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Bitcoin Hits $10,000 Because Ceilings Are Just a Construct, Man (gizmodo.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: On Tuesday, the trading price of the most prominent cryptocurrency hit $10,000 for the first time. And that nice round number will almost certainly have the kind of psychological effect that brings in new traders. Based on analysts' recent predictions, the $10,000 milestone could be the beginning of the end or just the beginning. Some thought that $2,000 would be the point at which we'd see a reversal of Bitcoin's ascent. Others predicted it would top out at $4,000. Then, $4,000 became the floor. These days, analysts with decent reputations have predicted the cryptocurrency's trading price could go as high as $50,000, $100,000, and even $1 million.
I bought 5 bucks worth of bitcoin last year... It's now worth $80 bucks (as of this writing). I'm simply floored by how much its gone up!
... I don't give a shit about BTC.
I do however, wonder if Lindsay Lohan is in rehab or if Pokemon Go is still a thing.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Sure...there is a bubble but when will it burst? They have been saying that at 1k, 2k, 3k, 4k....
I have to admit I've not really kept up on Bitcoin mining economics for some time, but about a decade ago I remember reading a lot about how if you were not using custom ASIC processors to mine you were spending more on electricity than you were getting from bitcoin...
With BTC going up and up it seems like at this point there's no hardware that is not economical to mine on any longer. Is that really the case or has mining at this stage become so compute intensive you still need powerful custom hardware to have mining make any sense?
BTW I salute those that had the foresight to purchase those custom mining rigs, assuming you had the grit to hang onto the BTC you managed to mine all this time...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Seems like yesterday
Search for "buy bitcoin" on Google's site.
The first suggestion will be "buy bitcoin with credit card."
If ordinary people are leveraging up at 10-20% per annum to buy a currency that's not accepted for most things, you know where this is going.
I don't know what else to call them, but the kind of day trader types that play the stock market noticed the price going up. So now in addition to the drug traffickers, money launders and ransomeware authors we've got those jackals. I'm sure this will all end well.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Can you remember 1929? Buying stocks on margin using credit? What a mess that was..
At least there won't be a margin call to deal with when this all goes pear shaped.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
more akin to the dot-com bubble, IMO
These days, analysts with decent reputations have predicted the cryptocurrency's trading price could go as high as $50,000, $100,000, and even $1 million.
In other words, they have no idea why it's doing what it's doing.
I'm starting to think "expert" is someone who is physically unable to utter the words "I don't know".
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
December 10th. That date will be December 10th.
Of course it's a bubble... the key to bubbles though isn't if they are there or not... but when they will burst.
If for instance you know bitcoin is a bubble and it bursts tomorrow, you find a way to short bitcoins today.
If you know it's a bubble and it bursts 5-6 years from now, you buy bitcoin now, and sell it in 4-5 years.
If you know it's a bubble but have no idea when it bursts, there is no value in knowing it's a bubble.
Everyone knows it's a bubble...
It might not burst, we might imbue bitcoin with value by allowing it to be used as currency in a great deal of transactions... if that becomes the case then we might fill that bubble with the value it needs to no longer be a bubble... (at that point the price should stabilize).
I think it's going to burst... but I don't know when.
You can't use BTC for everything but more and more I am seeing people and websites accepting BTC for real goods and services. Although it may not technically be "currency" it's close to making no difference.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Except they started saying that when Bitcoin hit $5... not $5k.. but five bucks.
I said it myself when it was about seven bucks. "Oh that's the dumbest thing ever. Seven dollars for some digital coin that nobody takes? pffft"
Fortunately a friend of mine convinced me to plunk down and buy $1000 worth back when it was about $10. I haven't sold them yet but I have to admit that the prospect of a million dollars is enticing.
Bitcoin, for whatever reason nobody really understands, is worth something to a lot of people - worth a LOT to a lot of people. Is there real intrinsic value? No. Is there tremendous perceived value? Definitely. Right now, the latter is more important than the former.
Gold's isn't useful either. It is also energy intensive to "create" (i.e. mine). It is useful for somethings, but it's limited uses are not the cause of it's price. U.S. dollars are not useful aside from their ability to be exchanged for goods. Dollars were previously backed by gold making their exchange rate fixed. Now it's variable. Bitcoin is not useful, but it can be exchanged for some goods or dollars (and therefore all goods including gold).
