Bitcoin's value isn't 0. It's 0 minus whatever the cost of the inputs is. Labour, electricity and water, hardware and paid software, opportunity cost, etc. It's expensive to print scam casino chips for weird nerds.
chat
Chat is a text only community for casual conversation, please keep shitposting to the absolute minimum. This is intended to be a separate space from c/chapotraphouse or the daily megathread. Chat does this by being a long-form community where topics will remain from day to day unlike the megathread, and it is distinct from c/chapotraphouse in that we ask you to engage in this community in a genuine way. Please keep shitposting, bits, and irony to a minimum.
As with all communities posts need to abide by the code of conduct, additionally moderators will remove any posts or comments deemed to be inappropriate.
Thank you and happy chatting!
Still way above its actual value (0) but headed in that direction.
Wrong. The actual value of bitcoin is negative when you factor in the tremendous energy cost to mine bitcoins.
Value is socially necessary labor time, so those things would actually increase the value of Bitcoin, not lower it. But for it's value to be realized, a commodity needs use value on top of exchange value. Bitcoins have no use value other than their use for facilitating exchange (as a currency). However, since bitcoins are almost never exchanged for other commodities, they don't facilitate much exchange at all. Without use value, the actual value would be zero no matter how much labor and resources go into a commodity. Those inputs are just destroyed.
Bitcoin is the modern equivalent of Marx's concept of socially unnecessary labor (e.g. repeatedly digging a hole in your backyard).
It's only maintained value because socially unnecessary labor is one of the most valuable forms of labor in the backwards neo-capitalist system since it's the only type of labor that the elite can perform.
Seeing this collapse I feel is a canary for a much larger crisis brewing that will snap away a lot of the fantasy value that has been incorrectly boosting GDP over the past decades.
Bitcoin has died 446 times. If you invested $100 each time, you'd have $98,548,050 today
Wildly inaccurate and intentionally misleading.
Look at it this way: if you spent $100 every time bitcoin died, you would have spent $44,600 to own 1045 Bitcoins, which only have value as long as "vibes good".
Isn't that how a lot of the fictitious capital market works in general? Bitcoin doesn't seem fundamentally different to me here than stocks or securities or whatever, it's just slightly more vapid than other similar assets because it's backed by absolutely nothing material, it's just another tool the financial sector money diddlers use to be even greater parasites on society.
backed by absolutely nothing
that is kind of a key difference tbh. like gold without any gold
That isn't a unique feature of crypto though.
Money that derives its value from the material it is made out of is called commodity money.
Money which has no intrinsic value but which everyone agrees can be exchanged for a valuable commodity is called representative money.
Money that derives its value from government regulation and protection is fiat money.
All of these are money and they've all been used by people successfully to supplement barter systems for thousands of years. Moneys don't have to have intrinsic value to be valuable, their value emerges socially.
Has anyone audited Fort Knox recently? Can we see the gold that supposedly guarantees the USD's value? Is there enough to cover all the USD in circulation?
It doesn't matter. Even if the gold standard were still in effect it wouldn't matter (until france demands to be paid in gold) because in practice fiat currency is valuable because we all agree on its value and we believe that tomorrow it will be similarly valued and we will be able to exchange it for intrinsically valuable things. Shared belief in the value of money is sufficient for it to work. Intrinsic value is basically irrelevant.
edit: tbh until relatively recently even the value of gold was mostly socially constructed. Gold's value used be based almost entirely on its rarity, not its utility in industry.
you can say this about any bubble until you can't anymore
this URL will be a lot funnier when it finally does pop
I think bitcoin is something that fools will always dump their money into hoping to sell to another fool for higher price. Even if it's not different from Litecoin or whatever, it has the advantage of being the "first".
(Not a recommendation to buy.)
Monero is going up though!
Down 3.5% today. Monero is arguably the only good crypto coin though since it can be made totally anonymous.
Still find crypto people annoying though when they're like "I just paid for my lunch, my car mechanic, and a new stereo with my monero today" like yeah cool you frickin nerd, every serious business around me would laugh at you for even asking.
I just paid for my lunch, my car mechanic, and a new stereo with my monero today
Yea, even if that were true, no one along the entire chain of debts is paying in Monero, workers get paid in $, they can't be paid in Monero since they have no obligation to accept it, and they have debts to pay in $ (or whatever their currency is).
And I do not think most traders (in real goods/services) themselves like holding Monero (or any non-stablecoin) for long because of exchange rate risk.
Ixnay with the "totally". Chainalysis had monero tracking tools years ago. Seriously doubt they got worse at it.
It's still up compared to days and weeks ago, even if it has dropped a fair amount today. When I posted that it was going up, it had been going up a bit, but crypto is relatively volatile.
And yeah, Monero is only good for a few things. People can accept donations without getting doxxed and people can purchase dubiously legal things. HRT is a good example, if you don't want someone (like the government, or your bank) to know about it, you can use Monero to stay unknown. I buy HRT stuff with crypto. There's also a number of places where you can buy normal things, like Mental Outlaw's merch store based.win (paying with Monero gets you a big discount, even), but that's not Monero's thing reallyl
And yeah, most businesses wouldn't really care about Monero at all, most trade is completely mundane and it doesn't particularly matter if it's anonymous. However, a lot of serious businesses are really into cryptocurrency, since they can make loads of money basically scamming people. Especially now, since Trump has been pretty explicit in pardoning and refusing to prosecute a bunch of cryptocurrency scammers. Trump is doing stuff with crypto, so all the tech company CEO's that are trying to be his buddy are diving into it. But when businesses are into crypto, it's generally a gamble and a store of value to them, they don't treat it like a currency at all.
a lot of serious businesses are really into cryptocurrency, since they can make loads of money basically scamming people. Especially now, since Trump has been pretty explicit in pardoning and refusing to prosecute a bunch of cryptocurrency scammers. Trump is doing stuff with crypto, so all the tech company CEO's that are trying to be his buddy are diving into it. But when businesses are into crypto, it's generally a gamble and a store of value to them, they don't treat it like a currency at all.
