Slashdot Mirror
Bitcoin Breaks $1,000 Level, Highest in More Than 3 Years (cnbc.com)
The price of digital currency bitcoin has hit the $1,000 mark for the first time in three years. From a report on CNBC: The cryptocurrency was trading at $1,021 at the time of publication, according to CoinDesk data, at level not seen since November 2013, with its market capitalization exceeding $16 billion. Bitcoin has been on a steady march higher for the past few months, driven by a number of factors such as the devaluation of the yuan, geopolitical uncertainty and an increase in professional investors taking an interest in the asset class. "We are seeing the aftermath of zero interest rates run amok. So bitcoin is a healthy reminder that we don't have to hold on to dollars or renminbi, which is subject to capital controls and loss of purchasing power. Rather it's a new asset class," Bobby Lee, chief executive of BTC China, one of the world's largest bitcoin exchanges, told CNBC by phone.
i remember when you could use a bitcoin fountain and get 1btc at each pull of the virtual lever.
I think that would be the best use of BTC. I have no interest in holding BTC but if there is a way of pegging it to USD using smart contracts, that would be pretty cool.
So long as speculators can make money holding onto bitcoin while the value shifts, it will not be a viable means of exchange. Currencies need a stable value for people to want to use them as a currency.
It is only a matter of time before one BTC is worth $10,000 to $100,000 in US money. Simple. BTC only has a limited amount of currency, while other fiat currencies can have the printer run at any time (*cough* QE *cough*.)
Only thing that can take down BitCoin is the 60+ GB blockchain that one has to parse with every transaction to protect from being double-spent, and the segwit pissing contest, effectively splitting what BTC clients verify what.
It's mostly due to the election of Donald J. Trump as the next POTUS. This has caused a lot of concern about the future US debt, a spike in both the strength of the dollar and the prices of US equities, and a lot of people looking for alternative places to put their money as the Trump administration looks (based on who he's appointing to cabinet positions) to being undoing the regulations on the banking industry that were put in place after the economic crash of 2008/2009 and undoing the Consumer Financial Protection Agency.
Someone involved in bitcoin thinks its relevant and people are doing big things with it. Next thing you know companies will be sending out press releases saying they're releasing great products.
While bitcoin is changing the landscape, I still think it suffers from the same problem that 'normal' currency has, in that the richest 1% control nearly all the currency, only this time that 1 percent are the techies/geeks.
Only time will tell if they'll also fall prey to human nature (ie. greed, and hoard it all to themselves). Here's hoping that won't happen.
AC comments get piped to
If someone is not interested in drugs or guns is there any benefit to bitcoin?
Just curious.
I don't think having to hold or parse 1000 GB of data is too big requirement to run your own bank! If you just want to use Bitcoin, there is many clients that have none of those huge "problems" and can be use on your phone.
With this description in mind, BTC seems to be more like gold than dollars.
Like gold, it seems to have an intrinsic value, in the eye of the beholder. And gold is assumed to be a finite resource, which we discover and deliver with variable effort and cost. BTC seems to have an increasingly higher cost to discover and deliver new BTC, though technology (as happens sometimes with gold) may make this relatively easier from time to time, possibly affecting perceived value.
Unlike gold, which has a broad, virtually universal appeal. BTC is less universally appealing, but still it is a perceived value.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Slashdot is helping with the pump, who is out there dumping?
Another way of writing the story is this: ... From the losers side.
People who bought bit coin in 2013 had lost money for the last three years, and at long last are now even.
Look for the same if you buy bitcoin now, you can help make the 2013 losers whole by participating in the next round of pump and dump
Seeing bitcoin and "professional investor" in the same sentence, as well as seeing real world economic situations used as an excuse for the latest bitcoin bubble.
It's very easy to look "professional" when the bubble is inflating. Let's see how professional they look when it pops again, as it will - because Bitcoin is SPECULATION not investment. I'm pretty sure that tulip salesmen were highly respected financial professionals in the 1630's, a few months before they turned gardener again.
Now don't get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with a bit of speculation and money can be made. However it is a universe of risk away from the term "investment" and the buyer must beware.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
It's only a matter of time before one BTC is worth $200 in US money, too. How much are you willing to gamble?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Global political attacks on cash (India http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/worl..., Pakistan http://www.financialexpress.co..., Venezuela https://www.theguardian.com/wo..., Euro http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/busi...) and gold (India gold ownership limits http://www.indianjobs4u.com/go...) and Euro currency (Italian bank bailout worries http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/busi...), US (geopolitical uncertainty from Trump, interest rate hikes http://abcnews.go.com/Business...), brexit (UK in or out of Europe http://www.express.co.uk/news/...) are all bullish for Bitcoin into 2017.
I guess you've never looked at a chart of BTC prices. Take a look at the volume, the transactions and tell me if you think it makes sense to wait until it goes back down to $200.00
Will BTC go back to the $600s perhaps. Two hundred. I don't think so.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
You mean someone has been dumping it for 3 years? Recent days we have seen insane price increase if you look over 3 years, it's a pretty consistent price increase. Sad you probably never read how bitcoin works and understand to true power of p2p transactions. If that would have been possible... would you have invest in the p2p communication called the Internet? Or the p2p file sharing torrent? Bitcoin is the next logical step against censorship.