One of the benefits of a good currency is it's lack of utility outside being a medium of exchange and a store of value. This is part of what makes gold and dollars good currencies as opposed to barrels of gasoline. We don't want the supply of the currency to be affected by a sudden demand for traveling or something like the rising utility of the electric car.
The fact that bitcoin is energy intensive to create is by design. If it were easy to create, then it would be worthless. Everyone would simply create a bitcoin rather than paying $10,000 for one. Just like how gold and dollars would be worthless if everyone could easily create gold and dollars in their basement.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I like how you idiots talk about it like it's going to burst. It's not going anywhere.
The banks and bankers are bursting.
I think this is the real question here. Are there entities other than the obvious market forces working to drive up the price of bitcoins for reasons other than the apparent ones?
If you want mine your own crypto currency, you need a motherboard with 19 PCIe 1X slots to plug in 19 GPUs and a couple of 1200W PSUs.
And an extension cord to steal the electricity from your neighbor.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
In related news .... the average BTC transaction fee is now at $6 USD, and climbing fast. Could be worse, however. Two weeks ago, it spiked above $19.
Does anyone seriously think that BTC is being used for anything except speculation? It sure isn't being used for "money". You've got people buying BTC using their credit cards, and converting their savings to BTC. It's a classic bubble.
It's gonna be nasty, and when the bubble pops the transaction backlog will be huge as people try to dump their BTC before they lose everything. Transaction fees will shoot through the roof. Boom or bust, the Chinese mining pools will make money hand over fist.
I did not join the bitcoin race, but I bought popcorn and took comfortable race to see the spectacular show. It will win "Best emotions swings award" of the year.
Not so anonymous anymore.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
And the Flanian Pobble Bead can only be exchanged for other Flanian Pobble Beads.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Liar.
Current transaction fees and times make the activities you describe impossible.
If you actually use bitcoin even once for anything but investment, meaning you paid the current premium price and then sold it for goods at some fixed quantity, when it increases in price this quickly then you are retarded.... Every day makes you insane. The question of buying bitcoin in the first place makes both outcomes likely, since it has no value outside of the hype and unlicensed "experts" doing the major pumping. There is some financial force behind this, and it is extremely likely to be a combination of Russia, the DPRK, and every other ever-so-nice pariah state using bitcoin to evade sanctions.
Oh, it will crash. Bitcoin is not actually worth anything in real-world terms and the current instability wipes out its usefulness as a currency. The only question is how much more fools can be found and when that supply dries up, the crash comes. The "Greater fool theory" applies nicely, and I expect a few reasonable master's theses will be written about it. (This whole thing is to obvious and predictable for a PhD of reasonable quality.)
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Actually, Gold is pretty useful and will nowhere drop as low as 10% of its current value. The thing is that if the price of Gold drops, it will be used in more places. Gold is pretty good for a number of engineering tasks.
Incidentally, unlike Gold, Bitcoin is now actually worthless. With these severe changes in value, it has no worth as an actual currency, and that was its only worth. When it crashes, it will crash down to zero. The only worth of Bitcoin is that you may still find a greater fool than yourself who is willing to buy it, in turn hoping for an even greater fool.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Exactly! The undisclosed force behind this is evading sactions on trade, sanctions imposed as alternatives to warfare to dissuade bad actors from doing tings like committing genocide or using nuclear weapons as actual weapons. The potentially literal fallout of this scheme is frightening, and the fools behind it should be shot.
this is the fifth story in as many weeks with no more substance than "bitcoin hits $x!". Comments from the fist story can be copied verbatim to all the others, there's nothing new to be said on the subject. Can we please find a more interesting subject to talk about?
If I wanted to know the day price for Bitcoin, I'd use a stock ticker.
How can I get in before everybody hears about it?
Yes. And all the deniers have a transparent motivation: They have Bitcoin and are lying through their teeth in the hopes of driving it even higher.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
According to charts on websites that people actually use, it didn't quite hit $10,000. Anyway, this is very uncommon during the winter when people don't have to offset the insane energy costs of mining hardware with cooling. In fact I'm heating my apartment and shop with minres. So I also don't have to play for heat (or electricity for the miners depending on how you look at it). People are willing to sell their bitcoins for a much lower price in the winter because of this so that's odd. Yes I know the southern hemisphere is a thing that exists. They just don't own many bitcoins.
