5 ms·

The only time HN is this interested in Bitcoin is when there's a bubble (2017)

33 points by dnpp123 1y ago

wouldbecouldbe 1y ago
BTC is still in a bubble and there is not much news about it :)
- guesswho_ 1y ago
  BTC is Bhutanease Currency. Do you mean XBT?
  - adastra22 1y ago
    Nobody uses XBT. That ship has sailed.
  - CjHuber 1y ago
    It seems like you are fighting a very lonely fight
  - walthamstow 1y ago
    BTN is the ISO 4217 code for the Bhutan Ngultrum, which is a currency I hadn't heard of until today
- diggan 1y ago
  For how long does a "bubble" need to be in "the bubble" for it to not be considered a "bubble" anymore? I'm guessing there is a time limit involved here somewhere?
  - willis936 1y ago
    Economic downturn that motivates holders to liquidate. The house of cards would collapse very quickly if one whale cashed out. Everyone holding is facing a bad version of the prisoner's dilemma.
    - diggan 1y ago
      > The house of cards would collapse very quickly if one whale cashed out So a thing is a "bubble" for as long as it is possible for it to collapse if whales cash out too quickly? In your mind, every financial system today is a bubble if I understand you correct then?
    - xtracto 1y ago
      It already happened several times for BTC. Look for ATH drawdown chart. Bitcoin has lost 75% of its value 4+ times, but for some strange reason everytime it "comes back stronger". My thesis is that, in all these years, the BTC price has been composed of 2 parts: Speculators and "believers". Speculators will buy and sell very fast as soon as the market moved or due to external phenomena. "Believers" will keep holding through everything. Thing is, with each cycle there is more money on Believers than Speculators. This time, ETFs and institutions have placed a lot more money, so it seems there are more and more Believers. That's why you see retail Speculators saying that this cycle is "boring". It's interesting to see how the price will keep stabilizing, as the ratio of Believers vs Speculators money gets larger (Speculators become a smaller and smaller % of the price). I think this was the last cycle (halving cycle) with that much volatility. Even if you are not into bitcoin, it's interesting to study its phenomena.
      - willis936 1y ago
        Backing the security with public programs just feels like the last step in a scam. As soon as BTC is backed by ETFs and government programs then suddenly the public are the people who make up the difference when whales cash out and crash the true value. It's a very efficient transfer of wealth. Backing a security like this adds no value to the public but puts large risk on it. There is no justification other than "we can steal from you so we will".
      - dnpp123 1y ago
        Your thesis is 10+ year old: https://nakamotoinstitute.org/mempool/speculative-attack/ https://nakamotoinstitute.org/mempool/speculative-attack/ Always good to find back well known results by first principles!
  - dmichulke 1y ago
    What you're saying is that the claim "it's a bubble" is not falsifiable (people move price and time targets) and therefore a belief and not scientifically grounded, just like a religion. So any discussion with BTC bubble people is futile unless they are willing to put their money where their mouth is.
    - diggan 1y ago
      > What you're saying is that the claim "it's a bubble" is not falsifiable (people move price and time targets) and therefore a belief and not scientifically grounded, just like a religion. No, I'm merely trying to understand what people's understanding of a "bubble" is. I couldn't care less if others consider Bitcoin a bubble or not, but after hearing "Bitcoin is a bubble" since ~2015 sometime, I feel like I misunderstand what a "bubble" is. The "tulip mania" seems to have been around 2-3 years long, the dotcom bubble around 10 years, so I guess it isn't impossible for a bubble to last 20 or even 30 years.
