1) The approval of various ETFs (so demand is heightened). It's much easier to invest in it than in was in the past.
2) Traders expecting the supply to tighten (see bitcoin halving which is due very soon) and the demand there also heightening due to supply constraint expectation.
3) A lot of the uncertainty in terms of exchanges is gone. Coinbase looks like it can stand up to scrutiny and this furthermore boosts demand.
When you have huge demand vs. constrained supply, bubbles form. Of course, are all of the factors I mentioned enough to keep the bubble going for a very long time? Well, that I can't answer. No one knows how long this will last. I can tell you though that this to me looks like it is the next Tulip bubble. I see almost no reason to use bitcoin as a store of wealth. As a decentralized currency it has tremendous value, but treating it as gold I have reservations on since a lot of corrupt gangs and regimes are currently using it as a method of payment and laundering (including North Korea), as well as it being a huge drain on the world's energy supply due to mining energy needs...I don't really see what value it brings to the world at all, so treating it as 'virtual gold' (the way the world has been treating it) makes 0 sense to me, but in general, the world in the short-term sometimes makes very little sense. Over the long term, things tend to clear up. Hopefully that helps.
On the other hand, when I keep seeing news about El Salvador getting out of a national financial crisis with bitcoin, or Sam Altman issuing a worldcoin, or what Optimism did with artificial intelligence, I wonder if it's really worthless.
Some say that various tokens will be in the spotlight at Ndivia's upcoming event, but what I'm most interested in is whether this crypto market really helps with AI distributed processing. In fact, when creating an LLM, the biggest concern is how to handle quantised data.
First time I see this. Could you share some links?
That's less than 8 dollars per capita. Hardly enough to solve a financial crisis.
First the country's access to international financing is still limited.
Right now International bondholders are being paid, but two major local debts have been renegotiated.
Last year the national banking association "voluntarily renegotiated" its short term with the government from 1 to 7 years. For context, the banks liquidity requirement has been lowered since 2020 and banks can buy more government issued bonds.
Also last year the ruling party changed the Retirement Fund law. And there have been changes to the individual and collective retirement savings accounts.
One of the changes on the collective accounts was that the old financial instruments that were interest paying were changed for new ones that include a four year 0% interest rate paid back to the account owners.
Information regarding this has been limited to a couple of paragraphs by foreign credit risk rating agencies and a tweet by the Retirement Savings management companies.
There is no publicly available prospectus for that new government debt, and the Retirement Fund statistics and reports haven't been updated for months.
Like if you go to check for a recent report on the regulatory government agency you get literally 404 errors.
While I believe it's ok for my government to invest public funds in assets with different risk profiles. I would like to see an official website and an audited financial report.
This is not a far-fetched requirement for El Salvador, where a corporation with just $2000 in equity has to submit a yearly audited balance sheet for public record. Or even small town credit unions with assets a fraction of the bitcoin funds have to publish full reports online.
ETH Merged from PoW to PoS in Sept 2022, and decimated the entire GPU mining industry, cutting obscene power usage down to just running some servers. Sure, there is a small amount of shitcoin PoW mining still, but overall it was a massive change across the board.
Combine that with the transactional burn introduced into EIP-1559, supply is going down because the network isn't having to pay as much for security.
Then, we have EigenLayer, which is taking staked ETH and restaking it to provide an additional layer of security to layer 2 networks. Now, you're just locking up even more ETH. 3m ($12b) are locked into that one alone. Vicious cycle.
ETH is about to have a network upgrade, the first since the Merge, that helps lay the groundwork for scaling.
These factors are all contributing to the growth as new money rolls back into DeFi.
https://decrypt.co/119687/4-6-billion-ethereum-flames-since-...
You do realize that being a great store of value is orthogonal to criminals using it or its energy consumption, right? Criminals also use USD bills, far more than they use bitcoin. Are you going to claim that USD is not a great store of value for poor countries then?
