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BitCoin Value Collapses, Possibly Due To DDoS
hydrofix writes "The Bitcoin-to-USD exchange rate had been climbing steadily since January 2013, from around 30 USD to over 250 USD only 24 hours ago. Now, the value bubble seems to have burst, at least partially. The primary trading site MtGox reported a drop in value all the way down to 140 USD today, a loss of almost half in real value. With many sites unreachable or slow, there are also news of a possible DDoS attack on MtGox: 'Attackers wait until the price of Bitcoins reaches a certain value, sell, destabilize the exchange, wait for everybody to panic-sell their Bitcoins, wait for the price to drop to a certain amount, then stop the attack and start buying as much as they can. Repeat this two or three times like we saw over the past few days and they profit.'"
We really need a corollary for Godwin's Law adapted specifically to Bitcoin discussions: as soon as you say, "The US dollar doesn't have any intrinsic value either!", you lose.
Dislike the Electoral College? Lobby your state to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
The ultimate value of a dollar is zero ... anything.
The dollar used to be a receipt for a certain amount of gold that you owned in the federal reserve. But starting from 1971, the government defaulted on this commitment and the dollar became just a piece of paper.
Bitcoin is not different in this aspect. There is nothing behind it either. The difference is that there is a limit to the amount of bitcoins that can exist, but there is no limit to the amount of dollars the government can print. The government and the bank cartel known as the federal reserve can and do print insane amount of money every year to finance government spending, at the expense of the value of every other dollar in existence.
To illustrate this, take a dime from 1942, you could buy a gallon of gas with it back then. But you can still buy a gallon of gas with the same dime _because_ it is made out of silver. So it is not that things are more expensive, it is that the money changed, there are a lot more dollars circulating now that the government and the FED printed, which has caused it to lose a lot of value over time. This kind of devaluation by printing money is mathematically impossible with bitcoins.
It's funny how people believe that their imaginary currency would have grown 10x in value in a few months weren't for those evil hackers.
The whole issue here is that there is just ONE major exchange and they own 80% of the trades. Hitting one exchange impact the whole currency. The exchange rate has been manipulated for weeks now. Its time for other exchanges to pop up or this will continue. Its easy money so they will keep doing it untill & unless there is multiple exchanges!
One step further; if you mention that 'bitcoin' isn't a real currency. The whole argument chain is fucking tired.
The solution's the standard one: take the long-term view. If you think Bitcoins are actually going to be worth that much long-term, don't sell. Hold onto them, and buy during the drops. If you think Bitcoins aren't worth their current value long-term, sell before another drop happens and don't buy back in. The speculators (because that's what's driving any manipulation) depend on people dumb enough to do short-term trading while lagging behind the curve. They're professionals with all the tools, so as a non-professional the only way you can win is to not play their game.
Rule of poker: there's always a sucker at the table. If you look around and don't see one, it's you.
Before the current silver bubble started you could buy a quarter's-worth of gas. You may not be old enough to remember when the last silver bubble was, back in the 1970s, but that dime would probably have bought two gallons of gas at the time. Once enough of the common public is invested in silver and gold the speculators will collapse the bubble, the public gets taken to the cleaners, and only the banks, speculators and lawyers win. A few years ago your logic was being used to inflate the real estate market.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
We might need to have a talk about what "steady" means.
To illustrate this, take a dime from 1942, you could buy a gallon of gas with it back then. But you can still buy a gallon of gas with the same dime _because_ it is made out of silver.
Do it. Nine times out of 10 or more, I'll bet the attendant will say "Nice try buddy. That's a dime. It's worth 10 cents. Now pay up!"
Fiat currency works both ways. You want to get your $1.99 out of the dime, melt it down and take it to somebody who buys silver. Less fees and commissions. If it's a collectable dime, you might get more selling it to a numismatist, but the "value" of the dime will be in in its collectability, not in its silver content.