  - wouldbecouldbe 1y ago
    As long as there is no world use justifying it's exorbitant value pumped up by speculation. The BTC holders trying to rebrand to a value storage instead of a currency is proof of this.
    - diggan 1y ago
      > As long as there is no world use Who judges this? Is "bubble" a personal/subjective thing then? Bitcoin is a bubble for you, because there is no use case, but not a bubble for others that can use it for any reason?
    - npoc 1y ago
      you can make money speculating that something will go down as well as up. It's not the reason for it's price to go up. BTW, you call it's price exhorbitant - I say it's rediculously cheap at any price where you can still get someone to accept fiat tokens for it
  - wmf 1y ago
    Maybe a generation or a lifetime. Gold is also a bubble but people are either into it or not so there's little discussion.
pyman 1y ago
Ironically, it's the banks that drive the price of Bitcoin these days. Along with the "Bitcoin whales": hedge funds, investment firms, and billionaires, they're all in on the speculation.
- msgodel 1y ago
  The derivatives market means it's much more like a "real fiat" currency than it used to be. That's why there's so little insane volatility these days.
scotty79 1y ago
Is there update for 2025? This is a general rule of all media. After 4 cycles you can pretty much feel at which stage the BTC bubble is just by the amount of coverage there is. The current one feels sluggish.
- Lerc 1y ago
  A bubble or two ago I hypothesised that the period is defined by how long the media feels is necessary to justify the narrative. It has to be just long enough that people op don't notice that they are saying the opposite of a previous story. They run all the stories about how BTC lost 80% of its value without acknowledging that the top measurement was at the peak of spikiest part of the bubble where only half a dozen trades occured. Then, after stories of how much value has been lost cease to be interesting enough to warrant further stories and noone is clinking on the stories that they do write. That's when it's time to start running the "It looked like bitcoin was dead, but it's coming back again, and this time it's stronger than ever!". Which promotes the next bubble that they can report on when it crashes. There may be underlying value there, but the oscillations are driven by short term sentiment. I can't help but feel that their are news organisations that are happy to provide self forefilling prophecies as long as it provides more easy to write news.
raincole 1y ago
Yeah, Bitcoin was in a big bubble in 2017. If you were dumb enough to buy BTC then, today your portfolio would be a devastating +400%.
- griffzhowl 1y ago
  Only if you'd held on to it while it went from 17k to 3k a month later, and the many ups and downs since. That's not necessarily a sound investment strategy without hindsight
- rvz 1y ago
  Remember what HN kept parroting in 2017? "bItCoIn is sCaM". So much of a scam that buying that coveted Tesla Model S in 2017 would sure have held its value much better than Bitcoin did and by now in 2025, Bitcoin should be worthless. Right? Not even close. If Bitcoin was a scam, was it supposed to "crash" from $10k to $100k+ and that Tesla Model S "skyrocketed" from $100k+ to around $40k from its retail price. Sounds like buying a Tesla Model S in 2017 was a scam.
  - AlecSchueler 1y ago
    > Remember what HN kept parroting in 2017? "bItCoIn is sCaM". Honestly, no.
    - johnisgood 1y ago
      I was here, and they still keep saying the same thing. There was a recent submission about Bitcoin. People were still saying how it is a scam and whatnot. Scam or not, many people have gotten rich off of it. I bet the people who kept saying it is a scam wish'd they bought when it was low, they would have been rich today, instead, they double down (because they completely missed their chance due to their opinion), which is to be expected. Too bad, life goes on, and you most likely will never get ~10 BTCs for the price of a bread anymore.
