Hacker News Reader

The mechanism: Prices of any commodity are determined by supply and demand. If supply goes down, prices go up.

Again, flawed reasoning. If all bitcoins were destroyed except for one, how much do you think it would be worth? There is no intrinsic demand for bitcoins, only inertia behind perceived value. And it looks to me that the inertia is mostly behind the price per bitcoin rather than total value of all bitcoins.

The current bitcoin economy is worth about 1.5 billion, so that one coin would be worth about 1.5 billion, if that were to happen. Where is my flawed reasoning?

That would be a fun conversation to see. You with your 1.5 billion dollar bitcoin trying to haggle someone down from 0.2 bitcoins to 0.00000002 bitcoins for a pair of pants.

Fiat currencies (which bitcoin is in one sense) are largely rooted in psychology. Recall this story: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2010/10/04/130329523/how-fake...

> There is no intrinsic demand for bitcoins, only inertia behind perceived value.

Not true; anyone who sells something for bitcoins creates some amount of intrinsic demand. Silk Road did, and was probably by far the biggest generator of such demand, but not the only one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com