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What if Bitcoin went to zero?
- rk06 5y agothen we will have chip excess!
- a9h74j 5y agothen my short at $300 will pay off!
- wcoenen 5y agoThe article links to a post by Fitch Ratings[1] (from two months ago) about how the dumping of stablecoin reserves could affect the rest of the financial market. That still seems to be the most plausible mechanism for contagion. [1] https://www.fitchratings.com/research/fund-asset-managers/stablecoins-could-pose-new-short-term-credit-market-risks-01-07-2021 https://www.fitchratings.com/research/fund-asset-managers/st...
- dustymcp 5y agopaywall
- BrissyCoder 5y agoWorks a treat: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome
- forgingahead 5y agohttps://archive.ph/HKm8k https://archive.ph/HKm8k
- batch12 5y agoThen I may buy some.
- ackbar03 5y agoThen I can finally afford to buy that graphics card
- CryptoPunk 5y agoBitcoin mining hasn't relied on graphics cards in years. SHA2 calculations are highly amenable to ASIC speedups, so ASICs took over Bitcoin mining pretty early in its history.
- strogonoff 5y agoI didn’t downvote you, but your point does not necessarily invalidate the point you responded to. The whale of cryptocurrencies more or less props up all of the smaller coins, which are relying on GPUs and even SSDs/HDDs in mining. It goes down, they could lose enough of value to suffer their own runaway effects, and crashes will make PC gaming and computing overall much more affordable.
- CryptoPunk 5y agoThat other cryptocurrencies would depreciate in the event of Bitcoin's dissapearance is a highly debateable point.
- toomanydoubts 5y agoWhat if the dollar went to 0 (as it has been going ever since Nixon took us off the gold standard)?
- sfe22 5y agoPresumably a lot worse than bitcoin to zero. And crypto fans get to advertise infinite percentage growth even if its value is a few pennies of todays dollars. But at least you can burn todays paper dollars. Cannot do that to bitcoin.
- elif 5y agoWhat if paywall journalism went to zero?
- xiphias2 5y agoThe big question that big media fails to ask is what if - after infinite money printing - all fiat currencies go to zero together
- factorialboy 5y agoShouldn't be defensive. Crypto communities spread FUD about fiat all the time. Some of it justified. But equally justified is looking at the -real- value that BTC and other crypto assets offer. (Disclosure: As many people here on HN, I entered into the crypto space during the 2016-2017 rally. Still get paid in fiat. And my biggest assets are in real-estate.)
- xiphias2 5y agoAs for me my biggest asset was fiat until I realized how bad deal I'm getting, how much I was screwed by going to another country and saving all my money in fiat. That's why I was open to Bitcoin early on. For you, as your biggests assets are in real-estate, you're not in the danger that most people in the world are.
- garyclarke27 5y agoIt’s clearly possible for a particular currency to go to go to zero with unlimited money printing as demonstrated in history - Germany, Serbia, Zimbabwe etc. But it’s almost certain that not ALL countries would be that stupid to print infinite new money eg Switzerland. Bitcoin will probably go to zero, when we have the next major crisis, such as when China invades Taiwan or before when the Tether Ponzi scheme inevitably implodes.
- sitzkrieg 5y agoabsolutely nothing of value would be lost really if this happened
- ur-whale 5y ago> absolutely nothing of value would be lost really if this happened You're wrong: all the nocoiners on HN would be robbed of an opportunity to cringe every time BTC is mentioned on the site.
- Ekaros 5y agoNah, we could still continue to laugh at it like we laugh at beanie babies... Or tulip mania.
- vntok 5y agoIn the current situation, both sides laugh. One laughs on HN, the other laughs all the way to the bank.
- bob229 5y agoFunny, we never hear from the people who have lost thousand even though they exist in great numbers as they do in all ponzi schemes
- goblin89 5y agoExactly, people who keep honestly earned currency in a bank can probably afford to laugh on the way there—they are used to paying tax, they don’t have to worry about new KYC measures somewhere or theft of their token device invalidating their savings, etc. They can be made fun of by cryptocurrency holders here on HN, but interacting with the financial system is much less like a warzone for them.
- helloworld11 5y agoI'm sorry, what? In many, possibly most jurisdictions, and certainly in the United States, there is nothing in the law that specifically stops you from having made a perfectly legal, legitimate fortune by holding bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies and then cashing them out into fiat through the same formal banks that any other investor uses with no worries about dodging KYC as long as they followed reporting requirements. Unless they're actively evading taxes or laundering money, cryptocurrency holders on HN or elsewhere can interact with many parts of the financial system without any warzone traumas at all. You're blatantly misrepresenting the nature of how it's possible to make money with Bitcoin et al. The majority of it is a legal market and its completely legally possible to hold, gain, sell and cash out successfully.
- ur-whale 5y agoI would love to see Bitcoin crash to close-to-zero levels: I'd buy as much as I can afford short of actually starving. I suspect I'm far from the only one with that outlook, and therefore ... BTC going to zero is unlikely.
