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Ah I see https://www.amazon.com/Are-Missing-Real-Estate-Boom/dp/03855...

One can invest in Bitcoin if one wants, but only because The Market Can Remain Irrational Longer Than You Can Remain Solvent

⬐ Rallerbabs

Fiat is at the end of its lifespan. People are seeking refuge in bitcoin now. It's deflationary by design, which makes it an excellent store of value. It's value has only been going up for 12 years straight now. No bubble to be seen here.

https://hope.com

The crypto market is now just gettings its first billionaires to invest in it (Michael Saylor, Elon Musk, GrayScale, etc.), and the market cap is still small. This is just getting started.

https://bitcointreasuries.org/

⬐ cableshaft

I would agree there are people that are buying in now that think there's no risk that Bitcoin will go down, and think it's only going to keep going up, and will probably sell as soon as it drops and lose a lot of money.

There's definitely a risk it could go down. Bitcoin has been super volatile in the past, and has cratered to 20% of its price before and probably will again. Might even be relatively soon (within a year, I'm guessing).

But people who have held on to the asset through those dips are now doing incredibly well, assuming they sell before the next major dip (and probably even if it they don't, 20% of $48,000 is $9600, and if they bought while it was $3500 a year ago, that's still triple what they bought it at).

People who have bought and held since it was $220 back in 2015 are likely doing extremely well.

There's very few assets out there that can offer 200x returns in just five years.

⬐ blueblob

In my mind this comparison isn't exactly the right way of looking at it. Most of the early buyers who held on bought full shares of bitcoin before fractional shares were an option. The people buying it at 48,000 are likely buying fractional shares. So they're not necessarily invested at the full risk of losing such a significant amount of money. I think this is part of the reason it's going up.

⬐ cableshaft

Pretty sure it's always had fractional shares. I was following it somewhat back then. Granted, it was worth so little that most people didn't bother except for maybe the fees, but it was fractional by design from the start, I'm pretty sure.

Regardless of people buying fractional shares, I see plenty of people on the bitcoin subreddit going "I'm a noob at bitcoin, and FOMO bought 0.1/0.2/0.4 coin yesterday for $46k, did I make a mistake, is it about to drop?"

Those people are still putting in thousands of dollars, and some of those people probably aren't so financially stable that they feel comfortable seeing the price of bitcoin drop 20% in 48 hours like it did a month ago, they could end up selling and losing thousands of dollars as a result.

I only put in a little every month, money that I'd probably just waste otherwise, so I'm really happy it's up but I'm not super stressed when it drops. But I acknowledge that not everyone does what I do.

⬐ blueblob

Fair enough

⬐ Rallerbabs

The real estate & bitcoin comparison is apples & oranges.

Real estate existed (and still exists) in a world of inflationary government IOUs (read: fiat). People were taking out too many & too large loans. Ofcourse it was going to go bust. People were talking about it. The author of the book he linked, was being a contrarian.

Bitcoin has created its own reality, which has only just started to gain traction. It's the early days of the dot com boom. It's the early days of SEO.

Every informed individual sees the writing on the wall. Something doesn't grow for 12 years straight, unless it's got something interesting going on.

To state that bitcoin is going away, is the equivalent of stating that the Internet is just a fad that will soon die out. It's an inherently contrarian view.

⬐ cableshaft

I'm not arguing it's going to die out. I may or may not be one of those someones who has had at least a little bitcoin since it was priced $220 (or earlier).

But while we may be nearing (or at) the end of the era of crazy drops, where everyone thinks "Oh crap, it's all over, time to jump off the ship!" and bitcoin is now in a 2+ year bear run, I can't discount the possibility, and the price still swings up and down in price quite a bit even as recently as two months ago, so I think it's possible that we could see see a fairly big, somewhat sustained drop again (maybe not a whopping 80% drop, but 30-40% maybe? I'm also hopeful it won't last as long, like maybe only 6-12 months, not 24 months).

⬐ Rallerbabs

The bear market was actually closer to 3 years. But that ended a while back. It's now solidly in a bull market.

Bitcoin is fantastic. But even fantastic assets can become overvalued. And indeed, this will happen again. There will be another bear market.

I keep myself up to date on the market sentiment every day. I have been doing this for years now. The current sentiment is that we are in the middle of the bull market. Both billionaires as well as retail buyers have only just arrived.

Everything is going much, much higher for at least the rest of the year.

If the market cycle repeats like last time, the bull market will last at least the larger part of this year.

