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Re:It can all go to zero by acdha on Tuesday January 16, 2018 @02:04PM (#16161106)
Look at the BP chart: yes, it dipped but having a real business meant that it didn’t go anywhere near zero and came back up.

Something based on faith can drop all the way to zero and stay there because e.g. everyone bailed to something else and there was no reason to come back.

Re:It can all go to zero by cableshaft on Tuesday January 16, 2018 @03:54PM (#16162445)
I looked at it before I made the post. They went from $60 a share to ~$27 a share in the aftereffects of the spill. It was an example of how these companies with great assets could still lose you money due to unexpected circumstances. I'm not asserting it went to zero. They've actually recovered quite a bit, probably due to the goldfish-like memories of the general public and the moral apathy of most investors.

That's kind of my point, really. If crypto goes low enough, especially if the price is down for no good reason (i.e. it's based on a single country in the entire world cracking down on it, not because the tech stopped being useful or interesting), there will be investors who will think it's underpriced and will jump back in, which will bump the price and draw more people back in, etc etc etc. Bitcoin went through exactly this in 2013-2015. It kept dropping and dropping and dropping, all the news was terrible for it, but it never dropped to zero because there was enough people who thought it was underpriced and bought and held, waiting to see if it would go back up. And boy, if they held through last year, those people won big time.

Re:It can all go to zero by adamnemecek on Tuesday January 16, 2018 @03:11PM (#16161912)
Do we have to have a discussion about the value of non-physical things?

"If everyone stopped using google tomorrow, their stock would go to zero. Investing in google is based entirely on faith."

Do you agree with this statement?

Re:It can all go to zero by acdha on Tuesday January 16, 2018 @03:43PM (#16162322)
That's overly simplified: Google's stock value is based on a history of successfully competing in advertising and receiving billions of dollars, based on their ability to deliver products which billions of people use and many are willing to sign contracts or make ongoing payments for.

Yes, there's some faith involved in assuming that the advertising market won't change overnight or that Google won't suddenly stop being able to compete effectively but that's orders of magnitude less than the level of faith needed to justify the current valuations, especially when the argument is not just that despite being unproven cryptocurrencies are certain to become mainstream but going further to say that a specific unproven implementation is going to win.