Hacker News Reader

Comment by bob33212 | Hacker News Reader

This is a great essay. I follow similar logic when assessing bitcoin.

1. Listen to as many viewpoints as possible 2. Remove the people who are not domain experts 3. Remove the people who are blinded by their own financial interests or ego. 4. Remove the people who are influenced by social pressures ( good and bad ) 5. Assign probabilities to the remaining viewpoints evenly. 6. Repeat steps 1-5 and chart the progression of the probability space.

Currently, It seems 40%+ likely that Bitcoin will end up as an accidental Ponzi scheme with a crash based on late adopters rushing out. But there is also still a 10%+ chance that it replaces gold as a currency hedge for the next 20+ years and 5+ percent chance that it becomes a first class currency.

View on HN

Who exactly is a "domain expert" in bitcoin? The whole thing was created by an anonymous developer 10 years ago, and all of the so called "domain experts" are johnny come latelys who smelled a quick buck.

The whole thing was not created by an anonymous developer 10 years ago. The building blocks used in bitcoin have been around for many years before this in things like hashcash. Furthermore distributed consensus is a topic researched for decades. The term cryptocurrency uses crypto as a base which has been researched for centuries. Bitcoin is a novel constuction around crypto primatives relying on economic incentive to solve distributed consensus. There are clearly domain experts here.

In terms of the tech, yes. But that doesn't give you any insight into the market, which is what the comment I was replying to was talking about.

Andreas Antonopoulos, Vitalik Buterin, any of the core devs at https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin, anyone who has studied blockchain and cryptographic currency systems for the past 10 years, etc. Keep the wool over your eyes.

For those 10%: Do you see BitCoin as an actual currency that you can buy stuff with, or purely an investment?

I'm new at this, having just purchased some miners, but have followed the space using a similar logic. For the 10% view I'd consider the insane amount of institutional money chasing the entire value chain, which will not be shy about protecting itself.

The policy environment is still evolving; the FinCEN travel rule will put the hurt on crypto ATMs and the exchanges (to some degree). But it's good collateral, it doesn't (generally) have storage costs like gold, the growth of supply is well understood. Potential positive catalysts remain, including a US btc ETF, the impact of cme's micro contract, and geopolitical developments further constraining the supply of ASICs.

Its clear from the above that I view it more as a store of value than something you should spend as a currency. Ethereum-world (incl stablecoins) seems to have a lock on the latter. It will be interesting to see what happens when ETH shifts to POS.

People buy BTC so they can sell it for USD.

Most BTC sits idle in exchanges like coinbase.

Who in his sane mind would use an appreciating asset as currency?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com