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Important to remember that while income and wealth inequality is at record highs, the trillions of dollars injected into the economy are still floating around a
by paxys 2y ago
Important to remember that while income and wealth inequality is at record highs, the trillions of dollars injected into the economy are still floating around among the top. People are getting more and more creative with investments (see luxury watches, sneakers, trading cards, collectibles, meme stocks all seeing a significant bump in value in recent years). Bitcoin's price is simply another symptom of this.
What I find new about this recent bull run is that the usual "crypto will upend global financial systems/crypto will change the world" hype is conspicuously missing. All the "Blockchain startups" have basically disappeared. NFTs are worthless. There is little/no VC money going into the space. I think people are finally coming to terms with the fact that it is a speculative investment and nothing more.
- nadermx 2y agoI just struggle to see it's utility
- testfrequency 2y agoIt’s because there isn’t any
- paulryanrogers 2y agoSomewhere between tulips and gold.
- XCSme 2y agoBoth are pretty, though.
- xyzzy4747 2y agoIt definitely has utility but it is at the same time overhyped IMO. Some examples of utility: 1. Cross-border transfers without needing permission from banks or identification 2. A fungible digital asset you can hoard and nobody can physically take from you if you secure the keys. 3. If you are a business in a gray or black market industry, you can accept payments from customers online without needing permission from payment processors. Many types of businesses are effectively banned by the banking system. 4. It provides a way to obfuscate your wealth which can help protect against asset seizures. Similar to #2.
- jonahbenton 2y agoThese are all true but far and away the dominant use case is long term (10+ year) store of value/dollar inflation hedge- which sometimes implies #2, but many entities are happy to hold on exchanges. Total BTC market cap at $2T- would guess from how relatively little transaction activity there is that at least $1.5T is due to this use case.
- ajkdhcb2 2y agoIt isn't fungible at all since every coin has a history which in some cases makes it unspendable, so it is highly risky to accept transfers without a third party chain analysis report, otherwise i agree
- throwme_123 2y agoReport which you don't get from centralized exchanges. So you have to trust them and they should somehow be liable for the provenance of what they sell to you. Probably most CEX don't allocate UTXOs upon buying, but only for withdrawals
- ajkdhcb2 2y agoI am aware of a couple of cases where people received flagged coins from centralised exchanges and had a lot of issues
- ajkdhcb2 2y agoIt is scarce, novel, transferable, passed critical mass of popularity long ago, uncensorable to some degree for now. That's all that's needed, it makes it better money than perhaps anything else
- wyldfire 2y agoIts utility is similar to that of cash. But unlike cash it's (1) less fungible (2) much easier to transport (3) harder to secure from theft and/or destruction * (4) value is more volatile than USD/EUR/CAD/AUD (5) incredibly resource intensive to maintain (and growing!). It's not an equity, it's a currency. The Bitcoin network is nigh "indestructible" as long as some folks still consider it useful. This delivers credibility towards the faith required to support some value. If its value dropped by 99% tomorrow (maybe from aggressive global legislation and cooperation among governments), it would still function (but perhaps primarily maintained by sanctioned countries). I think there's significant pros and cons to cryptocurrency in general and Bitcoin specifically. As the emission rate continues to decrease, I suspect its value will stay relatively high relative to what it is now. EDIT: I said in (3) above that it's harder to secure bitcoin from destruction (than cash) but in some ways it's remarkably more robust than cash. You can make as many copies of the keys securing your bitcoins as you like (and/or use multi-sig). Your home burning down would destroy cash, but if you have a backup your bitcoins are preserved. However this is in tension with "secure from theft".
- ConspiracyFact 2y agoShow me an economy that only uses bitcoin and doesn’t depend on cashing out to one fiat currency or another and I’ll allow that it’s a currency.
- OrigamiPastrami 2y agoEl Salvador.
- ethagnawl 2y ago> Its utility is similar to that of cash. In the USA, spending cash doesn't require ~30 minutes of validation or a capital gains report.
- Empact 2y agoTransacting bitcoin via the lightning network is instant. Capital gains is a matter of policy and is likely to change at some point as bitcoin succeeds.
- paxys 2y agoWhat is the utility of a baseball trading card or a piece of art sitting in a bank vault?
- Gigachad 2y agoThere’s “utility” in enabling crime and being able to move massive amounts of wealth fairly easily.
- cypherpunks01 2y agoThere's utility in being able to move both small and large amounts of value fairly easily. Moving value has high utility for criminals and non-criminals alike. There's utility in remittances, in protecting value from unlawful seizure, and protecting value from incompetent bureaucrats hyper-inflating your national currency.
- latchkey 2y agoMy favorite response on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26238410 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26238410
- LightHugger 2y agoThere is a lot of utility in bypassing the credit card company cartel which have been abusing their position to create a pseudo government to shut down or kill the value of (maybe to make them easier to buy out?) targeted businesses. Or in some cases impose the christian ideology of the owners upon entire countries, most recently japan.
- puzzlingcaptcha 2y agoAh yes, I remember when BTC was going to supplant Visa/Mastercard... 12 years ago.
- LightHugger 2y agoCryptocurrency when not being used for speculation or investment nonsense has already successfully provided a pressure release valve for abuse by the credit card cartels. It still sucks, and isn't very convenient or good for most transactions or safety. But it works! It would be more ideal to just regulate the credit card companies properly but that appears to be beyond current government bodies.
- amazingamazing 2y agoWhy does it matter if income inequality is high? Poorly hid envy it looks like.
- pixelatedindex 2y agoBecause you need the disposable income to buy speculative assets. This means that the rich get richer.
- amazingamazing 2y ago[flagged]
- throwawayq3423 2y agoRead some history, bad things tend to happen when a permanent underclass is cut off from ever-expanding wealth.
