The section about the fallacy of limited cryptocurrency supply is one of the key insights missing from many Bitcoin discussions:
> For those reasons the “limited supply” argument isn’t as true as it might appear—e.g., if Blackberries were in limited supply they still wouldn’t be worth much because they were replaced by competitors that were more advanced.
I agree that Bitcoin is interesting as an alternative asset, but the narratives have outstripped the facts as it becomes just another speculative trading instrument on the non-blockchain exchanges.
I agree but to play Devil's advocate I think the answer is "the network effect". Facebook could be replaced at any time, yet it continues to dominate social media. At some point, BTC could become, if it has not already, big enough to become self-sustaining.
Regarding free services, one could have said the same thing about Orkut or Myspace. Community tends to flock in via one door, and flock out via another door, as long as the product or service is free.
In this case however, completely agree with you. BTC is a paid network (a very expensive one at that). It could remain self-sustaining for quite long.
The analogy doesn't really work because cryptocurrencies aren't interchangeable the way phones are. A better analogy would be if each phone could only talk to people using the same phone brand. If everyone is on iphone and you need an iphone to talk to anyone you care about, the iphone becomes more valuable because of its scarcity. The network effects of bitcoin and the lack of interchangeability between different cryptocurrencies helps secure bitcoin's spot as the leader.
But people almost invariably don't need BTC to transact with people they care about (the number of people with BTC denominated payment obligations is relatively small, and most stuff that can be bought with BTC can be bought with other methods). And as flawed as many exchanges may be, they make cryptocurrencies very interchangeable, especially compared with phones.
Blackberry actually did have a proprietary messaging system, it just wasn't anywhere near enough lockin because most people used Blackberry for other reasons, the non-proprietary messaging layers were actually better and Blackberry's popularity turned out to be nearly all down to being first in class.
This would be true if Bitcoin transaction fees put it in reach of every-day transactions, but they don't and likely never will. Bitcoin is for HODLing, not for transacting.
Bitcoin can be used for transacting if you're not looking for instantly verified transactions.
In ye olden days, when Bitcoin was a few cents worth, transaction costs were tiny. I really doubt Satoshi et al predicted Bitcoin to be so unstable, so as to make transaction costs pretty much out of reach for 99% of normal everyday transactions.
That’s the underappreciated argument. If we to assume that the collective will power is all it takes to create an alternative asset, e.g. the narrative “gold is old, we need a new one” then it follows that it can and will be repeated. I don’t see why people not born yet would play by the rules of the future “Bitcoin wealthy elites” when they could become elites themselves by hyping another asset/cryptocoin instead. Thus even if the narrative of “store of value” and “hedge against inflation” turns out to be correct, I still don’t believe Bitcoin supremacy will last longer than a single human generation.
What's the fallacy you're debunking, and who commits it? I'm not aware of anyone arguing that Bitcoin is highly valuable because all things with a limited supply are highly valuable.
The deflationary nature of Bitcoin is a commonly used property to assert that Bitcoin is designed to increase in value over time due to artificially programmed scarcity.
However, I don't think GP's parallel lines up, as another commenter pointed out.
In any case, a single satoshi, which is the smallest denomination of Bitcoin (10^-8 of a Bitcoin), is worth about 0.05 cents as of writing this comment. If Bitcoin didn't have such large transaction costs, slow transactions, and price stability, it's scarcity would be way less of an issue due to this really large level of division of a single coin.
Bitcoin is an asset in the same way that a piece of paper with my signature on it is an asset. Why some people think cryptocurrencies are revolutionary is beyond my comprehension.
I'm surprised that the energy usage axis does not come up in this summary of his thoughts. Isn't that likely to be a factor in bitcoin's growth and long-term survival?
if there was some successful state-sponsored or populist uprising against bitcoin’s energy then the energy use will decrease and bitcoin will continue functioning as normal
it just incentivizes more efficient hardware or lower yield for miners
the network can decrease in difficulty or have steady difficulty forever
the value that the network can support is still several orders of magnitude higher, and there are at a lot of gigawatts of energy to tap into before it reaches said maximum
If there's an uprising about Bitcoin's energy usage in the USA (just for example), neither the US gov nor people will be able to force miners in, say, China to use less energy.
