[adeptusluminati]

..."and if no one wants to buy it"

It's a 3 TRILLION dollar market...so far! Looks to me like people want to buy it.

For context, the Beanie Baby craze in the 90's at peak, was $2.6 Billion dollars adjusted for inflation today. Crypto is world wide phenomena, and so far, is 1000x larger. It also has utility for those that don't like bank lineups and banker's hours.

PS. FYI The Atlantic has become an extreme left leaning digital publication (source: https://www.allsides.com/news-source/atlantic). It stopped writing balanced articles years ago. Too bad, because it used to be great.

[strgrd]

Market cap does not equal value... Market cap does not equal value... Market cap does not equal value...

[kjksf]

It is, however, strongly correlated with value. Therefore, if you want to argue that any specific asset is overvalued (or has no value at all), the onus is on you to provide an actual argument and not a lazy slogan.

What kind of usefulness threshold would Bitcoin have to reach for you to assign value to it?

Is 25 million wallet not enough? Given that a wallet is basically a bank account except it cannot be seized by a government, a bank can't stop transfers, a bank employee won't demand to know why you're withdrawing the money and you can access your satoshis anywhere in the world.

Is 420 million Bitcoin owners enough?

Multiple Bitcoin ETFs? Legalized in multiple countries?

Bitcoin ETF becoming the fastest growing ETF ever?

Blackrock recommending 1-2% portfolio allocation to Bitcoin?

El Salvador stacking on bitcoin?

Strategy becoming the best performing stock in recent years with a simple strategy of stacking bitcoin?

Other than that, what did Romans ever did for us?

[snailmailstare]

> Given that a wallet is basically a bank account except it cannot be seized by a government

All wallets could become worthless in a weekend if a government makes the wrong stride in quantum research..

El Salvador is not recommending Bitcoin and found low interest in actual use.

Madoff also had a fund that could return very well. Satoshi just has to show up and cash out to ruin his pyramid or push the pyramid entirely to the US tax payers right now. Seems improbable like the chairman of NASDAQ running a scam..

These bizarre scams have no place in a real economy and we have to get rid of 0% interest to kill this garbage.

[chronid]

> All wallets could become worthless in a weekend if a government makes the wrong stride in quantum research..

No need for the wrong stride in quantum research. A government can make it illegal and seize the exchanges and watch actual value go to a round 0 in seconds.

A nation's government has a vested interest in preserving the value and viability of its own currency, not Bitcoin's.

[kjksf]

If quantum computing breaks Bitcoin hash then it also breaks any other encryption so I can ssh to your server, login to your bank account, change the code in your github repo.

> El Salvador is not recommending Bitcoin and found low interest in actual use.

El Salvador is not a person.

The president of El Salvador is hardcore Bitcoin believer. El Salvador, the country, is stacking as much Bitcoin as they can, despite pressure from IMF that tries (I wonder why?) to stop them.

> Madoff also had a fund that could return very well

Except he didn't. He was lying about returns of his investments and it crashed and burned when the truth came out.

Blockchain is fully transparent. Every Bitcoin transaction ever made is recorded in immutable database and you get to read the full ledger, from the day it was created.

There is no way to lie about Bitcoin transaction. The current price is decided by an auction with millions of participants.

[throw0101a]

> If quantum computing breaks Bitcoin hash then it also breaks any other encryption so I can ssh to your server, login to your bank account, change the code in your github repo.

OpenSSH >9.0 has algorithms in place for the post-quantum world:

     * ssh(1), sshd(8): use the hybrid Streamlined NTRU Prime + x25519 key
       exchange method by default ("[e-mail]").
       The NTRU algorithm is believed to resist attacks enabled by future
       quantum computers and is paired with the X25519 ECDH key exchange
       (the previous default) as a backstop against any weaknesses in
       NTRU Prime that may be discovered in the future. The combination
       ensures that the hybrid exchange offers at least as good security
       as the status quo.

* https://www.openssh.com/txt/release-9.0

RFC draft:

* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-sshm-mlkem-hybri...

* https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/sshm/documents/

See also TLS:

* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-tls-hybrid-desig...

[desumeku]

Quantum research is nothing but a scam designed to extract grant money and pump share values higher until they can actually factor a number larger than 21 using Shor's algorithm. They did that in 2012. Everything since then has been smoke and mirrors. For as much as you want to call Bitcoin a scam, you're relying on an incredibly more obvious one in your hatred of it.

Additionally, El Salvador is only "dropping" bitcoin (officially) because they are being economically pressured by the IMF. So much for sovereignty for the little guy and democracy (he WAS elected, you know?).

