11 ms·

And thus, bitcoin. A stock that's guaranteed to provide no dividends, do no buy-backs, or deliver any value - aside from the ability to sell it to the next fool

by nikanj 6y ago

And thus, bitcoin. A stock that's guaranteed to provide no dividends, do no buy-backs, or deliver any value - aside from the ability to sell it to the next fool for an even greater value.

BelenusMordred 6y ago
You forgot no share dilution in this offtopic tangent. Every stock out there can double their issuance if they want to.
- vermilingua 6y ago
  As can bitcoin, and it would only take a soft fork.
  - WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
    Yeah, but you have to have people switch to that chain. Miners won't because it would devalue their coin. New buyers might because they can "buy cheap"
  - optimiz3 6y ago
    It wouldn't be Bitcoin then; a change in rules creates a new coin. There would have to be incredibly strong incentives for people to accept a fork that would debase their assets. Nit: it would also require a hard, not a soft fork.
  - BelenusMordred 6y ago
    There's a soft fork coming up for taproot requiring a super-consensus of 90% miners. It will likely go through and still be bitcoin afterwards. Thinking you might not understand the difference between the various types of forks the protocol can undergo. https://taprootactivation.com/ https://taprootactivation.com/
  - ric2b 6y ago
    > and it would only take a soft fork. No, it would be a hard-fork and be rejected by all nodes that weren't explicitly updated to accept it.
- auc 6y ago
  Yeah, but if they did this, they would be raising cash to deploy. Presumably in an attempt to grow their business and create actual value.
  - ric2b 6y ago
    > Presumably in an attempt to grow their business and create actual value. Or not, you don't know. Maybe a friend of the board wants to have a controlling stake in the company and that's the reason.
- scatters 6y ago
  A share offering doesn't make existing stockholdings worth less. Usually, they benefit, because it gives the company increased working capital to invest in projects.
  - ric2b 6y ago
    It (in theory) doesn't reduce the _market cap_, but it reduces the voting power of existing stockholdings and that is certainly bad for those shareholders.
px43 6y ago
I know this whole "bitcoin is pointles" meme gets upchuckles on hacker news all day long, but at this point it's pretty embarrassing that this level of ignorance continues to persist. As it turns out "sending money over the internet" is kind of an important utility for the modern world, and nothing does it as well as Bitcoin. This is why it's now a trillion dollar global economy. That's great for you that you're in a position where you never need to send money over the internet, and you have people who you trust that can manage all your money for you without robbing you, but that's a privilege not everyone in this world has. Please stop denigrating shit that you don't understand. Bring proud of ignorance is not a good look, and it really is embarrassing that a community that's supposed to be somewhat technologically sophisticated has bought in so hard to this ignorant-ass take.
- minitoar 6y ago
  I think I agree with your sentiment, but saying that nothing is as good as Bitcoin for sending money over the internet, and that’s why it has value, is just really not a compelling argument.
  - toss1 6y ago
    Yup. And that key feature of "sending money over the internet" thing hasn't worked out very well so far I've been in it, found the entire system wanting, and got out. May get in again to enjoy gamble in speculative bubbles, but as a technology, it is still in the early and massively-sucking and increasingly-sucking days. Like railroads in the 18th century, they utterly changed society, but most investors lost their shirts along the way. Scalability, inconvenience, insecurity, and transaction fees all suck to varying degrees at varying times. It used to be that transactions would take 5-10 minutes to confirm, and that seemed mildly inconvenient but acceptable due to low costs. Now, it varies wildly, e.g., between 61 and 426 minutes in the last week [1]. I just bought software last night and the transaction cleared in fewer seconds than I could notice, and that network handles orders of magnitude more transactions than does BTC. Costs. BTC transaction costs used to be astonishingly trivial. Now, they fluctuate wildly depending on network congestion, and average well over $20/transaction. [2] This is nuts. A BTC transaction has to be over $750 to be better than break-even compared to a 3% credit card transaction fee. The days of buying a pizza with BTC are long gone, unless you want to pay more in fees than for the pizza. But it might make sense for buying a Tesla, if your fiat-exchange costs on the input side are not too high. Inconvenience and insecurity. You can either keep your BTC with someone else, which means you don't control it ("Not your keys, not your coin", see also multiple exchange hacks and/or exit scams), or you must roll your own. This involves first, extensive research to avoid selecting a wallet that has either been deliberately designed to steal your bitcoin, or just has unknown vulnerabilities. Then, you need to have absolutely solid key management to avoid both having your BTC stolen bay targeted malware attacks, or losing it because you lost your key, crashed your drive, etc. I find this daunting with a solid tech background, getting individual users to successfully and conveniently do it is not going to happen. Paul Graham made an excellent point about this yesterday [3] In short, without