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That's because Bitcoin is very tightly held, and the amount of tradeable float is very very small compared to holdings. This results in outsized volatility, as

That's because Bitcoin is very tightly held, and the amount of tradeable float is very very small compared to holdings. This results in outsized volatility, as it is still a developing market. 1T for a global currency is very small. We'll see how it behaves at 10T.

arcticbull 5y ago
> That's because Bitcoin is very tightly held, and the amount of tradeable float is very very small compared to holdings. By the diamond-est of hands: those who lost their keys.
- inter_netuser 5y ago
  I see you often comment on Bitcoin negatively, curious why?
  - arcticbull 5y ago
    It's a substantially-manipulated negative-sum distributed Ponzi scheme. The most blatant example of a naked emperor I've seen in my lifetime. And it consumes the energy of Argentina to achieve as much work as a Raspberry Pi.
    - celticninja 5y ago
      Missed a couple of early opportunities to buy eh? Don't worry about, expending your energy is going to get you nothing. Even if it all implodes tomorrow all you can do is say "I told you so". And you may feel superior to others, but no one will care. And if it doesn't implode you are here expending energy unnecessarily, which, we have already gathered, is an activity that you don't appreciate.
      - arcticbull 5y ago
        Classic coiner arguments. "Have fun staying poor!" For the record I: (1) Bought during the 2017 run-up, and sold around $17,000 in early 2018, and parlayed that into various other investments that have done quite well. I've posted to that effect here in the past. (2) Shorted CME futures at $56,000, and a bunch of Coinbase and a bunch of Tesla. That's roughly $100,000 USD per contract in profit - deposited directly into my SIPC insured FINRA regulated account with zero counter-party risk, 60% long term capital gains. Not bad for two weeks work. You worry about your account, leave mine to me :) I'm talking about crypto on its merits, not its price. The merits of course inform my investment decisions. There are tons of ways to make money on this planet, HODLing crypto is just one among them. I was addressing the question directly: why do I hate bitcoin? Asked, and answered. But to supplement: the thing I hate most about crypto are the touts and the community.
        celticninja 5y ago
        I wasn't asking for a breakdown of you wealth, the fact you felt the need to provide it to me indicates that you are someone who puts great store in their ability to accumulate wealth. So, as much as you may dislike the implication that part of your dislike is rooted in having missed an opportunity, you are certainly not strengthening your case for the opposite. My point is more that people who are always on the lookout to bash something they don't like usually have an underlying (often irrational) reason for disliking it. To go out of your way to expend that energy, when you do not have to. I dislike Tik~Tok, I don't get involved in discussions about it, I don't share links to it. I dont even think about it, or the power it uses or even the harm it is doing to its users. But here you are on another thread about cryptocurrencies about to blow a blood vessel. Just an observation. Take a break from it.
        arcticbull 5y ago
        > Missed a couple of early opportunities to buy eh? I was referring to the above. You are incorrect. I'm thoroughly enjoying myself, and this particular advocacy is making the world a better place.
        5y ago
      - dang 5y ago
        Would you please not cross into personal attack? The GP comment wasn't good, either, because it's much too generic and repetitive. Discerning readers are weary of this repetition, which is getting shallower and nastier as it continues. Nonetheless, what you posted was considerably worse. Please don't take threads in degenerate directions. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: we've had to warn you about this repeatedly in the past. It seems like you (mostly) improved for a while—that's good. Please do that instead.
    - midhhhthrow 5y ago
