Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Stop Calling It A Bubble.
by
deisik
on 09/06/2017, 17:49:34 UTC
A bubble is when everyone is talking about cryptos, e.g. your taxi driver, the bellboy, etc. Outside of my close circle of tech colleagues zero people are talking about Bitcoin.
A bubble is when something's cost differs from its intrinsic value - a bubble can happen on something which is shockingly insignificant.  Bitcoin's "intrinsic value" is extremely hard to define, so we could just call a bubble whenever the price rises extremely dramatically without much reason (such as now)

I don't think that it is really hard to do

It may be hard to estimate or assess, but this is a different task, anyway. Bitcoin intrinsic value comes from its transactional utility, i.e. its value as a currency and payment system, and this value Bitcoin would have if we removed it from speculation entirely. How much Bitcoin would cost in that case is unknown, but I don't think very much. Just in case, the value that Bitcoin has for being used a speculative vehicle is certainly not its intrinsic value. In this way, it could be safely claimed that Bitcoin is highly bubbled nowadays
Came here to basically say just this, completely agree with you.

I think that in theory, it would even be possible to get pretty exact data on how much intrinsic value Bitcoin actually has, by looking at all transactions and sifting out the ones that are tied to anything other than buying, selling or holding for pure speculative purposes.

In practice, it's pretty hard to do since it would be fairly hard to actually tie transactions to specific purposes, despite everything being recorded on the blockchain

I guess there can be different approaches

We don't necessarily need to analyze Bitcoin transactions as such. We could just look at the turnover rate of merchants that are accepting Bitcoin as a means of payment. It seems that getting this data would be a lot easier. Knowing the amount of goods sold and services rendered in dollar terms (judging by the price of the same goods and services in dollars), we could roughly assess how much Bitcoin would be worth if it were only used for commerce taking a certain number of bitcoins in circulation (and all the way up to the current Bitcoin supply)