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Comment by username332211 | Hacker News Reader

It's not seemingly impossible, it's scientifically proven that the general public can't know when the price of Bitcoin will collapse. And it has nothing to do with the general public being stupid and any of that bullshit.

It's called the efficient market hypothesis.

If it was known that the price of Bitcoin will collapse on the 7th of June 2025, every owner would have sold their Bitcoins on the 6th of June. But then the price would collapse on the 6th, not on the 7th. But of course, the definite knowledge the price will collapse on the 6th would mean the price would collapse on the 5th and so forth.

Hence why accurate, definite and widely believed predictions are impossible.

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The efficient market "Hypothesis" (is it even testable?) presupposes a rational market, doesn't it? Real life markets are not rational, by definition. Humans are not rational actors.

Careful mentioning any actual economic theory here lol.

I remember being annoyed on the 2nd day of Econ class when the prof mentioned that empirically we know human preference graphs can be cyclic but we have to pretend that's not true for any micro to work at all.

That's succinctly phrased. I don't know why it would bother you. It seems like it's admitting a limitation of the model he's about to teach.

It's a fundamental premise of the entire discipline and it's known to be empirically false

Does it also bother you that engineers designing bridges use Newtonian physics and discount relativistic effects?

There's not a scale at which acyclic preferences is a good approximation of what actually happens, so that's not really a good comparison. But even given that, structural engineers use nonlinear models that are more complicated than Newtonian physics, whereas economists say "math is too difficult so we'll use a simplifying but false set of assumptions"

Apparently I choose a great example then!

There are a lot of examples where the assumptions, especially this one, of microeconomics hold. Profit-maximizing corporations don't have cyclic desires. In many cases, people don't have cyclic desires (e.g. in the flavor of the soda they want). Microeconomics starts with those, much as becoming a structural engineer requires understanding the basics of Newtonian physics.

They get into more complicated math in more advanced courses, but they don't start there. All of engineering, science, etc, is "the math at a deeper level is too complex, here's a simplifying but false set of assumptions". And then a subset of people who learn about that care about cases when the assumptions break down and studies the next level.

Right, but Newtonian physics can fairly accurately predict gross body mechanics whereas economics can't even predict the large-scale wage or price level. They'll simultaneously model the income effect and the replacement effect of taxes and then shrug and say "of course we can't say in advance which one will dominate".

"Wrong" isn't a boolean. There is a vast spectrum of wrong, and Newtonian physics is so unwrong that you can go to the moon with it. Economics is so wrong it has never worked.

Markets are not efficient much of the time. And Bitcoin even less so.

Source; I make a living exploiting market inefficiencies.

His point stands though. The general public can't know exactly when Bitcoin will collapse, because if they could, it already would have collapsed.

"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."

Just saw it for the first time last night

It was so cool, especially after reading ready player one and discovering that one of my favorite Sega games as a kid was Galaga, but didn’t know the name until I saw it in an arcade a few weeks ago

80s movies about smart kids are awesome

His point is built on a theory with as much scientific rigor as Freud's penis envy work.

If economics was a functioning field of scientific study, The list of top 100 richest people would all be economists withholding scientific findings for their own gain, not a bunch of rich kids swinging their money dicks around.

I wrote a long response but realized I don't want to enter a discussion with someone being as exceptionally uncharitable you are.

You are what makes the market slightly more efficient.

Markets can remain irrational a lot longer than you and I can remain solvent.

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