[iexplainbtc]

I'd rather invest into something that is highly volatile but almost certainly appreciates over time rather than something that depreciates at a predictable yet increasing rate.

We could discuss the fact that BTC might be overpriced or underpriced, nobody really knows. But that it's going to go up in value (in terms of purchasing power) in the long term is, black swan events aside, almost a certainty because of its engineered stock to flow.

Scarcity is real whether it's physical or digital (as we've seen with art, collectibles or more recently NFTs). Gold is a good store of value because of historically predictable scarcity but it's not predictable with certainty. Bitcoin is. We'll know exactly how many bitcoins are in circulation 10 minutes, 10 days, 10 or even 100 years from now. If anything many will be lost, which will contribute to its scarcity.

Will Bitcoin be replaced by something else in the future? Almost certainly. But let's not forget that unbacked cash has been around for just half a century. Even if Bitcoin is replaced by something 50, 100 years from now that's plenty of time for a couple of generations to use it as a store of value (and payment system).

[notahacker]

There are many, many things other than Bitcoin which are also guaranteed to be finite in supply (more so in the case of physical goods, since they cannot be forked). BCash, most shitcoins and inactive ICO tokens, for example, are limited in supply in exactly the same way. Share certificates of bust companies are fixed in supply, and yet rarely worth more than the paper they're printed on. The creative output of every dead person is fixed in supply, and yet some dead people's work appreciates massively in value whilst others' is near worthless.

Price is the interaction of supply and demand, and there is no particular reason to believe that people will be more willing to pay over $45k to update ledgers to indicate possession of a particular alphanumeric string in a couple of decades' time than they are now.

[iexplainbtc]

Yep and that's Bitcoin's network effect. There is demand for Bitcoin. 2017 was the year of retail interest, 2021 is the year of institutional interest. It's easy to see that the price is now uncorrelated with the retail interest, using Google Trends as an example. [0]

> there is no particular reason to believe that people will be more willing to pay over $45k to update ledgers to indicate possession of a particular alphanumeric string in a couple of decades' time than they are now

Absolutely. Nobody can know with certainty what will happen but if you compare Bitcoin with something like gold you immediately realize that Bitcoin is better in any possible way. There is literally no reason to think that Bitcoin won't replace gold in terms of market capitalization (except for the 7.5% actually used in manufacturing) [1].

[0] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/299609/gold-demand-by-in...

[notahacker]

> Nobody can know with certainty what will happen but if you compare Bitcoin with something like gold you immediately realize that Bitcoin is better in any possible way.

Again, this is cargo-cult nonsense. Gold does not take the electricity resources of a large country to render it secure and make transactions possible. People cannot vote for a greater gold supply or fork gold, or create an alternative gold which lacks the need to use the electricity resources of a small country to secure it but is in every other respect functionally identical. Gold is pretty to look at and can be made into jewellery, not intrinsically worthless. Gold's price might be pushed higher than that intrinsic value by interest in its use as a store of value, but it's driven by millenia of desire to possess gold as a status symbol and currency substitute across a vast array of cultures, not a 12 year bull run propped up by counterfeit dollars and increasingly unrealistic claims that it will replace currency. There is literally no reason to believe that Bitcoin will ever 'replace gold in terms of market capitalization'

[iexplainbtc]

> Gold does not take the electricity resources of a large country to render it secure and make transactions possible.

Except it does [0].

> Gold is pretty to look at and can be made into jewellery, not intrinsically worthless.

The first argument is laughable, the second is simply incorrect. Oil is intrinsically worthless. It's worth something only if you can turn it into fuel, plastic or some other product for which there is demand. Same goes for gold.

And although it's true that you can turn a piece of gold into a piece of jewelry that piece of jewelry will decrease in value over time unless it gains intangible value because of its history. Try buying a gold necklace and selling it the next day at the same value.

Nothing has "intrinsic" value. All value is relative.

[0] https://medium.com/@hillpot/bitcoin-vs-gold-which-hurts-the-....

[notahacker]

> Except it does [0].

That energy is used in production, not securing the existing stock of gold. With the very significant consequence for gold's "store of value" role that if environmental activists succeed in curtailing gold mining, gold owners would see their gold go up in value, not transactions becoming incredibly difficult and prone to fraud and a price crash. (But FWIW I'm not saying that gold mining to use as a "store of value" isn't also wasteful)

> It's worth something only if you can turn it into fuel, plastic or some other product for which there is demand. Same goes for gold.

I'm sorry to hear you find the aesthetic preferences of virtually every culture in history and the role they have played in promoting gold as a symbol of wealth laughable. You'd be surprised how much harder it is to enthuse them about the aesthetic properties of Bitcoins though.

And no, oil or gold is not "intrinsically worthless" because it is possible to use oil or gold for purposes other than exchange, and thus people value them for those use cases independently of beliefs about their future price.

> And although it's true that you can turn a piece of gold into a piece of jewelry that piece of jewelry will decrease in value over time unless it gains intangible value because of its history. Try buying a gold necklace and selling it the next day at the same value.

And yet gold necklaces of a given design are invariably more scarce in supply than Bitcoin! Almost like the demand side of the equation actually matters! Luckily, people do not buy gold necklaces solely because they believe gold necklaces will go up in price, and are not motivated to sell them as soon as they fear the price will fall in future. The same does not apply to Bitcoins, because unlike Bitcoins, people hold necklaces for the intrinsic pleasure of having a shiny necklace.

[iexplainbtc]

[flagged]

[maclured]

> Oil is ... worth something only if you can turn it into fuel, plastic or some other product for which there is demand. Same goes for gold.

You clearly don't understand what "intrinsic value" means if you believe this. The very fact it can be fabricated into something of value gives it some intrinsic value.

