Slashdot Mirror
Bitcoin Exchange Value Halves After Chinese Ban
An anonymous reader writes with news of the latest major fluctuation in the price people are willing to pay for Bitcoins. From the article: "China's ban on its financial institutions handling bitcoin causes world's largest exchange to cease trading, halving the value of the currency from $1,000 to less than $500 in a matter of days. The country's central bank took a hard line on Bitcoin in early December when it banned financial institutions from handling the decentralized crypto-currency, and as a result BTC China, the world's largest bitcoin exchange, has stopped accepting deposits from its users."
Just watch that line trend downward.
Buttcoins. LOL. Everyone knows the real money is in ass pennies.
downwards means upwards.
A week ago, there was a Chinese ban on Bitcoin as a currency (not as a tradable asset) and BTC had its value halved from $1k to $500. Now, you're telling me there's a ban on Bitcoin in China and it has caused BTC's value to be halved from $1k to $500? Now that's what I call news!
And this is why we're still decades away from having mortgages denominated in bitcoin. :P
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
ROFL.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Totally legal but...
States do everything to prevent access to it... shutting down clinics left and right..
And if you do find a clinic you to face a picket line
Given the responses from all these governments you can tell that Bitcoin is something big... that is.. maybe not the actual coins, but the intellectual underpinnings:
- Decentralized
- Limit in coins
- No one governs/owns
It is really what the world has been waiting for.. something that can not be corrupted by any government, is safe and fast. The internet needs this
If anything, it looks like it bounced off the bottom and is recovering upward.
Don't bet on trendlines though.
Both parties in a trade value what they are getting more than what they give. The person selling the item values the cash higher than the item. The person buying values the item higher than the cash. The price is where the exchange takes place where both parties value what they get more.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
I guess this why Litecoins halved from $30 to $15 each too.
I am a free slashdotter. I will not be modded, blogged, DRM'd, patented, podcasted or RFID'd. My life is my own.
Darn! Just when I finally got the BFL miner I ordered over a year ago - and silly me thought my 5GH miner was going to make me stupid rich...
If only one could trust any of the fly-by-night exchanges.
Pretty much all the cryptocurrencies are headed downwards after this announcement... Except, oddly enough, for meme-based dogecoin (www.dogecoin.com).
Yes, its a real alt coin. Its actually the second biggest, in hash rate (right behind litecoin).
This is a crazy world we live in!
Kind of a sideline approach here...
This is the clearest evidence yet that the pro-bitcoin libertarian segment misunderstand how government control works. The argument goes "government prints the money, and tracks the money therefor can tax me." The presumption of bitcoins is if the currency doesn't come from the government, they don't have any means to control it.
Good ol' actually tyrannical China comes along, and does the thing any government is capable of doing. Saying "if we catch you dodging our system, our system will throw your stupid self in jail." Poof.
If having a wallet.dat is a crime, the fact that the coins inside of it are encrypted won't protect you.
I expect the Chinease Yuan is going to collapse within, at most, five years with nothing but bitcoin to replace it. Fiat currency is doomed, and the governments know it.
halved to four times what it was a month or so ago...
Totally legal but...
States do everything to prevent access to it... shutting down clinics left and right..
And if you do find a clinic you to face a picket line
Given the responses from all these governments you can tell that Bitcoin is something big... that is.. maybe not the actual coins, but the intellectual underpinnings:
- Decentralized
- Limit in coins
- No one governs/owns
It is really what the world has been waiting for.. something that can not be corrupted by any government, is safe and fast. The internet needs this
No, it's pretty much just what libertarian utopians have been waiting for. "No one governing" the Euro is what almost caused the collapse of the EU over one small state having credit difficulties. It isn't an advantage, and exposes the currency to dramatic volatility.
I only wish I had some recent evidence of dramatic bitcoin volatility.
Now that they have driven the price of bitcoins down, they will now buy up all of them at low prices . . . and then . . . announce that the will accept them as currency . . .
Profit!
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
after I picked myself up off the floor and composed myself a bit, I still laughed to myself at how fast the BTC bubble burst
that said, I learned alot by studying & discussing how BTC worked & what it's benefits/drawbacks were...I wish I had found my BTC wallet info!
i bought exactly 1 BTC back in late 2009 IIRC but I was so busy with grad school it got lost in the shuffle
any idea that BTC could replace currency or be an investment vehicle were/are silly but its still noteworthy as a sort of 'prank' that got taken very seriously!
Thank you Dave Raggett
I wish people would stop calling these "crypto-currencies", because it is a total misrepresentation of what these things are. They are crypto-commodities. BTC is just like gold right now - it is not used to transact, it is used as a value store - except it is much worse as a value store because it is orders of magnitude more volatile. No one can use BTC as a currency because its value fluxuates so wildly. Everyone who is SUPPOSEDLY using it as a currency just has it pegged to the US dollar with a live update.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Somewhere in China a group of Bitcoin-speculating bureaucrats are very happy right now.
Must make the Bitcoiners really happy to know that their financial world can be so readily disrupted . . ..
Yes, just use Electrum or equivalent if running the full-blockchain is too bothersome (it is for most, now). Avoid putting your bitcoins on *any* online account, that is way too dangerous. With Electrum, you don't have to download a blockchain, but only you still have the wallet.
It's not the fall that kills you. It's the sudden stop at the end. -Douglas Adams
When a couple of my friends started posting "now is a great time to buy into BitCoin" messages on my Facebook feed a couple of weeks ago, I had a feeling the BTC price was about to take a strong downward turn. It is never a good sign when the "true believers" begin actively recruiting new buyers into a price bubble.
The collapse of BitCoin as a speculative investment is inevitable, and its own success will be its downfall. The speculative frenzy over BTC is based strictly on artificial scarcity. The problem is that there are an infinite possible number of cryptographically signed digital currencies. If only X amount of gold exists in the world, there is no replacement for it, assuming you desire the exact physical qualities of gold. But if only Y digital coins exist, it is trivial to create another digital coinage with a slightly different protocol that behaves exactly the same way as far as a user is concerned.
The boom in BTC has led to several new competitors, with similar frenzies growing around some of them. And given the low barrier to entry, you can expect more and more competing digital currencies to appear. It is only a matter of time before people realize that they're fighting over a particular set of tulip bulbs while standing in an infinitely large field of tulips. Once that happens, the speculative bubble will pop for good for all digital currencies. In the long run, this is a good thing, because once the speculators are gone, some digital currencies may actually prove useful as a real medium of exchange, with values that don't fluctuate wildly from one day to the next.
