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Comment by dumbfounder | Hacker News Reader

Yes. Internet stocks were in a bubble in the late 90's. It burst but the Internet turned out just fine. The question is, when the crypto bubble bursts, will Bitcoin recover, or will it be something else?

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The Bitcoin bubble has already burst, multiple times in fact.

  From the high point of $31 all the way to $2 in Dec 2011.
  From $266 to $130 in May 2013.
  From $1200 to $200 in Mar 2015.
  From $5000 to $2900 in Sep 2017.
  From $7300 to $5500 in Nov 2017.
  From $18000 to $14000 in Dec 2017.

Having read a thousand rabid forum posts over the last week, I get the feeling people will hold for decades regardless of short term changes or regulation. They think there is unlimited upside as it eats into gold and fiat, so it's only rational told hold until the new world order comes and everyone in the world is using bitcoin. I'm hard pressed to disagree. But diversification is important. Best strategy I've seen so far is to take some bitcoin profit and put a chunk into altcoins and the rest into dividend producing equities.

I hold a diverse portfolio. In my experience when the price of bitcoin falls, the alts fall too. Additionally, if I'd held bitcoin only I'd have greater dollar value today. If my alts were protecting me I'd be happy to sacrifice the greater growth I could have seen but honestly I am not so sure that I am protected at all.

I believe in the usefulness of the blockchain and related technologies though, and I am certain that adoption among businesses of said technology will only keep rising.

I don't know if the crypto currencies have a future though. And even if they do I don't know if they will ever be priced as highly again as they are now. I hope they do, but if my portfolio fell to $0 tomorrow I'd be bummed out but it wouldn't be critical.

Can’t just be “alt” coins.

Harvest profits and put into multiple uncorrelated premises or theories of how digital value works.

I think the contents of that bubble will fill another, more technically useful crypto. Something with 0 cost transaction fees.

It's not currently possible to have a crypto with 0 fees that's both distributed/non-centralized as well as very secure against attacks.

If there is, Bitcoin can easily incorporate the technology.

I'd say IOTA might fit your criteria, although it's still early stage.

I don't think bitcoin could integrate their tech since it's not a blockchain, but a DAG (what they call a tangle).

Interesting stuff.

I have been following IOTA for a while now and while concept of IOTA is very neat, it appears that the community/leadership surrounding it are in shambles. The network is not really working unless you run a full node, and even then if you send your IOTA to an address you have transferred IOTA out of you can lose them forever. These issues make me very nervous about the whole project.

Proof-of-stake is "very secure against attacks" but is less decentralized than proof-of-work. See Peercoin, Raiblocks.

Raiblocks [1] offers zero fee transactions. It will be interesting to see if node operators can be motivated by the same decentralization/benevolence that causes people to run bitcoin nodes today.

[1] https://raiblocks.net/media/RaiBlocks_Whitepaper__English.pd...

RaiBlocks has PoS consensus so node operators are incentivized. It also has PoW as a spam prevention mechanism (transactions are not completely free (few seconds on commodity CPU), and you can also "cache" PoW). I think it makes sense, unlike IOTA for example.

I have to correct that actually PoS is voluntarist. Node operators don't collect fees in RaiBlocks. They operate just to secure the network and their own investment.

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