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Comment by jcfrei | Hacker News Reader

Lots of similarities to the Bitcoin investment thesis. Where the chain itself becomes the product and not any utility derived from it. You have to believe in a future where all fiat money crashes and becomes worthless, evil states confiscate other forms of wealth, like stocks and bonds but for some reason will be powerless to prevent bitcoin transfers. At the same time the hard limit of 21 million BTC will never be revoked despite continuously declining miners revenue. And only within that strict narrative does a long-term investment really make sense.

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Author here. There's real overlap with that comparison, and I wouldn't dismiss it entirely. The receding horizon and community dynamics around belief reinforcement do look similar. Where I'd draw the line is the specific organizational failure mode: a product team whose feedback loops get hijacked by token economics. Bitcoin doesn't have a product team in the same sense. But the broader point (that a financial instrument can make belief liquid and self-reinforcing) applies more broadly than just token-funded ventures. I'm less certain where Bitcoin falls on that spectrum than I am about chains driven by ecosystems funded primarily by their tokens.

It does not need to be all or nothing though. It simply needs to be true for a large enough number of people, to create an extremely valuable market.

We are over 8 billion on earth, even if as little as 1% of the population rely on it directly or indirectly due to some form of oppression real or perceived due to political opinions, a long investment thesis on bitcoin can make sense.

I am not a bitcoin holder once this is said. Arrived at the party too late IMHO, and i have better investment options for now from a risk-adjusted perspective.

However if i had more cash to invest than i know what to do with, i'd definitely take a long position on bitcoin.

>even if as little as 1% of the population

1% of 8 billion is 80 million. Coordinating that many people onto a particular platform or alternative is a gargantuan task. It's not "little."

I think you are making a big deal out of nothing: today adoption is tiny but there isn't any coordination problem. Anyone wanting to buy or sell bitcoins, even for very large amount has no problem doing so.

As adoption increases, liquidity (which may be what you allude to when you talk about coordination) will be even better.

I'd also note that facilitating liquity can indeed be a complex problem, but there are people specialized in making money out of it and who therefore have an incentive to continually keep the market liquid, read about "market makers".

Only very small % of bitcoiners believe the ad absurdum thesis as you outlined it and yet to all bitcoiners the investment makes sense long term. That's something that you will have to reconcile on your side.

FATF and the government were desperate to eliminate/immobilize bearer bonds, bearer shares, high denomination notes, and hawala. It does seem like at least part of it is they think they have less control over oversight of their transfer for certain instrument or asset classes.

Bitcoin is not like high denomination notes or bearer bonds, though. Transactions are on the public blockchain.

In theory someone could have coins untraceable to them as long as they never intersect with something on chain that could be traced back to them, but that turns into a game of never spending the tokens when taken to the extreme. Bitcoiners quietly see that as a feature, not a bug, because the goal of the game is to get everyone to buy as much as possible but sell as little as possible. That’s the formula to make the number go up.

Exactly: money disappears into the hands of Government (or because of hyperinflation) but somehow you can buy goods on a "free" Internet without the Government intervention. Also: all transactions are recorded...

Good luck with that.

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