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Bitcoin and Ethereum Prices Are Surging Again (cnbc.com)
An anonymous reader quotes CNBC:
Bitcoin is getting a Black Friday boost. The digital currency climbed above $8,700 to a record high Saturday following increased investor interest around the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday and Black Friday shopping. Bitcoin rose more than 6 percent to a record high of $8,725.13, according to CoinDesk, trading around $8,674 midday on Saturday. [Bitcoin passed $8,000 for the first time just six days earlier]. Another digital currency, ethereum, also hit an all-time high of $485.18, according to CoinMarketCap [rising more than 50% from $300 as recently as mid-November]...
The largest bitcoin exchange in the U.S., Coinbase, added about 100,000 accounts between Wednesday and Friday -- just around Thursday's Thanksgiving holiday -- to a total of 13.1 million. That's according to public data available on Coinbase's website and historical records compiled by Alistair Milne, co-founder and chief investment officer of Altana Digital Currency Fund. Coinbase had about 4.9 million users last November, Milne's data showed... The world's largest futures exchange, CME, is planning to list bitcoin futures in the second week of December...another step in establishing bitcoin as a legitimate asset class.
UPDATE (9/26/17): Sunday the price of Bitcoin surged past $9,000 -- just one week after surging past $8,000.
The largest bitcoin exchange in the U.S., Coinbase, added about 100,000 accounts between Wednesday and Friday -- just around Thursday's Thanksgiving holiday -- to a total of 13.1 million. That's according to public data available on Coinbase's website and historical records compiled by Alistair Milne, co-founder and chief investment officer of Altana Digital Currency Fund. Coinbase had about 4.9 million users last November, Milne's data showed... The world's largest futures exchange, CME, is planning to list bitcoin futures in the second week of December...another step in establishing bitcoin as a legitimate asset class.
UPDATE (9/26/17): Sunday the price of Bitcoin surged past $9,000 -- just one week after surging past $8,000.
Can we get an article any time any investment related to tech goes up?
If only I could see the future.
Don't you care that nobody cares, or is this like how Reb
If this isn't a lack of confidence vote on the state of fiat currency, Time magazine will be revealed as offering Kim Jong-un its Man of the Year award, upon a conditional photo shoot.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Surely there's no cap to the price of one Bitcoin. Why would there be! Naturally, there's a relevant HitchHiker's quote:
"The Triganic Pu is a unit of galactic currency, with an exchange rate of eight Ningis to one Pu. This is simple enough, but, since a Ningi is a triangular rubber coin six thousand eight hundred miles along each side, no one has ever collected enough to own one Pu. Ningis are not negotiable currency, because the Galactibanks refuse to deal in fiddling small change."
Oh, did Walmart and Best Buy start demanding Bitcoin for payment? What on Earth does Black Friday have to do with currency values?
Once it exceeds ten grand, won't every transaction have to be reported to the Feds?
Just to be open, I already sold everything I own. I fully believe the market can continue to be irrational for another year and I would not recommend shorting bitcoin.
It's a bubble but I have no idea how to predict when it will burst. I do think at some point a crypto currency will replace some portion of the worlds M1 money supple (currently 70 Trillion dollars) but it won't be bitcoin. It might be ripple but I hope to god it isn't. I'm sort of hoping it will be some new currency or an evolution of an existing one (Vertcoin, Monero?) It would be ironic if US drug enforcement's actions led to Monero being the next big currency.
Side note: I bought my first house with Nortel Shares sold at around $90 while I worked there. They went up to $124 but never should have been over $5. The company wasn't profitable and their sales predictions something like 100% growth rate ever 9 months for the next 10 years. No one could have possible believed that.
Not much different from how the big investment bankers make money on the stock market, really. I don't really see this as being something unique to Bitcoin, it's just smart people taking money from dumb people.
...ecca Black and Justin Bieber got popular nearly exclusively thought people hating them (rightfully, but still) publicly and Black/Bieber feeding on the teens who rebelled against that bandwagon?
