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Comment by sjbzbeiks | Hacker News Reader

yeah I mean it just depends on time horizons, if you bought at 117k you are hurting now if you need the money ASAP.

Also, I gotta say I do not think Bitcoin is a bubble or whatever (IMO a real value there), but really this sort of site makes it seem like it is a bubble with the sort of "blind to history" boosterism.

Go read Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, or Market Wizards series, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, or any number of books about financial history and there are endless people saying 'it will never die and all the doubters are just wrong' before any big market crash.

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> Also, I gotta say I do not think Bitcoin is a bubble or whatever (IMO a real value there)

It's worth saying something with real value can still have a bubble - both bicycles and the internet were huge market bubbles at one time, but they're also undeniably valuable.

To play Devil's advocate:

Let's assume bitcoin has a tiny but positive probability of running the world economy in, say, 50 years. Ie bitcoin is a lottery ticket.

The fair value for a lottery ticket is some positive number. In 99.99..% of cases, the ticket will expire worthless. (In 0.00..1% of cases it will be worth quadrillions.)

The fair value of a lottery ticket is not a bubble, even if most lottery tickets expire worthless.

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Now, of course, it's still possible to overpay for lottery tickets. Eg if you buy an actual lottery ticket in retail, the whole transaction usually loses you at least 50 cents on the dollar for lottery taxes alone.

But that's a separate issue.

You argument is that it could have some long term value, which is different than a lottery ticket (which has a calculable minimum expected value at time of purchase).

Slightly more abstract: my argument is that assets with a very skewed probability distribution of future value will have a positive current value, even if in the vast majority of cases, they'll be worthless in the future.

Lottery tickets were only an example.

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