I've been expecting a huge crash in crypto. It doesn't seem to happen. I'll never invest as I see no reason for the high value and no reason for the value to increase. Other than it being something close to a Ponzi scheme that people love to invest in as they assume there is some underlying value.
It seems to me many people assume they'll find their greater fool to sell to and not be left holding the bag - everything else is just rationalising that greed.
To be fair, it has grown a lot. From Usenet groups, to some little-known thing used with Tor to buy drugs, to now having adverts for various companies in Snapchat, at the Superbowl, etc.
That's a lot more potential bagholders injecting capital.
It has grown as a speculation vehicle, but how much has it grown as an actually used means of exchanging value? (How much outside of toy usages? How much outside of immoral usage?)
You are conveniently ignoring Lightning which currently power payments for an entire nation (El Salvador) and has plenty of capacity for more. Lightning scales fast and cheap, offering instant final settlement powered by the largest security hashpower wall ever invented. Try that with Fiat.
"Blockchain is so great, it had to invent off chain transactions to be practical" isn't the best argument for real world feasibility. LN has lots of centralization with popular nodes, if you're still paying for an on chain transaction to open/close a channel, you have to start the channel with enough reserves to make it worthwhile.
Tell me you don't understand the fundamental blockchain tradeoff between scalability, decentralization, and security, without telling me you don't understand. Blockchain technology has unique advantages and constraints, like any novel technology.
Bitcoin chose a set of parameters designed to ensure sufficient security budget to protect the network, while optimizing for decentralization thereby limiting transaction throughput on layer 1 as the tradeoff. Lightning and other layer-2 provide the scalability by leveraging the security of layer-1.
Bitcoin layer-1 is ideal for sending large payments (say >$1000USD today):
It currently costs ~$1USD to post a transaction on the Bitcoin layer-1 blockchain. For that I can send an arbitrary amount with no upper limit of value, enjoy payment finality in about 6 blocks (~1hr) and I never have to pay any more to store the value associated with my Bitcoin address. Security for the life of the network is included in my $1 transaction fee.
Bitcoin layer-2 (Lightning) is ideal for small payments (<$1000USD today):
It currently costs a small fraction of a penny to send funds across the Lightning network with near instant finality (seconds) and very good anonymity.
The two technologies complement one another to provide an example to the world of what a sound-money system could mean if it was truly decentralized and immune from manipulation by centralized actors (central banks, governments, etc).
Prove me wrong. Is there another form of money that:
- is virtually guaranteed to be immune to manipulation by central actors?
- allows you to transmit any amount of value to anyone (censorship resistance) anywhere in the world within about an hour for about $1USD and know with confidence that the payment will go through with finality?
- allows you to send smaller amounts for fractions of a penny in seconds to anyone anywhere?
Solutions to non problems that introduce larger problems are inherently bad solutions.
Point 1) there are more bad actors wash trading, manipulating markets and pump & dump scams involved in crypto than any other markets. (Even ignoring Tether, the common DAO exploits involving $xx,xxx,xxx+ of losses)
Point 2/3 are the same. There isn't an easy, well known way to do this for no fee to any country. WU is expensive and PayPal will block your account. Egold tried to solve this in the past, until fraud caused it to shutter. There are niche Fintech startups that likely address this for sub 0.5% fees, without the learning curve and exposure to currency exchange volatility. Gas and BTC fees show that they weren't really built with this consideration in mind, they just added hacky pseudo-solutions at a later date. I'm lost as to the "anonymous" part, since I had to do all types of AML/KYC stuff when I've opened accounts with popular exchanges, so there is likely an element of discoverability.
Point 1) I don't believe you are describing Bitcoin, maybe altcoins, NFTs, DAOs but not Bitcoin.
- wash trading: tell me who, how, and why is doing wash trading on Bitcoin? I would argue the only entities capable of moving markets with wash trading are major centralized exchanges, not whales. The Bitcoin market is too large to be meaningfully manipulated by whales via wash trading. If exchanges are wash trading, please cite evidence. I'm not saying it doesn't happen in other cryptocurrencies, just that it doesn't happen with Bitcoin.
- manipulating market: again not sure what your claim is here related to Bitcoin? Who manipulates the Bitcoin market? How do they manipulate it? For what purpose?
- pump & dump scams: again, what does this have to do with Bitcoin? Agree there is a lot of pump-n-dump activity in low-cap altcoins, just like there are pump-n-dumps in low-cap OTC stocks. For pump-n-dumps to work the market cap needs to be small enough for manipulators to manipulate. Who is capable of manipulating the $1 Trillion dollar Bitcoin market?
Point 2/3) I may be misunderstanding what you mean (please correct me). If you are saying that digital payments and remittances are not a solved problem even with Bitcoin, well today I can send Bitcoin or Bitcoin over Lightning to anyone anywhere for less than an ATM fee. I could also send stablecoins instead or convert Bitcoin to Stablecoins and back without KYC using a self-custody wallet.
Please help me understand what you mean by Point 2/3. Did I understand you comment correctly?
Disclosure: I work for a startup (www.liquality.io) that has built tech into a self-custody wallet that allows you to swap any crypto to any other without KYC or added fees. We have several competitors so this space is rea
The block subsidy expires 99% by 2040 and 100% expired by 2140. I have no idea what the tx fee will be after that, but let’s take your guess of $100/tx as a baseline.
Whatever the fee - whether $1/tx as it is today or $100/tx, once the fee is paid, the Bitcoin funds on that address are secured for no additional charge until such time as the funds are moved to another address via an on-chain transaction. So you could be paying $100 to store $1000 or $1 million in Bitcoin for 1 day or 20 years for the same fixed price.
You're going to have to be more specific. Real money is a big place. LMAX does more transactions per second than all of BTC does in a week.
