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Comment by emerged | Hacker News Reader

I don’t care if it’s a guarantee to be 100k tomorrow, I refuse to profit off crypto speculation. It may seem crazy to people but I like to earn money with effort.

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Do you say the same thing about stocks? You can make more money with less effort by investing, whether it's crypto, equities, bonds, real estate... (you can also lose a lot more, obviously.)

Stocks are backed by real companies with real products and cash flows.

With Bitcoin, the only way to make money is to sell it at a higher price to someone else later. It’s a purely speculative asset.

What you say is true only in the most basic sense. If you look at the movement of some stocks, there is clearly a ton of speculation. There are whole stocks (and classes of stocks, like some recent SPACs) that essentially move on almost nothing but speculation. Regardless, he said he liked to "earn his money with effort", so I am interested in learning how far that goes...

Purely speculative stocks are traditionally called penny stocks, and brokers go out of their way to advice you against investing in them.

The same caveats should apply to Bitcoin.

My point is that it is not black-and-white. Stocks represent companies with real products and cash flows, but there is also a ton of speculative, bubble like behaviour on top of it. Take a look at a 1 year chart of something like TSLA or NIO and tell me that isn't true.

Buying a share of Tesla gives you equity in the efforts of thousands of smart people, accumulated intellectual property, factories, sales and marketing organizations etc. The shareholder probably expects the generated cash flow to be channeled by Tesla into creating something new, thus expanding the scope of what a share of TSLA represents. Those expectations may be unrealistic, but there is actual growth and invention underlying the speculation.

Bitcoin doesn’t represent any such creative endeavor. It’s the very opposite: an artificial scarcity mindgame that burns fossil fuels to power useless random number generators. It’s a tragedy that intelligent people who could be doing something creative instead spend their energy on greedy speculation around such a dark project.

Bitcoin represents some creative endeavor. Is it over exaggerated? Yes... but you can't say there's nothing there.

I got in early and got lucky. I mined a bunch of bitcoins about 10 years ago and have been selling them off gradually. I take that cash and buy stocks with it.

What's speculation in a guarantee? I thought that speculation is risky, therefore it can't be guaranteed.

speculating on housing market? buy to let? crazy valued Tesla stocks?

Yep. That's a slippery slope

I would seriously advise people not to speculate on crypto. The biggest use case is selling it to other speculators. That can't be sustainable.

But only wanting to earn money through effort is a ridiculous notion as well. Investing your savings is a good and necessary idea.

On almost all trading platforms, the trading volume is lower than 2017. I think a lot of people just bought coins over the last year, but not really trade, so just the "few coins left" are traded and make the price.

I'd really be interested to see the volume of forex vs. circulation. My intuition is that many more dollars trade hands every day for speculation than purchases, but I could be wrong.

That's a different kind of speculation mind , but I'd be curious to see the numbers. I don't think you're correct.

Also you don't want to hold dollars because unlike bitcoin they're inflationary and decrease in value over time - a necessary attribute for something to work well as a currency and one reason among many why cryto thus far is a failure as a currency.

Crypto is closest to gold in that both are scarce commodities used as a store of value. It's a terrible investment though. Warren Buffett made an interesting comparison between all the gold mined in history vs all the farmland in the US and which is a better investment over time.

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