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Someone just burned $8 million of bitcoin
(protos.com)
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this post was submitted on 26 May 2026
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You may not value bitcoin but enough people do that each bitcoin is currently worth more than $70k. Value was indeed lost.
Bitcoin is only as valuable as the next idiot is willing to pay.
That's true for literally everything
Bitcoin only has that value.
Everything else has actual value without the obvious drawback of wasting massive amounts of electricity to make a number that means nothing.
If bitcoin had real value it wouldn’t need a bunch of sad dudes to defend it online. No other type of investment needs that to stay relevant and valuable.
But there are enough of them, which makes the value quite high. That’s just reality
Bitcoin is not mandated by any government and yet has managed to rise to a value of over $70k. Your response is to be insulting. Sure thing buddy. Plus your statement can literally apply to anything. Houses are only as valuable as the next idiot is willing to pay.
People need a home. Nobody needs a bitcoin.
Only someone that owns crypto supports crypto. I’d like to meet someone that thinks it’s valuable when they have nothing to gain from it.
Everyone knows corn is valuable. Cars are valuable. Food is valuable.
Crypto is speculative gambling for gambling addicts.
People do need a place to live but the price of a home is not tethered to that. How much has housing increased over the past few years? Is this the same percentage of new people looking for housing?
If governments keep tracking more and more of what you do, or if they push us fully cashless so they can block transactions they don't like, a whole lot of people are gonna start learning about Bitcoin's value proposition. You only fail to see the value in it because it fails to provide value to you specifically.
Bitcoin is great for people that buy cp and narcotics online. Not any better than real money for normal people that don’t buy illegal stuff.
It already has at least one in that it isn't inflationary and so you don't lose any of your money's value over time as a foundational rule, and sort of another tangentially in that nobody can tamper with the money supply, so states can't debase the currency. There's still infrastructure issues in preparing for wider use, but I think people will eventually realize it has more value than none. It may still not be for everyone, but I think it will find its niche in the world.
Nobody can tamper with the supply?
How many crypto scams happen daily? How many people that have lifetime bans from securities are now in the crypto space?
Crypto is wildly volatile. Very few people have made money from it. Those few made massive amounts but the rest of the crypto bros believe it their head that they’re next. It’s so obvious that it’s almost sad.
Investing in the S&P 500 is safer and more reliable than any crypto or individual stock. No need to check it daily like a crackhead waiting for their next dopamine hit.
Nobody in the history of bitcoin had ever tampered with the money supply for it. The vast majority of cryptocurrencies are immune to it, but not all. When I say that, I mean you can't create or destroy coins. You cannot impact the total supply of available money. Well, you can technically burn coins by sending them to uncontrolled addresses, but that doesn't destroy them, just leaves them in a very public box nobody has the key to.
But having a secure money supply does not prevent scammers, correct. It's extremely unfortunate and not something I condone, but it doesn't take away from what I said about the money supply.
Last I looked, everyone who held bitcoin for more than I think 3-4 years had turned a profit, and that's been true at almost every point in bitcoin's history. The overall crypto scene is rife with scam coins and people who think their near clone of bitcoin will replace it despite no real features to distinguish it.
Like I said, on a long enough time line, bitcoin has almost ALWAYS turned a profit, and at many points, it outperformed S&P. But if you wanna get into the broader crypto market, don't do that, it's rife with scams.
“A long enough timeline”
Dude crypto isn’t even 20 years old and didn’t hit the mainstream until the last 19 years.
You don’t even know why crypto goes up or down other than hype. There’s no balance sheet. No profits. No product. Nothing. Just a bunch of gambling addicts waiting to defend it because they know their just only keep value as long as long as it has positive press. How is it not just a pyramid scheme?
Like I said, the long enough timeline is all of like 4 years, assuming we speak specifically of bitcoin. If you held at least that long, no matter when you bought in, you turned a profit.
Bitcoin seeks to fulfill the role of a currency, but currencies are just as or more strongly ruled by the network effect than things like social media. It's almost impossible to see the usage it's capable of before it hits a critical mass of popularity. Even in spite of that, there are communities of people who make and sell things exclusively in cryptocurrency, typically bitcoin. They don't buy it and hold it as an investment. They actually use it as a routine, daily currency where they have complete freedom to transact with anyone, anywhere with no concern for processor fees, credit cards censoring their products, banks holding the money for days, authoritarian controls most people in here don't have to even think of, etc. I understand that the value proposition may not make sense to you, but there are people out there absolutely loving what it does for them and using it every single day as the currency people here think it will never be.