Try and relax and have a little fun with them. Reddit coiners are possibly the most fun group to troll I have ever encountered. They eat the bait like sharks in bloody water. I hope this never ends. Comparing Bitcoin to Enron is always fun over there.
It's only going to get bigger. Bit of a flaw in the system, that.
Looking at the data provided in the summary's link, the value got from under 200 to over 1000 within a month. How is a drop of 50% within a few days any surprising? I would expect any currency that volatile and - above all - unregulated (in the sense of regulation through central banks), to do about anything.
"No one governing" the Euro is what almost caused the collapse of the EU over one small state having credit difficulties.
Wow. It's been a long time since I've seen such a high concentration of ill informed bullshit in one sentence...
Why are you talking about reddit, exactly? What does that have to do with this article?
I don't respond to AC's.
Yep, except it's total bullshit.
[FUCK BETA]
It was a standard parabolic bubble. It's happened three times with bitcoins now, and they always have a 40 to 60 percent drop when they pop followed by a random walk as they deflate. The 3rd one just happened to occur just as the second finished its random walk, and China just had to be the last to say anything about bitcoin before it poped. These will just keep getting close, and closer until the fun begins. My bet is the next one in 3 months, then a month, followed by ... fun. Who would have thought that one of these with the modern era of communication, and education would still be possible. But I guess without a modern example with that perfect bitcoin transaction log to watch it all go down it was probably inevitable to happen at least one more time.
Apologies, forgot to actually hyperlink...
[FUCK BETA]
I had 2200 bitcoins accumulated (I started mining 5 years ago)... and I sold them between 700 and 900... I think I did pretty well, to be honest. (and yes, I am going to pay my taxes)
But, you're right, hearing Bitcoiners talk is like listening to Glenn Beck talk about Gold.
Hmm... I can't chargeback cash, either.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Er, no. What people were worried about was that heavily indebted countries would voluntarily choose to exit the Euro so they could inflate away their debts by printing money as fast as possible, and bulk exits of countries from the Euro would cause problems. The "solution", if you want to call it that, was that after resisting for a long time the ECB (actually Mario Draghi) gave into immense political and personal pressure to start open-ended Euro printing in order to essentially reallocate money from savers in Germany and other northern states to heavily indebted, often highly corrupt governments in the south. In order to preserve the fiction that Europe is one big happy family all sharing the same wonderful currency, the ECB agreed to a global tax on all Euro savings everywhere and made lots of people who managed their finances appropriately very very unhappy!
This is not actually solving any problems - it just sends a powerful message from governments that only suckers try to save money because governments will inevitably confiscate it from you in order to pay for (e.g.) absurdly generous pensions in Greece or elsewhere.
Bitcoin does not allow governments to do this. If Europe had been running on Bitcoin at the time, then those governments would have had to go through an actual default and inflict the pain on the people who lent them the money - but on the other hand, if Europe was run on Bitcoin, it's very unlikely the southern countries could have got into so much debt in the first place. Who was lending such vast sums to countries that had such basic, fundamental fiscal problems? Banks, of course, banks who knew they would be bailed out (with yet more money printing) if something went truly tits up. They gambled that politicians cared more about keeping the Euro than protecting savers, and they were right. If Europe used Bitcoin for everything, the "moral hazard" of banking would not exist as they would know that nobody could bail them out, and they'd have far fewer deposits to play with anyway (or maybe none). As a result, far less money would have been invested into places like Greece and the economic distortions such huge borrowing allowed would have never happened.
right, I'm assuming you mean you bought at a low price and cashed out at a high price?
what I'm wondering is, which BTC to $$$ service you used (Mt Gox?), how often you were able to cash out, what the daily $$$ limits were, what the transfer fees cost, etc.
I've seen alot of people yammering about BTC but few claim to have made a profit...i'd like to know more about how
Thank you Dave Raggett
I get that sentiment, hence why I said that "libertarian utopians" would want it. Because they actually believe that gigantic defaults can be a good thing for an economy.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I think the problem the government has with bitcoin is that bitcoin has the potential of destroying the US government. In fact, any currency other than the US dollar does actually.
The government currently has a habit of going perpetually further into debt (spending exceeds income every year for the last few decades, the only exception being during the economic bubble of the late 90's where tax revenues were artificially high.)
So long as the government maintains control of the value of the dollars that it spends with, it can simply devaluate the dollar to make up for its losses (which comes at the expense of you and me, as well as encouraging consumer borrowing instead of saving.) Of course, that house of cards will come crashing down should the dollar ever run into any serious trouble. Bitcoin has the greatest potential of causing that to happen than any other currency.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
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They promised that THIS time it's DIFFERENT!
going from 100->50->100 is not the same as going from 1000->500->1000
see this isn't abstract numbers, this is $$$...money doesn't scale the same as flat abstract numbers
a 50 point swing vs a 500 point swing is an order of magnitude more **volitile**
also the timing of the drop is important, there are many new big name investors in BTC now, and in the past for the swings you cited there were none...the stakes are much higher now
Thank you Dave Raggett
I'm not fan of bitcoin and am in no way invested in it, but this seems like a classic case of a nervous market overreacting. Buy low my friends.
Minor correction - dispute mediated transactions have been a part of the design since day one. The problem is lack of surrounding infrastructure like "file dispute" buttons in wallets and the various protocols needed to organise that, companies that run dispute mediation services with those protocols and so on. But there is widespread consensus that it's a good idea and basically, it's just waiting for someone to do the design and implementation work to make it happen.
It's certainly a PITA at the moment, yes, although when Bitcoin is out of the public eye and governments aren't busy banning it there have been relatively long stretches of peace and stability. During those times you HAVE seen vendors price things in Bitcoins, actually, although yes most prefer to peg to an exchange rate.
Over time the instability will go away because governments will all decide on their policies around it, the technology will mature and become boring, most people will have heard about it and decided what they think, etc. The huge volatility you see at the moment is because almost every day there's some important piece of news that affects people's perception of future value.
As to the /r/bitcoin posters, yes, the over-excitability there is quite something. But that doesn't mean all people who use Bitcoin or like it think the same way.
Bitcoin analysis: Bit = Zero or One Coin = Heads or Tails No wonder the value is fairly random (leading or trailing zeros - - toss a coin)
Artificial intelligence is the study of how to make real computers act like the ones in the movies.
Yawn. The dollar isn't special. The exact same thing can happen with the Euro or any other currency. You can single out the US but every major currency on earth is just as vulnerable.
