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Comment by tuesdayrain | Hacker News Reader

> The amount of people making a profit from it is less than 5%

I find it amusing how casually you just made up a statistic and used it as justification to ban something. Here's an actual statistic: 100% of people who held Bitcoin for longer than 4 years are up on their investment.

edit: Lots of downvotes for an easily verifiable fact. Anyone can look at the BTC chart and see that there is no 4 year span where the price ends up lower than it was at the start.

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95% is clearly a number pulled out of thin air, but it is likely that most people have not realized a profit from Bitcoin. Where would the money come from? The only way for a majority of investors to realize a (small) gain is for the minority to pay for it in a (larger) loss. And that's for a zero-sum game. In Bitcoin, since running the system involves continuously consuming real world value in the form of billions of dollars worth of energy per year, it's most likely that the majority of participants end up at a loss.

Just imagine everybody in the world buys as much Bitcoin as they can afford, immediately.

How much richer are we all, in aggregate, at the end of the day?

Madoff ran his scheme for decades. Till the day it fell apart 100% of his clients were up on their investments. They also learned that when you multiply decades of fantastic returns by a single zero your outcome is zero.

Millions can be wrong for decades. If history teaches anything is has to be this.

Even more amusing to call what is supposed to be a currency, an “investment”.

Nitpicking based on your definition of "investment" isn't really a dig at Bitcoin. I would argue that even fiat currencies are often used as investments to hedge against various types of risks. Bitcoin is not "supposed" to be anything, it's just a technology that has different uses for different people. Something that outperforms a majority of investments is certainly an investment to anyone who isn't gatekeeping.

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