Even in 1971 the idea that everything in the world had a gold equivalent was absurd. These days we have computers and big-screen HDTVs that no amount of gold could give you back then. For a little while, these items may be worth hundreds or thousands of dollars, despite being made from inexpensive materials, then their value will plummet as something newer and better comes along. The amount of gold is limited and so, too is the value of the goods and services you can buy with it. If you owned all the gold in the world and spent it, you would still not own most of the world.
Value is what people give to things, not what things inherently have. To a parent of starving children, the only value gold has is if you can convince someone to accept it in exchange for food.
"We really need a corollary for Godwin's Law adapted specifically to Bitcoin discussions: as soon as you say, "The US dollar doesn't have any intrinsic value either!", you lose."
Not really. They are correct about the dollar, but people who say Bitcoin has no "intrinsic value" are just wrong. They don't understand Bitcoin. (Demonstrably, neither do most people who have been trading in it. I'll get to that in a moment.)
Bitcoin does have an intrinsic value: the computing time it takes to mine a bitcoin. This is a real, tangible, and strictly-defined value that can be quantified. This value is FIXED. That is to say, it is fixed today. It can vary with time, as Bitcoins are designed to gradually become more valuable per hour of computing time, but that subject can wait for another day.
For the sake of argument, for the rest of this post, let's say a bitcoin is worth 10 hours of (the right kind of) computation time. We will call that value "X". 1 bitcoin is worth X. My numbers are arbitrary for the sake of example but this is easily quantifiable if you want to look up the actual numbers.
So here's the important thing: this value standard, that is to say X, is also quantifiable in dollars, not just Bitcoin. After all, a fixed amount of the right kind of computation time also has a very definite value in $$. So 1 Bitcoin is worth X which is worth Y dollars. This is a solidly pre-defined amount. It is not "floating".
Therefore -- and this is the heart of the matter -- Bitcoin should not fluctuate at all in DOLLAR value, except to the extent that computation time fluctuates in dollar value. And since computation time has not fluctuated much in value, then Bitcoin should also NOT have changed in $$ value.
The upshot of this is: the Bitcoin market has been an utterly irrational "bubble", with the market valuing Bitcoins far higher than their actual intrinsic worth!
And the result is: lots and lots of people taken for a ride, many of whom will eventually lose buckets of money.
It is almost as if, with the gold standard having been gone for decades now, people have somehow forgotten how standards are supposed to work. While I LIKE Bitcoin, I would not touch today's Bitcoin market with a 10-foot pole. If I'd had a warehouse full of money to invest in it 2-3 months ago, though, I would have. Even today, with the market having fallen 40%, Bitcoin is selling for somewhere around 5 times what it is actually worth in dollars. It was (but perhaps is no longer) a good candidate for pump-and-dump. Which just illustrates how stupid the market is today.
Having said all that: the dollar, in contrast, really does have no practical intrinsic value. Ever since 1971, when Nixon threw the last vestiges of any standard away. (And defaulted on U.S. debt in the process, by the way. People who said the "fiscal cliff" would be the first time the U.S. ever defaulted on debt simply don't know their history.)
I shouldn't have to point out the obvious here, it will clearly fall on deaf ears considering the vast amounts of stupidity revealing themselves in postings on this topic. But hell, if it brings just one person to their senses I'll count it job well done.
First, nobody is forcing anyone to hold their savings in US Dollars. You can hold your savings in whatever form you want, it's called a BROKERAGE ACCOUNT. Buy a commodity-tracking ETF if you desire, and keep just enough dollars around to service your monthly needs. The dollar, after all, is very definitely stable in the short-term. One month isn't going to destroy its value. Realize, though, the price of everything in real terms fluctuates. Someone who bought gold at $1900 is sitting on a 15% loss of value in dollar terms right now, for example. Real commodities generally maintain their value over long periods of time. Are you worried about buy/sell fees? If you are, then you don't have enough savings to even be AFFECTED by inflation in the first place.
