[geremiiah]

Here's a shower thought. BTC essential is worth $70k solely through the power of memes. Can TSLA and SPCX remain overvalued (relative to the revenue of their respective underlying assets) forever through the power of memes?

Intuitively, it seems to me that there must necessarily be some kind of upper limit, but I'm not convincing myself. These speculative assets are only attractive as long as the price keeps inflating. But that can only happen if there is more and more demand. So it's basically a bet that there is an average amount of retail investors (I assume it's mostly retail investors but I could be wrong) that consistently put a percentage of their income into these speculative assets. Can this be maintained forever?

[drakythe]

The saying "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" exists for a reason.

In short, the answer to your literal question is "no" because nothing remains forever in this world. The practical answer is "yes" because the TSLA stock has been irrational for years already and it shows no sign of stopping.

[georgeecollins]

Or the way I would think about it is (I think this was a Krushchev quote): You don't convince people there is no imaginary river, you convince people that you built an imaginary bridge across the imaginary river.

So you are never going to convince people that Tesla won't make a fortune on humanoid robots or SpaceX won't colonize Mars. The fever will break when people decide flying robots (or whatever) are a bigger business then humanoid robots or some other company than Space X will colonize the ocean before Mars. You aren't going to convince people to price these things reasonably but eventually the heat will wear off.

[runarberg]

That saying assumes a rational market, and while there is some evidence that the average human behavior trends towards the rational there are plenty of evidence against individual behavior being rational (see homo economicus).

As more and more wealth get distrubuted to fewer and fewer hands, and as fewer and fewer extremely rich individuals control more and more of the market, My gut feeling is that if the market was ever rational (which btw. I am not entirely convinced of) that very much no longer holds true.

[grey-area]

In the short term it’s a voting machine, in the long term it’s a weighing machine (Ben Graham).

The current episode of irrational exuberance will pass, as others have.

[runarberg]

The before ones have had outside influence which forces the irrational episodes to pass. A spectacular collapse is usually fallowed by mass protests and labor actions, strikes etc. which forces the market to change its behavior. Most of the time these will result in a change in government policy which imposes regulation onto the market, and only then does the market go back to being rational.

[w10-1]

> exists for a reason

The reason is that people keep making the same mistake, because people are not very good at assessing high-risk, high-reward projects.

Only a real deadline/delivery failure can wake people up, and only if they haven't pivoted their dream to something else, and only if you don't have other people knowing it's a scam, but willing to prop up the stock price because they are highly invested.

Scams, like cancer, are real; they survive, grow and defend themselves using the same mechanisms (laws, advisors, promotors) as ordinary investments/tissue, until they kill the patient -- so the best scams target the largest unkillable patients and enlist the broadest and deepest range of self-interested insiders as their defense.

It's beautiful, if you really think about it, as a tragic example of the worst of capitalism.

[mixdup]

The thing is fundamentals really don't matter. TSLA and SPCX aren't paying dividends so there's no real performance they have to hit, no one is going to miss a dividend payment and dump the stock. The Elong vibes can carry it as long as people keep smoking what he's selling

The real question is, when does that run out of steam? When do we wake up to the charade that has built up around us? That's a much bigger thing than just Elon and his businesses. Like someone else said, when the next crisis/downturn/depression hits the house of cards will fall. Unfortunately it will hit all of us not just people in the meme stocks

[philistine]

I'm extremely cynical about the way the US government would react to any sort of financial crisis. I do not believe that they would not completely cave and bail out the AI companies and the monopolists if there is a downturn. And it's not that I don't trust the Republicans specifically. The whole political sphere is completely convinced that AI is a national security prerogative, and the cynical political atmosphere will equate national security with investor protection.

Let me append the saying a bit: The US government can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

[fluoridation]

*The US government can remain irrational so you can stay solvent.

[namuol]

I’m pretty sure the market agrees with you.

[philistine]

Unfortunately.

[lossolo]

If you exclude dividend paying stocks, then the entire stock market starts to look like a giant pyramid scheme casino.

[throw0101c]

> If you exclude dividend paying stocks, then the entire stock market starts to look like a giant pyramid scheme casino.

Stocks can start paying dividends in the future: MSFT did not in the past, and does now. AAPL did, stopped in the 1990s, and started doing so again.

You should be indifferent to the company's dividend scheme since it's the underlying business activity that drives total returns, and not its distribution policy. There is all sorts of magical thinking when it comes to dividends:

* https://canadiancouchpotato.com/2011/01/18/debunking-dividen...

* https://pwlcapital.com/the-irrelevance-of-dividends-still-a-...

A pyramid scheme can run out of people to keep it going: the stock market is in a sense a 'savings scheme' for future consumption. Younger people work and turn their cash into savings, older people take their savings and turn it back into cash: as long as young people need to think about the future, and older people / retirees need to pay bills, there's a mechanism to maintain this cycle.

[dingaling]

> A pyramid scheme can run out of people to keep it going

And then you describe how the secondary stock market requires 'fresh blood' to whom to sell stock to cash-out.

It's precisely a legalised pyramid scheme that always needs someone to come in at the bottom hold the bag to let someone else cash-out. In turn they need someone to come in 30 years later. That's exactly how a pyramid scheme works.

[throw0101c]

> In turn they need someone to come in 30 years later. That's exactly how a pyramid scheme works.

