> That's because Bitcoin is very tightly held, and the amount of tradeable float is very very small compared to holdings.

By the diamond-est of hands: those who lost their keys.

Which effectively make the total amount of live tokens (the rough equivalent of share count or money supply in stocks or currencies) more deflatory than useful for any application outside of pyramid games. All projections of market cap that include the dead tokens are even more worthless than other market cap projections.

Problem is: there's no way to tell the dead from the merely sleeping. The bigger the share of dark addresses, the bigger the impact of some "old god" dark address lighting up again. And the longer a "darkening deflation" goes on, the higher the impact of some old darknes wake-up would be.

PS: makes me wonder if we might eventually see something like "tokens not transferred since ${some generous date horizon} will get blacklisted starting ${some era switch date reasonably far into the near future for living address to create a lifesign transcribe}" merged into mainline. Or even "get reissued to miners". If that ever happened it would be at a time when total supply uncertainty would already noticeably influence price (basically: if you use it as a value store you need to hedge against possible old god address revival), and most buying/selling during the runup would be bets about the amount of dark addresses lighting up in time.

PPS: obviously I have no idea about governance of the code, but I do acknowledge that very few changes have ever been accepted (as evidenced by the high number of long running forks). I wouldn't expect any of this to happen before the known alive amount of tokens has become a tiny fraction of the dark parts.

Blacklists will be incredibly contentious and will likely never get merged. Even if they do - a fork is guaranteed to happen.

Undoubtedly. But my guess is that the threshold for blacklisting stale addresses would be noticeably lower than the threshold for any blacklisting based on, well, "governance".

You could even conjure up an argument based on block chain "balance of hashrate" security, which I presume is the best type of argument with that audience: "what if, after mining rewards have run out, everybody is just doing value store? No transaction fees for those selfless miners! (will they still be called miners?) One by one they will close their datacenters, difficulty goes down and suddenly the gates are wide open for 51%. Quick! Introduce mandatory keepalive ping transactions or we are doomed!"

Not that I expect this to happen, but I find these musings far more entertaining than the ups and downs of the market.

But surely most of the coins were lost when they were cheap rather than now? If that's the case most of the deflation stemming from lost coins already happened and isn't going to happen in the future, so it's not really a big issue.

Unless they were only presumed lost. Imagine someone had the power to suddenly activate whatever fraction of the contemporary USD supply their family had in 1800, proportionally scaled to the amount of USD circulating now. And in the deflatory bitcoin world, the amount of tokens in circulation might eventually end up being merely a tiny fraction of what some presumably dead addresses hold. An address like that lightning up would be as if the Fed suddenly announced that they just issued a multitude of the USD previously in circulation. Not to banks, as credit, but to some guy (unnamed). "Nice currency you have there, world economy, I have the other half of it. Let's be friends shall we?"

Of course these are more hypothetical end game states than immediate threats (I think, I have no idea what fraction could currently be considered dark), but we can't just ignore theoreticals like that.

Would they even be able to cash out though? Even a small transfer from a presumed-dead wallet can trigger a massive market crash in your scenario. Now if they just want to watch the world burn, that’s another matter.

I see you often comment on Bitcoin negatively, curious why?

It's a substantially-manipulated negative-sum distributed Ponzi scheme. The most blatant example of a naked emperor I've seen in my lifetime. And it consumes the energy of Argentina to achieve as much work as a Raspberry Pi.

OK, but who/what will the top holders of BTC exit to? In what scenario will the price go to zero?

"Bans" are not going to do it. It was designed toward censorship resistance. That moves it to an underground, at best.

The top holders are not going to dump it - they've committed book value assets; mining companies, exchanges - they aren't going to exit.

For their continued existence to make sense they want more things to be traded in crypto, so they invent stuff like "NFT" and "DeFi". Half of it is crap, but I have been around long enough to remember when Wall Street was bullish on "3D Television". Investors always want angles to make their current holdings more valuable, and as of this moment there are far too many crypto projects to be aware of them all. The re-investment rate is huge. Far different from when a penny pumper puts out the "good news" that they have put their logo on a race car and have t-shirts available.

So as I see it, it's either not a Ponzi or everything is.

Would you please not cross into personal attack? The GP comment wasn't good, either, because it's much too generic and repetitive. Discerning readers are weary of this repetition, which is getting shallower and nastier as it continues.

Nonetheless, what you posted was considerably worse. Please don't take threads in degenerate directions.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: we've had to warn you about this repeatedly in the past. It seems like you (mostly) improved for a while—that's good. Please do that instead.

Classic coiner arguments. "Have fun staying poor!"

