Ask HN: Bitcoin Price Speculation
Bitcoin is currently trading below $300. Where do you guys think it will be 6 months from now?
P.S. Can someone with enough karma set this up as a poll? I would love to get an HN consensus on this.
P.S. Can someone with enough karma set this up as a poll? I would love to get an HN consensus on this.
Bitcoin's price is 100% backed by speculation.
Bitcoins are worthless. They are worth $0. They are useless hashes. Their value is $0, and their price is destined to be closer to that than its current $265.
This scam has been over for over a year. The hucksters who created this fraud bailed out for the most part once they hyped the price up to over $1000 in November 2013.
People are still suckered into the Nigerian scam, and are also still suckered into this scam, for reasons unknown to me. The creator, "Satoshi Nakamoto" turns out not to be a real person. Mt. Gox is busted for fraud. The main ASIC makers, Butterfly Labs, are busted for fraud. The coins have no value. What signals do people need to realize to not spend their hard-earned cash on these worthless hashes?
Of course, some high faluting types in Silicon Valley have put their imprimatur on Bitcoins. But they did the same thing to Pets.com, Flooz and other worthless dot-bombs 15 years ago. Just like major banks and Wall Street peddled worthless subprime real estate and mortgages 8 years ago. Caveat empor, before you trade your cash for a Bitcoin hash, ask yourself, cui bono?
So is the US dollar.
USD and Bitcoin are both good currencies, in part because they are worthless.
To flip it on it's head - if a currency is worth more than the value it represents then no one would spend anything.
All fiat currencies are driven by the speculation that someone may want to trade with you in the future. They are useless 'pieces of paper'
You seem to think promotion has stopped because it hit $1000? Such an arbitrary figure. It could be much higher if it was adopted further.
It never had value. It had a price. The price of silver in 1980 was $33 an ounce, by 1981 it was under $10 an ounce. Pets.com had a market cap of $220 million in early 2000, by November it was bankrupt. Subprime mortgages, Dutch tulip bulbs, history is replete with prices temporarily overshooting their values. The difference between Bitcoin and silver, or Bitcoin and underwater real estate, is that Bitcoin is a useless hash, whereas silver and real estate have some value.
> All fiat currencies
The discussion of the price and value of fiat currencies is too complex to really cover completely in an HN comment.
The question about fiat currency also doesn't mean too much for Bitcoins. The argument seems to be "it doesn't seem to make much sense that this piece of paper is worth anything, but since it is, that means that Bitcoin is worth something". I'm not really sure how that follows. If it did make sense, it would also make sense for Dogecoin and Stellar and Litecoin and Ripple to have million dollar market caps, which in fact, they all do (technically any how).
Technically, dollars had no value even before 1971 when you could exchange them for gold. They weren't gold, they were just papers one could exchange for gold. They were an abstraction of gold.
After 1971, the US closed the window on the 10,000 tons of gold it stores at Fort Knox and elsewhere. At this point the dollar becomes an abstraction of an abstraction.
A simple announcement from the president that the gold window is open again would always put a floor under the dollar. It's the reason the US spends so much to store 10,000 tons of gold. If not, why does the US store all that gold? Wouldn't it make sense to liquidate it and pay down US debt? Fort Knox et al store that gold to give value to the dollar.
It turns out bitcoin's rapid price growth was driven by people from group 2, not group 1.
Does that help?