Bitcoin is over $100k

https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/BTCUSD/

by WheelsAtLarge • 2 years ago

141 302 2 years ago

echelon3• 2 years ago

Here we go again...

Hopefully this pulls competition away from the space I'm in and back into crypto. The last time crypto crashed, crypto folks flooded into generative media and we kind of became associated with them. I'm just trying to make tools.

z2• 2 years ago

If crypto has this much staying power despite the crazy hype, any AI winter would appear to be a long ways off!

equasar• 2 years ago

Not surprised. They're minting Tether USD out of thin air to inflate the price, so it's no shock.

echelon3• 2 years ago

How? And why isn't that being shorted?

Any prediction of when this will come crashing back down?

thinkingkong• 2 years ago

On the contrary. Your way better hedge was polymarket not hitting 100k prior to the election.

wmf7• 2 years ago

Tether appears to be too big to fail in the crypto world and now crypto is too big to fail in the White House so if you short you are the one who will lose.

lmm3• 2 years ago

How?

People say Bitcoin is worth $100k but what they actually mean is it's worth 100,000 "USDT", because that's the thing you can actually exchange for it.

Are those 100,000 "USDT" worth $100k? Well, maybe. Tether claims every USDT is backed by a US dollar. It just can't tell you where they are or let you audit them. But they're there. Honest.

And why isn't that being shorted?

How would you short it? Especially given that most crypto trading platforms are going to go bankrupt when it does crash.

monero-xmr3• 2 years ago

The Tether Truthers never fail to spread their conspiracy. HN should just admit it got crypto 100% wrong.

wmf7• 2 years ago

Tether admitted they loaned USDT against BTC collateral and they allowed the collateral to be delivered later (basically T+2 settlement). When the order book is shallow this is basically free market manipulation. It's not clear how much loaned USDT exists vs. regular USDT and what effect this has had on the price.

testfrequency2• 2 years ago

Bias much?

aryan1410• 2 years ago

Love the username

DickingAround• 2 years ago

TINA = There is no alternative... to stocks. Lot of people lost money on long term bonds. Short term bonds are at least better than cash. Stocks are supposed to be about investing in an asset. I guess there is kind of an alternative out there.

Mistletoe• 2 years ago

Congrats Bitcoin! You just can't overestimate the power of one really good idea.

https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

paulryanrogers4• 2 years ago

Will people see it as good in hindsight? When coal plants have dumped more waste in the air and oceans, just to drive the value of these tulips?

Mithriil5• 2 years ago

BTC is not sustainable, that's true. However, the world is now aware of decentralized ledgering tools, and other projects have worthwhile technologies and use cases.

I just wish they would drop the energy consuming ones...

deanmoriarty3• 2 years ago

I couldn’t care less about crypto, but just for fun I bought 1 BTC in 2016. Still own it, and likely will never sell, but boy I wish I bought a lot more instead of my index funds, skipping one monthly contribution in VTI back then would have mostly set me up for life instead of just having a nice but inconsequential $100k bonus in my portfolio :-)

Congrats to the people who held through thick and thin, I speculate (my own opinion) that we will likely not see 80% drawdowns anymore due to all the institutional money that flew in, just “standard” 40-50% dips. Fantastic to witness, an asset class out of thin air.

Cheers to the next 10X in 8 years, $1M in 2032!

ganeshkrishnan• 2 years ago

I had couple of bitcoin from 2013. Sold most at 10k and held on to one at 50k. I was absolutely super duper sure, 50k was the top.

pacomerh• 2 years ago

Ha, this is my story, except I thought 20k was the top.

huijzer2• 2 years ago

inconsequential $100k bonus in my portfolio

It seems we are truly ducking poor here in the EU. My parents have been running a farm for 40 years in the Netherlands and they’re doing well financially. Still, $100k is not inconsequential for them!

csomar4• 2 years ago

For most of the world, $100k in savings is simply beyond reach. So no, you are definitely not ducking poor in the EU.

benterix• 2 years ago

I don't think Americans are that much different in that respect from Europeans in general:

https://www.bankrate.com/banking/savings/emergency-savings-r...

One fourth have no savings at all. European stats are similar:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1221416/households-witho...

lifty2• 2 years ago

The world is split into two kids of people: the ones that have managed to take advantage of the massive financialization of the world, and the ones who haven’t.

piva002• 2 years ago

HN is a bubble of very rich folks compared to the vast majority of the global population. It's easy to fall into the trap of how people here talk about money, like a US$ 150k salary is too low, or like having less than US$ 300k in savings makes you poor.

Just remind yourself this place is an extreme outlier whenever you hear someone here treating life-changing sums of money for 90-95% of the global population as "inconsequential".