The entire economy is a pyramid scheme: the expenses of some people (shelter, food, clothing, entertainment, etc) are the income of other people (landlords/mortgages/property taxes, farmers/grocers, etc). It's why, during economic downturns, personal virtues (saving) can become vices from macroeconomic perspective: if everyone is saving, no one is spending, and so producers/suppliers lose their income (and generally start laying people off, which causes more saving / less spending).

At any given point in time, if no one spends, then no one has income.

This was the 'innovation' of Keynes in the 1930s: use government spending to 'induce' demand to get the cycle going again:

* https://archive.nytimes.com/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/0...

For a stocks point of view: if no one is currently saving, then those that need income will lose it. At any given point there are folks who need to save/buy and those that need to spend/sell.

[ozgrakkurt]

Exchange of goods with money isn’t a pyramid scheme imo. Financial system is a pyramid scheme, economy isn’t

[andrewflnr]

> it's the underlying business activity that drives total returns, and not its distribution policy

That's exactly the question, though, since a lot of stocks seem priced disproportionately to their business activities.

[throw0101c]

> A Keynesian beauty contest is a metaphorical beauty contest in which judges are rewarded for selecting the most popular choices among all judges, rather than those they may personally find the most attractive. This idea is often applied in financial markets, whereby investors could profit more by buying whichever stocks they think other investors will buy, rather than the stocks that have fundamentally the best value, because when other people buy a stock, they bid up the price, allowing an earlier investor to cash out with a profit, regardless of whether the price increases are supported by its fundamentals and theoretical arguments.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest

Plenty of folks may think these companies are garbage but are 'playing along' because it's not necessarily what they themselves think that is important, but what others think. You can make money in a bubble, even when it eventually pops. What we're seeing now is hardly new, either:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_Revolutions_and_...

This is why I stick with index funds, as I don't really can't be bothered playing the game:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Random_Walk_Down_Wall_Street

I generally check my portfolio once a year, in January, when I top things up when new contribution room becomes available with the new year. It's 'fun' to follow along with the gyrations and drama as things happen, but I don't sleep over it. If you're reasonably diversified you can generally weather storms and come out okay on the other side:

* https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2014/02/worlds-worst-market...

* https://www.forbes.com/sites/advisor/2010/09/13/its-not-real...

[altcognito]

I don't have better ideas than you to do anything except "buy indexes".

Everyone is happy enough to give Elon (and others) more and more leverage to buy politically strategic companies (this is not that, this is probably just an ego buy for him, something to kill time because he can).

I was worried about him selling out (from an overall market and even index perspective when they were going to bend rules), but it looks like largely the whole situation is predicated on the idea that he can't or won't sell. I don't know how exposed the market is but it doesn't feel good.

[andrewflnr]

> A Keynesian beauty contest

No shit. That's why, even if it's an exaggeration to call the entire stock market a pyramid scheme, you can't justify the claim that it's entirely "underlying business activity that drives total returns". That's the real question (from which dividends are, yes, a distraction).

[ethbr1]

No, there are a huge number of companies that are valued reasonably for their revenue / profitability / growth.

There's basically two stock markets: things valued on fundamentals and things valued on vibes.

And I don't think there's ever going to be a unified theory of value that can span both, because the former is quantitative and the latter is psychology.

[mixdup]

True, and it's a common question that comes up: What's the point of owning a stock if it doesn't pay a dividend? How do you participate in the company's performance?

There are other ways for performance to translate to the investors directly. For example, if the company sells itself then all the shareholders will get that payout. Stock buybacks are a thing. And, as other commenters here have said, eventually the company may start paying a dividend

But, you're not entirely off-base in that you're just buying into the vibes of a company. It's just that most of the time (much of the time?) those vibes have been rooted in some semblance of rationality, that there was something of value behind the shares you're buying. That is definitely not universally true anymore

[hylaride]

There's taxation reasons. Stock buybacks mean that investors get the usually lower capital gains tax rates instead of dividend income tax rates. On top of this, it also juices earnings per share.

[fluoridation]

>How do you participate in the company's performance?

Most stocks give voting power even if they don't pay dividends. Notably, SpaceX's don't.

[PyWoody]

Aren't buybacks the new dividends?

[Danox]

It’s only a pyramid scheme for Tesla, SpaceX or X formally known as Twitter see a pattern there?

[mixdup]

Gamestop is not an Elon venture. There's plenty of irrational stock valuations out there, most of them just come back to Earth on a reasonable timeframe

[criddell]

Would you say the same thing about Bitcoin? Will that house of cards all fall in the next crisis/downturn/depression?

[lokar]

Hasn’t it crashed in every economic downturn and financial panic so far?

[criddell]

Not really, no.

A decade ago it was under $1000 and has never been that low since. It's peak price is only about 2x the current price.

[lokar]

Isn’t a 50% reduction pretty bad?

And being higher over 10 years has little to do with it if acts counter cyclical to stocks and other assets.

[throw0101c]

> And being higher over 10 years has little to do with it if acts counter cyclical to stocks and other assets.

BTC has been called many things at many different times. It was originally a payment system:

> A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.

* https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

And it can still be used for that, however the transaction throughput is tiny, and so it became a store of value in essence: but it's kind of hard to be that when the value swings up and won so much. While "fiat" currency inflation is annoying, it is, generally, fairly predictable in most cases (<4%) and so you can plan ahead with regards to future value and purchase. The same is hardly true of BTC.