But that might provide a good excuse for the government to regulate Bitcoin in whatever way they choose.
I can see Bitcoin hardfork to POS once the tech has been proven in Ethereum. Bitcoiners only care about the 21 millions hard cap and a secure network, not the exact consensus algorithm used.
You can just get it in majority of exchanges. In case your exchange doesn't support it (like me, Coinbase and Gemini, NYC, don't support Cardano), just use swapping service like changenow.io, so buy ETH from Coinbase and use changenow.io to swap it to ADA
I've been using changenow.io and it always works. As always, don't send in really large transaction, but one by one, maybe like 3000 ADA each time (this is what I do).
No, the energy usage is proportional to its economic value. If energy prices go up or down while nothing else changes, bitcoin's energy usage will go inversely. If bitcoin's value goes up or down while nothing else changes, energy usage will go the same.
bitcoin can almost double (2x) in value every 4 years without an increase of energy usage by miners (if you put a wide enough filter)
- I guess most understand that the reason is the supply halving finding place every 210.000 blocks (roughly 4 years), and nothing to do with technology/moore's law or anything else
- this will probably be true (more or less... lets say 1.8x -2x) for another 2 halvings
- then the rate [1] will decrease from about 2x to 1x while fees rapidly start to be the predominant source of revenue to miners, and less and less the newly minted coins)
[1]: rate of possible increase in value for the same amount of energy consumed
PoW uses energy consumption for security. PoS uses staking for security. Every analysis I've seen agrees that PoW is more secure than PoS, precisely because of the energy requirements. Those who favor PoS argue that it's still secure "enough"; those who favor PoW disagree and prefer the increased security it brings.
Here something to read for those really interested in knowing both sides of the argument (PoW side in this case, as the potential benefits of PoS are clear to everyone):
I stopped reading after that sentence, as I figured any such characterization immediately showed bias - your comment pretty much confirms my suspicions.
It shouldn't; they're very open to being shown to be wrong. That's a key feature in their company culture. They're just not shy about how they phrase their current beliefs.
Then they should really think about how they phrase their intentions.
To me, this read like someone at a congressional hearing asking "Why are you against protecting children from predators?" to a witness opposing something on totally different grounds (ie. being needlessly confrontational from the get-go).
It's more like PG saying at AirBnB's interview: "People actually let strangers stay in their homes? What's wrong with them?"
It's a zinger and a challenge to the person making the claims. Some people will be turned off by that and refuse to engage. In the particular domain that YCombinator and Bridgewater are working in - finding undervalued opportunities that everybody else is overlooking - this is a feature, not a bug. Anyone who's turned off by a simple offhand zinger or personal attack is not going to have the strength of their convictions when everybody is attacking them, which is usually what happens when you sincerely hold very unorthodox beliefs.
Bridgewater doesn't need to convince their audience of their credibility. They're consistently one of the most profitable investment firms in the world. If they were just finding an audience, it might be necessary for them to temper their phrasing, but from their position it may be valuable to be intentionally provocative.
They do this for the selection bias effect: they want to weed out anyone whose emotional reaction to the content will prevent them from engaging with the data and the reasoning in it. The company culture is based around radical transparency (within the firm, at least): say anything you want, criticize anyone, don't get mad about the criticism but instead engage with the information content contained in it. It's basically selecting for autists. (Sure enough, I have a college classmate who I'm pretty sure is on the spectrum, and he's thrived at Bridgewater.)
This actually isn't a bad selection filter for an investment firm, since the #1 reason traders fail is investing on emotion.
> * They do this for the selection bias effect: they want to weed out anyone whose emotional reaction to the content will prevent them from engaging with the data and the reasoning in it.*
To me that sounds like the perfect way to create an echo chamber.
I guess we're also cowering in fear from Monat and LulaRoe and anything else where earnings are predicated on more and/or bigger fools entering after you.
