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comment by b_b
b_b  ·  3801 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: 1 BTC traded over 1000 USD

    Would you be willing to promise to sell me 100 BTC (or a bag of peanuts, if bitcoin ceases to exist) in five years for a total price of ten dollars? Seriously, with signatures and escrow and whatever we need to make a deal.

Obviously not. There's no upside for me in that case. I'm not going to make a hard price prediction. There is a chance BTC will be worth a decent amount years from now, but if so, it will be through gradual adoption, which will make the price increase steadily. As it stands now, this is a bubble. Bubbles all burst eventually.





wasoxygen  ·  3801 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I don't mean to suggest that you don't make a good point. There is no way I would accept less than, say, $10,000 for the promise to sell 100 BTC in five years. It's too risky. But on the buying side, I get uncomfortable at only $100. There is a huge amount of uncertainty.

    Bubbles all burst eventually.
If your time horizon extends to the heat death of the universe, then this is undeniable. And it has been true of all traditional commodities I know of. (Tulipomania was a great read.) All investments come to naught on a long enough time scale.

But what about Google stock? It was a positive frenzy at the IPO in 2004, when the first stocks went on sale for $85 per share. Was there ever a more obvious bubble? Yet GOOG trades today at about 1 BTC per share.

wasoxygen  ·  3801 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    There's no upside for me in that case.
There's ten bucks (less the cost of peanuts) in it for you. If that's not enough, you can name your price. (For the record, I am in at ten. I would consider it for $100.)

The point is, if you are bullish on bitcoin, you can buy them and hope to gain. If you are skeptical, you can still put money (and therefore credibility) behind your position and hope to gain by shorting bitcoin.

The current graph does make the word bubble come to mind. But this is exactly how it looked running up to $100. I was too skeptical then to buy in, so my money has been earning a safe 0.1% at Wachovia instead of gaining 20x.

People still make money selling tulips.