In many cases, instant final settlement is a liability, not a feature. Being able to reverse and compensate bad transactions is part of what provides confidence in the system we have today.
If all credit card transactions were immediate, final and non-negotiable, I suspect it would have a chilling effect on consumer behavior.
To be clear, the problem Bitcoin was designed to solve was not improving transaction throughput at scale. The problem Bitcoin aims to solve is all the trust involved in the fiat system we currently call money.
The current system requires us to trust that politicians and central bankers won't give in to the temptation to debase the currency by money printing out of thin air. As a result this exposes them to spend more public funds without the traditional constraint of having to raise taxes on the populace.
In short, Bitcoin was designed to offer an alternative monetary system to those who understand that the current fiat-based system is a scam and has been since the governments all moved off the gold standard. You may argue that this assumption is incorrect, but it is clear to me that Satoshi was solving the problem of trust in the creation of money.
Satoshi found a way to create digital value by minting a form of scarce digital money that does not rely on any government to give it value and makes it virtually impossible for any centralized actor to cheat the system and print more Bitcoin out of thin air.
Satoshi's vision was about honest money not high transaction throughput.
As for payment finality, I believe there is room in the market for multiple options and offering more options to the market is almost always good.
I agree that credit card transactions have their place in society and offer real and compelling benefits for consumers, but they are a nightmare in many ways for merchants. As a merchant, you cannot really rely on credit card payment receipts to be final for ~6 months if you must be certain there will be zero chargebacks. Try managing cashflow of a business if you have to be sure you will keep all the money you received via credit cards in the past 6 months.
For merchants who wish to have an option to receive payments with clear unambiguous and immutable fast final settlement of funds with no risk of chargebacks, there really is no alternative to Bitcoin in my opinion.
tl;dr Bitcoin offers the world an option to use honest money that cannot be manipulated. Can LMAX do that?
I mean, it’s a $1 Trillion dollar market so it would take considerable horsepower to meaningfully move the Bitcoin market today. It will get harder and harder over time. Like I said, a large central exchange could conceivably wash trade to manipulate the market, but I would ask what would be their motivation and also what is our justification for trading in conspiracy theories without evidence?
Crypto as a currency could be a truly great asset to the world. Decentralized trustable currencies would offer unique benefits. However no current crypto market is basing it's value on that promise. It's simply speculation and lack of understanding.
I would challenge that Bitcoin + Lightning + Stablecoins are well on their way to fulfilling the promise.
All three of Bitcoin / Lightning / Stablecoins offer “Decentralized trustable currencies” as well as a unique type of immutable, censorship-resistant, unreversible, fast-finality payments over the internet. These are net new novel currently and payment innovations that have never existed before.
Bitcoin and Stablecoins combined as a currency are a truly great asset class. Other altcoins (including Ethereum) are not trying to be a real reserve currency for the internet. They are speculative investments in new technologies.
Bitcoin is special. Bitcoin fixes problems we didn’t realize we had.
That's your opinion based on your disapproval of Bitcoin.
Care to share why you are negative on Bitcoin?
I believe most people confuse Bitcoin as an alternate means of payment instead of what it really is which is an honest sound digital money system, with a transparent monetary policy from now to infinity AND a censorship-resistant payment network built on the most secure distributed computer network ever created by humans.
Bitcoin is not competing with Visa or Mastercard. It is competing with all fiat currencies, as well as any other security or property that is used as a store of value (stocks, bonds, real estate, etc).
I am mostly indifferent to bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general, but strongly opposed to people shilling for them. I see no evidence thus far for bitcoin being anything other than a vehicle for speculation; just one more form of gambling with the froth on top of our financial system, distracting people and diverting resources from actual useful activity.
Curious, if we replace the word 'shilling' with advocating, and replace the word 'bitcoin' with another arbitrary technology, say Linux or Typescript, would you still be strongly opposed?
Tl;dr: are you strongly opposed to technology advocacy in general or are you simply anti-bitcoin?
I am mildly opposed to technology advocacy actually, but that is besides the point. Dev advocates are paid to market software and tools, and everyone knows their inherent bias and can factor it in when assessing their claims. When someone is pro-bitcoin, it is impossible to know whether they have a genuine interest in the technology (divorced from use-cases), a desire to see a new financial system come into being (regardless of the technical mechanism), some mixture of both, or if they have the literal definition of a vested interest like the dev advocate and just want to see their coin values increase for monetary gain. Most importantly, that final group get away with lying and other questionable behaviour because unlike with the paid advocate, there is no-one (ie an employer) to hold them accountable for their bullshitting.
100% of it is exchanging value. Less than 100% is for payments for goods or services.
I think it is arbitrary and capricious to declare that the store of value use case and/or increasing the value of your investment use case are not valid?
Do you believe that when one exchanges cash for shares in Tesla or Google they are not exchanging value?
Let's be honest, most of us work for a living to earn money to provide for a lifestyle for ourselves and our families.
Bitcoin solves the unique problem that all other fiat-based monetary systems allow those at the top to manipulate the money supply and print money out of thin air thereby diluting (inflating away) the value of all existing holders of the currency. This is Bitcoin's value proposition - sound money, honest money with a transparent monetary policy from now to infinity.
The temptation to print money instead of raising taxes is too great as we are seeing in the US with a multi-trillion dollar Build Back Better plan that politicians claim will not cost taxpayers anything.
Can you explain that math without disclosing that the money is costing taxpayers by way of monetary inflation?
There is over $34 billion settled on the Visa payment network every day (averaged over 12 months), and nearly 100% of this is merchant transactions for actual things and services.
So Bitcoin manages to compete with Visa in terms of amount of value settled while being decentralized, permissionless and uncensorable. That's pretty cool.
