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A tulip of our times... History never repeats but it rhymes For people who missed out on the .com bubble don’t miss this out. It’s a good time to experience w
by victor106 9y ago
A tulip of our times...
History never repeats but it rhymes
For people who missed out on the .com bubble don’t miss this out. It’s a good time to experience what a bubble looks like so you can detect one in the future...
Remember this buffet quote
It’s better to be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful
- rootusrootus 9y agoYesterday, finally, my 77 year old mother actually asked me about bitcoin. The end [of the bubble] is nigh...
- tfha 9y agoThe end is not nigh until she tells you she invested your inheritance into it.
- ripberge 9y agoThat’s also a sign that bitcoin could become the worlds most popular currency someday. Recognition and interest need to become ubiquitous.
- nxsynonym 9y agoThe general public is not talking about using bitcoin as a currency, or converting their daily spending habits into bitcoin, or even about the underlying tech and possible future applications for it. All of the "average-joe" hype is around getting rich quick off of it's meteoric rise. That's what scares me the most.
- tankenmate 9y agoBitcoin has some very serious problems with governance (code and policy governance that is, regulation governance is finally starting to happen, whether it will be good for bitcoin remains to be seen) which has led to very serious throughput problems (standard bitcoin can handle only 7tx/sec maximum, visa does up to 4,000tx/sec on it's busiest days) and cost problems (constrained throughput has pushed up transaction fees considerably compared to just a year ago). Bitcoin could increase it's maximum block size to 512MB to compensate but that would drastically increase the size of the blockchain as well as increase the cost of mining, how much that would decrease transaction fees is harder to determine.
- epx 9y agoBitcoin was being more used as currency two years ago than today.
- brazzy 9y agoHaven't you heard? Bitcoin is not a currency, and was never intended to be one; it's a "store of value"! No, really - the limited transaction rate is a feature, not a bug!
- 1_player 9y agoSimilarly, yesterday I was at the barber's and 4 people were discussing Bitcoin. I texted a friend that we've reached peak hype, and it's time to sell.
- ghaff 9y agoI had a Lyft driver talking to me about it a couple weeks ago. The same driver who drove for Lyft in part because they paid him immediately which was good because he really needed to get new tires. (Pro tip: Probably not something you want to discuss with your current passenger.)
- epx 9y agoI went to a funeral, and the son of the deceased asked me about investing in Bitcoin! Quite a flag.
- api 9y agoThis one is crazier than the dot com bubble by far. I recently went around to lots of places and asked if anyone was actually using an ICO backed system. Crickets. People used the dot coms. Even most of the really bad ones had utility. The housing bubble built actual houses. Even tulips grow. This might be the first bubble with zero utility. Seems like the reductio ad absurdium of financial capitalism. The irony is that many who started Bitcoin wanted to get away from the whole financial debt based bubble driven system. Bitcoin is becoming what it sought to escape. I have used Bitcoin a few times to do actual transfers, but the bubble has ruined its utility. Edit: yes there are some good ideas in the ICO space, but with a few exceptions most of the non-scam projects have been unable to actually ship working software that non-nerds can use. Even for those I don't know a single person using them for actual work or anything actually serious.
- michaelhoffman 9y agoPossibly even negative utility, since the energy required to run these systems is creating lots of pollution.
- relaunched 9y agoMy biggest concern with the lack of underlying utility / value is does currency have any real, long-term value if there is no sovereign government willing to go to war to defend its long-term interests? Or if there's no underlying system of law to protect those that engage in it? Is the plan that sovereign governments use their resources to reinforce a currency that undermines its own?
- adventured 9y agoSince Bitcoin isn't a currency and never can be, and seeing as it's a store of value (which matches up to its profile in terms of mining difficulty, scarcity, etc), the question if you believe Bitcoin is going to actually one day be worth $3 or $5 or $8 trillion: which countries own outsized holdings of Bitcoin? The US and China to name two. Very large quantities of Bitcoin were mined & purchased in the US in the first 3-4 years of Bitcoin. And China has represented about half of all mining the last few years as the difficulty has soared.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- victor106 9y agoOfficial press release https://globenewswire.com/news-release/2017/12/21/1268978/0/en/Long-Island-Iced-Tea-Corp-to-Rebrand-as-Long-Blockchain-Corp.html https://globenewswire.com/news-release/2017/12/21/1268978/0/...