JohnTHaller• 2 years ago

Nearly half of folks in the US have no way of paying an unexpected $1,000 expense. $100,000 isn't inconsequential to the majority of the world.

paulpauper3• 2 years ago

they said exactly that in 2018, 2021, and 2022 too

sandos• 2 years ago

I cry every time I think about the fact that I managed to CPU-mine 50 btc, and sold it for nothing.

Still, I did get a payout from the mtgox disaster and its a decent amount really, considering I put in less than 100$ from the start. Just far from life-changing amount, more like "ok, this gets us a nice vacation trip!"-money.

theshrike79• 2 years ago

I mined a bit over 2 BTC, sold them when it hit $200. Bought a pair of headphones that broke in 3-4 years.

If I had saved them, I could pay off my mortgage now.

pas• 2 years ago

I still have the postcard from Japan from the legal proceedings!

There's a ton of things I could regret.

BTC price going up makes the counterfactual very easy to imagine in rough outlines, and thus more and more appealing.

But that's a fool's errand. There's absolutely no guarantee that in all the alternate timelines where you had not sold you would be better off now. Even with all the extra money. Windfalls tend to cause problems for lottery winners for example.

kamaal2• 2 years ago

>Congrats to the people who held through thick and thin, I speculate (my own opinion) that we will likely not see 80% drawdowns anymore due to all the institutional money that flew in, just “standard” 40-50% dips. Fantastic to witness, an asset class out of thin air.

There was some person who invested $30 everyday in BTC since 2017, and has $1 million right now.

The tweet had gone viral on Twitter.

BTC bull/bear cycles have taught a lot of people many things about regular investing.

Like what this person did is called DCA(Dollar Cost Averaging).

>>>Cheers to the next 10X in 8 years, $1M in 2032!

Seems like showing up everyday is all there is to success. Mostly. Every once in a while, someone makes it big due to luck/help. But showing up everything is all.

thunky3• 2 years ago

There was some person who invested

"Invested" is a generous way to put it.

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/basics/09/compare-inve...

xyzzy47475• 2 years ago

I remember when people used to first talk about Bitcoin on HN back in early 2011 or so. The price was only $2 then. Congrats to anyone who had some and held onto it this long - personally I sold off mine in 2015 (big mistake in hindsight).

paulpauper3• 2 years ago

from $5 in 2011 to $500 was a 100x return, and still 200x too early, crazy

ArtTimeInvestor5• 2 years ago

    big mistake in hindsight

Will you repeat it?

bitcoinmoney• 2 years ago

Yep I was here when the whole HN mania was so against BTC. I was firmly bogleheads and was still a broke phd student. In hindsight if I just gambled with little money I have I might be set for life. But Don't know if I could have held till 100K.

paxys4• 2 years 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.

nadermx2• 2 years ago

I just struggle to see it's utility

testfrequency2• 2 years ago

It’s because there isn’t any

paulryanrogers4• 2 years ago

Somewhere between tulips and gold.

xyzzy47475• 2 years ago

It 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.

ajkdhcb27• 2 years ago

It 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

wyldfire2• 2 years ago

Its 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".

paxys4• 2 years ago

What is the utility of a baseball trading card or a piece of art sitting in a bank vault?

Gigachad2• 2 years ago

There’s “utility” in enabling crime and being able to move massive amounts of wealth fairly easily.

latchkey2• 2 years ago

My favorite response on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26238410

LightHugger2• 2 years ago

There 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.

amazingamazing3• 2 years ago

Why does it matter if income inequality is high? Poorly hid envy it looks like.

pixelatedindex• 2 years ago

Because you need the disposable income to buy speculative assets. This means that the rich get richer.

throwawayq34239• 2 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution

ks20483• 2 years ago

Because money is power. If you believe in democracy, then extreme inequality is extremely un-democratic. (Note, there is, IMHO, a happy middle-ground: some amount of tolerable inequality, resulting in some amount of tolerable un-democratic-ness)

soramimo• 2 years ago

Don't forget the funding of North Korea and organized crime.

xur17• 2 years ago

Like USD?

fixprix7• 2 years ago

Bitcoin 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.

XCSme3• 2 years ago

How exactly does BTC store any more value than an NFT?

nadermx2• 2 years ago

By definition store of value means "its ability to purchase other assets in the future without rapidly losing its purchasing power" yet bitcoin has in instances halved it's value. So, no not a store of value.

benchmarkist6• 2 years ago

Bitcoin is actually just a bunch of numbers. Whatever value you think you're storing with it is always denominated in fiat which is very ironic.

ActorNightly• 2 years ago

Bitcoin is a speculative asset like a stock.

josu3• 2 years 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...

paxys4• 2 years 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. So who is hedging what exactly?