There are no market forces behind Bitcoin as it has no value. The only value it ever had was as currency. With its lack of stability that is gone. There are just a bunch of fools that hope to sell to greater fools before the crash comes.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Take a look at the history of the South Sea Company; the physical value of all the assets that exist is no boundary for the irrational exhuberance of an ill-informed market fed on hype from targeted manipulations.
Ok, I am not well versed in economics but may be someone here can answer these questions :
With roughly 250B$ market cap between the 4 first crypto-currencies, would a collapse of Bitcoin send significant ripples through the "real" economy?
Do we know how much of this value was really invested in the currencies versus how much comes from the speculation?
Actually, Gold is pretty useful and will nowhere drop as low as 10% of its current value
Steel is more useful than gold, and is less than 10% of gold's value.
Gold is pretty good for a number of engineering tasks.
Most of these require gold in minute quantities. Gold is heavy and soft, which makes it a poor choice for many engineering tasks.
At this time, Bitcoin is completely worthless as a currency as that needs stability. You are not only a liar, you are a scammer trying to do a pump&dump.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Kidding, but it did hit $68 USD, on the 18th. There were at the time of writing almost 80,000 unconfirmed transactions. I sold my bit coin a while ago and I'm sure the price could still go higher but at this point bit coin is useless for any common person's day to day transactions. I'll keep to buying my drugs with Monero and cash out of almost everything else.
Bullshit! If you want to mine your own cryptocurrency, you can do it with the CPU you are using right now. If you don't even have a CPU, you can do it by hand.
Well, 23,700 is today on the DOW.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
I appreciate your perspective, though it incorrectly assumes that I purchased a sum of bitcoin and now I'm running around daily consuming/burning that bitcoin when it should be left alone to mature in value. You seem to believe that I should have two stacks of currency: one stack of dollars to live life by, and another stack of bitcoin to leave as an investment.
In reality, all the money received from my 9-5 job, my sideline business, and my miners goes into bitcoin. Therefore, I have no dollars left for daily life. I have a constant stream of finances going into bitcoin, and some coming out of bitcoin in the form of commodities and services needed to live daily life. This model ensures that my entire budget increases in purchasing power as rapidly as bitcoin increases in value. All I have to do is ensure that the stream of finances going into bitcoin is larger than the stream coming out of bitcoin and my nest egg grows at an even more rapid pace than if I only used bitcoin as an investment.
To quote yourself, "when it increases in price this quickly then you are retarded" you would be retarded to NOT put every dollar you have into bitcoin.
Let's make like a bird... and get the flock outta here.
I bought $500 worth this summer. Won't ever buy more, can afford to lose it all. Having fun watching it go up, expecting it to burst at any moment. Obviously this is a bubble. When will it burst? At this point Bitcoin can't be used as currency as its becoming more valuable that the product you want to buy with it.
At some point in the past, 1 bitcoin could only buy 1 slice of pizza. Today, 1 bitcoin can buy a brand new motorcycle.
At some point in the past 1 dollar could buy 10 movies tickets. Today 1 dollar can't even buy you 1 movie ticket.
Bitcoin sounds like a pretty awesome currency to me. Each to their own I suppose.
Let's make like a bird... and get the flock outta here.
The difference there is slow inflation in a large self-sustaining market vs inflation measured by the month faster than China grows per year.
Nope, I understand how bitcoin works, and thus I know you're a liar.
Actually, Gold is pretty useful and will nowhere drop as low as 10% of its current value
Steel is more useful than gold, and is less than 10% of gold's value.
You are severely mistaken.
Gold is pretty good for a number of engineering tasks.
Most of these require gold in minute quantities. Gold is heavy and soft, which makes it a poor choice for many engineering tasks.
There are other uses for metals than making hammers from them. But you just demonstrated your level of "insight" pretty clearly.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
"Steel is more useful than gold, and is less than 10% of gold's value."
It's also far far far more abundant.
