Given their lack of audits/transparency coupled with a Tether supply increase from 4 billion to 20 billion this year alone, I would by inclined to apply Occam’s Razor and view this as primarily market manipulation driven by Tether’s free money printer.
A major chunk of Tether lives on Ethereum and is mostly being used for on-chain decentralized money-markets using smart contracts. (Eg Unisawp, MakerDAO, CurveFi and Compound)
Tether is issued on multiple blockchains. Omni is Bitcoin based, and recently most of it moved from Omni to Ethereum ($12.6 bil). Others include Tron ($6.4 bil), EOS ($90 mil), Liquid ($16.5 mil), and so on.
Yes, this has been discussed many times on HN, but I'd like to hear the specifics of the mechanism by which Tether actually influences the price of Bitcoin up and down.
According to [1] (2018) , actually getting down to the metal to track what happens in the tether blockchain isn't straightforward.
According to coincap [2] there is around 20B tether in circulation.
Also according to coincap, the Bitcoin market cap is around 380B.
Now, the question is one of market depth: can 20B be used to manipulate a 380B market.
What I would very much like to see is an aggregate market depth number for - say - the top 30 exchanges. Does anyone have a reference for this?
That's 20B of "money" supposedly going into the market. A market cap of 380B doesn't mean 380B went into the market. 20B of "money" could easily move such a market significantly.
If I have a billion coins, and I sell one for $1, it has a market cap of 1B, but only $1 went into the market.
> Now, the question is one of market depth: can 20B be used to manipulate a 380B market.
I think the answer to this is yes, but I’d suggest a further specification: could it be used to manipulate a 380B market without breaking the dollar peg, which I haven’t been able to figure out a good mechanism for.
That said, I do think there’s a reasonably probable case where USDT unraveling is an existential threat to BTC: if a large portion of USDT reserves are actually in BTC, a run on USDT could cause Tether to start needing to sell BTC holdings at market to hold the peg, which would drive the prices down.
AFAIK Tether has not said that it is backed by USD, just by “assets”, and hasn’t completed an audit.
Any rational investor at this point should own some amount of bitcoin and / or ethereum. The asymmetric upside potential vs. going to zero makes a $1000 investment have very strong upside with limited downside.
Sure, you can buy crypto options in a few places, but buying and holding crypto is far less risky in the ecosystem. There is not a robinhood for crypto options.
Presumably your trade would be time limited as well (or at least have some exit conditions) unless your plan would be to buy and hold bitcoin from now until the end of time.
If you think it will break the previous floor on fear alone, absent the technical uncertainty and unsustainable rapid growth leading up to the 9k crash, let alone the institutional investment this round, you are speculating without any real basis.
It’s so strange to listen to Bitcoin advocates talk about hypothetically unlimited upside. I think a side effect of the realization that Bitcoin had no real underlying fundamentals that can explain the price, and therefore it’s difficult to think of an upper limit for the price using traditional metrics.
This leads to weird rationalizations where people compare losing their $1000 investment to the “what it” scenario of Bitcoin going to $500k or $1 million, in which case $1000 suddenly feels negligible. Of course, Bitcoin going to a million dollars per coin doesn’t make any sense, but the “what if” and FOMO are strong drivers for some people.
It doesn't make any more sense than the dollar going to ~1/2000 oz of gold, but here we are.
Bitcoin is decentralized fiat currency which you can perceive to be very valuable like the USD or worthless like the Venezuelan bolivar, as none have any intrinsic value or fundamentals besides trust.
It has currency fundamentals. Those are 1) limited supply/no one can print it 2) widely recognized 3) easily transferred and stored 4) difficult to steal or forge
The strength of those properties in Bitcoin are fairly unique and unprecedented. It makes it an ideal means of storing value in the long term. I think the main downside is the amount of speculation that’s been going on and the volatility that results from that speculation. That’s likely to change as it becomes more and more mainstream and more people use it as an emergency savings account protected from fiat devaluation rather than an investment.