      - AlexandrB 1y ago
ArtTimeInvestor 1y ago
People are generally not interested in discussing assets in depth. Or any other topic for that matter. It would be so awesome to have a forum where intelligent, grown up people discuss the possible futures of Bitcoin. Or any other asset. But I have not found one yet. If anybody knows some place, please please post a link!
- HPsquared 1y ago
  Honestly LLMs are the best bet for intellectual discussion of obscure topics with a specific tone.
  - diggan 1y ago
    Honestly, no. When people seek for forums to connect with other humans, LLMs aren't a good alternative for that. And I say that as someone who generally find LLMs useful, I'm not a "AI is impeding doom" person, but their use shouldn't replace the human connection and human conversations.
- celticninja 1y ago
  We had that, it was bitcointalk, between 2011 and 2016 it was a great place to do business, meet other people interested in bitcoin and to make and create new things. Then it slowly drifted into scammers and low quality begging posts.
praveen9920 1y ago
I remember when bitcoin post appeared first on HN. It was trending and lot of people were curious about technical details and people joking about viability as currency. I even started mining for a brief time on work desktop which I had to uninstall immediately of course.
- celticninja 1y ago
  Yeah I remember the white paper being posted in 2009, took another 2 years before I got into bitcoin. The reason I know bitcoin has hit the mainstream and isn't going anywhere is in sort due to HN. This bubble has spurred zero posts as far as I can tell, or zero that gained any traction. In part this is because there is nothing new to discuss. But in the past there was nothing new either, but it gained traction because of the numbers of comments. Now I guess the naysayers have moved on the criticism of AI and the defenders don't feel like it needs defending anymore. Welcome to the new asset class.
  - diggan 1y ago
    > This bubble has spurred zero posts as far as I can tell, or zero that gained any traction. ... Did you look? Quick search turns up a bunch of stories that were on the frontpage: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=false&query=bitcoin&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal... > But in the past there was nothing new either, but it gained traction because of the numbers of comments. That's the opposite of how things are ranked on HN. Submissions with more comments than votes are being pushed down the frontpage, not up.
    - celticninja 1y ago
      2 posts on that page are less than 6 months old and they are both posts of the same thing.
      - diggan 1y ago
        All of them are less than 12 months old, and most of the results on the first search page been at one point on the frontpage. Another search, limiting it to >50 points (so passed through the frontpage at one point) and within the last 12 months, showing ~26 results: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=true&query=bitcoin%20points%3E50&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...
roenxi 1y ago
Of all the things, people calling Bitcoin a bubble would have to be the most reasonable in hindsight of any group who got a prediction wrong. It is hard to argue with the reasoning and the observations. Goes to show, the economy is a funny thing.
johnisgood 1y ago
Well, they were wrong, and anyone who bought low before, are now rich today. It is quite funny if you think about it.
- duckinho 1y ago
  Buying _now_ is buying 'low' too...
  - johnisgood 1y ago
    You created this account to say this? I mean sure, go ahead and buy a few million, just let me know in advance. ;) In any case, when I said "low", I was referring to early Bitcoin days when 1 BTC cost'd a loaf of bread.

