35 ms·

It can all go to zero

235 points by kirillzubovsky 9y ago

Vadoff 9y ago
Maybe if you're holding a shitcoin, but Bitcoin? Nope.
- sputknick 9y ago
  What value does Bitcoin add to society? IF you don't add value, what's the point of having you around? Bitcoin could absolutely go to zero. I say this as a holder of some.
  - chrisco255 9y ago
    It's a 9 year old immutable public ledger that has yet to be hacked.
  - logicallee 9y ago
    >What value does Bitcoin add to society? the value is that you can have anyone in the world murdered without it ever conceivably getting back to you.[1] (that value is obviously negative.) Therefore the appropriate value of bitcoin is $0 because literally all of society is set up for the exact and sole purpose of ensuring that the availability of bitcoin is $0. This is literally the only purpose for which the past 100,000 years of society have been set up. That's it. 1) technology. 2) rule of law. briefly 1 has surpassed 2 but not for long. social progress is worth way more than technological progress. My price target for bitcoin is $0. That said, an appropriate target is trillions in market cap and it is likely to get to that price. ---- [1] While producing greenhouse gasses robbing our children and their children of the sole habitable habitat in the universe - but that is not enough to make it illegal.
    - stale2002 9y ago
      What about the value of fighting financial censorship? There are lots of governments and people that attempted to censor perfectly moral and reasonable transactions. Just because it is "the law" doesn't make it right. Do you also dislike Tor because it allows political dissenters to hide from the government?
      - roma1n 9y ago
        "censor" is a loaded term. Why not "forbid"? Also, what if the solution to an abusive government is not a technological tool but a plurality of governments, many of which promote (some vision of) human rights? Central power, authority is not inherently evil.
        stale2002 9y ago
        Yes, there are different governments, some of which are good, and some of which are bad. Which is exactly why tools for fighting censorship are important. To fight the bad governments. "just make the government better" isn't a solution. People have been trying to make terrible, abusive governments better for thousands of years. But until the problem of bad governments is solved, tools to fight those governments are important. Just like tools that allow people to engage in anonymous and protected speech and political disagreement are important. And right now there are a lot of really freaking terrible governments. I'd argue that around ~20 percent of people in the world right now live under a government that I'd describe as "Nazi level bad". (ex, much of the middle east has laws that literally give the death penalty for being gay. That's Nazi level bad... ). When you have this many people living under terrible governments, tools for these people are extremely important.
  - stale2002 9y ago
    The value of Bitcoin is to provide people with the ability to send quick transactions across the world that are difficult to censor. What other ways do people have of sending censorship resistant transactions?
adamnemecek 9y ago
The comparison with the other company makes no sense. A company has a "single point of failure". At this point there's waayy too many actors and people who want Bitcoin to succeed. The market is huge at this point. Like NASDAQ is like 7T IIRC. Crypto is today ~550B. It was like ~750B not too long ago. Note how there's no glue joining the idea of the company and crypto. It could go down but it could also go really up even higher. It's funny how the one thing that North Korea agrees with the West on is how dope Bitcoin is. Like in some sense NK, is very vested in this going well. And re: zero. No, it will never be a literal zero. No buying or purchasing happens when things are priced at zero. EDIT: HN seems to be really anti-crypto. I setup a slack channel right now, if anyone is interested in having a discussion about crypto beyond "what if it goes to zero".
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  > At this point there's waayy too many actors and people who want Bitcoin to succeed This has no relation to whether something goes to zero (or practically zero). Political influence? Sure. But I don't think anyone expects D.C. to bail out Bitcoin. > A company has a "single point of failure" Companies trade after bankruptcy. There are stubs, practical and theoretical, for companies improperly wound up going back decades. Even if a state says "XYZ failed to pay franchise taxes and is now inactive," a shareholder can sue the former directors, holders of proceeds from the company, et cetera. (Company "ownership" is de-centralised and ambiguous, a fact that becomes uncomfortably clear post mortem.) Colloquially, we call "practically worthless," i.e. where the cost of valuing something is likely more than it's worth, zero.
  - nxsynonym 9y ago
    Agree. Too big to fail is a terrible, copy-pasta argument that makes no sense. The combined worth of all the crypto-currencies put together is a drop in the global-financial bucket. The only people who would be hurt by a collapse to zero are those trying to artificially pump the price to cash out rich. I used to be anti-FUD, but whatever the term for the opposite is - it's way more infuriating.
mattmcegg 9y ago
a lot of words with 0 facts or valuable information
3cham 9y ago
yeah, it can all go x10 as well, at least in term of total market cap.
cableshaft 9y ago
So many people love to parrot the 'It'll go down to zero!' line, especially if they don't have skin in the game, but there's pretty much no way. Specific cryptocurrencies, sure they could potentially go to zero. I'm watching one right now that's looking pretty darn close. But this entire industry? I don't think so. It's too late for that. Too many players, too much ease of access, too much of the potential has been demonstrated at this point. Could it go down 50% or more still? Yeah possibly. I sat through 2013-2015 when Bitcoin had fallen from $1200 and got stuck in the $180-$300 range for two straight years. I don't think that's going to happen again, not least of which because there will be people like me that would be happy to buy and hold until whenever it goes back up again at that price, but sure, it's possible. But zero, or close to zero? No. Even this guy's example of his company was only one company, not the entire stock market.
- frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
  But that's the point, you're not invested in cryptocurrencies in general as much as most people are invested in 1 or 2 or maybe a small handful. When tech crashed did the tech sector basket go to $0? Of course not and no one contends that it would, but did a lot of people lose their shirts on Pets.com? You bet.
  - cableshaft 9y ago
    Well that's why it's common knowledge in the stock market to diversify your portfolio, and they call it a portfolio, not a single stock, and why so many people invest in mutuals. There's not an equivalent to mutuals in the cryptoverse yet, but there will be. I've made quite a few small bets on various alts. I'm taking the black swan approach to them. Quite a few could drop to zero in a couple years but I'm betting at least one of them will make enough of a profit to eclipse my losses in the others. If one of them had been Raiblocks, that already would have been the case ($0.10 cents to $34 in 3 months...crazy). It missed my radar because the aggregate site I check didn't include it.
    - tessierashpool 9y ago
draw_down 9y ago
I think we should all just admit we don't really understand what the hell is happening here. The "debates" about this stuff usually resemble a bunch of people throwing punches in the dark.
