Hacker News Reader

Comment by neals | Hacker News Reader

So much good news and so little bad news, though the market seems bearish.

Bearish!? You do realize that if you invested 6 months ago, your investment has risen by 1000% ?!

Also, these recent price rises are nothing compared to what will hit when mass adoption happens in 2014. It's all about perspective. Try to ''zoom out'' when thinking about where bitcoin will go.

http://blog.panampost.com/joel-fensch/2014/01/02/bitcoin-set...

The ghash.io story is very bad news

GHash.IO is not news. If you were going to invest in Bitcoin, you were supposed to learn about how it works. It's not hard to understand that building a huge mining farm does not require zillions of money. Especially, if you expect BTC value to grow a lot, you should have accepted that there will be huge interest in mining. If you still feel that BTC is a good deal and miners with 50+% of hashrate won't be dishonest in practice, then you buy. Otherwise you don't. Everyone who is skeptical does not go into this game, and those who move the price to $1000, accept it. (Those who don't learn much about BTC, but still buy are most probably short-term speculators who quickly exit the game anyway; or eventually stay and learn.)

GHash.io reaching 50% is something Bitcoin proponents have been loudly insisting couldn't ever happen.

I bet you can't provide a quote to back up your claim.

I, as Bitcoin proponent, was never insisting that this would never happen. The risk I'm taking as an investor is that if someone takes even 90% of mining power, they'd have little incentive to play dirty (and kill the value of their own savings as much as everyone else's) and a lot of incentive to play nicely. Of course, that's personal evaluation of the risk and I cannot promise to anyone else that shit won't happen. Everyone should think for themselves and vote with their money for what they think it likely to happen.

I expect that until we reach a stable mining market when mining chips are deployed as soon as being produced, there will be quick accelerations in mining hashrate here and there. It'll be volatile like with BTC price. I take the risk that during such volatility there won't be a Big Evil guy to step on everyone's dreams, even if it causes big troubles only temporary.

> If you still feel that BTC is a good deal and miners with 50+% of hashrate won't be dishonest in practice, then you buy. Otherwise you don't.

That's the thing -- I haven't formed a conclusive opinion on this yet. I was hoping that mining self-regulates to an extent that pools don't reach >50%, or that a majority pools is really transparent and trustworthy. GHash.io isn't.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com