I agree that the unlimited upside some people are touting doesn’t make any sense, but I think it does have the potential to grow further. I don’t know how much, but it’s still a niche area. Would be interested to see what the world looks like where most people have 5% of their savings in bitcoin.
The problem is, you can't get rich with sensible investing.
Compound interest is often treated as magic, but like the magic of special and general relatively, it only really kicks in under conditions that don't really matter to ordinary people.
Money going into an index fund will increase roughly 10x over the course of 30 years or so. This is nice; if you can stop living paycheck-to-paycheck by age 30 and save 10% of your pre-tax income (which is not a given), you can have a comfortable retirement, and the more frugally you live in your youth the more comfortable a retirement you can achieve.
But you won't get rich that way. Best case scenario, if you are absurdly frugal and save nearly all of your money, prudently invested, for forty, fifty, sixty years, you can get one big bang at the end after decades of deprivation.
To get rich you need to win the metaphoric lottery, by founding a unicorn startup, or going all-in on a series of absurdly risky investments, or by just winning an actual lottery.
Bitcoin has "unlimited upside" because USD/fiat has unlimited downside. Infinite debasement is normal in fiat, until the currency is destroyed at least.
I think you're getting somewhere but in terms of risk allocation. It may be optimal, overall, to allocate a small portion to high risk assets in case of a big payout.
But... I think in many ways BitCoin has passed that point. There is never going to be another 100x growth. Time to find the next thing.
Probably worth a disclosure if anyone works at a FAANG if they speak on any subject related to data collection, privacy violations, and ad tracking? Your comment is irrelevant.
My statement was less analogous to working at FAANG vs you being a FAANG shareholder and telling everyone to buy FAANG stocks.
I’ve worked in crypto in for 5 years, it’s disheartening the number of industry names that just talk up their own book/holdings.
Be bullish on crypto, fine, I am to a degree. Also why not spend some time being honest about risks so Joe Bloggs investor doesn’t get wiped out through fomo.
If you go through my post history over the past 3 years you will find attempts to get HN on board with crypto through every tactic you can imagine. I will continue to try, taking all of the downvotes along the way. Not sure how long you have been on HN for, but it is disheartening how anti-crypto this place is, given my passion and commitment to the industry and technology.
Thanks for your work on this. I expect a % of the people were encouraged to look deeper into the tech and now thank you profusely for pointing them in the right direction.
I think Ethereum is much more technically interesting and has more capable leadership. I'm surprised the rise in ETH has been so muted comparatively. Any conjectures?
It's not like Bitcoin has a hardcap in any of our lifetimes. Coin yearly inflation is the metric people should be concerned about. BTC is less than 2%, whereas Ethereum is around 4% today. With PoS, this figure will drop to <2%, so equivalent to Bitcoin. The whole "ETH supply is infinite" is such a lame argument. It's not infinite, because your life isn't infinite. It has a finite yearly inflation, just like Bitcoin.
BTC is less than 2%, whereas Ethereum is around 4% today
Let's not forget Bitcoin's block subsidy (currently 6.25 BTC) is cut in half every 210,000 blocks or about every 4 years. Bitcoin is deflationary—88.44% of all Bitcoin that will ever be produced have already been issued.
We have no idea where Eth is with its production of currency.
Because is also much more technically complex than Bitcoin. Also none of them are solving real problems, but ETH has the capability to become that with DApps, once the current generation of politicians die and the next one, that is more technically capable will replace them. Going to be at least another decade before that happen though.
Also none of them are solving real problems, but ETH has the capability to become that with DApps…
The problem Bitcoin solves is creating a non-sovereign store of value that can't be manipulated/inflated by governments and central banks. That's a problem worth solving.
Bitcoin started with smart contracts on day one, but the focus has been on robustness. However, there's plenty of work going on with layer 2 and side chains to for DApps, etc.
I can make three conjectures off the top of my head:
1. Bitcoin has some sort of "first mover" advantage which gives it a critical number of investors/PR that allows it to keep trading high, and no other coin will ever be able to catch up to it.
2. Bitcoin is actually technically superior to other coins, and it won't be supplanted until whatever the special sauce is, is replicated.