Bubbles burst, news at 11.
My sig has no nature
Is it time to buy them now?
Looks like BITC is recovering fast. 585 USD as I write this.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Bitcoiners on reddit are completely delusional.
A sentence that is guaranteed to be true for two independent reasons. ;-)
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Wake up people. This "currency" is never going to have anything close to wide adoption. The inability to charge back is the #1 reason that prevents any consumer from perceiving it as a safe currency against vendor fraud.
Do you feel the same way about cash?
Not really "the system" so much as the current client implementations. There is provision (Section 7, "Reclaiming Disk Space" in the original whitepaper) for reducing the size of the blockchain by discarding transactions where all the outputs have been spent again and those subsequent transactions themselves are buried under enough blocks. This lets you pare down the size of the blockchain considerably.
It's just that, AFAIK, no clients currently implement this.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
I don't read Reddit, but there is one thing that is not factored here, actually two:
The first is that actual value has been traded for BitCoin on a very large scale. That value is not going anywhere. Yes, BitCoin is going to have its ups and downs, but as a trend, it will only go up as the hard limit of coins is reached and coins disappear for good (due to wallets getting lost, etc.)
The second is that it has earned its place as an anonymous currency that the bad guys can use and use securely. No, the block chains are public, but wallets are. The bad guys can have their ransomware apps feed a wallet. That wallet can be fed to an anonymous exchange (just takes one broken link to hide transactions), or the wallet just sits for seven years until statute of limitation laws pass, and the contents can be emptied, free and clear.
BitCoin has too much physical value in it to be going anywhere south on the long term.
Very interesting!
I like the Amazon gift card solution.
What exchange rate did Amazon use for the transaction? Was it based off Mt Gox?
Thank you Dave Raggett
Did you miss the Portuguese default?
So China is banning the currency because it wants to protect the United States?
One interpretation of "not governed" could be "not governed *well*". And it is fair to say that the Euro has not been governed well over the last few years. The ECB (i.e. Germany) has shown huge resistance to being a lender of last resort, and has run an overly tight monetary policy, risking deflation and only recently dropping interest rates to where the US Fed dropped them years ago (and even the Fed was not aggressive enough - witness the weak recovery).
This is the main problem with bitcoin. The decentralization and anti-counterfeiting measures (and crypto that does it properly) are, IMHO, phenomenal advances in the realm of e-money. However, the "set-and-forget" monetary policy is inappropriate for a modern economy. The "great moderation" in the US between the mid-80s to the early 2000's was a period of low inflation and generally mild recessions. However, to achieve that stability in outcomes, the Fed had to change policy inputs many times, sometimes quite drastically (e.g., 1987 stock market crash, LTCM, Asian crisis).
Reddit is a huge part of the bitcoin community. It is the home of most of the cheerleaders you see on the comments section of news articles.
Oh noes, Germany had to actually pay a little money to maintain hegemony over Europe!
Don't kid yourself, they know what they're buying with that money. Nobody's "stealing" anything.
"No one governing" the Euro is what almost caused the collapse of the EU over one small state having credit difficulties.
Wow. It's been a long time since I've seen such a high concentration of ill informed bullshit in one sentence...
The likes of Greece, Spain and Italy fly in the face of your pronouncement that the Euro is fine. There ARE serious issues with the Euro, which is currently being held up by the more responsible and thus stronger governments which are part of it. Where the Euro as a currency might be doing OK, some of the countries that use it are decidedly not OK and may not be able to pay their bonds. There is talk of ejecting them from the Eurozone, not to mention significant civil unrest, pain, poverty and suffering in these countries BECAUSE they are in the EU and cannot manage their own currency.
I don't think this Eurozone thing will end well myself.
I would argue that, at this point, /. is far more worthless of a site than 4chan. 4chan at least still has some degree of impact on the internet at large. When's the last time the slashdot effect was actually a thing?
Not to mention that I'm pretty sure the Reddit community for dogecoin is at least as large as the 4chan community, if not larger.
By what name do you wish to be mourned?
"I have zillions of dollars worth of comic books! Wizard says I do!"
"I have zillions of dollars worth of Bitcoin! The exchange says I do!"
*Together* Let's cash out!
"WTF? Nobody wants to buy my comics at massively inflated prices!"
"WTF? Nobody wants to buy my Bitcoin at massively inflated prices!"
Cue the Python!
SCAM! SCAM! SCAM! SCAM! SCAM!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Wake up people. This "currency" is never going to have anything close to wide adoption. The inability to charge back is the #1 reason that prevents any consumer from perceiving it as a safe currency against vendor fraud.
Do you feel the same way about cash?
With cash I can see/touch the goods I'm buying before paying for them. I have to physically meet the person selling the goods. Unless I'm paying for something illegal there's little chance of getting screwed over because it would be too risky for the other party.
I would posit that the recent rise in Bitcoin pricing to $1000+ was the result of primarily Chinese speculation; inevitably the central govt. there was going to crack down on it as they couldn't control it / track ownership.
So China is banning the currency because it wants to protect the United States?
Not for that reason only, but China has massive investment in the US in the form of US debts. China wouldn't want anyone defaulting. Nor would they like seeing the US$ fall in value.
Seeing as China owns around $1.2 trillion dollars in US debt, yes, China very very much wants to protect the United States and the strength of its currency.
Amusingly, fake bitcoins are probably the only ones that'll have a stable enough price to be trusted. http://www.amazon.com/999-Fine-Copper-Bitcoin-Commemorative/dp/B00DEY7JYO
-- "Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability." --Dijkstra
anonymous liar lies big
Yes. I only use cash for transactions where I'll have the merchandise in hand at the time I hand over the cash; I'd never mail someone cash in the hopes that they'll later mail me a product. I'm pretty sure most people are the same in this.
you know, as does everybody else, that Greece cannot possibly pay back those hilarious "loans" without either A) doubling the population of taxpayers, instantly, or B) discovering the lost treasure of Pythagoras.
Most people don't make purchases by mailing a bundle of cash to a distant stranger. If they did, charge back mechanisms would be equally important for cash transactions.
A few countries have received some large loans, all of which still look like they will be paid back in full.
What? Really?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
So did they reduce the proof of work by half as well?