The things that gold is good at, generally the next-best alternative is quite a bit worse. Hence why gold is so valuable - because it is quite good and not very abundant.
"Most of these require gold in minute quantities."
Actually I think many things would use gold if it were as abundant as steel. But it isn't, so it's reserved for only the things that really need it, and cheaper substitutes are used where they can be.
But the DJI is an index measuring the value of the stocks in companies followed by the index. It represents a weighted value of what owning shares in those companies is worth (oversimplification is simple). This is like people trading commodities and then running the value of the commodity up even though they have no interest in the actual value or usefulness of the commodity -- similar to the oft-referenced tulip situation in the Netherlands, with the pricing being run up by speculators who bought and sold tulips to other people looking to buy and sell tulip bulbs with none of them having any interest in actually planting the damned things and enjoying the flowers.
Maybe crypto currencies are to be seen as a hybrid between traditional financial assets (like stocks) and traditional money (like cash)?
Right now, the total market cap of the 1200 biggest cryptocurrencies are about 0,3% of the global stock market value. Traditional finance are starting to take notice. If value is moved from traditional stocks to cryptocurrencies - say to a 95%-5% ratio, that is a x16,6 increase which places Bitcoin at 166000$ assumed that Bitcoin stays at ~50% of the total cryptocurrency value.
Link: http://www.businessinsider.com...
Looking at the history I realize you are not only right about ASIC's, but even bitcoin itself doesn't seem to be over ten years old! So I was really off in that one.
I have to say it FEELS like well over a decade since Bitcoin arrived, It's hard to believe it's only been around since 2010 but there you have it. I would have sworn it originated sometime just after Y2K...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Bitcoin Releases Version 0.3
Posted by kdawson on Sunday July 11, 2010 @09:09PM from the nobody-to-prosecute dept.
Teppy writes
"How's this for a disruptive technology? Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer, network-based digital currency with no central bank, and no transaction fees. Using a proof-of-work concept, nodes burn CPU cycles searching for bundles of coins, broadcasting their findings to the network. Analysis of energy usage indicates that the market value of Bitcoins is already above the value of the energy needed to generate them, indicating healthy demand. The community is hopeful the currency will remain outside the reach of any government."
Here are the FAQ, a paper describing Bitcoin in more technical detail (PDF), and the Wikipedia article. Note: a commercial service called BitCoin Ltd., in pre-alpha at bitcoin.com, bears no relation to the open source digital currency.
WikiLeaks, Money, and Ron Paul
Posted by Soulskill on Sunday December 12, 2010 @01:16PM from the headlines-that-will-make-some-people-mad dept.
Another day, another dozen WikiLeaks stories, several of which revolve around money. PayPal has given in to pressure to release WikiLeaks funds, though they still won't do further transactions. Mobile payment firm Xipwire is attempting to take PayPal's place. "We do think people should be able to make their own decisions as to who they donate to." PCWorld wonders if the WikiLeaks' money woes could lead to great adoption of Bitcoin, the peer-to-peer currency system we've discussed in the past. Meanwhile, Representative Ron Paul spoke in defense of WikiLeaks on the House floor Thursday, asking a number of questions, including, "Could it be that the real reason for the near universal attacks on WikiLeaks is more about secretly maintaining a seriously flawed foreign policy of empire than it is about national security?" The current uproar over WikiLeaks has prompted Paul Vixie to call for an end to the DDoS attacks and Vladimir Putin to break out a metaphor involving cows and hockey pucks.
Online-Only Currency BitCoin Reaches Dollar Parity
Posted by timothy on Thursday February 10, 2011 @06:59PM from the computationally-intensive dept.
IamTheRealMike writes
"The BitCoin peer to peer currency briefly reached exchange parity with the US dollar today after a spike in demand for the coins pushed prices slightly above 1 USD:1 BTC. BitCoin was launched in early 2009, so in only two years this open source currency has gone from having no value at all to one with not only an open market of competing exchanges, but the ability to buy r
If YOU are paying the bill, then you'd better be careful even at 10K/Coin.
That's exactly what I was asking in a roundabout way, how much would the electricity cost to mine a single bitcoin today?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Have gnu, will travel.
