[croon]

It's not a failure because Bitcoin tanked (relatively), it's a failure because Bitcoin tanking was and will always be a significant risk. People who got rich from Bitcoin weren't savvy, they won the lottery. It's not a sound investment decision based on outcome. Investments are sound based on probability and risk beforehand.

El Salvador gambled which is stupid. Whether they won or lost at the lottery is inconsequential to its stupidity.

[afterburner]

It's worse than a lottery for some. It rewarded incorrect thinking on how the financial industry works.

Speculative spikes can happen for a lot of reasons, but that Bitcoin would replace all currencies (as early advocates would have had you believe) was not one of those reasons.

[theplumber]

>> but that Bitcoin would replace all currencies (as early advocates would have had you believe) was not one of those reasons.

Bitcoin was not bought because people believed it will replace all currencies. They bought bitcoin to get rich fast and cash out BEFORE the expected crash.

[jl6]

A lot of the early enthusiasm absolutely was from cypherpunk futurists who genuinely did want/expect it to make traditional finance obsolete.

[JeremyNT]

This is pretty amusing to me, as somebody who did buy into the early hype - now over a decade ago. I actually got really excited about bitcoin, even mining way back when. It seemed like the possibilities were endless!

That excitement disappeared pretty quickly once I came to the (in hindsight, obvious) realization that its only valid use cases were illicit transactions and speculation. I donated whatever I had and moved well away from it (certainly a poor financial decision in retrospect, but I still believe it was the right choice personally).

The shine has been off BTC for a long time. Even though some (if not most) of the early adopters were as you describe, I suspect that almost all of the more recent comers have only joined the party for the get rich quick scheme.

[mrb]

«its only valid use cases were illicit transactions and speculation»

Crytocurrencies have many valid use cases. For one, they are the only system that allows sending money truly anywhere in the world, to anyone, anytime, and near-instantly. No other system accomplishes this. My most poignant example was being able to send money to a then-homeless unbanked friend, on a sunday, and he even converted it to cash in hands within 1 hour as he was near a bitcoin ATM. In such an emergency, no other system would have worked. We briefly considered Western Union but he was banned from them due to previous financial issues. So the permissionless aspect of Bitcoin was another benefit.

It's a little puzzling that you were an early adopter, and yet did not appreciate the qualities. Perhaps you think crypto isn't useful to you personally, therefore it has no use cases for anyone else.

[throw10920]

> its only valid use cases were illicit transactions

What makes this argument different than the "I don't have anything to hide" anti-privacy argument?

[undreren]

The “only valid use cases” of privacy is not to hide illegal or criminal activity.

Crypto currency is a wasteful, destructive, expensive and innefficient technology that has few benefits except facilitating crimes like tax evasion, money laundering, financing terrorism and purchasing drugs.

[mrb]

As an early Bitcoin adopter, I wouldn't say so. I have never seen anyone among the people I knew in the Bitcoin community in the last 12 years who believed it would "make tradfi obsolete".

For example, I expect Bitcoin to likely remain an alternative system, used only for a minority of transactions. And this view didn't conflict with my desire to buy in when I did.

[sizzle]

Wow 12 years in the game, did you make F U money?

[theplumber]

>> A lot of the early enthusiasm

These people were minning not buying bitcoin.

[afterburner]

Yeah, that was happening too, but I was getting an earful of terrible economic viewpoints in the earlier days.

I guess they could have all been lying to puff up their investments, but then I guess I'm left with thinking those particular people were stupid and liars.

[JauntTrooper]

I remember hearing similar economic arguments in 2006 - 2012 about gold and silver.

I often wonder if those same people moved into Bitcoin.

[spiralx]

When I saw the announcement of the release of the Bitcoin 0.3 client back on Slashdot in 2010, both the whitepaper and the comments (and who was making them) cemented my view as it being more of the "an-cap gold-buggery" that the site was rampant with. Basically the same people making the same arguments that they had over the Liberty Dollar a year previously following the arrest of its founders, and before that any time money came up as a topic i.e. fiat bad, gold good - which carried straight into fiat bad, gold good, Bitcoin best of all...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_dollar_(private_curren...