MASSIVE improvements, BTC and many other cryptos are nothing more than gambling on vaporware. And that is ignoring the deliberately engineered-in catastrophic energy consumption, which is literally more than the energy consumption of entire countries, when we need desperately to be cutting energy usage to minimize anthropometric global warning Sure IFF [4] the system could be scaled to handle billions of transactions per day at a cost of pennies per transaction (compare with ACH network costs), and with a usable and secure UI/UX, sure it WOULD be fantastic. But over a decade since those promises, all of the metrics: scalability, security, transaction time, costs, are tracking in the wrong direction. I really wish someone could point me to some cruptocurrency that has these solved. I'd genuinely like to see it and would use and advocate for it. But until then, I can only hope they enjoy their gambling. [1] https://www.blockchain.com/charts/avg-confirmation-time https://www.blockchain.com/charts/avg-confirmation-time [2] https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_f... [3] https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1364986808900202513 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1364986808900202513 [4] If and Only If
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
olalonde 6y ago
Wait until you hear about US dollars.
- paulgb 6y ago
  There are many differences between the two, but one of the more obvious ones is that nobody is running around claiming that US dollars are a good investment.
  - WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
    I mean, the US does... every time the question of whether US bonds are worth it, the answer is always "sure, it's backed by the US government"
    - selectodude 6y ago
      Bonds are not dollars. Bonds have a positive return. Dollars, by design, have a negative return.
  - IgorPartola 6y ago
    I lived in Ukraine during a period of like 1000% inflation period month. At the time USD was the value store or choice. You get paid on the 1st of the month and if you don’t turn that cash into USD, by the end of the month it became almost worthless. Nobody could pay with USD (except the bribes), but you wanted to minimize the time you held Ukrainian currency as much as possible, down to hours if you could.
  - tshaddox 6y ago
    My bank offers savings accounts.
JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
A 'stock' that has no regulatory environment, either. But that's part of the draw.
- phone8675309 6y ago
  Digital tulips, only tulip farming didn't consume the same amount of electricity as a small, South American country every year.
  - Symbiote 6y ago
    Argentina has 45 million people, making it the 31st largest country in the world. It's not small by any measure.
  - JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
    Things only have value because we agree they do. The US Dollar is backed by the full faith and trust in the government. "Faith and trust" is as much a digital tulip.
    - jrumbut 6y ago
      Americans have to pay taxes with them, even if we get paid in gold coins or cryptocurrencies. If you don't pay you can go to prison. Therefore, owners of dollars can know there will be at least some minimal demand for dollars in the near future.
    - earhart 6y ago
      The dollar is also backed by the legal system (which gives the general populace a mechanism to redefine who owns which dollars, e.g. in case of fraud), and the Federal Reserve (which manipulates interest rates and dollar supply levels to try to keep the value relatively stable over time). If bitcoin could solve those problems, and the energy usage problem, I’d use it. As is, it’s solved the double-spend problem - admirable and impressive, but it’s not a substitute for a stable currency yet.
      - deleted 6y ago
colordrops 6y ago
Yes, 11 years after its debut and nearly a trillion in valuation, still ridiculously ignorant statements like "delivers no value". It delivers no value you care about. Many people care about money that can't be inflated, can't be stopped from being traded, and can't be controlled across international borders. Those are hugely valuable to some people, whether you find it valuable or not.
- ac29 6y ago
  > money that can't be inflated The supply of Bitcoin has been inflated, on average, every 10 minutes for the past ~11 years.
  - 177tcca 6y ago
    And will continue to. Event-based, surprise inflation is the only negative inflation, for the end user.
  - solosoyokaze 6y ago
    It's known exactly how many Bitcoin will be produced and at what rate. There will never be more than 21 million BTC. This was known and agreed upon by all participants in the system. How much USD will exist in 10 years?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - albntomat0 6y ago
      I understand and appreciate the point you're making (I want to add this as my response is slightly flippant). How many BTC will it take to buy a Toyota Corolla in Feb 2022?
      - solosoyokaze 6y ago
        Hopefully less than in Feb 2021. I think a better question would be, how many BTC will it take to buy a house in 2050? I think the three things that have experienced the most drastic inflation are: housing, healthcare and education. It would be interesting to measure Bitcoin's long term value next to those highly inflating costs. Say a house now costs 10 BTC/$500,000 and in 2050 10 BTC/$2,000,000.

by nikanj 6y ago

And thus, bitcoin. A stock that's guaranteed to provide no dividends, do no buy-backs, or deliver any value - aside from the ability to sell it to the next fool for an even greater value.

