Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by tgtweak | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

tgtweak

Still up 500% since January 2017.

View on HN

Still down 78% since December 2017.

What's your point?

Just because a bubble pops doesn't mean it's useless or dead. Many bubbles pop in the real world, they always recover.

Ever heard of BitConnect?

Was scam from the beginning.

They don’t always recover. It’s hard to recover when you are a commodity that doesn’t have any inherent utility other than being a method for completing transactions.

Also - Tulips.

It's a lot easier to recover when a recovery mechanism is built in - aka the halving. We're a solid year and a half away from that event happening, it'll go lower than this in that time but once the new supply restricts it'll make its slow ascent back up, people will see the opportunity and the demand will skyrocket again.

I say this a lot, it's helpful to think of bitcoin as an algorithm, I just see this pattern playing out the same way over and over and over again every four years.

This only works if demand continues at all. "The halving" is of little consequence if nobody cares.

Yeah I'm sure nobody's ever going to care about bitcoin again you're right.

Not nobody, sure, but the halving really only matters if interest is at least half what it has been in prior bubbles.

Reduced supply may push up the price... or it may not if there isn't much of a market for the supply anyway.

The interesting thing is is that bitcoin enthusiasts tend to buy a fairly steady supply over time, this is what's maintaining the current price. Eventually demand will starts to wane off after a big run up but the core people are still buying in steady amounts, then once the halving comes and the demand stays relatively steady you start to see the price trend up, this draws in new interest and runs the price up even more, then you have all the rest of the people who are tuned out and they come rushing in and you have full blown FOMO, all the people who've been buying steadily begin to cash out and the price drops off.

It's happened before and it'll happen again like clockwork and that's because bitcoin is just an algorithm.

>> this is what's maintaining the current price

The price that's tanked about 30% in the last week alone?

>> It's happened before and it'll happen again like clockwork

I'm afraid this is a very bold prediction.

That will be the test for Bitcoin, can it survive a "popped bubble"?

Stocks normally don't survive, unless there's something of value in the company behind it. Bitcoin doesn't have anything of value behind it, and it's easily replaceable by other currencies. If the value drops to something like 5 cents per Bitcoin, or even just a few dollars, you have to wonder if people won't abandon their wallets over time.

> you have to wonder if people won't abandon their wallets over time.

Storage is cheap enough, I think the early forgetful adopters learned their lesson from that.

Still up thousands of percent since 1783.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com