Re:Beyond the boring blockchain bubble
by amrrs on Monday August 07, 2017 @01:32AM
(#14945523)
Sorry for being dumb. If someone wants to encash it to USD. Who's going to pay them? My knowledge in this subject is very minimal hence it sounds like the scene of Housing crisis.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
There are many Bitcoin exchanges and "banks" where you can buy USD for Bitcoin from someone looking to buy Bitcoin. Currently, about $70 million per day - $billions per month - is exchanged for Bitcoin, so it's easy to get in or out of it.
> hence it sounds like the scene of Housing crisis.
If everyone wanted to sell BTC and no-one wanted to buy, it would crash just like anything else.
People hoping for the next 10x increase, people who want a tax-proof and mobile value store, people who need it for a transaction involving something illegal (e.g. paying off a ransomware operator), people who want it for a regular payment or money transfer.
It's up for anyone's guess how big each of those groups is relative to the others. Believers tend to assume that the last one is big, e.g. the "send money back to the home country" use case.
> tax-proof
Ha
(replace "encrypted" with "untraceable" and make the skiddie a webmaster of some unregulated exchange and you can see the future of this situation)