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Comment by deadbabe | Hacker News Reader

Why hell does this keep going up? Can you pretty much just buy at any point in time and be guaranteed a 10x return?

If you hold long enough and the chain keeps working, then probably yes. However, this 10x return is guaranteed against the dollar and not real value. The gov. is committed to devaluing currency over a long period of time.

This is definitely true but btc buys you more of almost anything else too (btc/X): X is one of s&p500, housing, gold, etc. except maybe $nvda or $tsla. For example the btc chart in dollars looks the same as in gold.

No - it's quite reasonable to project bitcoin increasing in value (not price) 100x from here.

A part of the valuation comes from miners who gets their returns cut by half every ~4 years. They have an interest in having the price (at least) double by then.

So how do they do it? How do they just keep doubling the price?

I have an interest in having the price of my house double every four years but I can't just wish that into reality and neither can miners.

How much work have you put into having the value of your house double every four years? How many people are invested in your house appreciating like that? If your house appreciates, do a bunch of bankers and hedge funds also get rich along the way? How many politicians have you taken to lunch and on ski trips with the proceeds from the last time you sold half of your house when the price doubled?

Fuck, when you put it this way, I shouldn't have sold at $20k.

bubbles go up and up and up… until they don’t

But it has been a bubble and popped/crashed/recovered 4(?) times now - it seem fair to start considering it as a cycle rather than a bubble. I don’t know much about crypto or finance, so maybe I’m completely wrong

I wonder if it is something about it feeling like the digital future. As long as the future never arrives, there's always some potential? Other bubbles were pegged to more well-defined trends?

There's nothing future about bitcoin. It exist today, works well today, you can use it for payments, buy a house and in some places pay off your debt or credit card.

Anything held in Bitcoin is one misplaced key, or hacked wallet, or broken algorithm away from being worth precisely zero.

With power comes responsibility.

You want to own something? You need to be capable of keeping it safe. If not entrust it to someone who is and hope they don't steal it.

The same goes for everything in life.

The fiat banking system has demonstrated what it does when we trust it with our fiat money. It steals it (through zero-reserve banking aka infinite debasement).

With bitcoin I can audit the wallet they hold for me at any time (public keys) and know that they can't debase it.

Michael Saylor has been doing it for years now (and is also part of the reason why this is going up).

https://saylortracker.com/

Remember that this is a zero-sum game, for every winner that made it big, they are thousands more that had to pay up for their success.

I don't believe it is zero-sum.. Or at least, not rigourously. I feel the Market Capitalization of BTC must have been bootstrapped at some extent. It seems impossible to me that the sum total of what people have paid to have their BTCs to be more than $2.02T. In other words, the value the market gives it has given value to BTC out of nowhere.

Each transaction has a buyer and a seller. So in that sense it is a zero sum game. However the total market cap can go up and down and create value out of nothing (just like stocks).

Markets are not a zero sum game. When the price goes up, it goes up for all holders.

The price goes up (or down) because someone bought a stock at that price... For every buy, there's one sell. For every win, there's a loss.

A transaction is zero sum, the market is net positive. For the market to be zero sum, the market cap would have to be constant. If I buy something from someone for $1 then sell it to you for $2, I gained a dollar and you own a share that's worth $2.

> If I buy something from someone for $1 then sell it to you for $2, I gained a dollar and you own a share that's worth $2.

It's easy to see that this is nonsense: I could buy a widget from someone for $1, then turn around and sell it to my brother for $10000, does that really mean the widget is now magically worth $10000, and we doubled our collective holdings? No, what actually happened is that we together still have that same $10000, plus a worthless $1 widget.

Once again, the trade is within the context of a market and the market values the "widget", Apple Stock, Oz of gold or whatever as whatever people are willing to pay for it. That's how markets work. Individual Opinions are largely irrelevant.

You are 100% wrong, the market is not zero sum. A quick google search will educate you here.

Derivatives like options can be zero sum, options expire worthless.

I would have to agree beforehand that the share is worth $2, or else I wouldn't have bought it from you at that price. Somehow the share was already $2 before you sold it to me, but you got it for $1, how come? Your example is nonsensical.

And when you sell, it goes down for everyone. I don't consider you richer until you cash out your bitcoins for real money.

It is really negative sum game. As there is constant drain from mining, in buying and then operating equipment. Lot of that is not recovable and do not actually improve anything.

We haven’t run out of greater fools just yet

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