- sfe22 5y agoIf btc goes to zero a lot of stuff may have to happen, why do you think it would be so attractive to you then? Think of it this way: Are you rushing to buy forks that are dropping to zero now?
- ashwagary 5y agoPeople with high risk tolerance move in when everyone is afraid (catching the falling knife). Knowing enough to trust Bitcoin's antifragile support structure and game theory is a market edge during a blackswan scenario.
- FounderBurr 5y agoLinks to sites that are just advertisements to buy a subscription should not be allowed.
- axegon_ 5y agoChip shortage is over, hardware has reasonable price tags for the first time since the pandemic started(or longer, I lost track of time).
- ashwagary 5y agoBitcoin will never go to zero. Why? There are too many billionaires that will buy the total available supply long before it can get to $0.
- shapefrog 5y agoIt might just overshoot zero and go to a negative value. 0n a long enought time line bitcoin, in its current form at least, will 100% be worthless. That day is when its cryptographic backbone is either broken or surpassed by computing capacity to break the public / private keys.
- ashwagary 5y agoSo you think the chain will be attacked and all the devs with trillions invested (at that point in the future) will be completely blindsided and not defend the network by soft/hardforking/etc? I completely disagree.
- shapefrog 5y agoYour reply reads like a 'complete agreement' rather than a disagreement - as at that point in time you suggest, the chain ... will no longer be in its current form. So yes, I completely agree with your agreement.
- ashwagary 5y ago>Your reply reads like a 'complete agreement' rather than a disagreement Wrong, there have been a few soft forks already. You seem to not know the history of bitcoin or what makes bitcoin bitcoin. You need to do some studying before discussing this topic.
- bloodyplonker22 5y agoJust like all the billionaires that bought the total supply of tulips when they were falling, right?
- turbinerneiter 5y agoI think this will be a fun discussion, given the paywalled article, we are all free to comment instead of read.
- chews 5y agoBut like other commodities can it go to negative 0?
- hirako2000 5y agoIt's actually possible. If taxes due get assigned and tracked to particular bitcoin fractions, and since taxes incur interest, we could be in a situation one day where you would get paid to accept ownership of btc. It would be surreal, but if the IRS is given hope that it's a way to get people scared of btc, and that the KYC data all these exchanges have allow accurate enough accounting and tracking, they would do it, givin all sort of explanation as to why the new taxation rules are needed.
- tomp 5y agoHm.. if BTC is negative, then you’d be paying negative taxes on it (IRS paying you, or equivalently you paying less tax on e.g. income). A lot of people want that, so they’d want BTC, bringing it back into positive.
- HeyZuess 5y ago> if BTC is negative, then you’d be paying negative taxes on it Nouriel Roubini implies that carbon tax could mean a negative value. Contrary to income tax, a carbon tax wouldn't be a "negative" tax.
- hirako2000 5y agoafaik the IRS doesn't pay you on losses. It does balance your revenue and business expenses, but interestingly regulations on crypto investments make them a category on their own. So if you have 0 overall revenue in a year, but earned say 100k from salaried/contract labor employment, but lost 100k on BTC because it reached zero, you still owe the IRS taxes on your 100k revenue. Taxes are so absurd when looking a them more closely. Corporate entities get to offset expenses, only the net profit incur corporate tax on profit; but human entities have all their expenses ignored from the equation. So, buy BTC, and that's the same as gambling or have a serious drug addiction in term of expenses, make a profit and you end up having to pay the crypto tax, and also having to cover the cost of tracking all the transactions that may have occurred between btc and other tokens if you were adventurous and loved experimenting with the overall digital token market.
- hirako2000 5y agoIf btc goes to zero, and it's almost certain it will. Then it means other decentralised ledger tech have fulfilled the needs initially satisfied by btc. To the point where nobody wants btc even for the equivalent of a penny. I wouldn't pay a penny to get telegraphs credits since there are no network available to me to use them for anything. And phone, then Internet supersedes all features of telegraphs.
- gthaman 5y agoHow does it feel to be involved with technology to such a degree so as to be reading and commenting on hacker news and yet you entirely missed any opportunity so far with Bitcoin ?
- boublepop 5y agoBitcoin is not magic, the opportunities it offers are also available to other technologies and if others solve the problems better than Bitcoin then it too will go the way of the Telegraph credits. Social networks didn’t disappear and likely won’t disappear, but arguing that people “missed the opportunity of social networks” for saying that MySpace would go away is just plain silly.
- dang 5y agoThat crosses into personal attack, which is not allowed and will get you banned here. Please don't post like that to HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- cko 5y agoI don't own any crypto, yet I don't see BTC going to zero. It may already have network effects.
- ashwagary 5y agoNetwork effects are important but it is worth considering. Also worth considering what it would take for other large beneficiaries of network effects like Facebook, Apple, & Google to go to zero.
- newswasboring 5y agoSlightly off topic, but does economist never give the author of the article? There isn't one on this. One name mentioned on the cover art is I think the painter of the art. I find it weird that no author is mentioned.