Gold is not useful enough to warrant actually using it. It is much more useful as a store of value than as an hdmi cable. That's why we keep most of our gold in bars or chains, etc, and not in forms related to engineering applications that would make it hard to reextract. Whatever use gold has is surpassed by it's value as a currency, which is why we don't really use it.
Gold would actually become *more* useful (aside from a currency) if it's value dropped to zero.
Incidentally, unlike Gold, Bitcoin is now actually worthless.
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
With these severe changes in value, it has no worth as an actual currency, and that was its only worth.
A currency is useful as both a medium of exchange and a store of value
The volatility is preventing bitcoin from being a reliable store of value (depending on how you look at it), but it is still an amazing medium of exchange.
When it crashes, it will crash down to zero. The only worth of Bitcoin is that you may still find a greater fool than yourself who is willing to buy it, in turn hoping for an even greater fool.
So lets say hypothetically a giant gold meteor hits earth and now gold is more common than iron. All the people who held gold as a store of value just lost that value. The planet as a whole is better off because now we can make sold gold hdmi cables for everyone. Gold's utility is huge now, and it's value didn't drop to zero. It's just just $300/ton rather than $40million/ton. As a person who owned a lot of gold you are really no better off than the bitcoin owner who's bitcoins dropped to literally zero.
So you think there is no inherent value in a bitcoin. I agree with you. Where I think we differ, is that you seem to think that other currencies are fundamentally any different in that regard.
I mine Monero with a bunch of computers in my shop that were not doing much else. A couple of fileservers, an email/web server, nextcloud on one, another for downloading, one more as a VM host. None of them had much of a load.
Since I started doing this last February, I've upgraded all these computers to near their max (new CPU's / RAM), and added a couple of fairly high-end video cards to each. These upgrades were completely paid for by what I've been mining. Currently it still isn't quite enough to heat my shop so I will be adding a few more. This means I'm not using any more power right now that what I would have been using with my shop's heaters (at least in winter).
Spending Monero for me means using a coin exchange to get it into my Coinbase account as bitcoin, then I head over to newegg and spend it (they accept bitcoin). Overall I've bought over $11,000 in gear this way, tax free as it was never converted to USD.
I look at bitcoins the same as I do iPhones - they're not worth nearly what they cost, but lots of idiots just want them anyway and they don't care how much they have to spend to get them. Non-miners buying bitcoin as an investment are the ones driving the price up. Some of these people will exchange their coins in time to make a profit, but probably not many. The exchange price will continue to increase until the buyers of bitcoin (not the miners) start to exchange their coins for cash or goods at a large enough rate, then it will plummet quickly. I don't feel like this will happen for quite some time.
Nevertheless, I'm just heating my shop so whatever happens I'm not out anything really.
I do not belong to the church of the lowercase 'i'
A. Gold is valuable.
B. Gold is useful for some things for which there is no good substitute.
A and B are both true, but A is not true *because of* B.
If it were, we'd be melting down most of the worlds gold for engineering tasks. What's the point of having a valuable resource if you don't utilize it?
What will be ultimately interesting is the level of committed folk at buy back thresholds when it does start to drop. That is when people will lose the real $$ - if it keeps falling. I remember the day when this was under $USD1.00 and I thought, this is such a rubbish idea... it'll go nowhere. How wrong was I ..!
Sure there will be:
Credit cards will demand payment.
Debtors will Chapter11
Houses will be liened to the point of worthlessness; and upon sale the margin call will be collected.
Pretty roundabout call, but same end result.
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
If you know it's a bubble but have no idea when it bursts, there is no value in knowing it's a bubble.
sure there is. you know not to invest anything you wouldn't be willing to spend on lottery tickets; thus you save the possible (probable even) losses. Once the bubble pops you then take that money you held on the sidelines and buy in at severe discount (whether BTC or assets people lost because of over leveraged positions).
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
I really hope you are not serious mate!
When guys doing similar enough to what you're doing now encountered 29-Oct-1929 a fair portion of them jumped out of windows...
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Not useful? Tell me how else you can send $10 million to China in 15 minutes for a $50 fee.
For $50? I can't do it... HSBC only charges me $15 to wire transfer an unlimited amount of funds from Hong Kong to any destination in the world - including China. I'd have to do at least 4 transactions to reach the $50 of Bitcoin.