deleted 9y ago
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pwaai 9y ago
I think this summarizes the entire situation of the past 24 hours after China has banned its citizens from foreign crypto exchanges http://archive.is/2018.01.16-165846/https://twitter.com/AntPoolBITMAIN/status/953273283524227072 http://archive.is/2018.01.16-165846/https://twitter.com/AntP... Just looking at r/Poloniex it doesn't seem like quick customer turnaround is a thing.
- narrator 9y ago
  Every bubble has money coming from somewhere. The mortgage bubble had all the BBB- derivatives that were ridiculously underpriced turning trash into treasure. Bitcoin is all about money trying to get out of China. There is a bit of people in countries with trashy currencies trying to save, some illegal commerce and some greater fool speculation on top of that, but that's not a lot of money comparitively. As China squeezes the vice, it's going to slowly suck most of the air out of the market.
  - rlucas 9y ago
    Why do you think the mortgage derivatives were broadly speaking underpriced? There are a lot of kinds of risks you can buy that exhibit "picking up dimes in front of a steamroller" risk, and are priced fairly. That is, 99% of the time you get a free dime...
    - narrator 9y ago
      Seems AIG was the designated bagholder and lynchpin of the whole thing. Many derivative buyers got 100 cents on the dollar on all their derivatives they bought from them because the government picked up the obligations.
SurrealSoul 9y ago
Every year for the last four years, bitcoin went down -20%~ or so in the 3rd week of Jan. I don't know why everyone freaks out this week Honestly, the history and trends are there, its just a thing that happens every year, I dunno man
- egeekuk 9y ago
  Maybe the credit card bills that people ran up in December have come in, and they're selling their holdings to settle them.
  - SurrealSoul 9y ago
    the common theory [for the past four years] is that chinese new years is coming and its for red pockets
cantrip 9y ago
Author publicly admits to giving insider trading advice.
- inyourtenement 9y ago
  You mean when he relays a conversation he had with one of the company's VP's?
- gamblor956 9y ago
  Insider information that is publicly disclosed is by definition no longer "insider information". Indeed, if this had been an equity, it would have been illegal for him to trade the equity without disclosing the insider information prior to the trade.
fortythirteen 9y ago
At this point, Bitcoin is not much more than a phantom object. Too overpriced to use for any reasonable purchase, people are literally trading nothing but zeros and ones, no more or less valuable than the bits making up this comment. All that can change, but only if the price drops back down to its 2016 to early 2017 values, and there are too many people invested at this price to let Bitcoin survive as an actual currency if that happens. We crossed the event horizon a couple months ago.
- stcredzero 9y ago
  Too overpriced to use for any reasonable purchase Could one have a cryptocurrency which is always subdividable? Are there any which already have this feature?
  - fortythirteen 9y ago
    It's about transaction fees and computing power. The cost of powering the computers that verify transactions has to be covered.
    - stcredzero 9y ago
      That's a serious design flaw. "It can do it, but it's just too expensive for anyone to afford to do it," is a design failure condition.
      - fortythirteen 9y ago
        I think it's a natural flaw in the mining concept. Any coin that people use in a real sense will create heavy mining competition. That in turn raises the amount of computing power needed to successfully mine, meaning that transaction costs exponentially rise.
        stcredzero 9y ago
        I think it's a natural flaw in the mining concept. Any coin that people use in a real sense will create heavy mining competition. Are you sure it's not a flaw in pricing/incentive? If people are using a cryptocurrency "in a real sense" then the public blockchain ledger of a properly maintained cryptocurrency could be maintained by parties who are motivated to get their transaction done. This is not a natural flaw in the general mining concept. This is a flaw in Bitcoin's implementation of mining, due to the circumstance that most miners of Bitcoin are motivated by speculation in Bitcoin.
tw1010 9y ago
I take all my investment lessons from movies.
- slig 9y ago
  I take mine from HN. That's why I didn't mine or bought BTC while it was worthless.
- 8ytecoder 9y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Short https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Short - It's based on a non-fiction book which is based on a true story.
- freyir 9y ago
  I jump head-first into every bubble because this time it's going to be different.
  - obscurantist 9y ago
    It's different 60% of the time, every time.
maxxxxx 9y ago
This reminds me so much of the .COM bubble. Same kind of discussions. I think there will be a place for cryptocurrency but before that has been established there will be a lot of people taking a lot of pain. People who have bought them a few years ago will only take paper losses but now there is real money flowing into this.
- rcheu 9y ago
  One technology related bubble eventually succeeding does not imply the eventual success of every technology related bubble. There are plenty of bubbles that never really recovered (ex. the Japanese stock market crash of 1989), and technologies that petered out (ex. tablets). Pattern matching to the first chart that comes to mind isn't a great way to predict the future. Instead, look for arguments why something will or will not be useful, since that's what actually will determine the eventual success or failure.
- tbabb 9y ago
  I have seen comparisons to the .com boom/bubble, and I don't buy it. There was a lot of economic movement while the entire economy moved over to the internet. Those who didn't adapt failed. Those who tried models which didn't translate also failed. Lots of experimentation, and lots of reinventing things from scratch. So lots of failure and lots of speculation-- but ultimately around a real sea change. I don't see how blockchain tech could have a technological / cultural impact on that scale. It has some value, and it will find its place in mainstream society, but I don't see how/why the market needs to test everything against it to reinvent itself as was done when the internet came to the fore. I could see that for sure with AI, but blockchain? Seems pretty specific and limited. Much more hype and much less substance than the .com revolution, IMO.
  - tessierashpool 9y ago
    this makes a lot of sense to me for the simple reason that during the dot-com boom, the world wasn’t packed with people who remembered a dot-com boom.
  - eth1 9y ago
VMG 9y ago
If Bitcoin goes to 0, I will buy all of it and display the Trezor that stores it in a museum
- jhwang5 9y ago
  For a more theatrical effect, print out all the private keys on reams of A4 paper
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- kybernetikos 9y ago
  You're right. Bitcoin was a significant and interesting technological step even if it ultimately fails in other ways. As long as we have a civilisation there will always be someone prepared to run a miner and own some for historical interest. Maybe 0 isn't right for bitcoin but it is possible for it to go incredibly low and there are altcoins for which there isn't even any historical interest....
  - inyourtenement 9y ago
    > As long as we have a civilisation That is a crazy claim.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - kybernetikos 9y ago
