Comment by nakedrobot2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nakedrobot2 | Hacker News Reader

While I am still terribly sad that I didn't mine bitcoins with my workstation 3-4 years ago, I am glad I can stand at the sidelines and watch this amazing drama unfold.

Incidentally, I never figured out how to pronounce "Mt.Gox" But now I know: "Empty Gox" sounds about right :-)

7 - 8 years ago I was envying all my friends who were buying properties that keep going up and up ...

I bought my house 6 years ago. I bought some bitcoins this autumn.

You lucky bastard! :D

It sounds like a winning investment strategy would be to go short on whatever you are investing in.

Can this be applied recursively? Can you go short on your own going short, then go short on that as well?

That was the best back-handed compliment I’ve heard since the last episode of Downtown Abbey. I'm sure csv hates you every tiny bit I love you right now. :)

I don't hate anyone. I love living in my house, and I was fully aware of the risk when I bought my bitcoins. And I actually bought them just after the collapse when China dropped out, so I bought them at EUR 470, and now they're EUR 430 or thereabouts. The loss isn't huge. Yet. I'm not sure if I should cut my losses at this point.

Then I would have lost a lot on my Apple investment years ago. My only mistake there was to sell years too early.

Also, I'm not sure how I can go short on the house I intend to live in.

please tell me about your next investment so I can keep my money safe

Just FYI, bitcoin has had half a dozen 50% retraces into 1000% explosions already. This is probably another one (I hope, at least, I just bought another 2 btc at 480).

>has had half a dozen 50% retraces into 1000% explosions already.

Something shared by almost every hyped and now defunct securities out there.

Upside potential should not be the only factor for selecting an investment.

Risk management => Downside risk, liquidity, momentum etc. are way more important than limited past performance.

A better argument would be the evidence the hash rate is going through the roof. The inertia of those miners won't be stopped by bad sentiment caused by even worse software venerabilities. You either believe in the idea of what crypto currency technologies bring us, or you don't. Invest accordingly and leave your fears at the door.

When the price of electricity is higher than the mining payout, the hash rate will again plummet. Even though hashing with ASICs is much more efficient than CPUs or GPUs, it still takes electricity. And if the transaction rate remains low, the payouts are going to be smaller and smaller.

Mining capacity should act like a utility company that spins up and down power stations in response to demand for electricity. Mining slows until transactions payments go up enough to make it worthwhile. (And that doesn't even cover the fact that mining is still a lottery for the pools).

Change in hash rate only gives you a loose indication of what the miners guesses the price development will be, assuming you know their cost base well enough (i.e. there are no ASIC developments that people have been keeping quiet).

Also, any strongly positive or negative correlations to the price movements in other financial instruments.

It hardly matters that Bitcoin spikes and crashes its price every so often if you can't move your other investments around to profit from it. For this reason, every hedge fund manager on the planet is constantly looking for strongly negatively correlated prices that no one else knows about yet, or paying quants to invent instruments that show such behavior so that they have the information advantage until the other guys' quants decipher the formulas.

The graph that shows price vs time for a single asset is not a great thing to look at in isolation if your goal is to make piles of money on it.

I blew all my money on Beanie Babies and tulips.

I'm pretty sure its "Mount Gocks".

Funny fact, Mt.Gox originally stood for Magic The Gathering Online eXchange.

No, it almost certainly did not originally stand for "Magic the Gathering Online Exchange".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Mt.Gox#Possible_citogenes...

Discussion about this topic on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7249615

What's in dispute is whether there was ever a card trading site hosted at mtgox.com, not whether that's what it stands for. Even if it never hosted a card trading site, it is generally assumed that the domain was originally purchased for one.

It almost certainly did, but it was never used for that purpose.

It certainly did, which is easily confirmed with archive.org:

https://web.archive.org/web/20070525044536/http://mtgox.com/...

Clarification: MTGOX was intended to stand for that, but the card exchange was never finished, probably for lack of interest.

Which means Mt.Gox did originally indeed stand for Magic The Gathering Online eXchange. Doesn't really matter if it was finished or not when talking about what the origin of it is.

McCaleb has said that MtGox was at least at some point used for trading or buying cards.

You didn't need to mine any coins. You just had to pick your buy and sell points correctly.

That's all you need to do to make money on stocks, or bonds, or any other speculative trade. The trick is being consistent :)

Sure. The point is that mining wouldn't have helped if you sold at the wrong moment.

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