Also I just checked the median transaction amount on Bitcoin and it's something about $200. So it's reasonable to assume that at least half of all transactions are actual purchases of things and services.
> Also I just checked the median transaction amount on Bitcoin and it's something about $200. So it's reasonable to assume that at least half of all transactions are actual purchases of things and services.
No, it only includes on-chain transactions. Average daily Bitcoin trading volume over past 3 months on exchanges was $36 bln, according to Yahoo Finance.
Why does every thread on HN about crypto turn into a circle jerk about how it's a ponzi, used for nefarious purposes and is bad for the environment?
HN used to be (and for the most part is) a place for people excited about new ideas that could transform the world not blind derision and mockery. But every time this topic comes up you see the same predictable responses with nothing interesting or unique to add.
That's mostly how they/we conclude those things... Obviously.
Eg. You call it Ponzi, i call it money printing with tether..
And courts actually seem to agree on a lot of those things. We'll see how coinbase fares, but it's already obvious they can't do some things that others do. Because they care more about regulations.
Eg. Even the first Bitcoin discussion on the original board mentioned it would be a bad currency. Let's not pretend it's a good one and throw 100 of years of economic lessons out of the window.
I mostly see proponents don't do their research and see them influenced by plain greed.
Eg. Here, you didn't even reply on topic on the original comment and added a lot of other things out of thin air here. Lol
No one was even talking about Ponzi or environmental issues. They wanted to see actual applications for it, selling avatars isn't one fyi.
Because there is nothing new to discuss. The same arguments on both sides existed five years ago. So every discussion is a rehash of what has already been discussed. It isn't like the conversation has changed much on bitcoin-maximalist focused forums either.
The general population of HN posters think that cryptocurrency hype is not justified by the tech. That does not mean that the forum is against discussing new ideas. It just means that they disagree with you about this idea.
Consider the discussion of OOP every time it comes up. It is the same conversation over and over. But I think it'd be silly for somebody who prefers inheritance as a design choice to declare that HN is just filled with incurious people because they don't like inheritance.
The article was about a big drop in an hour. A constructive comment would be people discussing large transactions that occurred causing the drop or the market mechanisms of leverage and short positions, and how levered bets have to be unwound when the price drops, exacerbating the initial drop.
What's the most recent leverage policy of most exchanges? Who offers the most leverage? Are those exchanges the ones that get hit first as positions liquidate? Did all exchanges drop approximately the same? Is there a whale that unloaded?
There are a million things interesting things that could be discussed and I wish someone with more in-depth knowledge could comment. But instead I see these low effort 'cryptocurrency bad' posts.
I think the concern flows in the opposite direction.
If a new technology comes out, and tons of people on HN all evaluated it and found tons of fundamental flaws, readers generally engage and are appreciative of it. They're glad for the analysis, their glad they didn't end up using it on their job and all the problems it will cause. They see those same problems and realize a different approach is needed because that tech is flawed. Sharing of concerns is seen as a positive, and appreciated by the community.
However when that same process happens with one specific tech, the exact opposite response occurs. People appear to become upset when others helpfully point out the fundamental flaws. And while I can't guarantee intent behind that response, the fundamental difference to me appears to be that those who don't like to hear the criticisms are those who would personally profit if the tech worked out. Not exactly unbiased observers.
If HN criticized some Big Tech company's new tech, and the people defending it and ignoring the arguments and responding in HN saying "that flaw isn't true", or "stop being so negative" were the PR people the work for Big Tech, the HN response would be similar.
Reasonable criticism on HN usually leads to appreciation and understanding. Reasonable criticism of crypto, leads to people who would profit getting upset and complaining about "the negativity" and "why don't the just believe."
And all of that is without even getting into the issue of all the negative externalities of crypto that most tech doesn't have. It's not only that its impacting those in it, but via fraud, electricity, gpus, poor capital allocation,... it will have significant negative real world impact.
The hole in your reasoning is that “it’s a Ponzi scheme!!!” is not a reasonable argument against crypto and shows a misunderstanding of both Ponzi schemes and cryptocurrency. And it is always at the top of HN threads about cryptocurrency. “why don’t they just believe” ends up being the response because if you look around, there are well-reasoned arguments against nearly all of the criticisms of the main cryptocurrencies, and people continue to willfully ignore them, giving us never-ending comments about Ponzi schemes. Reasonable criticism is what is happening within the development communities of these projects.
And the hole in your argument is that nothing in /u/ colechristensen 's argument said anything about a Ponzi scheme. The argument /u/ bko was replying to. The and yet bko went immediately to arguing against ponzi scheme. Nothing in my argument said ponzi scheme and you went to arguing against ponzi scheme.
Lots of users casually and incorrectly use Ponzi scheme to describe crypto as shorthand for speculative "asset".
And while I'm pulling a number out of thin air, I argue after excluding people doing wash sales and using it to simply move to other crypto, 90%+ of the owners of the most popular crypto currency Bitcoin are 'buy and hold'. Ie speculating on price appreciation and nothing more. I'd love to see a number to prove that wrong.
And also out of thin air, 90% of crypto created, while I can't describe intent have followed the exact pattern of a pump and dump. Including the majority of their volume being wash sales by early insiders to inflate their value. Again please show me if this is completely wrong.
The majority of price movement in smaller alt-coins is driven by memes, hype and social media pushes and not due to sudden changes in fundamentals or revisions they made in their technology post launch.
Proof of work is here to stay. No matter how much 'greener' supposed alternatives like 'proof of stake' are. Who has any own to eliminate proof of work? Not add an alternative - but to get the people deeply financially invested in POW to move off of POW to their financial detriment to an alternative like POS? Motivated by the egalitarian nature against their financial interests? The mamy people who have argued againstvand downplayed in environmental impact of crypto for so long are suddenly going to want to lose money to be greener?
