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Bitcoin Just Hit a New All Time High in US Dollars
- endisneigh 5y agoWhat’s the end result of the hyperinflation of everything?
- systemvoltage 5y agoRemember last year when we couldn't even say the word 'inflation' on HN without being flagged and completely stomped by the boots? The boots are now realizing that inflation is here to stay. Even the most liberal media has admitted (NYTimes). Comparisons with 2009 fiscal stimulus didn't hold up.
- zionic 5y agoWho could have possibly seen this coming? https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL
- systemvoltage 5y agoLiterally all of HN. All you have to do is search threads from 2020. My point is more than this issue - it is how HN treats dissent and diverging opinions.
- purple_ferret 5y ago> Hyperinflation refers to rapid and unrestrained price increases in an economy, typically at rates exceeding 50% each month over time. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/hyperinflation.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/hyperinflation.asp
- endisneigh 5y agoSure, I’m not saying there is hyperinflation of everything, but I was wondering the result is. Per your definition Bitcoin has hyper inflated in the past month. What’s the result of this?
- steego 5y agoAssuming Bitcoin is a currency, it would have experienced hyper-deflation. Under hyper-inflation, your currency would lose value at the end of the month because the price of everything has risen 50% or more. Under-hyper deflation, the prices of everything plummets at the end of the month. While this sounds great, deflation also has a negative impact on economies because people are less likely to spend their money today if they know it’s going to appreciate value at the end of the month. If you’re interested this subject, there’s so many great resources that do an excellent job explaining monetary policy. Salman Kahn of Khan Academy is actually a pretty great resource for explaining this stuff in simpler terms. Planet Money keeps their shows accessible and do a great job explaining the basics and backstory of policies and ideas.
- steego 5y agoYou do know that hyperinflation refers to inflation that exceeds 50% per month, right? 5% yearly inflation is just plain old inflation.
- janandonly 5y agoEarlier this week Bitcoin already hit ATH's in Euro and some other currencies. Earlier this month already new ATH's in Total Market Cap in us Dollars.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jzig 5y agoiFinex printing more tethers to pay that 41mm fine?
- jonrcooper 5y agoBitcoin's market cap has increased by 70B in the last 24 hours. That fine and this rise is not even in the same order of magnitude.
- Slartie 5y agoTether printer is rather silent right now. So is USDCoin. Both hit a plateau a week ago. That's one thing concerning me with this ATH. Large upswings usually coincided with USDT/USDC issuance for the last years, which makes sense, given that fresh money is needed to drive new ATHs and the USDT/USDC market caps are the best-available proxy for the amount of fiat stashed in the crypto ecosystem. It could be that this hype cycle and new ATH is still being driven by money that has already been in the system (but on the sidelines for a while, probably since the big drop in May of this year), but if that was the case, then it should be rather short-lived if large chunks of new money don't start entering the system soon.
- WalterSear 5y agoAccording to this tweet, Tether has over 1.62 billion USDT to get through before it needs to print. https://twitter.com/realpauleverton/status/1450875891362435073 https://twitter.com/realpauleverton/status/14508758913624350...
- yitchelle 5y agoAnyone have a layman's guess as to what is driving it to hit these ATHs?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- bally0241 5y agostock to flow.
- bob229 5y agoThe infinite stupidity of the human race
- washedup 5y agoMost likely related to SEC allowing futures ETFs to launch as of yesterday (creating more exposure to retail and retirement accounts), but overall there continues to be inflation pressures across the world that are driving some people to buy it. Others are simply speculating.
- baq 5y agothat's a convenient narrative. if anything, i'd expect $BITO launch to be a sell the news event. lo and behold, didn't happen. i don't believe retail bought several billions of it in the first day and change of trading.
- bob229 5y agoMore evidence that humanity really is the most idiotic it species. Cryptos are trash
- option 5y agoUS dollar hit all time low compared to BTC. US dollar has been hitting all time lows compared to most (all?) asset classes. It even hits lows with regards to basic consumer goods these days.
- rawling 5y agoIs that not just indicative of inflation?
- piva00 5y agoOr an indicative of USD as an asset being less attractive and less valuable, it's more likely to be a conflation of multiple causes: printing USD (flooding the supply), US's economy being less attractive than expected at this time so investments have moved or being deferred (sold USD) and even perhaps pricing in some kind of systemic risk that could be building up in USD-marked economies (mainly the USA). I'm no economist so this is all speculation.
- jerf 5y agoThere's probably an inflation signal in there, but unless you believe the US dollar has lost 99.9999%-ish of its value since BitCoin first came out about 12 years ago (you can add more 9s depending on exactly when you decide bitcoin got a solid value against the dollar), it probably isn't all of it.
- rawling 5y agoNah, I meant the "even" hits lows with regards to basic consumer goods "these days". Constant, low inflation should mean it's forever in a state of hitting lows vs consumer goods.
- mohanmcgeek 5y agoIt's indicative of an asset bubble. A lot of people who are participating in this bubble were too young to be affected in 2008.
- GoblinSlayer 5y ago
- SilasX 5y agoAnd yet, still no progress in stopping readers from submitting dupes or searching first. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28930809 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28930809
- mpfundstein 5y agowell. even my uncle invests now. a rural dude from the middle or nowhere in southern bavaria...
