New Bitcoin Mania Has People Making No Sense Again

14 thoughts on “New Bitcoin Mania Has People Making No Sense Again”

1. Because people are making sense when TSLA is worth half a trillion dollars and the Fed breaks its own charter to buy AAPL bonds…

   1. Your comment is a total non sequitur. But don’t worry. This thread will probably be full of non sequiturs within a week, and yours won’t be the most egregious.

      1. Thank-you H for my evening laugh!

2. I too, am not of the “cult of the coin”. I would prefer to spend that money on a ridiculously overpriced Bourbon. At least if the power goes out I can drink it.

3. I’m starting to think that you might dislike Bitcoin even more than Jeff Gundlach.

4. Define bitcoin? As Stephen Colbert said sometime back, “An unregulated, imaginary currency invented by an anonymous hacker, backed by the full faith and credit of YouTube. What could go wrong?” If people will believe that Donald Trump is secretly working to dismantle a world-wide ring of cannibalistic, Satan-worshiping pedophiles led by Hilary Clinton and George Soros, and that a high-level US intelligence source working with him would actually post the play-by-play on some low-level, backwater internet discussion board, then believing in bitcoin almost makes sense.

   1. Thanks Richard! The cartoon light-bulb above my head just lit up.

5. I am a computer person with a background in cryptography and networking. Let me try:

   Bitcoin is a distributed, public, non-repudiatable ledger whose unit of exchange inflates at a fixed rate as enforced by the laws of information theory.

   That wasn’t so hard, was it? Although I see eye-to-eye with H about cryptocurrency as an investment vehicle or as a currency, setting judgement aside, the technology itself is simple to grasp.

   What trips most people up is that BTC is supposed to “be money,” but tries to achieve that by “being the bank,” only without a central authority (or much of any authority, other than consensus among the participating nodes – and yes, the tyranny of the majority applies here. It’s one of the more well-known attacks on BTC.)

   Blockchains do have a future in applications where those properties (transparency, integrity, non-repudiatability) are required among a large number of parties with minimal trust in each other. Money, however, is not one of those applications.

   1. I’m curious about those “laws of information theory.” Please explain how a theory has laws.

      1. Xeger, I’m a computer person as well — I think your comment is spot on.

         1. @Shelden — laws of information theory is a “hand wavy” way of stating that instead of trusting a bank to do a transaction you can trust 1,000,000 randomly selected machines to do the transaction.

   2. I really would like H acknowledging he just got a definition of what Bitcoin is.

      As to the fact that people like me don’t care all that much and just use “liquid gold” as a shorthand? well, it’s b/c what it is is less important than what it does.

      That said, agreed that ‘fundamental’ analysis in the sense of DCF is pointless/nonsensical. You can try supply and demand by taking into account miners and their own costs and what BTC prices/demand do to them. Technical analysis is always possible but… err…

6. A few people have posted here and explained what bitcoin and blockchain is very well already. I just want to add that bitcoin does exist in the same sense that any software exists. Fundamentally, it’s software, made of lines of code, just like every apps in your smartphone app store. It’s like this website and forum we are using, it’s like mac OS or Windows, or any accounting software or game that you might buy. It does have the additional property of scarcity and allows ownership. What the price should be or whether it has any value at all, is simply up to the market.

7. Bitcoin can be valued on the “Tulip Scale of Relative Value”, proven Econometric measurement that dates back hundreds of years.

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