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Bitcoin Price Hits Fresh Record High Above $2,200 (cnbc.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Monday marks the seven-year anniversary of Bitcoin Pizza Day -- the moment a programmer named Laszlo Hanyecz spent 10,000 bitcoin on two Papa John's pizzas. More important than the episode being widely recognized as the first transaction using the cryptocurrency is what it tells us about the bitcoin rally that saw it break through the $2,100 mark on Monday. Bitcoin was trading as high as $2,185.89 in the early hours of Monday morning, hitting a fresh record high, after first powering through the $2,000 barrier over the weekend, according to CoinDesk data. Throughout the weekend, the value of cryptocurrency was looming around $2,000.
Man, $11 million dollars for a pizza; I hope it was damn good!
-SaNo
I just thought of a name for it: "deflation". It will NEVER work!
Anyone still on the bitcoin bandwagon are the ones who either have free electricity or criminals. As a currency it's just doomed to fail due to the ever changing "value" people attribute to it. It's simply too volatile. One day it can be worth $2k and the next it could be worth $500. The fact it becomes rarer after a while, only the ones who invested heavily in bitcoin in the early days actually made a decent profit, today if you join, you basically get peanuts.
That's the nature of every system, including Wall Street, education, investments, government, and sex.
The ones who get in early reap the benefits.
So, you were whining 5 years ago; had you invested 5k, you could retire today.
Instead, you're still whining today.
Bit coin is slowly limiting the supply of new bit coin (by design), which drives up the price of bitcoin.
Correct. This is because the makers of bitcoin were under the (incorrect) belief that having no ability to adjust the money supply quickly (ala the gold standard) is beneficial and failed to understand why such a system failed. Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
So every time you go to buy a good or service you spend less bitcoin because its value has increased.
Not necessarily true. Just because the supply of bitcoins is (roughly) fixed it doesn't mean the demand for them is fixed. The price can and does go both up and down with great regularity.
I see a problem emerging when someone says they want to get paid in a fixed amount of bitcoin per hour.
That would be no different than saying you want to be paid a fixed number of dollars per hour. Inflation/deflation are real things with real consequences. Doesn't matter if you are talking about bitcoins or dollars. The difference of course is that you can buy most things with dollars but very few things with bitcoins so you are experiencing exchange rate risk in addition to simple inflation/deflation.
You're investing in the hope that someone else in the future will want to pay more for it.
It's nothing more than speculation. And people have been made rich (and poor) by speculating for a very long time.
The flip side (which BTC proponents don't want to talk about) is that fees are currently running around $2 USD per transaction if you don't want your transaction to sit around unconfirmed for hours if not days
The flip side to that (which BTC opponents don't want to talk about) is that credit card processing fees are currently running around 3% plus $0.15 per transaction if you want to accept and receive payments at all.
$2 to convert 1 bitcoin into another currency is a great deal, as a credit merchant would charge over $60 for the same amount.
$2 to convert one ten hundredth of a bitcoin or less isn't much of a deal, as a credit merchant would only charge $0.65 or so for the same amount.
So what has happened is that Bitcoin has become useless for what its supporters intended it to be - as money (unless the transaction is large enough to make the transaction fee negligible). Bitcoin has devolved almost exclusively into an instrument for speculation, blackmail, and transactions in illegal goods.
That sure is the truth.
On the former point, about the only way to use bitcoin as originally intended is by keeping the entire end-to-end transaction within the bitcoin ecosystem, which alone makes it fairly pointless (or at least expensive) to use as a form of money. About the only cost effective use would be for some type of investment/speculation use.
Which moves right into the latter point, in that all of the massive criminal usages of bitcoin keeps the ecosystem insanely volatile as to be incredibly unwise to use for investment purposes.
Instead we just have no other choice but to give up all forms of currency except the one supported by your current government, granting them final say on if and when you are given permission to partake in society.
As we know all too well, it's completely impossible to use two separate and unrelated currency systems at the same time, such as cash and credit, or cash and bitcoin.