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Didn't know that. That would make sense, actually. I just looked at reddit, and it seems to be like the Tea Party or the Insane Clown Posse: a vast gathering of idiots.
ok think of a boat on the ocean
a storm with swells between 5-10 feet in variance is navigable
a storm with swells between 50-100 ft in variance is not navigable
does that make sense?
it's not abstract, the quantity the numbers represent changes how they are applied b/c of real world context...there is a fixed point at which the swells become too big and the boat will be innundated
or think of it this way...if you and your bro were watching the game on the couch and he said he'd give you $5 to get him a fresh beer, you'd at least consider it...b/c you can buy a beer at the bar later w/ it
if you refused, but he then offered you $50 to get him the beer, most ppl wouldn't turn that down!
now, imagine if he offered you $5 in Candy Bars...if you don't like candy bars, will going from 5->50 in quantity make you any more likely to get the beer?
Thank you Dave Raggett
Yes, really. There have been a few extremely uneventful defaults against private creditors, but not against the EU bailout loans.
as of this writing you're properly rated at +5 Insightful
I think how your comment gets rated will be a good litmus test for the quality of /. commetors vs reddit
reddit is fine for what it is, but when I want to see discussion about something like Bitcoin or Snowden I need something more
I'm curious to see how this plays out.
Thank you Dave Raggett
I have zillions of dollars worth of comic books! Wizard says I do!
Boy did I find that out. But in the days when I was collecting comics, access to the high valued ones were scarce. The internet had as many useful sights as I could write in a little notebook. Ecommerce wasn't a thing yet. Years later, I decided, "Hey, they are still holding their value! I'm going to sell these!" and BAM, it hit like a ton razorblades... with a global, online market, there is always someone out there willing to sell that $500 comic book for $1 plus shipping.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Well that's one thing, but you really think Greece will pay back their loans?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
China needs us to keep dumping money into their economy for another 50 to 100 years.
Yep, except it's total bullshit.
Apologies, forgot to actually hyperlink...
2nd sentence in the introduction is wrong. Makes it hard for me to want to finish reading the rest of it.
Glad I didn't just sell a car for bitcoins
Bitcoin value continues to be incredibly unstable! Also the sky is blue and water is wet! More updates as news develops!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Is there an online/crypto currency you actually think would be genuinely useful to the world - which hasn't taken off yet?
Like Tesla Motors, I'd like to invest in something which benefits us all, and Bitcoin, while potentially promising, may be technically/practically inferior to another startup currency.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
That's because the comic book was never really worth $500 in the first place.
The reason some comics are so valuable is BECAUSE they're scarce.
In the last 40 years, they've been ANYTHING but scarce.
So, no matter how much some schmuck sets the value for it, unless just about every other of the tens or hundreds of thousands of copies are known to be destroyed, it probably isn't even worth the cover price.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Well obviously I don't have a crystal ball. But there is no evidence or reason to assume that they won't. All of the doomsayers are just speculating wildly. They're mostly hacks who are hoping to profit from it somehow.
It would be very bad for the Euro if Greece defaulted, or left the Eurozone. I think it simply won't be allowed to happen. Note that I'm not saying that that's necessarily a good thing.
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I agree with the first part, but China has made pushes to replace petrodollars - that would be much more damaging to the value of american currency than embracing bitcoin.
One interpretation of "not governed" could be "not governed *well*". And it is fair to say that the Euro has not been governed well over the last few years. The ECB (i.e. Germany) has shown huge resistance to being a lender of last resort, and has run an overly tight monetary policy, risking deflation and only recently dropping interest rates to where the US Fed dropped them years ago (and even the Fed was not aggressive enough - witness the weak recovery).
This is the main problem with bitcoin. The decentralization and anti-counterfeiting measures (and crypto that does it properly) are, IMHO, phenomenal advances in the realm of e-money. However, the "set-and-forget" monetary policy is inappropriate for a modern economy. The "great moderation" in the US between the mid-80s to the early 2000's was a period of low inflation and generally mild recessions. However, to achieve that stability in outcomes, the Fed had to change policy inputs many times, sometimes quite drastically (e.g., 1987 stock market crash, LTCM, Asian crisis).
Germany always does it different, hence their tendency to start world wars.
China has made efforts to undermine the US Dollar's status as reserve currency though. That would devalue the US$ much more than bitcoin.
Treat BitCoin like currency and it's obvious why this happened. China, a major economic power, doesn't take BitCoin anymore. If China suddenly decided not to take US dollars, the US dollar would probably take a big hit around the works as well. That's true for any currency. Nothing to see except that currency traitors got caught with their pants down.
If one USD/BTC is at 1000 ($1000 per BitCoin), and I exchange $100 to BTC, I get .1BTC, and when USD/BTC then drop to 500, and I exchange the .1BTC to USD, I get $50.
If USD/BTC at 100 ($100 per BitCoin), and I exchange $100 to BTC, I get 1BTC, and when USD/BTC drop to 50, and I exchange the 1BTC to USD, I get $50.
Same volatility. There's significant volatility in USD/BTC moving from 100 to 1000, and the overall market volume has grown much larger, and the impact on the economy is much large, but if we move 1000 -> 500 -> 1000 in X days or 100 -> 50 -> 100 in X days, that's the same volatility for that price movement.
And it is fair to say that the Euro has not been governed well over the last few years.
I don't agree with that at all. The Euro has consistently remained strong, even during this so called "Euro crisis". Whether the way the Euro is being governed is good for the economies of the individual countries of the Eurozone is an entirely different question, but reality shows that it was good for the Euro and that the ECB is doing a good job of keeping its independence. There just is no comparison whatsoever (which the original poster was doing) between the Euro and the way it is governed, and Bitcoin.
I get that sentiment, hence why I said that "libertarian utopians" would want it. Because they actually believe that gigantic defaults can be a good thing for an economy.
I think the GP was saying the default would have been much smaller because the bank would have (a) been less willing to loan out the money, and (b) had less money to lend out.
While (a) might be a reasonable assumption, I am not sure about (b). I think that the banks, regardless of the currency, would have figured out other ways to emass gigantic sums of money.
Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr
For the next rev, they need a way to keep crypto-currency within an exchange rate band. The band could be a basket of currencies, commodities, etc. The currency needs to float *some* but not too much. That seems challenging since we're talking about pulling in data that's external to the protocol; but it's a real problem. Real functioning currencies have to be a more reliable store of value. Central banks are criticized these days for trashing their currencies; but they also have the ability to defend their currencies against attacks like this, peg them to other currencies and/or commodities, etc.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I've managed to make about 90% of my Christmas gift purchases using 0.7 Bitcoin. I managed to trade most of that at the $1100 value, lucky me. That trade payed for my Bitcoin mining. As more people use this option for taking payment it will only help to stabilize the value. Right now there are several online retailers taking them directly and there's a number of gift cards you can get using them. Gift cards are an easy way to trade coins into real products until more retailers start taking them directly.
