<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>erosenbe0</author><text>If you are living in the US or EU then being able to hide assets and transfer without censorship is mostly a bug, not a feature. And eventually the governments will have to do something about it in order to preserve the rule of law.&lt;p&gt;What happens if you are disabled in a horrible negligent accident or defrauded in some conventional transaction and defendant hides all assets and transactions in BTC?&lt;p&gt;I can&amp;#x27;t imagine a long term equilibrium where [Americans, at least] store trillions and trillions of dollars in BTC without substantial additional regulation.&lt;p&gt;Edit: for those in relatively more corrupt, tenuous circumstances then BTC is a net positive, of course.</text><parent_chain><item><author>virgilp</author><text>&amp;gt; ignoring that the ability to independently verify the money supply and being able to transfer money across political boundaries without censorship is probably the most important intrinsic value one could hope for in a MoE&amp;#x2F;SoV.&lt;p&gt;That BTC is not (yet?) money should again be non-controversial, since the vast majority of economic agents anywhere won&amp;#x27;t accept it directly (so you need to exchange BTC for cash first). It does have a decent claim at &amp;quot;store of value&amp;quot;. But, where is the &amp;quot;intrinsic value&amp;quot;? You claim two of them:&lt;p&gt;1. ability to independently verify the money supply&lt;p&gt;2. being able to transfer money across political boundaries without censorship&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t understand either, to be honest:&lt;p&gt;1. You can verify the supply of other things (e.g. company shares) at an independent body. I&amp;#x27;m pretty sure that&amp;#x27;s true for &amp;quot;money in circulation&amp;quot;, too. Ok, the verification is not distributed, but is that distribution so valuable? Or do you actually mean &amp;quot;The supply is naturally-limited and nobody can easily produce tons of BTC out of thin air&amp;quot;? Then, yes, BTC has that property... but, tons of other things do! E.g. why not invest in amber, it&amp;#x27;s probably one of the rarest things in the universe.&lt;p&gt;2. Transfer across political boundaries: is there ANY inherent guarantee? Say US decides tomorrow that trading BTC is illegal, how would BTC protect you from that? Using existing anti-money-laundering laws &amp;amp; global institutions, you&amp;#x27;d be effectively banned from getting back any value from your BTCs (or, doing so would expose you to all the associated risks).</text></item><item><author>frankenst1</author><text>Like most posts critical of Bitcoin it ignores that&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    - Bitcoin becomes less volatile over time
    - Bitcoin was less volatile than TLSA, AMZN or AAPL in 2020 (3-month realised volatility) [0]
    - Bitcoin becomes less risky over time (since despite increased incentives to &amp;quot;hack&amp;quot; it, no exploits happened)
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
It also repeats typical nocoiner fallacies like &amp;quot;it has no intrinsic value&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;gold is used for jewelry&amp;quot;, ignoring that the ability to independently verify the money supply and being able to transfer money across political boundaries without censorship is probably the most important intrinsic value one could hope for in a MoE&amp;#x2F;SoV.&lt;p&gt;New in this post was the author&amp;#x27;s stance to trust the Fed to keep inflation predictable:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;   &amp;quot;as long as the Fed isn’t run by spider monkeys stacked in a trench coat, the inflation is likely to be within reasonable bounds&amp;quot;

   &amp;quot;well-run currencies like the USD, GBP, CAD, EUR, etc. all lose their value at a low and most importantly fairly predictible rate&amp;quot;
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
However, the Fed increased M1 money supply by ~20% just in the 2 months following that blog post and by ~70% in the total of 2020 - an increase unprecedented in the history of the US dollar. 2 of the 3 dollars in your pocket have been created out of thin air in 2020.&lt;p&gt;Believing that inflation rates in the next years won&amp;#x27;t spike as a result requires an amount of trust even more artificially inflated than the USD today.&lt;p&gt;[0]: Daily %-change of TSLA,BTC,NFLX,AAPL,AMZN: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;imgur.com&amp;#x2F;a&amp;#x2F;mE7bSI4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;imgur.com&amp;#x2F;a&amp;#x2F;mE7bSI4&lt;/a&gt; (TSLA is green)</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>BadEconomics: Putting $400M of Bitcoin on your company balance sheet</title><url>https://www.singlelunch.com/2020/10/21/badeconomics-putting-400m-of-bitcoin-on-your-company-balance-sheet/</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>as300</author><text>&amp;gt; Then, yes, BTC has that property... but, tons of other things do! E.g. why not invest in amber, it&amp;#x27;s probably one of the rarest things in the universe.