- joshgel 9y agoI'm sure we heard this frequently in the early days of the public internet. "What are we going to use this for?" Not a lot survived those early days, but enough did.
- INTPenis 9y agoDid people expect the dotcom bubble? I was just 15 but one of my current day co-workers was active at the time and he lost a lot of money in shares that he thought would keep their value. Shares he had received from employers. But with cryptocurrencies people can't stop talking about how it will burst. Maybe that will change things in a somewhat psychological way.
- rthomas6 9y agoIt will burst when everyone who could possibly be convinced to buy has bought. When the optimism is so contagious you start to doubt if it will ever really pop, that maybe this time it's different. In the dotcom bubble, people were buying shares at prices such that justifying those prices would require companies to make more money than any company had made before. But people, including experts, said this time it's different because the internet will change everything, and those companies really will make more money than any company has before. Even though no actual hard data justified that optimism.
- charlesdm 9y agoI highly doubt we're close to that point, to be honest. This is a global bubble. Billions of people around the world. Most of the money invested will flow in a few top coins -- not 200 different equities. The dot-com bubble was US centric, and the market went up to $6.7tn before imploding to $1.7tn. If, in the mania of the 2000s, things could head towards $6.7tn, I don't believe that this bubble will be smaller in the age of loose monetary policy. Money is essentially free today. A few weeks ago, Saudi Arabia paid $450m for a painting. If that isn't a sign of how money has lost its value, I don't know what is. Would I bet everything I own on crypto? No, of course not. Can you still get a 10x return on money you invest today? I wouldn't be surprised. Even knowing there will be a major correction at some point, it's probably a mistake not to own at least some.
- rthomas6 9y agoYeah, I own some ETH and EOS (not very much), because those are the ones I most believe have long-term intrinsic value for the world.
- moduspol 9y agoRespectfully, what drives people to post tulip and dot-com bubble comparisons on literally every cryptocurrency / blockchain post? We saw it yesterday. We saw it last week. And a few months ago. And in 2016, and 2014, and 2012. It's unfalsifiable and meaningless. We don't need to have this same "point" made on every post.
- darkstar999 9y agoTo counter the irrational crypto people.
- moduspol 9y agoPerhaps we don't need it in every borderline-relevant thread, though.
- root_axis 9y agoPerhaps we don't need a half dozen blockchain stories on the front page every day, it's borderline spam. These threads always rehash the same arguments on both sides.
- Nursie 9y agoPerhaps we do need to have a lick of sense and critical thought put into these discussions, every time. Otherwise you risk just being in a positive-reinforcement echo chamber.
- moduspol 9y agoWe're well beyond a "lick," and nobody benefits from reading for the millionth time that a random HN commenter thinks it's just like tulips.
- Nursie 9y agoYou're commenting on an article in which a small soft drink company has just sextupled it's share price by changing its name to include the word "Blockchain", and you're not seeing a tulip angle?
- mojuba 9y ago> Remember this buffet quote It’s better to be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful Everyone is fearful about the blockchain bubble right now, it seems. Time to be greedy? :)
- inimino 9y agoNot the people buying.
- ryanwaggoner 9y agoThat’s always true, or they’d be selling :)
- 52-6F-62 9y agoIt appears they presently are: https://www.bfxdata.com/orderbooks/btcusd https://www.bfxdata.com/orderbooks/btcusd
- baddox 9y agoOut of curiosity, if this piece of news is evidence of a bubble, does they mean that if cryptocurrencies were NOT a bubble, that would somehow prevent this company from changing its name and mission and increasing in value? I’m not immediately seeing how that would be the case.
- syntheticnature 9y agoMight've made the value increase wait until they actually did something more than only change their claimed mission, given, per the article: "Long Blockchain so far has little to show for its aspirations. It has no agreements with any blockchain firms, and says “there is no assurance that a definitive agreement with these, or any other entity, will be entered into or ultimately consummated.”" Wait wait, you're right. I'm going to go get a dog puppet for my new business, Bitcoin Pets.