[MrMan]

those people (where I was) also loudly predicted (and lost real-money bets) on the trading floor that Obama was definitely coming for our guns and that mass shootings were all false flag operations to justify seizure of personal firearms. The Venn diagram of gun nuts and gold bug - hard money types at many places I frequent was basically a circle.

[adastra22]

Yes, they did.

[jollybean]

It should not have been any kind of 'investment' in the first place.

[edwnj]

The bet being made by El Salvador is to get the immense benefits of being an early adopter at the cost of short term volatility and risk of bitcoin failing.

Regardless of your opinion on this, you have to at least wait till the proposition plays out before passing judgement. You have to see if they can withstand the short term volatility and whether bitcoin succeeds or not.

Calling the experiment failure before the results is silly to say the least.

[el-salvador]

> The bet being made by El Salvador is to get the immense benefits of being an early adopter at the cost of short term volatility and risk of bitcoin failing.

Salvadoran here.

It's hard to see the benefits if there is no transparency on the process.

If we could even have a dashboard and an official website were we could have access to audited reports about the results of this bet, and see how its value varies over time. Then I might agree.

Maybe just a graph like the one found Norway's Sovereign Fund website

https://www.nbim.no/

In reality we just don't. Public information is limited or contradictory. The few public information available includes a tweet about the president buying bitcoin from his phone while not wearing clothes.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/01/26/el-salvador-...

As far as I know, the trust that holds El Salvador bitcoin doesn't have a public website. And the state wallet's website doesn't publish an address or phone number.

The only time I've seen their address is a receipt from a veterinary hospital run by the same state company operating the wallet, in which every procedure costs only US $0.25 because they are subsidized by "bitcoin profits"

El Salvador is a strange country sometimes.

[edwnj]

I 100% agree with you.

El Salvadors adoption could have definitely been handled in a more transparent and self sovereign manner. I really wasn't big fan of forcing companies to accept it..

But then again, you never get everything you want. I guess the best we could do is praise them for the good and provide feedback when they miss the mark..

[croon]

No, I specifically called it a failure regardless of results, because results of surviving a base jump without a parachute doesn't affect the merit of the decision to jump.

See: Survivorship bias.

[edwnj]

Here’s a proposition: - Gold got dethroned from its 5k year rule as the global store of value because of globalisation & speed of commerce. FDR ban & dollar being taken off the gold standard sealed its fate. - Gold is replaced by the fiat currency of the global economic & military hegemon. - Central banking & MMT is deeply corrupt & dysfunctional to the core. - Digital alternatives were attempted but failed because of the double spend problem which in turn required private centralisation - Satoshi invented bitcoin which solves double spend problem. Through the invention of Proof of Work and the use of supply limit, Satoshi puts bitcoin up as a contender for global store of value. - A decade later, Bitcoin is in the zeitgeist. 100s billion in market cap. Best investors in the world are hedging for/against bitcoin (Paul Tudor Jones). Countries are banning/integrating bitcoin. - Basically the bet is on.

Now we have a game theoretic situation where the early adopters take the most risk but are going to reap the most benefits.

To call this a "base jump without parachute" is asinine and completely unwarranted. There is a clear bet going on with the smartest people in the world on both sides.

Some believe the “rulers” of the current system will never allow this to happen therefore we will get CBDC’s instead. Others believe, the collapse of the current debt passed system is inevitable therefore bitcoin is a lifeboat.

Either way, china isn’t using the same technology invented by satoshi (without the PoS & decentralisation) for no reason. The US isn’t thinking about thinking about creating a FedCoin for no reason. India isn’t building one for no reason.

The race is on. Its a bet. There is risks on both side but its definitely not a one sided thing to say the least.

[edwnj]

Also those are not just the 2 bets btw. El Salvador still supports the dollar.

There are those who envision a world full of privacy coins, CBDC's, bitcoin, company coins etc..

In this world, bitcoin will be the ruler of rulers. As in, Bitcoin will reward disciplined countries and punish undisciplined countries. Just like gold did in the past.