If by that, you mean it has never been that high and is now less than $5:
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees.html
The coming "global warming" meltdown is going to flood Holland and send the price of tulip bulbs THROUGH THE ROOF! Buy now before the "global warming" tuilip shortage!
You can win up to $200 worth of Bitcoin every hour, for free!
The current average fee is $57 USD per transaction.
Nonsense... it's closer to $6 USD per transaction, and that's because of some users' broken wallets sending more fees than necessary --- Low-Fee transactions are going through just fine. Also Due to SegWit; you can transact with a much smaller fee, and the blocksize effectively HAS increased due to SegWit.
Also, Bitcoin no longer has a fixed blocksize limit; it's "Block Weight".
"The current average fee is $57 USD per transaction."
No it's not. I don't know where you're getting that figure. The current average fee is $4.91. But average fee isn't even the right statistic to look at, as that's skewed higher by transactions of very large dollar amounts, as well as large weighted transactions with many inputs from places like exchanges. The median transaction fee is better, at $2.84. Even the median fee doesn't imply that you have to pay that to have your transaction confirmed in a reasonable period of time, either.
"The current reward for mining a block is 25 bitcoin"
No it's not. It's been 12.5 since 2016.
you really don't know what you are talking about
The current average fee is $57 USD per transaction. That doesn't even guarentee you will be in the next block
This doesn't mean it's unusable, it means that now so many people are using it, a bunch of them are willing to pay $57 to actually use it.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Wow! Sounds like an expensive transfer fee. I pay from $6.40 to 12.50, based on low 1.5-3 hours) to high priority (a few minutes) using Mycelium.
After thousands of /. stories in no way biased towards cryptocurrencies Im finally convinced its time to "invest" all my monies into this magical wealth-generating blackbox! If only there was a kindly unbiased moderator who was in no way heavily "invested" in this garbage to tell me what kind of magic beans to buy. Dogebean? Bitbean? Etherbean? So confusing!!
$2.84 better? Okay. Wake us when it's $.10 or lower.
But transaction costs aren't the real problem. They're a symptom the bigger problem with Bitcoin, and that is scaling. Not but a month ago, BTC had over 250k unconfirmed transactions. That number has come down to "only" 22k as a baseline, but that's due to low transaction counts.
As of this post, Bitcoin's blockchain is handling a measly 3.82 txns per second. The core devs have no plan to improve that figure. Maybe Lightning will improve things, a bit. I remain skeptical about Lightning until I see it implemented (ditto for Raiden, fwiw. At least Lightning doesn't have its own token for closing channels).
Until someone can bring txn counts up to 4k/sec or more, BTC will never even get close to its intended function of "digital cash" which is mentioned explicitly in the whitepaper. Now all the maximalists want to say that it's a "store of value", which basically means you can't move it anywhere in an acceptable timeframe for transactions.
Informative ? Basically everything said in this post is wrong.
oblig--this made reddit's homepage.
Wow so much inaccuracy in one short paragraph.
Why does Slashdot run stories on Bitcoin, Etherium, etc. on a daily basis? In the world of technology and even technology politics the spectrum is significantly larger than has been represented. In contrast, the only explanation is that some vested interests are involved in furthering the scheme. The current crowd on Slashdot is composed of mostly new technology fans, those who are young and lack experience. This group is vulnerable to extreme manipulation, and is quickly separated from their wallets. Slashdot should be better than a facade for a pump-and-dump scheme.
wow...you've never heard of a mining pool i guess.
please learn about bitcoin before you decide to educate people about bitcoin.
With regards to transaction costs.
The spot price for BTC is $9000.
The last block mined was #496206
It contained 2192 blockchain transactions
It touched 13,456 BTC or which 1951 BTC was guessed to be the actual transaction and the rest change.
The transaction fee was 1.59 BTC direct to the users and 12.5 in block reward.
For the users, the 12.5 BTC dilution is a very small dilution cost compared to the 1.59, so this leaves a simple transaction fee of $9000 * 1.59 / 2192 = $6.52.
But this is only part of the story.
