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Is it really a bubble or is it driven by market demands as more and more applications and use-cases emerge? In the end, a lot of the blockchain infrastructure r

Is it really a bubble or is it driven by market demands as more and more applications and use-cases emerge? In the end, a lot of the blockchain infrastructure relies on bitcoin hence it moves in sync. China's real estate market is a bubble because there is a excess of 500 million dwellings that are not needed.

bcrosby95 5y ago
I'm not really in the crypto scene so it's hard for me to tell. But of everyone I know in bitcoin, they just use it as an investment. Sell when it gets too high. Buy when it crashes. Sell it when they need to buy a new car. That's pretty much it. Maybe they're the minority. But if they aren't, I think there's eventually going to be a rude awakening.
paulgb 5y ago
> In the end, a lot of the blockchain infrastructure relies on bitcoin hence it moves in sync. Does it, though? I’m on the sidelines, but it seems like all the excitement/money flowing into crypto these days is into blockchains with higher transaction throughput and more advanced smart contract interpreters. I know there are some maxis trying to build things like DeFi and NFTs on Bitcoin but it seems to have really taken a backseat in the latest crypto hype cycle.
- leesalminen 5y ago
  > DeFi and NFTs on Bitcoin There are DeFi and NFT platforms on Bitcoin? I haven’t heard of those. Are you talking about Ethereum?
  - ur-whale 5y ago
    There are some efforts underway to bring ETH-like smart contracts to BTC, which - if they succeed - will allow all the ETH-powered paraphernalia to happen on top of BTC. But the going is slow. Other than that, there already are some "NFT's" embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain. To give you an example of what I mean, consider the Genesis block, which, while its reward can't be spent still has a private key attached to it. I'm willing to bet that the day the person who owns that key (Satoshi, assuming he's still alive) decides to put it up for auction, the bids won't be zero :)
  - jsemrau 5y ago
    Stacks is an example for such services on Bitcoin
- chillacy 5y ago
  As of this past week though, the price action is all in BTC reaching its ATH again of 60k+. Financial news is all about inflation, so I assume it's related buyers liking the fixed supply of BTC.
Tenoke 5y ago
Almost none of the blockchain infrastructure of other crypto projects relies on Bitcoin directly beyond it being an investment in the same general sector.
chadcmulligan 5y ago
> there is a excess of 500 million dwellings Do you have a reference for this?
closeparen 5y ago
It doesn't follow from an application or use case for blockchain technology that I should pay you millions of dollars for the service of having previously owned some Bitcoins. For one thing I could transact on some cheaper altcoin, or make my own. I still have to pay for hashing power and liquidity. Those guys are smart. But their business is competitive and in the long run profits will be thin. Bitcoin's dwindling supply is a clever trick, but in reality the supply of tokens with which to make blockchain transactions is growing all the time. For another, payments infrastructure is a problem but not a huge problem. There is a ceiling on how much it's worth to solve. And the traditional banking system remains a competitor. Not to say you can't get paid for helping me with a payments problem, but orders of magnitude profit? For such an ancillary contribution of having the currency prior to me (or my customers)? Color me skeptical.
NicoJuicy 5y ago
Who is actually using it? I know a lot of people that have like 100-200 € in it as an experiment and they spend 0€ . It's 2017 all over again.
- patchtopic 5y ago
  I use it a bit for buying stuff (hosting, VPNs, domains, SSL certs and other stuff when I can).. but litecoin is actually more useful for this as less volatile, faster transactions and lower fees.
1270018080 5y ago
We're still waiting for the first application or use case.
- jsemrau 5y ago
  Who is we? Joke aside, I believe a lot of the creator economy will be build on crypto.
rsj_hn 5y ago
I'm interested in this problem, so I'll dig into it here. 500 million? From what I can see, it's 50 million here: https://www.scmp.com/business/china-business/article/2172413/fifth-chinas-urban-housing-supply-lies-empty-equivalent-50 https://www.scmp.com/business/china-business/article/2172413... Elsewhere I see 65 million https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/The-Big-Story/China-s-housing-glut-casts-pall-over-the-economy https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/The-Big-Story/China-s-hous... So maybe you added a zero accidentally? Either way, the 50 million figure is supposed to be 1/5 of all urban homes. Let's see if that checks out. 64% of China is urbanized according to https://www.statista.com/statistics/270162/urbanization-in-china/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/270162/urbanization-in-c... So they estimate 840 million urbanized and a fifth of that is 50 million? That means 250 million homes for the 840 million people. That would be 3.4 people per home, on average. Statista says Chinese household size is 2.92 https://www.statista.com/statistics/278697/average-size-of-households-in-china/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/278697/average-size-of-h... So in that case, with 840m urban pop., we'd expect 288 million homes, urbanized so a fifth would be 58 million, about half-way between 50 and 68. My guess is that they did a sample and found about a fifth unoccupied, rather than trying to count all unoccupied homes. So let's ballpark and say 60 million homes. But if you look at the same urbanization graph from statista, it's climbing at about 1% per year (ignoring the sharp climb from 2019 to 2020). Moreover, household sizes are falling by 0.1 per year. Both of these are sources of demand for more homes -- people moving to cities and moving out of their parents homes to create smaller households. So together, the growing demand for homes would be the 14 million people from urbanization (1%) corresponding to ~4.8 million new homes, and decreasing household sizes, corresponding to 1.6 million more homes, so 6.4 million homes per year. But there is also a demand coming from homes being torn down. Let's say homes last for 50 years (assuming not very well built, as China was poor when the oldest homes were built). So they'd need to build ~9.6 million new homes each year just to replace the obsolete old homes. So now ~16 million homes need to be built each year (assuming my estimates). Let's see if we can double check that number. From one of the housing glut articles, we see that 15 million homes are built each year https://www.businessinsider.com/china-empty-homes-real-estate-evergrande-housing-market-problem-2021-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/china-empty-homes-real-estat... snaps suspenders. Seems like a good enough double-check for back of the envelope calculation. So if we need 15 million per year, a ~60 million supply of empty homes is only 4 years lead. Let's compare that to the U.S. We have 17 million empty homes. https://247wallst.com/housing/2019/09/30/there-are-over-17-million-vacant-homes-in-america/ https://247wallst.com/housing/2019/09/30/there-are-over-17-m... Out of a base of 141 million https://www.statista.com/topics/1618/residential-housing-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/topics/1618/residential-housing-in-... And we're building about 300K. So the US ratios of %vacant homes and vacant/annual_production are 12% and 57. Whereas the Chinese ratio of vacant homes/total and vacant/annual_production is 12% and 4. Now many of the US vacant homes are vacation homes. But then why can't China also have vacation homes? In other words, it doesn't seem that the Chinese market, in terms of number of vacant homes, is really extreme. I suspect what happened is that a reporter stumbled on a statistic that said 1 out of 5 urban homes were empty, and they freaked out; then the story went viral. There's so much terrible reporting happening now. The difference seems to boil down to the fact that Chinese use their homes not as second homes but investments, and they leave the home unfurnished (like a concrete box), in the expectation that they will sell it for more later. And if you borrowed to buy the home and are leveraged, then you may be in trouble. But if you didn't, you can turn it into a vacation home. So maybe there is a problem there, but it doesn't seem to be an enormous problem. But this is me just googling and applying some arithmetic.

