Many are scratching their heads: "WTF? Bubble!? When will Bitcoin come crashing down?"
The thing is, individuals and institutions worldwide currently own around $300 trillion in financial assets.[a] If as a group they decide to hold, say, 2% of their financial wealth in Bitcoin, say, to diversify away from all nations on earth, then Bitcoin's market capitalization would go up 30x, from around $0.2 trillion to $6 trillion. The number of bitcoins is fixed, so the price would go up by the same multiple. In short, all it takes is for the world to want a tiny exposure to Bitcoin.
Note that before Bitcoin it was impossible to diversify away from all nation-specific risks.
So a currency that is hardly used to pay for things with and can handle a small number of transactions per second, with transaction fees, risk of being made illegal, competitor altcoins that are at least as good and the energy consumption of a small country will hold 2% of the value of the world's financial wealth?
Buying bridges from strangers looks completely sane in comparison.
This reminds me of my wannabe indie developer friends saying things like, "If we sell this program for $10 and only 1% of Mac users buy it, we'll make $BIGNUM!"
It's not wrong, but that 2% figure you mention really needs to be justified, not handwaved.
How is a currency backstopped by nothing going to be superior? Volatility? It won't have the same exposure to the source of volatility to which national currencies are succeptable? Presumably it wouldn't be encumbered by an obligation to provide for the welfare of its constiuents. But in that sense, the burdens of a citizenry also translate into a valuable commodity which can be leveraged in the form of labor.
Just spitballing here. It's a very interesting thought exercise.
No person or entity can affect the money supply so the only governance function would presumably be
This seems very murky. It's utility as a currency of last resort seems uncertain and therefore relatively weak. Considering it would have to serve as a source of stability in a time of volatility which is itself a highly uncertain proposition.
To my mind, seems likely BTC is being used by the super-wealthy (persons and fictitious entities, i.e. corporations) to avoid taxes and to pay bribes.
BTC is currently being used by a number of (rich) investors and a very, very large horde of excited people that see a lot of other people that got very rich this year. Tax avoidance in that last group is probably more out of ignorance than anything - I mean for a lot of people it's their first dip into something like the stock market.
> The thing is, individuals and institutions worldwide currently own around $300 trillion in financial assets.[a]
The overwhelming majority of which is productive assets. The only major non-transient holdings of non-productive assets is of gold. And that makes up about half a percent. So 2% for bitcoin, which at absolute very best is a slightly better gold, seems like a real stretch.
> Note that before Bitcoin it was impossible to diversify away from all nation-specific risks.
I don't disagree but wonder whether the fact that it doesn't have a phyiscal property would militate in its favor over gold. I recently read a story about how a Saudi prince was having a few tonnes of gold driven to a neighboring country every day in order to avoid trade restrictions. Seems like it would be a lot easier and safer to just click a button on his computer. That said I could imagine it easily cutting the other way and saying that golds tangible properties are an advantage. This is a fascinating subject!
It also just involved a click of a button. Nonetheless it was uncovered.
Too often would be cypher-anarchists forget about rubber hose cryptoanaysis. And unlike gold, bitcoin are fundamentally non-fungible and traceable.
The biggest advantage gold has over bitcoin is 5000 plus years of history as a store of value. The biggest advantage bitcoin has over gold is its immateriality. Personally I think the former outweighs the latter (no put intended).
I wouldn't say Bitcoin is even a good example of being able to diversify from nation-specific risks. China's crackdown on the currency is a great example and if the SEC or other regulatory body decides to crack down or otherwise make interacting with these markets more difficult it would presumably have an effect on the price.
The largest risk to the long term viability for bitcoin (and probably crypto in general) are regulatory in my mind. A lot of value can be derived from regulatory arbitrage - just look at the evolution of cryptocurrency's use cases from 1) buying and selling illegal goods, 2) getting around capital controls, and now 3) issuing securities without having to go through the normal IPO process. It's a long road to people using this stuff to transact "real" goods and services. There is a very real nation-specific risk in the form of regulatory regime.
> Note that before Bitcoin it was impossible to diversify away from all nation-specific risks.
