[Kiro]

We don't even see this kind of stuff in a regular bubble. I think this is something new, either Bubble 2.0 or The New Dawn.

I lived through the IT bubble and it mostly went unnoticed among me, my friends and family. Literally everyone talks about Bitcoin though. I'm seriously thinking this is a first for humanity and the consequences will be extreme regardless of crash or paradigm shift. It's one for the history books for sure.

[ermir]

I started to get tempted to get in the crypto craze after resisting it since 2011, until my mother, who can barely use a computer, told me last night "What is this Bitcoin that everyone keeps talking about, everyone is getting rich, we should get in on it". That was a definite sign to stay away.

She was still tempted even after I explained the bubble and reminded her that 2000 of our people died last time something like this happened in 1997. A lot of people are going to suffer this time, it's not going to be pretty.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albanian_Civil_War

[Kiro]

I posted another comment here saying that if the value reaches a certain level the Bitcoin crash could potentially start a war. I removed it though since I was downvoted to oblivion. I guess it wasn't so far-fetched after all!

[rhino369]

This probably isn‘t even 1/10 as bad as internet and tech bubble. That had common people throwing their entire 401k into tech stocks.

My dad ruined his retirement fund buying Nextel options that ended up worthless.

Bitcoin is a dumber bubble though.

[cableshaft]

There are people putting their life savings into bitcoin. You'll see those stories pop up from time to time on the bitcoin subreddit.

I've only got in it what I can afford to lose, personally, which isn't a whole lot, but it's still some skin in the game, at least.

[kuschku]

Several japanese retirement funds announced they’re going all in on Bitcoin, according to what I’ve heard.

Even the rumors show that this is going in the same direction.

[Kiro]

I don't think we've seen anything yet. Imagine the crash when Bitcoin is $1M or $10M. I don't see that as an impossibility.

[sulam]

It’s pretty much exactly the same, down to companies adding .com to their names and talking about their internet strategy and seeing their stock double.

[Kiro]

There are so many other spectacular things with this bubble, down to the nature of the actual instrument itself. Cryptography, decentralisation, miners, forks, etc. The IT bubble was still a stock bubble. I think this is something new.

[sulam]

If you were an adult during the first one, we might be able to have a real conversation about this. If not, probably not so much.

This bubble is relatively small in comparison -- so far. The number of companies, the amount of the real economy affected, the sheer pervasiveness in daily life, etc. AOL single handedly carpeted North America with CDs. Internet technology revolutionized so many things it's hard to pick the most important, in the space of about 5 years. The one that still stands out to me personally is how it totally crushed international long distance calling. Hell, it completely revolutionized the _porn_ industry. Bitcoin is no comparison (again, so far).

[sulam]

Adding some more thought to this — if anything I think Bitcoin is running too hot. Crypto-currency in general has the potential to be a big deal. Ethereum especially. BTC as a mechanism of exchange is probably dead right now. It could recover, but it will require a lot for it to become more than a speculator’s wet dream. Ethereum, on the other hand, is a hacker’s wet dream. But it seems to have more long-term potential from my perspective...

In general, as compared to the Internet bubble, this year might be Bitcoin’s 1995 (the year Netscape went public and suddenly the Internet went from being something you read about in a magazine to something that could make you rich). The next 5 years were pretty crazy, and Bitcoin has a long way to go to equal it. But maybe it will get there. The only thing is, I think this might be 1995 and 2001 all rolled up together, and I don’t think that will be good for Bitcoin specifically, and maybe crypto currency in general.

[Kiro]

> If you were an adult during the first one

That was uncalled for. I was very much an adult during the first one.

You are talking about the internet revolution in general and a comparison to blockchains could possibly be relevant but not in this discussion. You didn't trade the internet in the Dot-com bubble, you traded stocks. Bitcoin is different because that's the actual instrument being traded.