      I agree, but I don't retract it. People still occasionally perform music from 2000 odd years ago, which I would consider to belong to a different civilization to our own. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seikilos_epitaph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seikilos_epitaph
- desireco42 9y ago
  That is the best idea I heard all day. :) Not that it would happen, but great idea.
aitrean 9y ago
Time for the monthly cryptocurrency panic thread. While I fully agree that most cryptocurrencies are grossly overvalued, these articles always pretend a 20% selloff is the beginning of the end, when, in crypto land, 20% selloffs are a pretty standard bad day for the market.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  > these articles always pretend a 20% selloff is the beginning of the end There are individuals in this thread claiming "there will always be buyers" and that the probability of Bitcoin becoming worthless is zero. The point of the article isn't that Bitcoin is doomed. It's that there is a substantial non-zero probability it ends up worthless. That such an elementary claim about a volatile asset is controversial almost says more than the article.
  - adamnemecek 9y ago
    Ok can you talk more about your failure case then? What are the conditions like what exactly is the end result. There are 0 exchanges?
    - JumpCrisscross 9y ago
      > Can you talk more about your failure case then? The classic one. Nobody wants to pay more than a token amount for Bitcoin. Maybe central banks jacked up rates or we went into a recession or something newer and shinier came about. Value crashes, miners find it more valuable to sell their equipment than keep mining or confirming transactions, the entire ecosystem compresses to where it was when it was more about tinkering. Maybe it remains somewhat relevant, as a curiosity. Our generation's Esperanto. It takes no more imagination to imagine $0.0000000001 than it does to imagine $50,000.
      - adamnemecek 9y ago
        Are we talking about Bitcoin or all crypto?
deleted 9y ago
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mtgx 9y ago
We have this discussion every year when there's a major correction (hint: this isn't that, this is one of the small ones). It seems there are only two types of sentiment in the cryptocurrency market: extreme hype, where you start seeing mainstream media articles about "getting rich with cryptocurrencies," and extreme FUD, where everyone that has never trusted cryptocurrencies starts piling on for weeks about the tulip mania (we've never heard that one before) and how it will all go to zero this time. But it never does. Almost every year, cryptocurrencies become bigger, on average. Small corrections, major corrections/bear markets, and even super-corrections (2-3 year long bear markets) are all in cryptocurrencies' future. But cryptocurrencies are here to stay. They won't ever crash to zero.
surrey-fringe 9y ago
I've been thinking of starting a Medium account lately. All I have to do is wait for something bad to happen in crypto and give a first grade interpretation of events and compare them to some money movie I saw recently. I don't need to understand anything about crypto, and I can feel superior to all my friends who aren't working because they made money.
- eth1 9y ago
  Top of hacker news. Top of Reddit. everywhere. nocoiners feeling vindicated after a 30% drop when we've had a 3000% rise in 2017 and a 30%, 40%, even 50% drop has happened more than i can count in two hands in the past 9 years. So, let them enjoy their moment. I'll be laughing when bitcoin hits 50K in 2018.
- milesokeefe 9y ago
  I wouldn't call his interpretation "first grade". The author has a bit of experience in this domain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brad_Feld https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brad_Feld
- FLUX-YOU 9y ago
  >All I have to do is wait for something bad to happen in crypto and give a first grade interpretation of events and compare them to some money movie I saw recently. Stock analysts have been doing this forever, and probably pays better than medium.
  - deleted 9y ago
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S_A_P 9y ago
Ive some positions in different cryptos. I bought them with the same mindset that I use when I go to a casino. What do I not mind losing? Its just one more investment vehicle that I plan on riding out for the mid to long term. I may win, I may lose but its not the only horse Im betting on.
- Method-X 9y ago
  Yup, this is definitely the right mindset to have. I've been involved in crypto since 2013 and I've found the key to making money is not drinking the kool-aid. Sell when you're happy with the return you've made. Investing in crypto is a little like playing poker.
seannyg 9y ago
Bitcoin and many other cryptocurrencies are fiat currencies, nothing more. Bitcoin's value is dependent not on underlying fundamentals, but rather on supply and demand. Its supply is limited and will be fixed, but its demand is based on on its perceived usefulness, either for storing value or making purchases (maybe other things?). Until we see that it is useful for these things, we should assume its fundamental value is zero.
- dnautics 9y ago
  you're describing currencies, not fiat currencies. Even gold has limited 'intrinsic' value. Pretty much all of it 'real' applications have acceptable, cheaper substitutes. Anyone buying gold-plated connectors for their audio equipment is basically an idiot (source: in high school I used to work for radio shack)
  - seannyg 9y ago
    There are many reasons gold has become a valuable currency: it has a distinctive density, a distinctive color, it doesn't oxidize easily, it's not radioactive or toxic, and it's relatively rare (compared to, for example, iron). Its scarcity and distinctiveness, together with its aesthetic appeal, have made it a natural choice as a currency. See, for example, http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25255957 http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25255957. Bitcoin has none of these properties ,which makes me call it a fiat currency (like the U.S. dollar). The only difference is that the U.S. dollar does have transactional value (and limited storage value).
    - dnautics 9y ago
      The distinctive color and density are intrinsic properties of gold that relate to its viability as a currency because it makes gold verifiable. In that sense, Bitcoin has intrinsic value due to its verifiability as well.
  - Vendan 9y ago
    Gold plated is useful because gold doesn't rust, and still conducts decently.
singularity2001 9y ago
it might even go to minus one if there is another bug in ethereum. jokes aside it can't go to zero because I will buy all bitcoins once it goes back to $0.01/BTC, where it was just some years ago.
- overhang 9y ago
  And then it will well and truly be stuck at $0. It would be foolish indeed to buy a coin of any cryptocurrency when all the coins are held by one individual.
  - deleted 9y ago
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tribby 9y ago
the idea that blockchains with utility are valued as a % of BTC is the real insanity. IMO the nature of crypto-panic will change quite a bit when fairx and other similar "every shitcoin is a cash market now" exchanges get off the ground.
api 9y ago
I think a big problem is that people are conflating two kinds of value. One is the technical value of block chain and other distributed consensus algorithms. The other is the monetary value of block chain backed assets. The latter could indeed crash without impacting the former. Advances in the former that solve cryptocurrency scaling problems could even cause the latter to crash by reducing artificial scarcity. Unlike gold there is no real objective scarcity here. It's just software. "Bitcoin is a major innovation" and "Bitcoin is a bubble" can both be true. BTW... I'm waiting for someone to explain to me why this kind of appreciation in value is actually a desirable thing in a currency. It makes Bitcoin less useful. It's similar to housing. How is housing being more expensive a good thing?