[ploppyploppy]

Price is one thing.

Its utility as a decentralised banking system for those who have no access to banking in poorer regions of the world is a clear benefit and has achieved what it wanted for the country.

[MomoXenosaga]

The people who get rich from crypto are the ones running the exchanges. When this fad has run its course they'll move on.

[hackerlight]

> It's not a failure because Bitcoin tanked (relatively), it's a failure because Bitcoin tanking was and will always be a significant risk.

A lot of the risk can be hedged by custodians, so I don't agree.

The reason it should fail for transactions is because Bitcoin sucks for transactions. Few people will prefer slow, irreversible and expensive transactions.

[plebianRube]

Lightning is popular because few prefer slow transactions.

El Salvador primarily uses lightning network, same network Strike uses for instant cross border payments.

[hackerlight]

Of course, I stand corrected about that.

So, aside from irreversibility of transactions, what is preventing adoption?

[spiralx]

It doesn't even use that, the Chivo wallet only uses LN for external transactions, everything else is a plain old centralised app.

[plebianRube]

I don't have time to thoroughly research the topic and come back to you, so maybe you can do some leg work.

But I do know people over estimate what can be accomplished in a year and underestimate what can be accomplished in 10.

[MrMan]

also correlation doesn't equal causation, the Overton window, etc

[adastra22]

Setting up lightning channels are still slow, expensive, and worse require hot, online wallets.

[VMG]

Those that need unstoppable transactions are willing to pay the 10'000 satoshi fee on a transaction with arbitrary amount.

[mrguyorama]

Which users actually need and want irreversible transactions. What's the utility of a system that doesn't let you combat fraud?

[yellowapple]

A system with a middleman capable of reversing transactions enables fraud. See also: the folks behind Flipper Zero being permanently robbed of more than a million USD thanks to PayPal's whims (as the latest of a long list of high-profile cases of PayPal taking vendors' money and running).

[VMG]

people targeted by law enforcement or secret police need unstoppable transactions

[koonsolo]

I agree with you on the El Salvador part, but not on the investment part.

> Investments are sound based on probability and risk beforehand.

Investing in bitcoin had a limited downside (lose 100%), but a very high upside (reaches it's initial goals). For me, the potential gains outweighed the low probability.

I consider myself very lucky that I made some money (wasn't crazy to put all my money in there). But for me, when it would have gone to 0, I still feel it was worth the risk.

But of course, with such a high risk high reward investment, only invest a small % of your total money.

[gopuck16]

What you've stated here is your experience, now if you try to extrapolate the thinking/investment model you've used to large number of people - there is very limited upside and very high downside.

[koonsolo]

No it stays the same if you have an investment portfolio and only invest max 5% in high risk assets.

Assume you invest 1% of your portfolio in Bitcoin. What is your downside? 1%. Not that high, is it?

What is your upside? Maybe x100, so double your entire portfolio.

Right now, you came late to the game, so don't expect a x100. The risk is probably still the same, but the upside way lower. But when Bitcoin was still young, the upside was definitely worth the risk. And it didn't even live up to its original intent. Imagine the price if it did!

[SketchySeaBeast]

If we think like this why wouldn't I invest 1% of my portfolio in lottery tickets? At worst lose 1%, at best x1,000,000 upside?

[prottog]

You could consider lottery tickets as an OTM option expiring in a week with those payoffs, I suppose. If you spread 1% of your portfolio over a year and buy lottery tickets every week, you're effectively losing 1% per year with a very small chance of becoming very rich.

There are probably better places to put your 1% on. ;-)

[SketchySeaBeast]

> There are probably better places to put your 1% on. ;-)

I totally agree, but the argument being made is that "the potential upsides outweigh the low probability". That's not investing, that's gambling.

[koonsolo]

The reward/risk ratio of lottery tickets is very well known. And it's obviously not in your favor. So it's basically a no brainer not to invest in them.

Things like startups for example also have a very high risk rate, but also potential high payouts. There it actually makes sense since the ratio is way better.

[SketchySeaBeast]

> And it's obviously not in your favor.