This. I mean, it's not even an ad for Bitcoin per se (it includes lines like "Bitcoin looks like a long-duration option on a highly unknown future that I could put an amount of money in that I wouldn’t mind losing about 80% of"!).
It's "look, you don't understand Bitcoin but you've heard it's doing well. We understand it very well including potential upsides and downsides, but won't make any specific predictions. Trust our quality insights into markets we're actually focused on"
Edit. Nocoiner was removed from the previous comment as it was not intended to be taken this way. My Previous Response( Nocoiner sounds a lot like Antifa or MAGA. Is the goal to lump everyone who doesn't agree with you into a group to ridicule?)
It's possible, but I don't think so. This isn't Bridgewater's style; they're too uncharismatic to meaningfully influence investor sentiment the way Donald Trump or Elon Musk can.
I think this is a starting point to try and solicit countervailing facts. Dalio's putting his reasoning out there because he wants to be proven wrong. Reading between the lines, he's probably doing this because his global macroeconomic thesis is that inflation is coming, his normal response to this would be to buy gold, and he's heard that this Bitcoin thing is the new "digital gold" that could replace physical gold ownership. If this new thesis is right, his impulse to buy gold is wrong, and the money that would've gone into it will go into Bitcoin instead. If it's all just hype, though, he should buy gold. So he puts out a public piece explaining the pros and cons of Bitcoin and then waits for the controversy, while his assistants read the online commentary and take notes of anything that might be relevant to evaluating the investment thesis.
Not quite. This isn't a poll: they'll probably tally up the overall sentiment but that's just one data point among many.
I think they're looking for arguments. They want to get the folks who've been in Bitcoin for the last 5-6 years to come out and say "Here's where you're wrong. Bitcoin can do X, Y, and Z and here are the projects that demonstrate that. People are using it for A, B, and C in countries Alpha, Beta, and Gamma and that shows exactly why Bitcoin is going to take over the world." Then Bridgewater's going to research projects X, Y, and Z and countries Alpha, Beta, and Gamma, and determine if those arguments are actually relevant.
It's intelli-trolling, basically. They're crowdsourcing their research by writing a provocative piece, targeting it at people who might know better than them, widely disseminating it on the Internet, and then seeing who responds.
> For those reasons the “limited supply” argument isn’t as true as it might appear—e.g., if Blackberries were in limited supply they still wouldn’t be worth much because they were replaced by competitors that were more advanced. I still don’t know the answer to why that isn’t a risk, but I would welcome my naïveté being corrected.
I think he's missing the mark a bit about the limited supply argument, which I think is as strong as ever, even with so many competing cryptocurrencies. For one, Bitcoin isn't set in stone and can change over time, albeit very slowly. Additionally, network technology is generally built in layers, and the bottom layer doesn't have to be where all the innovative features live. Bitcoin can serve as layer 0 of the future financial system, and we can build fast payments (lightening network), smart contracts (RSK), and other financial services on top of it. The most important thing is to have a robust and secure bottom layer that can serve as a financial clearing house, and Bitcoin has performed flawlessly in that role for 10+ years now.
I also wrote the following recently about some of what makes Bitcoin unique, and gives it value even in an ever growing sea of cryptocurrencies.
Bitcoin has some unique properties that are hard (or even impossible) to recreate in a new cryptocurrency, which form a large part of its primary value proposition. This is why you can't simply fork Bitcoin or create a new crypto from scratch and beat it.
1) Immaculate Conception. The fact that no one ever knew who Satoshi was and that he disappeared (died??) is hugely important. Crypto is all about removing as much trust from the system as possible, and having a leader (or worse, a company) behind a crypto provides a point of potential failure/corruption. I'm also a big fan of Ethereum, but having a figurehead like Vitalik incurs a large risk that he has disproportionate power to drive things in directions that aren't to the benefit of the entire network. It's almost like Bitcoin was a gift from the gods.
