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Bitcoin Currency Surpasses 20 National Currencies In Total Value
Velcroman1 writes "More than $1 billion worth of bitcoins now circulate on the web – an amount that exceeds the value of the entire currency stock of small countries like Liberia, Bhutan, and 18 other countries. Bitcoin is in high demand right now — each bitcoin currently sells for more than $90 U.S. — which bitcoin insiders say is because of world events that have shaken confidence in government-issued currencies. 'Because of what's going on in Cyprus and Europe, people are trying to pull their money out of banks there,' said Tony Gallippi, the CEO BitPay.com, which enables businesses to easily accept bitcoins as payment. 'So they buy gold, they put it under the mattress, or they buy bitcoin,' Gallippi said."
time to cash in
http://xkcd.com/605/
captcha:infamous
It's not a bubble! Push the price higher, higher, higher!
Or like has been stated before it's mostly being hoarded. (like when collecting anything, mostly of value to the collector and other collectors but not anyone else)
For example, the value being higher than a Yen shouldn't be a surprise, because there's no common foundation in value. There are simply more Yen than bitcoin. There's no reason to compare the value of an individual piece of currency against another, only the changes over time.
A bitcoin is also worth more than a penny. Why do we treat the dollar as the base unit for comparison there?
So, how do you "short sell" Bitcoin? I'd like to make a few bucks from this ridiculous bubble when it pops.
Bitcoin is probably safer than Cyprus banks.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Who cares what your CAPTCHA was?
They probably surpassed North Korea with their first nickel.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
How long til the web is full of ad banners mining bitcoins?
The article should say that more than 1 billion dollars in bitcoins theoretically exists on the web. Given the horrific problems that a few bitcoin exchanges have had in the recent past, I think some skepticism is warranted. My prediction is that sometime in the upcoming years some kind of attack nobody foresaw will happen on bitcoins and the attackers will get wealthy and the bitcoin holders will be left holding dust or bitcoins will simply be another bubble that collapses. I don't see a bright future for bitcoins.
Just a bit of Humor in good fun! "Bitcoin Miners Threaten Strike Over Fed Regulations!"
There is a fixed supply of Bitcoin and increasing demand. $10,000 per Bitcoin is posable as Bitcoin can be divided into many fractions. The price only goes UP! When the US thought about creating the new world order biased on the control of the remaining oil reserves and gold they forgot about the "X" factor.
Myself being a multi-trillionare (in Zimbabwean dollars), I'd like to comment that it may not be hard to surpass some currencies.
If we colonize Mars, it won't be the World Wide Web anymore. UWW?
Cyprus has set a €300 withdrawal limit per day for their banks, to tame a bit the money escaping.
And when that happens you'll all wish you bought 1000 coins for a few cent. Now look at you all rushing to pay $100 per coin. By this time next year it will be $1000 per coin. A year later it will be $5000. Then 6 months later it could be $20,000, then $100,000, etc.
...I wonder which of the editors here has some sort of vested interest in making sure the value stays high and people keep talking about it?
So how does this compare to the value of the worlds tulip bulbs?
If you wait for it to pop this time you'll miss out. It will never be $2 a coin again. In fact it's going to reach $1000 a coin by the end of the year.
I have some experience with both cryptography and decentralized systems of this kind. Which doesn't make me an expert. But I know enough to ask questions. I have had grave concerns about the validity of their design since I first read about it on slashdot some years back. It seemed to me the case had not been made that bitcoin was not vulnerable to rapid destruction of value, due to attacks on fundamental flaws in its design.
The thing that really surprised me was that people decided to try to use it anyway. But I guess our desires often cloud our judgment. As much as I would love a decentralized digital currency, I do not believe it yet exists. I wouldn't invest 90 cents in bitcoin.
Many currencies can appear to be stable until they're not.
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If you understand how it's designed, it will never again go below $50. It will probably rise to $1000 by the end of 2013. And by 2015 it could and probably will be in the tens if not hundreds of thousands.
So those who put their entire life savings into bitcoin, those who will put $100,000 or so in today will be millionaires or perhaps even billionaires a few years from now.
another bitcoin submission...
yawn.
