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Comment by thaumaturgy | Hacker News Reader

Ignoring all of BTC's significant issues for a moment, there are a lot of groups in Bitcoin. One of those is the fairly average, tech-savvy want-to-be-investor, who has a little bit (but not a lot) of disposable income and wants to do something with it that's better than the 2% annual yield of ... pretty much everything else.

With BTC, you could buy in at almost any amount, get out whenever you wanted, and transfer fees were pretty low. Those aren't common traits for most other investment vehicles.

It's kind of a side effect of so much capital being locked up in a smaller and smaller percentage of the population. The folks closer to the bottom are clawing at anything that might improve their situation a little, even if it comes with a lot of risk.

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The S&P 500 has a ~10% annual return (7% adjusted for inflation) as a historical average. 2% is what you can get in a savings account with no risk at this point.

Index funds/ETFs allow anyone to invest in the stock market starting with small amounts of money.

And bitcoin has made 100000% in 9 years. Its all a matter of timing.

Bitcoin is up quite a bit, but it's total returns are negative as every dollar out is a dollar someone else up in and mining + transfer fees is a huge expense.

It's possible to win big at negative sum games, but by definition not everyone can.

One is investing, one is speculation/gambling.

Some people got very lucky. Some people lost their life savings.

In the stock market with diversified investments, even if the market crashes, historically you would have always recovered and then some within not very many years so long as you didn't do the stupid thing and panic and sell during the crash in an attempt to time the market.

That would depend on if you had a basket of stocks representative of the whole market and rebalanced your portfolio throughout a downturn (not common at all). Companies can and do go bankrupt. Historically, the same has been true of Bitcoin, where it always recovers to a new base.

Throughout this conversation I've been referring to index funds and the S&P 500.

«In the stock market with diversified investments, even if the market crashes, historically you would have always recovered and then some within not very many years so long as you didn't do the stupid thing and panic and sell during the crash in an attempt to time the market.»

Same with Bitcoin. There is no difference between the all-time SP500 chart and the all-time BTC price chart. In both cases, historically anyone who holds long enough ("within not very many years") eventually makes money:

• https://dividendtotalreturn.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/C...

• http://bitcoin.zorinaq.com/price/

I'm not saying people should dump their savings into BTC, just that your argument isn't a good argument to defend the SP500. An SP500 index fund is great for other reasons, namely: it has a great track record and you can't really go wrong with investing in ~500 of the biggest American companies.

This is a pretty ridiculous argument to throw your weight behind given that there is a significant difference in timescale: 61 years vs. 9 years.

...which is why I said it had a great track record :) The problem I had with your post is that you implied long-term BTC holders were not recovering their investment, which is plain wrong.

That wasn't my intended implication, I was suggesting just that in the long term there's a far greater track record of positive growth in the traditional stock market compared to Bitcoin.

It's shocking how much of that gets eaten up by investment fees when you're only investing a small amount of money.

It's also amazing how small investment fees can become.

If you're losing much of that to fees, you're investing in the wrong funds with the wrong firms. Vanguard, Fidelity, Schwab: no fee, low-expense ratio total market index funds. In my target retirement fund, I'm paying $16 per year per $10,000 invested, and that's not the lowest ER fund you can find.

Many employees find themselves forced to select between a narrow selection of mutual funds from their employee provided RSP.

Unless they forego their employee contribution to the RSP, they have very little flexibility.

Low quality fund options in employer provided retirement account are a problem, but in the U.S. you can roll it over into a self-controlled IRA at whatever provider you like once you change employers, so for most people the number of years it'd be subject to those higher fee funds is not too high, at least.

I completely agree with everything you said.

But not everyone can do a triple flip with a half twist while navigating the financial system.

i.e. I think I reworded my original comment in reverse.

It's not very complicated at all, the issue is more a lack of education. Online personal finance resources and communities help a lot, but people still have to know to seek out that information.

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