The first step in measuring the transaction fee is to define it.
BTC does not make this easy for a variety of reasons.
A blockchain transaction can have multiple inputs and outputs.
The a basic, user transaction would have 1 input and 2 outputs for the funds source, the funds dest, and the change. A transaction with 1 in and 1 out may be an artifact of BTC and often not a useful user transaction. An exchange transaction might have multiple inputs and outputs and manage to perform multiple useful user transactions in a single blockchain transaction.
So how many useful transaction were there in this block?
Unfortunately, the BTC explorer does not give the total inputs and outputs in a block. If you guess that the exchanges managed to double the number of useful user transactions, then the transaction fee might drop to $3.
This swag still seems orders of magnitude too high for what is supposed to be a new way to move money.
For BTC to have value, it needs to be useful. The magnitude of these fees seems contrary to that end.
Other similar issues are the transaction rate and the legal status of the coin realm.
(So for folks cashing out, how many are planning on reporting this to the local friends at the tax authority?)
For those still in, it seems like a case of the hard thing about playing chicken is knowing when to blink.
except so is yours - meaning the GP is all correct
Bitcoin is people paying cash for numbers somebody made up.
Better?
I pay 1-10 cents a transaction with bitcoin all the time. Just get a segwit wallet and manually set the fees. If you want a quick confirmation you may have to pay more like 50 pennies USD .
Bitcoin is just the same as any other asset or currency with price discovery. There are fiat and commodity trading pairs and the market determines price based upon supply and demand
Switch to a segwit wallet with manual fees/fee bumping. My tx fees are pennies
I paid $0.69 recently for one transaction and $3 at the most for any other transaction recently. It's high. Too high. But it is still somewhat working. This is without segwit support. Just select the economic fee option in the Bitcore core wallet. I'm not sure segwit is going to solve the fee problem. I think it is like 25% less expensive from what I've been told once segwit is turned on within your wallet. AnyPay is a point of sale solution for brick and mortar businesses and it's going to have support for other crypto currencies. It really only works for Dash right now even though you can take Bitcoin with it as well. I haven't actually had a chance to utilize Dash yet even though a number of business here are taking it. Every time I go into a restaurant or shop the cashier assumes I'm paying in Bitcoin when I take out my phone to pay and I haven't yet said anything about wanting to pay with Dash instead even though the business is taking Dash. The AnyPay Dash option is just soooo new. We've got only four or so businesses that I'm aware of in my small town (Keene, NH population like 25,000) taking Dash thus far, but more are on the way. D's Caffè, 101 Local Goods, Hot Hogz, and Corner News so far are the ones taking it. Local Burger and a bunch of others will get on board as soon enough. These are all places that are already taking Bitcoin. Portsmouth, NH already has a bunch of places taking Dash now too. Can't name em though as I'm like an hour away and have only been out there once on a date/dinner/theater. Though the three places we stopped all took Bitcoin. The theater also took Dash. So did one of the other places. The restaurant I'm not sure about. I forget.
It's a bubble but I have no idea how to predict when it will burst. I do think at some point a crypto currency will replace some portion of the worlds M1 money supple (currently 70 Trillion dollars) but it won't be bitcoin.
The 'problem' with Bitcoin is that it is deflationary because only a finite amount (~21M) can be generated / mined.
So once the maximum number is generated, if demand for it keeps rising (or even if mining gets slower but the rate of demand stay the same), the value will rise. If the value of your bitcoin(s) will be worth more next week/month/etc., why would you spend now? Why not just horde for as long as you can?
I've read (a little) bit on this, and some in the Bitcoin community say it's not a problem, but haven't read an account convincing me it's not (at least if you want Bitcoin to be used in the wider world like USD and EUR).
"That number has come down to "only" 22k as a baseline, but that's due to low transaction counts."
If you look at the mempool charts, low transaction counts have been the norm, not the exception. The spikes in unconfirmed transactions are what have been the exception.
"The core devs have no plan to improve that figure."
That's false. There are multiple areas where they are working on scaling.