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Comment by humbledrone | Hacker News Reader

Well, what other measure would you use? The markets did, rather quickly, correct themselves with regards to tulips. There was a brief window of mania, but for the last several hundred years the tulip market seems to have been pretty reasonable.

It's just not possible at this time to know whether Bitcoin provides enough value to succeed in the long term. But to survive in the long term, it has to survive in the short term, and our best measure of short term utility is the market.

Again, if the market crashed far below the mining costs, then I would view that as a demonstration of the lack of Bitcoin's utility. And that very well could happen! But it hasn't yet.

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Well, what other measure would you use?

There is no other way to calculate whether something is done at an economic loss or profit than by the loss/profit mechanism of the economy.

Again, if the market crashed far below the mining costs, then I would view that as a demonstration of the lack of Bitcoin's utility.

Keywords being "far below". In cases where gold was the unit of money, there would be times where mining gold was economically unprofitable. As a result, more goods started chasing a fixed supply of money, bringing up the price of money making it more profitable to mine gold.

FYI: price of gold currently is at its mining cost.

And Greenspan would still call it a "bubble"

When he is personally responsible for creating dot-com bubble and the housing bubble. Who would ever listen to this clown anyway?

Wrong dude, dude.

You are confusing Aaron with Alan. And Alan Greenspan was one of the first to point out the dotcom bubble (he coined the term irrational exuberance).

>>The markets did, rather quickly, correct themselves with regards to tulips.

Quickly is subjective... I don't believe several years, according to some historians, is "quickly" considering if you were affected by it.

Also "seems to be pretty reasonable" means it's just your opinion.

You're also very high strung and on the offensive for bitcoin. This is not how you would sell an idea and a huge warning sign of your view being very skewed and not objective when it comes to the matter of bitcoin.

Quickly and pretty reasonable are both subjective, yes. In the context of several hundred years of tulip history, though, I'm happily confident that a 1 year bubble is "quick." You're free to disagree.

Calling me high strung/on the offensive/skewed though is a bit of an argumentum ad hominem and thus irrelevant. My argument would not be affected at all even if I were foaming at the mouth and wearing a sweater woven out of paper wallets.

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