huge declines like in 2018 and 2022. It stopped going up as much anymore either like it did in 2013 or 2017.

But you've picked the very peak of a previous bull run against a dip of a bear market... QQQ peaked in 2021 at $404 but is now at $355 so it's down 15%. This is just as relevant as what you're saying but obviously doesn't capture the whole picture? QQQ dipped from $101 to $20 once which is a huge loss, larger than BTCs largest dip as a percentage, but again that doesn't really tell the whole picture either.

Not trying to be rude or argumentative here, I just really don't understand your point.

This reminds me of those "biggest X since Y" headlines. No matter how insignificant the event, you can always write a clickbait-y title.

I'm not sure what you mean. BTC is up 29x since 2017 while QQQ is up 1.8x

it went up 20x in 2017. i said late 2017. it peaked at 20k in dec 2017.

As pointed out above, complete fallacy. You are cherry picking a handful of dates that support your argument and those dates are completely arbitrary.

Let's layout the fallacy here because it is trivially obvious:

You are cherry picking the exact top for bitcoin while not doing the same thing for QQQ.

You mention 5 years ago so lets use your arbitrary data point:

Bitcoin was floating between 7500 and 6500 this week 5 years ago. Let's use the upper end. Bitcoin is up well over 300% over this period.

QQQ is up 103.10% according to google over the last 5 years.

Nothing about adding the word "rolling" changes this.

Winning lottery tickets are a good investment. Losing tickets are a bad one.

The probability of making money investing in lottery tickets and BTC are obviously different

> Who goes against the fed. government and wins? big tobacco couldn't do it. neither could the auto industry.

Drugs won the war on drugs. Prohibition is another infamous failure. When the government tries to attack a decentralized commodity valued by the people it always loses.

Pretty much any short is way worse, unlimited downside! If you bought Bitcoin and stored it correctly you would be down less than 100%. Buying S&P 500 is probably less risky though.

> Who goes against the fed. government and wins? big tobacco couldn't do it. neither could the auto industry.

Millions of people. Not a centralized exchange like this.

This is an obvious troll. Bitcoin has absolutely stomped $QQQ of $NDX over this period as basically every other person here is pointing out.

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