[tasuki]

Is it bad? Isn't 60x in 10 years still kind of ok? The things I invested in ten years ago didn't return 60x since.

[thisisit]

There is some misunderstanding of what a crash really is. It doesn't necessarily mean that things get written down to 0 or some arbitrary level because everything has a price at which someone will buy.

Even companies have some value after a crash and you could make a case that at some arbitrary point it was worth $x and since the crash didn't cause the company to crater to below $x it has not "crashed". Even companies filing for bankruptcy have some residual value above what they might have been founded on - it doesn't mean the company hasn't gone bankrupt.

[lokar]

Yeah, I certainly did not mean go to zero, or near that.

To be more specific, I have often seen people argue for including crypto in a portfolio based on the theory that if equities drop a lot (25, 30%?) crypto will hold or go up. People make the same argument for gold.

[mixdup]

I personally think Bitcoin will eventually peter out, and that it's fairly risky as it has definitely been pushed by vibes and promotion and everyone wanting to get in on it

I mean that can apply to anything. There's nothing intrinsic about gold that makes it valuable other than it's rare, but there's plenty of things that are relatively rare that aren't valuable. Yes there's industrial uses of gold but that's not why we as a society and a species treat it as valuable

Maybe bitcoin is the new gold and will hold value forever, and as more serious people get into it, it will lose its volatility and be less subject to the vibes shifting and there being a run on the market. Maybe not

It is different from Elong stocks, though, because the myth of Satoshi aside, it's not exactly a cult of personality like his companies are

[senordevnyc]

To me the difference is that BTC's continued value isn't predicated on the actions of one person, who has continually proven himself to be childish, mercurial, and dishonest.

[ahcharades]

Yes when will everyone wake up for the charade of having a monopoly on space launches? Of putting over 90% of all mass into space, of your closest competitor being the nation state of China, and they are years away from where you are right now. Ah yes, that charade, when will people learn am I right? Total genius.

[mixdup]

An extreme majority of Space X's self-determined value proposition has nothing to do with space. Out of an overall TAM of $28.5 trillion, $26.5 trillion is based on AI. Personally I believe that number will actually approach zero, but it certainly even in my most optimistic view is a number with a B, not a T

The total addressable market even at Space X's own calculation for space launches is only $370 billion. And, supposedly as the only company that can launch things into space they are still losing money on that business. This is bankrupt-a-casino levels of incompetence

[ben_w]

SpaceX are currently losing money on the "going to space" part of their business.

They're making money on telecoms, and may have just started making a profit on renting out the data centres they originally built for the AI that it turned out hardly anyone wanted to actually use.

[V__]

Even if one assumes this is true, it still wouldn't justify the valuation.

[moogly]

The demand just isn't there, which is one of the reasons SpaceX is pretending they will generate more demand with their cosmic wizard spires.

[petilon]

Michael Burry, a hedge fund investor featured in the book “The Big Short” for his predictions on the 2008 financial crisis, said in a Substack discussion last month that any increase in SpaceX’s stock after its I.P.O. would “be on hype and technicals.”

Here, “technicals” means technical analysis signals rather than the company’s business fundamentals. In other words, Burry is saying the stock could rise because of chart-based trading, momentum, and market behavior—not because investors think SpaceX is truly worth that much based on revenue, profits, or other fundamentals.

How long can the hype be maintained? TSLA is still maintaining its hype, judging by its P/E ratio.

[TaupeRanger]

Technical Analysis is Astrology, and Burry has predicted 17 of last the last 2 stock market crashes.

[UncleOxidant]

> Astrology

Exactly, but there are people out there who buy stocks based on technical analysis. It can have an effect if enough people act on it's "signals".

[rob74]

The hype already starts with the SpaceX SEC filing. According to it, its addressable market is $28.5 trillion, of which $26.5 trillion are AI. This means that every human being who owns a computer on this planet (1.75 billion) would need to spend (on average) over $15.000 on xAI products.

[root-parent]

>> that every human being who owns a computer on this planet (1.75 billion) would need to spend over $15.000 on xAI products.

Current US national debt is approximately $39.22 trillion. As we achieve a zombie movie, level of collective madness, lets take all this into the last degree.

Nationalize SpaceX, and with this bright obvious future described on the prospect lets pay US debt :-) Pay US retirement benefits pensions in token credits, pensioners can resell, make an options market for tokens. I am sure Robinhood will open you a margin account for that?

Lets open a futures markets for food goods grown up on SpaceX Asteroids, as they will have free solar energy. They can grow them three times faster than on Earth...

To quote Ron Baron yesterday on CNBC, we are all going to earn hundreds of billions....

[dzhiurgis]

> would need to spend over $15.000 on xAI products.

For perspective - that’s 12.5 years of Tesla FSD subscriptions. I think there are probably about that much cars out there.

[ben_w]

Yes indeed.

While this would be conceivable if some future AI gets good enough to actually replace 100% of global paid labour currently done by using a computer, the reference class I have here is that Wikipedia is definitely not valued at [number of people online] * [peak cost of Encyclopaedia Britannica].

Economic displacement on that scale breaks the valuation.

[darth_avocado]

Technicals are the star signs of stock market.

[root-parent]

Funny, the European Central Bank just made life even harder, by raising interest rates purely on that, and the FED is preparing to do the same...