askafriend 9y ago
I'll bite. This article isn't terribly useful and doesn't really put forth any new ideas. Most people are aware of how much risk is involved in the space.
flowctrl 9y ago
Another new year, another market correction. https://twitter.com/cryptozerp/status/953324474077769728 https://twitter.com/cryptozerp/status/953324474077769728 Good time to go shopping!
- diimdeep 9y ago
  yes https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/702obx/bitcoin_major_corrections_september_2010/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/702obx/bitc...
hateduser2 9y ago
Sorry but his was just a bad article. I like it for generating discussion about the topic but it’s contents were without insight and seemed mostly just to promote the author. Made me lose most or all respect for them instead.
deleted 9y ago
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oculusthrift 9y ago
the part that really resonated with me was: I don’t want to make money on short-term financial trades, but rather by helping create new things over the long-term. Anyone else have comments on this? I’ve been thinking this lately as well
rsuelzer 9y ago
I see Dogecoin is no longer at it's 2 billion dollar market cap. When my dad asked me if I thought BitCoin was in a bubble, I told him that the fact that a parody coin had a market capitalization of two billion dollars seemed to indicate that something was off.
- koonsolo 9y ago
  While on one hand I agree with you, on the other hand, remember the million dollar web page? In the end it was worth a million dollars. So who's to say a parody coin isn't worth that much? It certainly caught everyone's attention. But yeah, it is questionable, and a serious indicator there is a lot of "me too" money in the cryptocurrency space.
imharvey 9y ago
https://i.redd.it/twe79v68sea01.jpg https://i.redd.it/twe79v68sea01.jpg Will the history show the future again?
- rpedela 9y ago
  What a misleading chart. It makes it seem like the market drops significantly every January. Yet if you look at a chart of the entire history of Bitcoin, you realize that Bitcoin has never dropped as much as in the last month or so. Not even close.
rsuelzer 9y ago
There are so many glaring issues with BitCoin that it's insane that there are people who are dumb enough to buy it at these prices. 1) 96% of it is controlled by 4% of people. That means if it were to become a currency 96% of the wealth in the world would have to be given to 4% of people either through goods or a fiat currency. 2) It's just a matter of time before enough people lose their private keys that the total number of coins in circulation reaches 0. Already, something like 30% of current coins are considered "lost".
- ejanus 9y ago
  But US wealth is controlled by less than 1%. So, what is the difference
  - georgeecollins 9y ago
    Wealth <> currency
    - ejanus 9y ago
      Some math ?
      - georgeecollins 9y ago
        Total wealth of US households = 84.9 T http://time.com/money/3919690/americans-total-net-worth-record/ http://time.com/money/3919690/americans-total-net-worth-reco... Total amount of US currency in circulation = 1.2 T https://www.newyorkfed.org/aboutthefed/fedpoint/fed01.html https://www.newyorkfed.org/aboutthefed/fedpoint/fed01.html Any way you want to figure it, the amount of wealth that exists does not correspond to the amount of currency in circulation. Both can go up and down independently of each other.
  - mattthebaker 9y ago
    Wealth is not primarily held as currency, and currency has inflation.
- 9y ago
otakucode 9y ago
A few months ago I listened to an audiobook about Long Term Capital Management, both their rise and their spectacular fall. Their largest error was one I could easily see causing a catastrophe in cryptocurrency markets. Some call it a "liquidity crisis" but really its a matter of no one being willing to buy. LTCM was witness to a situation where it was positively idiotic for everyone to be getting out of the market - but they were anyway. Humans are skittish, irrational creatures, especially in large groups. If you operate on the 'rational market' hypothesis, you're wrong. Plain and simple, just wrong. That's not how it works, or how it has ever worked. Panics happen. People hurt themselves in order to limit their exposure to even manageable risk. But, their main insight stands, really. If you can hold long enough, things converge. It's the 'hold long enough' bit that can sometimes require a wait that costs more money than there is in the world.
nlh 9y ago
The chances that BTC (or any given crypto asset) goes to zero right now (or in the near future), with the information we CURRENTLY have, are low...market gyrations will happen, things will fluctuate +/- 20, 30, 50%, maybe they'll all go up 10x, maybe 100x, etc. As long as folks believe there's a get rich quick possibility (or believe in the viability of crypto assets, or whatever), things will keep on as they've kept on. HOWEVER: What that line of thinking misses is the possibility of new, external, market-shocking information. I don't know what that is or could be (the ol 'we don't know what we don't know'). Maybe someone discovers a massive and fundamental bug that renders them useless. Maybe quantum computing advances faster than we think and factoring large numbers becomes trivial. Maybe ______, maybe _______, maybe maybe maybe. THAT is what could bring it all to $0. That's what you should be worried about. That's why this isn't a sure thing for ever and ever.
- coldcode 9y ago
  I've always wondered what Bitcoin would be worth if (1) Nuclear war destroys the internet or cloud servers (2) Mining costs more than its worth and no one mines any more (3) It becomes impossible due to legal or other reasons to convert bitcoin to a real currency without extra-legal efforts.
  - qsucvatz 9y ago
    If mining is too difficult,the difficulty drops, until a single PC is finding every block on schedule. I'll mine, so that won't happen.
    - nlh 9y ago
      So I guess I'd say my point is that you say "I'll mine, so that won't happen" NOW, which is both fair and rational. But let's say tomorrow we discover a critical vulnerability in the bitcoin source that's been overlooked and causes the whole thing to be destabilized and, effectively worthless. Everyone moves on to BTC 2.0 (or whatever the fork is). Will you still mine original BTC? No. Why would you? It'd be a waste of resources.
seannyg 9y ago
What is the general thinking on what the right properties of cryptocurrencies should be to give them nonzero value? (e.g., cheap, low volatility, low transaction cost (in time and expense to transacting party), reliability of transactions, lack of central authority?) To motivate this, there are many reasons for gold to have become the physical currency of choice, outlined here: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25255957 http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25255957 I would imagine that the long-term cryptocurrency will have comparable benefits (whatever those benefits are for cryptocurrencies).
singularity2001 9y ago
with transaction times of several minutes (hours?) how can people even trade that stuff?
amelius 9y ago
> It can all go to zero But there is more room to go up than to go down :)
test6554 9y ago
Lately, nothing makes me snicker more than google search hits like this: "Dogecoin price | index, chart, expert analysis and news"

