Why Bitcoin is up by almost 150% this year | Hacker News Reader

Why Bitcoin is up by almost 150% this year

economist.com

29 pointsBrajeshwar29 comments

Pretty poor article that has the usual Bitcoin bingo points - criminals and terrorism (because that didn’t exist before 2009?) and volatility.

It misses more interesting aspects or theories about bitcoin - it’s scarcity or how it supposedly incentivises clean energy.

It also misses an obvious reason it’s pumping which is the looming approval of the ETF’s supposedly in January.

You have to actually read to the end of the article to get to the bit about ETFs.

> also misses an obvious reason

Isn’t it just following the stock and bond markets just with a whole lot more volatility?

I think it was one of the better from mainstream media: no more doom and gloom, or Bitcoin is a scam that is going nowhere. This time, the Economist, is recognising that until there are two people in the world that believe it has value, Bitcoin will exist. It might not reach the moon, but it will not reach zero anytime soon.

They call it the cockroach theory, and I believe it is a massively underrated feature. As much as this forum would like it to be stamped out, for some irrational reason, Bitcoin is here to stay, like it or not. It's just a piece of technology after all.

it's a social phenomenon.

no coincide that BTC and alt/memecoins rose at the same time as social media and generation of people who grew up with the internet.

it's a social casino and it isn't going anywhere. it captures the post 2007-2008 zeitgeist perfectly.

not necessarily true: many social phenomena stick, and later you can find usage for them. Gold was mainly a social thing for a long time (embellishing armors and weapons) before some usage was find (connectors and other stuff). This may, or may not, happen for cryptocurrencies even if they aren't very useful today.

> Gold was mainly a social thing for a long time (embellishing armors and weapons)

Gold’s role as an instrument for storing and transferring was infinitely more important than that. And it worked quite well at that before stable and competent governments were a thing. It was extremely useful (much more than it is today)

do you have any source on that? I got none, just my opinion formed over time. Might be wrong. If that's the case, I'll restate it as follows. I don't see why a technology that bears no initial utility couldn't find it in the future. Again, I'm not sayign it's definitely the case with Bitcoin. Using cryptography in some clever way to record transactions though... but yes, some hype is definitely misplaced.

Does it matter? That's (mostly, in terms of its value) true of gold too for example.

I'm not a BTC/cryptocurrency fan or proponent (though I read the paper, was interested, mined as it was profitable at the time, and still hold some just as ~part of a diverse portfolio~ FOMO) but it's here, it exists, people can and do profit from it or store their wealth there - more volatily than gold, historically, sure, but it's not completely stupid and it's clear at this point it's not going to just go away.

Yes for the most part in the modern economy gold is also a non productive speculatory asset/token just like bitcoin.

Speculating on what exactly?

Price movements. The CFTC’s old educational site was pretty solid: https://web.archive.org/web/20120813061455/http://www.cftc.g...

Everything moves in price due to people trading it, so in that sense all assets are speculative. And housing for example is non productive.

> And housing for example is non productive.

That’s not strictly true (I’m pretty rented housing fits the definition of a productive asset) and certainly not true at all when compared to bitcoin or gold

Are you classifying it as productive because you can receive compensation (rent) for lending someone your house? That's true for all property. In the case of money (which includes bitcoin and gold), it's called interest.

> The second reason is that, with each boom-and-bust cycle, it becomes clearer crypto is not a bubble like tulip mania in the 1630s or the craze for Beanie Babies in the 1990s. Although bitcoin is a volatile asset, its price history looks more like a mountain range than a single peak, and appears closely correlated with tech stocks. Yet it is only moderately correlated with the broader market. An asset that swings up and down, and not in parallel with other things people might have in a portfolio, can be a useful diversifier.

> That bitcoin has established itself as a serious asset seems to be the source of the latest surge.

If this doesn't sound like some naysayers finally turning around in order to not look too stupid later in retrospect, then what?

I don't know what it is, but to answer your question: This could be people who were either burned so badly that they're not abandoning their assets due to a sunk-cost fallacy, or those who think they'll benefit from another round of pump-and-dump.

As long as casinos are a thing, Bitcoin stays a thing.

As long as people in embargoed countries need to transfer wealth, Bitcoin stays a thing.

A piece of technology that is completely out of reach of any government. Makes me shed an anarchist tear of joy.

https://archive.is/kdjIR

It's almost irrelevant, I don't know why they pay for that. I thought it would be like a paper

As long as the sha256 snake doesn't bite its tail, everything will be fine, unless someone finds an exportable weakness in your algorithm, brute force collisions are still pretty unlikely. Well, one of the challenges is also surviving solar storms. I don't know about you but I prefer something tangible that is physically in my possession and at the same time is cryptographic without electronic components (Impossible really, whoever achieves it is a new god)

Take the following scenarios:

1) solar storm destroys your country. It would wipe the traditional finance sector. Servers. Backups. Records. All destroyed. How do we restore everyone’s wealth to what is was?

2) solar storm destroys your country. You hold bitcoin so you either wait for electricity to be restored. Or migrate to another country.

Solar storms won't kill computers, they aren't EMPs but magnetic storms that induce currents in coils. It'll destroy power utilities that could take months to years to repair.

> pretty unlikely

you've mastered the art of understatement

> I don't know about you but I prefer something tangible that is physically in my possession

That comes with serious drawbacks, the primary one being exchanging it with other people (1000 miles away for example). You'd be paying a heavy price just so that you're able to physically touch it.

Never ever forget Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX.

MtGox called. I haven't forgotten.

Not your keys, not your cyrpto™.

Your comment has about the same amount of relevancy to a generic Bitcoin story as saying "9/11 never forget" in the comments of a story about Boeing airplanes.

Reminds me of that tragedy.

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