ManuelKiessling• 2 years ago

If people don't care about the dollar, then why is "Bitcoin is over $100k" a headline?

You know why it is a headline?

Because the $ symbol in the headline is what people ACTUALLY care about. You don't even need to ask people: simply watch what people do, and you will learn what they care about.

And what they do is they buy nice things, like Lamborghinis, yachts, homes — and they do so using US dollars.

monero-xmr3• 2 years ago

Crypto VC is booming! What the heck are you talking about

throwawayq34239• 2 years ago

Besides an exchange, what company is doing well right now in the crypto space?

bakugo• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

An 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.

paulpauper3• 2 years ago

this makes sense. price inflation is out of control . it's like everything is being inflated in the name of scarcity

huijzer2• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

I 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• 2 years ago

luxury watches are way down since their peak in early 2022 https://watchcharts.com/watches/price_index

deadbabe2• 2 years ago

Why hell does this keep going up? Can you pretty much just buy at any point in time and be guaranteed a 10x return?

csomar4• 2 years ago

If you hold long enough and the chain keeps working, then probably yes. However, this 10x return is guaranteed against the dollar and not real value. The gov. is committed to devaluing currency over a long period of time.

cconroy• 2 years ago

This is definitely true but btc buys you more of almost anything else too (btc/X): X is one of s&p500, housing, gold, etc. except maybe $nvda or $tsla. For example the btc chart in dollars looks the same as in gold.

npoc2• 2 years ago

No - it's quite reasonable to project bitcoin increasing in value (not price) 100x from here.

xenospn• 2 years ago

We haven’t run out of greater fools just yet

efficax• 2 years ago

bubbles go up and up and up… until they don’t

jdenning2• 2 years ago

But it has been a bubble and popped/crashed/recovered 4(?) times now - it seem fair to start considering it as a cycle rather than a bubble. I don’t know much about crypto or finance, so maybe I’m completely wrong

Mithriil5• 2 years ago

A part of the valuation comes from miners who gets their returns cut by half every ~4 years. They have an interest in having the price (at least) double by then.

deadbabe2• 2 years ago

So how do they do it? How do they just keep doubling the price?

wmf7• 2 years ago

I have an interest in having the price of my house double every four years but I can't just wish that into reality and neither can miners.

thrance3• 2 years ago

Remember that this is a zero-sum game, for every winner that made it big, they are thousands more that had to pay up for their success.

Mithriil5• 2 years ago

I don't believe it is zero-sum.. Or at least, not rigourously. I feel the Market Capitalization of BTC must have been bootstrapped at some extent. It seems impossible to me that the sum total of what people have paid to have their BTCs to be more than $2.02T. In other words, the value the market gives it has given value to BTC out of nowhere.

robjan4• 2 years ago

Markets are not a zero sum game. When the price goes up, it goes up for all holders.

Ekaros3• 2 years ago

It is really negative sum game. As there is constant drain from mining, in buying and then operating equipment. Lot of that is not recovable and do not actually improve anything.

latchkey2• 2 years ago

Michael Saylor has been doing it for years now (and is also part of the reason why this is going up).

https://saylortracker.com/

some-guy• 2 years ago

Is there way to quantify how much of the economy these days is "bullshit" (purely speculative assets), and if we are at peak bullshit now as a percentage of total economic activity?

xyzzy47475• 2 years ago

The entire economy outside of agriculture and real estate is basically "bullshit", if you really think about it. The ratio of bullshit to everything else seems to increase over time, though, as a general trend. It's probably correlated to technology.

paulryanrogers4• 2 years ago

This seems reductive. Things do get more abstract, yet there is a spectrum of naunce: oil, vehicles, clothing, etc.

sampullman• 2 years ago

If agriculture is required, so is shipping. I'm not so sure about real estate.

mbil• 2 years ago

Agriculture and real estate would not exist in their current forms without the mammoth apparatus of the entire economy surrounding them. Maybe you mean food and shelter are the only non-bull parts of the economy. Nomadic bands might find them bullshittish. And grain stores require soldiers to guard them, soldiers require weapons, weapons require metallurgy, mining, surveying, transport, etc. Pretty soon there’s a whole lot of something but I don’t know that it’s bullshit. It feels more like layers of increasing abstraction away from the source of the value: energy.

gmays• 2 years ago

Real estate can be speculative as well. A better way to state that might be "things outside of productive assets and services" are increasingly speculative.

The bright side of this that has me excited is what seems to be a growing sense of optimism about the future, driven by AI entering the public conscious, Space X's "rocket catch" etc. There seems to be a growing belief that the future can and will be better, more so than a decade ago.

