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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

Could be the nineteenth time. This is the logic that BASE jumpers use: I haven't died yet, ergo it's safe.

It only needs to crash once.

And as basically everyone knows but refuses to acknowledge, the liquidity limitations of all this speculation (i.e. there's nowhere near enough demand to buy up a dropping currency) mean that it'll crash all the way to zero when it does.

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I'd rephrase the metaphor - someone is saying, "I saw him hit the cliff, he's done for!", and then it turns out he didn't hit the cliff. After a couple times you stop paying attention to this message, it's too unreliable.

I'll grant you bitcoin is volatile and "dangerous". That's true before China "bans" bitcoin. But the question is "did China just ban bitcoin" and the answer is "most probably not".

OK, sure. That part I agree with. I thought you were making the case that because people have been predicting a bitcoin crash for years (they have) and been wrong (they have), that such a crash won't happen (it will).

Speculative investments have boom/bust cycles, they always will. Arguing that bitcoin is somehow immune is silly.

And, specific to bitcoin, when that crash happens it's going to be catastrophic. Daily-trade-to-capitalization ratio for bitcoin is literally 10x lower than it is for any other volatile security. When the owners start fleeing there will be no one to buy.

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