The belief the exponential growth in electricity consumption isn't a loaded gun. Every person who responds 'oh but is only 1% of world energy usage' that appears to show no idea of how exponential growth works.
Finally, those who believe in democracy and are very concerned by the outsized influence the money has in for example American democracy, and how much the current declininh state of the US has been due to the growing impact of money in the country. How money via influence, lobbying and similar gets way more votes in politics than those without. How they use that influence for regulatory capture by setting the rules in their favor to accumulate more wealth in a feedback loop. To reach the point where instead of one person one vote it's effectively one dollar one vote.
And that somebody in crypto came along and said hey, that's surely a good idea, let's name it proof of stake. And somehow thought that was an egalitarian action! No matter how wealthy someone was they never controlled the money supply. You think you had issues with the 1% of the 1% before, wait till they buy into POS and their votes literally define the rules of the money you're using.
All of the above I'd love to hear responses to and not vague 'the problem will just go away', or minimizing their importance which is usually what crypto supporters do when their isn't and answer. And definitely please not redherring arguments about the word 'Ponzi'.
If you take an intellectually honest argument and inject a good amount of greed - since the biggest proponents of it are all big owners of it - you're going to hear some unreasonable claims.
The flaws in most of the arguments in favor of cryptos are quite apparent. When you don't have a personal financial interest in it! Some of these arguments only continue bc people have ALOT of money tied up in its success.
More money, more legitimacy. Cause that's how finance works. The dollar is only the dollar cause people BELIEVE it's a dollar. Tech don't work like that. People have arguments based on (usually) honest intellectual and observable evidence.
The classic argument that will never die. It only has value as long as people put value on it. Green paper also has no value, but there seems to be nothing that people won't do to get more...
This is a disingenuous take. The green paper is a certificate of debt backed by the US government's full faith and credit. The dollar has value as long as the US government accepts it as payment.
Similarly, the number in the bitcoin wallet has no value itself and is backed by greater fools. If you believe greater fools will continue to increase in number over time then bitcoin is a good bet I suppose, but there's a reason the price is so ridiculously unstable.
Increasingly doesn’t mean as much to people as it used to when it comes to debasing their own currency. See the recent lie about inflation being transitory, which Powell literally just admitted isn’t true.
> the number in the bitcoin wallet has no value itself
This is a weird take and I don’t see what your point is. The number in your fiat bank account means just as much as the number in a BTC wallet. The number there is how much you’re entitled to withdraw or spend.
Right, it isn't the number that has value, it's what the number represents. The number of dollars in my bank account represents (in a roundabout way) debt the US government owes me. What does BTC represent? Most generously one could say it represents debts owed by the community, but since each member of the community can choose whether or not to honor that or to what extent it doesn't have any stability.
It is rare that people hold a lot of pieces of green paper, either physically or virtually in a bank account. People that "have money" actually have stock, or houses, or expensive cars and yachts and planes, or other valuable stuff.
Could it be that by a process of inflation and deflation of the money supply governments have historically manipulated the value of their population's savings?
Could it be that the current zero interest rate policy has made it impossible to save for the future without taking considerable risk in the stock market?
Could it be that governments have made savings a joke, ensuring that anyone putting their savings in a bank is guaranteed to lose purchasing power over time?
Could it be that some governments are so corrupt that they will force savers to accept negative nominal interest rates, so you get back fewer dollars/euros than you put in?
Could it be that from inception Bitcoin was designed as a better form of money? One that does not leak it's value over time? One that cannot be manipulated by any government or powerful centralized entity because it is truly decentralized? One that comes with a fixed and predictable central bank inflation policy valid from now to the end of time that allows everyone to know exactly how many bitcoin will exist in a given year now, tomorrow or 20 years from now?
Could it be that everything you assume you know about Fiat Currency and Bitcoin is incorrect? Could it be that the fact that you have been consistently wrong in under-appreciating and under-estimating the potential of Bitcoin, should teach you a lesson? That maybe you should examine the flawed assumptions that led you to ignore Bitcoin as yet another Ponzi scheme?
What would it take for you to realize you are wrong?
It seems as though you are asking why anyone would want to delay immediate consumption in favor of saving for the future. Think of all the major expenses we take on on life healthcare, higher education, housing, retirement. These all generally require saving. Can you not imagine a world where it would be beneficial to individuals to have access to a savings vehicle that offered massively superior returns vs putting money in a savings account in the bank?
In fact, unlike saving in a bank, saving in Bitcoin over the long term has proven to consistently outpace inflation. In fact Bitcoin’s return on investment over the past 12 years has 10x’d the equity market.
Some may argue that Bitcoin is risky or speculative. I would argue that none of those who dismiss Bitcoin as risky or speculative have actually done the research to go down the rabbit hole to understand the economic, game theory, technical and social innovations of the Bitcoin protocol. Anyone who has spent 10-100 hours studying Bitcoin instead of dismissing it out of hand discovers an amazingly rich world that promises to deliver sound money to the world.
I would venture that is because looking at green pieces of paper is fun for a while but gets old quite soon.
A big ass boat is fun for a longer time, and says "I'm rich" louder than a number in a bank account.
Real estate and stock are not much fun, but people will pay you to live in your flats and to buy stuff from the companies that you own, and this will get you a bigger boat (see above).
Other than the fact that I need it to pay my taxes and put food on the table. Neither the government nor the shops around me accept any other form of payment.
The employers around me know that, so they will only offer salaries denominated in the local currency.
Green paper has value in trust, liquidity and stability. If people were using crypto as currency I'd be on board. It's a great idea as currency. Trading in it with such a huge valuation, that's where I see problems.
I was just talking to someone recently about how I’m long short on Bitcoin. This sort of event makes me really feel validated on this opinion, and reminds me once again to ask publicly what the longest term options are for taking a short position on Bitcoin are. I’d like to be able to take a 30 year short position but I suspect no one offers such a long short position.