Oh, and you can't do it either - Bitcoin is banned in China, so good luck sending it there. But USD, or HKD, or EUR, or GBP, or even RMB? Not a problem. But BC? Nope.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Ah, but one thing will be very different because folks where trading options and on margins, not buying and selling actual stocks.. In 1929, people ended up owing more than they had invested when the margin calls couldn't be covered and the assets they controlled couldn't be sold fast enough. In 1929, folks ended up owing debts which where multiples of their initial investment.
Buying BitCoin with credit cards, while stupid, will only end up incurring the initial debt. Folks won't be margined/leveraged and won't end up owing more than they invested.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
AFAIK there aren't any trading cryptocurrencies that are practical to mine with CPU.
Also IIUC due to the difficulty you can pretty much only mine with the very latest generation of equipment and it be profitable due to the cost of power and equipment efficiency.
So yes you technically could mine by hand but it wouldn't not be cost (money/time) effective.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
The truth is, I use bitcoin everyday to buy coffee, gas, pay my bills, take my dates out, and buy every day items such as groceries and electronics.
You're not a liar, you're just wrong. Or perhaps you're being lied to.
You're using dollars every day, lent to you by a bitcoin wallet provider against bitcoins held as collateral by the provider. This is not a bit different from the debit card I have that draws against my stock brokerage margin account, except that your provider is almost certainly more aggressive about doing "margin calls" than my brokerage.
Well, one other difference is that you're currently in fat city, seeing your BTC appreciate in value far faster than my stocks do. Of course, there will come a time when that reverses, and it'll reverse much, much harder and faster than any stock market crash, because stocks have, at root, something of real tangible value. The only real value of BTC is its use as a currency which, as others have pointed out, has simply broken down as it attempted to scale. Were BTC a better cryptocurrency with better scalability characteristics, then it would be the case that BTC is just for criminals.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Note the existence of this book:
This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly
It is a pretty impressive pyramid-scheme, I have to admit that. It is nothing else though, and certainly not a "currency". At least not anymore.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Indeed.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Congratulations, you just failed Economics 101.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Look for coins using the CryptoNight algorithm. Monero is the big one.
People aren't looking for credit card BTC purchases to use leverage. They are looking for credit card BTC purchases because that's how people buy things online.
Claiming an international, regulation-resistant payment platform is "not actually worth anything" is ignorant.
Or you take an opportunity cost and thus you do take a loss.
But if gold's fair price compared to steel is predicated on its relative scarcity, then that just shows that BTC's scarcity is intrinsically valuable without utility.
Disagreeable people have always been the mainstays of Slashdot. Take a position; someone will be there to tell you how wrong you are.
Q.E.D.
There is some serious potential with BTC in the emerging world to make a huge difference. Many nations are plagued by the lack of a decent currency. These places are ripe for BTC to take over the economy. By relying on an international currency, a poor nation can benefit from global economic activity without putting themselves at risk by tying themselves to some foreign currency. BTC could be problematic for an economy that needs to incentivise consumer spending over saving, but for third world nations who are more concerned about capital investment, an appreciating currency (especially an internationally accepted one) can be a game changer by increasing available investment capital over time.
It wasn't much of a point of resistance for BTC. What's interesting is BTC analysts seem heavily weighted to Elliott wave analysis, and subsequently the market is weighted towards the Elliott wave analysis, as people look to analysis to make trades. This appears to be a self-reinforcing action, leading to higher volatility in both directions, but it also means trading on Elliott waves without regard to underlying value (technical vs fundamental) can be effective with BTC. It also means the points of resistance tend to be Fibonacci Elliott wave extensions, rather than more traditional psychological barriers of round numbers.
That's where I heard about it. I lost my drip coinage and waited too long before starting CPU mining on my laptop, producing just enough coins to be mildly annoyed today that I lost them on an old hard drive. But it did get me researching and paying attention well enough to wrangle some gains more recently, so I still credit /. for the win.
Most conservative analysts seem to circle around Metcalfe's law, which says the value of a communications network is proportional to the square of its active user base. Now, we don't have a way of calculating some fundamental value to compare against, but the BTC price has been substantially correlated to Metcalfe's law over time. In other words, the "entities ... working to drive up the price of bitcoins" might be largely explained as a result of the growth in its user base.
