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BTC is currently $11.5k USD, market cap $200 billion+. This is a valuable asset.
by seibelj 6y ago
BTC is currently $11.5k USD, market cap $200 billion+. This is a valuable asset.
- coldpie 6y agoYeah but like, what's it valuable for? It seems like commodity trading, except the commodity that is being traded is who gets stuck holding the bag when it all collapses. There's no real value there.
- leppr 6y agoIt's money not controlled by any single government or entity. It can be exchanged almost as easily as cash. If you don't see the use in that, then good for you, your needs must be met by the existing financial services. Personally, I used it to buy electronics in Japan, worked well. Also used it to sell my VR headset in person, because Paypal and our banks didn't allow the transfer. I use it to tip and donate to various online creators with no fuss. It's really quite simple, no need to overthink it. Sure, maybe one day the price will crash or the peg fail, but for most intents and purposes it works fine. Monitoring crypto prices and fundamentals is not so bad compared with traditional finance folks having to read through hundreds of all-caps tweets to know how much value the USD will lose this month, or sifting through reddit WSB troll posts to know which stock to buy.
- floatboth 6y agoIt's "money" controlled by a few large electricity-wasting pools.
- aeternum 6y agoStill more efficient than the alternatives. USD is controlled by an entity which spends $680 billion / year along with countless lives and 270k barrels of oil a day in order to defend it. Gold dug out of the ground, then put in high tech vaults which must be similarly actively defended.
- throwaway2048 6y agoEvery single one of those things is easier with the existing money system.
- leppr 6y agoExcept no, the exact reason I do/did these things with crypto is that I couldn't as easily do it with the existing infrastructure. Buying at a Bitpay PoS in Japan is just scanning a QR code, instant confirmation (Wechat easy but even foreigners can use it). A P2P sale for a non-insignificant amount of money (~$1.5k): rejected by Paypal, inter-bank transfer would take days to go through. BTC was 5 minutes to wait for a confirmation. Donations through Patreon or other require you to sign-up, go through convoluted systems that sometimes require sending your identity documents, crypto is just copy an address/scan a QR code and confirm in your usual, familiar wallet.
- VBprogrammer 6y ago> inter-bank transfer would take days to go through In the UK bank transfers are practically instantaneous. It's nuts that the US is so far behind on this.
- flotzam 6y agoGood luck paying an Iranian mail-order shoemaker... It's not hypothetical: https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-iranian-shoe-store-trade-sanctions https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-iranian-shoe-store-trade-sa... (EDIT) Sorry for my rude reply. Your point about intra-national transfers stands.
- leppr 6y agoThere are fast bank transfers in my country too, but for some reason my buyer's bank application was buggy and would only allow a traditional transfer. And of course, you can't use an alternative, non-buggy, app with your bank account...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- cultus 6y agoEach bitcoin transaction costs about $50 now. They're quite a bit more onerous to use than cash, thus people use "exchanges" which are controlled by for-profit private interests.
- flotzam 6y ago> Each bitcoin transaction costs about $50 now. That's off by a factor of 18 even if you want it to be fast, according to https://bitcoinfees.earn.com https://bitcoinfees.earn.com "The fastest and cheapest transaction fee is currently 110 satoshis/byte, shown in green at the top. For the median transaction size of 224 bytes, this results in a fee of 24,640 satoshis." = .0002464 BTC = $2.81
- Wheaties466 6y agoI just processed a bitcoin transaction and paid ~1.52 in fees. That was this morning.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- gamblor956 6y agoMonitoring crypto prices and fundamentals is not so bad compared with traditional finance folks having to read through hundreds of all-caps tweets to know how much value the USD will lose this month, No, you just have to worry about how much your crypto will change in value each day. Bitcoin's value changed by over 7% in just the past month, and in the past year has dropped in value by over 20% twice. That's so much better than worrying about the fraction of a percent in the monthly deltas for USD over the past several decades.
- MichaelBurge 6y agoIf you're worried about price fluctuations, sell Bitcoin futures against your holdings dated for when you need the USD? You have the exact same problem with gold, which has increased 30% over the last few months.
