from Hacker News

More than half of Bitcoin investors are in the red, study says

by tonyjstark on 2/13/22, 12:05 AM with 93 comments

  • by disruptalot on 2/13/22, 12:54 AM

    > By collating all such timestamps, Ndinga’s firm can aggregate the cost basis for every bitcoin transaction on record.

    If i'm understanding the methodology here, the assertion that it translates to investors is really flawed. You can't assume:

    - a transaction appearing on chain constitutes a buy

    - that the transaction represents 1 investor

    - that 1 investor = 1 address

  • by Animats on 2/13/22, 2:06 AM

    Well, of course. It's zero-sum. For everyone who gets fiat out, there has to be someone who put fiat in.

    The way they measured this may not be meaningful, though.

  • by chrisma0 on 2/13/22, 1:39 AM

    The data these statements are based on seem dubious? Or is that just me?

    > if you bought in 2014, we would know that [someone] bought at 5pm CDT

    But if I bought BTC on an exchange, e.g. Coinbase, then that purchase would not necessarily be recorded on the blockchain, right? Just CB internally updating a value in their DB. All BTC buying and trading would be a larger superset of the collected data.

    Also if I transfer 1 BTC from one of my wallets to another, then that counts as a buy/sell transaction for this dataset!

  • by KasianFranks on 2/13/22, 1:05 AM

    To keep things in perspective, twitter (TWTR) is trading below its IPO price.

  • by shrimpx on 2/13/22, 1:13 AM

    The claim in this headline is almost as trivial to guess as "100% investors are in the green" when bitcoin is at ATH.

  • by robbrown451 on 2/13/22, 1:30 AM

    This is unsurprising. The cost to mine it is lost.... that isn't coming back. So it is a supremely negative sum game. Clearly a lot more money has been lost than made, and that which has been made is essentially borrowed from the future.

  • by rvz on 2/13/22, 1:00 AM

    I mean, it's not really a surprise [0] when you have lots of people expecting BTC to 100K by 2021 and then buying BTC at $69K and holding it all the way down. Then they end up thinking that DOGE will be over $1 by the end of August 2021 and betting $10K with random people that it will happen. Well [1].

    It's no wonder they are all in the red.

    [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27206314

    [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27046019

  • by 300bps on 2/13/22, 12:59 AM

    Speaking as someone who mined BTC profitably with a GPU and has my ETH mining rig churning away with gminer on flexpool.io right now, I sell everything I mine as soon as I get it.

    I see no legitimate utility in it. It has enabled scourges on society like ransomware, wasted massive amounts of energy.

    web3 is based on the false premise that people want to make 100 decisions per day to pay half a cent to read someone’s blog.

    Big money NFTs are generally just a simple tax scam. Person X makes 10 NFTs, sells one to Person Y for $10,000. Donate the 9 remaining for a $90,000 write-off. Person Y does the same thing making 10 NFTs, selling one to Person X for $10,000. No money changes hands and only one losing out are other taxpayers. Other people see NFTs selling for big bucks and start buying them too thinking they’re investing rather than misunderstanding the scam.

    The most ridiculous claim I see repeated now is that blockchains like BSV will replace cloud services like AWS.

    I’ve spent many years making a modest amount of money with it; I just see all of it as just nonsense.

  • by cam0 on 2/13/22, 2:46 AM

    This is a snapshot statistic that is rather shallow. The more interesting point is the distribution of wealth in BTC. The majority of "investors" are scrounging to buy a fraction of a single bitcoin, while wealthy VCs, family offices, LLCs, etc etc are owners and are continual buyers of hundreds and thousands of bitcoins. Just think about how much BTC the Winklevoss brothers alone must own, and then add just two more people - Marc Andreesen and Chris Dixon. I'd love to know how much BTC these four men alone are in possession of...

  • by anshumankmr on 2/13/22, 1:32 AM

    To be fair in any speculative way to earn money, a lot of people are in the red. I lost of fair deal of money myself, in stocks.

  • by hamiltonians on 2/13/22, 1:20 AM

    it goes to show if you want to get rich fast you need to be early and not succumb to hype.

  • by LorenPechtel on 2/13/22, 2:11 AM

    Well, duh! Bitcoin produces nothing, it shouldn't really be called an investment in the first place. Look at the other "investment" that people like: gold. Likewise, it does very badly for most buyers.

  • by Zhenya on 2/13/22, 12:49 AM

    Investors… more like get rich quick dreamers pumped by celebrities with little or no underlying knowledge of the tech or economics.

  • by tacosbane on 2/13/22, 1:19 PM

    given that bitcoin is no longer a currency and its lack of liquidity, i'd say you're in the red until the moment you exit for more than your original position

  • by elorant on 2/13/22, 1:33 AM

    If that's true it means that all those people got in while Bitcoin was north of $50k. Which is ridiculous. What were they expecting, to reach a fucking million each?