It all starts at 0
it just sends a powerful message from governments that only suckers try to save money because governments will inevitably confiscate it from you.... Bitcoin does not allow governments to do this.
I think you greatly under estimate the ingenuity of motivated tax collectors. This is "merely" a "technical limit". They will find ways to work around it.
Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr
The guy is not talking about cryptography. He's talking about basic economics.
[FUCK BETA]
Is there a way to effect a short on bitcoin values?
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
My backup wallet on Megaupload has 1700 BC that I bought when they were less than one dollar.
Since there is so much news on this topic, when will it be added to the list, like "hardware," "linux," "security," etc?
What's to stop "insider trading" with this bullshit currency?
The current market rate of a bitcoin is not a mystery, and selling your coins at whatever the current price may be is quite easy and fast.
My 16 year old son is just coming face-to-face with this. "I want cash for all my Xmas presents this year, don't bother buying me anything ... I'll buy it later if I want".
Its tough to explain the value to the giver of picking out something that they hope you'll really like, and then having you really like it.
China wants both:
1) Undermining of the US dollar's status as a reserve currency.
2) Absolute control over their own currency.
Thus, they like Bitcoin for #1, but are wary of it when it encroaches on #2.
What the EU is doing - via confiscation/excessive one-time "special need" taxation of savings - is essentially a distributed default. It is taking from Peter to pay Paul, and in the process you're not teaching Paul how to better manage his finances and you're upsetting Peter and teaching him to NOT save up money because it's not his.
A big default is usually the best way to settle things out. Yes, it's painful. Yes, millions of people are left near-destitute. However, the alternative is to bring everyone down significantly (equality of misery) and to lose the lesson - don't be careless with your assets, nor promise away your future income stream (bird in the hand worth two in the bush).
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I think the problem the government has with bitcoin is that bitcoin has the potential of destroying the US government. In fact, any currency other than the US dollar does actually.
The government currently has a habit of going perpetually further into debt (spending exceeds income every year for the last few decades, the only exception being during the economic bubble of the late 90's where tax revenues were artificially high.)
Just to point out, the last time the US Government ran an honest-to-goodness surplus of income, and paid down its debt because it had money left over (rather than increased its annual debt) was in 1957 under President Eisenhower.
It's been 3 generations since we've actually had a surplus at the Governmental level. The surpluses of the late 90s were strictly on-paper/on-budget items only, but every fiscal year since 1957 has seen the US Federal debt increase. Sometimes by huge amounts (like now), sometimes by small amounts (late 90s, mid 2000s), but an increase in debt annually nevertheless.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
The majority of things people pay for are not "things you feel or touch". (one could argue housing, that's a different topic)
The majority of money spent in the western world goes to three places:
-Income
-Housing
-Taxes
Income: Employers and companies PAY their employees. Imagine a world in which this could be charged back. Just imagine that for 30 seconds, then tell me that "Charge backs are required". This is by definition nearly half of all money spent.
Housing: people pay for housing, VERY FEW places (banks, rental agencies, etc) will take a form of payment that is susceptible to a charge back, simply because it makes no sense. Imagine renting a place for a month, then issuing a charge back a week into the agreement. At the speed of most companies, you have another week or two to get an eviction notice, and another 10-20 days before you have to respond to that notice. Rinse and repeat every few months, and you're living for free.
Taxes: Pay your taxes on a Credit card (if you can!), and issue a charge back on that. See how many times you can get away with that before you're either thrown in jail or fined a years wages.
From a consumer's point of view, charge-backs HURT the market overall; they lead to consumer blindness and apathy. Who cares how shitty a retailer is with their policies when you can just get a credit card charge reversed? who cares how low quality a product is when you can assure yourself you can get your money back? Don't you think companies might compete for consumer's if the consumers actually CARED about the people they were buying from?
The only group who benefit from charge-backs is shipping companies. They get the joy of getting paid regardless of how shitty consumers / suppliers get.
Anonymous Cowards always do well, it seems...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
near 0 fees and lack of charge back is why merchants like it - it doesn't bother me as a consumer, I've never needed it.
the volatility doesn't matter either with services such as bitpay.
oh and nobody's worried about the temporary drop in price.
The inability to charge back is the #1 reason that prevents any consumer from perceiving it as a safe currency against vendor fraud. It serves no benefit to the consumer.
Nonsense. There is a mechanism for chargebacks in Bitcoin. It's known as "escrow". Given a non-reversible payment mechanism, it's trivial to add reversible transactions as a layer on top. Implementing a non-reversible payment scheme on top of reversible transactions, on the other hand, is nearly impossible. Which kind you need depends on the situation. For an individual ordering durable goods from the smaller online venders, you want escrow to protect both sides. For the provision of services or highly non-durable goods, where there is no way to recover costs in the event of a chargeback, a more permanent form of payment makes sense. Disputes in such cases need to be handled through arbitration anyway.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
It make take a while, but so long as Bitcoin remains uncorrupted by counterfeiting it will stabilize because it will remain out of the sphere of government influence.
Oooh, what a trustworthy source! Nobody rich is wasting their time on slashdot.
Now excuse me while I go back to my orgy with super models.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
There's not even a point in making them ridged any more. Who's going to shave a copper/nickel alloy?
The ridges help tell quarters from dollar coins.
The first claim - banks can't do reserve banking with BitCoin - is just wrong.
Reserve banking in its core form is "Bank takes currency from client. Bank records this currency in ledger in the bank, associated with some way the client can authenticate access to that amount of currency. Bank takes some fraction of the currency (say 90%) and re-use for other purposes (e.g. lending)."
There is nothing that blocks this with BitCoin. A bank account is a separate ledger from the BitCoin cash ledger (block chain); you can transfer BitCoin to the bank, they can credit that as a deposit against your bank account (separate ledger), and then they can lend most of it.
The problem in the original article is that he does not recognize that having a deposit account *is* creating a loan paper. It is a loan from the depositor to the bank. As long as this is considered as if it was available cash, it increases the money supply. And in terms of money supply calculations, this is how it is commonly done for demand deposit account (MB/M0 is monetary base - real hard currency issued, and M1/M2/M3/MZM includes demand deposit accounts, and generally is the money supply that's considered most interesting.)
Using loan paper between banks is just a minimal technical detail; it's the deposit accounts that's the interesting part.