3. Something is hinky in the Bitcoin markets, eg, Tether, and this explains its divergence from other coins.
Does Tether have a direct relationship with Bitcoin in a way that for example Ethereum doesn't? I was under the impression that all places that trade USDT do so with all major cryptocurrencies.
I believe they proposed the essentials of 2.0 years ago, and there were a lot of tutorials and workshops related to dapps that made it sound like a scalable, global compute network was just on the horizon.
Between that and the fork after the DAO got hacked, I’ve personally been staying away from it until 2.0 proves itself (phase 0 just came out this month).
I agree it’s very technically interesting, and think they’re responsible for the bulk of the innovation in the crypto space (them and monero for advances in privacy), but I don’t follow crypto super close/there might be others pushing the same ideas or better ideas in better ways.
Bitcoin has enough dev power to implement any feature, the gatekeepers are the people running the node and to a smaller extent the developers and miners. There is a reason Bitcoin just is.
>'m surprised the rise in ETH has been so muted comparatively.
Well, there's the fact that Ethereum supply isn't finite.
As a matter of fact, from a practical point of view, it's pretty much anyone's guess what the issuance's rate is (there is an algorithm buried somewhere in the code, but whenever you ask an ETH acolyte how many more ETH there will be in existence in X months, I've never gotten a straight answer).
As evidenced by the replies here, most people don't understand Ethereum, much less what is being done with Ethereum atm. Most people still don't know what DeFi means, or know that Ethereum has more nodes, processes more transactions per day, has thousands of more devs building with it, that real estate shares are issued on it (https://realt.co/), or that tokenized digital art is selling for millions on Ethereum (https://usaherald.com/beeple-an-iconic-digital-artist-sells-...). etc. Most don't know that $2.3B (0.62%) of BTC is locked in custody to be traded as an Ethereum token (https://defipulse.com/wbtc) as to get access to financial istruments built on Ethereum.
Eventually this will be common knowledge, but it isn't yet. It's early days.
DeFi is being able to trade unregulated equities or lend on their collateral on decentralized exchanges with transactions guaranteed by code.
In other words, it's for degens that think avoiding taxes on shitcoin trading is peak crypto.
There are other interesting things on blockchains that can be done outside of decentralized finance. But trading shitcoins is what people are getting off on right now.
It reminds me of how porn is almost always first in new technology adoption.
Ethereum software development has many perilous foot guns. Last time I looked, it's nearly impossible for a technical investor to validate the code in a contract themselves, because the compiled code from human readable languages produces hard-to-read machine code non-deterministically.
I would also note that Bitcoin is up 5% since Dec 15, 2017, while GOOG is up 66% and TSLA is up 800%.
I am curious whether this peak will go significantly (2x) higher than the last one, or whether the number looks "too big" and discourages investors, even though Bitcoins are finely divisible.
Partially related: there seems to be a ton of money around. I sold my startup about 18 months ago, and I’m already being contacted by VCs (4 in the past 2/3 months) to see “what we’re working on next”. We’re not even looking to raise money.
Seems like interest rates are very low, and monetary supply is going up in the US. Investors are looking for better alternatives to escape ZIRP. Don’t quote this as financial advice cause I’m no expert, but ill keep betting on BTC.
There is a lot of money floating around, but there has also been a huge explosion of new and aspiring VCs.
The number of VCs seems to be growing faster than the number of startups, so VCs are increasingly competitive to get the scoop on potential deals before their competitors. This leads to mass spamming of anyone and everyone who might potentially have a lead.
The new trend for aspiring VCs is to source deals and bring them to actual VCs. It’s not uncommon to be hit up by people implying that they have connections to VCs, when in reality they’re just hoping to find a new, unknown deal to bring to a VC firm to build rapport.
Yeah, debt seems to be really cheap right now and people are making the most of it, lots of acquisitons have been announced recently that I feel wouldn't have without this low interest rate.
End of (2?) year peak! Get ready for 80% drop and gradual rise over the next 1-2 years again. It's the pattern, maybe this year I'm smart enough to sell before the drop and buy again by the end of January ;)
Huh, finally. I hopped on the bandwagon in 2017 but didn't sell when it was up, I've just been sitting on my hands until it did.
