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Comment by karel-3d | Hacker News Reader

You can get rich by... having it

Sort of like gold I guess.

I have never figured out "lightning network", their "solution" for payments. (bitcoin payments are so impractical that they have a different, separate system to use for actual payments, that works completely differently.) Seems very convoluted. I need to pay a huge fee just to make a channel so I can receive anything? And there is something about liquidity? I implemented bitcoin stuff and still cannot figure lightning out.

bitcoin is mainly for buying it and looking at a chart.

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> bitcoin is mainly for buying it and looking at a chart

That’s what my broker and many others do. They buy a pool of crypto and resell to investors. You don’t get a wallet, you can’t transfer your crypto at all. It just sits there until you sell it. The most distilled Hodl practice ever.

edit: typo

You can't get rich with gold. And haven't been able to for a long long time. It usually preserves wealth due to its long term real rate of return of around zero. But as BTC is new enough, the early owners have indeed become very rich.

In the long term everything goes to zero, so an asset that pays no dividends but has significant storage costs isn't much good for investment.

Bitcoin holders as a group are constantly losing money by definition. Some of them cash out at a profit, I suppose.

> Bitcoin holders as a group are constantly losing money by definition

Modulo market cap representing unrealized PnL, but yes otherwise. Miners and exchanges take a good cut.

Yeah the paper gains are nice, but they all net to zero in real money.

I'm trying to figure out what the significant storage costs for bitcoin are. It's a bit higher than a Robin Hood stock because it costs fees when buying/selling, but it's significantly lower than gold/silver which really require some investment in physical security or a vaulting service.

Mining and theft mostly.

It's the miners who are hemorrhaging hard currency. It's currently costing $8-10 billion per year to keep the BTC blockchain alive, but blockchain fees are paid when transacting, not when HODLing, so it's not a storage cost.

Miners get paid in BTC but have costs in money.

They have to sell, so the money is coming from buyers and impacts holders via reduced demand.

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