- cinquemb 9y agoWhen people trade their respective government legal tender for a cryptocurrency and engage in trade of some form with said cryptocurrency a bubble? Is the current total outstanding global debt a bubble from where it was 20 years ago? Are institutional purchase of negative yielding bonds a bubble? Are global central bank purchases of global stocks a bubble? From where I sit, the bickering over the price and how justifiable it is/isnt where, is ignoring the larger societal changes taking place. All I know that, in Indonesia, I can have a website with a monero miner on it, and use the proceeds to pay for electricity, food and shelter directly. This wasn't happening 5 years ago. And this says nothing about tax enforcement, law, and even warfare that won't go untouched by this. For the non marginal users of crytocurrency, typical speculation rules with financial instruments still apply, but for those who can do what they couldn't before… yeah, this is just the beginning.
- koonsolo 9y agoHistory indeed repeats. But if you were a smart investor during the .com bubble, you might have invested in Amazon or Ebay. The question is, will there be an Amazon or Ebay cryptocurrency, and which one?
- mey 9y agoWhere the .com boom had infinite (or seemed like) players. There is only a handful of crypto currencies that have any faith. It's not betting on the right horse if there is only one horse. The only winners are/will be people who reap their gains from now until the bubble collapse.
- CabSauce 9y agoThere are 1,400 cryptocurrencies listed on coinmarketcap. Edit: 32 with over a billion dollar cap.
- ghaff 9y agoTiming is everything. I was invested in both (admittedly not much) and made a bit of money but certainly nothing remotely life changing--and way more than offset by other investments.
- mikestew 9y agoBut if you were a smart investor during the .com bubble, you might have invested in Amazon or Ebay. And if a frog had wings, it wouldn’t bump it’s ass when it hops. If you were a smart investor, you stayed the hell from internet stocks (because just like ICOs, the vast majority were losers). What you describe as “smart” was just someone who got lucky or had a crystal ball. Not that I followed my own advice, but at least I learned something for the tuition I paid.
- colorint 9y agoI was playing Pai-Gow poker at a casino with my parents and some friends. The game has side bets, which pay out if you get a good hand, independently of whether you win or lose, and (inversely) proportionate to the probability of the hand. By the numbers they're terrible bets (while Pai-Gow has the, I think, third-lowest house edge, after craps and blackjack), so my friend and I don't bet them, but my parents do. My friend got a great hand, full house maybe, and my dad said, "bet you wish you'd made the side bet," and we both said, "no, we don't."
- mbesto 9y ago> It’s a good time to experience what a bubble looks like so you can detect one in the future... Unfortunately predicting bubbles is nigh impossible. Bubbles can only be defined after they exist.
- meri_dian 9y agoIdentifying bubbles with absolute certainty may be impossible, but identifying them with a reasonable amount of confidence is possible. They follow similar paths.
- BlanketApple 9y agoOf course, there's the old saying that the financial media has correctly predicted 20 of the last 3 bubbles
- yellowbeard 9y agoI think the original quote is "The stock market has forecast nine of the last five recessions." 1966 https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Paul_Samuelson https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Paul_Samuelson But the idea probably applies to most predictions :)
- mbesto 9y agoDo you have a data model you can share that would show "a reasonable amount of confidence"?
- mey 9y agoThere are means of prediction/identification that will not identify exactly when it collapses but identifies the potential. Has the cost of the thing separated from it's usefulness? (Bitcoin is too slow and expensive for transactions. It's too volatile to be a storage of worth.) Does slapping unrelated products with it's name boost that products purely from branding? New financial instrument backing the bubble? In this case we have the holy grail where the backing instrument is the thing itself! https://www.forbes.com/sites/investor/2017/05/31/cryptocurrency-is-a-bubble/#7f6415333b16 https://www.forbes.com/sites/investor/2017/05/31/cryptocurre... Bubble Talk Cycle: Not talking about a bubble, discourse of a bubble, denying a bubble, seeing a bubble, late investors rushing into to get gains from the bubble. Shoeshine boy: Everyone is excited about bitcoin, seeing the large numbers you start getting random people proffering as the next sure thing.
- jondubois 9y agoWell right now everyone I know is fearful of Bitcoin, so I guess that means I should be greedy?
- ChristianGeek 9y agoThe volatility has kept me away since friends starting talking about it back when it was $50, and obviously I’m kicking myself now. But while the risk then was from the unknown, the risk now feels more like it’s from the inevitable, so I’m staying out.
- ATsch 9y agoctrl+f tulip Never fails.
- JoBrad 9y agoI find it surreal that we are riding what we know to be a bubble. If we just checked out, it would deflate slowly without causing as many issues.