[darth_avocado]

Fed is not raising rates because of technicals. It’s because of economic numbers. The two aren’t the same.

[root-parent]

At the essence they are the same, if you think a bit about it.

[gpderetta]

they literally are not.

[Danox]

Tesla definitely is floating down slowly worldwide with hype when it finally crashes just don’t be left holding the bag. 2026 will be another year downward.

[_trampeltier]

I guess now a lot of Elon fans change from Tesla to Spacex.

[pjc50]

Notably, it looks like the meme power is gradually being redirected from BTC and cryptocurrency in general towards AI and SpaceX in general. Now that people have found a means of consuming vast amounts of computing power that occasionally emits useful output, rather than just a hash and a colossal waste.

[throw0101c]

> Here's a shower thought. BTC essential is worth $70k solely through the power of memes. Can TSLA and SPCX remain overvalued (relative to the revenue of their respective underlying assets) forever through the power of memes?

The "value" of something can be a bit of a meta-game:

> A Keynesian beauty contest is a metaphorical beauty contest in which judges are rewarded for selecting the most popular choices among all judges, rather than those they may personally find the most attractive. This idea is often applied in financial markets, whereby investors could profit more by buying whichever stocks they think other investors will buy, rather than the stocks that have fundamentally the best value, because when other people buy a stock, they bid up the price, allowing an earlier investor to cash out with a profit, regardless of whether the price increases are supported by its fundamentals and theoretical arguments.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest

Plenty of folks may think these companies are garbage but are 'playing along' because it's not necessarily what they themselves think that is important, but what others think.

This idea was put forward by Keynes in his General Thoery publish in 1936, so human nature has hardly changed since then.

[jld]

While gold has industrial uses, isn't most of its value based on the fact that people like it and believe that it has value?

[interstice]

I'm not sure if this means gold isn't powered by memes or whether it's just one of the most long lived memes of all time. Aside from other nice properties like lasting a long time, being pretty, and not requiring electricity to exist.

[Danox]

Certainly, gold is not a meme, nor are all the other rare earth metals. This principle applies most to the other elements found on the periodic table. In fact, they have become more valuable due to research and development in today’s modern world, as numerous useful discoveries are made daily.

Cryptocurrency, such as Bitcoin, is undoubtedly a meme. If given a choice, one would prefer to possess any of the rare metals, rare earths, or any other elements that can be obtained in sufficient quantities, whether on land or in the ocean. Bitcoin or cryptocurrency is beneficial only to insiders and not to the general public. In essence, they are akin to modern tulips with a cherry on top, and like Tesla in 2030, one should avoid being caught with the bag.

[jpadkins]

What you are describing applies to all forms of money. It has value because people believe other people will use it as money. If that belief drops, the value drops.

People comment on gold and Bitcoin, but don't realize the same principles apply to US dollars and bonds.

[chriswarbo]

> the same principles apply to US dollars

Currencies are a little different, since they are required to pay taxes; and payment of taxes is enforced (to varying degrees) by state violence.

Hence if you believe you will be taxed ("death and taxes" being the only certainties in life, etc.) then the currency associated with that tax has value, in that it avoids imprisonment, etc.

[jimnotgym]

I was once told bitcoin was a 'pet rock'. Thing is people pay a lot of money for rocks when they have no planned industrial activity for them. Diamonds, for instance.

I think you are spot on. The problem comes if SpaceX goes out of fashion, not its fundamentals.

[instalabsai]

This is why I think Elon buying Twitter was one of the most strategic decisions he ever made: he quite literally bought the meme machine that upholds the valuations of his companies.

[ben_w]

I still don't think it was strategic on his part, he did try to back out after all; my guess is that having bought it, he tried to maximise the value it produced.

And given the financial statements in the SpaceX IPO, to the extent X still has any value at all, it is almost all just influence of one kind or another, not actual money.

[ceejayoz]

And the government that helps fund and regulate (or not) them.

[yousif_123123]

At least as long as Musk is the CEO, perhaps. I don't think it's easy to find another charismatic figure to keep it going.

It's a different kind of hype than Nvidia has, which is showing very high and fast growing revenues (which may not continue, but they're real now). Jensen I think is not as critical to the AI hype as Elon is to his companies.

All these major tech companies eventually get leadership changes. Apple, Google, Amazon, have all done well because they're real companies and go beyond their original leadership. Tesla and SpaceX I think would surely go down the moment Musk is no longer in leadership.

[functionmouse]

you think Musk is charismatic?

https://www.natesilver.net/p/elon-musk-polls-popularity-nate...

majority view him unfavorably.

[SketchySeaBeast]

I think we've all seen by now that the majority doesn't much matter if you have a rabidly zealous minority.

[functionmouse]

suppose you've got me there

[ben_w]

> majority view him unfavorably.

Indeed, but for general stock market purposes it's one dollar one vote, not one person one vote.

Possibly even worse. Short-sellers got burned on Tesla (and perhaps now also SpaceX), which may mean the marginal buyer and seller consists only of people who already buy into the hyper and by trading are sharing price info with each other rather than with a single person who doubts the man.

I sold my Tesla stocks a while back; the people who kept them don't care what people like me think.

[yousif_123123]

Well I meant he has a big Twitter following and whatever he gets into many are willing to fund and so on. Like there's no way Tesla would be taken seriously for all its future ambitions and valued accordingly without Musk at the helm.