Of course, getting back onto Coinbase and I'm now asked to verify my identity and upload my driver's license and all. I mean they should have done that in the first place insofar as governments are concerned, but still.
edit: I also spammed random cryptocurrencies (ripple, dash, augur?) on Kraken, those have tanked since then, lol.
Similar situation for me: I've had an account since 2013, but Coinbase is just a month ago started asking me to verify my identity. That prevents me from selling or transferring my crypto, but I'm still allowed to buy more!? Their automated verification tool fails for my driver's license, and despite multiple support tickets I've gotten no human response. My takeaway from this is that Coinbase isn't mature enough to be trusted.
I can only echo the sentiment wrt Coinbase. They're failing address verification for me, in spite of sending them multiple different types of documents that are clearly showing needed data. And not a peep from direct help via tickets for weeks now.
Interesting, seems they either deployed a new verification system or having massive issues with the existing one as I’m in the same boat. Been verified on Coinbase for years now, and still shows up as verified on the verification page, but the dashboard says I have to verify again. None of my documents works, even though they worked before and all details match. Also wrote to them but no response so far.
Coinbase seems to be the most trustworthy of all exchanges. Most coins in cold storage plus insurance on top of the hot wallet. They also offer Coinbase wallet where you control your keys.
I’m considering moving to a trusted exchange.
Do you see disadvantages in storing and managing all on your own? It also carries risk. I’m more frightened to loose my Trezor T than Coinbase screwing me.
Even if you have a trezor (or other hardware wallet), you back up your private keys (all those words) somewhere else. That is the real security hole in all of this, not the risk of losing your device.
Bitcoin's exchange rate has advanced in regular four-year cycles going back to about 2010. The peaks are phase-shifted from the four-year halving period.
Each cycle is punctuated by a media hype deluge. Nonstop coverage of Bitcoin in the popular media. Face ripping rallies every other day. Tales of freshly-minted millionaires and fortunes buried in landfills. That hasn't happened yet.
Each cycle brings in more news coverage, more users, more holders, more speculators, more critics, and more haters. If this trend holds, Bitcoin will follow one of two paths: it will be replaced by something better at its primary function; or it will replace something else. Network effects favor the latter.
The current cycle just happens to coincide with the largest expansion money base the world has ever seen.
> it will be replaced by something better at its primary function
What is its primary function? I used to think it was supposed to be a currency, but it's failing quite badly at that. But it keeps growing so what's the actual primary function?
Why does it have to be all or nothing? 10% to 15% of your portfolio is more reasonable. Adjust the percentage based on your bull/bear feeling towards the market.
It actually means no ATH was reached. We just reached a higher number in dollar value. The actual goods you can buy with one bitcoin is still lower than at the peak in 2017.
Obvious measuring form peak to peak is rather meaningless.
Parroting shallow conclusions you've heard on the internets a thousand times without actually investigating them yourself isn't going to make you popular on HN.
Considering the generalized anti-crypto sentiment you often find here in HN, I'm not so sure about that. ;)
Speaking about the fact itself and not just quipping: I think this latest all-time high speaks a lot more about USD than it does about BTC. Lots of money floating around at the moment looking to get busy and all that.
Bitcoin is an almost perfect exploitation of humanities fatal flaws (greed, unwillingness to acknowledge externalities - i.e. selfishness). For that reason I think demand will continue to increase for Bitcoin / it will continue to increase in value.
Not wanting to get 50% of your savings stolen by the state/cantillonaire-class through dollar/fiat debasement every 5-10 years isn't greed. It is actually the opposite of greed.
It's really very simple. Tether is meant to be designed such that you can buy 1 "tether" (USDT) for $1 and sell for $1, initially the suggestion was that every tether in existence was backed by $1 in a bank account owned by the issuer. But that doesn't seem to be true. So how do you manipulate BTC using USDT? You just print USDT and use them to buy BTC. Everyone thinks that 1 USDT = $1, so they're willing to receive it. As long as no one actually tries to cash out the USDT, it's fine. And why would you cash out? Bitcoin is going to the moon!