Yeah, but that payout ratio - millions to one! Bitcoin will never pay out at that level - I don't know if it ever did.

I find it interesting you're arguing that an unknown ratio is preferable to a known one. Bitcoin has a known current cost, but entirely unknown chances and payouts over an unknown duration. There's little reason to assume that Bitcoin will make another massive jump other than optimism that there will be a new wave of true believer bag holders. I know the lottery is going to be drawn each week and I know the cost and the odds, as well as the minimum payout, and the current payout is updated as we get closer to the drawing.

[darth_aardvark]

So don't invest it in that lottery. Invest it in my lottery! I'll sell you as many tickets as you want, I pay out a trillion to one if you win, and I'll keep the risk rate totally unknown to you.

[the_gastropod]

Boy do I have the investment for you! Give me your life savings, and I'll give you 50% equity in my Evil Empire. I plan on taking over the planet by 2028. What an upside! Only risk is losing 100%—that's practically nothing in comparison!

Or I guess you could buy lottery tickets. Probably a slightly less insane way to "invest" your money.

[koonsolo]

Both seems like a bad idea. Bitcoin on the other hand, made me a shitton of money :D

Have a nice day.

[donatj]

Have you seen the dollar’s buying power recently?

I went from living very comfortably to living paycheck-to-paycheck in about 6 months. Holding my value in USD has become a significant risk.

[dragontamer]

> Have you seen the dollar’s buying power recently?

Yeah, its up like 100% over Bitcoin and like +30% over Euro, Yen, and GBP? In fact, holding Cash/USD has been basically one of the best performing things in my entire portfolio this year (after oil/energy)

Have _you_ seen BTC's buying power recently?

[donatj]

USD is not up. Everything is down. Have you been to a store recently?

[dragontamer]

USD is hugely up vs Yen and Euro. You buy anything from overseas recently? USD is hugely strong. USD is up vs the stock market, vs the bond market, vs the overseas bond market, vs overseas stocks.

USD is also up vs Bitcoin.

EDIT: Feel free to look at gold, silver, and other 'inflation hedges' while you're at it. The main thing going up is commodities (oil and food), which is certainly important. But there's more to the world than those two things.

[nightski]

Inflation is basically the exact definition of the change in USD's value relative to goods & services.

Unless you are arguing we currently don't have any inflation, which would be a tough sell :)

Also this last CPI report oil & gas pulled inflation down whereas just about everything else pulled it up. Food is hot, but a lot of other things are as well including non-commodity service based industries.

[dragontamer]

> In fact, holding Cash/USD has been basically one of the best performing things in my entire portfolio this year (after oil/energy)

This is what I'm arguing. Do you deny it?

------

In a bear market, you don't have to outrun the bear to get ahead. You only have to outrun your friends.

[Auracle]

That all depends on the timeframe you’re looking at. The Bitcoin I bought (not nearly enough of) at under $80 is doing a lot better than any cash I still have from around then.

A year or two from now Bitcoin very well might be back above it’s all time high.

[dragontamer]

When people are complaining about the declining purchasing power of USD, they are mostly talking about since November 2021, because that's when inflation started to really kick in.

Its ironically, also when BTC really began to collapse from its $60,000 high. So it really demonstrates how much the BTC was benefiting from low-interest rate / inflationary policies.

[SketchySeaBeast]

> So it really demonstrates how much the BTC was benefiting from low-interest rate / inflationary policies.

It's almost like it's not a hedge at all and just another part of the exact same game as the rest of the market.

[hajile]

Inflation numbers for December of 2021 were 6.8% CPI and 9.6% for wholesale (way higher when you look at goods only rather than services).

CPI was nasty for most of June 2020 to June 2021. It's just that fewer publications were picking up the story yet.

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/cpi_07132021.pdf

[pessimizer]

If 8% inflation has put you paycheck to paycheck, living "very comfortably" was already living far beyond your means.

[donatj]

The 8% figure doesn’t match real life. My electric bill doubled, my natural gas bill doubled, my municipal bill doubled, my groceries doubled.Everything that makes up the vast majority of my expenditures had doubled.