I just cancelled my cursor, which was the best for my workflow. Will need to find something else.

[miduil]

same just cancelled it and left Elon Musk as a reason

[rapind]

> Can this be maintained forever?

Obviously not. It’s all about timing your bail so you don’t get left holding the bag.

[otterley]

On what grounds do you believe the value of BTC is meme-driven? Another (and arguably more plausible) explanation is that the price reflects the vast amount of criminally-obtained wealth stored in it. It’s a far better store than burying cash in mountain caches.

[observationist]

All money is meme driven. Money is fundamentally a meme itself. Seeing lots of people who seem to be making some sort of implicit distinction between bitcoin and USD and so on, but they are no different. They serve the function they serve because of what people believe about them, like any other social, cultural, or economic abstraction. Bitcoin has the feature of a verifiable ledger, but its value and function are in our heads, just like the USD or GBP.

[8note]

tax payment is kindof a meme i guess, but one with force behind it

[Stevvo]

BTC is a terrible place to put criminally-obtained wealth. Public ledger and all that makes it very difficult to hide anything.

[otterley]

That ship sailed long ago, before there were viable alternatives to BTC. There are plenty of ways to launder BTC (i.e. hiding in plain sight) and the existence of hoarded wealth in BTC isn't necessarily exclusive of other cryptocurrencies that are better fit for purpose.

[ozgrakkurt]

> BTC essential is worth $70k solely through the power of memes

This is not true.

BTC is way more sane than SpaceX as can be seen by it's history so far.

[rebolek]

SpaceX is successfully building reusable rockets. BTC can process few transactions every ten or so minutes at enormous price.

I think SpaceX is definitely overpriced but saying that BTC is more sane is completely delusional.

[Overpower0416]

BTC has the layer 2 lighting network that can process more transactions than Visa and MC combined with very cheap fees. I guess HN knowledge of Bitcoin does not go further than 2015

[ben_w]

"Can" != "does". The current actual throughput of the Lightning Network is estimated at around 300 TPS: https://www.spark.money/tools/lightning-vs-visa

Also, everything on level 2 needs to be ultimately balanced on level 1; BTC doesn't have enough throughput to balance all the banks in the world, and lo Lightning appears to be consolidating into fewer nodes.

Also also, everything level 2 (including Lightning) necessarily takes away at least one of the selling points used for BTC, and replaces them with something functionally equivalent to 50% of a bank but worse.

[Overpower0416]

It literally says this in the website your linked

> Current actual throughput is significantly lower, estimated at around 300 TPS, because the network is still growing. However, Lightning's architecture scales horizontally: as more nodes and channels are added, capacity increases without any protocol changes. The network's total value locked has grown past $500 million, with over 15,000 active nodes and 50,000+ payment channels.

The layer 2 has been predicted by one of the first adopter in 2010 so it was always the plan

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2500.msg34211#msg342... It can scale without any changes and if there is demand it will surpass Visa and MC

[two_handfuls]

SpaceX the company has done and is doing amazing feats of technology.

SpaceX the stock is only in a very small part about rockets and space. In their filing they talk about their total addressable market being $28.5 trillion, of which $26.5 trillion are AI.

That means that they believe the SpaceX stock is 93% about AI.

It's open to argument whether xAI or BTC is crazier - I just wanted to say that when talking about SpaceX stock, it's not really about rockets.

[vanuatu]

dont think the value of btc comes from its utility anymore

stables are much better for transactions anyway

[misiti3780]

neither of them are sane. BTC is useless, unless your trying to buy child porn, buy illicit drugs on the internet, or someone who bought it before the value exploded. eventually, the world will come around and it will go to zero, if quantum doesnt kill it first. im looking forward to that day.

[vovavili]

>BTC is useless, unless your trying to buy child porn, buy illicit drugs on the internet

The market has long shifted to "buy Litecoin with cash, swap it to Monero" for these kinds of activities.

[misiti3780]

i know exactly zero people using any of these markets, and 99% of the other people here can probably say the same.

[jimnotgym]

USD is useless unless you want to buy something with it. You can't eat it, it has little fuel value...

...it is also propped up in value by a frankly insane demand for it from other countries...on its fundamentals it would be worth much less

[misiti3780]

what is your point?

[throw310822]

BTC's use is being bought and sold. So it's not useless. If I offer you one BTC for $30k, will you buy it?

[tcp_handshaker]

If I offer you a tulip for $25,000 would you buy it?

[throw310822]

Sure, if there were a stable enough market in which I can fetch twice that amount for that tulip, I'd buy it in a heartbeat. Wouldn't you?

The point being: BTC is a an abstract good, of no practical use except that of being transacted. Has whatever value the people are willing to pay for it, and has had a value in the tens of thousands for long enough that buying one with the intent of keeping it for a while is not such a stupid idea. I don't currently own any but there is a price at which I would buy one, and that price is many thousands of dollars... For an alphanumeric code in a distributed ledger.

[tcp_handshaker]

Being transacted is the least usable thing for BTC. He you tried to transact on it? Its so slow its funny people claim it a use case for it... I know of only one use case, and its to anonymously bribe politicians who have their own coins.

[petesergeant]

If I think the resale price will stay at $30k long enough for me to flip it, then obviously yes?

[misiti3780]

sure, because you'd be offering me an idiotic arbitrage. your sentence doesnt prove it's useful.

