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Comment by Guvante | Hacker News Reader

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Guvante

> One has its price regulated artificially by creating more of it

Not on these scales. Artificial adjustments to the dollar happen on month increments, possibly days.

> while the other depends solely on the whims of the free market

Free is relative, the Bitcoin market is still too small to be isolated from manipulation.

> same way startups' stock fluctuates

Care to quote a startup stock that is traded decently (Bitcoin isn't a penny stock) and has a 10% dip in minutes that isn't newsworthy for anyone interested in that stock?

Because I can bet anyone following it would find it newsworthy.

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> > One has its price regulated artificially by creating more of it

> Not on these scales. Artificial adjustments to the dollar happen on month increments, possibly days.

To give you a sense of perspective, the FED was printing $55bn/month this year [0]. So the FED prints the whole Bitcoin economy ($6.7bn) every 3.6 days, ... day after day, month after month ... for many many years now [1].

[0] http://www.forbes.com/sites/samanthasharf/2014/03/19/fed-cut...

[1] http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/52e4250869bedd404cb...

Milton Friedman is famous for saying the inflation of the dollar is exclusively controlled by the FED, but that isn't 100% true today. There are other branches of government that capture back large amounts of the printed paper from operations that are illegal. So in a sense, the "war on drugs" could be keeping inflation lower than it would be without it. For inflation to be felt the money has to be in circulation. Also, when the US broke away from the gold standard and printed a lot of money for police actions, it took about 10 years for the inflation to become rampant. It is important to realize this was before the crack wave.

Any references on the volume of paper that is confiscated and how it compares to $55bn/month? In any case, isn't drug money re-distributed into the economy? (I don't know, so I'm genuinely curious)

paper confiscation isn't what he's talking about when he says capturing back dollars.

> Care to quote a startup stock that is traded decently (Bitcoin isn't a penny stock) and has a 10% dip in minutes that isn't newsworthy for anyone interested in that stock?

"traded decently", gotta love those vague expressions.

Any company that at some point was just a small startup, sold stock privately, and today is big, has had these swings. Eg: Facebook, Amazon, etc.

If you don't know this, it probably means you have never bought private stock.

This swing is newsworthy, but EduardoBautista said it would cause huge problems to the world economy, which is not the same thing.

If the value of the USD fell by 10 percent in fifteen minutes, I can see that causing some problems in the world economy; do you disagree?

This was on a single exchange. Bitcoin didn't really lose 10% of its value momentarily. If the same thing somehow happened at a currency exchange with such crummy controls as this one, a lot of people would lose a lot of money, but not 10% of the value of all USD.

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