WiSaGaN• 2 years ago

Unless you see gold as bullshit as well. I think it should now be consensus that Bitcoin isn't acting as a transaction tool, but as a store of value, just like gold. There are pros and cons when comparing it to gold as a store of value. But the main thing that keeps up the "value" of Bitcoin is just the belief that "it is a store of value" itself. As long as people continue to believe this, it doesn't need to have traditional value. This is the same as gold. Bitcoin in this sense is even more pure, because gold still has some industrial and consumer uses, while Bitcoin has zero. This belief may or may not persist in the foreseeable future, but it is what it is now. Thinking this is "bullshit" just doesn't really matter.

throw1010102• 2 years ago

I'll add that if gold wasn't so impractical to transfer, store and verify we would most likely still be using it as a currency way more frequently (even in our inflatuonist systems, it would likely be seen as a more sound money).

Bitcoin improves a lot on all of these properties while introducing other properties (open/public network, borderless, public ledger, etc.). Its supply/issuance has also been much more stable than Gold ever was (and ever will be if we're to believe the predictions of giant mines and even future asteroid mining).

robjan4• 2 years ago

For traditional stocks, you can use the PE ratio and other fundamentals to see how detached the market is from reality

e.g. https://www.multpl.com/s-p-500-pe-ratio

genghisjahn2• 2 years ago

It’s way higher than I ever thought it’d be. I sold mine at $800 so maybe I’ve got some sour grapes here, but all this reminds me of the book “Devil Take The Hindmost.”

TacticalCoder2• 2 years ago

You're talking about mania that lasted, at the very most, three years.

Is it really that intellectually honest to compare tulips, which can be grown everywhere, by anyone, with "something" that has been designed, on purpose, to have a diminishing issuance rate?

Satoshi made it very clear, in the very first Bitcoin block, that Bitcoin was a middle finger to politicians ever printing more money to bail out the banks.

I see Bitcoin has the "anti tulip".

genghisjahn2• 2 years ago

Housing went up for a long time and then what happened in 2008? That wasn’t a 2-3 year mania. Everyone thought houses were “safe as houses.” The stock market rally in the 90s went up until it didn’t in the .com crash. I’m not comparing btc to tulips, I’m comparing it to things that went up a lot and then went down fast. And if you come back with “btc is different” I’ll respond with “that’s what everyone says about everything else before it crashes.”

Ekaros3• 2 years ago

I got something like 30k XRP for free. Then I traded that for one BTC and got 300. I could now have 100k, but oh well I never was true believer. And I am still too sceptical even with stock market...

rvz• 2 years ago

The problem with the anti-crypto absolutists is that they just watched Bitcoin and the entire crypto industry go up once again and they did nothing but complain.

They are real quiet today. No where to be seen this time and probably sulking that they ended up on the wrong side of the trade. (again)

Well done to those who did not listen to their cope.

pm2222• 2 years ago

Sounds like btc is good for large amount of transfer as relatively low cost but not really ready for day to day expenses like gas/grocery. Yes?

Trasmatta• 2 years ago

People gave up on using BTC as an actual currency long ago. It's solely an investment vehicle now.

stackingsaunter4• 2 years ago

Yeah, so how can you explain I use it for daily payments here in El Salvador, buying groceries, coffee and pupusas? I need to use fiat maybe once a week, otherwise I pay with bitcoin for everything

tim3335• 2 years ago

I used it as actual currency not long ago to buy phone credit on Silent Link via the lightning network. So it is possible if quite a niche use case. Silent Link is quite cool by the way - they have an esim that works with almost every network on the planet and the credit doesn't expire.

aryan1410• 2 years ago

You’re right, but that’s not what BTC was designed for.

You could use something like Litecoin, Solana, maybe even Ethereum if you’re willing to pay the fee.

ajkdhcb27• 2 years ago

The whitepaper shows it was intended to be "peer to peer electronic cash". It did clearly fail at that goal since it has none of the privacy of cash and so on.

OkayBuddy44• 2 years ago

Arguably, that's exactly what it was designed for.

There was a very contentious split many years ago now (Bitcoin Cash vs Core fork) regarding this point. Until then, it was taken for granted that block size would continue increasing in proportion to transaction volume in order to facilitate such use. This was Satoshi's expectation, and there was little-to-no discussion otherwise. Quite suddenly, a few powerful, well-positioned people (with conflicting interests in the form of their Lightning side-chain solution) conspired to form a consensus of limiting on-chain transaction bandwidth via astroturfing and comprehensive censorship.

