I stopped being annoyed by crypto generally when people stopped pitching me insane scams of how the entire internet 2.0 was going to run on blockchain (its not) and they accepted its a fun gambling vehicle.

Exactly. It frustrates me that the term "investment" has been stretched to include raw speculation. People are welcome to do either one, but it's dangerous when people confuse zero-sum and positive-sum games. Buying any currency, crypto- or otherwise, is like playing the ponies: for every dollar won, there's (at least) a dollar lost. That's very different than investing in a company, which hopefully uses the money to create value.

that‘s not true.

Would be true if bitcoin was full premined, but it wasn‘t.

There are still 900 new bitcoins mined per day, and with an open source / patent free environment the space is a competitive market, the cost to produce one should tend towards the price of selling it (less so when the price rises quickly).

So how is at least a dollar lost (for every dollar won)?

The new coins aren't handed out generally. They are rewards to the "miners". They're relevant only for people going into the mining business. I'm talking about price speculation.

For people speculating, there's always a buyer and a seller. If I buy $100 of Bitcoin from person A and then later sell that for $101 to person B, then I have gained a dollar. A dollar that A would have gotten had they held on, or B would have gotten had they bought in earlier. It's a zero sum game. Except that everybody involved is paying transaction fees, putting in otherwise-valuable time, and taking risk (e.g., of theft), so in reality it's a negative sum game.

That's very different than actual investing. If I put $100 into a friend's company, then they will hopefully use that money to create something more valuable than the total investment. I'll come out ahead, but so will my friend and my friend's customers. That's a positive-sum game.

If your point was that bitcoin is worse than zero-sum because it generates net losses, then you're right.

It's volatile, but the overwhelming trend has been upwards. Historically it's a great investment if you can weather volatility

> overwhelming trend has been upwards

You’re cherry picking your price analysis time period. Last year I could have said “BTC has trended down tremendously the last 2 years” and I’d have been right as well.

I'm looking a lot further back than two years. What I said is true even if you ignore the current run up.

If you want to make the opposite argument, that it has a downward trend, you have to cherry pick a fairly small period.

This is a pretty silly comment. It's you that's cherry picking. The overall trend of Bitcoin over its lifetime has been up. Any complete analysis of its time series would tell you that. Buying at any point in its history would have been a good idea.

This is the same argument Wirecard shareholders always made.

No it isn't. I am not arguing that the price going up makes it good. That would be silly. I am merely disputing the characterization of the prior comment as 'cherry picking'.

Bitcoin never dropped below its previous peak.

You have to cherry-pick narrow enough time period to see bitcoin dropping in price.

If you pick sufficiently large time period bitcoin always grows. This screms 'investment'.

So did Enron

Except that bitcoin books are open and they don't describe the thing, they are the thing.

Do any simple technical analysis and you will find an upward trend over its existence. You don't look at a narrow window.

Technical analysis has continually been shown to not work in predicting future prices.

I am talking about past prices.

While HN pundits have clearly been much more successful at it.

So is roulette if you win. A "good investment" in many contexts has a 20 year lifespan and low risk profile, so TBD.

I'm not saying its bad, but its an extremely high risk investment so not suitable for the money you can't afford to lose. I've heard of many people withdrawing superannuation to put into crypto (or using credit) for example.

I really dislike the way the finance industry has been conflating two notions that - while related - are actually different: that of volatility and that of risk.

Volatility results from the fact that the markets have a very hard time pricing an asset (because the asset's properties are hard to understand and its future behavior is therefor hard to predict).

This results in the creation of noise on the price signal.

It does not mean the asset is inherently bad. It just reflects lack of knowledge.

Well I don't think roulette is a good comparison, roulette has a capped upside with a known, negative expected value. Agree with the rest of your comment though.

Over period of 10 years behavior of Bitcoin price was extremely predictable.

https://miro.medium.com/max/1838/1*Ao2C0phpSfknHvorWl2a3Q.pn...