[snailmailstare]

I find the scientific community that is either researching or confused by quantum phenomenon to be a lot more legitimate than the financial community who are either researching or confused by blockchain.

[desumeku]

Bitcoin price, 2012: $13.50

Largest number factored with Shor's algorithm, 2012: 21

Bitcoin price, 2025: $90,000

Largest number factored with Shor's algorithm, 2025: 21

[Terr_]

Cypto-currency has vanishingly few good and legitimate use cases, but:

> All wallets could become worthless in a weekend if a government makes the wrong stride in quantum research..

TBF, you could say something similar about all stocks remotely related to transportation the moment someone invents a teleporter.

I agree there's a difference there, but I don't think it has to do with the vulnerability of the asset.

[snailmailstare]

In something like transportation one is betting real returns come in before the asset is worthless. Bitcoin has no return so one is betting the asset goes up because it is scarce and you get out before it is worthless. Real estate at least has rents or personal use.

[desumeku]

The return of Bitcoin that it represents the next step towards a superior form of money and an evolution of how financial systems work in a digitized world. It's "stock price" increases the more true and realized this idea becomes.

[kjksf]

Real estate has taxes, insurance, repairs, tenants that can trash your place, competition from other real estate, illiquidity, high transaction costs, hurricanes, fires, floods, riots, is impossible to move.

Bitcoin has none of those problems.

[adeptusluminati]

"The stock market is not real!" Same logic & vibe.

$3 Trillion dollars and 500+ Million people disagree with you.... so far.

[brokencode]

Nope, not at all. Stocks represent partial ownership of a company. If you buy all the stock for a company, you own the company. Companies are valuable because they (ideally) make a profit for the owners.

Bonds are valuable because the company or government that issues them signs a contract to pay out a certain amount on them. They won’t always do that, but thats why we have rating agencies to help investors understand the risk.

The closest equivalent to crypto in traditional assets is probably precious metals and gemstones, though even those typically have some industrial uses to drive demand.

Diamonds are a great example of the downside of looking at the market value of something alone. The natural diamond market has been massively disrupted by the rise of artificial diamonds and diamond alternatives.

[desumeku]

Great argument. "I don't believe it has value, so it doesn't." Well, keep telling yourself that. I'm sure you feel just as smart as you did when you dismissed bitcoin at $1,000, and you'll feel just as smart dismissing it at $1,000,000.

[brokencode]

I’m not dismissing it. I’m saying that it’s different than traditional investments since most of the potential uses are still speculative, whereas it’s pretty obvious what value you can get from ownership of a company or a barrel of oil.

[Terr_]

"Dude, tulips literally cannot go down."

[kjksf]

I can create (grow) as many tulips as I want.

Can you create as many bitcoins as you want?

[Terr_]

It's a satirical reference to a historical event, where the speculative bubble kept going up... Until it didn't.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania

[kjksf]

I know that, I've read about tulip mania before.

To expand on my previous response: econ 101 teaches us that the price of any non-scarce product will converge to the cost of production plus some small profit margin.

Tulip is not a scarce asset because you can make more tulips. If cost to produce a tulip is $1 dollar and the price spikes to $100 due to demand outstripping supply, people will be incentivized to grow more tulips.

At some point they'll grow enough tulips for supply to meet the demand and they will have to sell tulips at merely small profit. In fact, some will likely have to sell tulips at a loss due to overproduction.

Mona Lisa doesn't have this problem. There's only one Mona Lisa so as long as demand goes up, the price goes up.

Bitcoin doesn't have this problem. There's a hard limit of 21 million bitcoins that will ever exist. As long as demand for bitcoin goes up, the price goes up.

[notahacker]

> As long as demand for bitcoin goes up, the price goes up.

And as long as the demand for Bitcoin goes down, the price goes down.

There's nothing magical about scarcity. The amount of Enron stock certificates issued was finite, but I'm not sure buying them would have been a good idea....

[desumeku]

It's important to note that this pretty much never actually happened and is only repeated all the time because of some movie.

Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/there-never-was-real-...

[liveoneggs]

I can create as many liveoneggs-coinz as I want(z). Would you invest in some?

[kjksf]

No, because you can create as many liveoneggs-coinz as you want.

But I do invest in Bitcoin because you can't.

Bitcoin is scarce, your coinz aren't.

Do you get it now?

[desumeku]

Sure, you can go launch it on pump.fun right now. But you still can't create any more bitcoins.

[creaturemachine]

Can I be in on the rug-pull?