Sha256 will be replaced, but even if it's cracked before a replacement, there are alternatives ready to be deployed with a fork. It'd be ugly but not lethal.
Changing the hashing functions, encryption, and network verification are all built into bitcoin. It's designed to be resilient, and to use consensus when adapting over time.
It'd be really stupid for people to go "oh no, someone cracked sha256 and mined a million blocks, I guess we're done with bitcoin now. Buh-bye money!"
They'll fix it in the case of a noticeable exploit. If someone were clever, they'd mine blocks surreptitiously, sufficiently spaced out over time and different networks so that it looks like normal mining. They could get a few blocks per day for maybe a couple years until the upgrades. The impact to the system would be minimal.
I doubt it. The Bitcoin ecosystem is weakly organised and governed, which is an advantage in some regard but has also been shown to lead to the incapacity to make decisions.
On top of that, most of the ecosystem is built on specialized hardware that is designed to compute sha256 specifically and that cannot be swapped.
I wonder: if somebody would silently break sha256 and was able to mine an almost arbitrary amount of Bitcoin would it be unethical to do so? (Or illegal, which would probably depend on the jurisdiction)
I feel like it would be slightly unethical but on the other hand you're not really defrauding anybody. You did actually produce those blocks, not by improving your calculator but by using some other method.
If and when sha256 is broken, the internet breaks, period. It will be a Y2K-like event across the world. Every single banking website would be vulnerable.
The Bitcoin core devs have been thinking about the failure modes of hash algorithms since Satoshi. If you are betting against Bitcoin primarily because you believe it will fail when sha256 inevitably falls, you are missing the bigger picture and underestimating the resilience of the Bitcoin developers and broader community.
First, the way you phrase it is confusing and generally not how most would refer to that type of position. Better would be 'how I have been short Bitcoin for a long time'. Likewise 'I suspect no one offers very long dated put options on bitcoin'
Second, even if there were exchange traded/cleared bitcoin options with very long expirations (say 5 years), you would still have to consider the possibility that the exchange removes the product at a future date, either for lack of volume or other issues. While that might still work in your favor, it would not necessarily imply a bitcoin value approaching zero.
Of note, CME only has bitcoin futures out one year and futures options out three months (with very little volume). The bitcoin ETF BITO has options out to Jan 24 with considerably more volume/open interest. ETFs are not 24/7/365 vehicles but do have the advantage as likely to implode quicker than anything else (see USO)
Your right it’s a confusing phrase, I was trying to remember the specifics at the time but couldn’t remember the terminology since it’s not something I deal with on a regular basis, thanks for clarifying with the correct terms, I did indeed mean a put option with a very long date in the future.
As for removal, as long as I didn’t have to pay if they de-list the option I’d still put it on the books. I’m quite convinced of my position. As for selecting a more short term timeline, I don’t see my short position happening in the next 3 to 5 years based on block mining rewards so I’ll just have to continue waiting and watching for the day it becomes viable to put my own personal “big short” into action on Bitcoin.
Nobody knows why markets move suddenly the way they do.
My theory is the cartel of whales that control Bitcoin made a big purchase of real assets, or wanted to pay off their holiday season spending, but I'm a cynic.
The craziest part of that story is: "El Salvador President Nayib Bukele, whose country holds bitcoin on its balance sheet and has purchased coins during previous dips, announced another purchase of 150 BTC for around $48,700 each."
We're living in interesting times when the president of a (small) country decides to speculate on Bitcoin using treasury money.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 165 ms ] threadThat's a lot more potential bagholders injecting capital.
Bitcoin chose a set of parameters designed to ensure sufficient security budget to protect the network, while optimizing for decentralization thereby limiting transaction throughput on layer 1 as the tradeoff. Lightning and other layer-2 provide the scalability by leveraging the security of layer-1.
Bitcoin layer-1 is ideal for sending large payments (say >$1000USD today): It currently costs ~$1USD to post a transaction on the Bitcoin layer-1 blockchain. For that I can send an arbitrary amount with no upper limit of value, enjoy payment finality in about 6 blocks (~1hr) and I never have to pay any more to store the value associated with my Bitcoin address. Security for the life of the network is included in my $1 transaction fee.
Bitcoin layer-2 (Lightning) is ideal for small payments (<$1000USD today): It currently costs a small fraction of a penny to send funds across the Lightning network with near instant finality (seconds) and very good anonymity.
The two technologies complement one another to provide an example to the world of what a sound-money system could mean if it was truly decentralized and immune from manipulation by centralized actors (central banks, governments, etc).
Prove me wrong. Is there another form of money that:
- is virtually guaranteed to be immune to manipulation by central actors?
- allows you to transmit any amount of value to anyone (censorship resistance) anywhere in the world within about an hour for about $1USD and know with confidence that the payment will go through with finality?
- allows you to send smaller amounts for fractions of a penny in seconds to anyone anywhere?
Point 1) there are more bad actors wash trading, manipulating markets and pump & dump scams involved in crypto than any other markets. (Even ignoring Tether, the common DAO exploits involving $xx,xxx,xxx+ of losses)
Point 2/3 are the same. There isn't an easy, well known way to do this for no fee to any country. WU is expensive and PayPal will block your account. Egold tried to solve this in the past, until fraud caused it to shutter. There are niche Fintech startups that likely address this for sub 0.5% fees, without the learning curve and exposure to currency exchange volatility. Gas and BTC fees show that they weren't really built with this consideration in mind, they just added hacky pseudo-solutions at a later date. I'm lost as to the "anonymous" part, since I had to do all types of AML/KYC stuff when I've opened accounts with popular exchanges, so there is likely an element of discoverability.
