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Comment by thebean11 | Hacker News Reader

> Government-issued currencies have value because they represent human trust and cooperation. There is no wealth and no trade without these two things, so you might as well go all in and trust people.

Hm..

If you bought BTC when this article came out you'd be up 250%

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what does that statement mean, though? for example, if you bought GameStop you would have 6x'd. are we to assume that GME is twice the "investment" that BTC is? twice as impressive? twice as meaningful to the world?

no, of course not.

all of this is fueled on speculation, and picking arbitrary date ranges and prices on speculation as a basis for comparison outside of relative speculative performance is not super useful - as recent events have shown, things can move quickly based on purely market- and popularity based events.

If you bought Beanie Babies in 1995 and sold in 1997 you'd be up 16000%

Maybe, not convinced that market was quite as liquid as BTC. Either way, is it really a useful, interesting, or novel comparison this late in the game?

Sure, but only if you could stomach to hold onto it for 3 years while being down between 20% and 80%.

That's what it always comes to, doesn't it? It can't be that bad if it turns a profit. The same argument used by pirates, slave traders, tobacco CEOs and money printing central bankers.

Right, Bitcoin is like slave trading, great point

And mathematically-issued currencies such as cryptocurrency have value because they represent mathematically-provable trust, which is more reliable than human trust.

The mathematical trust just ensures the transactions will all add up and history won't be rewritten. You still need the human trust to deliver the sold goods, have your exchange give you USD for your BTC, etc.

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