If you just want a way to digitally pay for things with limited (but far from perfect) anonymity, bitcoin is a fine mechanism if you can stomach the wild fluctuations in valuations relative to governmental currencies. But if you actually want something independent of government currency, you don't want to jump overboard into an exchange based on artificial scarcity backed by nothing but the good will of mathematicians; you want durable commodities. Bitcoin is simply a zero-value hash which a subset of people have agreed has value. Nothing less, nothing more.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Saying that bitcoin is not subject to capital controls and loss of purchasing power is something that the guy running Silk Road would strongly disagree with. He was one of several people who have lost their bitcoin's purchasing power following government controls - in this case seizure. Here's another in Australia.
It's like anything else - if yu can own it, someone else can take it away from you. "New asset class" my arse.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
$1000 today... 5 cents tomorrow... $300 next week. Doesn't really matter what Bitcoin is worth today, it flops around like a wet fish, still not really viable as a useful currency, better as a medium in which geeks take money from other geeks.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
"So bitcoin is a healthy reminder that we don't have to hold on to dollars or renminbi, which is subject to capital controls and loss of purchasing power."
As if bitcoin isn't subject to a loss of purchasing power? As if that wasn't why the prices fluctuate so wildly?
Holy shit, the people getting into bitcoin are getting scammed harder than I thought if they're buying this economically-unsound statement.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
... all, it has been around for 8 years, while being bashed, trolled, speculated, fluctuated and obliterated over and over again.
Because of the moronic increasingly constrained supply over time, the price will continue to trend up even as people abandon it and demand trends down.
A normal fiat currency the price would crash until you need 10 billion Zimbabwe dollars to buy a sandwich. With bitcoin, you can't even print more; people will have to abandon it. It won't get easier/cheaper to get, either, because of the speculation premium.
If you want a new fiat currency, fine. But it has to have long-term low inflation to succeed. If it has built-in deflation then speculation will dominate the market.
LOL you're making a pretty huge vocabulary mistake when you confuse the definition of a fiat currency ("in the eye of the beholder" eg, value is in the perception/agreement that there is value) and intrinsic value.
About $250/oz of the value of gold is based purely on the industrial value as a construction material! There is real long-term intrinsic value that serves as a guaranteed floor and allows gold to trade at a much higher level in a similar way to a fiat currency.
Bitcoin has zero intrinsic value. Zero. You can love bitcoin and it isn't less true. ;) You can't even wipe with it. Even a dollar coin has 5 cents of metal value. Bits on a computer don't have higher intrinsic value if they're flipped one way than if they're flipped the other way.
About $250/oz of the value of gold is based purely on the industrial value as a construction material! There is real long-term intrinsic value that serves as a guaranteed floor and allows gold to trade at a much higher level in a similar way to a fiat currency.
What's "intrinsic" about that? Is there some particular reason to think that people will always and forever value gold at $250/oz or higher, no matter what?
Keep in mind that aluminum was once valued more highly than gold, now it's cheap enough that many people don't even both to recycle it but rather just throw it in the landfill.
Seems to me that gold is valued as an industrial material only as long as no cheaper/more-useful substitute can be found, at which point its value would drop accordingly. Outside of that, its main attraction is that it is shiny and people like the way it looks, at which point we're definitely back to 'eye of the beholder' territory.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
There are no respectable bitcoin exchanges left, it's all under criminal control. You pay your money and you take your chances.
It's the largest bitcoin market by far. Everytime China threatens currency controls/devaluation the price runs up as money flees offshore.
If you haven't spent 100 hours looking in to Bitcoin and have concluded it is rubbish, you are being wilfully ignorant. Your grandchildren will be amazed that you, an IT professional, didn't see this one coming.
Why don't you put your money where your mouth is and profit off its' collapse?
I'll be on the other side of the trade.
Please stop this bullshit.
You obviously have no clue about bitcoins and your economics 101 is pretty flawed, too.
You get bit coins via bitcoin exchanges. You are mixing up mining, wich will hit a limited supply and will make finding new coins more and more expensive with transactions and payments.
There is no difference between gong to an ATM, withdrawing $10, going into a pub and drinking 2 or 3 beer versus "withdrawing" bitcoins worth $10 from an "bitcoin exchange" and buying some thing you want to buy via the internet. Except for the difference in "physical" versus internet, both exchanges are exactly the same. And as far as I can see bitcoin will never vanish.
It probably won't be hyper successful but it will be - like gold - always be a collectors item.
With bitcoin, you can't even print more ... can't e so hard to grasp. The winning point of bitcoin is: they are limited.
Exactly as with gold. The remaining gold simply gains worth, same as bitcoins. If you need more, you split the existing coins
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Stopped reading at "you obviously have no clue."
Everything I stated as a fact is a fact. Things not stated as a fact might be my opinion. You might simply be unaware of the facts, or don't care about my opinion, but then, why even respond? If I state a fact, and you offer a correction, I might read it. If you say I have "no clue," even though I actually did look into the subject and my comments were a mix of fact and educated opinion, then I know you're full of shit. I don't need to know whatever else you wrote to know that, because I know that I did go out and acquire some clues before forming my opinions.
You're not even logically competent enough to disagree with me without making an ass of yourself. If you think somebody has "no clue," don't respond to their comments. You're not even attempting to engage in constructive communication, and so why would anybody expect that to be followed with worthwhile words?
Then you are not very smart ... as the opinions you form from your "even though I actually did look into the subject" make no sense and are wrong.
Your whoe posts indicates: you have no clue. ;D
And your follow up indicates: You're not even logically competent enough to disagree with me without making an ass of yourself because you are full with insults
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Wow, "you disagree with me, you must not be very smart."
I know you are but what am I?
You're right, I don't have anything but insults to respond to that with, because it is too fucking stupid to waste time with any other response. If you say shit like that to people, they are only going to respond for their own entertainment.
I'll leave it to you to figure out why your response is idiotic.