His secondary point about not being able to save BitCoin is dependent on the first misunderstanding, so it goes away. If you have demand deposit accounts in BitCoin, you can loan and save and earn interest.
His point about zero sum games don't really work. If bankruptcy exists and John's chance of winning/losing is exactly 50%, then it doesn't make sense for anybody to lend to John at less than 100% interest - because there is 50% chance of losing out. Adding inflation only makes the situation worse - the payback has to be more than 100%, because there is a different time value to the money.
Now, investing in general works because we're not investing in games. We are investing in something that has some form of value for people in the world, and where they are willing to take a loss of currency in order to get an increase in some other good.
In short: Most of his primary arguments are fundamentally flawed.
Now, I *do* believe that it is unfortunate to have a deflationary currency as a primary currency because it makes borrowing difficult; this is partially covered in his point 2.5 (of version 2 of the paper). However, all good arguments are hidden behind flawed reasoning :-(
Easy and fast, you say?
I wonder what the car dealership owner is thinking right now after selling a Tesla for bitcoins. I hope he cashed them in already or his revenue for that sale just tanked. Do you think the salesman took commission in bitcoin? http://www.dailypilot.com/news/tn-dpt-me-1212-bitcoin-lamborghini-20131211,0,678358.story
exactly...**'I'M NOT A SPECULATOR**
you need to think about it from a system design perspective, not as a hacker
see, you're thinking like an outsider who is intruding on a system for an immediate personal gain
i'm evaluating BTC as part of the system looking to constantly improve on a sustainable long term path
that's why all the BTC fanbois arguments are so infuriating...you're coming from the perspective of a parasite not someone trying to make their own independent system
Thank you Dave Raggett
no YOU don't get it
Hint: Stop thinking only in abstractions
Really...if I don't get it...if its all about variance...if it's so simple...fucking explain it and interact w/ my examples.
Don't just post some random shit and think you've contributed to the conversation.
This pisses me off because I get downmodded not for content but b/c people disagree w/ my opinions...i'm not trolling, many of my respondents, like HornWumpus, just toss off random bon mots, and of course my comment gets downmodded
Thank you Dave Raggett
http://xkcd.com/149/
Thank you Dave Raggett
It's already going back up. $586 and rising as we speak.
it's interesting because of all the BTC fanbois it was an actual story of actual evidence of how BTC made some one a profit, with full details
no one said it was 'ready for the world to use'...b/c **the world is already using it**
i'm the opposite of a BTC fanboi, but i think your perspective is wrong too
you should take an hour or two and learn how BTC actually works, because...something about knowledge...idk...power and knowledge...w/e nevermind just keep on moving...nothing to see here
Thank you Dave Raggett
word thanks
I'm just curious about numbers...whatever you want to share
I always thought that your strategy, the "slow and steady wins the race" strategy would be foiled by the transfer fees
thanks for saying this...this is all I ever wanted to see acknowledge...I'm not a BTC hater but this "last mile" thing is overlooked in the conversation
as I said, I bought 1 BTC on a lark but lost my wallet info (probably on my laptop that died)...I'm looking at BTC now as a business owner who is considering taking BTC payments.
Thank you Dave Raggett
word I looked at the process for getting "trusted" on Mt. Gox
I thought I'd use them if/when I ever did any BTC trading, but the fact that they are not based in the US was problematic.
As a business, if something went sour with BTC and the broker gets shut down in the US I might be able to sue or at least claim it as capital loss on my taxes.
Thank you Dave Raggett
Chargebacks and volatility seem not be a concern for the growing number of merchants and their customers who are adopting bitcoin.
You have clearly never used bitcoin. Volatility is not the problem you make it out to be. If you were speaking from experience instead of helpless raging impotence that you missed the biggest boat of a lifetime, you would know this.
You'd be stupid to admit to owning that much on a public forum. But then you admit to owning guns on a public forum so maybe some folks just don't care about getting doxxed.
You're just making stuff up to suit your argument. There is no evidence that BTC will ever be stable. The very nature of it's inability to be centrally regulated will guarantee that it can never be stable. Regulation is a stabilising force, it's why prosperous, healthy and wealthy countries all have the most regulations. Don't get caught in the Tea Party anarchist hype. If you want anarchy go take a holiday in Mogadishu or Kabul and then come back and tell us how well that works out.
See e.g. http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/10/world/amnesty-international-death-penalty/
Choice quotes:
There were at least 682 confirmed executions worldwide last year, two more than in 2011, according to the group.
China is believed to have executed several thousand people last year, Amnesty said, but government secrecy makes it impossible to confirm exact numbers.
The United States executed 43 prisoners across nine states in 2012
I believe the death penalty in non-war situations to be bad policy no matter where it is done, but China clearly seems to be much worse than the US.
Did you miss the Portuguese default?
Yes. When did it happen? /checks news on tv...
[iconv --from-code=utf-7]
s/purtuguese/greek/
If you want anarchy go take a holiday in Mogadishu or Kabul and then come back and tell us how well that works out.
The libertarian echo chamber has figured out how to resist this line of argument by insisting (against all evidence) that life is actually a paradise in Somalia, thanks to the absence of the dead hand of a state suppressing humanity's natural desire to be free of coercion. (Never mind that there's plenty of coercion to be found in Somalia, in the form of the warlords who are happily filling the power vacuum left by the collapse of the state.)
This response to inconvenient facts is fitting since libertarianism is nothing if not deliberate, studied ignorance of how the world actually works.
That paper has factual errors. For example, on page 6 it says "...because bitcoins are mined in integer units, not satoshis". This is incorrect. The mining reward halves every 210,000 blocks (about 4 years). It dropped from 50 in Jan 2009 to 25 in Nov 2012, the current rate. The next halving, in about 3 years, will reduce it to 12.5 bitcoin units per block. The arithmetic series 50 + 25 + 12.5 + . . . = 100, and since it stays at that level for 210,000 blocks at a time, the total number of coins has a limit at 100 x 210,000 = 21,000,000.
The mining algorithm is a basic feature of the bitcoin system. If the paper's author got that wrong, I don't have much confidence in the rest of his arguments.
What a ridiculous load of nonsense. Firstly, I'm not making stuff up to suit my argument. There really have been periods of stability. For instance I remember that when Bitcoin was at about $5 it stayed there for around 6 months or so, iirc, and after that it spent another six months floating around $10-$12 mark, which is the sort of volatility associated with national currencies. The reason is that back then it wasn't in the media much, governments weren't paying attention and so on. When I argue that in future it will be stable again, it's an argument based on both common sense and historical experience.