Whether they were responsible visionaries with the foresight to avert disaster using a novel solution, or spiteful saboteurs driven by greed and power, is up to the reader. Un/fortunately, they were very successful.

rhplus• 2 years ago

Literally the first sentence of the Bitcoin paper states that it was designed for peer to peer cash transactions:

https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

littlecranky67• 2 years ago

And it never will be. There is simply no point to register/log every expense at every gas station in a global, distributed ledger. Actual payments will be done with Layer-2 protocols, such as Lightning or Liquid, which are kind-of separate networks and protocols, but yet rely on the BTC network.

The idea that everyone will run custodial BTC/Lightning wallets is also rubbish. In the future, there will be institutions that do what banks do today: Give out accounts, which are non-custodial wallets like your todays online banking, and settle transfers with other banks in bulk by doing actual BTC onchain transactions.

Average Joe in 2040 will not run his own wallet but use an external service provider - just as Joe is not a member of the SWIFT transaction network, he will not be settling debt with BTC transactions but rather have an "account" and pay with whatever L2/L3 technology we will come up with.

It will be like in the gold-standard days. You had the right to exchange your paper dollars for gold, but no-one ever did. Yet every transaction was backend by gold, just as every L2/L3 transaction will be backed by bitcoin, though no onchain transaction will happen.

ericra• 2 years ago

Honestly, this is just repulsive. Crypto has brought nearly zero benefits to society and has made income inequality even worse. Not to mention the environmental impact.

I don't see how any reasonable person can celebrate this. Ask yourself who is benefiting most from this.

throwme_1233• 2 years ago

You can't be more wrong.

If anything, from my personal experience, "crypto" brought financial resources to minorities, especially PoC in the US. Some of them would never had that chance in the traditional world if you identify to that cause.

aryan1410• 2 years ago

Decentralization helps a lot of people who may be under government pressure/being monitored, for example if you’re an anti-government russian journalist, you’d ideally use crypto as they would be able to freeze your assets.

Lots of citizens of sanctioned countries aren’t able to use their credit/debit cards to shop online outside of their country, paying with crypto or even using something like a SolCard fixes that.

It’s also generally convenient, there’s no other realistic and accessible way to transfer any sum of money, whether $10 or $10M, for a $2 fee nearly instantly.

stackingsaunter4• 2 years ago

Just because you don't see the benefits, it doesn't mean they are not there. You don't know how bitcoin affected people's life and how they use it.

WheelsAtLarge• 2 years ago

If you are feeling regret, don't. Very few people anticipated such a significant increase. Any profit is a good profit. Even investments that seem highly promising can end up in bankruptcy. This is one of the few that managed to succeed.

evantbyrne• 2 years ago

Naw man not everything is luck. People have been talking about $100k Bitcoin for what feels like forever now. When the stock market rolled back two years of gains and Bitcoin moved similarly, those who understood what they were looking at made big plays. What happens long-term now that it has hit that mythical price point is less clear.

Gigachad2• 2 years ago

“People have been talking about” a lot of things that never happened.

If this price was truely guaranteed, then investors would have bought in as soon as the information became available.

cypherpunks013• 2 years ago

Bitcoin's not had to file for bankruptcy so far. And CEO never assassinated. But you never know, crazier things have happened.

TheBruceHimself• 2 years ago

I just don't understand why you'd choose Bitcoin over gold. Gold, like Bitcoin, was criticized for just being a stupid store of value, but that wasn't completely true as it undoubtedly had some utility in the economy. Worst case comes and the market crashes, you know there's at least someone somewhere buying. What does Bitcoin get you over gold? The same "it's scarce and therefore valuable" narrative so you can store your wealth there, but it's not got the intrinsic value of gold. If the market crashes, you can't sell Bitcoin to someone to make jewelry or false teeth.

If you want to argue that people could theoretically discover a lot more gold or bring in an asteroid one day full of it, okay, but then why not just by land then? Even better than gold, there's a potential for some income too. Or why not just go with something that's equally as scarce like vintage wine? You literally can't make anymore wine of a particular year; it's inherently scarce.

ipaddr2• 2 years ago

Bitcoin offers portability by not having to store gold. Rapid price changes.

One is more stable and the other more lucrative.

from-nibly• 2 years ago

The last two things are descriptions of the markets of those things not the things themselves.

Mithriil5• 2 years ago

To follow up on the idea.

It HAS a physical tie: it is the energy spent to run the chain, which is, however, backward to gold being a material. And it's not to the advantage of the owners, but of the miners.

I can easily see a catastrophic scenario out of this: a downward spiral of value happens for XY reason, and then a halving happens. That makes the mining of it suddenly highly costly, which makes it uninteresting, or less and less profitable to mine, which renders the chain slower and less popular, etc.