[pessimizer]

You could be the guy where it's only raining above his house, but the people you are having this conversation with also live in the world and disagree with your figures as much as the statistics do.

[ceejayoz]

Now imagine you had half as much USD for your groceries, because you decided to put it in BTC a year ago instead.

[donatj]

Quite literally what happened. My groceries cost over twice as much.

[Zanfa]

Ignoring the fact that you’re implying a 100% USD inflation over the past year, you’d only have 25% of the purchasing power if you “invested” in BTC per the GPs example.

[sp332]

"Inflation" is an average of several things. Actual inflation doesn't have to be even across all items. Groceries went up more than other things.

Edit: some examples https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-price-outlook/su... Retail egg prices went up 38% from July 2021 to July 2022.

[the_gastropod]

Yes. And eggs are the highest increase on that list, at 38%—still a far cry from 100%. Comparatively, fresh fruits are down 0.8%, and fresh veggies up only 0.8%.

[UncleMeat]

I cannot think of a single individual item that I buy at the grocery store that has doubled, let alone more than doubled.

[yamtaddle]

IIRC the giant flats of Costco eggs went up to 3-4x their former price over the last year or so. Still a great deal, they're just not "holy shit that's practically free!" like before.

[UncleMeat]

Weird. Eggs by the dozen (along with onions, one of the most volatile staples at the grocery store) are up only like 75% for me. Admittedly that's a lot and more than I had expected when I went and checked but I'm still seeing very different numbers.

[njarboe]

Do you happen to live in California? If so, most of the egg price increase is likely due to compliance with Prop 12 regulations.

[donatj]

Cereal and butter. A box of cereal is $7+ now, whereas it was $4 not long ago. A pack of butter was $2.50 and now close to $5.

[mrguyorama]

Meanwhile pork and chicken are roughly the same as they've always been where I am, at least ignoring sale pricing.

Hell, I got 3.5 pounds of steak tips for $20 about a month ago.

My food costs have absolutely gone up, but it's MUCH closer to the "10 percent" figures quoted as inflation than anything close to what you have said. Where do you live and shop?

[Bud]

Butter actually wasn't $2.50 at any point in the recent past. This is easy to track.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000FS1101

So of the two items you cherry-picked to support an assertion that groceries have more than doubled, one is up...around 30-35%. In fact, there doesn't appear to be a single food item in this list that has doubled in the past year. Eggs are the closest.

https://www.bls.gov/regions/mid-atlantic/data/averageretailf...

[benj111]

It isn't literally what happened because that would be equivalent to your groceries costing 4 times as much.

[pjc50]

People are unable to distinguish "prices have gone up from money printing" from "prices have gone up due to the pandemic and the war between Russia and Ukraine". Neither bitcoin nor gold can hedge against the latter.

[pookha]

Prices have gone up because we have demand side inflation:

https://www.mercatus.org/publications/inflation/inflation-la...

Which is mostly driven by putting trillions of dollars into the economy. The Fed had 1 trillion on it's books during the 07 recession. It has 8 trillion on it's books now. That's a major problem.

[psychlops]

I guess you'll have to put me in the camp of unable to distinguish. There is always an "emergency" reason to print money.

[jallen_dot_dev]

> Have you seen the dollar’s buying power recently?

Yeah, it's been going up relative to almost all other currencies and especially BTC.

[mtrycz2]

It is a failure because BTC has pivoted away from the Bitcoin whitepaper (p2p ecash), limited its blocksize and has taken the path of this strange "digital store of value" (lol). BTC's activity rose gradually up to 2017, and then topped off at 1MB and even dropped. [1]

If Bitcoin's momentum hadn't been dissolved, it wouldn't require people to be forced by State to accept it.

[1] https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/size-btc-ema14.html#all...

[frankenst1]

Growth continued on second layers: Bitcoin's tx count on the Lightning Network has doubled over the last year. Forks of Bitcoin who attempted to scale by increasing the blocksize all failed and are practically dead (Bitcoin SV, Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin Cash, eCash, Bitcoin ABC, ...).

[CyberDildonics]

That's not growth, bitcoin's throughput is still less than a 56k modem from 25 years ago.