It's still impossible, since your (and your potential trading partners’) access to the Bitcoin network, or even your ability to retain the keys which are equivalent to the Bitcoin itself, are not independent of state-specific risks.
These present real storage, and even moreso liquidity, risks.
It's a complex phenomenon. There are various jurisdictions with their supply/demand for Bitcoin, affected by regulations, government (in)stability, the exchanges' ability to handle heavy volumes, etc. So Bitcoin's value doesn't diversify away from nation-specific risks---rather, it aggregates across the risks of all nations, which would tend to reduce the risk, but it doesn't exactly get away from it.
Presumably a Bitcoin in North Korea is worth little to most North Koreans because they have no means of accessing the Internet or leaving the country to redeem its value. Should Bitcoin transactions be banned in a given country, but citizens retain mobility, Bitcoins will keep some value in that jurisdiction because of the ability to drive to a neighboring country, buy/sell Bitcoins, and return. Of course this will be subject to limits on cash flows across borders.
Has anyone made a map showing Bitcoin prices across the globe?
thats a dangerous line of thinking. along the lines of telling an investor "if we just get 1% of this massive market, we'll be huge!"
if people decided to invest 2% of the worlds financial wealth into, say, drawings i made of million dollar bills, then my million dollar bill drawings would be worth $6 trillion. since i cant draw that fast, price would go way up
it would be incredibly hard to get 2% of all the worlds wealth. for reference, private equity as an asset class (including venture capital, growth equity, buyout funds, etc) has only like $2.5T in assets
So I guess what you are saying is that the price of Bitcoin does actually have an upper bound, which is informed by the world's aggregate financial wealth, and is probably ~$500k per Bitcoin?
Agreed. Basically the bullish case for bitcoin is that it's a financial asset that institutional investors want to hold just because it has some sort of beta value that makes it useful as an investment hedge.
The argument for it as an alternative currency seems out the window. The stakeholders don't care though because the price keeps going up, which is all they really care about.
Because nothing has changed about gold, whereas bitcoin is new. Any investor putting 2% of their value into gold is already doing it. Investors putting 2% into BTC couldn’t do it before it existed, or matured to where it is now.
It's not. The productive (e.g. industrial or jewelry) utility of gold is about USD $80 per ounce. But the price is at over $1200 per ounce. In effect investors haven't just not been ignoring gold, they've been buying it at such a rate as to pull it away from its intrinsic uses.
You can't transfer gold at will across the world. Although BTC is claimed to be a "store of value", it can also be transferred around fairly easily (with very little friction). It can also be exchanged for many different currencies.
You either have to hold gold, which is dangerous and again contingent on avoiding nation-state failure risk, or you have to trust someone else to hold gold, which is perhaps as risky but the risks have a different profile.
Bitcoin has the same issue as gold in that regard: it's not that easy to hold it securely both from third party attackers and from your own stupidity. You can encrypt everything behind a password, but what if you forget that password? So you write it down somewhere, but then what if this somewhere is stolen? How do you handle sudden death, or loss of memory? You can also leave all your crypto currencies to a third party, but do you really trust that third party?
These problems are mostly solved for "us", on hacker news. You might even say that it's easy to solve. Yet the status quo for anything digital around me is "hello123" as a password, and panic when having to re-enter the gmail password on that new iDevice because it has long been forgotten and neither "hello123" nor "hello321" worked.
A) How is holding gold contingent on avoiding nation-state failure risk, or at least how is the relevant risk to gold as opposed to say your person?
B) It's pellucidly clear that holding bitcoin is dangerous in the same way that holding gold is -- i.e. it can be stolen. In fact, it looks like the carrying costs may actually be higher.
A) If your nation state fails and you have to flee the country, how are you going to take your gold with you? That's the real risk, not local vault security.
B) You can take your bitcoin, encrypt it, and put it anywhere on the Internet in plain sight, and then hold the encryption key in your pocket, or in your head. Totally safe, especially against the real threat, border security. Bitcoin is far easier to physically secure than gold is. What's difficult is securing it in a manner that also makes it easy to do business with it.