&lt;p&gt;Yes but the amount of amber, gold, silver, etc. on Earth is a known unknown. There are presumably deposits of gold that we don&amp;#x27;t yet know about. The amount of BTC is known. You seem to be conflating rarity with fixed scarcity.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;  Using existing anti-money-laundering laws &amp;amp; global institutions, you&amp;#x27;d be effectively banned from getting back any value from your BTCs (or, doing so would expose you to all the associated risks).&lt;p&gt;While this is true, this is sort of the whole point of bitcoin. Like, it&amp;#x27;s a currency that is independent of any nation-state and acts as a sort of systemic-hedge against governmental incompetence&amp;#x2F;malfeasance. So the fact that it could even be banned by any particular country is kind of part of its value proposition. And, similar to VPN&amp;#x27;s, just because an IP-based technology is banned doesn&amp;#x27;t mean that it&amp;#x27;d become impossible to use.</text><parent_chain><item><author>virgilp</author><text>&amp;gt; ignoring that the ability to independently verify the money supply and being able to transfer money across political boundaries without censorship is probably the most important intrinsic value one could hope for in a MoE&amp;#x2F;SoV.&lt;p&gt;That BTC is not (yet?) money should again be non-controversial, since the vast majority of economic agents anywhere won&amp;#x27;t accept it directly (so you need to exchange BTC for cash first). It does have a decent claim at &amp;quot;store of value&amp;quot;. But, where is the &amp;quot;intrinsic value&amp;quot;? You claim two of them:&lt;p&gt;1. ability to independently verify the money supply&lt;p&gt;2. being able to transfer money across political boundaries without censorship&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t understand either, to be honest:&lt;p&gt;1. You can verify the supply of other things (e.g. company shares) at an independent body. I&amp;#x27;m pretty sure that&amp;#x27;s true for &amp;quot;money in circulation&amp;quot;, too. Ok, the verification is not distributed, but is that distribution so valuable? Or do you actually mean &amp;quot;The supply is naturally-limited and nobody can easily produce tons of BTC out of thin air&amp;quot;? Then, yes, BTC has that property... but, tons of other things do! E.g. why not invest in amber, it&amp;#x27;s probably one of the rarest things in the universe.&lt;p&gt;2. Transfer across political boundaries: is there ANY inherent guarantee? Say US decides tomorrow that trading BTC is illegal, how would BTC protect you from that? Using existing anti-money-laundering laws &amp;amp; global institutions, you&amp;#x27;d be effectively banned from getting back any value from your BTCs (or, doing so would expose you to all the associated risks).</text></item><item><author>frankenst1</author><text>Like most posts critical of Bitcoin it ignores that&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    - Bitcoin becomes less volatile over time
    - Bitcoin was less volatile than TLSA, AMZN or AAPL in 2020 (3-month realised volatility) [0]
    - Bitcoin becomes less risky over time (since despite increased incentives to &amp;quot;hack&amp;quot; it, no exploits happened)
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
It also repeats typical nocoiner fallacies like &amp;quot;it has no intrinsic value&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;gold is used for jewelry&amp;quot;, ignoring that the ability to independently verify the money supply and being able to transfer money across political boundaries without censorship is probably the most important intrinsic value one could hope for in a MoE&amp;#x2F;SoV.&lt;p&gt;New in this post was the author&amp;#x27;s stance to trust the Fed to keep inflation predictable:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;   &amp;quot;as long as the Fed isn’t run by spider monkeys stacked in a trench coat, the inflation is likely to be within reasonable bounds&amp;quot;

   &amp;quot;well-run currencies like the USD, GBP, CAD, EUR, etc. all lose their value at a low and most importantly fairly predictible rate&amp;quot;
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
However, the Fed increased M1 money supply by ~20% just in the 2 months following that blog post and by ~70% in the total of 2020 - an increase unprecedented in the history of the US dollar. 2 of the 3 dollars in your pocket have been created out of thin air in 2020.&lt;p&gt;Believing that inflation rates in the next years won&amp;#x27;t spike as a result requires an amount of trust even more artificially inflated than the USD today.&lt;p&gt;[0]: Daily %-change of TSLA,BTC,NFLX,AAPL,AMZN: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;imgur.com&amp;#x2F;a&amp;#x2F;mE7bSI4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;imgur.com&amp;#x2F;a&amp;#x2F;mE7bSI4&lt;/a&gt; (TSLA is green)</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>BadEconomics: Putting $400M of Bitcoin on your company balance sheet</title><url>https://www.singlelunch.com/2020/10/21/badeconomics-putting-400m-of-bitcoin-on-your-company-balance-sheet/</url></story>