Quote me. A year from now it will be approaching $1000 a coin. It will never be $17 a coin again.
Have you seen the actual numbers? Who owns the US national debt?
- China 8%
US gov't and pension funds 46,1%:
- The Federal reserve 11,3%
- Social Security fund 19%
- US households 6,6%
- State & local gov't 3,5%
- State, local pensions funds 2,2%
- Private pension funds 3,5%
http://www.businessinsider.com/who-owns-us-debt-2011-7?op=1
It getting to be a little much. Have you really got so much money invested in Bitcoin that you are willing to sacrifice /. to advertise it?
You need to find either
a) somebody willing to let you borrow their bitcoins in return for a reasonable interest rate, so you can sell them on the open market, or
b) somebody willing to take the other side of a put option trade (so you can buy them)
I'm no expert in bitcoins but I don't believe either of these possibilities exist (at this time).
I've kind of been interested in the bitcoin thing and was actually mildly favorable but this is like....the fourth article on this this week and is so blatantly stupid I know now it is just a giant scam.
Enron's stock went up too. You might want to think about the fundamentals of what you're buying.
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But there seems to be this misunderstanding that China can just "call in" the loans. They can't. US securities are sold for fixed periods of time. They pay off on a given date, period. There is no ability to call them due early.
So all someone can do who wishes to cash out early is to sell them on the open market, and of course if you dump a ton of them the price will crash meaning you'll take a sizable loss on your investment.
People really need to go and look at how public debt in the US works before they chatter about it. Too many think it is the US going to China The Loan Shark and begging for money on any terms. Quite the opposite, it is China buying US securities (denominated in US dollars, held and tracked in the US exchange) when they are auctioned off.
quit comparing bitcoin to USD. We all know inflation on the dollar is crazy and trending toward never getting better. If you truly want to measure worth, compare the bitcoin to gold or oil. I have no doubt bitcoins could one day be worth $1000. I also have no doubt that a tank of gas could one day be worth $1000.
Slashdot needs to provide a way that would allow us to hide stories based on some word or phrase in the title.
I might even pay real money if I never had to see a "BitCoin" story show up on Slashdot ever again.
(Posted AC because I've already moderated in this thread)
Invest all bank assets currently held in Cypress, Greece, Italy and Spain, invest them all in Bitcoins, and wait... It will drive the value of bitcoins through the roof, give the currency the universal acceptance it lacks, and save the EU, all in one fell swoop!
Boy, wouldn't that tick off the Fed.
It's interesting to note that a currency used almost exclusively for procuring illegal drugs and illegal pornography is doing so well.
Shouldn't this news by printed in High Times instead of Slashdot however? Nobody cares about the plight of drug addicts or perverts here.
Speculation is what kills economies. Idiots trying to make money by doing nothing are going to kill this system before it even finds its footing.
Money is supposed to make goods exchange easier. Bitcoin's promise lay in the fact that it wasn't linked to fucking banks. But people are scurrying to change that, to play the same stupid games which crash economies. It won't be long until some moron starts lending Bitcoins at interest, if they aren't doing that already.
I have zero interest in Bitcoins until I can easily exchange it for food and shelter and other necessities. Until then, being
worth more than X number of dollars is meaningless, and by that time, the asshats of the world will have figured out how to rig the system into another rent collecting scheme.
Wow, that's like infinity dollars per ounce - it makes gold seem cheap.
I read the Nakamoto paper. Here are my concerns.
The system is secure as long as honest nodes collectively control more CPU power than any cooperating group of attacker nodes, or so it is hoped. But pervasive communications are also assumed so that chain length can be measured, for the CPU-power argument to be possible to begin with. Consider how many key elements in the protocol require extensive communication, for instance to determine chain length. Between botnets, transparent proxies, ASICs, domestic and foreign powers with extensive eavesdropping, intercept, and computational resources... who by the way might be rather put out at having their currencies threatened... do you really want to trust any hard earned cash to this system? Or... if it is easy to make or get bitcoins without hard work, how much can they really be worth?