2) Extremely hard to change. I hear it all the time, Bitcoin is too slow, has too few features, is too hard to change, etc. Resistance to change is a very good thing for a monetary system. This is a distributed system that's now trusted with over 1 Trillion USD. Do you really want such a system to be easy to add new features to? If I'm Papa Musk and I'm dumping 1.5 Billion into Bitcoin I want security and reliability to be top priorities, not features. Bitcoin has had consistent development over the years by top notch engineers, but the rate of change has always been extremely conservative in an effort to preserve what makes Bitcoin unique and valuable for the long term.
3) Large market cap. Large market cap IS a feature. Imagine you're Tesla and you want to store 1.5B in BTC, you can't do this if the market cap is too small, because there either wouldn't be enough value in the network, or you'd drive prices up wildly acquiring your stake. A high market cap allows individuals, corporations, and governments (next wave of demand I believe) to store very large amounts of wealth. As such, there's a tremendous advantage to being the frontrunner in the crypto game, because you have the largest market cap, and thus attract more investors, which further drives the market cap up. This is a feedback loop that strongly favors the coin with the highest market cap, the highest security, and the longest record of trust. I'm not saying it's impossible to break this cycle, but it's going to be extremely unlikely at this point.
4) A name that's synonymous with cryptocurrency and money. Bitcoin has an enormous branding advantage, in that when people hear it they instantly think crypto/money. Ethereum, eh not so much. I like its name (ETH) more than a lot of other cryptos (Polkadot, WTF!), but it's not even in the same league as the iconic name Bitcoin. A lot of people are simple minded, they don't want to invest in something with a name they can't trust. You always have to keep in mind that money is more a social/psychological phenomenon than a technological one. Yet people get lost debating the merits of various crypto features, and forget about all the social reasons BTC is number one and has set in place the positive feedback cycles that will most likely keep it as number one. People are highly irrational when it comes to trust, and having a reliable brand name that's proven over time is disproportionately valuable.
5) Most secure network in crypto. Bitcoin is by far the most secure, and a double spend attack would be ridiculously expensive at these prices. This is another positive feedback loop that favors the coin with the largest market cap. Higher market cap leads to more people mining, which increases security via increasing the cost to double spend, which increases demand and further increases market cap.
The rising of Bitcoin can be a threat to working democracies - at least if it is used as a currency. Monetary politics are important for our society to function properly. On the other hand: For broken countries, it can help the people as a temporary replacement.
How do people in those broken countries get Bitcoin? To buy Bitcoin in a first world country I need a valid ID, an online exchange that operates in my country, access to the internet and a bank account. And it can take days if you've never done it before. Is that realistic for someone living in a third world country? What does bitcoin give you that you don't already have if you have access to all the items listed above?
You don't need those things to get Bitcoin. You need those things to stay out of trouble with your government. If your government and financial system is broken it's even easier for you to get Bitcoin because no one is demanding you jump through their tacked-on hoops.
What Bitcoin gives you in this case is that you and I can be in two different broken countries with adversarial governments, but you can I can still transact from around the world without the blessing of our broken governments or their broken banks.
I don't know exactly. There has to be enough liquidity in Bitcoin locally to find enough persons to trade with. Starting a new cryptocurrency in such a situation will be difficult because of deflation. Deflation is extremely dangerous for the economy.
There are places to buy bitcoin without KYC enforcement: Localbitcoins still exists; I'm sure there's some dark web site to coordinate in-person OTC trades.
Yesterday bitcoin's average transaction fee was over $31. Bitcoin Cash and Ethereum both exceed bitcoin's transaction count consistently now, with Ethereum far exceeding bitcoin's crippled transaction capacity.
Yes, this was absent from the analysis. Bitcoins security derives from computer power which is currently paid by combination of fees and inflation (mining). We have yet to see what happens to the prices and security when mining dries out.
It would also be interesting to see a large market event that causes many people to move bitcoin at once. (What happens to transaction costs? Does this affect perception of bitcoin as a safe store of value?)
Bitcoin will have to adapt in a big way before inflation stops. It needs to crank transaction volume way up, or otherwise collect fees (for example smart contracts) in order to keep mining profitable.