So as long as there's a net inflow of cash into tether, the issuer of tether can just pump the market up using unbacked USDT.
What's a safe way to buy crypto? Obviously the crypto values can change, but is there a recommended platform? I've considered buying for some time but am always put off by now knowing whether a platform is considered shady or not. I see a lot of stuff about people losing keys or bitcoins and don't know how to safely purchase
My recommendation would be to get an account on Gemini and purchase crypto through them and then transfer it off to a hardware wallet like Trezor. Since its beginning Gemini has always tried very hard to be fully compliant with US law and regulations, which is not the case for some other popular crypto exchanges. Also, I've been happy with their customer service and responsiveness. At one point I had an issue with a trade executing too slowly. I opened a ticket with them and the team ultimately resolved the issue by issuing the trade at the lower price I saw.
In regards to the hardware wallets, I'd buy 2 Trezors and store them in separate locations, so that if something happens to one, then you can still quickly and easily access your coins with the other one. (If you don't do this, then if you lost your Trezor for some reason, you'd have to order another one and wait for it arrive before you could recover and access your crypto)
In regards to the hardware wallets, I'd buy 2 Trezors and store them in separate locations
If you're going bitcoin-only, you should consider Coldcard, which is the hardware wallet the hardcore bitcoiners love [1].
Cobo Vault is fairly new on the scene but is also getting rave reviews [2].
If you're going multisig, you should buy hardware wallets from different vendors to guard against a flaw or security vulnerability from any one vendor. For example, Trezor has some issues recently [3].
Bitcoin’s supply is constrained by math. You can’t inject trillions of BTC out of thin air like US govt is doing right now. Plus low interest rates mean there is just so much money for those who already have money.
I expect BTC to rise. It’s a store of value. Holding USD in the bank is a terrible idea right now.
Even real estate is shooting up like crazy - at-least in Seattle area (well because supply is constrained)
Strongly disagree, the USD is still the main flight to safety in the world. I don’t see that changing any time soon.
That was before a global pandemic and the printing of many trillions of dollars this year, with no end in sight. Why do you think Saylor [1] put his corporate treasury of $425 million into BTC? And then issued bonds to buy even more? Because keeping his company treasury in cash and cash equivalents would mean losing 5-20% each year, since interest rates are zero and inflation is increasing.
Inflation is NOT increasing. It's around 1% right now, near historical lows. There's no way that cash will be losing 5-20% each year, that's crazy. Who cares what Saylor is doing, he's 1 guy who controls the purses of his company. Last I checked he's no financial wizard with a proven track record. He's just noteworthy because he's the only one doing it and he'll get burned badly if BTC drops back down to $4k. Like lose the company burned.
A typical store of value doesn’t have annual 80% price swings.
Volatility is a thing but Bitcoin has outperformed every stock and commodity over the past 5 and 10 years. It can't be deflated or manipulated by central banks and governments.
You're cherry picking the time periods to prove a point. Last year if I said "BTC is under-performing every asset class imaginable in the last 2 years" I would have been correct too.
Stores of value early in their lives have volatility that subsides eventually. Losing 50% of your USD savings every 5-10 years thanks to dollar debasement isn't a "flight to safety"
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 227 ms ] threadThey still haven't passed an audit, and they've changed the "1USDT is backed by $1" to "1USDT is backed by loans and vaguely defined investments". https://cointelegraph.com/news/changes-to-tethers-terms-of-r...
You can track the Tether issued on Ethereum in real-time by looking at this contract https://etherscan.io/token/0xdac17f958d2ee523a2206206994597c...
Currently over $12.4 billion Tether issued on Ethereum
Last I read up on it, it was implemented on top of Omni [1]
[1] https://hackernoon.com/a-closer-look-at-tethers-blockchain-5...
Are there multiple Blockchains where Tether was issued?
Full stats https://wallet.tether.to/transparency
According to [1] (2018) , actually getting down to the metal to track what happens in the tether blockchain isn't straightforward.
