Bitcoin
I get nervous every time I hear someone say “the next bull market” like it’s a given. It makes me think that there won’t be a next bull market, despite my high conviction that there will be one. The intelligent investor doesn’t believe past performance predicts future results. Though she also doesn’t believe things are different this time either…
Anyways, it’s hard to ignore the eerie similarities between things from the Bitcoin annals and things today. Zooko dug up this post following the Gox hack of 2011 where he says:
For context, after the Great Bitcoin Bubble Pop of 2011, the price of Bitcoin in $ slid to a low of $2. Then in the last 30 days or so it has shown a steady climb—currently at $3.5—on fairly steady volume of trading:
[…]
Now to be clear, I’m not hereby predicting that the price will rise further, I’m saying that the fact that the currency is still traded at all is remarkable! No other digital money design to date could have kept on ticking after taking such a beating.
[…]
My current belief is that there is little you can do with that which would actually successfully steal money from Bitcoin users, and that you would probably make more profit by running a legitimate mining operation than by trying to do rollback attack on the public ledger. However, I’m not entirely sure of that.
Still very true! In the face of negative shocks, when trading profits disappear, Bitcoin leaves us with “just” a completely unseizable money. Even if BTC the cryptocurrency falls in price, Bitcoin the public ledger continues to chug along, largely indifferent to the sentiment of traders.
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