Meanwhile, is it anonymous, or has this massively transparent electronic P2P currency been designed to keep a particularly difficult to erase record of every transaction completed with it? From the paper:
Some linking is still unavoidable with multi-input transactions, which necessarily reveal that their inputs were owned by the same owner. The risk is that if the owner of a key is revealed, linking could reveal other transactions that belonged to the same owner.
...aaaaaaand, the section ends. So good luck, silk-road purchasers.
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...and, by the way, the argument about bubbles holds for currencies, stocks, bonds, commodities, real property, or anything you can exchange. So saying "it isn't stock" misses the point being made.
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$1 billion "dollars" "worth" of bitcoins now circulate
Fixed that for ya.
Bitcoin is in high demand right now [...] because of world events that have shaken confidence in government-issued currencies.
That does not make sense. If you don't trust the government-issued currency, then you don't trust that government to survive too much longer. At which point, your bitcoin means jack and shit in the face of your ability to either a) defend yourself against those who would take your actual property by force, or b) make yourself useful to those who can do the defending.
A corrupt slashdot luser has infiltrated the moderation system to downmod all my posts while impersonating me. Nevermind that my calling attention to this is a blatant invocation of the Streisand Effect!
Again, IT ISNT ME, I wouldn't waste my time posting to every forum post like this, even though I actually do!
Nearly 180++ times that I know of @ this point for all of March 2013 so far, I know because I have obsessively counted them all!
& others here have told you to stop - take the hint, lunatic (leave slashdot)... I will conveniently NOT take that same advice!
Sorry folks - but whoever the nutjob is that's attempting to impersonate me, & upset the rest of you as well,
has SERIOUS mental issues, no questions asked! I know, because I have the EXACT same ones!
I must've gotten the better of him + seriously "gotten his goat" in doing so in a technical debate & his "geek angst" @ losing to me has him doing
the:
---
A.) $10,000 challenges, ala (where the imposter actually TRACKED + LISTED the # of times he's done this no less, & where I get the 180 or so times I noted above) -> http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3585795&cid=43285307 [slashdot.org] Which my OCD then FORCES me to count over and over again!
&/or
B.) Reposting
OLD + possibly altered models - (this I haven't checked on as to altering the veracity of the info. being changed) of posts of mine from the past here!
Not that the posts that *I* actually made are of any real value to any of the discussions I have posted them to anyway though! THAT ISN'T IMPORTANT! He just keeps on posting! ONLY I CAN DO THAT!
---
(Albeit massively repeatedly thru all
threads on /. this March 2013 nearly in its entirety thusfar). The FACT that I do exactly the same thing which is WHY he is trying to impersonate me, and it's clearly pissing me off enough to cause me to rant and rave publicly is inconsequential!
* Personally, I'm surprised the moderation staff here hasn't just "blocked out" his network range yet honestly! In fact, I'm surprised they haven't "blocked out" BOTH of our network ranges! Maybe using a HOSTS file!
(They know it's NOT the same as my own as well, especially after THIS post of mine, which they CAN see the IP range I am coming out of to compare with the ac spamming troll doing the
above...).
APK
P.S.=> Again/Stressing it: NO guys - it is NOT me doing it, as I wouldn't waste that much time on such trivial b.s. like a kid might... Except when I do! Like right now, and like I have done on just about every story submitted the past 2 days as seen below!
http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3595609&cid=43312085
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3595561&cid=43311901
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3595381&cid=43311677
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3595009&cid=43311781
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3593009&cid=43307981
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3592973&cid=43307757
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3592933&cid=43307447
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3592647&cid=43307493
A currency's significance can't be understood by the size of the money supply alone. USD-equivalent volumes of bitcoin transactions is probably a better measure.
because when it comes down to it, the value is the same, as it is for the toy money I made as a kid. there is no backing, and who's behind it?
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Can you get one billion dollars dollars from an automatic teller machine machine?
It's extremely lame when you make up the captcha. Seriously, you don't even see the captcha until after you try to submit so you have to go back in and add it. And since none of us see it, I always assume it's made up and that the poster is lame. I also suspect that it's the same person that does it on /. and wonder why not just log in if you're going to sign every post by making up a captcha with it.