For the record I:

(1) Bought during the 2017 run-up, and sold around $17,000 in early 2018, and parlayed that into various other investments that have done quite well. I've posted to that effect here in the past.

(2) Shorted CME futures at $56,000, and a bunch of Coinbase and a bunch of Tesla. That's roughly $100,000 USD per contract in profit - deposited directly into my SIPC insured FINRA regulated account with zero counter-party risk, 60% long term capital gains. Not bad for two weeks work.

You worry about your account, leave mine to me :) I'm talking about crypto on its merits, not its price. The merits of course inform my investment decisions.

There are tons of ways to make money on this planet, HODLing crypto is just one among them. I was addressing the question directly: why do I hate bitcoin? Asked, and answered.

But to supplement: the thing I hate most about crypto are the touts and the community.

This is different to hating tiltok though. Ponzi schemes actually hurt real people when they collapse. I think it’s reason able to think that pointing out the emperor’s lack of clothes is public spirited.

Honestly 'its a Ponzi' has been debated a million times, it isn't, except in a really loose description into which any currency or asset could fall. They all rely on someone else wanting to pay more for an asset that you did. That's it.

It's a negative sum speculative vehicle. For every $1 that goes in exactly $1 can come out - minus miner fees. Any gains in welfare are illusory.

Options, futures and commodities are zero-sum, because gains for one party are distributed directly from the other party's losses.

Stocks are positive sum because companies have earnings, revenues and profits. They use this income to grow the business, pay dividends or re-purpose shares. It's absolutely the case that you can get more than $1 out for each $1 put into share ownership.

Hope that clarifies the difference.

> Missed a couple of early opportunities to buy eh?

I was referring to the above. You are incorrect. I'm thoroughly enjoying myself, and this particular advocacy is making the world a better place.

making the world a better place = deny billions access to any financial lifeline they may have.

Those silly Zimbabweans, Venezuelans and Turks, why are they losing their life savings?

Can't they just do smart things like you, and login to an SIPC insured account to short Bitcoin right at the top without any counter-party risk, while their financial advisors manage the rest of their portfolios? Duh.

It finally makes sense, you are from the "let them eat cake" camp.

In those countries a single BTC transaction fee can be a month's wage. Venezuelans know this - they moved 66% of domestic transactions to USD, not crypto. [1] And of course they did, it's strictly a better currency. In every meaningful way.

I'm from the "don't tell them it's cake when it's a sawdust to pump your bags" camp.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-13/venezuela...

Where else should people invest their money?

Stocks are extremely overvalued According to the buffet ratio

And bonds/cash will soon be completely worthless by the time the gov and feds of the world are done with them

Real estate is extremely difficult to buy and sell. Execution is hard.

There’s a desperate need for a store of value, now more than ever (gov of the world are abandoning their obligation of providing a stable fiat)

Do you see any better solution than crypto?

> Where else should people invest their money?

Pretty much any low volatility/world ETF or streak based ETFs (paying out an increasing dividend). If you trust nobody except yourself then get gold.

>And bonds/cash will soon be completely worthless by the time the gov and feds of the world are done with them

Actually, the worst thing that could happen to the US economy is that the USD goes up in value.

>There’s a desperate need for a store of value, now more than ever (gov of the world are abandoning their obligation of providing a stable fiat)

Why would anyone want to buy a "store of value" that is extremely volatile? You put in $1000 and you aren't unlikely to get $1000 back out, either you make a big loss or big gain. People love shouting that assets going up is inflation but when they go down nobody thinks "hyperdeflation".

>Do you see any better solution than crypto?

Even gold is better at the "store of value" meme than Bitcoin. People buy Bitcoin because it goes up, that's all there is to it.

Personally, volatility aside, I don't invest in non-productive assets (be it gold, or other precious metals).

I have a risk appetite so I keep my IRA in this [1]. Then, for taxed investments, I have a core portfolio of the stock from companies I've worked at, against which I sell covered calls. I sell futures options for passive income (not all the time, I'm sitting this move out, for instance). I carved out a chunk for my financial advisor to manage more conservatively.

NFA, of course.

[1] https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=272007

It's really hard to imagine a WORSE store of value than crypto.

only went up 400% this year. Terrible.

Everyone is wiping their tears with dollar bills right now, very bittersweet.

Stores of value are not suppose to increase wildly in value. The purpose of a currency is not speculation, it's almost the opposite.

Not anyone who bought in after January. Let's not cherry-pick dates. It's down 60% this month.

Buy gold then, it is much less energy intensive to produce and hold.

Put everything in gold/ precious metals with no other diversification?

Gold has some funny business with its paper holdings because of the way governments lend it out.