- beervirus 6y agoIt's "money" that's not meaningfully exchangeable for goods or services. I can't buy a sandwich with it, or pay my taxes with it, or get my salary in it. Its only utility is that it can (for now) be turned into a large amount of fiat currency. Its only value proposition is that maybe that large amount will be an even larger amount in the future.
- leppr 6y agoTo put your argument in other words: it doesn't have enough adoption to be more useful than the current alternatives. That has always been a caveat of new network-effect dependent technologies. In the early days, the internet wasn't useful to communicate with other people. It was way easier to just call the person on their phone instead of hoping they had a particular messaging application installed on their PC and had it turned on when you were hoping to talk. Its only value propositions were downloading porn for free or finding communities of geeks, trolls and conspiracy theorists. It served those niches well though, and from there slowly grew to attract more and more people and usecases.
- bigbubba 6y agoI've bought things with BTC (I believe I am rare insofar as I have never bought BTC but have spent them...) and having frequently used cash, I can assure you that spending BTC is not even remotely as easy as spending cash.
- troquerre 6y agoDigital gold is a better analogy for BTC than digital cash. As a value reserve BTC has a lot of desirable properties over gold (try moving $10m of gold around...). The fact that it's fairly easy to spend BTC is an additional positive point.
- K0balt 6y agoYeah, but ever tried to spend (actual) cash online? Any way you try, you're going to need 2 banks and a payment processor involved. The buyer bank, the seller bank, and Visa, PayPal, or somebody. In the end, something like 3-5 percent of what you spend is going to be redirected. These are real costs you pay.
- cryptica 6y ago>> Yeah but like, what's it valuable for? It's a deflationary store of value. What is Gold valuable for? It's a deflationary store of value (though it does inflate slightly so it's not as good as Bitcoin in that sense). Deflationary stores of value are valuable. It's the same reason why a battery is valuable if you have solar panels. It captures excess energy from the system and allows you to store it for later use when you actually need it (like at night when the sun doesn't shine). When the Fed is printing tons of money, the sun shining... You don't know what to do with all that excess energy. You could buy more electrical appliances to consume that excess electricity (e.g. invest in that hot new startup), but you already have more of them than you know what to do with... You may as well store that excess energy to use later for a rainy day.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- throw_m239339 6y agoNot a fan of bitcoin here but apparently it helps Venezuelans survive the terrible ordeal they are going through, because they can actually buy stuffs with bitcoin ,get donations to buy food,... thus avoiding US sanctions.
- jandrese 6y agoIt's kind of like asking what Tulip Bulbs are good for. There's a niche use case, but most people are just in it to make money by basically gambling.
- MichaelBurge 6y agoAt 72.61 terawatt-hours/year and an average electricity cost of 13.19 cents/kilowatt-hour, that's an asset that loses 9.6 billion per year. And if you ever stop wasting electricity, your bitcoin become less valuable. https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/
- oarsinsync 6y ago> an average electricity cost of 13.19 cents/kilowatt-hour Source? The link supplied uses 5 cents/kWh, which is also an assumption on their part that they do not explain either. There are lots of reports of 'seasonal mining' occurring in China, where mining operations are occurring in areas with very cheap or completely free electric, generally because the costs of producing the electricity are fixed, rather than scaling up or down with demand (geothermal / hydro / other renewables).
- MichaelBurge 6y agoI got that figure from Google, but it's the average residential rate and I guess you'd get the industrial rate for a large operation(my power company charges 5.95 cents for that).
- Passthepeas 6y agoVast majority of crypto currency mining is done with excess green energy that would otherwise be rejected by the grid and wasted, as high as 78% by some estimates. https://medium.com/value-of-bitcoin/bitcoins-energy-consumption-is-a-necessity-and-has-positive-impact-on-the-environment-752502288082 https://medium.com/value-of-bitcoin/bitcoins-energy-consumpt...
- banachtarski 6y agoSorry but this reeks of nonsense to me. Even if true, surely the compute power could be used for protein folding or something actually useful instead of hashing bits only to throw the results away the majority of the time. Crypto needs to die.
- bigbubba 6y agoMany things appear to be a valuable asset, right up until the moment they aren't. In mid-2000, Enron stock was a 'valuable asset.'