If your nation state fails and you die in the resulting chaos what good will the encryption key in your head do anyone? Saying that bitcoin is a better gold because it solves the nation-state failure risk is missing the forest for the bacteria in the ants crawling on the leaves of the trees.
> You can take your bitcoin ...
Perhaps you could, but people generally don't. So in terms of actual risk and carrying costs and how that relates to potential market cap, your foolproof system is rather irrelevant.
You seem to be dealing in absurd hypotheticals here. In most countries in the world, having your nation state fail on you is a very real risk. It doesn't fail all at once, so it's something you can plan for. Having wealth outside of the banking and financial sectors that's not also in physical form is something that's very valuable for this purpose.
>Note that before Bitcoin it was impossible to diversify away from all nation-specific risks.
Except for gold and tangible capital. How did Germany get through hyper inflation and Zimbabwe didn't? Germany had a real economy and an industrial base.
A person who owns a tractor owns a tractor regardless of the money printing going on. Sure, the State can seize the tractor but the United States can (and has) seized bitcoins - go tell the folks with bitcoins in the Silk Road that there's no nation specific risk exposure.
"As long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance." -Charles Prince, Ex-Citibank CEO 2007
This is one of my favorite modern finance quotes on bubbles because it encapsulates so well why there is still momentum in this crypto bubble even after an even casual reading of the news will tell you that everyone and their grandparents believes it's a bubble.
My bet is that heavy regulation in a market where there is heavy trading (e.g. USA, Japan, Korea) will be the blow that bursts this, but as with everything in public markets, who knows?
I really hope that the lightning network (which had its first successful test a day ago) will end this speculation bubble (by enabling fast microtransactions). Currently BTC is not suitable for general trading, the transaction fees are too high. But I really would like to be able to pay for things using BTC, online or in stores.
The price of BTC went up by $2k USD in 2 hours this morning. Why would anyone want to use it to buy something when there's a good chance it'll be worth more in a day or so?
And conversely, it just fell by $3,000 in 20 minutes. Why would anyone accept it for a purchase when there's a good chance it'll be worth substantially less not long after?
The technical implementation of the lightning network is neat, but I swear at a high level it feels like we're just re-implementing modern money.
Once upon a time when we realized shuffling around gold bars was slow, expensive, and a pain in the ass, we created a much more liquid network on top of the gold, and called it the dollar.
How long until lightning network runs into limitations due to the fixed supply of gold, err I mean bitcoin, and abandons the "bitcoin standard"?
Not more than current fiat currency volatility (say, USDEUR or EURCHF). If I transfer 1000 USD to my bitcoin (or LN) wallet at the beginning of the month, I want it to remain roughly stable till the end of the month, so I can easily pay for stuff throughout the month without worry about loosing half of it.
The value of something is what somebody will pay for it.
If you disagree with this, I challenge you to give an example of something that fits your description of intrinsic value. That is, something that would still have “value” even if nobody in the world were willing to pay for it.
In bitcoin's case it is a liquid global asset, this has never happened before, this allows it to be used as collateral globally which is what SALT enables. This is one innovation driven by speculation. Without speculation you wouldn't have the liquidity, and it would be a bad collateral system.
The SALT system allows people worldwide to lend to others. Even in sanctioned countries because they can just source lenders in those countries and the borrower has the universal collateral.
And thats just one utility, only possible because of the speculation driving liquidity.
From what I've seen I came to this conclusion (further input from HN readers gladly accepted, maybe I got something wrong):
It seems that yesterday at around 01:00 UTC, someone with a huge amount of cash on GDAX started a buying bot, which bought BTC in small increments every second or so at market price. Judging by the GDAX volume in comparison to normal volume and an estimated average price, I'd say this person bought about 50-60k BTC for around 800-900 million dollars. Shortly after this buying activity started, the Bitcoin network mempool got clogged by transactions - and it doesn't seem like spam, but more like legitimate transactions with fees attached that would normally go through in an acceptable timeframe. I'm pretty sure this is people realizing that GDAX is the place to sell right now, thus they're trying to move BTC from other exchanges and from cold storage onto that exchange. However, most of them likely didn't get there in time, but the buying bot apparently had no upper price limit and just continued buying its way through the order books, until finally arriving at 19,6k$, when someone apparently hit CTRL-C.