If the cycle is lengthening, as you'd expect when market cap grows larger, then the current bull rally will last longer still: say... to the end of 2022.

The question is: are we currently at the knee of a larger S-curve?

If so, then we are truly witnessing a rare event, in which asset appreciations will truly blow us off our socks.

In such an event, bitcoin would become too scarce for it to do another 85% retrace, which is what it's done in previous market cycles.

(Any by the way... the 30-40% figure are considered normal retraces, of which we usually have multiple during a larger bitcoin bull run.)

Billionaire Michael Saylor from Microstrategies is saying that he's not selling. Billionaires are, in this regard, different from retail, who do sell.

The only way to estimate bottoms and tops successfully, is to be right on top of it every day of every week.

You snooze, you lose.

⬐ cableshaft

Yeah I don't really think we're actually in disagreement here. I pretty much share your thoughts in this comment.

⬐ Rallerbabs

Wasn't arguing.

Except for whether we're in a bear or bull market. It's definitely a bull currently.

⬐ cableshaft

Wasn't trying to argue we weren't in a bull market right now, just not sure how long it will last. You said basically the same as I did, that it may end within a year. I hope it will last a lot longer than that, of course. Hell, I was hoping we'd be flirting with $50k 2 or 3 years ago.

It looks like it should last longer based on the institutional investment, but I also thought we had enough interest three years ago and suddenly we entered bear territory (thankfully I luckily sold some of my crypto a week before it started to drop for a downpayment on a house, but I held on to the rest for way too long, way too long meaning I never sold, and should have sold and bought back in a year or two later, in hindsight). At least I still have it now for this boom, but I could have had double or triple what I have now.

But I'm watching the market and news like a hawk in case sentiment seems to shift back to 'the sky is falling' suddenly again.

https://www.amazon.com/Dow-36-000-Strategy-Profiting/dp/0609...

https://www.amazon.com/Are-Missing-Real-Estate-Boom/dp/03855...

>>> were the fodder for every economic fear monger, rightly, for literally years

You realize "everyone" and "every economic fear monger" are very distinct groups? Before the crisis struck, those fear mongers were generally thought of as curiosities or cranks, not visionaries. It wasn't that long ago, too early yet to rewrite history.

Moreover, theories like these: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.09/zeros.html http://bullnotbull.com/archive/predictions-2007.html http://useconomy.about.com/b/2007/01/03/2007-forecast-for-th... http://knowledge.wpcarey.asu.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1344 or even this one: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385514344

were pretty popular. At the last one, we've got excellent review from top people at Federal Reserve and Fannie Mae.

>>> There was zero specificity in Taleb's proclamations.

Huge surprise from a guy who talks about principally unpredictable events as the basis of his philosophy. You expect him to talk about black swans and then say "the market would go down X points at day Y"?

>>> In the same way that the world is pretty certain we're going to run out of oil.

Are you sure? http://cnsnews.com/news/article/gao-recoverable-oil-colorado...

If you call current situation in financial industry laissez faire you obviously have no idea what these words mean. Yes, there was some deregulation in 2000s, but there was still huge amount of regulation and government control over the financial industry. None of these controllers foresaw the crisis of 2008, none of them objected to subprime mortgage industry - actually, most of the politicians sung praise to raising home values, better access to homewonership for the poor, and upcoming prosperity for all, and pressed the banks into doing more to help the poor take the loans to get on the property train.

Check out this book, promising ever-rising home prises in 2005: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385514344

Now check out the glowing reviews of this book, quoted on the same page, by no other than chiefs of Federal Reserve and Fannie Mae. You are telling me the problems happened because guys like these didn't have enough power? I've got a nice bridge for sale in Brooklin, are you interested?

>> Regulation doesn't mean nationalization.

For the guy on whose post I was responding it definitely does. Not only nationalization, but also removing democracy and rights of self-rule for everybody but people having enough of some "merit", which I suspect he assumes himself to possess in abundance. I am glad the problem with such suggestions is obvious for you.

The #1 sign we are in a bubble is that people are writing articles saying we are not in a bubble.

For reference, compare the following two editions of a book regarding the recent housing bubble. These were written by the chief economist for the National Association of Realtors at the time, David Lereah.

Original title (2005):

http://www.amazon.com/Are-Missing-Real-Estate-Boom/dp/038551...

"Updated" title (2006):

http://www.amazon.com/Real-Estate-Boom-Will-Bust/dp/03855143...

I think we all know what happened next.

When people start spewing denial, it's time to think about heading for the exits.