33 points by dnpp123 1y ago

wouldbecouldbe 1y ago

BTC is still in a bubble and there is not much news about it :)

guesswho_ 1y ago
BTC is Bhutanease Currency. Do you mean XBT?
- adastra22 1y ago
  Nobody uses XBT. That ship has sailed.
- CjHuber 1y ago
  It seems like you are fighting a very lonely fight
- walthamstow 1y ago
  BTN is the ISO 4217 code for the Bhutan Ngultrum, which is a currency I hadn't heard of until today
diggan 1y ago
For how long does a "bubble" need to be in "the bubble" for it to not be considered a "bubble" anymore? I'm guessing there is a time limit involved here somewhere?
- willis936 1y ago
  Economic downturn that motivates holders to liquidate. The house of cards would collapse very quickly if one whale cashed out. Everyone holding is facing a bad version of the prisoner's dilemma.
  - diggan 1y ago
    > The house of cards would collapse very quickly if one whale cashed out So a thing is a "bubble" for as long as it is possible for it to collapse if whales cash out too quickly? In your mind, every financial system today is a bubble if I understand you correct then?
  - xtracto 1y ago
    It already happened several times for BTC. Look for ATH drawdown chart. Bitcoin has lost 75% of its value 4+ times, but for some strange reason everytime it "comes back stronger". My thesis is that, in all these years, the BTC price has been composed of 2 parts: Speculators and "believers". Speculators will buy and sell very fast as soon as the market moved or due to external phenomena. "Believers" will keep holding through everything. Thing is, with each cycle there is more money on Believers than Speculators. This time, ETFs and institutions have placed a lot more money, so it seems there are more and more Believers. That's why you see retail Speculators saying that this cycle is "boring". It's interesting to see how the price will keep stabilizing, as the ratio of Believers vs Speculators money gets larger (Speculators become a smaller and smaller % of the price). I think this was the last cycle (halving cycle) with that much volatility. Even if you are not into bitcoin, it's interesting to study its phenomena.
    - willis936 1y ago
      Backing the security with public programs just feels like the last step in a scam. As soon as BTC is backed by ETFs and government programs then suddenly the public are the people who make up the difference when whales cash out and crash the true value. It's a very efficient transfer of wealth. Backing a security like this adds no value to the public but puts large risk on it. There is no justification other than "we can steal from you so we will".
    - dnpp123 1y ago
      Your thesis is 10+ year old: https://nakamotoinstitute.org/mempool/speculative-attack/ https://nakamotoinstitute.org/mempool/speculative-attack/ Always good to find back well known results by first principles!
- dmichulke 1y ago
  What you're saying is that the claim "it's a bubble" is not falsifiable (people move price and time targets) and therefore a belief and not scientifically grounded, just like a religion. So any discussion with BTC bubble people is futile unless they are willing to put their money where their mouth is.
  - diggan 1y ago
    > What you're saying is that the claim "it's a bubble" is not falsifiable (people move price and time targets) and therefore a belief and not scientifically grounded, just like a religion. No, I'm merely trying to understand what people's understanding of a "bubble" is. I couldn't care less if others consider Bitcoin a bubble or not, but after hearing "Bitcoin is a bubble" since ~2015 sometime, I feel like I misunderstand what a "bubble" is. The "tulip mania" seems to have been around 2-3 years long, the dotcom bubble around 10 years, so I guess it isn't impossible for a bubble to last 20 or even 30 years.
- wouldbecouldbe 1y ago
  As long as there is no world use justifying it's exorbitant value pumped up by speculation. The BTC holders trying to rebrand to a value storage instead of a currency is proof of this.
  - diggan 1y ago
    > As long as there is no world use Who judges this? Is "bubble" a personal/subjective thing then? Bitcoin is a bubble for you, because there is no use case, but not a bubble for others that can use it for any reason?
  - npoc 1y ago
    you can make money speculating that something will go down as well as up. It's not the reason for it's price to go up. BTW, you call it's price exhorbitant - I say it's rediculously cheap at any price where you can still get someone to accept fiat tokens for it
- wmf 1y ago
  Maybe a generation or a lifetime. Gold is also a bubble but people are either into it or not so there's little discussion.

pyman 1y ago

Ironically, it's the banks that drive the price of Bitcoin these days. Along with the "Bitcoin whales": hedge funds, investment firms, and billionaires, they're all in on the speculation.

msgodel 1y ago
The derivatives market means it's much more like a "real fiat" currency than it used to be. That's why there's so little insane volatility these days.

scotty79 1y ago

Is there update for 2025? This is a general rule of all media. After 4 cycles you can pretty much feel at which stage the BTC bubble is just by the amount of coverage there is. The current one feels sluggish.

Lerc 1y ago
A bubble or two ago I hypothesised that the period is defined by how long the media feels is necessary to justify the narrative. It has to be just long enough that people op don't notice that they are saying the opposite of a previous story. They run all the stories about how BTC lost 80% of its value without acknowledging that the top measurement was at the peak of spikiest part of the bubble where only half a dozen trades occured. Then, after stories of how much value has been lost cease to be interesting enough to warrant further stories and noone is clinking on the stories that they do write. That's when it's time to start running the "It looked like bitcoin was dead, but it's coming back again, and this time it's stronger than ever!". Which promotes the next bubble that they can report on when it crashes. There may be underlying value there, but the oscillations are driven by short term sentiment. I can't help but feel that their are news organisations that are happy to provide self forefilling prophecies as long as it provides more easy to write news.

raincole 1y ago

Yeah, Bitcoin was in a big bubble in 2017. If you were dumb enough to buy BTC then, today your portfolio would be a devastating +400%.