[ozgrakkurt]

It is not useless, it is incredibly arrogant to think it is useless at this point. You can do a 10 minute research and see how useful it is

[Slartie]

True, it's very useful for scammers, grifters, international terrorists and authoritarian governments to funnel monetary value around without having to rely on the traditional financial system where they may be blocked and their money confiscated.

[ozgrakkurt]

It costs 150 usd to send 5k usd between two countries I live in.

It costs the same amount of money to literally go there by plane and bring it as cash. This is not fair obviously. So traditional finance is a scam itself.

It takes 10 seconds and no fees to make the same transfer via blockchain.

I am pretty sure you know basically nothing about those crimes or the people that do crimes or how they actually transfer money. Just doing casual newspaper intellectualism while talking about things you never interacted with

[misiti3780]

what percentage of BTC transactions do you think are being used for international cash transfer in 2026 ?

[tasuki]

> funnel monetary value around without having to rely on the traditional financial system where they may be blocked and their money confiscated.

Yes. Unfortunately the traditional financial system is governed by a country which has been behaving increasingly erratically, threatening its long-term allies with invasions and committing obvious war crimes. This is not a "good guys vs bad guys" scenario.

[throw310822]

As long as there is someone around who is very good at keeping the price inflated (and that in turn also because he did actually deliver extraordinary things, it's not just smoke and mirrors).

On the other hand, the fact that BTC has absolutely no intrinsic value can be an advantage over a real company, as it makes it more insulated from reality. Supply chain shock? No problem. Competition? Same. New technologies, political change? Neither.

[jimnotgym]

USD has no intrinsic value either

[catlikesshrimp]

At least that one is backed by a military.

[stetrain]

The current market cap of SPCX and TSLA combined (~$3.8T) is about 3 times the total value of all BTC (~$1.3T).

[_DeadFred_]

SPCX only floated a small amount of shares, and made the stock exchanges compete so that it would get to rig the system in a way. If funds have to buy SPCX + small share amount, it's going up. This is the reason stock buyback used to be illegal. It's purely market manipulation of share count, not market based on actual value.

[jtbayly]

I saw that one wealthy individual had purchased $1 billion of SpaceX at the IPO. Does that count as a retail investor?

[andsoitis]

> I saw that one wealthy individual had purchased $1 billion of SpaceX at the IPO. Does that count as a retail investor?

There were two individuals who each bought $1B: Ron Baron and Gina Rinehart.

While they are individuals, they executed these billion-dollar investments through their massive corporate entities and investment firms, rather than personal brokerage accounts.

A retain investor is an individual, non-professional investor who buys and sells securities through brokerages using personal funds.

[throwaway894345]

At least some of TSLA and SPCX value is derived from Musk's ability to purchase politicians to ensure the tax dollars keep flowing to them. Essentially, these ticker symbols are backed by the US government's ability to force us to give Musk's companies our money.

[kamaal]

>>Intuitively, it seems to me that there must necessarily be some kind of upper limit

I mentioned this in other thread(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48514481), we are at runaway intelligence already.

Mostly because we are looping AI to fix problems, and then the same data is used to improve AI. There is no upper limit to this.

Taken to its logical conclusion, this process needs a hardware scale that might even look laughably huge at this point. Its fairly obvious space is going to play a big role in the coming times.

I could be wrong, and I humbly accept it when Im proven wrong. But it does feel like a lot of people in top places know we are going to need all the energy and resources space has to offer to run this runaway intelligence.

[petesergeant]

> we are at runaway intelligence already. Mostly because we are looping AI to fix problems, and then the same data is used to improve AI. There is no upper limit to this.

I'm an AI booster, but this really doesn't follow. There's absolutely no guarantee that the marginal improvement from this continues to hold.

[kamaal]

Its not marginal improvement.

Validated data coming out of LLM(Itself generated from a recursive/loop process, used to incrementally arrive at solutions) being using to improve the very LLM is a very powerful loop. And there is no real upper limit to this, at least not in the near future.

Like most exponential processes, the start is slow, but it gets fast very rapidly.

This is also what Anthropic has said, the ones training these models today(i.e 2025 - 2027) will be impossible to catch up with, let alone beat.

So we are at a kind of runaway AI already today.

[petesergeant]

Economics meaning of marginal, not the qualitative one.

> there is no real upper limit to this

This is what you need to cite for your argument to hold together.

[grey-area]

It seems like that during a bubble (things can never go down!) but the market eventually does correct, even if it can take years or even decades to do so, and usually overcorrects when it does.

[tim333]

It's down to the balance between buyers and sellers. If you've got more selling than buying it'll go down but Musk has been remarkably good at keeping the buyers there.

[_DeadFred_]

Don't forget the amount of shares released to the market. That impacts the price dramatically as can be seen be all the 'stock buyback' manipulation of stock prices.

[tim333]

Indeed. There's bit of a funny effect just now because the various index funds are having to buy into SpaceX so their funds match the index and apparently that's ~$14bn of forced buying at a time when there are not so many sellers.

[jayd16]

Pump and dump only has to meme hard enough for the pump part.

[jesse_dot_id]

If there is ever another depression, which seems highly probable at this point, the meme stocks will be the first ones down the toilet.

[bilsbie]

Everything is ultimately valued by memes.

[jpadkins]

money is just an idea that spreads (a meme).