According to coincap [2] there is around 20B tether in circulation.
Also according to coincap, the Bitcoin market cap is around 380B.
Now, the question is one of market depth: can 20B be used to manipulate a 380B market.
What I would very much like to see is an aggregate market depth number for - say - the top 30 exchanges. Does anyone have a reference for this?
[1] https://hackernoon.com/a-closer-look-at-tethers-blockchain-5...
[2] https://coincap.io/
If I have a billion coins, and I sell one for $1, it has a market cap of 1B, but only $1 went into the market.
I think the answer to this is yes, but I’d suggest a further specification: could it be used to manipulate a 380B market without breaking the dollar peg, which I haven’t been able to figure out a good mechanism for.
That said, I do think there’s a reasonably probable case where USDT unraveling is an existential threat to BTC: if a large portion of USDT reserves are actually in BTC, a run on USDT could cause Tether to start needing to sell BTC holdings at market to hold the peg, which would drive the prices down.
AFAIK Tether has not said that it is backed by USD, just by “assets”, and hasn’t completed an audit.
Should any rational investor put some over their portfolio in roulette spins every year?
BT could easily crash back to $3k if people get spooked
That said it seems like a more solid foundation of interest now.
If you think it will break the previous floor on fear alone, absent the technical uncertainty and unsustainable rapid growth leading up to the 9k crash, let alone the institutional investment this round, you are speculating without any real basis.
Do you see the flaw in arguments of extremes?
This leads to weird rationalizations where people compare losing their $1000 investment to the “what it” scenario of Bitcoin going to $500k or $1 million, in which case $1000 suddenly feels negligible. Of course, Bitcoin going to a million dollars per coin doesn’t make any sense, but the “what if” and FOMO are strong drivers for some people.
Bitcoin is decentralized fiat currency which you can perceive to be very valuable like the USD or worthless like the Venezuelan bolivar, as none have any intrinsic value or fundamentals besides trust.
The strength of those properties in Bitcoin are fairly unique and unprecedented. It makes it an ideal means of storing value in the long term. I think the main downside is the amount of speculation that’s been going on and the volatility that results from that speculation. That’s likely to change as it becomes more and more mainstream and more people use it as an emergency savings account protected from fiat devaluation rather than an investment.
I agree that the unlimited upside some people are touting doesn’t make any sense, but I think it does have the potential to grow further. I don’t know how much, but it’s still a niche area. Would be interested to see what the world looks like where most people have 5% of their savings in bitcoin.
Compound interest is often treated as magic, but like the magic of special and general relatively, it only really kicks in under conditions that don't really matter to ordinary people.
Money going into an index fund will increase roughly 10x over the course of 30 years or so. This is nice; if you can stop living paycheck-to-paycheck by age 30 and save 10% of your pre-tax income (which is not a given), you can have a comfortable retirement, and the more frugally you live in your youth the more comfortable a retirement you can achieve.
But you won't get rich that way. Best case scenario, if you are absurdly frugal and save nearly all of your money, prudently invested, for forty, fifty, sixty years, you can get one big bang at the end after decades of deprivation.
To get rich you need to win the metaphoric lottery, by founding a unicorn startup, or going all-in on a series of absurdly risky investments, or by just winning an actual lottery.
By the same logic any rational investor should own some Tesla stock: hide potential upside in battery tech going forward and "limited" downside.
Problem is at least one of these options has some fundamentals.
But... I think in many ways BitCoin has passed that point. There is never going to be another 100x growth. Time to find the next thing.
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/050115/what-types-o...
I’ve worked in crypto in for 5 years, it’s disheartening the number of industry names that just talk up their own book/holdings.
Be bullish on crypto, fine, I am to a degree. Also why not spend some time being honest about risks so Joe Bloggs investor doesn’t get wiped out through fomo.
Let's not forget Bitcoin's block subsidy (currently 6.25 BTC) is cut in half every 210,000 blocks or about every 4 years. Bitcoin is deflationary—88.44% of all Bitcoin that will ever be produced have already been issued.
We have no idea where Eth is with its production of currency.