griffzhowl 1y ago
Only if you'd held on to it while it went from 17k to 3k a month later, and the many ups and downs since. That's not necessarily a sound investment strategy without hindsight
rvz 1y ago
Remember what HN kept parroting in 2017? "bItCoIn is sCaM". So much of a scam that buying that coveted Tesla Model S in 2017 would sure have held its value much better than Bitcoin did and by now in 2025, Bitcoin should be worthless. Right? Not even close. If Bitcoin was a scam, was it supposed to "crash" from $10k to $100k+ and that Tesla Model S "skyrocketed" from $100k+ to around $40k from its retail price. Sounds like buying a Tesla Model S in 2017 was a scam.
- AlecSchueler 1y ago
  > Remember what HN kept parroting in 2017? "bItCoIn is sCaM". Honestly, no.
  - johnisgood 1y ago
    I was here, and they still keep saying the same thing. There was a recent submission about Bitcoin. People were still saying how it is a scam and whatnot. Scam or not, many people have gotten rich off of it. I bet the people who kept saying it is a scam wish'd they bought when it was low, they would have been rich today, instead, they double down (because they completely missed their chance due to their opinion), which is to be expected. Too bad, life goes on, and you most likely will never get ~10 BTCs for the price of a bread anymore.
    - AlexandrB 1y ago

ArtTimeInvestor 1y ago

People are generally not interested in discussing assets in depth. Or any other topic for that matter. It would be so awesome to have a forum where intelligent, grown up people discuss the possible futures of Bitcoin. Or any other asset. But I have not found one yet. If anybody knows some place, please please post a link!

HPsquared 1y ago
Honestly LLMs are the best bet for intellectual discussion of obscure topics with a specific tone.
- diggan 1y ago
  Honestly, no. When people seek for forums to connect with other humans, LLMs aren't a good alternative for that. And I say that as someone who generally find LLMs useful, I'm not a "AI is impeding doom" person, but their use shouldn't replace the human connection and human conversations.
celticninja 1y ago
We had that, it was bitcointalk, between 2011 and 2016 it was a great place to do business, meet other people interested in bitcoin and to make and create new things. Then it slowly drifted into scammers and low quality begging posts.

praveen9920 1y ago

I remember when bitcoin post appeared first on HN. It was trending and lot of people were curious about technical details and people joking about viability as currency. I even started mining for a brief time on work desktop which I had to uninstall immediately of course.

celticninja 1y ago
Yeah I remember the white paper being posted in 2009, took another 2 years before I got into bitcoin. The reason I know bitcoin has hit the mainstream and isn't going anywhere is in sort due to HN. This bubble has spurred zero posts as far as I can tell, or zero that gained any traction. In part this is because there is nothing new to discuss. But in the past there was nothing new either, but it gained traction because of the numbers of comments. Now I guess the naysayers have moved on the criticism of AI and the defenders don't feel like it needs defending anymore. Welcome to the new asset class.
- diggan 1y ago
  > This bubble has spurred zero posts as far as I can tell, or zero that gained any traction. ... Did you look? Quick search turns up a bunch of stories that were on the frontpage: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=false&query=bitcoin&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal... > But in the past there was nothing new either, but it gained traction because of the numbers of comments. That's the opposite of how things are ranked on HN. Submissions with more comments than votes are being pushed down the frontpage, not up.
  - celticninja 1y ago
    2 posts on that page are less than 6 months old and they are both posts of the same thing.
    - diggan 1y ago
      All of them are less than 12 months old, and most of the results on the first search page been at one point on the frontpage. Another search, limiting it to >50 points (so passed through the frontpage at one point) and within the last 12 months, showing ~26 results: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=true&query=bitcoin%20points%3E50&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...

roenxi 1y ago

Of all the things, people calling Bitcoin a bubble would have to be the most reasonable in hindsight of any group who got a prediction wrong. It is hard to argue with the reasoning and the observations. Goes to show, the economy is a funny thing.

johnisgood 1y ago

Well, they were wrong, and anyone who bought low before, are now rich today. It is quite funny if you think about it.

duckinho 1y ago
Buying _now_ is buying 'low' too...
- johnisgood 1y ago
  You created this account to say this? I mean sure, go ahead and buy a few million, just let me know in advance. ;) In any case, when I said "low", I was referring to early Bitcoin days when 1 BTC cost'd a loaf of bread.