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I personally think Bitcoin will eventually peter out, and that it's fairly risky as it has definitely been pushed by vibes and promotion and everyone wanting to get in on it

I mean that can apply to anything. There's nothing intrinsic about gold that makes it valuable other than it's rare, but there's plenty of things that are relatively rare that aren't valuable. Yes there's industrial uses of gold but that's not why we as a society and a species treat it as valuable

Maybe bitcoin is the new gold and will hold value forever, and as more serious people get into it, it will lose its volatility and be less subject to the vibes shifting and there being a run on the market. Maybe not

It is different from Elong stocks, though, because the myth of Satoshi aside, it's not exactly a cult of personality like his companies are

by lokar5 hours ago|

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Hasn’t it crashed in every economic downturn and financial panic so far?

by criddell5 hours ago|

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Not really, no.

A decade ago it was under $1000 and has never been that low since. It's peak price is only about 2x the current price.

by lokar4 hours ago|

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Isn’t a 50% reduction pretty bad?

And being higher over 10 years has little to do with it if acts counter cyclical to stocks and other assets.

by throw0101c4 hours ago|

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> And being higher over 10 years has little to do with it if acts counter cyclical to stocks and other assets.

BTC has been called many things at many different times. It was originally a payment system:

> A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.

* https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

And it can still be used for that, however the transaction throughput is tiny, and so it became a store of value in essence: but it's kind of hard to be that when the value swings up and won so much. While "fiat" currency inflation is annoying, it is, generally, fairly predictable in most cases (<4%) and so you can plan ahead with regards to future value and purchase. The same is hardly true of BTC.

by tasuki4 hours ago|

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Is it bad? Isn't 60x in 10 years still kind of ok? The things I invested in ten years ago didn't return 60x since.

by lokar4 hours ago|

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Again, the original argument was that it was like gold, and provided a hedge against equities.

by fluoridation3 hours ago|

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As the sibling says, the original value proposition of Bitcoin was that it would supplant Paypal and wire transfers. The store of value narrative was a post hoc rationalization by stakeholders when it became clear that it was technically unsuited to serve Internet-wide throughputs. Not only that. I sat in during the meetings around the time of the segwit transition; I think they were debating making the blocks bigger or something. It was amazing to see first-hand how such a relatively minor and technically necessary change could generate so much friction. That was when I realized Bitcoin was never going to evolve in a useful direction, and sevenish years on I see that I was correct, as the block structure is pretty much the same as the last time I saw it.

by lokar3 hours ago|

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Yeah, now both the first and second rationalization have fallen.

by criddell3 hours ago|

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Who argued that? In 2008 Bitcoin was proposed as a peer-to-peer digital cash system. The comparison to gold didn't really take off until years later.

by lokar3 hours ago|

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I mean the original thing I replied to. The idea that it was a stable or anti-cyclical store of value emerged after it became clear the payments stuff was not working.

by thisisit4 hours ago|

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There is some misunderstanding of what a crash really is. It doesn't necessarily mean that things get written down to 0 or some arbitrary level because everything has a price at which someone will buy.

Even companies have some value after a crash and you could make a case that at some arbitrary point it was worth $x and since the crash didn't cause the company to crater to below $x it has not "crashed". Even companies filing for bankruptcy have some residual value above what they might have been founded on - it doesn't mean the company hasn't gone bankrupt.

by lokar2 hours ago|

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Yeah, I certainly did not mean go to zero, or near that.

To be more specific, I have often seen people argue for including crypto in a portfolio based on the theory that if equities drop a lot (25, 30%?) crypto will hold or go up. People make the same argument for gold.

by senordevnyc3 hours ago|

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To me the difference is that BTC's continued value isn't predicated on the actions of one person, who has continually proven himself to be childish, mercurial, and dishonest.