Can someone explain to me how bitcoins have any intrinsic value? What's different about a bitcoin and any old unit I make up and arbitrarily designate as a currency? Is it simply because bitcoin value is tied to CPU power?
That is a place where you see that level of volatility. Something that can be worth a ton one week, down a bunch the next, back up, back down, etc. Also has daily volatility like one. If you compare the charts to a thinly traded stock, it looks much more like that than a currency.
Do remember the Internet has a long and perfect memory of claims you make.
THIS is why he's doing it & proof of it, here -> http://interviews.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3585927&cid=43295193 when others pointed out Jeremiah Cornelius forgot to submit one of the "first post spams" masquerading as myself as AC, & mistakenly submitted one of the impersonations of myself as his registered 'luser' name here on /. forums.
Pretty pitiful actually, but like every up to no good idiot does? He screwed up & submitted it under his registered 'luser' name here.
* Jeremiah Cornelius: DO YOURSELF, and the rest of us, A GIANT FAVOR MAN: Seek professional psychiatric help!
(Since Jeremiah Cornelius obviously can't get over the fact he made a spelling error on what it is HE ALLEGEDLY DID FOR A LIVING? That's not MY fault... it's HIS!)
APK
P.S.=> I seriously must have dusted JC (in his mind @ least) for his BAD spelling error & it "got his goat"...
I.E.-> Catching what he claimed to do as a job, for YEARS he left "PENETRATION" (correct) spelled as "PENTRATION" (incorrect) on his resume on LinkedIn & I pointed it out as he & his friends trolled me as usual (webmistressrachel, gmhowell, & crew (probably ALL JC no doubt using alterate emails or TOR to do it as a possible - I've caught "them & theirs" doing it before, ala Barbara, not Barbie = TomHudson (same person))).
So THAT is what has gotten his goat in a technical debate & his "geek angst" could only come up with *trying* to "impersonate me" in every news thread on /. for the month of March 2013 so far!
(Just to attempt to 'discredit me' as a spammer here obviously)
Doing so, by posting that "$10,000 challenge" &/or reposts of my old posts on hosts file value to end users into EVERY SINGLE NEWS ARTICLE POSTED on /. ...
It's all I can think of that *might* cause such a mentally troubled 'reaction' like the Jeremiah Cornelius is doing & there's NO QUESTION he's the one doing this spamming of nearly every posted article masquerading as myself...!
... apk
Does Amazon or any of the other big e-commerce sites take them? Do people pay for porn subscriptions with them or something?
The IRS considers Bitcoin an good not a currency.
You got a citation for that? I'm pretty sure the IRS will consider it a negotiable instrument which is not a good. And yes I am an accountant.
It isn't income until/unless you sell it and realize a profit.
Properly stated until you sell it, it is an unrealized gain and typically is not taxed, though there are some special cases.
Are you the same 'anonymous coward' who predicted a month ago that Bitcoins would be worthless 'a month from now' (ie: Now)??
Because that would be hilarious.
You're the APK of bitcoin forums, aren't you? You probably post about your HOS^H^H^Hreverse time attack in every thread.
is that anyone can create it. If someone figures out a way to create them much faster than today; or some government decides it wants to create some uncertainty in the market by flooding the market regardless of cost of production the value will drop. there is no "full faith and credit" backing its value and will ing to act to proptect its value; in that respect it's more like a stock or freely traded commodity.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
From the article:
Bitcoin watchers and financial experts aren't as convinced. While the two events may be happening simultaneously, there is little, if any, hard evidence to suggest that one event is fueling the other.
Maybe someone needs a refresher in "correlation does not imply causation"?
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
or try Glenn Beck's paranoid ranting... and selling gold during the commercials on Fox "News"
i really hope someone at slashdot is getting a kickback for the pumping going on here
for the rest of you: time your sell right!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It has exactly ZERO value. You can't buy shit with it. Especially when dealing with me, or any sane person who isn't one of the initial miners. Because that would make *them* the new fat cats, ruling the world. No can do, fuck off, thanks, and goodbye.