You must be a EMH denier :)
> ETH supply is infinite
I never claimed that ETH supply is infinite, just that the issuance is unpredictable.
The problem Bitcoin solves is creating a non-sovereign store of value that can't be manipulated/inflated by governments and central banks. That's a problem worth solving.
Bitcoin started with smart contracts on day one, but the focus has been on robustness. However, there's plenty of work going on with layer 2 and side chains to for DApps, etc.
https://blockstream.com/2020/10/22/en-blockstream-amp-issue-...
1. Bitcoin has some sort of "first mover" advantage which gives it a critical number of investors/PR that allows it to keep trading high, and no other coin will ever be able to catch up to it.
2. Bitcoin is actually technically superior to other coins, and it won't be supplanted until whatever the special sauce is, is replicated.
3. Something is hinky in the Bitcoin markets, eg, Tether, and this explains its divergence from other coins.
Can you elaborate? I was under the impression that it had notable failings, including privacy, compared to something like Monero
Perkins Coie released a report [0] saying that privacy coins are compatible with regulation.
[0] https://www.perkinscoie.com/en/news-insights/anti-money-laun...
And to be fair Ethereum has more scalability problems than Bitcoin.
I believe they proposed the essentials of 2.0 years ago, and there were a lot of tutorials and workshops related to dapps that made it sound like a scalable, global compute network was just on the horizon.
Between that and the fork after the DAO got hacked, I’ve personally been staying away from it until 2.0 proves itself (phase 0 just came out this month).
I agree it’s very technically interesting, and think they’re responsible for the bulk of the innovation in the crypto space (them and monero for advances in privacy), but I don’t follow crypto super close/there might be others pushing the same ideas or better ideas in better ways.
If it's a breaking change, you would need to convince enough people to migrate to Bitcoin2(similar to what's happening in ETH right now).
Have you considered the possibility that this is a bug, not a feature?
Well, there's the fact that Ethereum supply isn't finite.
As a matter of fact, from a practical point of view, it's pretty much anyone's guess what the issuance's rate is (there is an algorithm buried somewhere in the code, but whenever you ask an ETH acolyte how many more ETH there will be in existence in X months, I've never gotten a straight answer).
ETH has been known to fork to change the blockchain and eradicate some transactions the leadership didn't like (see the DAO story).
That may be a good thing in some people's book. In the Bitcoin world, this kind of thing is not very popular.
See the "Value overflow incident" of 2010, which was fixed with human intervention which ultimately rolled back 53 blocks through a soft-fork.
Anyways, both this and theDAO incidents are far away in the past now.
Ethereum aspires to have fun.
Eventually this will be common knowledge, but it isn't yet. It's early days.
DeFi is being able to trade unregulated equities or lend on their collateral on decentralized exchanges with transactions guaranteed by code.
In other words, it's for degens that think avoiding taxes on shitcoin trading is peak crypto.
There are other interesting things on blockchains that can be done outside of decentralized finance. But trading shitcoins is what people are getting off on right now.
It reminds me of how porn is almost always first in new technology adoption.
TSLA up 15x over same timeframe
BTC only 4x Tesla rn
(So BTC is only 4x more of a scam than TSLA is)
Maybe BTC should split so retail investors don't have to look at any big impressive feeling numbers
Just change your measuring stick.
I am curious whether this peak will go significantly (2x) higher than the last one, or whether the number looks "too big" and discourages investors, even though Bitcoins are finely divisible.
there are always new opportunities !
Seems like interest rates are very low, and monetary supply is going up in the US. Investors are looking for better alternatives to escape ZIRP. Don’t quote this as financial advice cause I’m no expert, but ill keep betting on BTC.
The number of VCs seems to be growing faster than the number of startups, so VCs are increasingly competitive to get the scoop on potential deals before their competitors. This leads to mass spamming of anyone and everyone who might potentially have a lead.
The new trend for aspiring VCs is to source deals and bring them to actual VCs. It’s not uncommon to be hit up by people implying that they have connections to VCs, when in reality they’re just hoping to find a new, unknown deal to bring to a VC firm to build rapport.
