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Comment by jcfrei | Hacker News Reader

It has in dollar terms but it still hasn't on an inflation adjusted basis. One bitcoin today has less purchasing power than at its peak in November 2021. The dollar has lost about 12.5% since then so the true all time high would be around $79250.

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I have it charted against the Malaysian Ringgit. It was 347k BTC/MYR high this year, compared to 326k today.

this should be the real headline. I am certain and beyond any doubt that I speak for all of us hackernews readers when I say that I have no frame of reference on the value of cryptocurrencies without comparing first with the Malaysian Ringgit

The biggest use case for Bitcoin is as a wealth store for third world countries that don’t have stable banking institutions.

In case you intentionally left out the /s at the end of your comment...

You'd be surprised how advanced the banking systems are in some 3rd world countries. In many cases the banks skipped over a lot of the legacy cruft that 1st world countries are struggling to get rid of now.

Also, in countries where the banking system or currency is falling apart, they use USD cash. Zimbabwe is doing this, Argentina is doing this, I'm sure more places also do this.

Also also, often where you have crumbling banking or currency, you also have crumbling internet and/or electricity infrastructure. Nobody is sitting on an upturned milk crate in their dilapidated corrugated iron shack in the middle of a slum fucking trading bitcoin on Coinbase so that they can buy bread.

Bitcoin is 99% used as a speculative investment instrument and as a means to participate in illicit markets (drugs etc). There is nothing altruistic or democratising about it.

the certainty of this post is its undoing. Someone once relayed this story .. while speaking between two intelligent but not expert adults, about the "size of the Internet" .. one said .. the Internet is so big, that there are whole social groups online, for example a popular multi-player game in Korea, that you have never heard of.. yet there are hundreds of thousands of active participants in this thing that you have never heard of.. that is how big the Internet is..

So wrt. this Bitcoin.. one armchair Admiral is going to pronounce that "electronic cryptographic money exchange Only Does This (list of things that are obnoxious).

It is parochial.. the definition of uninformed.. people who are directly involved don't know all the things that are being done with Bitcoin.. dismiss simplistic portrayals

I'd bet the biggest use case is scamming/extorting people. It has been the fastest growing use case, it must move more money than all other use cases combined.

The best base of reference!

1 Ringgit = 1 Ringgit

I mean a lot of people speculate that BTC is going up due to Trump's policies and promises, but an equally logical reason is that people expect the fall of USD. Currencies tend to fall after heated elections anywhere.

USD/EUR isn't necessarily a good reference either because they could be headed the same direction - an aggressive POTUS could be viewed as bad for NATO. Even gold, because that gold is going somewhere physical.

But there's not much other evidence that the USD is weakening after the election.

As it should be? ! ?

lmao

Compare it to gold or silver. It has very stable price for centuries or even millennia, when compared to daily salary of skilled worker.

>Compare it to gold or silver. It has very stable price for centuries or even millennia, when compared to daily salary of skilled worker.

You have to show your work, without to resorting to "one ounce of gold buys a nice suit" kind of stuff.

But it kind of does. Salaries of workers in ancient China, Rome, medieval Europe... are well known.

That's simply untrue. There's been constant swings in valuation of around 20x recorded through the past 3000+ years (and decent evidence this also happened before that).

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-archaeolog...

Pretty much all of recorded history is local govts trying to fix the price of gold to remove this instability, and in pretty much every case those govts had to abandoned the fix as actual market values caused local mints to implode.

There's ample research available on google scholar covering all of these points.

This is one of those things that people say as though it's a good thing, but since precious metals are a negative carry asset (ie it costs money to store and insure gold or silver) this means that when you take compounding into effect they have been responsible for a devastating destruction in wealth over that time. Even more so if you consider the opportunity cost of holding metals when you could be holding a productive asset.

You don't adjust currency pairs for inflation

"so far"

I wanna hear more from you.

12.5% in the bitcoin world isn't much for something which often goes up or down by 12.5% in a single day.

This depends on one's consumer preferences. The CPI includes depreciating items that does not scale with income, like healthcare , cars, clothes, and food. Someone with a net worth of millions of dollars incurs likely a smaller opportunity cost.

But I agree despite the hype Bitcoin's returns are still poor and easily surpassed by the S&P 500.

I'm not sure that's true. See https://topforeignstocks.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Bitc...

obviously it depends a bit on the time frame.

This being Bitcoin, the best price reference would probably be the cost of energy. How many megawatts of energy could one Bitcoin buy at that November 2021 peak, and how many could one Bitcoin buy now?

>But I agree despite the hype Bitcoin's returns are still poor and easily surpassed by the S&P 500.

Over what time period?

Recent history I presume because obviously if you bought at $5 your return is still quite nice. Although, GP suggests you’d now be better of selling btc and buying the index to optimize future returns.

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