bcrosby95 5y ago

I'm not really in the crypto scene so it's hard for me to tell. But of everyone I know in bitcoin, they just use it as an investment. Sell when it gets too high. Buy when it crashes. Sell it when they need to buy a new car. That's pretty much it. Maybe they're the minority. But if they aren't, I think there's eventually going to be a rude awakening.

paulgb 5y ago

> In the end, a lot of the blockchain infrastructure relies on bitcoin hence it moves in sync. Does it, though? I’m on the sidelines, but it seems like all the excitement/money flowing into crypto these days is into blockchains with higher transaction throughput and more advanced smart contract interpreters. I know there are some maxis trying to build things like DeFi and NFTs on Bitcoin but it seems to have really taken a backseat in the latest crypto hype cycle.

leesalminen 5y ago
> DeFi and NFTs on Bitcoin There are DeFi and NFT platforms on Bitcoin? I haven’t heard of those. Are you talking about Ethereum?
- ur-whale 5y ago
  There are some efforts underway to bring ETH-like smart contracts to BTC, which - if they succeed - will allow all the ETH-powered paraphernalia to happen on top of BTC. But the going is slow. Other than that, there already are some "NFT's" embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain. To give you an example of what I mean, consider the Genesis block, which, while its reward can't be spent still has a private key attached to it. I'm willing to bet that the day the person who owns that key (Satoshi, assuming he's still alive) decides to put it up for auction, the bids won't be zero :)
- jsemrau 5y ago
  Stacks is an example for such services on Bitcoin
chillacy 5y ago
As of this past week though, the price action is all in BTC reaching its ATH again of 60k+. Financial news is all about inflation, so I assume it's related buyers liking the fixed supply of BTC.