- wash trading: tell me who, how, and why is doing wash trading on Bitcoin? I would argue the only entities capable of moving markets with wash trading are major centralized exchanges, not whales. The Bitcoin market is too large to be meaningfully manipulated by whales via wash trading. If exchanges are wash trading, please cite evidence. I'm not saying it doesn't happen in other cryptocurrencies, just that it doesn't happen with Bitcoin.
- manipulating market: again not sure what your claim is here related to Bitcoin? Who manipulates the Bitcoin market? How do they manipulate it? For what purpose?
- pump & dump scams: again, what does this have to do with Bitcoin? Agree there is a lot of pump-n-dump activity in low-cap altcoins, just like there are pump-n-dumps in low-cap OTC stocks. For pump-n-dumps to work the market cap needs to be small enough for manipulators to manipulate. Who is capable of manipulating the $1 Trillion dollar Bitcoin market?
Point 2/3) I may be misunderstanding what you mean (please correct me). If you are saying that digital payments and remittances are not a solved problem even with Bitcoin, well today I can send Bitcoin or Bitcoin over Lightning to anyone anywhere for less than an ATM fee. I could also send stablecoins instead or convert Bitcoin to Stablecoins and back without KYC using a self-custody wallet.
Please help me understand what you mean by Point 2/3. Did I understand you comment correctly?
Disclosure: I work for a startup (www.liquality.io) that has built tech into a self-custody wallet that allows you to swap any crypto to any other without KYC or added fees. We have several competitors so this space is rea
Most of the security is paid for by the block subsidy. That will change within a few decades though, as the block subsidy keeps halving every 4 years.
At that point, you'll be paying closer to $100 to transact on-chain with the same security that you enjoy today.
Whatever the fee - whether $1/tx as it is today or $100/tx, once the fee is paid, the Bitcoin funds on that address are secured for no additional charge until such time as the funds are moved to another address via an on-chain transaction. So you could be paying $100 to store $1000 or $1 million in Bitcoin for 1 day or 20 years for the same fixed price.
Seems like a good deal to me.
You're going to have to be more specific. Real money is a big place. LMAX does more transactions per second than all of BTC does in a week.
In many cases, instant final settlement is a liability, not a feature. Being able to reverse and compensate bad transactions is part of what provides confidence in the system we have today.
If all credit card transactions were immediate, final and non-negotiable, I suspect it would have a chilling effect on consumer behavior.
The current system requires us to trust that politicians and central bankers won't give in to the temptation to debase the currency by money printing out of thin air. As a result this exposes them to spend more public funds without the traditional constraint of having to raise taxes on the populace.
In short, Bitcoin was designed to offer an alternative monetary system to those who understand that the current fiat-based system is a scam and has been since the governments all moved off the gold standard. You may argue that this assumption is incorrect, but it is clear to me that Satoshi was solving the problem of trust in the creation of money.
Satoshi found a way to create digital value by minting a form of scarce digital money that does not rely on any government to give it value and makes it virtually impossible for any centralized actor to cheat the system and print more Bitcoin out of thin air.
Satoshi's vision was about honest money not high transaction throughput.
As for payment finality, I believe there is room in the market for multiple options and offering more options to the market is almost always good.
I agree that credit card transactions have their place in society and offer real and compelling benefits for consumers, but they are a nightmare in many ways for merchants. As a merchant, you cannot really rely on credit card payment receipts to be final for ~6 months if you must be certain there will be zero chargebacks. Try managing cashflow of a business if you have to be sure you will keep all the money you received via credit cards in the past 6 months.
For merchants who wish to have an option to receive payments with clear unambiguous and immutable fast final settlement of funds with no risk of chargebacks, there really is no alternative to Bitcoin in my opinion.
tl;dr Bitcoin offers the world an option to use honest money that cannot be manipulated. Can LMAX do that?
I don't buy this for a second. You are telling me there is no way for some entity to effectively manipulate the actual value of Bitcoin?
Please provide evidence that the ~13% drop in value recently was caused by market manipulation, or retract your statement.
All three of Bitcoin / Lightning / Stablecoins offer “Decentralized trustable currencies” as well as a unique type of immutable, censorship-resistant, unreversible, fast-finality payments over the internet. These are net new novel currently and payment innovations that have never existed before.
Bitcoin and Stablecoins combined as a currency are a truly great asset class. Other altcoins (including Ethereum) are not trying to be a real reserve currency for the internet. They are speculative investments in new technologies.
Bitcoin is special. Bitcoin fixes problems we didn’t realize we had.
Care to share why you are negative on Bitcoin?
I believe most people confuse Bitcoin as an alternate means of payment instead of what it really is which is an honest sound digital money system, with a transparent monetary policy from now to infinity AND a censorship-resistant payment network built on the most secure distributed computer network ever created by humans.
Bitcoin is not competing with Visa or Mastercard. It is competing with all fiat currencies, as well as any other security or property that is used as a store of value (stocks, bonds, real estate, etc).
Tl;dr: are you strongly opposed to technology advocacy in general or are you simply anti-bitcoin?
I think it is arbitrary and capricious to declare that the store of value use case and/or increasing the value of your investment use case are not valid?
Do you believe that when one exchanges cash for shares in Tesla or Google they are not exchanging value?
Let's be honest, most of us work for a living to earn money to provide for a lifestyle for ourselves and our families.
Bitcoin solves the unique problem that all other fiat-based monetary systems allow those at the top to manipulate the money supply and print money out of thin air thereby diluting (inflating away) the value of all existing holders of the currency. This is Bitcoin's value proposition - sound money, honest money with a transparent monetary policy from now to infinity.
The temptation to print money instead of raising taxes is too great as we are seeing in the US with a multi-trillion dollar Build Back Better plan that politicians claim will not cost taxpayers anything.