Maybe if you're holding a shitcoin, but Bitcoin? Nope.

sputknick 9y ago
What value does Bitcoin add to society? IF you don't add value, what's the point of having you around? Bitcoin could absolutely go to zero. I say this as a holder of some.
- chrisco255 9y ago
  It's a 9 year old immutable public ledger that has yet to be hacked.
- logicallee 9y ago
  >What value does Bitcoin add to society? the value is that you can have anyone in the world murdered without it ever conceivably getting back to you.[1] (that value is obviously negative.) Therefore the appropriate value of bitcoin is $0 because literally all of society is set up for the exact and sole purpose of ensuring that the availability of bitcoin is $0. This is literally the only purpose for which the past 100,000 years of society have been set up. That's it. 1) technology. 2) rule of law. briefly 1 has surpassed 2 but not for long. social progress is worth way more than technological progress. My price target for bitcoin is $0. That said, an appropriate target is trillions in market cap and it is likely to get to that price. ---- [1] While producing greenhouse gasses robbing our children and their children of the sole habitable habitat in the universe - but that is not enough to make it illegal.
  - stale2002 9y ago
    What about the value of fighting financial censorship? There are lots of governments and people that attempted to censor perfectly moral and reasonable transactions. Just because it is "the law" doesn't make it right. Do you also dislike Tor because it allows political dissenters to hide from the government?
    - roma1n 9y ago
      "censor" is a loaded term. Why not "forbid"? Also, what if the solution to an abusive government is not a technological tool but a plurality of governments, many of which promote (some vision of) human rights? Central power, authority is not inherently evil.
      - stale2002 9y ago
        Yes, there are different governments, some of which are good, and some of which are bad. Which is exactly why tools for fighting censorship are important. To fight the bad governments. "just make the government better" isn't a solution. People have been trying to make terrible, abusive governments better for thousands of years. But until the problem of bad governments is solved, tools to fight those governments are important. Just like tools that allow people to engage in anonymous and protected speech and political disagreement are important. And right now there are a lot of really freaking terrible governments. I'd argue that around ~20 percent of people in the world right now live under a government that I'd describe as "Nazi level bad". (ex, much of the middle east has laws that literally give the death penalty for being gay. That's Nazi level bad... ). When you have this many people living under terrible governments, tools for these people are extremely important.
- stale2002 9y ago
  The value of Bitcoin is to provide people with the ability to send quick transactions across the world that are difficult to censor. What other ways do people have of sending censorship resistant transactions?

The comparison with the other company makes no sense. A company has a "single point of failure". At this point there's waayy too many actors and people who want Bitcoin to succeed. The market is huge at this point. Like NASDAQ is like 7T IIRC. Crypto is today ~550B. It was like ~750B not too long ago. Note how there's no glue joining the idea of the company and crypto. It could go down but it could also go really up even higher. It's funny how the one thing that North Korea agrees with the West on is how dope Bitcoin is. Like in some sense NK, is very vested in this going well. And re: zero. No, it will never be a literal zero. No buying or purchasing happens when things are priced at zero. EDIT: HN seems to be really anti-crypto. I setup a slack channel right now, if anyone is interested in having a discussion about crypto beyond "what if it goes to zero".

JumpCrisscross 9y ago
> At this point there's waayy too many actors and people who want Bitcoin to succeed This has no relation to whether something goes to zero (or practically zero). Political influence? Sure. But I don't think anyone expects D.C. to bail out Bitcoin. > A company has a "single point of failure" Companies trade after bankruptcy. There are stubs, practical and theoretical, for companies improperly wound up going back decades. Even if a state says "XYZ failed to pay franchise taxes and is now inactive," a shareholder can sue the former directors, holders of proceeds from the company, et cetera. (Company "ownership" is de-centralised and ambiguous, a fact that becomes uncomfortably clear post mortem.) Colloquially, we call "practically worthless," i.e. where the cost of valuing something is likely more than it's worth, zero.
- nxsynonym 9y ago
  Agree. Too big to fail is a terrible, copy-pasta argument that makes no sense. The combined worth of all the crypto-currencies put together is a drop in the global-financial bucket. The only people who would be hurt by a collapse to zero are those trying to artificially pump the price to cash out rich. I used to be anti-FUD, but whatever the term for the opposite is - it's way more infuriating.

mattmcegg 9y ago

a lot of words with 0 facts or valuable information

3cham 9y ago

yeah, it can all go x10 as well, at least in term of total market cap.

cableshaft 9y ago

So many people love to parrot the 'It'll go down to zero!' line, especially if they don't have skin in the game, but there's pretty much no way. Specific cryptocurrencies, sure they could potentially go to zero. I'm watching one right now that's looking pretty darn close. But this entire industry? I don't think so. It's too late for that. Too many players, too much ease of access, too much of the potential has been demonstrated at this point. Could it go down 50% or more still? Yeah possibly. I sat through 2013-2015 when Bitcoin had fallen from $1200 and got stuck in the $180-$300 range for two straight years. I don't think that's going to happen again, not least of which because there will be people like me that would be happy to buy and hold until whenever it goes back up again at that price, but sure, it's possible. But zero, or close to zero? No. Even this guy's example of his company was only one company, not the entire stock market.

frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
But that's the point, you're not invested in cryptocurrencies in general as much as most people are invested in 1 or 2 or maybe a small handful. When tech crashed did the tech sector basket go to $0? Of course not and no one contends that it would, but did a lot of people lose their shirts on Pets.com? You bet.
- cableshaft 9y ago
  Well that's why it's common knowledge in the stock market to diversify your portfolio, and they call it a portfolio, not a single stock, and why so many people invest in mutuals. There's not an equivalent to mutuals in the cryptoverse yet, but there will be. I've made quite a few small bets on various alts. I'm taking the black swan approach to them. Quite a few could drop to zero in a couple years but I'm betting at least one of them will make enough of a profit to eclipse my losses in the others. If one of them had been Raiblocks, that already would have been the case ($0.10 cents to $34 in 3 months...crazy). It missed my radar because the aggregate site I check didn't include it.
  - tessierashpool 9y ago

draw_down 9y ago

I think we should all just admit we don't really understand what the hell is happening here. The "debates" about this stuff usually resemble a bunch of people throwing punches in the dark.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

pwaai 9y ago

I think this summarizes the entire situation of the past 24 hours after China has banned its citizens from foreign crypto exchanges http://archive.is/2018.01.16-165846/https://twitter.com/AntPoolBITMAIN/status/953273283524227072 http://archive.is/2018.01.16-165846/https://twitter.com/AntP... Just looking at r/Poloniex it doesn't seem like quick customer turnaround is a thing.