Second, Bitcoin isn't a currency. It's a commodity with a limited supply. Not only is it a commodity with a limited supply but it is a VIRTUAL commodity with a fixed supply. It isn't even real. It's not something you can touch. It doesn't even behave like a currency fod gods sakes! It may not be possible to counterfeit, but that doesn't stop anyone from creating their own virtual commodities and competing. In fact, there are MANY virtual currencies already in existance, primarily used in games, which are already far more stable than bitcoin.
Third, Bitcoin's 'value' is fleeting. It's like tulip-mania but worse. It's worse because the market is so shallow it is trivial (and obviously trivial) to manipulate. Heavy manipulation by people selling high slowly, causing a panic, and then buying low. Rinse and repeat.
I'm guessing that a large percentage of the exchange volume is from rinse and repeaters and very little is actual investment purchases or sales. It creates the illusion of decent volume when, in fact, there actually isn't any. Each time it cycles the manipulators are removing more real money from the system, leaving everyone else holding the bag.
Think about what this means, folks. It isn't rocket science. Whatever cash was injected into the system by real investors is being leeched away by the manipulators. There is LESS real original cash remaining, yet all the remaining real investors believe that a Bitcoin is worth at least as much as they originally paid for it, because they see that magic exchange value in $USD 'Oh look, 1BTC is worth $166 BTC!'. What these investors do not understand is that they cannot ALL get that price if they were to sell. They can't get it even if they all paid that price going in because the manipulators have already squeezed out a considerable amount of cash from the system.
The very definition of a Ponzi scheme. This will only end in tears.
-Matt
Some of your argument is interesting, but the idea that something's value is equal to the effort that it takes to obtain/create the thing is certainly not the case. There are lots of things that are very difficult to create and/or duplicate that have no value. If I have my computer hash random strings until I get a hash that includes my name in it, even though it might take 10 hours to do (and would take another 10 hours to duplicate), it doesn't make that random string valuable.
Value is the benefit I get from having a good or service (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_(economics)). While often times it is correlated with the difficulty in obtaining something, they are not equivalent.
That being said, your argument could still (sort of) work like this: there SHOULD be a cap on the value of a bitcoin.... the $ cost in computing power to mine a new coin. Whenever the price rises much above that, there should be an economic incentive to spend the money mining a new coin instead of buying the coin on the market. Of course, this price isn't a HARD cap, since there is still a capital expense in buying the hardware to mine the coin (or the opportunity cost of not using that hardware to do something MORE valuable), but it shouldn't get too high above that cost.
Of course, the fact that the cost to mine a bitcoin increases with each previously mined coin makes this even more complicated..
For every $1000 in deposits, that means they can lend $10,000 at 5% above their costs and payouts, or more, yielding a $500 profit... wow!
1: It's $1,000 in assets. That includes a whole bunch of things beyond deposits, such as certain bonds.
2: That's $500 in revenue, not profit. From that revenue, they need to pay for all of their bills, and their payroll, and account for losses due to uncollectable accounts and outright thievery.
This $500 is spent by them eventually, and helps dilute the value of your original $1000 by inflation... so your "savings" loses value, as they leverage against it in multiple manners....
3: Inflation is a feature, not a bug. The work you did picking tomatoes last year is less valuable to the species than the work you did picking tomatoes today. The species would be better served if you used that same frugality to horde useful items instead of tokens, which is why the market rewards investment over savings.
The thing about Bitcoin is that its exchange rate to the "real" currencies is irrelevant to its usefulness.
I think most users exchange e.g. dollars for Bitcoin, and then spend the latter as quickly as possible on (mostly) illegal goods. As long as Bitcoin can be obtained at all, the price is stable on the timescale of hours to days and secrecy is maintained, Bitcoin will be used.
In short, "currency" does not always need to represent debt (as do modern money and treasury bonds), or even to have the imprimatur of state authority, for it to be useful transactionally. Low-risk savings, of course, is another matter.
.: Semper Absurda