[sulam]

I understand the point you’re making about Bitcoin being mechanically different from “Internet”. However the average consumer was investing in “Internet companies” in the same way people today talk about investing in Bitcoin. There was very little deeper knowledge about the complexities of what they were putting their money into. The motivation then and now was simply greed and “wow this is big!”

My grandfather, who sold cars for a living, called me up out of the blue to ask me what he should invest in after Netscape went public. I was 24 and we’d never talked about the stock market in my life. I had no business experience (I was about to get a lot, it turns out, but had none then) and while I was doing a ton of Internet-related work, it wasn’t making anyone money. Yet suddenly I was an Oracle to a man in his 60’s who really should have been putting his money into the bond market if anything. Instead he invested it in Spyglass, on my half-hearted “well this is a company like Netscape I guess”, and then proceeded to tell me all about how it was doing for the next 5 years. If he were still alive today, I could imagine the same thing happening with respect to Bitcoin (except this time I would tell him I have no idea, and to put his money into something that generates cash).

[sulam]

Not uncalled for at all. The people talking to me about Bitcoin and how big it is are almost all in their 20’s. They have a vague idea about the Internet bubble but they certainly didn’t live through it in any meaningful way. It’s like someone telling me I can’t properly appreciate the 70’s since I didn’t experience them as an adult. It’s totally true!

[workthrowaway27]

The most recent times I've met someone and told them I was a programmer there next question has been along the lines of: "Do you have bitcoin/what do you think about bitcoin". Super strange.

[throwawayReply]

"It's different this time!" - Someone in every bubble.

[Kiro]

Can we just stop for a moment and look at what people are actually trading here? A decentralised protocol upheld by a cryptographic function. This can't be compared with any stocks or commodity. Maybe the crash will be the same but it is still different.

[beaconstudios]

stocks and commodity holdings are just protocols too though - not technical ones but legal/contractual ones. It's still pretty crazy though given bitcoin doesn't even have a major (legal) use to anchor it.

[kgwgk]

But it can be compared with other decentralised protocols upheld by cryptographic functions, so it’s a commodity of sorts.

[ghostbrainalpha]

The Crypto Kitty bubble already popped. I lost a paycheck, which sucks right before Christmas.

Ultimately I am probably lucky that I learned my lesson with "Captain Furball Cheezburger" instead of losing my mortgage when Bitcoin pops.

According to the CIA there is 80 Trillion dollars in the world in soft money. With 21 million Bitcoins, if 1% of all the worlds money was transferred to Bitcoin, each Bitcoin would be worth $38,000.

We are basically half way there. I wouldn't be surprised if it gets that high, but we I don't understand how people think it could keep going past that even theoretically. If someone understands the reasoning behind the $500,000 predictions, I would love to have that explained.

[beefield]

Theoretically: Let's just agree with all bitcoin holders for a few moment to not to sell bitcoins to anyone but me. Then, I buy one satoshi (0.00000001 BTC) for one dollar. Just like that, the bitcoin market price is now 100 million dollars. With exactly one dollar "transferred" to bitcoin.

[s17n]

$500,000: BTC market cap approximately equal to value of all mined gold.

[ghostbrainalpha]

I see that number all the time as well, but i'm confused.

There is less than 2 Trillion in Gold in the entire world. If you divide 2 Trillion / 21 Million (total number of possible bitcoins), you would get BTC of $100,000 equals the market cap of Gold. Not $500,000.

By my math BTC of $500,000 would be 5x the market cap of gold. Would someone explain how my math is wrong?

[bpicolo]

There's really no actual reason it should have value equal to the value of all mined gold though.

[ryanwaggoner]

There’s no actual reason that gold should have the value it does, either, other than the global shared delusion of it as a store of value.

[down]

yes, bitcoin is better then gold, will probably get higher

[acchow]

Except, the millions of gold holders (including in jewelry, etc) around the world can transact among each other at any time.

Bitcoin can handle 3-7 transactions per second.

