Bigger hands that know how to play the media and the market...

What's that got to do with it?

All you have to do is hodl.

Bitcoin is supposed to be a fast, cheap, private and decentralized way of sending money. That's what gives it its value.

This is kind of a red-herring thing. Peter Schiff does this. "Well, supposedly Bitcoin is supposed to blahblahblah",

but really it's like.... some guy on Reddit or CNBC has said all sorts of fuzzy or sorta wrong things about everything, and these things shouldn't officially represent what Bitcoin is.

Private, definitely not. Fast and cheap, no. It's faster and cheaper to run a centralized database.

(But you can build fast and cheap solutions on top of it, i.e. lightning network, or even just old fashioned banks and Visa cards who keep score in btc instead of usd.)

Trustless and no one controls the parameters and is able to censor or issue new units at whim is the groundbreaking feature.

Having the trustless bits of information is all that matters. And then it will probably be used in lots of ways even besides currency.

However, that's not what's driving the price. People aren't buying bitcoin because they want to USE it. They're buying because they expect someone to pay more for it in future. It's the Greater fool theory that's playing out here

It's different from buying, say shares in a company. If the company performs well consistently, prices increases. If it messes up or gets tangled in scandals and all, prices will fall.

What do you think is different about it? In both cases people are speculating on what the inherent value is.

With Bitcoin the value is more abstract and difficult to figure out whereas with stocks it's relatively easy to know roughly the right value.

But both are attempts to figure out the real value. (Bitcoin isn't used too much now, but the value is based on how it can potentially be used going forward.)

You could say everything is the greater fools theory, if you deny that it has real value. So it's just another form of saying it has no real value.

Which is just an assertion.

My post tried to explain why there's fundamental value. I'd be interested to hear why I'm wrong or why it doesn't have value. But to say "it's the greater fools theory" is just assertion without argument.

When Microsoft stock goes up, I can say "it's the greater fools theory". But people who think it has real value disagree. There's a real reason to expect people to pay for it in the future.

In fact, I wonder if the price would have gotten this far if btc bulls knew some dude could crash the price at anytime.

We always knew that. Why would that not have been known? We also knew that (a) he probably won't because he also understands how valuable it is and (b) if he did, oh well, btc is still btc and nothing has changed fundamentally.

This is kind of another form of suggesting it does not have real value.

I bet stocks often have big hodlers who have a huge % of them. But people don't usually worry about omg what if they sell. Because the fundamentals won't have changed and you know it still is what it is and there's value there. And even if the market was shocked in the near-term, it would just be an opportunity to buy cheaply and eventually rise back to its correct price.

Of course, he can't control all miners but he's got enough cash to dominate the scenes.

What would he do with it? Jeff Bezos has 5x all of Bitcoin. If wealth can control Bitcoin, there's no shortage of people out there who could take a swing at it. Satoshi is a smaller player by comparison.

Besides, most people would readily listen to what he has to say, doesn't matter what. He could say btc has been hijacked and he's working on a better Blockchain and waited for FUD to set in

He'd ruin his legacy in one swoop. People who like Satoshi aren't usually the type to take something on faith and look no further into it. So he's kind of doomed and did it wrong if he wants to be diabolical manipulator man.

Weak hands might fold if this happened. But it would have no lasting impact other than people realizing Satoshi was kind of a weirdo.

The smart money isn't holding Bitcoin because we think it all hinges on what somebody says about it, even if that somebody was the founder.

(And founder really just means "person who discovered it". It's math. It's natural to our world and was waiting there for somebody to find and would have been found by someone else. Satoshi found it, but it doesn't mean he controls it now.)

But if he's connected to some syndicates, as some conspirators alleged, then he (or they) have got real power.

But then he'd have that anyways. That's what I mean, finding his identity wouldn't matter. If he's a CIA end-boss or something, he has those powers anyways.

With a proper revenue sharing formula, there's nothing preventing mining firms from merging together. (remember when two mining firms on BCH 'hijacked' the network to prevent an attack.)

I don't follow BCH at all, but this kind of confirms what a joke it is. BTC people warned that branching off into another chain will make both chains less secure. (Particularly the gimmick new one.. but to a smaller extent it hurt BTC too to whatever extent it pulled people over.)

BCH super centralized because it's small and.. imo pointless and not going anywhere. I don't think it's a good example for the theory of how monopolies play out and whatnot.

It's like if you sold popcorn in your cafeteria in middle school, it's too wonky of a situation to draw any conclusions about how it would happen in a full economy.

Read estimates on expected power costs for btc mining in the nearest future? It's scary. There are other costs too.

High startup cost isn't the important part of the equation tho. At least not from what I briefly read from the wiki page that you linked, or from my own little imagination. High startup cost relative to a small/contained market is what's important.

Just the high startup cost... There's still no shortage of people who can take on that cost.

If it's profitable for one, other people will see the same opportunity.

Sure, it won't be decentralized in the sense that we can mine on our laptops like the vision some people had originally.

But needing to be done by more specialized, larger players is different than it being a monopoly.

It's simply more efficient to have two or three miners doing the entire work.

I don't see why that's the case, necessarily.

Mining is an equilibrium thing where the more mining power that's out there, the tougher it is for everyone to get a piece of the pie. So I imagine most of the mining will be done by a finite number of players.

Whether that number will be 2 or 3 or more like 8 or 9 or 50 or 100, I don't know. Whatever skins the sheep at the fastest and cheapest rate is what's most efficient. I don't know why that would mean 2 or 3 players or how you know that or what it's based on.

And 2 or 3 still isn't a monopoly.

After all, it's not as if they can improve the service provided. They only have to confirm transactions and record them.

The improvement is in terms of how quickly/cheaply they can do it.

It's a game of the best equipment matched with the cheapest electricity, basically (and always wanting to make sure you end up generating enough revenue to justify the investment).

I'm not anti btc. In fact, I'm trying to see how I can get in before its too late. But sometimes, I enjoy being the devil's advocate

I know. You're the gray.

Being devil's advocate is good in the sense that it's good to scrutinize. Hopefully everything you say tho is your real thought process and you actually mean it and stuff.