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Comment by Sodman | Hacker News Reader

If you don't want to be any richer, then why do returns, dividends, yields or earnings growth matter?

It's great that you're successful enough that throwing away over a million dollars worth of BTC isn't a big deal for you, but that's a life-changing amount of money for most folks. I'm making no claims about the features or benefits of BTC, but one million dollars worth of bitcoin is primarily useful because it can be exchanged for one million dollars, today, right now. It doesn't need any additional features, promises, guarantees or selling points.

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Again, you're making the point for me. You agree that bitcoin has no value on its own, it offers nothing but what I can sell it for to another sucker.

1M is life changing, agreed. But there's no reason to have known it would be worth that. There's no reason to believe it will be worth that tomorrow. Yet someone else, possibly far less astute than I am, is on the other end of that trade. For every dollar in wealth it created for me, it destroys for someone else. Nothing else has happened but I got lucky, timing was good, and I robbed wealth from others. That 1M would be better spent on people's salary, or a dozen Teslas, or a bathroom in the bay area. But, it was given to a jerk who downloaded some program and ran it for a couple of days in 2009 (or whenever I did, it's not important).

BTC is objectively bad. It is objectively speculation. It is objectively a random number. That is all. It is a shame we place any price on it, when the money spent speculating on it could create actual wealth.

It is you who is making my point for me. I agree that the 1M would be better spent on any of those things, rather than rotting away in a refuse site somewhere in MA. My argument was never that BTC is a good investment or even that it's worth the opportunity cost. I was just arguing against the "nothing of value was lost" mentality you have at throwing away all this BTC.

Put another way - If somebody were to buy SNAP stock, it's also a purely speculative investment (no dividends, no votes, etc). I may think this is a poor use of money, but I'm still confident if somebody gave me some SNAP stock I'd convert it into USD instead of just straight up throwing it into a dump somewhere and claiming I didn't miss out on any value.

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