Being able to send and receive from anyone is growth, lightning isn't on the bitcoin chain until it gets synchronized.

If I give you a bitcoin address, you can't send anything to me with the lightning network.

It's unnecessary nonsense because bitcoin is pointlessly crippled. Every other cryptocurrency has plenty of throughput and can be used decentralized.

[frankenst1]

> lightning isn't on the bitcoin chain until it gets synchronized.

That is literally the purpose of building second layers. We don't need to keep on-chain records of every microtransaction and coffee purchase in an immutable, ever-growing blockchain synchronized across thousands of nodes across the globe.

> If I give you a bitcoin address, you can't send anything to me with the lightning network.

Sure I can. It is called a submarine swap.

[CyberDildonics]

> Sure I can. It is called a submarine swap.

You can call it whatever you want, someone still has to sync with the main chain, where all the utility is. You can get together with your friend and give each other IOUs all day every day, it doesn't somehow change the fact that bitcoin's throughput is severely crippled to be the speed of a dialup modem.

Have you ever stopped to think that other cryptocurrencies don't have second layers because people don't want them and their chains don't need them? Why go through all this when there is no reason to have a crippled chain in the first place?

Using regular cryptocurrencies is incredibly simple and elegant. It's only when people started to believe propaganda about disk space and cpu time (that never made sense with the most basic examination) that somehow something that worked amazingly well is now a complete mess.

[frankenst1]

> Using regular cryptocurrencies is incredibly simple and elegant. It's only when people started to believe propaganda about disk space and cpu time (that never made sense with the most basic examination) that somehow something that worked amazingly well is now a complete mess.

Bitcoin SV did not care about these things and is dead because of it. Its blocks are ~200MB spammed with mostly non-payment related data. Its blockchain has grown to over 6 TB, the global number of nodes verifying the chain is down to 20 and it has been delisted by many exchanges and block explorers.

Bitcoin and Lightning in comparison have ~25,000 nodes.

[kranke155]

Someone needs to explain to me how the Lightning Network actually works, because I find it super sus. How do people make money off transactions as miners if BTC transactions are so cheap ?

[Yizahi]

People must lock BTC in the "channels" from them to each of the peers they ever want to transact with, in the amount of what they will spend with them in the future. This should produce approximately 10billion*10billion channels in total (so 1^20 whateverellion channels for all humans). Then magic internet machine will solve this Traveler Salesman problem for each transaction.

After people realised that this is a crap idea, they have reinvented banks, who take people's BTC and give them IOUs instead. Then only banks have to deal with the "channels" and "locked" tokens in a centralised way, lessening the overall complexity.

Few understand :)

[thinkloop]

People have realized this a long time ago. The expected configuration is a node-based network like the internet. Messages (money) hop from "router" to "router" until they reach their final destinations through the shortest paths. The "bank" would still be your bitcoin wallet, while your lightning allocation would be like a credit account with every vendor simultaneously. The nodes are routers. The amount you put "at-risk" in lighting only needs to be a minimum amount you need to transact for the day/week/month - and it is not really "at-risk" since there are strong protections built-in.

The general story is that not all transactions are equal. A payment from your cousin for a poker debt doesn't need the fury of a million computers protecting it. Similarly if you have an ongoing relationship with a vendor, and many other examples. In real-life there are vastly differing trust-profiles between transactions. It's ok to trade some security for some efficiency sometimes. It doesn't make sense to treat them all the same.

[Yizahi]

So user gets a credit at the Not-A-Bank router-node for the full amount of what he intends to spend. Tell me, how exactly does this differ from a bank? Except with less oversight?

[Yizahi]

More info about LN:

https://github.com/davidshares/Lightning-Network

[kranke155]

Seems like what I expected. Core Dev team of Bitcoin has corrupted that project completely. It’s a shame that Hal Finney/Nakamoto went away so early.

[thinkloop]

Are you asking how do lighting STAKERS make money if lightning transactions are so cheap? Right now they don't, people are doing it to bootstrap the network. But in the future, they will be able to make it on volume. Staking is nearly costless. There were 369 billion purchase transactions for goods and services worldwide in 2018 [1]. At a penny per, that's a lot of scratch.