- Uberphallus 5y agoThis is also coinciding with the approval of the civil rehabilitation for Mtgox creditors. [0] https://www.trustnodes.com/2021/10/20/99-of-creditors-approve-mt-gox-rehabilitation-plan https://www.trustnodes.com/2021/10/20/99-of-creditors-approv...
- ur-whale 5y ago>This is also coinciding with the approval of the civil rehabilitation for Mtgox creditors Correlation with ATH is a stretch imo, but nice find :)
- Uberphallus 5y agoYeah, if anything it'll add btc to the market and lower the price, rather than increase it. Anyway it's just the approval, and not the actual distribution.
- IkmoIkmo 5y agoWhat I'm always missing from the discussion around bitcoin and its price is: what are reasonable KPI's to measure its success, its impact, its utility etc. When you want to value an organisation or company, it makes sense to look at these KPIs. They could be purely financial, e.g. profits, revenue, margins. Or they could be more fundamental, number of users, or rather, number of times a person has benefitted (e.g. # of one-night stands or relationships that Tinder generated). What are these KPIs or metrics for bitcoin, that can tell us it has value, beyond the speculative? When I invested in bitcoin in 2013, there was a lot of work to get user-adoption. It was seen as the way forward, also to create a return on your investment. we used to track numbers on # of wallets, # of daily transactions, # of merchants accepting bitcoin, # of volume on exchanges. Over time it began harder to differentiate true numbers from fake numbers, e.g. exchanges became notorious for faking transaction volume as a marketing tool. But overal, the general idea was that after 2015 or so, the number of real-world transactions and active (non-zero volume) merchants either declined, or in later years at least was not growing at remotely the same rates as the price of bitcoin. Whereas I used to use bitcoin for various things and saw others do it, too, today I can hardly point to a single person or company which has utilised bitcoin in a way that isn't speculative. There's no positive KPI or metric that I can point to, except speculative ones (e.g. price). If I survey my friends, the only reason they give to buy bitcoin, is that there's an expectation the price will keep going up. Yet, the work on user-adoption of bitcoin (i.e., real-world usage, not merely investing) seems like it's not at all part of anyone's calculus. That's the reason I sold all my bitcoin some time ago. Although I would not at all be surprised that the price will keep growing, I can forgive myself and justify me having sold. But if the price falls it'd be entirely reasonable, and I wouldn't be able to justify my choice not to sell. There is obvious real technology here in having a database/ledger that's not under control of 1 centralised party. But a decade later I'm not seeing anyone exploit that value outside of the speculative investment side. Btw, I believe there's potential long-term value in bitcoin merely as a store of value, a digital gold. But right now there's still a pretense of something more. Second, the store of value ideal only applies to one coin, not the trillion other crypto variants. And it requires trust and faith (over decades/centuries) in one particular fork of Bitcoin. There's only one chemical that's pure gold, but one could create infinitely many bitcoin forks.
- 5y ago
- purple_ferret 5y agoImagine the day 500K bitcoin looks cheap. Coming sooner than you think.
- SketchySeaBeast 5y agoIs it? When does the growth end? If it keeps at the pace it has been we're talking trillions in a few decades, and bitcoin isn't going to be worth the whole world's GDP, so where does it stop?
- axg11 5y agoThis is an interesting line of thinking. As a point of reference (rather than a serious forecast), total market cap for gold is roughly 10x the total market cap for BTC
- GoblinSlayer 5y agoThere are lost bitcoins though. Shouldn't they cost zero?
- bitcoinmonger2 5y agoWhy are we no longer having a discussion about the environmental impact of Bitcoin? A technology designed solely to burn fossil fuels has no place in society. How is the price still going up after all the conversations we've had on this topic?
- axg11 5y agoEverything we do as a species has an environmental impact, even breathing. Perhaps this is one of the group of activities where the benefits outweigh the costs.
- ambientenv 5y agoPerhaps, as a species, a society, a culture, our value system is completely out of whack in that it remains - at least for a sizable proportion of those in the world who can avail themselves of such 'opportunity' - the "optimal" action to sacrifice a planet in order to gain material/monetary wealth in the short term. I really don't understand bitcoin or crypto currencies but it feels to me like so much opportunism at the expense of, well, life as we have come to know it.
- panarky 5y agoMaybe because Bitcoin mining is rapidly moving away from dirty coal-fired electricity generation in China, and toward clean and renewable energy sources. We're not there yet, but there's been astounding progress just in the last 12 months. Or maybe because Bitcoin mining helps solve the intermittancy problem of renewable sources such as wind. Today there's a lot of supply at the times there's low demand, so it doesn't make economic sense to invest in enough wind power to make a difference when demand spikes. Intermittant Bitcoin mining provides a market for the surplus, then goes dark during demand spikes to match supply with demand. Or maybe because the current monetary and financial system is so fantastically corrupt and broken that it's worth spending a fraction of one percent of the world's energy on an alternative. Or maybe people use energy for all kinds of things that I think are stupid and wasteful, but I can't tell others how to invest their own resources.
- qeternity 5y ago