Bitcoin isn't that good at avoiding tracking. Cashless digital payment systems that offer privacy guarantees are possible (e.g. GNU Taler), but anyone who tries to accomplish that with blockchain is doomed to failure before they start. For the same reason why you can't cure illness with snake oil.
Not necessarily. If you transact directly on chain and ever transact with a point that ties your identity to your wallet address, sure, you're very easily tracked. If you put your coins on the lightning network, it uses a method similar to onion routing to pass the money through many nodes in the network in a way that guarantees that the money only sends if everyone cooperates so it can't be stolen in transit, and no transaction is written to the blockchain. Nobody who helped transfer the money knows where it finally landed, nobody publishes anything to the blockchain. Not really any way to trace a lightning transaction short of finding evidence of the invoice at both ends, but you already know who your end points are in that case.
That's why I use it to buy groceries, as any currency can do.
My local grocery store only accepts one currency out of the hundreds (?) that currently exist.
So you claim bitcoin is a failure because it hasn’t already supplanted state mandated currencies? Bitcoin went online in 2009. Still so early on.
Yes, it has failed in its original claimed purpose, that's undeniable. Over the same time period even fucking Amazon gift cards have grown to be a better form of currency, even for anonymous crime, my personal former use case.
That's just a system failure no matter how much you like the idea of "what if money, but even easier to track, control, and steal once the feds woke up"
Bitcoin is easier to track, the ledger is public, but it isn’t easier to control or steal.
No, it hasn’t failed its original purpose. Bitcoin is the first currency of the modern era that the state hasn’t been able to destroy. That is an amazing achievement.
There are different kinds of value. Houses indeed have more use value than a bitcoin which only has exchange value and whose use is entirely in exchange. NFTs and smart contracts were a failed attempt at adding use value to crypto.
The numerical money value of commodities and real property is historically dependent, whereas the use value of a house is vital and inflexible.
No, bitcoin can be sent to anyone anywhere in the world in about 10 minutes. So despite your claims bitcoin isn’t worthless. Housing value is inflexible? That doesn’t make any sense in the slightest. We can certainly live in a house but it’s purchase price is untethered from that fact.
You start with insults so I’m not going to read whatever is you wrote after that.
Fair enough, just having a bit of fun
It is not worth that. It is what speculators might pay for it. It has no inherent value in itself besides speculation. It is pure gambling and the world will be a better place if it completely crashes and burns.
Bitcoin has been traded for how many years now? You can deny reality all you want but it doesn’t make it true. Do you think state mandated currencies have inherent value? Seriously?
Holding it is gambling. So is holding a current gen IPhone. Putting it in a shredder instead of selling it and doing something productive is wasteful and harmful and may even increase value of other similar things.
Bicoins are worth zero man.
That isn’t the objective reality. You may not think Bitcoin has value but the chances of you getting a full bitcoin for $0 are effectively zero.
For what? For 0 what?
Ohbright, you have to measure it in dollars, because it has no value on its own, you have to turn it into real money to use it.
Dollars and every other fiat currency have no intrinsic value. Bitcoin provably takes energy and work to create. Bitcoin can be sent to anyone in the world without spending any fiat. Would you like to try an argument based in reality?
Yes, in the same way a green piece of paper with 10$ written on it is almost worthless. Yet you can buy stuff with it.
(I don't like bitcoin or crypto in general, but I think as long as someone is willing to give you money or goods in exchange for a certain thing then this thing has a worth??)
The difference is thst green piece of paper is backed by an entire country's economy and military, etc.
Crypto is backed by hopes and dreams and scams. WoW tokens are worth more than crypto.
Wouldn't the value be redistributed? If the bitcoin price is driven by the desire for bitcoin liquidity and that desire didn't change, then burning $8 million in bitcoin should raise the value of all other bitcoin combined by $8 million, no? Bitcoin would still have the same number of people willing to pay the same amount to buy bitcoin, they just have fewer bitcoins available to buy. So every other bitcoin in existence just got more rare and valuable.
Logically I agree.