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Bitcoin Hits Highest Levels In Almost Three Years (reuters.com)
Digital currency bitcoin hit its highest levels in almost three years on Friday, extending gains since India sparked a cash shortage by removing high-denomination bank notes from circulation a month ago. From a report on Reuters: Bitcoin was trading as high as $774 on the New York-based itBit exchange, up almost 1 percent on the day and the highest since February 2014, having climbed almost 9 percent in the past month. It has climbed around 80 percent so far this year, far exceeding its 35 percent rise in 2015.
Also the strong dollar and the fear of what is going to happen after Trump undoes the banking regulations that were put in place after the Great Recession are driving this thing north.
They are easy to spot, they include mentions of beanie babies, tulips and lists of "FACT"'s.
Because this time it's different!
There are many well documented use cases. Just take the time to understand it. Your comment makes as much sense as saying "the Internet is only useful for criminals."
Since there's no one standing behind it.
Of course even major currencies sometimes go down (like it happened to the Russian ruble after 1991) but it's still a very rare occurrence, unlike Bitcoin where any major event can trigger a colossal loss in its value because a lot of bitcoin owners will rush to cash their bitcoins when they see something worrisome happening thus they will accelerate its fall even further.
Also there are other purely technical reasons why Bitcoin is not a stable currency and most likely will never be. For instance it has long ceased to be purely decentralized. Nowadays you can easily say that it's directly and indirectly controlled by Chinese.
Oh come on, you have to see that the blockchain cryptomancy technology here will lead to a deep AI machine big learning data revolution and finally give us the open cloud paradigm for internet of dark web things computing we've always dreamed of.
(Since Poe's Law is a thing, yes, this is in jest).
This forum Sig is licensed under the LGPL.
All money is fake by definition. We all agree those paper bills cost something when in fact it's just worthless paper. What's more, there's hugely more electronic money and various forms of money derivatives (like shares, debts, obligations, etc. etc. etc. read this article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ) right now than real banknotes. I guess it's 100 to 1 nowadays if not more.
So real money is only 1% tangible while bitcoin is 0% tangible. Not a huge difference for me.
As a bitcoiner, this isn't news
Stop posting every time it moves
having climbed almost 9 percent in the past month. It has climbed around 80 percent so far this year, far exceeding its 35 percent rise in 2015.
Don't forget mentioning that it may actually make up all the losses from 2014.
I like the idea of Bitcoin. It's fantastic.
But in reality it's still trading more like a commodity than a currency. Sort of like how Susan B. Anthony dollar coins are more hoarded than used as actual currency.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
I don't know who wants this stuff other than the criminals who keep trying to lock up everyone's data and demand ransom. Fake money? Who wants it?
It is quite handy as a payment token that transcend international boundaries and VISA blockades. I can buy things from for example Russia and pay with bitcoins where I cannot pay with a credit card. All perfectly legal as per the Berne convention.
I hold about 1.8 bitcoins. The other .2 is what I spent over the past few years. I wouldn't call it a high volume thing. But it's handy.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
someday James Howell's harddrive will turn up...
you betcha...
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
So real money is only 1% tangible while bitcoin is 0% tangible. Not a huge difference for me.
That's because you're not trying to actually buy anything with bitcoins. Go try to pay for your Big Mac at McDonald's with bitcoin and see if you can tell the difference.
With a mentally ill about to be president named trump the Chump many people may seek to get away from US cash as well as investments in US companies. If we get rid of Donald Chump maybe America would be a good place to invest in again. Please help dump the Chump ! Dump the Chump !
I like the idea of Bitcoin. It's fantastic.
Not if you actually understand finance and risk it isn't. Bitcoin is an interesting experiment in some ways but as a practical matter for real world use it's rather clumsy, risky and impractical. It's flawed in so many ways I barely know where to begin. The only thing about it that I really think might eventually prove valuable is the block chain technology which has applications far beyond bitcoin.
But in reality it's still trading more like a commodity than a currency.
Currencies ARE commodities. The term commodity is specifically used for an economic good or service when the demand for it has no qualitative differentiation across a market. A dollar is a dollar no matter where you trade it. Don't feel bad, a lot of people fail to understand this. Currencies in forex markets are traded very much like other commodities. They're just an abstract/intangible sort of commodity rather than bars of gold or barrels of oil. There is some nuance to the market just like every other commodity but they really are commodities all the same.
Did I wander into the Yahoo financial message boards? WTF? This is damn near a copy paste of every penny stock spam in my spam folder.
If you really think that inflation is going to run crazy, then instead of stuffing cash into your mattress, you can do one of the following: buy gold, buy shares in the stock market, or deposit into a savings account or certificate. The value of all of these will float with inflation. I remember getting 11% interest on a fixed-term deposit in the late 1980's. All of these have the advantage of not carrying the same risk exposure as Bitcoin, whose value can fluctuate by 20% over a few days.