BelenusMordred 6y ago

You forgot no share dilution in this offtopic tangent. Every stock out there can double their issuance if they want to.

vermilingua 6y ago
As can bitcoin, and it would only take a soft fork.
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
  Yeah, but you have to have people switch to that chain. Miners won't because it would devalue their coin. New buyers might because they can "buy cheap"
- optimiz3 6y ago
  It wouldn't be Bitcoin then; a change in rules creates a new coin. There would have to be incredibly strong incentives for people to accept a fork that would debase their assets. Nit: it would also require a hard, not a soft fork.
- BelenusMordred 6y ago
  There's a soft fork coming up for taproot requiring a super-consensus of 90% miners. It will likely go through and still be bitcoin afterwards. Thinking you might not understand the difference between the various types of forks the protocol can undergo. https://taprootactivation.com/ https://taprootactivation.com/
- ric2b 6y ago
  > and it would only take a soft fork. No, it would be a hard-fork and be rejected by all nodes that weren't explicitly updated to accept it.
auc 6y ago
Yeah, but if they did this, they would be raising cash to deploy. Presumably in an attempt to grow their business and create actual value.
- ric2b 6y ago
  > Presumably in an attempt to grow their business and create actual value. Or not, you don't know. Maybe a friend of the board wants to have a controlling stake in the company and that's the reason.
scatters 6y ago
A share offering doesn't make existing stockholdings worth less. Usually, they benefit, because it gives the company increased working capital to invest in projects.
- ric2b 6y ago
  It (in theory) doesn't reduce the _market cap_, but it reduces the voting power of existing stockholdings and that is certainly bad for those shareholders.

px43 6y ago

I know this whole "bitcoin is pointles" meme gets upchuckles on hacker news all day long, but at this point it's pretty embarrassing that this level of ignorance continues to persist. As it turns out "sending money over the internet" is kind of an important utility for the modern world, and nothing does it as well as Bitcoin. This is why it's now a trillion dollar global economy. That's great for you that you're in a position where you never need to send money over the internet, and you have people who you trust that can manage all your money for you without robbing you, but that's a privilege not everyone in this world has. Please stop denigrating shit that you don't understand. Bring proud of ignorance is not a good look, and it really is embarrassing that a community that's supposed to be somewhat technologically sophisticated has bought in so hard to this ignorant-ass take.

minitoar 6y ago
I think I agree with your sentiment, but saying that nothing is as good as Bitcoin for sending money over the internet, and that’s why it has value, is just really not a compelling argument.
- toss1 6y ago
  Yup. And that key feature of "sending money over the internet" thing hasn't worked out very well so far I've been in it, found the entire system wanting, and got out. May get in again to enjoy gamble in speculative bubbles, but as a technology, it is still in the early and massively-sucking and increasingly-sucking days. Like railroads in the 18th century, they utterly changed society, but most investors lost their shirts along the way. Scalability, inconvenience, insecurity, and transaction fees all suck to varying degrees at varying times. It used to be that transactions would take 5-10 minutes to confirm, and that seemed mildly inconvenient but acceptable due to low costs. Now, it varies wildly, e.g., between 61 and 426 minutes in the last week [1]. I just bought software last night and the transaction cleared in fewer seconds than I could notice, and that network handles orders of magnitude more transactions than does BTC. Costs. BTC transaction costs used to be astonishingly trivial. Now, they fluctuate wildly depending on network congestion, and average well over $20/transaction. [2] This is nuts. A BTC transaction has to be over $750 to be better than break-even compared to a 3% credit card transaction fee. The days of buying a pizza with BTC are long gone, unless you want to pay more in fees than for the pizza. But it might make sense for buying a Tesla, if your fiat-exchange costs on the input side are not too high. Inconvenience and insecurity. You can either keep your BTC with someone else, which means you don't control it ("Not your keys, not your coin", see also multiple exchange hacks and/or exit scams), or you must roll your own. This involves first, extensive research to avoid selecting a wallet that has either been deliberately designed to steal your bitcoin, or just has unknown vulnerabilities. Then, you need to have absolutely solid key management to avoid both having your BTC stolen bay targeted malware attacks, or losing it because you lost your key, crashed your drive, etc. I find this daunting with a solid tech background, getting individual users to successfully and conveniently do it is not going to happen. Paul Graham made an excellent point about this yesterday [3] In short, without MASSIVE improvements, BTC and many other cryptos are nothing more than gambling on vaporware. And that is ignoring the deliberately engineered-in catastrophic energy consumption, which is literally more than the energy consumption of entire countries, when we need desperately to be cutting energy usage to minimize anthropometric global warning Sure IFF [4] the system could be scaled to handle billions of transactions per day at a cost of pennies per transaction (compare with ACH network costs), and with a usable and secure UI/UX, sure it WOULD be fantastic. But over a decade since those promises, all of the metrics: scalability, security, transaction time, costs, are tracking in the wrong direction. I really wish someone could point me to some cruptocurrency that has these solved. I'd genuinely like to see it and would use and advocate for it. But until then, I can only hope they enjoy their gambling. [1] https://www.blockchain.com/charts/avg-confirmation-time https://www.blockchain.com/charts/avg-confirmation-time [2] https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_f... [3] https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1364986808900202513 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1364986808900202513 [4] If and Only If