I'm afraid you're at least somewhat wrong. Gov't bonds are solid investments that have a low, but reliable return.
If you're worried about preserving your wealth, but still need a return to fund your pension payouts, gov't bonds are a "safe" bet in many countries around the world. That's the type of debt Social Security, state and local gov't, pension funds own. The debt is real, the interest payments are real and they have to issue new bonds every year.
A government bond is a bond issued by a national government, generally promising to pay a certain amount (the face value) on a certain date, as well as periodic interest payments. Bonds are debt investments whereby an investor loans a certain amount of money, for a certain amount of time, with a certain interest rate, to a company or country.
You are an idiot.
Obviously there is a bitcoin bubble. It is high time to start selling insurance packages against bitcoin crack. Then resell the insurance within complex financial products and wait for the world to collapse again.
Did you warn them?
http://xkcd.com/875/
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=48521.0
From 2011.
As best I can tell 35.5% of all bitcoins have already been minted. These 7,473,950 coins are all property of existing bitcoin users. There seem to be about 41,280 registered members of this site. I'll be generous and say there are ten times as many bitcoin users as there are members. That means about 410,280 bitcoin owners with on average 18 BTC each. Clearly BTC ownership is more concentrated than this, but lets be egalitarian for the moment.
If we pretended all bitcoin owners were all Americans that is about 0.13% of the population. It's not of course. Bitcoin is intended to be a world currency. So 0.0068% of the world population own 100% of all current and at least 35.5% of all possible bitcoins.
The view on this forum is that the world will come to their senses, throw out fiat currencies and move to something rational like Bitcoin. This of course means 6,000,000,000 people basically begging to use a resource owned by a relative handful of people. Say we just minted up the remaining 13,526,050 BTC and scattered them to late adopters purely out of the kindness in our hearts. That means about 0.00225 BTC for each of them to use in rebuilding their economy. Sure 18 BTC on average doesn't make us feel very rich. But it is 8,000 times what everyone else would have if we stopped competitive minting today.
But we won't stop competing of course. Sometime around Pearl Harbor Day of next year Bitcoin will hit the 50% distributed mark.
----
By that day, how many active Bitcoin users and daily goods trades do there need to be to make a sustainable Bitcoin economy viable?
----
Because to potential new adopters, after that point Bitcoin is going to look like a new a 21,000,000 coin currency with a 10,500,000 coin pre-generation that went to the creator and his "friends". Certainly people will stop caring about Bitcoin long before they show up on our doorsteps with signs saying,
"We are the 99.9932%!"
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
Bitcoin isn't all about being an investment, it offers easy transactions at a much lower cost than systems like paypal, credit cards etc.
The side effect of mainstream adoption as a payment system will just happen to make bitcoins worth a hell of a lot more than they are now so may as well buy a few along with some silver and gold in anticipation of what seems to be an inevitable economic collapse.
Because we all know how valuable Beanie Babies were at their peak. There is no doubt in my mind that a rebound will come any day now...
It is interesting how mainstream media talks about this: Sky News Trying to scare people away from using Bitcoins (30Mar13) http://www.newbitcoinworld.com/2013/03/sky-news-trying-to-scare-people-away.html Bitcoin is awesome concept and decentralizing is the key here. Currency of the revolution - by the people, for the people, with the people :)
As we know mining get more difficult by the day and now that we have these ASIC's it's even more difficult to do mining with normal computers. I just tested this bitcoin mining service and deposited about 7,5 BTC. You can rent hashing power for a great return. It's a great way to do Bitcoin mining if you don't have needed machinery to do mining yourself. This is worth of cheking out: http://www.pyramining.com/referral/harzdqpse
I think the question is, are they circulating, or are they being hoarded? The answer is, people are buying them as a way to maintain their wealth.
Once bitcoins start being used to buy and sell things, instead of just to hold, we might see some interesting times. But just buying them (demand) creates just a bubble. Nothing interesting to see here, except maybe people losing everything once the bubble bursts.