      Where else should people invest their money? Stocks are extremely overvalued According to the buffet ratio And bonds/cash will soon be completely worthless by the time the gov and feds of the world are done with them Real estate is extremely difficult to buy and sell. Execution is hard. There’s a desperate need for a store of value, now more than ever (gov of the world are abandoning their obligation of providing a stable fiat) Do you see any better solution than crypto?
      - Grustaf 5y ago
        It's really hard to imagine a WORSE store of value than crypto.
        inter_netuser 5y ago
        only went up 400% this year. Terrible. Everyone is wiping their tears with dollar bills right now, very bittersweet.
        arcticbull 5y ago
        Not anyone who bought in after January. Let's not cherry-pick dates. It's down 60% this month.
        Grustaf 5y ago
        Stores of value are not suppose to increase wildly in value. The purpose of a currency is not speculation, it's almost the opposite.
      - xyzzyz 5y ago
        Buy gold then, it is much less energy intensive to produce and hold.
        midhhhthrow 5y ago
        Put everything in gold/ precious metals with no other diversification? Gold has some funny business with its paper holdings because of the way governments lend it out.
    - megameter 5y ago
      OK, but who/what will the top holders of BTC exit to? In what scenario will the price go to zero? "Bans" are not going to do it. It was designed toward censorship resistance. That moves it to an underground, at best. The top holders are not going to dump it - they've committed book value assets; mining companies, exchanges - they aren't going to exit. For their continued existence to make sense they want more things to be traded in crypto, so they invent stuff like "NFT" and "DeFi". Half of it is crap, but I have been around long enough to remember when Wall Street was bullish on "3D Television". Investors always want angles to make their current holdings more valuable, and as of this moment there are far too many crypto projects to be aware of them all. The re-investment rate is huge. Far different from when a penny pumper puts out the "good news" that they have put their logo on a race car and have t-shirts available. So as I see it, it's either not a Ponzi or everything is.
- usrusr 5y ago
  Which effectively make the total amount of live tokens (the rough equivalent of share count or money supply in stocks or currencies) more deflatory than useful for any application outside of pyramid games. All projections of market cap that include the dead tokens are even more worthless than other market cap projections. Problem is: there's no way to tell the dead from the merely sleeping. The bigger the share of dark addresses, the bigger the impact of some "old god" dark address lighting up again. And the longer a "darkening deflation" goes on, the higher the impact of some old darknes wake-up would be.
  - gruez 5y ago
    But surely most of the coins were lost when they were cheap rather than now? If that's the case most of the deflation stemming from lost coins already happened and isn't going to happen in the future, so it's not really a big issue.
    - usrusr 5y ago
      Unless they were only presumed lost. Imagine someone had the power to suddenly activate whatever fraction of the contemporary USD supply their family had in 1800, proportionally scaled to the amount of USD circulating now. And in the deflatory bitcoin world, the amount of tokens in circulation might eventually end up being merely a tiny fraction of what some presumably dead addresses hold. An address like that lightning up would be as if the Fed suddenly announced that they just issued a multitude of the USD previously in circulation. Not to banks, as credit, but to some guy (unnamed). "Nice currency you have there, world economy, I have the other half of it. Let's be friends shall we?" Of course these are more hypothetical end game states than immediate threats (I think, I have no idea what fraction could currently be considered dark), but we can't just ignore theoreticals like that.
      - lovecg 5y ago
        Would they even be able to cash out though? Even a small transfer from a presumed-dead wallet can trigger a massive market crash in your scenario. Now if they just want to watch the world burn, that’s another matter.