Tenoke 5y ago

Almost none of the blockchain infrastructure of other crypto projects relies on Bitcoin directly beyond it being an investment in the same general sector.

chadcmulligan 5y ago

> there is a excess of 500 million dwellings Do you have a reference for this?

closeparen 5y ago

It doesn't follow from an application or use case for blockchain technology that I should pay you millions of dollars for the service of having previously owned some Bitcoins. For one thing I could transact on some cheaper altcoin, or make my own. I still have to pay for hashing power and liquidity. Those guys are smart. But their business is competitive and in the long run profits will be thin. Bitcoin's dwindling supply is a clever trick, but in reality the supply of tokens with which to make blockchain transactions is growing all the time. For another, payments infrastructure is a problem but not a huge problem. There is a ceiling on how much it's worth to solve. And the traditional banking system remains a competitor. Not to say you can't get paid for helping me with a payments problem, but orders of magnitude profit? For such an ancillary contribution of having the currency prior to me (or my customers)? Color me skeptical.

NicoJuicy 5y ago

Who is actually using it? I know a lot of people that have like 100-200 € in it as an experiment and they spend 0€ . It's 2017 all over again.

patchtopic 5y ago
I use it a bit for buying stuff (hosting, VPNs, domains, SSL certs and other stuff when I can).. but litecoin is actually more useful for this as less volatile, faster transactions and lower fees.

1270018080 5y ago

We're still waiting for the first application or use case.

jsemrau 5y ago
Who is we? Joke aside, I believe a lot of the creator economy will be build on crypto.

rsj_hn 5y ago

I'm interested in this problem, so I'll dig into it here. 500 million? From what I can see, it's 50 million here: https://www.scmp.com/business/china-business/article/2172413/fifth-chinas-urban-housing-supply-lies-empty-equivalent-50 https://www.scmp.com/business/china-business/article/2172413... Elsewhere I see 65 million https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/The-Big-Story/China-s-housing-glut-casts-pall-over-the-economy https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/The-Big-Story/China-s-hous... So maybe you added a zero accidentally? Either way, the 50 million figure is supposed to be 1/5 of all urban homes. Let's see if that checks out. 64% of China is urbanized according to https://www.statista.com/statistics/270162/urbanization-in-china/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/270162/urbanization-in-c... So they estimate 840 million urbanized and a fifth of that is 50 million? That means 250 million homes for the 840 million people. That would be 3.4 people per home, on average. Statista says Chinese household size is 2.92 https://www.statista.com/statistics/278697/average-size-of-households-in-china/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/278697/average-size-of-h... So in that case, with 840m urban pop., we'd expect 288 million homes, urbanized so a fifth would be 58 million, about half-way between 50 and 68. My guess is that they did a sample and found about a fifth unoccupied, rather than trying to count all unoccupied homes. So let's ballpark and say 60 million homes. But if you look at the same urbanization graph from statista, it's climbing at about 1% per year (ignoring the sharp climb from 2019 to 2020). Moreover, household sizes are falling by 0.1 per year. Both of these are sources of demand for more homes -- people moving to cities and moving out of their parents homes to create smaller households. So together, the growing demand for homes would be the 14 million people from urbanization (1%) corresponding to ~4.8 million new homes, and decreasing household sizes, corresponding to 1.6 million more homes, so 6.4 million homes per year. But there is also a demand coming from homes being torn down. Let's say homes last for 50 years (assuming not very well built, as China was poor when the oldest homes were built). So they'd need to build ~9.6 million new homes each year just to replace the obsolete old homes. So now ~16 million homes need to be built each year (assuming my estimates). Let's see if we can double check that number. From one of the housing glut articles, we see that 15 million homes are built each year https://www.businessinsider.com/china-empty-homes-real-estate-evergrande-housing-market-problem-2021-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/china-empty-homes-real-estat... snaps suspenders. Seems like a good enough double-check for back of the envelope calculation. So if we need 15 million per year, a ~60 million supply of empty homes is only 4 years lead. Let's compare that to the U.S. We have 17 million empty homes. https://247wallst.com/housing/2019/09/30/there-are-over-17-million-vacant-homes-in-america/ https://247wallst.com/housing/2019/09/30/there-are-over-17-m... Out of a base of 141 million https://www.statista.com/topics/1618/residential-housing-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/topics/1618/residential-housing-in-... And we're building about 300K. So the US ratios of %vacant homes and vacant/annual_production are 12% and 57. Whereas the Chinese ratio of vacant homes/total and vacant/annual_production is 12% and 4. Now many of the US vacant homes are vacation homes. But then why can't China also have vacation homes? In other words, it doesn't seem that the Chinese market, in terms of number of vacant homes, is really extreme. I suspect what happened is that a reporter stumbled on a statistic that said 1 out of 5 urban homes were empty, and they freaked out; then the story went viral. There's so much terrible reporting happening now. The difference seems to boil down to the fact that Chinese use their homes not as second homes but investments, and they leave the home unfurnished (like a concrete box), in the expectation that they will sell it for more later. And if you borrowed to buy the home and are leveraged, then you may be in trouble. But if you didn't, you can turn it into a vacation home. So maybe there is a problem there, but it doesn't seem to be an enormous problem. But this is me just googling and applying some arithmetic.