I think invest is the wrong term. Investments have some kind of builtin return like interest or dividends. You're buying bitcoin in the same way you buy gold or a lottery ticket. Maybe you have some solid reasoning on why price will go up but you aren't getting any returns like in an investment.

> investments have some kind of builtin return like interest or dividends

I'd say, more so, the distinguishing factor between an investment and speculation is that an investment is used to facilitate a business process that could potentially create wealth whereas speculation is a bet that something of value will be worth more at a later date.

Although, you can buy ETFs that aim to track cryptocurrencies by buying a basket of them, looking at payment processors, etc.

It's like, I think that lithium is gonna be short in the near future. It's really useful stuff. But I'm not buying kilograms of raw lithium to hoard in my garage, I'm investing in the companies that oversee the element's mining, processing, surveying, etc. And maybe looking at commodity options in the short term, but given what happened there with aluminum...

Suppose I buy gold to diversify my portfolio, because it has a low correlation with the other asset classes I own? Is that an investment?

Crypto can play a similar role.

Boiled down to the base principles it's the same... money goes in, more money might come out, or you might get less money out. The only difference is predictability and odds.

The entire profit motive from Bitcoin "investing" comes from selling it to another human for more than you bought it for. They're digital Beanie Babies.

Real investments have a return derived from capital. A house, for example, can be rented out for money. Or a business can earn profit and distribute it to its shareholders. You can try to buy and sell houses like people did during the RE bubble for profit, or try to buy and sell stocks like a day trader, but these are still fundamentally different from an "asset" which has no means by which to generate a return on its own.

> Real investments have a return derived from capital. A house, for example, can be rented out for money.

You can buy goods and services with Bitcoin. It's just another currency. Do people claim that forex is not investing?

> Do people claim that forex is not investing?

Yes, all the time. It's clearly speculation (in the technical sense)

> You can buy goods and services with Bitcoin. It's just another currency.

Not really though. You can buy a few novelties online and there are a handful of places that accept bitcoin, but realistically it is not "just another currency", it's an IOU for usable money.

Forex trading is certainly more speculation (or hedging) than investment

Very true. The correct term is speculation.

I think that it will go to like 20k in the next 4 years but there are coins that will grow much more. Bitcoin is the conservative investment.

> Bitcoin is the conservative investment.

Now this is what I come to HN in the morning for.

I talk to these people all the time. Them: "I KMOW stock XXX is going to be at price YYY in time Z." Me: "How much have you invested in stock XXX?" Them: "Oh nothing yet".

If you "invested" in bitcoin wouldn't you keep talking about how great it is?

There's tons of folks on hn betting their shorts on bitcoin and way more exotic things, just that hopefully we can all afford to lose our, uh "investments" ;)

I think he means within the context of the Cryptocurrency market, which he is pretty correct on.

Many other coins have gone up 2x, 5x, even 10x in the last weeks/months.

Bitcoin going from 4K to 20K in 4 years (ie 5x) is relatively tame.

I see things this way as well.

Options and derivatives are risky. A merely volatile asset that never expires is pretty conservative in comparison.

> I think that it will go to like 20k in the next 4 years

Why like 20k (as opposed to like 100k or like 1k)?

Because nobody knows. This has literally never happened before.

99% of Bitcoins are being held by people expecting to sell it to someone else for more than they bought it for. That doesn't seem to be changing.

You just have to do a calculation involving the number of people on the planet to figure out when the supply of new suckers runs dry and the price crashes.

Doesn't that assume every person on the planet will own some BTC before it crashes? It also assumes the rate new people start buying BTC is constant, or even predictable.

The comment was perhaps a satirical take on the "BTC as investment" philosophy's implied endgame.

If more vendors would take BTC, I would gladly buy things using said BTC. I would rather do that than convert to cash and then buy.

If BTC has a good chance of doubling in value over the next few months, then how is it remotely rational to spend it?

Yeah I agree with 20k in 3-5 years. That's conservative. John McAfee said $500k in 3-5 years! Would be nice. :D

McAfee also said he would chop off his penis and eat it if it didn't hit $500k.

I'm bullish on crypto but McAfee is... well something else.

No, but you may still make some money from it before it drops to zero.

Just don't consider it an investment, and don't put anything into it that you'll miss. Investments are tied to real world value, returns and having a say, bitcoins have no real world application or substance outside of financial crime.

> bitcoins have no real world application or substance outside of financial crime

https://www.coindesk.com/information/what-can-you-buy-with-b...

Your product simply isn't valuable if the world wouldn't miss it if it disappeared over night. Outside of keeping money away from legislation what value does crypto currencies have that would be missed?

Try transferring $1 million (or hell, even simply more than $10K) of legitimate cash to another country. With USD you have to jump through hoops. With BTC, it's less than an hour to clear and the transaction fee is peanuts. BTC has properties of physical cash and credit/debit cards. That's valuable.

I don't know about the US, but that would be illegal in a lot of countries.

Depends on who you think will adopt it after you.

Indeed. The question isn't whether you're an early adopter, but whether you're an early enough adopter.

Which Bitcoin?

If you are looking into investing you may want to understand the volatility of assets. Then all assets are practically the same.

Nope.

Bitcoin's network is not scaling well.

I think it would be a mistake to assume performance cannot improve.

Umm anyone who has studied distributed systems understands a fully distributed system cannot scale past a certain limited point. That's not controversial. That's just reality.

LN, for example, is adding degrees of centralization to achieve better scaling. Human systems have a tendency towards centralization and consolidation of power/authority as well, as we see in various ways already with Bitcoin (China, Ver, Core).

There's overwhelming evidence to believe that the future of Bitcoin is much more centralized, at which point it starts to resemble the systems we already have but with horrifying disadvantages: your entire transaction history is public to everyone, your identity can be linked to your wallet through exchanges, etc.

I don't agree with you, but an interested in your view. What in your opinion is the best implementation of a blockchain?

Distributed renewable energy sharing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15349405

‘Dark’ coins like Monero. They provide the highest utility for their most obvious use case: money laundering and illicit, untraceable transactions.

What on earth does that mean

One example is that BTC's transactions costs are getting more expensive as time goes on. They were supposed to start going down after the most recent hard fork, but I don't know if has been the case.

Another example is that the electricity cost to run the system is going up at an unsustainable pace. Eventually they'll have to switch to an new way to propagate the blockchain something other than Proof of Work mining.

Most likely though, these problems will be solved with some kind of hard fork rather than BTC dying.