[alpineman]

Sure until retail are forced to sell in an correction. Wealth destruction can happen very fast

[Grombobulous]

Bitcoin isn’t valuable solely through memes, it’s also deflationary by design.

[teekert]

Someone invents something that is digital, but can't be copied. Quite brilliant as it is the first digital asset that can store value without centralization and trust, based on market demand.

Someone on HN: "BTC is valueable solely through the power of memes".

[throwaway894345]

Bitcoin doesn't "store value", it has the value that society assigns it, which is what the parent means when s/he says "BTC is valuable solely through the power of memes". It's not a fiat currency, nor does it have any intrinsic utilitarian value.

[teekert]

Age old argument: money also has no intrinsic utilitarian value.

And yes, btc does store value, it is doing that for me now. I stored some of my value in it and it has held better value than fiat.

[throwaway894345]

> Age old argument: money also has no intrinsic utilitarian value.

I didn't claim money had intrinsic value, I claimed that money is fiat currency--it's backed by a lot of people with a lot of guns. BTC is not.

> And yes, btc does store value, it is doing that for me now. I stored some of my value in it and it has held better value than fiat.

Currencies (BTC included) don't "store value", they are assigned value by society esp via markets. Sometimes society decides one currency is more valuable than another, or that its change in value differs from that of another, but neither currency stores value.

[teekert]

You mean like gold?

[throwaway894345]

No, gold is not a fiat currency and it also has significant utilitarian value.

[somenameforme]

The overwhelming majority of SpaceX holders are institutional. They had planned to allocate 30% to retail, but it ended up in the 20% range as a result of institutional demand. [1] No clue what's going on right now as their stock is going to the Moon. But in any case, I think the people that don't understand why it's doing well are mostly those who are unfamiliar with the space industry. SpaceX has already revolutionized space by dropping the cost to orbit by multiple orders of magnitude relative to the Space Shuttle, which it replaced. And it looks set to do that again with the Starship.

The main reason humanity hasn't meaningfully started expanding into space is because it used to cost $54,000 to get a liter of water into space. SpaceX brought that down to about $5000, and then further down to near $1400. That's a massive reduction in price, but you're still left with the problem that it costs $1400 to get a liter of water to space, which is why we still can't have nice things, yet.

Starship has the promise of bringing that down a couple of more orders of magnitude where the goal is to get it within the $10-$20 range. If they succeed, then you've just opened the doors to an entire new frontier of expansion and growth for humanity which is practically infinite. And right now there's no real reason to think that they won't succeed. And more importantly than this is that nobody seems to be able to compete on their level, or even remotely close. Their closest competitor is probably China who remains technologically well behind. And so SpaceX today is akin to being able to get a piece of some sort of super-ship making monopoly, just prior to the Age of Sail. The downside risk is basically zero since they're still making rapid progress - the only question is how rapid. And upside potential is basically infinite.

[1] - https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/11/spacex-cuts-retail-ipo-alloc...

[cjrp]

> The main reason humanity hasn't meaningfully started expanding into space is because it used to cost $54,000 to get a liter of water into space.

Am I naive in thinking that we haven't expanded into space because we don't need to? What's the benefit?

[ben_w]

> What's the benefit?

For why we'd want to go at all: there's a lot of resources up there, and pollution is much less of a concern for factories made up there. Also some material processes may be much easier in zero-gee.

But that doesn't mean it's actually worth the effort.

[ajmurmann]

Asteroid mining is the obvious one. That said as part of looking into SpaceX's business I learned that currently the TAM for launching other people's stuff into space is under $10 billion. SpaceX already owns most of that market. Their own focus on data centers in space IMO speaks for itself.

[chrissnell]

A hedge against civilization-destroying events. Meteors, global war, disease.

[phlakaton]

Space is not a hedge against these things. At best it's our final tomb.

There is no backup plan.

[petrocrat]

to be fair, in the pharoahs quest for immortality after death, if they could have put their pyramid burial tombs in space to avoid decay/ruin for longer they would have. I wouldn't be shocked to see the oligarchs paying for their own space burials inside very lavish satellites whose orbit won't decay for thousands of years so they can "live forever".

[andsoitis]

> we haven't expanded into space because we don't need to? What's the benefit?

Access to resources. A sense of adventure. Learning.

[lokar]

Which resources are cheaper to get from space? I’ve only ever seen hand waiving arguments, never any math.

[ben_w]

That depends entirely on the price; things are very different when it costs $20k/kg to orbit (basically nothing is worth that) vs. $20/kg to orbit.

Some people are suggesting making high quality fibre optics and pharmaceuticals in LEO already with Falcon prices:

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

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

While I am *extremely* skeptical, I've heard people talk about space-based solar. I mention this only so nobody adds an "and also" for that.

Ditto anyone talking about lunar He-3. This is a bad idea, "why" is long enough to be worthy of a blog post.

But if you were committed to expansionism for whatever reason, then you'd want some way to get industrial quantities of steel from mines already in space, to make the factories themselves cheaper. Possibly megastructures like an orbital ring, too.

[somenameforme]

The hand waving is probably reasonable for a couple of reasons. The first is that you can't really math things out yet when costs are shifting by orders of magnitude on relatively short timeframes. What seems impossible in one year is a casual achievement in the next. If we go back to 2002 (when SpaceX was founded) and I told you that within 2 decades they'd have lowered the cost to get stuff to space by more than 97% relative to Space Shuttle, it'd have sounded somewhere between unreasonable and impossible, yet that is exactly what happened. And Starship is set to send prices plummeting yet again.