[1] https://www.cardrates.com/advice/number-of-credit-card-trans...

[kranke155]

This rests on the amazing assumption that Bitcoin will replace all currency everywhere somehow.

This is why I can’t get Bitcoiners - their assumptions are always over the top “we will take 100% of gold’s value” “nations will dissolve because of Bitcoin” or something of that order.

Compare that to ETH - people will build decentralised applications and ETH will be the currency in those applications. Stakers get a fee.

Simple.

[mtrycz2]

Since we're on a tech inclined site, you'll be happy to hear that an RPi4 can process 256MB blocks in well less than two minutes. Current 32MB size limit on BCH in 8 seconds. Check for yourself.

Bitcoin Cash (the og big block chain) is alive and kicking, and getting stable updates (both features and performance), and also has optional (affordable) coin shuffle). Lightning Network is a security and usability nightmare, and its total liquidity is in the low thousands of BTC (lol).

[frankenst1]

Since LN's inception, liquidity and transaction count on the LN have roughly doubled with every year.

In comparison, BCH has lost 80% of its transaction volume in the last year alone. Its blocksize is now 100KB on average and it now processes fewer transactions than LN. It also regularly hard-forks, either because of leadership cults (Ver, Wright, Sechet, ...) or because of scheduled hard-forks every 6 months which kick off all users who haven't updated. It's the opposite of stable and the market apparently does not share its determination in sacrificing decentralization for adoption.

[Andrew_nenakhov]

/r/btc is strong in this one. Lost truly he is.

[Kathula]

It isn't lucky to hold through multiple multi-year 80% drawdowns, it's called doing research and having a conviction. I didn't sell at 60k, I'm not selling now, because I have a strong conviction. You call this lucky, but it isn't. If you have a conviction and a span longer than four years you could get "lucky" too.

[amarant]

But if you didn't sell at 60k you're not lucky at all. If you're still sitting there, hodling the ball, you're one of the suckers who paid the lunch for those who did get lucky.

You're the opposite of lucky.

[welshwelsh]

Only if you bought around 60k.

I bought in 2015 when Bitcoin was about $250, so still looking good on a 10 year timescale.

[codyb]

Yes, because people who bought at 20,000 are holding your ball for you... and you're holding the ball for people who bought at 10 dollars...

Or am I missing something?

[jollybean]

Your 'convictions' will not help you predict where a herd of cows will move or stampede. And that's all BTC is. Whatever a crew of people believe it will be worth. Other currencies are integrated into the economy, which gives them a baseline value from which valuation isn't going to go to far away from.

Moreover, the entire philosophy of holding BTC as some store of value destroys the notion of BTC as a viable currency.

[wikfwikf]

You would have been much luckier if your worldview had allowed you to sell at $60k and buy back at $20k.

[welshwelsh]

For most of 2018-2020 it was between $4k and $10k.

If someone's looking to sell high, what's to stop them from selling at $20k, which was an all time high in December 2020? Why not wait for $80k instead of selling at $60k?

It's easy to see these opportunities in hindsight, but you can never be sure where the peak is.

[Kathula]

I had no conviction that 60k would be the top. But I have a conviction that it'll be surpassed eventually.

[Chris2048]

> it'll be surpassed eventually

money has a time-value, the opportunity loss of investing it in other instruments. The longer you wait for a peak, the more that peak has to be for it to be worth it. When the value you would have had you invested elsewhere reaches your expected peak, you can officially say your strategy failed.

[benj111]

And what objective metrics are you using to back up your conviction that bitcoin is worth X?

Many people have conviction in their belief in God. That doesn't make the existence of God any more sound.

[plebianRube]

I may only buy when Fidelity and Blackrock say it is safe for retail, if at all.

Until then, I will let institutions take the risk and I will stick with my index fund.

[xwolfi]

I think even if they say it's safe, it wont make it so: there is fundamentaly no special value in bitcoin compared to the Thai Baht and nobody's rushing to buy those.