- amazingamazing 2y agoOk, where are the bad things from this century caused directly from rich people getting richer and nothing else? And moreover - tell me how your prosperity harms the poorest in the world and what you’re doing to reduce that gap between you and them.
- OrigamiPastrami 2y ago[flagged]
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- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- soramimo 2y agoDon't forget the funding of North Korea and organized crime.
- eric_cc 2y ago[flagged]
- throwawayq3423 2y agoWhat denial? It is an excellent way to gamble or launder money. That's not changed, but it's not expanded either.
- eric_cc 2y agoBitcoin is the only sound money in existence. It will slowly devour fiat currency over time and humanity will benefit. There are quite a few similarities to the fall of monarchies.
- throwawayq3423 2y agoMoney that isn't freely exchangeable isn't money at all.
- kortilla 2y agoGold is basically the same. The only upside to bitcoin is that it works over the internet so it’s much faster to trade
- tim333 2y agoIt's good in some ways - value goes up, independent of governments - but bad in others - too unstable in value for day to day transactions, wages, mortgages and the like.
- fixprix 2y agoBitcoin is a store of value. Nothing more or less. DAOs and NFTs were just distractions trying to ride the wave. The fundamentals remain strong. It really hasn't changed much in 15 years. The Hacker News comments certainly haven't either. Salty as ever.
- XCSme 2y agoHow exactly does BTC store any more value than an NFT?
- jdenning 2y agoSupply & demand?
- echelon 2y agoIt's the "chosen one".
- Mithriil 2y agoEnergy wasted to secure the chain
- Empact 2y agoFungibility is one of the important properties of money. So a non-fungible token has less ability to accrue monetary value. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money#Properties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money#Properties
- josu 2y ago>Bitcoin's price is simply another symptom of this. Bitcoin is not the symptom, Bitcoin is the answer. People are not longing Bitcoin, people are exiting the dollar, the euro, the yuan...
- paxys 2y agoYet the dollar is at record highs, and commodities are at record highs, and the stock market is at record highs, and real estate is at record highs, and Bitcoin is at record highs. So who is hedging what exactly?
- olddog2 2y agoLook at a chart of purchasing power adjusted USD over the past 100 years and tell me its at record highs. All fiat currencies go to zero. BTC does the opposite using number go up technology.
- josu 2y agoLet's revisit this in 10 years.
- panarky 2y ago> the dollar is at record highs Compared to what? Other government currencies?
- ur-whale 2y ago> Yet the dollar is at record highs The SingleFamilyHome/USD pair begs to differ
- csomar 2y agoIf commodities are at record highs, then the dollar is at record lows. Just because other currencies are inflating more, doesn’t mean the USD is getting stronger.
- tasuki 2y ago> Yet the dollar is at record highs, and commodities are at record highs, and the stock market is at record highs, and real estate is at record highs, and Bitcoin is at record highs. I'm not even sure what this means and what you're trying to say. One can compare two things, say bitcoin and dollar. Dollar is at record lows compared to bitcoin. It's at record lows also compared to the stock market, commodities, real estate, etc.
- monero-xmr 2y agoCrypto VC is booming! What the heck are you talking about
- throwawayq3423 2y agoBesides an exchange, what company is doing well right now in the crypto space?
- aryan14 2y agoPolymarket, Bitrefill, Stake
- throwawayq3423 2y agoGambling, money laundering, and more gambling. This is just a repeat of all the companies that promised people could get rich using them, then the price collapsed and they all died.
- aryan14 2y agoQuestion was asking for companies doing well that weren’t exchanges.
- throwawayq3423 2y agoTrue, I had just responded to another comment with this so I had a chuckle. > What denial? It is an excellent way to gamble or launder money. That's not changed, but it's not expanded either.
- throwme_123 2y agoLess money laundering than cash obviously
- throwawayq3423 2y ago
- bakugo 2y ago> the usual "crypto will upend global financial systems/crypto will change the world" hype is conspicuously missing. All the "Blockchain startups" have basically disappeared. NFTs are worthless. There is little/no VC money going into the space. All of those people pivoted to AI.
- purple_ferret 2y ago> the usual "crypto will upend global financial systems/crypto will change the world" hype is conspicuously missing That hype is nothing compared to the current hype, the idea that the US Government is going to buy a significant amount of Bitcoin to create a "strategic" reserve. Every hype cycle gets bigger and bigger even as past ones never amount to anything
- atlgator 2y agoAn important point, whichever way you want to interpret it, is that you can now buy Bitcoin exposure via ETFs like IBIT. Those didn't exist in the last run. The upside is they enable more liquid investment, especially to non-native investors (e.g. those that don't know what a crypto wallet is). The downside is it could drive speculation or allow manipulation by big banks and hedge funds.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- paulpauper 2y agoImportant to remember that while income and wealth inequality is at record highs, the trillions of dollars injected into the economy are still floating around among the top. People are getting more and more creative with investments (see luxury watches, sneakers, trading cards, collectibles, meme stocks all seeing a significant bump in value in recent years). Bitcoin's price is simply another symptom of this. this makes sense. price inflation is out of control . it's like everything is being inflated in the name of scarcity
- huijzer 2y ago> it is a speculative investment and nothing more. Mostly yes. The only true value I see is that Bitcoin is the new Swiss banking. So if you don’t trust your government then you get yourself some Bitcoins. I realized this while reading a book about Swiss banking. It also used to involve elaborate schemes to preserve client privacy.
- klipt 2y agoI imagine the Swiss also made lots of money from having account holders die without ever telling anyone their secret key. Just like many bitcoins got irrevocably lost on broken hard drives.
- rsanek 2y agoluxury watches are way down since their peak in early 2022 https://watchcharts.com/watches/price_index https://watchcharts.com/watches/price_index