Bitcoin hits new all time high near $110K | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin hits new all time high near $110K

thestreet.com

27 pointsur-whale19 comments

I like the concept of cryptocurrency but its sad to see many of them being demoted to an asset like with gold where the only thing that matters is number go up and sell higher. Especially since it takes away the attention of other crypto that are better and actual currencies.

Yeah I feel the same, even if you want to use Bitcoin as a currency it's prohibitive as the fees are worse than most fiat services. I think it was something like $0.70 in fees to transfer $3 a few days ago, and it took a full 30 minutes to confirm which is insane.

In the communities that use bitcoin for day-to-day transactions they send bitcoin over lightning network and so the fees are much smaller and transactions happen in seconds. The issue is that not many people know about it and also not many people want to spend.

I wrote an article on this topic here https://stacker.news/items/887222/r/nout

Ahh that makes sense, there's often not a lot of clear info out there on the variants.

And when there is some info, it's often trying to trick you into buying some "get rich quick altcoins" that fizzle out and go to 0 in 2-3 years. It's annoying that that's the case.

Why spend when you want to accumulate your bag and sell higher?

Because by spending bitcoin you are actually fueling the bitcoin economy, you are showing interest to the sellers and so the price of bitcoin will go even higher (companies see the interest -> start supporting it -> start buying it -> start marketing it -> more people using it -> price goes up).

Further, if you believe that bitcoin is going to be used as a currency at some point, you may as well start using it already.

And finally, since bitcoin is so liquid (you can literally buy or sell in seconds with custodial wallets/accounts like Strike, or in minutes with self-custodial/private solutions), it doesn't really make sense to "sell the worse currencty (fiat) first" you can just buy whatever is your target amount of bitcoin today. You don't need to wait. This is not physical gold that takes hours up to days to buy or sell (you have to go to a special place, etc...).

Some people do "spend-and-replace", where they spend bitcoin for products/services and immediately buy the same amount of bitcoin for fiat. That's a nice way to start, but it's sort of unnecessary.

The BitCoin/Gold ratio has held steady (with the normal noise) since the election last year. It's the Global Reserve currency Status of the dollar that's in question now.

We haven't had a good president since Eisenhower.

I still remember the shock I felt when first 1 bitcoin >>> 1ozt. gold [0]

Exciting that we're creating a new global economy with reserves to be held in gold, bitcoin, & SDRs [1]; perhaps bankers will stop the past decades fighting against Keynes' true economic miracle proposal: issuance of the global Bancor [2], instead of this [always silly to me] petrodollar hegemony.

[0] disclosure: I HODL small amounts of each

[1] IMF's "Special Drawing Rights," which cannot be citizen-owned

[2] wikipedia.org/wiki/Bancor

110k now officially broken.

A wealthier friend jokingly said to me, last week, "do you think it'll ever be $1,000,000/btc?!"

To which I informed him "that's only moving the decimal place just one more position — I've already seen it happen five times!"

This simple revelation shocked us both (both: me saying it, him hearing it).

I'm excited for what the post-Dollar world will allow (albeit with a long period of "readjustment," particularly for US citizens [of which I am, still]).

Triffin's Dilemma... just got even more interesting =P

I'd suggest looking at the BTC chart with logarithmic scaling. I'm not saying it won't happen, but you can distinctly see how the exponential growth has greatly slowed down over time, so the move from 100k to a million is definitely not the same in terms of momentum and likelihood as the one from 10k to 100k.

(Of course that was under the previous 'house rules'; who knows what announcement will come out of the White House tomorrow.)

it's deceptive - the curve on the logarithmic chart looked the same when bitcoin was 100x less than it is now

Well, no, you can see that the rate of growth is slowing over time and the time spans for each 10x are getting longer, which would be what would you expect if we were getting closer to some kind of 'point of saturation'. Again, not saying we won't see 1 million, but I wouldn't use the "well we've seen a 10x five times now!" as an argument for thinking it's a sure thing.

Nothing is a certainty. But most people (especially on this site!) would argue that bitcoin not reaching $1M is close to one.

Reality is that the market cap of gold is now around $25T. If bitcoin matched that, it would put it at $1.5M/BTC, based on estimated 4M BTC lost forever. And bitcoin has way better monetary fundamentals than gold...

Additionally, adoption of new technology generally follows an S-curve.

>market cap of gold is now around $25T. If bitcoin matched that, it would put it at $1.5M/BTC

Market cap of gold is ~$22T. If bitcoin matched that, it would put it at 1.05M/BTC

>based on estimated 4M BTC lost forever

This is irrelevant to the conversation — even "lost" bitcoin are still included in the marketcap calculation of an asset.

>adoption of new technology generally follows an S-curve

I accept your premise, but IMHO bitcoin is still just getting started.

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Based on my bitcoin usage (since 2012), bitcoin seems to have doubled approximately every eighteen months. Under this anecdotal observation, it could be just five years to $1M [0]

[0] but of course past performance doesn't predict future [1]

[1] Time IN the market beats timING the market — excited to keep waiting =P

> This is irrelevant to the conversation — even "lost" bitcoin are still included in the marketcap calculation of an asset.

If assets are destroyed or forever lost, they essentially no longer exist and so have no effect on the market cap.

If all but 1 bitcoin were lost, the total supply would then be 1 bitcoin. From then on, the 21M figure would just be an arbitrary number with no relevance to real world supply and demand. The world would be fighting over 100M sats.

> I accept your premise, but IMHO bitcoin is still just getting started.

Agree completely. It's clear from this website alone (filled with people of above-average technical knowledge and intelligence) that most of the world has no idea what it really is yet (they think they know). People who understand both the inherent flaws of Keynesian economics and the technological aspects of bitcoin are few and far between. But both are becoming increasingly obvious as each year passes, along with bitcoin's robustness for which time is only true test.

>look at the BTC chart with logarithmic scaling

Yes I've spent over a decade placing lines of best fit, usually in log-land; it all still seems early-phase of the S-curve (which I agree: you're correct about new adoption timelines; it's just not now) [0].

Governments are in early implementations of Bitcoin Strategic Reserves — which I will predict should increase the slope of the aforementioned log_line (i.e. BTC growth becomes even faster) as citizen access increases.

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Honestly: I'm surprised my above bitcoin comment hasn't been further-downvoted... simply because HN-folks have "blasted" me for years on my lived experiences within bitcoin ecosystem. At present, I too am (still) anti-alt-coins =D

[Harrelson_wipes_tears_with_hundies.GIF]

[0] https://imgur.com/Yw9a8Pu

And Retail has not even started buying yet, google trends show low interest.

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