Demand is outpacing supply by 12 to 1 at the current pace and all signs point to further tightening as demand continues to grow and supply remains programmatically fixed and soon to fall by half.
The world has never before experienced an asset with perfectly inelastic supply and exponentially growing demand.
It is the perfect storm.
Fully agree, and a point that most folks who shout "no intrinsic value" on the rooftops, completely fail to understand.
Furthermore, no economic theories exists to this day (that I know of) that can get a handle on this kind of asset class and predict its future behavior and impact on society.
Others buy because the prices are going up. Some genius draws lines on a graph that tells them prices are going to go up even more, and they buy more. Because the Bitcoin halving tends to be over a 4 year cycle, it's very convenient for the line drawers to predict patterns, and it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.
> On March 5, when Bitcoin reached a new all-time high, the BlackRock ETF (IBIT) saw a record inflow of $788.3 million in a single day. This meant that BlackRock had to buy over 11,000 Bitcoins, which likely brought Bitcoin to its new high.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/blackrocks-bitcoin-etf-breaks...
This is the answer. There is a spread of expectations around what the Fed will do. I’ve been hawkish, figuring since last year that rates will stay higher, for longer, than the median expectation. Silicon Valley has been dovish. (In my opinion, aspirationally.)
Crypto, for obvious reasons, appeals to those predisposed towards dovishness. (It sounds contradictory. But if you believe the Fed is fucked you’ll always predict imminently-lower rates.)
Me: "correct"
Tiger Cub: [begins converting a large single-digit percentage of his assets from Dollarydoos to BTC].
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Early 2023, I'm asked "so this ChatGPT thing, who else besides NVDA is making all the hardware?"
Me: "awkshually, NVDA nor Apple nor AMD actually make their microchips — it's TSMC, using ASML machines. You should look at MSFT's recent $1,000,000,000 investment into OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT."
[a few days later, MSFT announces additional $10B over a decade investment]
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His family chartitable foundation gave away so much money this past year [for tax reasons == profits].
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My take on bitcoin, having been a fungible user since 2012: it's not that BTC protocols are "so great" (they're not); rather, it's that fiat currency is so terrible... is why I HODL.
This is kind of the main use case for crypto. Fear and Greed
Like, “crypto will go away as soon as humanity stops feeling fear or being greedy”?
TBH, if anyone really wants to take the air out of crypto, they need to make an easily accessible, divisible, provable deflationary asset, that doesn’t require a lot of work to find or store (so not real estate, gold, guns, rare LEGO sets, etc.)
No.
Fear and greed have motivated human investors since the dawn of investing, but saying that because this motivation is and likely ever will be omnipresent means that every individual thing this fear and greed have acted on will also be omnipresent is, off (Can I interest you in some Dutch Tunips, only 10k each?)
I think the Fed not providing an easy API for a non-dollar token backed by gold is the real thing that keeps crypto around.
GLD is an ETF that tracks gold.
BTC is for gambling.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/there-never-was-real-...
- Interest rates rise cut cash flow to many startups - NFT bubble burst - And mostly: the FTX drama, which froze even more investments in the market
Now it's starting to get back to "normal" (actually a bit more than normal with the Bitcoin spot ETF being approved)
So if you want to view HN as hating crypto, you can find posts that confirm that. If you want to see it as heavily pro-crypto, you can also find confirmation.
Crypto is like the startup that perpetually just burns cash, but keeps on luring in investors with its shiny tech, huge promises, and ever expanding user base. But people in the know are aware that that tech isn't especially useful.
That being said: I am riding this wave again, as I have ridden two of the past three and might as well harvest while the sun is shining.
Where are they now? Dead silent after Ripple won the SEC lawsuit, the ETFs being approved and now BTC reaching $70K
This time without interest rate cuts, FTX, etc. So I say again:
Like it or not, crypto is here to stay.
