Hacker News Reader

Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

I really don't see how this fork is going to go down as anything other than a boondoggle. Right now the value of BCC is being propped up by having almost no way to actually sell it, but once an actual market opens I fully expect its price to crash hard.

View on HN

This also explains where the "missing" (negative) value actually exists: in non-tradable BCC.

This is pretty funny though - it turns out that you don't need to control 50% of the mining pool to mess with it - you only need enough to start a half-credible fork that presents BTC holders with enough paper-losses to make them angry and potentially expose exchanges to lawsuits.

You can say the value of BTC was propped yesterday by that logic too since many exchanges froze transactions.

BCC is far from pointless since it serves those who have a different ideology. Whether it remains as valuable is uncertain. Whether it is already valuable to some, is clear.

This line of argument makes little sense. In the markets that do offer a way to buy and sell it, there's still a market setting the price. This idea that there will be totally different market forces at work once more people have access to the market is silly. I would not buy a $400 BCH today if I wasn't also willing to buy a $400 BCH when transaction volume is 1000x what it is now. If anything the fact that there's not an insane selling frenzy from those "lucky enough" to have access to their BCH on an exchange shows that there's a real demand for BCH as a currency.

There seems to be a lot of propaganda out there trying to marginalize and minimize Bitcoin Cash. The belief that literally everyone will instantly sell their BCH as soon as they can seems to be one of the messages of that propaganda rather than a reflection of reality.

So I'm not a bitcoin nor market expert but jandrese laid down his opinion, which sounded like it made sense to me. I was hoping for a well informed response but your comment just reads like you wanted to call names versus explain your reasoning why you think jandrese's argument doesn't make sense.

Perhaps's that's not what you intended but if you had an explanation for why parent's response doesn't work I'd love to read it.

My point is that there is no driver for the price to crash. There will not suddenly be a surprise supply of BCH found that will flood the market. Everyone knows that there is 1 BCH for every BTC out there, and that almost none of that is currently able to be exchanged on a market. That includes every single person who is driving up the price of BCH by purchasing it in the limited markets where it is available.

Multiple large holders have publicly said they'll dump their BCH. Grayscale, plenty of others have made their trading preference public. Of course that's not the same as hearing the market and putting your money where you mouth is- but right now the market is being restricted due to deposit issues.

Grayscale also seems to have chosen Ethereum Classic. Interesting tastes.

Interesting. I don't understand how all of the BCH and BTC stuff works so I guess I should read up on it but thanks for further explaining your position :)

People trading BTC for USD seem to think otherwise. The BCH fork had no serious impact on the value of BTC. Holders of BTC are not confident that BCH will be successful.

Yet, if we were to take BCH's $400/coin at face value, then splitting BTC into BCH just created $340 of value, per coin in existence.

If I gave everyone who currently had a US dollar a 'Vkou-dollar', would I have created even a penny of value? What if there was one exchange, where Vkou-dollars were trading at 20 cents (With no liquidity)? Would you accept that valuation uncritically?

If so, I'm looking for a co-founder.

Having Big Blockers off on their own chain instead of causing headaches for the Bitcoin legacy chain is probably increases the value of BTC by about 15%, so the math works out. (I'm being a little flippant here, but on a serious note we have no idea how the value of BTC was affected because 15% daily swings aren't something anyone even bats an eye at anymore.)

There's thousands of people like me checking every minute if we can deposit bch to sell. There's millions waiting and I'm hoping to be the first..

People who want to buy BCH have relatively unrestricted access to the market since most of the exchanges have reopened BTC deposits. (Of course, whether they can withdraw that BCH is another story entirely.) Most people who want to sell do not have access since BCH deposits are either not available or require multiple days worth of confirmations. Can you see the problem here?

You're saying that people buying BCH right now aren't aware that there's a huge glut of supply waiting to flood the market, and aren't taking this into account in their buying decisions?

There is no need for anyone to have BCH in hand today, no reason for someone to value a BCH today more than a BCH in a week. If they thought that thousands of people selling BCH once they are able will lead to a drop in price, they would just buy at the lower price.

The "it's priced in" argument doesn't hold for in my experience. The halving was supposedly "priced in" as well. This is still a small market with inexperienced players.

I think the average cryptocurrency trader is much lower-information than you are estimating.

There are hundreds of rubes who see "Bitcoin Cash" and think that because it suddenly jumped to the 3rd largest cryptocurrency by market cap, lots of people are talking about it, and its cheaper than Bitcoin, this could be their chance to get the elusive short-term 3x+ crypto ROI. Many of these people have no concept of the locked supply.

I'd estimate that roughly 1/4 of buyers are informed BCH proponents, the other 3/4 are low-information get-rich-quick hopeful speculators.

Fair enough, we'll all find out in due course. The constant flow of comments where people are trying to equate this particular hard fork (the end result of a very long and messy civil war) with any old Joe creating his own BTC fork is clearly just grinding my gears a little too much. There's a reason to expect BCH to end up as more than just a boondoggle (to the extent that any cryptocurrency can be said to be more than just a boondoggle): Bitcoin with larger blocks has been desired by many people for a very long time.

Pretty much. BCH bulls who find out about the supply issue have been assuming that it can't be that much of a big problem, that most people who wanted to sell must've done so by now anyway, and of course there's no way to tell how much supply is actually locked up. BCH bears are mostly irrelevant to the price since, unless they expected it to be worth enough to justify locking their BTC in less reputable exchanges during the fork, they can't actually sell yet. Anyone who isn't following the online discussions closely probably simply doesn't know about this - the news articles I've seen haven't mentioned that issue, and it took many hours for this information to even percolate through the discussions. Claims like "3rd largest cryptocurrency by market cap" have been a lot more prominent everywhere. (Also, if you want an idea of what BCH supporters are thinking right now, the front page r/btc is currently a good place to look.)

There's thousands of people like me checking every minute if we can deposit bch to sell. There's millions waiting and I'm hoping to be the first.

I'd guess a lot of the BCH volume is from well informed momentum traders riding the volatility wave.

The volumes purchased are very low so far, it is relatively easy and cheap for a whale to manipulate the price.

> You're saying that people buying BCH right now aren't aware that there's a huge glut of supply waiting to flood the market, and aren't taking this into account in their buying decisions?

Why do you think buyers even exist right now... with the tiny amounts available it's just as likely that it's a few people painting the ticker trading with themselves at more or less arbitrarily high prices.

We've seen the same thing play out time and again when deposits or withdrawals are prevented on an exchange- the order book gets eaten through.

Not trying to minimize BCH, but if you don't see that, look at what happened when people had trouble withdrawing from Gox, or when BitFinex had issues with USD withdrawals. It leads to pressure on the price.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com