Regulation is a stabilising force? Regulation is an ossifying force. If you confuse "stagnant " with "stable" then it might superficially appear that way, but all it really does is lock in the status quo. The global recession of 2008 started in America, it was triggered by subprime US housing loans, and the USA has probably the most heavily regulated financial sector in the entire world. It's also got one of the most backwards. The USA still uses cheques, it still uses 1970's era magstripe credit cards, most online banks don't even seem to use two-factor authentication, internal wire transfers take days and are not free: all these things are commonplace outside the USA. If regulation is so great, why is the financial system in the USA such a mess despite vast, sprawling financial regulatory bureaucracies?
Finally, your belief that I'm a tea-partier is hilarious. I'm not even American. I think the tea party are a bunch of nutters. They're certainly not for small government, that would require them to heavily slash military spending, something they are very visibly not doing. I certainly don't want to live in Somalia. However Somalia's problem is not lack of financial regulation (there aren't even any banks there), it's very recent and massive wars that wrecked any semblence of civilisation.
In fact, it's funny you bring up Somalia, because badly thought out financial regulations (around making bankers liable for the crimes of their account holders regardless of whether the bankers knew anything) are about to start killing large numbers of innocent Somalis. Somalia relies heavily on the diaspora sending back money to their families, in particular from the UK. Many of those families use money from family members who work abroad to buy food. British banks have all terminated the accounts of money transmitting firms who send money into Somalia because they're afraid the US government will accuse them of aiding al Shabab. Barclays was the last bank to allow these companies to have an account, and the threat of the Somali diaspora being cut off from their families was so great that 45 MP's wrote to Barclay's, begging them to not comply with the governments own financial regulations! Barclays didn't listen of course, nor would you if you faced jail sentences for the actions of account-holders-of-account-holders, and a UK court had to force them to keep the accounts open via injunctions. God knows how that will play out.
He's talking about economic "theory" (which is hypothesis to anyone who knows what a theory is supposed to be) which has been tested for less than a century on a system with investments that old or older and 20% of that duration common and which was more less debunked when it led to global economic meltdown. Deflation on the other hand was the basis for essentially every economy in the world for a few thousand years before that. Inflation was only implemented because there weren't enough currency units to go around. Bitcoin does not have that problem.
The same as diamonds as far as resale goes. A diamond can be "worth" thousands of dollars, until you try to sell it. No buyers to be found.
Heh. Talk is cheap. I hear stories like that all the time on financial forums, but rarely is it actually true. Still, at least some of the stories are going to be true... the problem is that most of them are not, and the far larger numbers of people who got cleaned out on the other side of the trade instead don't boast about their losses so...
Hope you paid your taxes when you cashed them out!
-Matt
> If anything, Bitcoin is a concordant currency, its value determined by agreement.
The Bitcoin network provides a useful service - moving money from one person to another. It does it faster and cheaper than many of the alternatives, therefore people value the *network*. In order to use the network, you need some of the bitcoin currency units. Thus demand to use the network also drives demand for the currency units. Since the number of units grows slowly (1.1% per month), but the demand measured by number of merchants and online wallet accounts grows fast (25-30%/month), the price of a unit is driven up by simple supply and demand at about 25% per month.
The number of units available to buy, and the demand for those units, both vary on a daily or even minute to minute basis, thus the market rate fluctuates. But seen on longer time scales of several months or more, it sticks to the expected average growth pretty well. Events like China caused in the original article create a predictable drop in demand (people can't use their Yuan to buy bitcoins) and an increase in supply (speculators dump their coins on the market before it drops), leading to the big drop in exchange rate we have seen.
But that is a temporary disturbance in the market. Once people return to their normal use of the network to move money around, supply and demand will come into balance at a "normal" price.
> The inability to charge back is the #1 reason that prevents any consumer from perceiving it as a safe currency against vendor fraud.
Although they dealt in illegal products, the now closed Silk Road marketplace solved that problem. They had to, because vendor fraud is an especially high risk buying an illegal product online from an unknown seller. The solution was simple. The Silk Road held the payment in escrow until the buyer reported receipt and posted a positive review. A seller that racked up too many negative reviews (a) didn't get paid, and (b) stopped having customers. That was a good enough incentive that very few people got screwed over, reportedly less than with in-person deals.
It's true that bitcoin transactions are irreversible, but that does not stop you from using a third party who can send the money back. Think of it as programmable money. At an assembler language level, moving data from one memory location to another is not reversible when you only look at a single line of code. But nothing prevents creating more complex results by using longer programs. Similarly, you can build more complex payment methods on top of the atomic one way transactions. In fact, the bitcoin protocol has scriptable transactions with conditional events, though they are rarely used so far. People are too busy building payment networks and smartphone apps so you can more easily use it. They haven't had time to do fancy transactions.
China is duplicating their own version again.
Even whith 1K executions, China would have less executions per capita than US.
And that 43 are only prisioner executions, no war executions numbers (Bin Laden is the first one that comes to my mind).
I assume the "several thousands" figure includes disident executions without public trial, then that wouldn't be a fair comparission
You gave no Amnesty estimates, not even confirmed cases. That doesn't mean I'd prefer to live in China than the US.
The full block chain has been growing at an average of 700 MB/month the past year. At the cost of my last hard drive purchase, that is 2.5 cents a month. If I save mailing one paper check, that pays for two years of block chain storage (49 cents for postage, and 20 cents for check printing and envelope). I can deal with that flaw for a while. Eventually people will come up with a solution. The simplest would be dedicated block chain servers, who do nothing else but store a copy, and people subscribe to using it.
The Euro was not "dramatically volatile" at any point. It's been trading for about $1.20 to $1.40 consistently for the last ten years
The Euro was perfectly stable - especially for those using it within the Eurozone. It was the USD that showed this serious volatility!
On a more serious note: Bitcoin is not a currency as such, so it's indeed Bitcoin that's volatile. For the traditional currencies, it's not so clear. However over the past few years it's mostly USD that's gone down against most other currencies. Not the EUR that's gone up so much.
Check your sources. The author is a microbiologist with a hobby of writing crank papers on global banking and curing homosexuality
There seems to be a general misunderstanding by many folks on who inflation hurts the most... I guess because a lot of people want to blame inflation for all their troubles. But inflation is not the cause of your troubles, folks.
