And it was $92k just less than 24 hours ago. That’s why it’s bad for currencies because people can’t make meaningful plans more than a few hours out, and it’s terrible for the economy if you incentivize everyone to reduce spending in the hopes that speculators will make you rich later.
Real currencies circulate so the same dollar is spent by many people, benefiting each of them while you’re still holding onto your Bitcoin hoping it’ll reach $110k next. You do not want to live in a country where people are staying out of the local economy.
I dare you to come up with a single example of someone that has a billion dollars in liquid assets. They probably don't exist: "billionaries" are worth billions on paper, thanks to stocks, investments, real estate holdings, etc.
All in all, billionaires are a bad example of holding legal tender, because that just doesn't happen.
Warren Buffett. Berkshire Hathaway has over $300B in cash reserves, Buffett owns 15% of Berkshire and directs investments — he chose to park all that value in cash reserves, roughly $50B of that is his share.
> While Buffett has stated that Berkshire Hathaway will maintain a permanent cash reserve of about $30 billion to fund potential insurance payouts, Bloomstran takes a more conservative approach and adds about $50 billion to that reserve level to account for a full year's worth of potential insurance losses.
There is additional context there explaining why Berkshire holding cash reserves is unique to their needs, and historically has only represented 17.5% of their total assets.
Billionaires and large firms are not sitting on piles of cash Scrooge McDuck style, because holding cash is costly.
No it's that billionaires mostly aren't worth their estimated net worth in actual cash.
If Elon Musk wanted to turn his Tesla holdings into cash, then his estimated net worth of $436 billion dollars would very rapidly not be worth anywhere near that much (i.e. probably by at least an order of magnitude).
Are you claiming TSLA is fundamentally worth less than $43.6B, and the mere fact that Elon owns 23% of TSLA shares is worth four hundred billion dollars?
I know that selling 23% of a company in one go would move the market, but a 90% haircut would be bonkers.
Or are you claiming TSLA is special, and the haircut would be 90% just for Elon and just for TSLA because that particular stock is super overvalued due to his celebrity and reality distortion field? That seems a little more believable, but this was a discussion on net worth of generic billionaires to start.
Why not work to become a billionaire, then donate your wealth? Or begin donating your earnings today? I would guess most people on Hacker News are in the upper decile of wealth globally — there are still billions of people living poverty. Feels like a fairer way to help people than trying to do it with other people’s wealth — the latter feels like hypocrisy.
Nobody in history has ever worked hard enough to earn a billion dollars fairly.
It's crazy to me that you'd defend these people who have corrupted and degraded the entire system - the government, the finance sector, the media - to only favor holding everyone else to ransom. Not producing but holding. Societal wealth stolen without paying tax to benefit society. People didn't choose this.
I'm not starving, sure. And I'd be absolutely fine paying significantly more tax than I am now.
But I'm not about to voluntarily donate while I am still forced to work towards retirement, and there are people controlling literally 10,000 times more assets than I am that pay zero tax.
Do you not see the inevitable outcome of that?
You and your children, and their children, will own nothing because the super-rich will outbid you and everyone else for everything.
> a single example of someone that has a billion dollars in liquid assets
Lots of billionaires manage their portfolios conservatively. Your equating currency with liquid assets is unnecessary and tanks your argument. Almost nobody holds billions of dollars in legal tender other than those who have to, e.g. sanctioned countries and criminals.
The term "Billionaire" refers to a person who has total assets over a billion. In most cases those assets are shares in some company (or companies). It's not like they have a billion in their sock drawer.
By contrast, when at rest in my wallet, bitcoin is "dormant". It's not earning any interest and other not circulating in the economy. The only "growth" is capital growth.
That growth is predicted on demand outstripping supply. Or on "bigger fools". When the fools run out you're left with tulips.
Billionaires do not literally have big rooms full of money, like a common Disney duck-plutocrat. In general, no-one much is holding large amounts of _cash_/cash-equivalent, except to some extent for the likes of insurance companies, who are obliged to do it for risk management reasons.
I sleep better at night knowing my savings aren't part of a massive Ponzi scheme that's going to one day leave lots of working class people holding the bag as the savings they invested in bitcoin are transferred to the wealthy insiders.
If you own a house you are part of a Ponzi scheme in most developed nations.
Japan already has houses worth $0 because Japan has run out of population growth to keep the demand for houses growing.
The same issue will occur in other countries that have low population growth. In New Zealand we have been importing people so house prices have been appreciating. However my impression is that other countries are competing for immigrants (NZ seems to be slowly relaxing our filters).
Also if you ever had a mortgage then you had a leveraged investment (often dangerously leveraged).
Yes and that is absolutely a problem, houses should go down in value as they are used just like your car does. The fact that we've learned nothing from all the previous real estate bubbles and continue to use houses as investment opportunities is pure insanity.
> If you own a house you are part of a Ponzi scheme in most developed nations.
Not unless you explicitly choose to.
If you own a house to have a roof above you, to have a comfortable and safe place for you and your family, if you love and care about that place, then that's what you are getting out of the house.
Its monetary value changes are "just" a side story.
But if you buy a house purely as an investment, then yeah.
Social Security is a Ponzi scheme by design, that's not a bug it's a feature. All participants are aware that they are paying into social security to redistribute that wealth to vulnerable individuals.
People are not paying into bitcoin expecting to redistribute their wealth to the insiders.
What does that mean? USD value decreased that much and bitcoin proved itself as an asset with tangible value (like gold?), or did value of bitcoin itself rise? I’m not a currency guy, so I don’t pretend to know crap, it’s a real question, not rhetorical.
It means that if you bought under $100k, you are no longer the biggest fool. Bitcoin is completely unworkable as an everyday currency and this this is due to multiple factors. Any attempt to address these shortcomings ends up slowly[0] re-inventing the modern financial system and its various systems of trust. People who try to convince you otherwise are simply in search of a bigger fool, since they bring up the USD value of bitcoin.
[0]: but also too quickly, hence all the breaches and 8-figure heists
If you snooze through the day-by-day, season-by-season noise, the volatility of Bitcoin is a fun and relaxing rocket to ride. You just have to ignore all discussion focused on time frames of less than four years.
Real currencies circulate so the same dollar is spent by many people, benefiting each of them while you’re still holding onto your Bitcoin hoping it’ll reach $110k next. You do not want to live in a country where people are staying out of the local economy.