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Re:Ask HN: Is buying a cryptocurrency a bet that the currenc... by devzill on Monday December 18, 2017 @05:56PM (#15956251)
> the reason the price keeps going up is that there is increasing demand for it.

Yes, but I just want to mention demand in this context isn't adoption of cryptocurrencys, but demand to own them. For example if we were talking about a stock, Tesla's stock price may go up because of increased demand for the stock, but that isn't necessarily because there is more demand for Tesla's products, although a predicted increase in future demand could be what investors buying the stock are betting on.

Also, at this level demand owning crypto only makes sense if it's undergos mass adoption fairly quickly. I believe Bitcoin has a market cap of around 3 or 4 times that of PayPal, so that's the kind of mass adoption we'd be talking about here for current prices to make sense.

Re:Ask HN: Is buying a cryptocurrency a bet that the currenc... by eberkund on Tuesday December 19, 2017 @12:35AM (#15958018)
You're comparing the wrong thing, PayPal's market cap and Bitcoin's market cap represent different things. A more fair comparison would be payment volume, in which Bitcoin has done 15B in past 24hrs, whereas Paypal has done 100B in the last quarter.
Re:Ask HN: Is buying a cryptocurrency a bet that the currenc... by patrics123 on Tuesday December 19, 2017 @06:53AM (#15959494)
Do you have a source?

I'd believe the 15B is transaction volume (including investors buying/selling) not payments for regular goods?

Re:Ask HN: Is buying a cryptocurrency a bet that the currenc... by madamelic on Tuesday December 19, 2017 @01:51PM (#15962851)
Someone would have to be dumb to use BTC as regular money right now because of the large transaction fees and long confirmation time.

I am doubtful anyone is actually holding and transacting on clear market with BTC.