However, I think that the popularity of Bitcoin is still on the rise, and we won't see such a downward spiral before many halvings (20 years? That's a lot of GWh lost to useless computing...)

audleman• 2 years ago

You're forgetting about difficulty adjustment. Every time mining gets more expensive large number of miners drop out. This causes the difficulty target to drop. The remaining miners then start mining more blocks and profits rise. As a system it has built-in economic incentives to keep in in homeostasis.

aryan1410• 2 years ago

Well if you need to send someone a sum of money instantly anywhere in the world for no fees, it’s kind of unrealistic to meetup with gold bars

TMWNN• 2 years ago

Indeed, when I wanted to send $2000 across the US-Canada border in 2021, I found to my surprise that doing so with BTC within Coinbase was the cheapest option.

joegibbs• 2 years ago

But how much of the price of gold is its intrinsic worth? A fake gold ring made of some alloy can look and feel almost exactly the same as a real one, but as soon as you find out that it isn't real gold it suddenly loses 99% of its value - maybe it's not magnetic or it is slightly the wrong shade, but the value of gold isn't assigned for not reacting to magnets.

Only 11% of gold is for industrial purposes, so I think that if the thousands of years of cultural association of gold with wealth suddenly disappeared and people decided it was a bad investment, then it would be basically worthless.

ur-whale3• 2 years ago

its intrinsic worth

There is no such thing as "instrinsic worth".

There's only supply and demand.

Why there is demand for a certain good is a many-colored and complicated affair.

bufferoverflow• 2 years ago

There are many reasons to choose BTC over gold:

- easy to transmit

- easy to store (but both gold and BTC are dangerous to store at home from the security standpoint)

- easy to buy and sell

- BTC is actually limited (capped). There's no practical limit to the amount of gold. You're always one tech breakthrough away from gold becoming very common - read the history of aluminum, they used to make jewelry out of it.

- impossible to counterfeit. Even banks struggle to detect counterfeit gold

- gold for payments is completely impractical, BTC has Lightning network that seems to work.

- BTC is programmable

csomar4• 2 years ago

You can’t store $100m of gold in your brain and transit through an airport with just a sneakers in your backpack. If you happen to need this, you’ll realize how revolutionary bitcoin is.

zild3d• 2 years ago

as an extreme example consider holocaust survivors who managed to escape with jewelry or gold as a "store of value". Then those who managed to escape but the family member with the gold did not. With bitcoin, it could be written down or even committed to memory by your entire family

max_likelihood• 2 years ago

I wonder how much of the price action is due to debt funded purchases through MSTR and other leveraged ETFs (e.g. BITU, BITX)?

throw1010102• 2 years ago

Have a look at the daily volume of trading for Bitcoin, these financial tools are a very small part of this... we are talking $50-100 billions daily. It does contribute, but in terms of scale way less than what you seem to suggest... arguably I would guess that these days the announcements of big purchases move the market more than the actual purchase itself.

Uptrenda• 2 years ago

I was there, anon... I was there 11 years ago when the $100k Bitcoin was proposed... One had only to outstretch their hand and all the Bitcoins would be yours. But the coins, it seemed, had a will of their own. The fearful and the weak were the first to fall to its power. I watched grown men cry out as their fortunes vanished in an instant, lost to the abyss of forgotten passwords and the fiery maw of exchange hacks.

“It is but numbers on a ledger,” they said at first, dismissive of its allure. Yet the numbers grew, and their hearts darkened with greed.

I remember the great split—the Hard Fork Wars. Brothers turned against brothers, chains rent asunder, each claiming to be the true heir of Nakamoto's vision. But it was a war without banners, fought not with swords, but with hash rates and cryptographic fire. Many were the tokens that fell, discarded like the leaves of autumn, their worth reduced to naught.

I saw the rise of the altcoins, a thousand pretenders clamoring for a place in the sun. "To the moon!" they cried, their banners bright and hopeful. But most found only ruin, their holders wandering the barren wastes of forgotten wallets, muttering of rug pulls and false prophets.

Then came the age of DeFi, and the people rejoiced, for they thought they had found a new power—a magic to rival the centralized lords of old. But it was a perilous path, anon, filled with cunning contracts and exploits that devoured the unwary. I saw kingdoms built on leverage crumble in a single night, their rulers cast out into the dark.

And the NFTs! Ah, the NFTs… Each token a promise, a glimpse of eternity, they said. Men and elves alike paid dearly for these fragments of art and culture, yet many were cursed to hold only shadows, their treasures mocked by the uncaring markets.

Through it all, the Bitcoin endured, its ledger immutable, its purpose unyielding. But even it was not free from the grasping hands of fate. I remember the fall of Mt. Gox, the poisoned chalice of FTX, and the whispers of whales who moved the tides unseen. Each event a lesson, each loss a tale of hubris and folly.