I get the impression that a significant amount of crypto is held as a hedge against the collapse of the USD, so the people who won capitalism can stay wealthy after capitalism fails completely and is replaced.
Cryptocurrency isn't a monolith, so while corporate holdings of Bitcoin might be a hedge against USD, a lot of other crypto trading is speculative, essentially criminal, and at the very least unethical.
Yeah, I didn't mean to imply institutional buy-in gives the crypto market and industry more legitimacy. It's just something that's been on my mind this year with the way crypto has become an openly discussed plaything for the richest people on the planet. I vacillate between weighing the "outlast america" motive and the "techlords resent financelords for the power they traditionally monopolise" motive as the primary driver of stupid shit like the "Bitcoin Sovereign Wealth Fund" idea.
essentially criminal, and at the very least unethical
I'd be keen to hear you elaborate on this if you feel like it.
I'd be keen to hear you elaborate on this if you feel like it.
When I get some free time I can write more of my thoughts, but for now you can just check out Coffeezilla and Voidzilla.
Only good crypto, only one worth keeping on hand. If there is a big dip in crypto I'll be buying more
Absolutely, I love Monero and I have a fair (not huge) amount in XMR right now. I've used it to buy HRT and other stuff.
I've given up on predicting the Bitcoin collapse. It has collapsed so many times already. And it's still hundred times higher than I thought it would ever go.
And the AI bubble makes thr Bitcoin bubble look small by comparison.
Bitcoin is not collapsing because it has been fully appropriated by the US government.
The whole selling point of bitcoin/cryptocurrency was that it is this decentralized currency that will eventually topple government-backed fiat currencies and will become the next version of gold.
The exact opposite has happened. Not only has it failed to find actual uses where government-backed fiat currency cannot do (beyond some very specific cases), what it is actually good at - global money laundering operations - is now under the full control of the US government. It is the exact opposite of the decentralization and anonymity promised by the crypto founders.
Now it's basically secured by the state but ironically still less useful as a currency than 10 years ago. But yeah all a mood point since it's only used for speculation now.
Concerning the anonymity. When I send someone mutualaid with PayPal I get their government name (which is often a dead name too), they get my government name. Thiel gets all that info too. I'm a bit uncomfortable with all of that. Seems a lot worse than even just Bitcoin, and altcoins like zcash or Monero have like actually pretty solid anonymity when used right.
is now under the full control of the US government. It is the exact opposite of the decentralization and anonymity promised by the crypto founders.
The founder's name is what you get when you Google Translate "Central Intelligence" into Japanese, which should be a pretty big clue who is behind Bitcoin.
Since 2017 the baseline trend of BTC has been a low-coefficient exponential growth curve with many spikes that last several months before falling back to the baseline.
It currently looks like we are in a spike on top of a spike, and the double-spike has been lasting for well over a year. The baseline looks like it's vaguely in the vicinity of 30k-40k USD.
lots of ETF outflows and redemptions too afaik
One of my lathe predictions was a Bitcoin bailout. Bc there's no intrinsic value there we could easily see a sudden rush for the exits. This will be one to keep an eye on in the coming weeks
TARP for libertarians while we cut snap benefits would be S-tier contradictions. This would be the administration stupid enough to do it. But who are we kidding, the Democrats would do it too
One of my lathe predictions was a Bitcoin bailout.
I figure during Trump 2.0 - there might be one of two crypto bailouts. One, a bailout for crypto in general. All the companies will say they are facing the current crisis and they'll feed like starving hogs at the glorious bailout trough filled with 10s of billions of dollars. Two, a bailout of select companies decided upon by Trump.
Either way - Trump will make billions simply because he's the president.
How would a Bitcoin bailout be conducted... like the FDIC but for crypto? That structure only has the reason to exist for USD holdings. Bailouts are done to companies which Bitcoin is not. What are they going to do, something identical to ensuring a minimum payout for call options, on a currency that doesn't really have everyday use?
Trump was talking about making a Strategic Reserve for Bitcoin during his reelection campaign. The US is already a major holder of Bitcoin just from asset forfeiture, but they were talking about having the US government explicitly invest in bitcoin for the treasury.
So no its not a proper bailout but it is effectively a way to bail out the Bitcoin market by buying any major dips. Think of the the US buying up oil when its price went negative.
My guess : They can set a price say 1 BTC = $100k and have anyone sell their bitcoin there.
Then no one wants to sell it on market for less than $100k since they can just go to the window for the floor price. At worst the Government ends up owning all the Bitcoin in existence (unlikely) ie 21 million, the bitcoiners get $2.1 Trillion I think (most of it is a transfer from the gov since they wouldn't have been able to sell it for anywhere near 100k otherwise).
Maybe the people claiming BTC is nonsense that was always tied to (now also falling) USD are correct...
Call me when it's down enough to fuck Michel Saylor or when Tether implodes
Great time to buy drugz
Why is it 0?
Basically zero labor and assets are paid in bitcoin. You should expect bitcoin to neither increase nor decrease in value, its value is completely speculative and based on sentiment.
What if labor only contributes to value?