arcticbull 5y ago

> That's because Bitcoin is very tightly held, and the amount of tradeable float is very very small compared to holdings. By the diamond-est of hands: those who lost their keys.

inter_netuser 5y ago
I see you often comment on Bitcoin negatively, curious why?
- arcticbull 5y ago
  It's a substantially-manipulated negative-sum distributed Ponzi scheme. The most blatant example of a naked emperor I've seen in my lifetime. And it consumes the energy of Argentina to achieve as much work as a Raspberry Pi.
  - celticninja 5y ago
    Missed a couple of early opportunities to buy eh? Don't worry about, expending your energy is going to get you nothing. Even if it all implodes tomorrow all you can do is say "I told you so". And you may feel superior to others, but no one will care. And if it doesn't implode you are here expending energy unnecessarily, which, we have already gathered, is an activity that you don't appreciate.
    - arcticbull 5y ago
      Classic coiner arguments. "Have fun staying poor!" For the record I: (1) Bought during the 2017 run-up, and sold around $17,000 in early 2018, and parlayed that into various other investments that have done quite well. I've posted to that effect here in the past. (2) Shorted CME futures at $56,000, and a bunch of Coinbase and a bunch of Tesla. That's roughly $100,000 USD per contract in profit - deposited directly into my SIPC insured FINRA regulated account with zero counter-party risk, 60% long term capital gains. Not bad for two weeks work. You worry about your account, leave mine to me :) I'm talking about crypto on its merits, not its price. The merits of course inform my investment decisions. There are tons of ways to make money on this planet, HODLing crypto is just one among them. I was addressing the question directly: why do I hate bitcoin? Asked, and answered. But to supplement: the thing I hate most about crypto are the touts and the community.
      - celticninja 5y ago
        I wasn't asking for a breakdown of you wealth, the fact you felt the need to provide it to me indicates that you are someone who puts great store in their ability to accumulate wealth. So, as much as you may dislike the implication that part of your dislike is rooted in having missed an opportunity, you are certainly not strengthening your case for the opposite. My point is more that people who are always on the lookout to bash something they don't like usually have an underlying (often irrational) reason for disliking it. To go out of your way to expend that energy, when you do not have to. I dislike Tik~Tok, I don't get involved in discussions about it, I don't share links to it. I dont even think about it, or the power it uses or even the harm it is doing to its users. But here you are on another thread about cryptocurrencies about to blow a blood vessel. Just an observation. Take a break from it.
        arcticbull 5y ago
        > Missed a couple of early opportunities to buy eh? I was referring to the above. You are incorrect. I'm thoroughly enjoying myself, and this particular advocacy is making the world a better place.
        5y ago
    - dang 5y ago
      Would you please not cross into personal attack? The GP comment wasn't good, either, because it's much too generic and repetitive. Discerning readers are weary of this repetition, which is getting shallower and nastier as it continues. Nonetheless, what you posted was considerably worse. Please don't take threads in degenerate directions. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: we've had to warn you about this repeatedly in the past. It seems like you (mostly) improved for a while—that's good. Please do that instead.
  - midhhhthrow 5y ago
    Where else should people invest their money? Stocks are extremely overvalued According to the buffet ratio And bonds/cash will soon be completely worthless by the time the gov and feds of the world are done with them Real estate is extremely difficult to buy and sell. Execution is hard. There’s a desperate need for a store of value, now more than ever (gov of the world are abandoning their obligation of providing a stable fiat) Do you see any better solution than crypto?
    - Grustaf 5y ago
      It's really hard to imagine a WORSE store of value than crypto.
      - inter_netuser 5y ago
        only went up 400% this year. Terrible. Everyone is wiping their tears with dollar bills right now, very bittersweet.
        arcticbull 5y ago
        Not anyone who bought in after January. Let's not cherry-pick dates. It's down 60% this month.
        Grustaf 5y ago
        Stores of value are not suppose to increase wildly in value. The purpose of a currency is not speculation, it's almost the opposite.
    - xyzzyz 5y ago
      Buy gold then, it is much less energy intensive to produce and hold.
      - midhhhthrow 5y ago
        Put everything in gold/ precious metals with no other diversification? Gold has some funny business with its paper holdings because of the way governments lend it out.
  - megameter 5y ago
    OK, but who/what will the top holders of BTC exit to? In what scenario will the price go to zero? "Bans" are not going to do it. It was designed toward censorship resistance. That moves it to an underground, at best. The top holders are not going to dump it - they've committed book value assets; mining companies, exchanges - they aren't going to exit. For their continued existence to make sense they want more things to be traded in crypto, so they invent stuff like "NFT" and "DeFi". Half of it is crap, but I have been around long enough to remember when Wall Street was bullish on "3D Television". Investors always want angles to make their current holdings more valuable, and as of this moment there are far too many crypto projects to be aware of them all. The re-investment rate is huge. Far different from when a penny pumper puts out the "good news" that they have put their logo on a race car and have t-shirts available. So as I see it, it's either not a Ponzi or everything is.
usrusr 5y ago
Which effectively make the total amount of live tokens (the rough equivalent of share count or money supply in stocks or currencies) more deflatory than useful for any application outside of pyramid games. All projections of market cap that include the dead tokens are even more worthless than other market cap projections. Problem is: there's no way to tell the dead from the merely sleeping. The bigger the share of dark addresses, the bigger the impact of some "old god" dark address lighting up again. And the longer a "darkening deflation" goes on, the higher the impact of some old darknes wake-up would be.
- gruez 5y ago
  But surely most of the coins were lost when they were cheap rather than now? If that's the case most of the deflation stemming from lost coins already happened and isn't going to happen in the future, so it's not really a big issue.
  - usrusr 5y ago
    Unless they were only presumed lost. Imagine someone had the power to suddenly activate whatever fraction of the contemporary USD supply their family had in 1800, proportionally scaled to the amount of USD circulating now. And in the deflatory bitcoin world, the amount of tokens in circulation might eventually end up being merely a tiny fraction of what some presumably dead addresses hold. An address like that lightning up would be as if the Fed suddenly announced that they just issued a multitude of the USD previously in circulation. Not to banks, as credit, but to some guy (unnamed). "Nice currency you have there, world economy, I have the other half of it. Let's be friends shall we?" Of course these are more hypothetical end game states than immediate threats (I think, I have no idea what fraction could currently be considered dark), but we can't just ignore theoreticals like that.
    - lovecg 5y ago
      Would they even be able to cash out though? Even a small transfer from a presumed-dead wallet can trigger a massive market crash in your scenario. Now if they just want to watch the world burn, that’s another matter.