narrator 9y ago
Every bubble has money coming from somewhere. The mortgage bubble had all the BBB- derivatives that were ridiculously underpriced turning trash into treasure. Bitcoin is all about money trying to get out of China. There is a bit of people in countries with trashy currencies trying to save, some illegal commerce and some greater fool speculation on top of that, but that's not a lot of money comparitively. As China squeezes the vice, it's going to slowly suck most of the air out of the market.
- rlucas 9y ago
  Why do you think the mortgage derivatives were broadly speaking underpriced? There are a lot of kinds of risks you can buy that exhibit "picking up dimes in front of a steamroller" risk, and are priced fairly. That is, 99% of the time you get a free dime...
  - narrator 9y ago
    Seems AIG was the designated bagholder and lynchpin of the whole thing. Many derivative buyers got 100 cents on the dollar on all their derivatives they bought from them because the government picked up the obligations.

SurrealSoul 9y ago

Every year for the last four years, bitcoin went down -20%~ or so in the 3rd week of Jan. I don't know why everyone freaks out this week Honestly, the history and trends are there, its just a thing that happens every year, I dunno man

egeekuk 9y ago
Maybe the credit card bills that people ran up in December have come in, and they're selling their holdings to settle them.
- SurrealSoul 9y ago
  the common theory [for the past four years] is that chinese new years is coming and its for red pockets

cantrip 9y ago

Author publicly admits to giving insider trading advice.

inyourtenement 9y ago
You mean when he relays a conversation he had with one of the company's VP's?
gamblor956 9y ago
Insider information that is publicly disclosed is by definition no longer "insider information". Indeed, if this had been an equity, it would have been illegal for him to trade the equity without disclosing the insider information prior to the trade.

fortythirteen 9y ago

At this point, Bitcoin is not much more than a phantom object. Too overpriced to use for any reasonable purchase, people are literally trading nothing but zeros and ones, no more or less valuable than the bits making up this comment. All that can change, but only if the price drops back down to its 2016 to early 2017 values, and there are too many people invested at this price to let Bitcoin survive as an actual currency if that happens. We crossed the event horizon a couple months ago.

stcredzero 9y ago
Too overpriced to use for any reasonable purchase Could one have a cryptocurrency which is always subdividable? Are there any which already have this feature?
- fortythirteen 9y ago
  It's about transaction fees and computing power. The cost of powering the computers that verify transactions has to be covered.
  - stcredzero 9y ago
    That's a serious design flaw. "It can do it, but it's just too expensive for anyone to afford to do it," is a design failure condition.
    - fortythirteen 9y ago
      I think it's a natural flaw in the mining concept. Any coin that people use in a real sense will create heavy mining competition. That in turn raises the amount of computing power needed to successfully mine, meaning that transaction costs exponentially rise.
      - stcredzero 9y ago
        I think it's a natural flaw in the mining concept. Any coin that people use in a real sense will create heavy mining competition. Are you sure it's not a flaw in pricing/incentive? If people are using a cryptocurrency "in a real sense" then the public blockchain ledger of a properly maintained cryptocurrency could be maintained by parties who are motivated to get their transaction done. This is not a natural flaw in the general mining concept. This is a flaw in Bitcoin's implementation of mining, due to the circumstance that most miners of Bitcoin are motivated by speculation in Bitcoin.

tw1010 9y ago

I take all my investment lessons from movies.

slig 9y ago
I take mine from HN. That's why I didn't mine or bought BTC while it was worthless.
8ytecoder 9y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Short https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Short - It's based on a non-fiction book which is based on a true story.
freyir 9y ago
I jump head-first into every bubble because this time it's going to be different.
- obscurantist 9y ago
  It's different 60% of the time, every time.

maxxxxx 9y ago

This reminds me so much of the .COM bubble. Same kind of discussions. I think there will be a place for cryptocurrency but before that has been established there will be a lot of people taking a lot of pain. People who have bought them a few years ago will only take paper losses but now there is real money flowing into this.

rcheu 9y ago
One technology related bubble eventually succeeding does not imply the eventual success of every technology related bubble. There are plenty of bubbles that never really recovered (ex. the Japanese stock market crash of 1989), and technologies that petered out (ex. tablets). Pattern matching to the first chart that comes to mind isn't a great way to predict the future. Instead, look for arguments why something will or will not be useful, since that's what actually will determine the eventual success or failure.
tbabb 9y ago
I have seen comparisons to the .com boom/bubble, and I don't buy it. There was a lot of economic movement while the entire economy moved over to the internet. Those who didn't adapt failed. Those who tried models which didn't translate also failed. Lots of experimentation, and lots of reinventing things from scratch. So lots of failure and lots of speculation-- but ultimately around a real sea change. I don't see how blockchain tech could have a technological / cultural impact on that scale. It has some value, and it will find its place in mainstream society, but I don't see how/why the market needs to test everything against it to reinvent itself as was done when the internet came to the fore. I could see that for sure with AI, but blockchain? Seems pretty specific and limited. Much more hype and much less substance than the .com revolution, IMO.
- tessierashpool 9y ago
  this makes a lot of sense to me for the simple reason that during the dot-com boom, the world wasn’t packed with people who remembered a dot-com boom.
- eth1 9y ago

VMG 9y ago

If Bitcoin goes to 0, I will buy all of it and display the Trezor that stores it in a museum

jhwang5 9y ago
For a more theatrical effect, print out all the private keys on reams of A4 paper
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
kybernetikos 9y ago
You're right. Bitcoin was a significant and interesting technological step even if it ultimately fails in other ways. As long as we have a civilisation there will always be someone prepared to run a miner and own some for historical interest. Maybe 0 isn't right for bitcoin but it is possible for it to go incredibly low and there are altcoins for which there isn't even any historical interest....
- inyourtenement 9y ago
  > As long as we have a civilisation That is a crazy claim.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - kybernetikos 9y ago
    I agree, but I don't retract it. People still occasionally perform music from 2000 odd years ago, which I would consider to belong to a different civilization to our own. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seikilos_epitaph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seikilos_epitaph
desireco42 9y ago
That is the best idea I heard all day. :) Not that it would happen, but great idea.

aitrean 9y ago

Time for the monthly cryptocurrency panic thread. While I fully agree that most cryptocurrencies are grossly overvalued, these articles always pretend a 20% selloff is the beginning of the end, when, in crypto land, 20% selloffs are a pretty standard bad day for the market.