In addition to the obvious, the network's value - whatever that might be - will be positively affected by its age and by its market capitalization. The longer it goes without significant security holes, the more valuable it is. The larger the BTC market cap, the better secured the network is, and the better it is able to withstand price shocks from some whale moving around some money.
If the fundamental value is non-zero (and how could it not be?), then Metcalfe might explain the rest.
To be fair, you're probably paying a fee somewhere; it just might be opaquely calculated into the spot price of the transaction or monetized as risk on some profitable derivative.
A currency does not need stability. A national currency based on fractional reserve banking (like the USD) needs almost continuous inflation. A reserve currency (like the USD) needs predictability. A third world currency needs flexibility. An international, digital currency needs... who the fuck knows? I've used it as currency. Plenty of other people have too. Currency is a utility; one which BTC offers.
Deflation is a neutral thing. It's a perhaps a terrible thing for a national currency based on fractional reserve banking, like the USD. BTC is not a national currency, and its not backed by debt, like the USD. This means there are no BTC-denominated debts that are getting more expensive with every move deeper into deflation. And as a secondary currency, there's little risk of deflationary spiral, because BTC isn't tied into the production and labor markets.
BTC deflation is arguably better suited to our future world economies, which should be focused on conservation, rather than consumption. BTC rewards the thrifty, not the spendthrift.
No rebuttal or counterargument? All you can muster is a re-assertion that you are right? Congratulations, you just violated the rules of civil discourse and therefore lose the argument.
Well, I'm paying to heat the house in winter anyway, I might as well get some work out of those electrons other than making the wall heater warm.
The distance between what you think how things work and actual reality is to great. I did indeed fail, but the root cause is on your side.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
When you just know you're right, but you can't seem to articulate how or why, maybe you're just wrong.
Gold has inherent value, proven by the fact that every single civilisation in human history has considered it valuable and a tradeable commodity. US dollars are useful in that they are necessary for the payment of taxes, and as legal tender must be accepted for payment of a debt. They are also a reserve currency, accepted all over the United States and many places worldwide.
Bitcoin fits none of these.
Gold has inherent value, proven by the fact that every single civilisation in human history has considered it valuable and a tradeable commodity
That's not "inherent" value. That is value that only exists in the minds of people.
US dollars are useful in that they are necessary for the payment of taxes, and as legal tender must be accepted for payment of a debt.
Once again, this is not intrinsic value. This is value that is given to the dollar by the US government.
They are also a reserve currency, accepted all over the United States and many places worldwide.
Once again, not inherent or intrinsic value
This sort of argument is "Gold and the US dollar are valuable because people all agree that it's valuable." "Bitcoin is not inherently valuable because it has no value beyond people agreeing that it's valuable".
Also, for your statement of needing to pay taxes in US dollars, this is possible to do regardless of the value of the dollar. If the value of the dollar plummets, my income is going to sky rocket due to inflation, causing me to pay higher taxes in dollars (but not higher taxes in value)
Requiring people to pay taxes in US dollars only requires me to convert some of my % of my income to X dollars (how ever many that is at any given time) to then pay my taxes. This is completely independent of how valuable the US dollar is.
I really hope you are not serious mate!
When guys doing similar enough to what you're doing now encountered 29-Oct-1929 a fair portion of them jumped out of windows...
And for every other year they were owning yachts. Fair enough if you want to play it safe, success doesn't usually come with that behaviour.
Well the minds of people are the ones investing in it, so that makes it inherently valuable. Maybe aliens won't value it, that's not really relevant.
If the concept of "inherent value" means anything other than "value", than it must mean something that is valuable beyond just it's perception of value in the minds of people. If it inherent value can be value only in the minds of people, then there is no reason that bitcoin can't be inherently valuable as well. All that would be required for this is for some people to think it's valuable (a condition which has clearly been met).
Traditionally the concept of inherent value is reserved for stuff like gasoline, which can be used as a fuel regardless of the perception of value in the minds of people. Presumably even aliens would value things like fuel even if they may not highly value primitive fuels like gasoline.