>So now who's ignorant?
You, you mindless cultist. You know how to parrot the Bitcoin propaganda like any number of other morons hoping to get rich quick for nothing while understanding precisely none of the reasons Bitcoin is a giant, steaming, pile of crap that never had the potential to work for social, technological, business, and economic reasons.
Or you're not ignorant and believe that if you lie hard enough and often enough, you can pump the price and some newb will buy you out and that's good, right?
Either way, you're just a waste of a human being because you're a net negative for society. Maybe you're young and naÃve, and it's just for now and one day you'll be worth something as a person. If you're over 19 though... game over. This is it, the best you'll ever be as a human being. You've failed to engage your brain.
Go somewhere else. I hear http://www.reddit.com/r/bitcoi... is good.
Heh, yeah obviously it will not be different, it will soar and crash as it always has. However, and this is the beauty of bitcoin, no matter how hard it crashes it never really goes away and will just come back stronger than before. Bitcoin is a brilliant and terrifying idea if i have ever seen one, if it becomes what its designed to become and that's no small if, it will rock the world. Will it eventually replace nation currencies, who knows, its not as far fetched as one might think, the potential is there. We are not talking about replacing any mayor currencies to start with, but just imagine a small and weak national currency crashing and burning real badly, is it so far fetched for a small nation to pick up bitcoin? Maybe not quite yet, but if it happens at a peak of another bitcoin hype, could happen you know. And if bitcoin continues coming back stronger every time, I think it will happen eventually. Once there is one country using it, its no stretch to see a second country adopting and so forth.
So real money is only 1% tangible while bitcoin is 0% tangible. Not a huge difference for me.
You live in a bubble, if the difference is so small to you. (1) The USD is backed by assets, even if not directly as it was when we had the gold standard. (2) The USD is also backed by binding explicit and implicit promises that 300 million US citizens will accept it. In comparison bitcoin is explicitly backed by nothing, and no one on the planet has made a binding promise to accept bitcoin.
Major bummer for the guy who had 10,000 bitcoins on a hard drive and threw it away.
The India explanation is strange: if a note is removed from circulation, people would tend to use lower value notes. Why would they move to bitcoin?
That's bollocks. I was living in France when it happened and there were strict limits on changing Francs to Euro well in advance of the actual switch; they knew there was plenty of money stuffed in mattresses & teapots.
It caused a short term boost to home renovation & antiques market.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
> All money is fake by definition.
That's partially incorrect.
* Hard currencies have an intrinsic value. i.e. Especially the metals.
* Soft currencies -- you are correct -- they are completely artificial.
However, this isn't telling the entire picture.
There are 4 Levels of money. That is, money can represent 4 different things:
1. Barter
If you have physical good I desire, and vice versa, we can trade. The *thing itself* is money -- ANYTHING can have value -- depending on who wants it. Now this becomes impractical when you only want 1/2 a cow -- thus a solution was needed for this problem. Which leads me to my next point:
2. Tokens
Instead of trading the physical things themselves, we can trade tokens which represent them. The nice thing is that we can sub-divide tokens into any division we want.
3. Time, Effort, and Skill
I don't have the skills to build a house, nor the time, but if I have enough tokens, I can hire people who do. As a result we've started to ditch using physical tokens and moved to digital tokens, aka bits to represent money. For the time being banks will honor this Bits <--> Paper money equivalency.
4. Energy
At the end of the day, currency is really about energy. Hell, Bitcoin mining shows _exactly_ this. We can currently, very primitively, convert matter into energy and vice versa. This will play an ever increasing role as our technology moves beyond the primitive level we have.
ZPE (Zero Point Energy) will free us from the greed of currency, and move the value into what people can create uniquely. But hat is still a few decades off before we evolve to that level.
> All money is fake by definition. That's partially incorrect. * Hard currencies have an intrinsic value. i.e. Especially the metals.
Except in practice this "intrinsic value" is a laughable myth, especially the metals:
1. Almost all of that "intrinsic" value is due to it being perceived as luxurious. Most people don't even like gold-colored jewelry; so-called "white gold" (i.e. gold that's been adulterated with other metals to hide its real color) is more popular. How is the totally psychological value of "I feel teh warm fuzzies because this ring is REAL!" any more "inherent" than the warm fuzzies you get from knowing you have 20 $100 bills in your pocket?
2. Excepting supply issues, whenever gold skyrockets (usually dragging the other precious metals with it, although they don't always rise as dramatically), it's when all non-precious metals are crashing in value... the same fears that cause people to suspect copper will be worth less tomorrow also cause them to think gold will be worth more. Thus, it should be clear that gold's value as currency is definitely not rooted in its practical or intrinsic worth.
All currencies will take on "artificial" qualities once they become widely accepted as a currency, or even if they are merely thought to be an emergency currency that almost no one currently accepts (gold).