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

olalonde 6y ago

Wait until you hear about US dollars.

paulgb 6y ago
There are many differences between the two, but one of the more obvious ones is that nobody is running around claiming that US dollars are a good investment.
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
  I mean, the US does... every time the question of whether US bonds are worth it, the answer is always "sure, it's backed by the US government"
  - selectodude 6y ago
    Bonds are not dollars. Bonds have a positive return. Dollars, by design, have a negative return.
- IgorPartola 6y ago
  I lived in Ukraine during a period of like 1000% inflation period month. At the time USD was the value store or choice. You get paid on the 1st of the month and if you don’t turn that cash into USD, by the end of the month it became almost worthless. Nobody could pay with USD (except the bribes), but you wanted to minimize the time you held Ukrainian currency as much as possible, down to hours if you could.
- tshaddox 6y ago
  My bank offers savings accounts.

JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago

A 'stock' that has no regulatory environment, either. But that's part of the draw.

phone8675309 6y ago
Digital tulips, only tulip farming didn't consume the same amount of electricity as a small, South American country every year.
- Symbiote 6y ago
  Argentina has 45 million people, making it the 31st largest country in the world. It's not small by any measure.
- JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
  Things only have value because we agree they do. The US Dollar is backed by the full faith and trust in the government. "Faith and trust" is as much a digital tulip.
  - jrumbut 6y ago
    Americans have to pay taxes with them, even if we get paid in gold coins or cryptocurrencies. If you don't pay you can go to prison. Therefore, owners of dollars can know there will be at least some minimal demand for dollars in the near future.
  - earhart 6y ago
    The dollar is also backed by the legal system (which gives the general populace a mechanism to redefine who owns which dollars, e.g. in case of fraud), and the Federal Reserve (which manipulates interest rates and dollar supply levels to try to keep the value relatively stable over time). If bitcoin could solve those problems, and the energy usage problem, I’d use it. As is, it’s solved the double-spend problem - admirable and impressive, but it’s not a substitute for a stable currency yet.
    - deleted 6y ago

colordrops 6y ago

Yes, 11 years after its debut and nearly a trillion in valuation, still ridiculously ignorant statements like "delivers no value". It delivers no value you care about. Many people care about money that can't be inflated, can't be stopped from being traded, and can't be controlled across international borders. Those are hugely valuable to some people, whether you find it valuable or not.

ac29 6y ago
> money that can't be inflated The supply of Bitcoin has been inflated, on average, every 10 minutes for the past ~11 years.
- 177tcca 6y ago
  And will continue to. Event-based, surprise inflation is the only negative inflation, for the end user.
- solosoyokaze 6y ago
  It's known exactly how many Bitcoin will be produced and at what rate. There will never be more than 21 million BTC. This was known and agreed upon by all participants in the system. How much USD will exist in 10 years?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - albntomat0 6y ago
    I understand and appreciate the point you're making (I want to add this as my response is slightly flippant). How many BTC will it take to buy a Toyota Corolla in Feb 2022?
    - solosoyokaze 6y ago
      Hopefully less than in Feb 2021. I think a better question would be, how many BTC will it take to buy a house in 2050? I think the three things that have experienced the most drastic inflation are: housing, healthcare and education. It would be interesting to measure Bitcoin's long term value next to those highly inflating costs. Say a house now costs 10 BTC/$500,000 and in 2050 10 BTC/$2,000,000.