Bitcoin is one and definitely going to stay around as a store of value (digital gold).
There are legit projects like ETH, USDC or Uniswap which have earned credibility in one way or the other (being open source, regulators allowing them to exist etc). Most of the alpha is going to be in this bucket, as it is still maturing.
And then there is a cesspool of scammers (SBF) and shitcoins. Stay away from those.
1. The time to transfer from coin to coin took ages
2. To finish the transfer I would've paid fee (gas) on the target wallet (eth), and the price is ridiculous (around $20)
3. Presumably I would've had to do this again if I wanted to transfer to exchange
4. The UX in general is still bad and you have to become cryptocoin expert to actually do basic things
If you can avoid ethereum's main layer altogether it becomes much cheaper transact, most exchanges support the various l2 layers that have been popping up recently.
I do agree that it takes way too much time and effort for anyone not familiar to the crypto scene to figure out all the different chains, their compatibility, bridges, swaps etc. to make cost efficient transactions.
You can say that stocks and bonds don't have value, but the value of publicly traded companies is much more tangible. I can look and see that Apple is generating a profit and at least paying a dividend, and US and municipal bonds are backed by notable entities in our every day lives.
If you think those have no value and we're doomed as a society in the near future, you should be putting your money into food, water, and ammunition instead of gold and crypto.
value is subjective, and most people value gold or bitcoin for their scarcity (an objective truth)
Gold is scarce because it is hard to find, and available in very low concentrations (meaning, you have to process a lot of rock to get to it). There is plenty of it on the planet. It cannot be lost forever, unless we send it off the planet.
"The WGC estimates that there are 54,000 tonnes of “below-ground gold reserves” waiting to be mined. These below-ground reserves account for less than 30 percent of what has already been mined."
Bitcoin will only have 21m total, is easy to find and available in as much quantity as you can afford, which has the value of driving the price upwards. If you lose your private key, it is gone forever, making it even more scarce. Millions have been lost already.
The Blockchain promises this verification, decentralized.
I think the current boom in bitcoin is rooted in plain greed, as it has been before. And outside of tokens no significant stuff is happening in cryptoland AFAIK.
Immutable “crypto” ledgers offer the promise of restoring confidence in provenance.
This of course has nothing to do with random new cryptocoins, that are indeed mostly scams.
If they need to be immutable, isn’t it easier to use ordinary asymmetric cryptography? Given that the Intel Management Engine is still a black box to us, perhaps the private key could be obfuscated well enough in the camera that it cannot be recovered by adversaries.
If the concern is that the private key could be reverse engineered by an adversary, then how does a blockchain-based method circumvent such an attack?
- Camera manufacturers all agree to implement blockchain record on photos produced with their devices. This includes smartphones (iPhones, etc.) as well. They publish this to a public blockchain.
- Image editing tools like Photoshop develop a way to maintain the blockchain record of edits made and publish to the same public record. This is not substantially different from the way document verification works already.
- Social media sites use the same record to flag or otherwise mark images that are not verified.
This seems complex, I know, but if the alternative is that anyone, anywhere can create fake images at the push of a button, a verification solution like the one I've proposed will be necessary, whether it utilizes blockchain or not. It may turn out that we just end up trusting corporations to handle this, without requiring any sort of public records like blockchains.
Security issues at the camera level might be a problem, but realistically the vast majority of camera devices (including phones) are made by a handful of companies and I don't foresee this being that much of an issue.
Personally I really don't buy the idea that we can technologically eliminate something as vague as fake images. The solution is a less gullible public, and an acceptance that the short interval where communication was easy and forgery was comparatively difficult, was an exceptional circumstance. We're just returning back to the norm.
> Can you explain how blockchain is saving us from AI shitting over the internet?
One of the original use cases was the defense against Sybil Attacks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack To make it prohibitively expensive to attack the network.
Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fraud#Ballot_stuffin... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack#Identity_validati...