JumpCrisscross 9y ago
> these articles always pretend a 20% selloff is the beginning of the end There are individuals in this thread claiming "there will always be buyers" and that the probability of Bitcoin becoming worthless is zero. The point of the article isn't that Bitcoin is doomed. It's that there is a substantial non-zero probability it ends up worthless. That such an elementary claim about a volatile asset is controversial almost says more than the article.
- adamnemecek 9y ago
  Ok can you talk more about your failure case then? What are the conditions like what exactly is the end result. There are 0 exchanges?
  - JumpCrisscross 9y ago
    > Can you talk more about your failure case then? The classic one. Nobody wants to pay more than a token amount for Bitcoin. Maybe central banks jacked up rates or we went into a recession or something newer and shinier came about. Value crashes, miners find it more valuable to sell their equipment than keep mining or confirming transactions, the entire ecosystem compresses to where it was when it was more about tinkering. Maybe it remains somewhat relevant, as a curiosity. Our generation's Esperanto. It takes no more imagination to imagine $0.0000000001 than it does to imagine $50,000.
    - adamnemecek 9y ago
      Are we talking about Bitcoin or all crypto?

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

mtgx 9y ago

We have this discussion every year when there's a major correction (hint: this isn't that, this is one of the small ones). It seems there are only two types of sentiment in the cryptocurrency market: extreme hype, where you start seeing mainstream media articles about "getting rich with cryptocurrencies," and extreme FUD, where everyone that has never trusted cryptocurrencies starts piling on for weeks about the tulip mania (we've never heard that one before) and how it will all go to zero this time. But it never does. Almost every year, cryptocurrencies become bigger, on average. Small corrections, major corrections/bear markets, and even super-corrections (2-3 year long bear markets) are all in cryptocurrencies' future. But cryptocurrencies are here to stay. They won't ever crash to zero.

surrey-fringe 9y ago

I've been thinking of starting a Medium account lately. All I have to do is wait for something bad to happen in crypto and give a first grade interpretation of events and compare them to some money movie I saw recently. I don't need to understand anything about crypto, and I can feel superior to all my friends who aren't working because they made money.

eth1 9y ago
Top of hacker news. Top of Reddit. everywhere. nocoiners feeling vindicated after a 30% drop when we've had a 3000% rise in 2017 and a 30%, 40%, even 50% drop has happened more than i can count in two hands in the past 9 years. So, let them enjoy their moment. I'll be laughing when bitcoin hits 50K in 2018.
milesokeefe 9y ago
I wouldn't call his interpretation "first grade". The author has a bit of experience in this domain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brad_Feld https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brad_Feld
FLUX-YOU 9y ago
>All I have to do is wait for something bad to happen in crypto and give a first grade interpretation of events and compare them to some money movie I saw recently. Stock analysts have been doing this forever, and probably pays better than medium.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

S_A_P 9y ago

Ive some positions in different cryptos. I bought them with the same mindset that I use when I go to a casino. What do I not mind losing? Its just one more investment vehicle that I plan on riding out for the mid to long term. I may win, I may lose but its not the only horse Im betting on.

Method-X 9y ago
Yup, this is definitely the right mindset to have. I've been involved in crypto since 2013 and I've found the key to making money is not drinking the kool-aid. Sell when you're happy with the return you've made. Investing in crypto is a little like playing poker.

seannyg 9y ago

Bitcoin and many other cryptocurrencies are fiat currencies, nothing more. Bitcoin's value is dependent not on underlying fundamentals, but rather on supply and demand. Its supply is limited and will be fixed, but its demand is based on on its perceived usefulness, either for storing value or making purchases (maybe other things?). Until we see that it is useful for these things, we should assume its fundamental value is zero.

dnautics 9y ago
you're describing currencies, not fiat currencies. Even gold has limited 'intrinsic' value. Pretty much all of it 'real' applications have acceptable, cheaper substitutes. Anyone buying gold-plated connectors for their audio equipment is basically an idiot (source: in high school I used to work for radio shack)
- seannyg 9y ago
  There are many reasons gold has become a valuable currency: it has a distinctive density, a distinctive color, it doesn't oxidize easily, it's not radioactive or toxic, and it's relatively rare (compared to, for example, iron). Its scarcity and distinctiveness, together with its aesthetic appeal, have made it a natural choice as a currency. See, for example, http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25255957 http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25255957. Bitcoin has none of these properties ,which makes me call it a fiat currency (like the U.S. dollar). The only difference is that the U.S. dollar does have transactional value (and limited storage value).
  - dnautics 9y ago
    The distinctive color and density are intrinsic properties of gold that relate to its viability as a currency because it makes gold verifiable. In that sense, Bitcoin has intrinsic value due to its verifiability as well.
- Vendan 9y ago
  Gold plated is useful because gold doesn't rust, and still conducts decently.

singularity2001 9y ago

it might even go to minus one if there is another bug in ethereum. jokes aside it can't go to zero because I will buy all bitcoins once it goes back to $0.01/BTC, where it was just some years ago.

overhang 9y ago
And then it will well and truly be stuck at $0. It would be foolish indeed to buy a coin of any cryptocurrency when all the coins are held by one individual.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

tribby 9y ago

the idea that blockchains with utility are valued as a % of BTC is the real insanity. IMO the nature of crypto-panic will change quite a bit when fairx and other similar "every shitcoin is a cash market now" exchanges get off the ground.

api 9y ago

I think a big problem is that people are conflating two kinds of value. One is the technical value of block chain and other distributed consensus algorithms. The other is the monetary value of block chain backed assets. The latter could indeed crash without impacting the former. Advances in the former that solve cryptocurrency scaling problems could even cause the latter to crash by reducing artificial scarcity. Unlike gold there is no real objective scarcity here. It's just software. "Bitcoin is a major innovation" and "Bitcoin is a bubble" can both be true. BTW... I'm waiting for someone to explain to me why this kind of appreciation in value is actually a desirable thing in a currency. It makes Bitcoin less useful. It's similar to housing. How is housing being more expensive a good thing?

