[ludamad]

Quoting a 2017 book about how thinly traded bitcoin is? I appreciate the concept but it doesn't always feel like it rounds out the takes. (FTR, I appreciate it's thin enough to make market cap misleading, but up-to-date liquidity figures would be helpful if we're trying to criticize market cap)

[jacinabox]

Most bitcoin have never been sold. Bitcoin is a commodity that is intended to serve as a store of value, and other commodities like gold and silver do their work as a store of value without an appreciable fraction of them ever being sold. So using the term market cap is not a misleading measure in relation to bitcoin; it is simply used by analogy to how it would be used for a company; it's not literally implying that all bitcoin is the equivalent of shareholder value.

[randomhodler84]

Hmm that’s not quite right to say never been sold. https://stats.buybitcoinworldwide.com/unspent-outputs/

Today, there is 1.7M unspent coinbase tx out of a emitted 19M coins. Once moved from a coinbase-tx, 4.3M are older than 5y, with 2.4M at >10y.

Most Bitcoin have been sold many times in their life, but they do typically sleep for a long time, given the switch of time preference. MtGox alone would have cycled a majority of the coins in its short lifetime.

[acdha]

Bitcoin is a failed currency - see the original paper. After around a decade of failing to find demand the big holders started to market it as a commodity but since there’s no inherent value to it unless it’s actively traded it doesn’t really fit the usual meaning of that term.

[randomhodler84]

Oh please do explain why it is failed?

The only thing that has evolved over time, that is peoples time preference. There will always be demand for BTC. The software works as it was designed, and grows stronger every year. Gresham’s law might be the key to understanding this.

[acdha]

The original goal was to be a currency but over a decade later, statistically nobody uses it for normal transactions. If it shut down tomorrow, the few businesses which accept it would remove that option from the others they accept and that'd be it. Nobody other than speculators would care because it's never given them a reason to use it.

I realize you need to say there will be demand for it but your desire to sell your random numbers at a profit doesn't make that true. Demand has to come from somewhere and something which has many competing alternatives which are generally cheaper, faster, and easier to use does not have much lock-in potential.

[jron]

A little more than a decade to bootstrap an idea worth nothing to almost a trillion USD... Did you expect it to be valued at two-trillion USD instead? I can reach out to you when it gets there if you like.

[acdha]

How about you let me know when ordinary people use it for anything other than speculation? When a business would care about it shutting down because their customers can’t trivially switch to an alternative?

That’s the problem with multiplying the number of coins by the last sale price: it assumes a larger pool of buyers than we’ve ever seen. The number of people treating it as anything other than a lotto ticket isn’t anywhere near enough to support a valuation in the range of trillions of USD.

[Hjfrf]

If the price goes higher, it only gets worse as a transactional currency. Those are in direct opposition.

[wbsss4412]

Parent never claimed it failed to make money, only that it failed as a _currency_.

If you think failure is only synonymous with making money then certainly Bitcoin hasn’t failed, but at the same time it has hardly had much affect on the world outside of being a speculative asset for people to get rich off of.

[acdha]

Exactly: when it first launched, places like HN were full of optimism that it’d kill off things like PayPal, force credit card companies to offer better transaction pricing, etc. That sounds great to me but it definitely didn’t happen, and the design in combination with volatility makes that even less likely since it’s more like trading stock shares to buy a toaster.

[davidgerard]

author of said book here. Nothing in the quoted statement has changed in the past five years. You don't appear to be disputing the claim, but casting about for a spurious reason to play "gotcha." Are you in fact disputing the claim?

[jonathan-adly]

Bitcoin liquidity is about the same as the typical FAANG stock - which is pretty good. This a commentary by skeptics for skeptics - It is as factual as a reddit post on r/bitcoin.

If people actually want facts, then that's the wrong place to look.

[wbsss4412]

I certainly wouldn’t want my currency to have the liquidity of a FAANG stock. That is really not a very great benchmark.