Scaling only the price of transactions is NOT going to work, but it has quite a bit of runway to figure this out.
I imagine everyone holding bitcoin will wise up and agree to a fork in 2040 to stop the halvings. The people who use bitcoin as a store of value should be willing to pay a bit of inflation to maintain the network. As a bitcoin holder, I really don't want to rely on people transacting on the network to fund its security and existence.
No it goes up and down based on how "busy" the mempool is, its basically a measurement of the overall desire to get a transaction on the blockchain. When bitcoin goes through big price swings this tends to increase number of TX which therefore increases the fee.
Another company shilling a coin, hoping to convince many more greater fools. Only goal of this article is to convince you to buy, and to transfer a part of your wealth to them.
Yes it is. Part of the art of becoming a good contributor is learning to select what one can respond meaningfully to, and to leave what merely provokes a pre-existing reaction. We're all working on learning that.
I love how people will always find a reason to remain cognitively dissonant. At first it was just people doing illicit activity, then it was only a tulip bubble, then it's just that retail investors are playing the greater fool. Not that there's financial professionals advocating for it you say that they just want your business. At what point do you consider you may be wrong? What will you say when banks start holding Bitcoin reserves? What will you say when countries are holding Bitcoin reserves? Serious question, because with the way people on HN are acting, it seems like your heads will remain in the sand for eternity.
Usually, when someone makes a wrong prediction, it doesn't have huge consequences. But if you knew about Bitcoin early on and didn't research or understand it and wrote it off, your opportunity costs are pretty significant.
It doesn't matter how many use cases or rationales people give, they are still going to be stuck on the negatives. You'd expect HN to understand that everything has tradeoffs, both pros and cons. Is Bitcoin perfect? No! It needs to improve costs and speed through L2, it needs to find ways to reduce energy consumption and use green energy as much as possible, we need to make sure that the money flowing in things like Tether is legitimate. There's still lots of work to be done and it's still just 12 years into it's existence, so you expect price volatility and lots of hype as people are learning and investing into it.
This isn't a case of who's right or wrong. The success of Bitcoin is entirely based on belief, which doesn't have a right or wrong answer, particularly this early in its history.
Bitcoin is successful if enough people agree to believe that it is valuable. And that's the period we're still in now: trying to determine if this thing is valuable and by how much (hence the price volatility).
I mean, that's a poor man's excuse because you can say that about anything. USD is only worth something because enough people believe it is, same with gold, same about anything worth value.
Yes, surely these already billionaires whose entire business revolves around publishing analysis on assets, and who don't claim to be holding any major stake in BTC, could only be writing about it because they are shilling...
The only incentive to write articles like this is to convince others to buy, consequently making more money yourself. This is a pitch, not a fairly supported argument.
>The only incentive to write articles like this is to convince others to buy, consequently making more money yourself.
Given that you're not the author and so not privy to their motives, I don't see your support for your assertion that personal profit is the only possible incentive to have written the article.
I mean, they are an investment firm, whose goal is to make money. Personal profit is literally their only motive.
Another thing to note here is that these firms can shill any coin they like without any market manipulation accusations from the SEC, were they to do this for any other asset.
The incentive is to appear informed about an important trend in their industry. It's a pretty good analysis. Do you have a problem with a specific piece of his content?
The issue they have is that they weren't against bitcoin. Clearly their preconceived notions are preventing them from discussing and looking at it objectively.
Waiting for PragmaticPulp to join the conversation.....
1. Some hedge fund will find a way to short Bitcoins.
2. Someone will inject a lot of illegal sh*t into the Blockchain. People already post images, e.g. https://cryptograffiti.info/
3. Authorities have to intervene, the price goes down, the hedge fund gets rich.
4. Lots of whining from people who didn't understand how Bitcoin works. Shoulder shrugs from those "in the know" who converted to regular money shortly before the fall.
I wouldn't short BC anymore than I'd short GME, there's a lot of get-rich-quick metooism and as the saying goes, the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.