askafriend 9y ago

I'll bite. This article isn't terribly useful and doesn't really put forth any new ideas. Most people are aware of how much risk is involved in the space.

flowctrl 9y ago

Another new year, another market correction. https://twitter.com/cryptozerp/status/953324474077769728 https://twitter.com/cryptozerp/status/953324474077769728 Good time to go shopping!

diimdeep 9y ago
yes https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/702obx/bitcoin_major_corrections_september_2010/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/702obx/bitc...

hateduser2 9y ago

Sorry but his was just a bad article. I like it for generating discussion about the topic but it’s contents were without insight and seemed mostly just to promote the author. Made me lose most or all respect for them instead.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

oculusthrift 9y ago

the part that really resonated with me was: I don’t want to make money on short-term financial trades, but rather by helping create new things over the long-term. Anyone else have comments on this? I’ve been thinking this lately as well

rsuelzer 9y ago

I see Dogecoin is no longer at it's 2 billion dollar market cap. When my dad asked me if I thought BitCoin was in a bubble, I told him that the fact that a parody coin had a market capitalization of two billion dollars seemed to indicate that something was off.

koonsolo 9y ago
While on one hand I agree with you, on the other hand, remember the million dollar web page? In the end it was worth a million dollars. So who's to say a parody coin isn't worth that much? It certainly caught everyone's attention. But yeah, it is questionable, and a serious indicator there is a lot of "me too" money in the cryptocurrency space.

imharvey 9y ago

https://i.redd.it/twe79v68sea01.jpg https://i.redd.it/twe79v68sea01.jpg Will the history show the future again?

rpedela 9y ago
What a misleading chart. It makes it seem like the market drops significantly every January. Yet if you look at a chart of the entire history of Bitcoin, you realize that Bitcoin has never dropped as much as in the last month or so. Not even close.

rsuelzer 9y ago

There are so many glaring issues with BitCoin that it's insane that there are people who are dumb enough to buy it at these prices. 1) 96% of it is controlled by 4% of people. That means if it were to become a currency 96% of the wealth in the world would have to be given to 4% of people either through goods or a fiat currency. 2) It's just a matter of time before enough people lose their private keys that the total number of coins in circulation reaches 0. Already, something like 30% of current coins are considered "lost".

ejanus 9y ago
But US wealth is controlled by less than 1%. So, what is the difference
- georgeecollins 9y ago
  Wealth <> currency
  - ejanus 9y ago
    Some math ?
    - georgeecollins 9y ago
      Total wealth of US households = 84.9 T http://time.com/money/3919690/americans-total-net-worth-record/ http://time.com/money/3919690/americans-total-net-worth-reco... Total amount of US currency in circulation = 1.2 T https://www.newyorkfed.org/aboutthefed/fedpoint/fed01.html https://www.newyorkfed.org/aboutthefed/fedpoint/fed01.html Any way you want to figure it, the amount of wealth that exists does not correspond to the amount of currency in circulation. Both can go up and down independently of each other.
- mattthebaker 9y ago
  Wealth is not primarily held as currency, and currency has inflation.
9y ago

otakucode 9y ago

A few months ago I listened to an audiobook about Long Term Capital Management, both their rise and their spectacular fall. Their largest error was one I could easily see causing a catastrophe in cryptocurrency markets. Some call it a "liquidity crisis" but really its a matter of no one being willing to buy. LTCM was witness to a situation where it was positively idiotic for everyone to be getting out of the market - but they were anyway. Humans are skittish, irrational creatures, especially in large groups. If you operate on the 'rational market' hypothesis, you're wrong. Plain and simple, just wrong. That's not how it works, or how it has ever worked. Panics happen. People hurt themselves in order to limit their exposure to even manageable risk. But, their main insight stands, really. If you can hold long enough, things converge. It's the 'hold long enough' bit that can sometimes require a wait that costs more money than there is in the world.

nlh 9y ago

The chances that BTC (or any given crypto asset) goes to zero right now (or in the near future), with the information we CURRENTLY have, are low...market gyrations will happen, things will fluctuate +/- 20, 30, 50%, maybe they'll all go up 10x, maybe 100x, etc. As long as folks believe there's a get rich quick possibility (or believe in the viability of crypto assets, or whatever), things will keep on as they've kept on. HOWEVER: What that line of thinking misses is the possibility of new, external, market-shocking information. I don't know what that is or could be (the ol 'we don't know what we don't know'). Maybe someone discovers a massive and fundamental bug that renders them useless. Maybe quantum computing advances faster than we think and factoring large numbers becomes trivial. Maybe ______, maybe _______, maybe maybe maybe. THAT is what could bring it all to $0. That's what you should be worried about. That's why this isn't a sure thing for ever and ever.

coldcode 9y ago
I've always wondered what Bitcoin would be worth if (1) Nuclear war destroys the internet or cloud servers (2) Mining costs more than its worth and no one mines any more (3) It becomes impossible due to legal or other reasons to convert bitcoin to a real currency without extra-legal efforts.
- qsucvatz 9y ago
  If mining is too difficult,the difficulty drops, until a single PC is finding every block on schedule. I'll mine, so that won't happen.
  - nlh 9y ago
    So I guess I'd say my point is that you say "I'll mine, so that won't happen" NOW, which is both fair and rational. But let's say tomorrow we discover a critical vulnerability in the bitcoin source that's been overlooked and causes the whole thing to be destabilized and, effectively worthless. Everyone moves on to BTC 2.0 (or whatever the fork is). Will you still mine original BTC? No. Why would you? It'd be a waste of resources.

seannyg 9y ago

What is the general thinking on what the right properties of cryptocurrencies should be to give them nonzero value? (e.g., cheap, low volatility, low transaction cost (in time and expense to transacting party), reliability of transactions, lack of central authority?) To motivate this, there are many reasons for gold to have become the physical currency of choice, outlined here: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25255957 http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25255957 I would imagine that the long-term cryptocurrency will have comparable benefits (whatever those benefits are for cryptocurrencies).

singularity2001 9y ago

with transaction times of several minutes (hours?) how can people even trade that stuff?

amelius 9y ago

> It can all go to zero But there is more room to go up than to go down :)

test6554 9y ago

Lately, nothing makes me snicker more than google search hits like this: "Dogecoin price | index, chart, expert analysis and news"