[dang]

Please omit personal swipes from your comments, and please don't post in the flamewar style.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[iexplainbtc]

> The very fact it can be fabricated into something of value gives it some intrinsic value.

That's a plain contradiction. Oil is valuable because there is demand for products manufactured with it. In a world where there's no demand for gasoline, plastic or any other derivative of oil the "intrinsic value" of oil is zero, which proves there is no such thing as intrinsic value that isn't relative to a market.

Just to be clear we're discussing commodities and not company stocks, for which there is a very specific definition of "intrinsic value", according to fundamental analysis at least.

I'm pretty sure you're the one who's confused, but ok.

[maclured]

The question is, will people run to it as a safe haven in the event of a huge stock market crash, or away from it? Nobody knows for sure. It's a game of chicken - not having the heritage of gold, I don't think it'd take much for people to get scared and realise that all they have are a load of strings of characters (scarce or not) and want to dump it. After all, it's crashed before.

Until then, it's potentially a great investment in today's climate (especially if you don't care about the climate).

[iexplainbtc]

> all they have are a load of strings of characters

Most things valuable nowadays are strings of characters. It's not the byte sequence that's valuable, it's what it represents. Bitcoin is, conceptually speaking, an asset that is orders of magnitude better than most existing financial instruments and commodities. The fact that it's implemented using bits instead of atoms is completely irrelevant.

I really don't understand this urge of breaking down anything digital into its fundamental units to try and diminish its value. It's the equivalent of evaluating anything in the physical world as "just a bunch of atoms".

[maclured]

> I really don't understand this urge of breaking down anything digital into its fundamental units to try and diminish its value. It's the equivalent of evaluating anything in the physical world as "just a bunch of atoms".

Because in the good times, people think these things are great investments. But as soon as things go south they look at what they have from a different perspective. Something with some intrinsic value (e.g. a "bunch of atoms" that can be eaten or lived in) is likely to be much easier to rationalise holding on to in that scenario, rather than something that's only worth something due to consensus by a bunch of strangers.

And that's the risk - it doesn't matter if as an individual you see great potential. If everyone else disagrees, gets scared and sells, then BTC could be battered.

[iexplainbtc]

Most subjectively "useless" objects are used as a store of value. Only 7/8% of gold is used in the manufacturing industry, the rest is sitting there with no active purpose other than existing. Same goes for collectibles (you can't eat or live in a baseball card or a valuable artwork).

Also the "live in" is a big misconception. Real estate doesn't increase in value. What does is the land on top of which it sits. A house depreciates over time exactly like a car (prefabs on rented land are a great example of that).

The only question that matters is: is Bitcoin better than commodity X? Where X can be gold, silver, oil or whatever else. And if the answer is yes there's no reason to believe it wouldn't take over X in terms of market capitalization (and, therefore, value).

[maclured]

> The only question that matters is: is Bitcoin better than commodity X

No. The only question that matters is will people collectively continue to agree that it's worth something, lacking any intrinsic value?

If interest rates go up and people need to call in their assets to repay their debts, what do you think will happen? Would people rather lose their houses or their bitcoins?

I think people will dump stocks and risky "assets" like BTC and take flight into cash with some percentage in traditional safe havens with a proven track record (like gold) until things settle down. This is exactly what happened a year ago. There's no reason in my mind to believe anything would change regarding BTC's status now - I think it'll be dumped like it was last year. It may recover faster (I'd certainly buy it for a heavy discount), but I just don't buy the "store of value", "digital gold" argument.

It's an early-stage speculative asset IMO - let's not pretend it's a stable, low-risk store of value.

> A house depreciates over time

Tell that to people unable to buy because house prices have shot up. Property can also generate a good rental income - yield obviously dependent on the price paid. BTC doesn't provide any such perpetuity.

[iexplainbtc]

You fail to understand 3 things:

1. There is no such thing as "intrinsic value" and I explained clearly why in a different reply to your comment.

2. What goes up is the value of land, not houses. If houses themselves were valuable movable homes would also increase in value. They don't. The reason why land goes up in value is that (residential) land is scarce.

3. Gold isn't a safe haven because of its track record (in fact gold is relatively volatile [0] and if you had bought gold in 1980 you'd have lost money today, adjusted to inflation), it's considered a safe haven because it's the only commodity that has a historically predictable stock to flow and can (and normally does) act as a hedge against inflation. Bitcoin does that and more.

> It's an early-stage speculative asset IMO

So was gold in its early stages as a store of value. So is any valuable company's stock in the first few months after IPO. Speculation is uncorrelated with the lack of fundamental valuable features.

At this point I'm not sure your intent is to try to understand more about Bitcoin (or economy, for that matter) but rather to force a narrative that isn't at all obvious, unlike what you're trying to imply. And I'm not saying you're wrong, rather that you're unable to corroborate your statements with data and facts.

"And for that reason, I'm out".

[0] https://www.macrotrends.net/1333/historical-gold-prices-100-...

[Priem19]

>Even if Bitcoin is replaced by something 50, 100 years

How about 5 years?

[iexplainbtc]

Extremely unlikely. Bitcoin has been around 12 years and it's just now starting to go mainstream. Most people still have no idea what it even is. You can count the number of publicly traded companies that have Bitcoin in their treasury on 2 hands and that's only destined to increase.

I can't give you an actual estimate of how long it will take for Bitcoin to lose its market share but I can confidently say it will take decades. At very least until it replaces a good chunk of gold's market cap.

[Priem19]

Seems like an Is/Ought Fallacy. Also, governments won't willingly surrender their control of the money supply. I think that with one stroke of a pen they could let the price /10 as fast as it went x10.

Moreover, since technology is accelerating ever faster, five years from now is a lot longer than five years starting from 1980.