Can you explain that math without disclosing that the money is costing taxpayers by way of monetary inflation?
Also I just checked the median transaction amount on Bitcoin and it's something about $200. So it's reasonable to assume that at least half of all transactions are actual purchases of things and services.
(I agree though, that was impressive mental gymnastics.)
No it isn’t.
https://finance.yahoo.com/u/yahoo-finance/watchlists/crypto-...
HN used to be (and for the most part is) a place for people excited about new ideas that could transform the world not blind derision and mockery. But every time this topic comes up you see the same predictable responses with nothing interesting or unique to add.
Ps. He wasn't saying anything about the environment and it's also what I'm thinking :)
Eg. You call it Ponzi, i call it money printing with tether..
And courts actually seem to agree on a lot of those things. We'll see how coinbase fares, but it's already obvious they can't do some things that others do. Because they care more about regulations.
Eg. Even the first Bitcoin discussion on the original board mentioned it would be a bad currency. Let's not pretend it's a good one and throw 100 of years of economic lessons out of the window.
I mostly see proponents don't do their research and see them influenced by plain greed.
Eg. Here, you didn't even reply on topic on the original comment and added a lot of other things out of thin air here. Lol
No one was even talking about Ponzi or environmental issues. They wanted to see actual applications for it, selling avatars isn't one fyi.
The general population of HN posters think that cryptocurrency hype is not justified by the tech. That does not mean that the forum is against discussing new ideas. It just means that they disagree with you about this idea.
Consider the discussion of OOP every time it comes up. It is the same conversation over and over. But I think it'd be silly for somebody who prefers inheritance as a design choice to declare that HN is just filled with incurious people because they don't like inheritance.
What's the most recent leverage policy of most exchanges? Who offers the most leverage? Are those exchanges the ones that get hit first as positions liquidate? Did all exchanges drop approximately the same? Is there a whale that unloaded?
There are a million things interesting things that could be discussed and I wish someone with more in-depth knowledge could comment. But instead I see these low effort 'cryptocurrency bad' posts.
If a new technology comes out, and tons of people on HN all evaluated it and found tons of fundamental flaws, readers generally engage and are appreciative of it. They're glad for the analysis, their glad they didn't end up using it on their job and all the problems it will cause. They see those same problems and realize a different approach is needed because that tech is flawed. Sharing of concerns is seen as a positive, and appreciated by the community.
However when that same process happens with one specific tech, the exact opposite response occurs. People appear to become upset when others helpfully point out the fundamental flaws. And while I can't guarantee intent behind that response, the fundamental difference to me appears to be that those who don't like to hear the criticisms are those who would personally profit if the tech worked out. Not exactly unbiased observers.
If HN criticized some Big Tech company's new tech, and the people defending it and ignoring the arguments and responding in HN saying "that flaw isn't true", or "stop being so negative" were the PR people the work for Big Tech, the HN response would be similar.
Reasonable criticism on HN usually leads to appreciation and understanding. Reasonable criticism of crypto, leads to people who would profit getting upset and complaining about "the negativity" and "why don't the just believe."
And all of that is without even getting into the issue of all the negative externalities of crypto that most tech doesn't have. It's not only that its impacting those in it, but via fraud, electricity, gpus, poor capital allocation,... it will have significant negative real world impact.
Lots of users casually and incorrectly use Ponzi scheme to describe crypto as shorthand for speculative "asset".
And while I'm pulling a number out of thin air, I argue after excluding people doing wash sales and using it to simply move to other crypto, 90%+ of the owners of the most popular crypto currency Bitcoin are 'buy and hold'. Ie speculating on price appreciation and nothing more. I'd love to see a number to prove that wrong.
And also out of thin air, 90% of crypto created, while I can't describe intent have followed the exact pattern of a pump and dump. Including the majority of their volume being wash sales by early insiders to inflate their value. Again please show me if this is completely wrong.
The majority of price movement in smaller alt-coins is driven by memes, hype and social media pushes and not due to sudden changes in fundamentals or revisions they made in their technology post launch.
Proof of work is here to stay. No matter how much 'greener' supposed alternatives like 'proof of stake' are. Who has any own to eliminate proof of work? Not add an alternative - but to get the people deeply financially invested in POW to move off of POW to their financial detriment to an alternative like POS? Motivated by the egalitarian nature against their financial interests? The mamy people who have argued againstvand downplayed in environmental impact of crypto for so long are suddenly going to want to lose money to be greener?
The belief the exponential growth in electricity consumption isn't a loaded gun. Every person who responds 'oh but is only 1% of world energy usage' that appears to show no idea of how exponential growth works.
Finally, those who believe in democracy and are very concerned by the outsized influence the money has in for example American democracy, and how much the current declininh state of the US has been due to the growing impact of money in the country. How money via influence, lobbying and similar gets way more votes in politics than those without. How they use that influence for regulatory capture by setting the rules in their favor to accumulate more wealth in a feedback loop. To reach the point where instead of one person one vote it's effectively one dollar one vote.
And that somebody in crypto came along and said hey, that's surely a good idea, let's name it proof of stake. And somehow thought that was an egalitarian action! No matter how wealthy someone was they never controlled the money supply. You think you had issues with the 1% of the 1% before, wait till they buy into POS and their votes literally define the rules of the money you're using.
All of the above I'd love to hear responses to and not vague 'the problem will just go away', or minimizing their importance which is usually what crypto supporters do when their isn't and answer. And definitely please not redherring arguments about the word 'Ponzi'.
The flaws in most of the arguments in favor of cryptos are quite apparent. When you don't have a personal financial interest in it! Some of these arguments only continue bc people have ALOT of money tied up in its success.
More money, more legitimacy. Cause that's how finance works. The dollar is only the dollar cause people BELIEVE it's a dollar. Tech don't work like that. People have arguments based on (usually) honest intellectual and observable evidence.
