Comment by as300 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by as300 | Hacker News Reader

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> Then, yes, BTC has that property... but, tons of other things do! E.g. why not invest in amber, it's probably one of the rarest things in the universe.

Yes but the amount of amber, gold, silver, etc. on Earth is a known unknown. There are presumably deposits of gold that we don't yet know about. The amount of BTC is known. You seem to be conflating rarity with fixed scarcity.

> Using existing anti-money-laundering laws & global institutions, you'd be effectively banned from getting back any value from your BTCs (or, doing so would expose you to all the associated risks).

While this is true, this is sort of the whole point of bitcoin. Like, it's a currency that is independent of any nation-state and acts as a sort of systemic-hedge against governmental incompetence/malfeasance. So the fact that it could even be banned by any particular country is kind of part of its value proposition. And, similar to VPN's, just because an IP-based technology is banned doesn't mean that it'd become impossible to use.

The total amount of Bitcoin in circulation is an unknown as lost wallets are a huge thing. At most you can say Bitcoin is less than X, but that’s true of many many other man made things.

Aka any movement of Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoins would have a huge impact on the number of Bitcoins estimated to be in circulation.

Like Retric says below, it's easy to put an upper bound to all of the other commodities on earth (and especially so to amber, since no amount of asteroid mining is going to increase that). I think the appeal of BTC is that it's a commodity [+] that's easily transferable across large distances & incurs very low storage costs. I get that. However, that alone does not necessarily make it a good store of value in my eyes; for that to be true, there'd have to be an extremely low risk of the value suddenly degrading to less than 1% essentially overnight(e.g. in less than a week). I guess here is where I disagree with lots of BTC proponents - I don't see it as "independent" of anything, certainly not of big nation-states. I don't see what would persuade people to continue to assign value to BTC in the face of events like those presented in the article.

[+] Do note that I do not accept it is "currency" - because it has low acceptability, by design.

I would add that it’s also extremely unlikely that all countries in the world would ban bitcoin. For example I read somewhere that Iran is using Bitcoin to avoid some of the sanctions the US out on Iran.

Vice also wrote an article on this: https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjppx3/iran-bitcoin-us-sanct...

> Yes but the amount of amber, gold, silver, etc. on Earth is a known unknown. There are presumably deposits of gold that we don't yet know about.

There's a difference between known unknown with high variance and known unknown with low variance. As I understand it, astrophysicists have a non-controversial model for how much gold is present on earth. Geologists probably have a reasonable model for how much gold is easily accessible.

The last time I looked into this, the mined gold supply seemed to be increasing at a fairly steady 2% per year, over the last N decades I was able to find good data for.

That may have more to do with the pace of mining investment than the total amount of gold, which won't change (until the next meteor impact).

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