It’s becoming a numbers game.
Of course, getting back onto Coinbase and I'm now asked to verify my identity and upload my driver's license and all. I mean they should have done that in the first place insofar as governments are concerned, but still.
edit: I also spammed random cryptocurrencies (ripple, dash, augur?) on Kraken, those have tanked since then, lol.
You have zero bitcoins if you don't control your private keys. Millions of bitcoiners worldwide got screwed by the exchanges.
I’m considering moving to a trusted exchange. Do you see disadvantages in storing and managing all on your own? It also carries risk. I’m more frightened to loose my Trezor T than Coinbase screwing me.
Each cycle is punctuated by a media hype deluge. Nonstop coverage of Bitcoin in the popular media. Face ripping rallies every other day. Tales of freshly-minted millionaires and fortunes buried in landfills. That hasn't happened yet.
Each cycle brings in more news coverage, more users, more holders, more speculators, more critics, and more haters. If this trend holds, Bitcoin will follow one of two paths: it will be replaced by something better at its primary function; or it will replace something else. Network effects favor the latter.
The current cycle just happens to coincide with the largest expansion money base the world has ever seen.
What is its primary function? I used to think it was supposed to be a currency, but it's failing quite badly at that. But it keeps growing so what's the actual primary function?
Would you be willing to put your life savings in bitcoin for e.g. 30 years? I wouldn't and I would be surprised if many did.
I was speaking against this specific idea that bitcoin is (long term, stable) store of value.
Inflation hedge.
If you look at the amound of USD that has been issued in the last year alone, that's a fairly attractive proposition.
Measuring anything in USD is self-flagellation.
Parroting shallow conclusions you've heard on the internets a thousand times without actually investigating them yourself isn't going to make you popular on HN.
Speaking about the fact itself and not just quipping: I think this latest all-time high speaks a lot more about USD than it does about BTC. Lots of money floating around at the moment looking to get busy and all that.
So as long as there's a net inflow of cash into tether, the issuer of tether can just pump the market up using unbacked USDT.
It's crazy to see btc hit this price. Everyone said I was silly when I spent 5k on mining rigs back in 2013!!
In regards to the hardware wallets, I'd buy 2 Trezors and store them in separate locations, so that if something happens to one, then you can still quickly and easily access your coins with the other one. (If you don't do this, then if you lost your Trezor for some reason, you'd have to order another one and wait for it arrive before you could recover and access your crypto)
If you're going bitcoin-only, you should consider Coldcard, which is the hardware wallet the hardcore bitcoiners love [1].
Cobo Vault is fairly new on the scene but is also getting rave reviews [2].
If you're going multisig, you should buy hardware wallets from different vendors to guard against a flaw or security vulnerability from any one vendor. For example, Trezor has some issues recently [3].
[1] https://coldcardwallet.com
[2] https://cobo.com/hardware-wallet
[3] https://blog.kraken.com/post/3662/kraken-identifies-critical...
Coinbase and Gemini are both regulated and safe as well.
I expect BTC to rise. It’s a store of value. Holding USD in the bank is a terrible idea right now.
Even real estate is shooting up like crazy - at-least in Seattle area (well because supply is constrained)
A typical store of value doesn’t have annual 80% price swings.
> Holding USD is a terrible idea
Strongly disagree, the USD is still the main flight to safety in the world. I don’t see that changing any time soon.
https://www.macrotrends.net/1333/historical-gold-prices-100-...
That was before a global pandemic and the printing of many trillions of dollars this year, with no end in sight. Why do you think Saylor [1] put his corporate treasury of $425 million into BTC? And then issued bonds to buy even more? Because keeping his company treasury in cash and cash equivalents would mean losing 5-20% each year, since interest rates are zero and inflation is increasing.
[1] https://www.microstrategy.com/en/bitcoin
[2] "The Fraying of the US Global Currency Reserve System"—https://www.lynalden.com/fraying-petrodollar-system/
Volatility is a thing but Bitcoin has outperformed every stock and commodity over the past 5 and 10 years. It can't be deflated or manipulated by central banks and governments.