- jks 5y agoUsually not, with some exceptions: https://www.economist.com/frequently-asked-questions https://www.economist.com/frequently-asked-questions
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- chewz 5y agoIn relation to what? US Dollar? Gold? AK-47? A loaf of bread?
- aix1 5y agoI am not sure I quite follow the thinking. If something has zero intrinsic value, does it matter which units are used to expressed that (so long as the units themselves have some non-zero value)?
- BoHerfIIIJrEsq 5y agoWhat does "intrinsic value" mean?
- chewz 5y agoAre you sure that US Dollar or Gold or bread have some intrinsic value? Day to day they do have some stable price but on a longer time scale that changes a lot. Let's take EURUSD for example - both currencies are loosing purchasing power but EUSUSD ranges from 0,9 to 1,6 within last 50 years. In some sci-fi scenario US Dollar could also go to zero if for example USA looses major war with China as is left with crushing debt. This is a possibility. What would be the value of Bitcoin then?
- retsibsi 5y agoIf USD became worthless, people would stop denominating the value of bitcoin in USD. This (or less drastic but still major fluctuations of USD) would complicate questions about how bitcoin's value had changed over time, but I'm not seeing how it would create ambiguity over whether bitcoin had 'gone to zero' or not.
- retsibsi 5y agoWhy would it have value in relation to some of those and not others? Sure, state action could make it hard to exchange bitcoins for other currencies, but we could still infer a $ value by looking at the btc and $ prices of goods they can both buy. (And yeah there can be complications and imperfections in that process, but not enough to make the statements 'bitcoin does/doesn't have 0 value' particularly vague or ambiguous.)
- bob229 5y agoIt’ll never go to zero, there are too many idiots in the world who will always buy into this eternal ponzi scheme
- zarzavat 5y agoIf bitcoin went to zero it would imply some exploit in bitcoin allowing creation of an unlimited number of coins. If this happened, then someone would hard fork the chain before the exploit and fix the issue and anybody who had not transacted since the exploit would keep their coins, albeit at diminished (but not zero) value.
- notanog 5y agoThe only case i see it goes to zero if there's a breakthrough in ECC (Elliptic curve cryptography). Then everyone owns everyone's coins.
- agumonkey 5y agonot to sound moronic, but the news cycles on cryptocurrencies is funny to watch a nice stream of useless hyperbolic and very well timed pieces on a more serious note, who thinks distributed supply chain management could really help things on large scale ? (supposedly free, consistent, 24/7 tracking of items and data) I see so much friction for that in companies .. it made me wonder.
- junon 5y ago> distributed supply chain management This is already its own industry. Lots of big companies have bought into the blockchain aspect of it. Unfortunately I can't give you any names. I just know a few select friends of mine quite literally never shut up about it. I just know it exists.
- agumonkey 5y agoand based on your info, do you think: 1) it's 90% fad ? 2) it does improve the existing ? 3) do you think the broad principles can reach other parts of society (I do, but I'm not connected to anybody in the industry.. I should though)
- junon 5y agoI don't really know, to be honest. I haven't done much research on it. But I know the types of people that talk about it have little authority on the subject, so by that metric I'm not a fan. But I could be wrong.
- boublepop 5y agoTo me the most fascinating thing about Bitcoin is perfectly displayed in this comment thread. People act like simply because it’s computers and algorithms that it’s beyond the reach of law. Imagine that mentality in other fields. Like “there’s no way we can make laws against murder, because people can just sail to international waters and kill their victim and then come back” Bitcoin only has value due to people and those people are all subjects to some laws and regulations. It’s perfectly reasonable to expect over time that these laws will make bitcoin “just a boring currency” in which case it will go to zero, because it’s an absolutely horrible currency by all accounts. Anyone who has ever tried to buy a cup of coffee with Bitcoin will tell you. Bitcoins current valuation is a combination of speculation and illegal transfer of value. Both of which are extremely vulnerable to regulation, and “it’s algorithms running on computers” doesn’t protect against that, no matter how many cyberpunks have wet dreams that it does.
- 0x000000001 5y agoHere is a video of what it's actually like to buy coffee with Bitcoin https://twitter.com/PeterMcCormack/status/1404472405549060100 https://twitter.com/PeterMcCormack/status/140447240554906010...
- nroets 5y agoBitcoin is most popular in countries with high inflation and countries with capital controls. That coincides with bad policies, mismanagement or even oppression. As a citizen of such a country, I can see the attraction of Bitcoin. Bitcoin offers hard-working people a way out. (South Africa has relaxed it's capital controls to the point where I never considered buying Bitcoin. But there are some millionaires here who are not allowed to take all their money out)
- shapefrog 5y ago> Bitcoin is most popular in countries with high inflation and countries with capital controls. That coincides with bad policies, mismanagement or even oppression. Source please? I would have guessed; by market cap the majority is held in the US and Europe. I would have guessed: by transaction volume, the majority in the US and Europe.
- yawaworht1978 5y agoIt could go to zero if all miners stopped. People could still go back to mining on PCs but the network would become fragile and prone to a malicious take over. If this ever happens, the sequence of events will be interesting to observe.
- andirk 5y agoBack to where we started. Good buying opportunity