During that time, the price on GDAX and all other exchanges decoupled, as arbers probably gave up on arbing (guess they ran out of coins or cash respectively and weren't able to interchange the funds between the exchanges, just like all the sellers). Even the Koreans, which usually are paying a large premium with regard to Western exchanges, almost lost all of their premium over GDAX for a few minutes.
I have only one idea who could have caused this: a single person or entity trying to load up on huge amounts of coins, planning to use them with corresponding orders on the upcoming futures markets. They probably got surprised with the CBOE announcement of starting futures even a week earlier than CME and thus had to speed up the buying plans a little, regardless of the premium they'd have to pay this way. The tricky question that remains however is: are they going to use these coins as a hedge, or are they planning on dumping them to do the inverse of what they just did (artifically lowering the market price, so their shorts on the futures markets earn them way more than they lose on the BTC exchanges)?
And of course: is this over now? GDAX went down and up again, and the mysterious and frequent buys at ridiculously high prices have returned as well, although the blockchain had practically no time to re-stock GDAX with coins. This person definitely doesn't care at all about the price and just wants to load up on any coins it can get really, really quick.
In all seriousness, I wouldn't be surprised if a group of high-net-worth individuals go short (exactly how you described) in order to shake out all the inexperienced traders/investors in the space for a nice profit.
Also, could it not just be CME preparing the underlyings?
I frequent several Korean websites (that used to have nothing to do with cryptocurrencies) and the number of bitcoin-related posts in the past few days has reached an insane level.
Half of them are saying it's a bubble. The other half say they're getting rich. Nobody's talking about blockchains, fiat currency, built-in deflation, monetary policies of nations, or any of that stuff, because nobody's interested in these topics. To these people, it's a get-rich-quick scheme, pure and simple. The only difference in viewpoint is whether they're in the scheme or not.
I don't know how far it will go, but a new economic order it is not. The players themselves (who are pumping up the price) don't give a damn about economic orders.
I live in Korea (and run a small cryptocurrency related service) and I couldn't agree with you more. Koreans are looking at BTC as a pure get rich quick scheme. Even those chasing out altcoins, they are not hooked by, you know, PoS or more privacy or any other features that the coins evangelists are talking about. They are just looking for "the next Bitcoin" haha.
Even when you try to go to these "Blockchain meetups": most of them are discussing nothing but the latest price of bitcoin.
Biosphere failure forensic report by agent 359348349 in outer galactic sector 17:
"The third planet began its ascent to technological singularity but became terminally fixated upon the repeated calculation of an obscure cryptographic mathematical function. Nearly all geologically sequestered carbon was rapidly oxidized to provide energy for the computation of this function, triggering a runaway greenhouse effect and transforming the planet's climate to one resembling that of the second planet in this solar system."
"And as was the case with the second planet in the solar system, before its runaway greenhouse gas death, we expect to see the process repeat itself on the 4th as probes sent from the 3rd again contained micro-organisms which have managed to adapt to climate there and have begun replicating. This time the period should be considerably shorter then the previous 2 billion years as cells with a nucleus have successfully adapted to the 4th, whereas from the 2nd's probes to the 3rd only non-nucleus possessing cells managed to initiate a replication cascade until this terminating event."
i don't have anything of real value to add here, and have never owned bitcoin (and probably never will), but this is an incredibly fascinating phenomenon to watch as a disintereted, underinformed party. i laughed out loud in amazement (not sarcastically or scornfully, just in amazement) when i saw it passed $16K
it is unlike anything most people in the world have probably ever seen
Wonder if they'll be a consulting market for IT engineers from the stock market exchanges for the cryptocurrency exchanges since they have experience handling a large volume of transactions etc.. All the current crypto exchanges seize when high volume, stop losses etc.. are triggered at the moment.