Now, anon, as we stand upon the precipice of a new cycle, the wise and the weary tread cautiously. For the Bitcoin, though a gift, is also a burden. Those who seek it must be strong of will and sharp of mind, lest they too fall prey to its power.

I have seen the rise and fall of many. I have borne witness to fortunes made and lost, dreams forged and shattered. And still, the blockchain spins, unending, unyielding, like the great Eye ever watching.

Beware, anon. For the world of crypto is not for the faint of heart. It is a realm of shadow and light, where one must navigate with care, or be consumed by the fire of their own greed.

prng20212• 2 years ago

$1k, $10k, $100k. Watching this nonsensical hype at every stage left me in disbelief. Funny thing is after all these years I’m finally realizing there’s no reason whatsoever why it couldn’t hit $1M, $1B, or go back to $1.

Anytime we see a dollar symbol we assume something has value like a traditional asset, tied to tangible or measurable things like material costs, a company’s quarterly earnings, etc. But cryptocurrencies are totally different. This thing’s dollar value per unit wildly fluctuates literally hourly, because it’s based purely on human emotion and speculation.

Empact5• 2 years ago

There is an upper limit on the aggregate value of money - somehow related to the amount of stored value in the economy. On the other hand, there is no lower limit on the value of a dollar.

If bitcoin reaches $1B it will be through some combination of dollar depreciation and bitcoin appreciation.

https://www.fiatmarketcap.com https://assetmarketcap.com

JeremyNT• 2 years ago

The amount of money flowing into it has been a real shock.

I too played with bitcoin many years ago, mining on my CPU. Like a sucker I got rid of it because it clearly was not useful at its stated purpose.

Why have we created an economy where this kind of speculation is rewarded so highly, while it contributes nothing back to society? It's nonsensical.

But once you accept that finance is kind of ridiculous (and completely decoupled from any meaningful work in the real world), you can see that there is no limit to how high it can go.

jhrmnn• 2 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania - this one lasted only 3 years though

tim3335• 2 years ago

no reason whatsoever why it couldn’t hit $1M, $1B, or go back to $1

Not entirely true. The value is driven by number of people invested x average amount they have invested. Most of the historic increase has been as the number of people involved increased. Currently that's probably in the 100 - 200 million people range. It could 10x from here to $1M per bitcoin but is unlikely to go to $1B or $1.

prng20212• 2 years ago

What do you think the number of people and average amount they have invested is based on? I’m saying it’s based purely on emotion and speculation. It could be a sunny day so people feel good and put more money into Bitcoin. That’s quite different from egg prices skyrocketing after chickens get bird flu or stock price skyrocketing after an amazing earnings report or the dollar skyrocketing because of a fast growing economy.

colesantiago• 2 years ago

It is still a pyramid / ponzi scheme.

Sell while it is still high.

xnx2• 2 years ago

Whatever your theory of Bitcoin is, it has to incorporate that its 50% price increase is directly tied to the US election outcome.

tofuahdude2• 2 years ago

I'm curious what you'll "blame" the next 50% price increase on.

xnx2• 2 years ago

No telling what the next big move will be caused by.

Feb 2024: +50%. Approval of Bitcoin ETFs in the United States

Nov 2024: +50%. US election results

??? ????: ???%. ????

zahlman• 2 years ago

Nothing ever seems to come of discussing this topic on HN - just the usual cycle of people arguing with each other over whether BTC "ought to" (by what ontological principles?) be worth what it is (or, for that matter, anything at all), or what social impacts it has, etc.

None of that has anything at all to do with the current spot price. That's just an excuse to "debate" the topic again by pulling out the same old arguments.

Several other submissions intended to report the same simple fact were flagged and killed. Why not this one?

jaredklewis• 2 years ago

Well I mean, is there anything to discuss about the spot price itself? Stocks, bonds, and other assets also regularly reach round, base 10 values, and I can't think of any substance in these events generally worth discussing. Bringing out the usual flame wars seems as good a move as any.

owens992• 2 years ago

Congrats to the everyone who had the conviction to hold Bitcoin all these years.

owens992• 2 years ago

Why is this post flagged?

cypherpunks013• 2 years ago

Because people on the site don't like the topic

TacticalCoder2• 2 years ago

Yup why is flagged? The discussion seems civilized.

It looks like there aren't too many people comparing something that was designed, on purpose, with a fixed supply curve using a diminishing issuance rate and which exists since 16 years with "tulips", a mania that lasted 3 years (and everybody could grow tulips anywhere they want).

