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if I invest in Bitcoin today, am I still an early adopter?
by noipv4 9y ago
if I invest in Bitcoin today, am I still an early adopter?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- VMG 9y agoDepends on who you think will adopt it after you.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoIndeed. The question isn't whether you're an early adopter, but whether you're an early enough adopter.
- adamnemecek 9y agoI think that it will go to like 20k in the next 4 years but there are coins that will grow much more. Bitcoin is the conservative investment.
- CPLX 9y ago> Bitcoin is the conservative investment. Now this is what I come to HN in the morning for.
- nobaelazum 9y agoI talk to these people all the time. Them: "I KMOW stock XXX is going to be at price YYY in time Z." Me: "How much have you invested in stock XXX?" Them: "Oh nothing yet".
- ringaroundthetx 9y agoI see things this way as well. Options and derivatives are risky. A merely volatile asset that never expires is pretty conservative in comparison.
- eudoxus 9y agoI think he means within the context of the Cryptocurrency market, which he is pretty correct on. Many other coins have gone up 2x, 5x, even 10x in the last weeks/months. Bitcoin going from 4K to 20K in 4 years (ie 5x) is relatively tame.
- Joeboy 9y ago> I think that it will go to like 20k in the next 4 years Why like 20k (as opposed to like 100k or like 1k)?
- whataretensors 9y agoBecause nobody knows. This has literally never happened before.
- RyanCavanaugh 9y ago99% of Bitcoins are being held by people expecting to sell it to someone else for more than they bought it for. That doesn't seem to be changing. You just have to do a calculation involving the number of people on the planet to figure out when the supply of new suckers runs dry and the price crashes.
- mediocrejoker 9y agoDoesn't that assume every person on the planet will own some BTC before it crashes? It also assumes the rate new people start buying BTC is constant, or even predictable.
- RyanCavanaugh 9y agoThe comment was perhaps a satirical take on the "BTC as investment" philosophy's implied endgame.
- chrisco255 9y agoIf more vendors would take BTC, I would gladly buy things using said BTC. I would rather do that than convert to cash and then buy.
- zaccus 9y agoIf BTC has a good chance of doubling in value over the next few months, then how is it remotely rational to spend it?
- companyhen 9y agoYeah I agree with 20k in 3-5 years. That's conservative. John McAfee said $500k in 3-5 years! Would be nice. :D
- billmalarky 9y agoMcAfee also said he would chop off his penis and eat it if it didn't hit $500k. I'm bullish on crypto but McAfee is... well something else.
- ybrah 9y agoNope. Bitcoin's network is not scaling well.
- sp821543 9y agoI think it would be a mistake to assume performance cannot improve.
- sp527 9y agoUmm anyone who has studied distributed systems understands a fully distributed system cannot scale past a certain limited point. That's not controversial. That's just reality. LN, for example, is adding degrees of centralization to achieve better scaling. Human systems have a tendency towards centralization and consolidation of power/authority as well, as we see in various ways already with Bitcoin (China, Ver, Core). There's overwhelming evidence to believe that the future of Bitcoin is much more centralized, at which point it starts to resemble the systems we already have but with horrifying disadvantages: your entire transaction history is public to everyone, your identity can be linked to your wallet through exchanges, etc.
- sp821543 9y agoI don't agree with you, but an interested in your view. What in your opinion is the best implementation of a blockchain?
- Caveman_Coder 9y agoDistributed renewable energy sharing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15349405 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15349405
- sp527 9y ago‘Dark’ coins like Monero. They provide the highest utility for their most obvious use case: money laundering and illicit, untraceable transactions.
- 9y ago
- csomar 9y agoIf you are looking into investing you may want to understand the volatility of assets. Then all assets are practically the same.
- matthewbauer 9y agoI think invest is the wrong term. Investments have some kind of builtin return like interest or dividends. You're buying bitcoin in the same way you buy gold or a lottery ticket. Maybe you have some solid reasoning on why price will go up but you aren't getting any returns like in an investment.
- nwah1 9y agoVery true. The correct term is speculation.
- fenwick67 9y agoBoiled down to the base principles it's the same... money goes in, more money might come out, or you might get less money out. The only difference is predictability and odds.
- RyanCavanaugh 9y agoThe entire profit motive from Bitcoin "investing" comes from selling it to another human for more than you bought it for. They're digital Beanie Babies. Real investments have a return derived from capital. A house, for example, can be rented out for money. Or a business can earn profit and distribute it to its shareholders. You can try to buy and sell houses like people did during the RE bubble for profit, or try to buy and sell stocks like a day trader, but these are still fundamentally different from an "asset" which has no means by which to generate a return on its own.
- mcjiggerlog 9y ago> Real investments have a return derived from capital. A house, for example, can be rented out for money. You can buy goods and services with Bitcoin. It's just another currency. Do people claim that forex is not investing?
- root_axis 9y ago> You can buy goods and services with Bitcoin. It's just another currency. Not really though. You can buy a few novelties online and there are a handful of places that accept bitcoin, but realistically it is not "just another currency", it's an IOU for usable money.
- omarchowdhury 9y agoWhich Bitcoin?
- eksemplar 9y agoNo, but you may still make some money from it before it drops to zero. Just don't consider it an investment, and don't put anything into it that you'll miss. Investments are tied to real world value, returns and having a say, bitcoins have no real world application or substance outside of financial crime.
- mcjiggerlog 9y ago> bitcoins have no real world application or substance outside of financial crime https://www.coindesk.com/information/what-can-you-buy-with-bitcoins/ https://www.coindesk.com/information/what-can-you-buy-with-b...
- eksemplar 9y agoYour product simply isn't valuable if the world wouldn't miss it if it disappeared over night. Outside of keeping money away from legislation what value does crypto currencies have that would be missed?
- chrisco255 9y agoTry transferring $1 million (or hell, even simply more than $10K) of legitimate cash to another country. With USD you have to jump through hoops. With BTC, it's less than an hour to clear and the transaction fee is peanuts. BTC has properties of physical cash and credit/debit cards. That's valuable.
- eksemplar 9y agoI don't know about the US, but that would be illegal in a lot of countries.