Similarly, the number in the bitcoin wallet has no value itself and is backed by greater fools. If you believe greater fools will continue to increase in number over time then bitcoin is a good bet I suppose, but there's a reason the price is so ridiculously unstable.
Increasingly doesn’t mean as much to people as it used to when it comes to debasing their own currency. See the recent lie about inflation being transitory, which Powell literally just admitted isn’t true.
> the number in the bitcoin wallet has no value itself
This is a weird take and I don’t see what your point is. The number in your fiat bank account means just as much as the number in a BTC wallet. The number there is how much you’re entitled to withdraw or spend.
What is inflation targeting then, and why is inflation targeted instead of deflation?
The answer: so its debt is inflated away.
Could it be that by a process of inflation and deflation of the money supply governments have historically manipulated the value of their population's savings?
Could it be that the current zero interest rate policy has made it impossible to save for the future without taking considerable risk in the stock market?
Could it be that governments have made savings a joke, ensuring that anyone putting their savings in a bank is guaranteed to lose purchasing power over time?
Could it be that some governments are so corrupt that they will force savers to accept negative nominal interest rates, so you get back fewer dollars/euros than you put in?
Could it be that from inception Bitcoin was designed as a better form of money? One that does not leak it's value over time? One that cannot be manipulated by any government or powerful centralized entity because it is truly decentralized? One that comes with a fixed and predictable central bank inflation policy valid from now to the end of time that allows everyone to know exactly how many bitcoin will exist in a given year now, tomorrow or 20 years from now?
Could it be that everything you assume you know about Fiat Currency and Bitcoin is incorrect? Could it be that the fact that you have been consistently wrong in under-appreciating and under-estimating the potential of Bitcoin, should teach you a lesson? That maybe you should examine the flawed assumptions that led you to ignore Bitcoin as yet another Ponzi scheme?
What would it take for you to realize you are wrong?
In fact, unlike saving in a bank, saving in Bitcoin over the long term has proven to consistently outpace inflation. In fact Bitcoin’s return on investment over the past 12 years has 10x’d the equity market.
Some may argue that Bitcoin is risky or speculative. I would argue that none of those who dismiss Bitcoin as risky or speculative have actually done the research to go down the rabbit hole to understand the economic, game theory, technical and social innovations of the Bitcoin protocol. Anyone who has spent 10-100 hours studying Bitcoin instead of dismissing it out of hand discovers an amazingly rich world that promises to deliver sound money to the world.
I would venture that is because looking at green pieces of paper is fun for a while but gets old quite soon.
A big ass boat is fun for a longer time, and says "I'm rich" louder than a number in a bank account.
Real estate and stock are not much fun, but people will pay you to live in your flats and to buy stuff from the companies that you own, and this will get you a bigger boat (see above).
Other than the fact that I need it to pay my taxes and put food on the table. Neither the government nor the shops around me accept any other form of payment.
The employers around me know that, so they will only offer salaries denominated in the local currency.
So, yes, it has a lot of value.
This isn't very useful reporting. There is a reason all professional financial reporters add the percentage change.
From 2200 to 1100 is a 50% drop, from 100000 to 98900 only 1.1%
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29248056
Changing the hashing functions, encryption, and network verification are all built into bitcoin. It's designed to be resilient, and to use consensus when adapting over time.
It'd be really stupid for people to go "oh no, someone cracked sha256 and mined a million blocks, I guess we're done with bitcoin now. Buh-bye money!"
They'll fix it in the case of a noticeable exploit. If someone were clever, they'd mine blocks surreptitiously, sufficiently spaced out over time and different networks so that it looks like normal mining. They could get a few blocks per day for maybe a couple years until the upgrades. The impact to the system would be minimal.
On top of that, most of the ecosystem is built on specialized hardware that is designed to compute sha256 specifically and that cannot be swapped.
My 10 years prediction is based on a heuristic, the constatation that a generation of cryptographic functions tend to last 20-30 years.
I feel like it would be slightly unethical but on the other hand you're not really defrauding anybody. You did actually produce those blocks, not by improving your calculator but by using some other method.
Have fun raking in those free bitcoins. https://keys.lol/bitcoin
The Bitcoin core devs have been thinking about the failure modes of hash algorithms since Satoshi. If you are betting against Bitcoin primarily because you believe it will fail when sha256 inevitably falls, you are missing the bigger picture and underestimating the resilience of the Bitcoin developers and broader community.
First, the way you phrase it is confusing and generally not how most would refer to that type of position. Better would be 'how I have been short Bitcoin for a long time'. Likewise 'I suspect no one offers very long dated put options on bitcoin'
Second, even if there were exchange traded/cleared bitcoin options with very long expirations (say 5 years), you would still have to consider the possibility that the exchange removes the product at a future date, either for lack of volume or other issues. While that might still work in your favor, it would not necessarily imply a bitcoin value approaching zero.
Of note, CME only has bitcoin futures out one year and futures options out three months (with very little volume). The bitcoin ETF BITO has options out to Jan 24 with considerably more volume/open interest. ETFs are not 24/7/365 vehicles but do have the advantage as likely to implode quicker than anything else (see USO)
As for removal, as long as I didn’t have to pay if they de-list the option I’d still put it on the books. I’m quite convinced of my position. As for selecting a more short term timeline, I don’t see my short position happening in the next 3 to 5 years based on block mining rewards so I’ll just have to continue waiting and watching for the day it becomes viable to put my own personal “big short” into action on Bitcoin.
My theory is the cartel of whales that control Bitcoin made a big purchase of real assets, or wanted to pay off their holiday season spending, but I'm a cynic.
We're living in interesting times when the president of a (small) country decides to speculate on Bitcoin using treasury money.