[mynewtb]

> With 21 million Bitcoins, if 1% of all the worlds money was transferred to Bitcoin, each Bitcoin would be worth $38,000.

Thanks for reassuring me that a bitcoin wont ever be worth anything within an order of magnitude to $38,000.

[ryanwaggoner]

It’s currently worth $16k, so no idea where your skepticism that it’ll reach $3800 is coming from :)

[Scalestein]

My guess would be that the .com bubble wasn't as easy to get involved in. With Bitcoin you can buy/invest in Bitcoin in 10 minutes with zero prior knowledge. With the .com bubble you had to find a specific stock to buy and go through all the rigmarole of buying it. The barrier to entry to this bubble (if it is!) seems much lower.

[mikestew]

With the .com bubble you had to find a specific stock to buy and go through all the rigmarole of buying it.

You mean click a mouse? Buying a stock in 1999 was a lot like buying a stock now. I don’t recall how fast one could go from account creation to trading, but eTrade has been around for a while. A lot of folks had a 401K account that probably had a trading account of sort as well, so there might not have even been a barrier.

Not saying you might not be right, but buying stocks wasn’t all that hard in the 90s, either.

[workthrowaway27]

I don't know. People at least know what stocks are. Bitcoin is mysterious to most non-technical people and seems sort of sketchy at first glance.

[cableshaft]

Most people have a tenuous knowledge at best about what stocks are or the ecosystem behind the stock market, how to analyze stocks, or what the rules of trading are (I managed to break one when I briefly thought I could daytrade from Sharebuilder years and years ago and got suspended from trading for a few days).

They don't understand it much more than most people understand Bitcoin. Not really. It's all 'buy X and hope the number goes up!', where X is a mutual fund or random company, just like with Bitcoin/Altcoins.

[stordoff]

Most people will at least know that a share is a tiny fraction of a company, and why it has value. Bitcoin is more of a black box (to many), and thus more prone to hype (it's far easier to make grandiose claims about the future of a currency than it is to pretend a company will grow at nearly the same rate).

[Kiro]

That's also what makes it so different.

[ghaff]

I'm pretty sure the opposite is true. Many people are already invested in stocks and, even in the .com bubble, many had accounts with etrade and the like--some of which were part of the bubble itself. All you had to do was transfer your cash/stocks to pets.com or whatever.

With bitcoin, you have to sign up for/transfer money to various sketchy exchanges that you've never previously used.

[fullshark]

E trade and Ameritrade were new companies at the time. Buying stocks on your own without your bank/a brokerage was not commonplace actually and that was a pretty substantial barrier to entry.

[ghaff]

Well, those are brokerages. I assume what you mean is that it was more common to call your broker on the phone and place an order (at a fairly high fee in most cases). That's fair. Even in the US, online trading really came in contemporaneously with the dot-com era. That said, even the newish online brokerages were regulated to a degree we don't see with cryptocurrencies.

[fullshark]

Yes that's a more accurate characterization.

[spdionis]

What are you talking about? Most people in the world barely have access to buy stocks, especially US stocks, without not-so-minor annoyances.

[devdoomari]

maybe you're in a different age group/peer group compared to when you lived thru the IT bubble? someone else going thru the 2000s IT bubble may have said that too...

[s4vi0r]

The technology behind it could maybe one day cause "the new dawn", but there's 0 chance this is anything other than people going full retard. It's like a smaller scale, equally as stupid/shitty version of that tulip craze that happened in the Netherlands like 400 years ago or whatever.

[Keyframe]

Someone said it's ok if everyone talks about that, start worrying when everyone says they bought some.

[usrusr]

Group A is talking about bitcoin a lot to mutually reassure themselves that buying into it was the right move (and also a bit to keep others from selling before they do).

Group B is talking about bitcoin a lot to mutually reassure themselves that staying out of it was the right decision (and also a bit to keep others out since all new paper money entering the exchanges weakens their arguments, at least superficially)

I think that defection rates between those groups are already very low and will keep shrinking.