I stand my case: Satoshi made it very clear with his message in Bitcoin's genesis block that his invention was a gigantic middle finger to politicians bailing out banks by ever printing more money.

Bitcoin is the antithesis of tulips.

Bitcoin is the "fuck you" to QE / fractional reserve banking / helicopter money / physical bills printing / bonds issuance / etc.

And, so far, it's working.

animex• 2 years ago

To think I had 17 BTC at one point :-)

skwee3574• 2 years ago

I'm failing to understand the proposition behind bitcoin.

From what I remember, the amount of BTC is finite, so eventually we will run out of new BTCs, and by then, most will be held by big institutions and some individuals who didn't want to sell, and it will become yet another luxury commodity like diamonds or gold. Hence, the entire premise of "Bitcoin is the future of money" is kind of stupid, unless it's money for the ultrarich/lucky, because it's not available to the common folks.

And even if it was available to the common folks, how do you expect to live in a world where your currency changes value drastically from day to day? Isn't that a characteristic of a defaulted state/currency?

But let's say it's not the money of the future, but rather a speculative investment that is "not tied to greedy institutions". How does one sell 10 BTC and cash it out, bypassing the "greedy banks"? Last time I checked, most reputable exchanges are somewhat regulated, and in any way, getting a sudden $1M won't go unnoticed by the government.

So yes, I am failing to understand the premise of bitcoin. It seems to fail on both as the currency of the future, as well as unregulated investment instrument.

tmikaeld• 2 years ago

That's the irony of it all isn't it - since it's bound to traditional currencies for it's valuation, it's essentially the same thing as a traditional currency except you can't inflate it by printing more of it.

It is "digital gold" at this point.

omnimus• 2 years ago

Its a tradable financial asset. You are indeed right that it cannot be money. As finance people were saying from the very start. The whole point of money is that its possible to influence its price.

ArtTimeInvestor5• 2 years ago

    it's money for the ultrarich/lucky

Ok, so let's say you buy 1 Bitcoin today and then we end up in that future.

Now 21 million minus one ultrarich lucky guys hold one Bitcoin and one stupid poor guy (you) holds one bitcoin? Or would it make you part of the ultrarich lucky club?

skwee3574• 2 years ago

Sorry, I'm not sure if I understand your question/statement.

What I wanted to say, is that in its current form, bitcoin IS money for some ultrarich people who have enough of it AND are able to access a commerce world where you can actually buy stuff with it without converting it to fiat currencies. Because last time I checked, I can't buy milk with BTC in my local supermarket, but I bet I can buy some luxury/illegal thing that cost absurd amounts of money (for the common folk) with BTC.

Therefor, the mantra of "Bitcoin is the future of money" that's being pushed by BTC/crypto enthusiasts, is false. It MIGHT be a form of money for people who have lots of it, but not the common folk, doing everyday purchases.

fragmede2• 2 years ago

The banks are in on it this time. You can buy crypto on Fidelity, starting with as little as $1. Whether that's better or worse than buying SP500 or QQQ or Tbills on their platform is for you to decide. So pay your taxes on $10 million, you'll still have 5 left.

skwee3574• 2 years ago

But that's the point I'm making.

BTC was "advertised" as either the money of the future, which it is not, or an investment instrument that allows you to bypass government restrictions, which again, it is not, at least not for the common folks.

At this point, it's just a very volatile investment/speculation instrument.

xtracto• 2 years ago

So, the question one has to ask is, why aren't banks and "serious" institutions now behind bitcoin? If it is a scam/fad/etc?

The story of Cryptocurrencies reminds me a bit of Linux: "it was a cancer to society" until it was not. And now everyone is adopting it and corps have fucked it with their "open core" offerings.

I myself think that the use case of "trustless store and transfer of value" has a LOT of more attraction to what detractors see.

miohtama• 2 years ago

It's not about luck.

I run one of the early Bitcoin exchanges in 2013.

We had users from 200 countries, mostly common folks with small amounts.

Everyone had a change to make 1000x. Bitcoin has been mostly widely available asset in the world.

skwee3574• 2 years ago

When I said luck, I meant people who were among the first to either mine or buy (at an affordable price) whole Bitcoins and held them until this day.

It's fine that common folk can buy fractions of BTC, but these amounts won't change their lives. And anyone who can afford to buy >= 1 BTC today, is already wealthy (or stupid).

asenna• 2 years ago

Why is this post flagged?

jpatters• 2 years ago

Makes me really wish I could find that wallet I mined 50 bitcoin into from my laptop back in 2009 and then got bored of because they were essentially worthless.

ArenaSource• 2 years ago

Why all this negativity against Bitcoin?

It is one of the best instruments for speculating on the extent of human idiocy.

Bitcoin is over $100k

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