The second reason is that the notion of economics becomes kind of odd when you start introducing space. Space has practically infinite resources of every type imaginable. For instance one single asteroid, Psyche 16, is thought to have orders of magnitude more gold than has ever been extracted in human history. But I mean, what does this even mean economically? Obviously if you start bringing back hundreds of thousands of tons of gold, the price is going plummet. And even the viable possibility of this happening would probably send the price of gold plummeting. So... it's weird. We're in uncharted waters.

And then on top of this access to space will mean we will start expanding outward - colonies, vastly larger stations stations, and so on. And these expansions will develop their own parallel economies with their own needs/production/etc. This is all kind of like trying to predict the economics of the internet before the first cable had been laid.

[lokar]

Most people I see online freak out at the idea of normalizing living in an apartment/condo and slightly higher density. I don’t see them lining up to live in space :)

[petrocrat]

It's not about the "Access to resources. A sense of adventure. Learning."

Since you are right. All of these things are available on Earth for far cheaper, with better ROI and with far less risk of dying or getting early cancer from cosmic rays.

The real benefit is a commanding lead over geopolitical rivals in the domain of satellites and satellite platforms for hosting devices in orbit, thus securing an insurmountable national security advantage.

[CuriouslyC]

The only argument for space is because you're so set on capitalism that you'd rather destroy the earth than stop trying to continually grow profit. If you're that sick and deluded, then space gives you a way to escape the consequences of your own foolish hubris.

[CuriouslyC]

So, your argument for SpaceX is that they'll take physical systems that they've already tried to squeeze down, and squeeze them down nearly two orders of magnitude? What fundamental scientific discovery do you think is going to enable this? Or do you think that AI is magically going to do it for them?

[somenameforme]

That has nothing to do with how they have already reduced costs, and how they continue to do so. Before SpaceX, you launched a rocket to space once, and then you discarded it. Imagine how much a plane ticket would cost if each time a plane was flown once, it was then discarded.

The big revolution with SpaceX was meaningful reuse (I can get into the comparison with Space Shuttle if you're unfamiliar there). Landing and reusing rockets is something that Boeing et al thought was impossible from an economic point of view, and actually taunted SpaceX in their early years over it along the lines of 'Oh you're going for reuse. Yeah we researched and trialed that out a decade ago. The economics don't work. Cute to see you trying though.'

Their success there is what helped bring the costs way down. But there's still plenty that's not reused - in particular they currently only reuse the first stage (the big rocket that gets things off the ground initially) while discarding the second stage - the space-optimized payload delivery rocket. With Starship they're going for 100% rapid reuse. So you're looking at this absolutely massive 2 stage system where both parts will be able to be repeatedly and rapidly reused.

[threetonesun]

You really think cost is the main reason humanity hasn't expanded into space? I'm all for space exploration and learning from space but actual humans are quite squishy, like gravity, dislike radiation, and would need to take a lot of water with them just to visit a rock very indifferent to their existence.

[somenameforme]

Definitely. Humans expand. It's probably an evolutionary imperative in many of us. Africa was essentially an oasis and yet some of us decided to go make our way outward to inhospitable freezing ass places where the environment itself is just constantly trying to kill you in a million different ways. And we knew nothing about how to deal with it, at first.

Or take the early sea voyages. Not only were there endless worries about things that were ultimately nonissues like sea monsters or falling off the edges of the Earth, but there were endless very real dangers awaiting which we had no clue about or how to deal with - scurvy, rogue waves, and much more. In the aforementioned Age of Sail, it was just expected that a significant chunk of your crew would die. Yet somehow we pushed onward and outward.

And the infinite possibilities of space are going to absolutely dwarf all previous frontiers in terms of interest and potential.

[threetonesun]

You're much more optimistic about the concept of infinity than I am!

[somenameforme]

You mean in terms of us creating a system of gods and serfs?

[dist-epoch]

When you invest in TSLA and SPCX, you don't invest in a car and a rocket company, you invest in Elon Musk. So revenue, assets, are irrelevant.

[fofoz]

You basically buy an asset whose risk is tied to a man's life.

[alpineman]

And not the healthiest man alive

[cbeach]

General Electric was just fine when Thomas Edison died in 1931. And Apple was fine after the tragic early death of Steve Jobs.

Companies like this become bigger than their founders.

And I'm sure many on the Left would argue that Tesla and SpaceX would be healthier companies without Elon Musk.

Although I tend to differ on that, having owned $TSLA for a long time. Never bet against Elon!

[DanielHB]

The limits are when companies and institutions start to default on their loans. Or, in the case of governments, trigger hyperinflation by printing money to pay off the debt.

Of course it can collapse before that, but if it gets to that point it is guaranteed to collapse.

[jimnotgym]

But that won't happen while the share price keeps going up no matter what. Borrow more, secured against the massive unissued equity, or issue more shares.

[brachkow]

> BTC essential is worth $70k solely through the power of memes

Like everything else in finance...

Saying this is not to defend all sorts of crypto-bros. The economy, especially one overly focused on publicly traded companies like the Western, and especially the US economy, is a meme economy.

Coffee, flats, healthcare, military spending, etc., of comparable quality in the abstract East, cost multiples less than in the EU/USA because they and their currencies are weak on memes.