Inflation hurts people with more money the most, because inflation only affects people who actually hold money for long periods of time. People with very little money (for example, who live pay-check to pay-check or have only a few thousand or a few tens of thousands of dollars in the bank) simply do not carry the cash long enough for inflation to have any effect.
Even at modest levels of inflation a person working pay-check to pay-check is spending the cash almost immediately after receiving it. Most people... most of the population, spends the cash within a year (or sooner). Losses from inflation are minimal in those situations. But for anyone with real savings inflation is a problem that can only be solved by investing the cash and receiving a better return... outpacing the inflation.
How does inflation transfer more money to the government? People seem confused about this too. The answer is also simple: Through taxes on gains. If I own stock in company X and it is worth $100, and 25 years later through inflation the company is valued at $200 and I cash it out, I owe taxes on the $100 difference even though the intrinsic value of my stock has not changed. This also tends to have a lower effect on the less affluent because the less affluent tend to be in a lower tax bracket. Taxes due to inflation wind up being a huge component for the affluent, and near zero if you are poor.
Inflation is the bane of the rich, not of the poor, and always has been.
What people misunderstand the most is the relationship between wages and inflation, particularly when the average worker is losing ground due to wages not keeping up. Wages not keeping up is not really a function of inflation, but more a function of supply and demand. The supply of jobs and the number of people looking for jobs, in various categories. As inflation occurs and wages become insufficient, workers demand raises. This is why we see strikes here and there in different industries all the time.
It is true that inflation makes it easier for employers to allow worker wages to stagnate. It would be hard to argue against that, but employers can only stretch the mechanic so far. The bigger problem for the average worker is that the skill requirements for jobs change and older workers tend to not keep up with the changing environment, becoming marginalized. For example, working a metal cutting tool in the old days required significant labor but little education. In modern times it requires having factory programming skills and enough knowledge to ensure that you do not accidentally destroy a $50,000 piece of machinery or kill yourself.
All this talk about bitcoin somehow magically being a way to work around inflation is just hogwash. There are many things which work around inflation with FAR less volatility and risk than bitcoin... bonds, stocks, and so forth. None of these things are riskless, and many work on the similar principle of having a fairly limited supply (a blue-chip stock, for example), and thus for a stable business tends to be immune from inflation in the long-run (except for taxes later on when you sell, but bitcoin won't save you from taxes either).
The idea that one can simply conjure money out of thin air with no risk and no investment has NEVER worked in the past and won't work for bitcoin either, but I guess there's a siren's song involved here similar to the siren's song that attracts so many people to casino gambling (despite 'gambling' in the stock market being more lucrative than 'gambling' in a casino).
The lack of education prevalent in this age of boundless information just astounds me. People are literally blind to proven facts that they don't happen to agree with.
-Matt
Yes since they hold a decent amount of US treasuries
This really goes to the main point about how one should judge a currency, and specifically the central bank when it is the monopoly supplier of the currency. I strongly disagree with using strength/value w.r.t. other currencies as the main metric for quality. Instead, one should judge the currency based on how well it reduces the risk of price instability (this is not the same as zero inflation) thereby supporting the real economy that uses it as the medium of exchange.
So the first place I look is at the performance of the real economy. Granted, non-monetary events can hurt the real economy (e.g., war, natural disasters), but decent monetary policy is a necessary though not sufficient condition for good economic performance. And on that measure, the ECB has not done as well as the US, dipping back into a recession while the US has managed positive, albeit slow, growth since the great recession ended.
And this goes back to my point about bitcoin. It is designed to maintain its value against other currencies, but there is no function that I can see that tries to counteract economic shocks and lay the groundwork for economic growth. In the US, the political structure, and yes, only quasi-independence of the Fed ensures that economic growth is a priority of the central bank. With the ECB it is less so, and bitcoin almost not at all.
Don't forget that I get to proliferate a mortgage instrument and derivatives scheme backed by monopoly money if u get to have twit coin
He found them at the corner of Smith & Wesson.
I come here for the love
... decent monetary policy is a necessary though not sufficient condition for good economic performance.
Exactly. In other words, without a lot of scientific research you can't conclude from the fact that the Eurozone did worse than the US for the last few years economically that the ECB therefore did a worse job of making monetary policy. They could have just been dealt a much worse hand. Ultimately I don't think you can make comparisons like this between the Eurozone and the US anyway. The Eurozone is not one country, which makes a huge difference in practice and invalidates all kinds of comparisons.
It is designed to maintain its value against other currencies, ...
I have to disagree again. It can't maintain its value against other currencies if it is to be a success. There will only ever be 21 million bitcoins. If it ever becomes a large and stable economy then the bitcoin will have to be worth much more than it is worth today against other currencies. That's what I'm banking on anyway... ;)
I don't care .. HODL rulez
I agree that it is very difficult to compare different countries but the Fed fairly quickly went to ZIRP and QE and avoided a double dip recession while Europe did not take those steps, went into a recession, then took those steps to try to fix the problem. Not proof, but a convincing argument to me that they probably should have done it in the first place. The reason they didn't was because of excessive independence.
And yes what I meant was bitcoin is designed to maintain it's value against a basket of goods and services better than other currencies will
bitcoin is that bitcoin has the potential of destroying the US government.
And here I thought that coldfjiord had a monopoly on the 'Theatre of the Absurd' postings.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
They will never allow it to flourish (the Central Bankers). They have the world wrapped up in the biggest ponzi scheme (fiat currency and the bond market generally speaking) in Human history. This is ALL about CONTROL and maintaining the existing status quo. Until the Central Banking System ultimately gives itself enough rope to hang itself (i.e. the world markets lose confidence in one or more major currencies, especially the US Dollar), nothing will change.
bitcoin is going down, bitcoin is going up. try not to get excited
Bitcoin is being accepted directly by businesses, particularly drug dealers. Needless to say that is a huge industry itself. One guy recently bought a new $100K+ Porsche from a Porsche dealer using BTC. Richard Branson, owner of Virgin Galactic is accepting BTC for space flights. These are just some examples. The drug industry alone has a market cap in the hundreds of $billions, which by itself provides an ongoing market and value for BTC.
However, I do agree that governments could crush it if they wanted. If they feel seriously threatened, which I believe they do, they could erode the market, as China just did. But, I don't think that's going to happen. If BTC gains wide enough acceptance, the volatility will dissipate and stabilize the value due to a larger statistical base population.
Time will tell.
So basically you're saying bitcoins would make hard-working public servants and retired workers in greece to eat shit and die horribly. That's just cruel and totally inhuman. Governments cannot allow that to happen!