Most stock markets stop trading when prices change too much. If this was the case with bitcoin, we'd be limit up each day after a minute or so. The exchanges implementing it would lose out vs. others. So not sure they want to implement that now.
Yeah this is just the thing - you cannot stop the bitcoin blockchain because it's decentralized, and due to competition, individual exchanges can't call for a stop on trading. They can but people will revoke trust in that exchange and move to another one. If Coinbase is down more often in times like this, they will start losing trust too and people will move to the next best competitor. Then again I think by now Coinbase has built up such a good reputation and whatnot that it'd take a lot for that to happen.
Lets all just thank the big central banks for pumping so much liquidity into the markets that people and companies are mostly clueless on what to do with the money.
And now everything seems like a good investment, you see average companies maling little to no profit acquired for billions, the housing market growing year-on-year, the US stock market up ~20% YTD. What’s the surprise?
Remains to be seen how much of the trading activity is new money vs people buying with other crypto, people buying with tethers they cannot redeem for USD or just plain old self-trading where one can move cash from wallet A into wallet B at arbitrary prices.
Bitcoin exchanges are not exactly offering a high degree of transparency on their cash inflows.
not an expert by any means, but from reading the article it looks like people are buying in anticipation of price increases after BTC futures launch on major exchanges (supposed to be 12/10 launch for the first one, tho i think thats coming into doubt now)
I am very genuinely curious how people bought bitcoin before coinbase? There was that vending machine. Or you could mine it. But how did regular folks do it?
I also used Bitstamp and had to shop-around UK banks until I found one that would authorise the transaction. Most declined once they identified the recipient as dealing in cryptocurrency.
Curious how you decided to trust a particular escrow service. With Coinbase, the leap of faith one could possibly make was that they were associated with YC (gave them credibility in my books at least).
It was mostly what everybody was using on Reddit and the recommended method of aquiring BTC at the time. Before exchanges, some sort of trust would have been necessary for any BTC <-> $ exchange, and even now, trust is necessary in the exchange itself.
I do believe the technological possibility is baked in BTC for 3-way signing a transaction so that a validation requires 2 sources of signature. You could implement an escrow system this way.
I wonder to whatr extent BTC could be seen as an investment in a corporatist future where nationstates are less influential than the fictitious entities they have spawned.
is it possible to buy and sell bc, as quickly as one buy and sell stocks (aka speculating)? last time I checked there were ways but it would take some user verification process to buy, and selling seemed to be very well hidden.
Sure, most exchanges have an API you can use to automate your trading. The verification is a one-time thing, once you're past that you can trade as quickly as you want.
You can on e.g. gdax, but Bitcoin isn't intended as a high volume trading platform; it handles about 15 transactions per second, and right now there's a backlog of over 200.000 unconfirmed transactions. I'm fairly sure coinbase / gdax has like its own transaction log, guaranteeing that you will get X btc for Y price at the moment you make the transaction, even if the transfer to your own (offline) wallet could take a while.
Blocks take approximately 10 minutes, assuming your transaction is on the first block. In a way that might put some brakes on high speed trading, though it could still be automated.
The futures market will do the rest. Only settlement is once a day. But as the bitcoin price moves (which indicates that the settlement price that evening will be different), actors will buy and sell which should bring the futures market in line with the bitcoin price. So in the end you'll end up with a pretty close mirror. You only need 1-2 algo traders for that.
Curious if you have any source links for banks pulling out. It seems like smart risk management to back off supporting a BTC futures contract right now.
The thing is, individuals and institutions worldwide currently own around $300 trillion in financial assets.[a] If as a group they decide to hold, say, 2% of their financial wealth in Bitcoin, say, to diversify away from all nations on earth, then Bitcoin's market capitalization would go up 30x, from around $0.2 trillion to $6 trillion. The number of bitcoins is fixed, so the price would go up by the same multiple. In short, all it takes is for the world to want a tiny exposure to Bitcoin.
Note that before Bitcoin it was impossible to diversify away from all nation-specific risks.
[a] http://money.visualcapitalist.com/worlds-money-markets-one-v...