Slashdot Mirror
Bitcoin Tumbles From Record High After Exchanges Confirm Outage
Fearful of missing out on the frenzy in the Bitcoin world, several people were left disappointed on Wednesday noon after they were unable to buy some cryptocurrency because the websites of Coinbase and Gemini, two of the largest online exchanges for Bitcoin trading in the United States, were either down or taking too long to load, they said. In a statement, Coinbase said it was facing issues handling the overwhelming traffic it has been receiving on its website. Bitcoin surged past $11,000, the highest it has ever been, early Wednesday, though it has since taken a tumble as well, going as low as $9,290.30. Gemini said in a tweet it had resolved the performance issues, though some users continue to report delays on the website. Bitcoin's professional trading platform GDAX and exchanges Kraken and Bitstamp were also facing issues on Wednesday. The issues had been addressed, they said.
How does one go about it on a mac? I mean, I'm not in a hurry and my computer sits idle most of the time anyway. And it's in a cold room that could use the heat.
good luck trying to cash out that high number it will drop and they will say at the time the order went though it's price was X and all sales are finale. Who are you going to call the SEC?
Q: What's between your nose and your chin?
A: Two lips!
When it naturally takes 7 or more minutes just to confirm transactions (depending on how entrenched in the blockchain you want the transactions to be before you consider them to be "confirmed"), how can delays be seen as being "outages"? Long delays considered totally unreasonable for credit cards and other mediums of exchange are perfectly normal for Bitcoin.
Subject self-explaining
But I buyed them at 11k now what I do? Shoot? Posin?
Oh, so the price tumbled BECAUSE a few of the exchanges temporarily went down? Coincidentally at the exact same time? It wasn't that the price started tumbling, people went into panic mode, and the exchanges got overwhelmed? No, couldn't be that.
1. Something something tulips.
2. Something something can't cash out.
Bitcoin Cash is a fork that occurred on August that can be accepted instantly because transactions are reliable. If you have a perfectly signed transaction you can be pretty sure it will be included in the next block or so. Unless you trade a huge amount of money for everyday purchase 0-confirmation transaction is safe to accept. This was the case on Bitcoin SegWit until they voluntary prevent to raise the limit, jammed the mempol and started to drop transactions because there was no enough room to confirm them all.
LifeHack: Never store anything of value in something that rhymes with "Cocks".
With zero technical skills, running a computerized "investment"... What could go wrong? ;)
Why is there no source article for this "story." What the fuck, Slashdot. That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works.
- In Soviet Korea, only old people loose all their bases to Natalie Portman's petrified hot grits overlords.
LOL, dummies can't tell a bubble when they see one.
Thanks. It takes one to spot one. Maybe we can hang out some time. You like nerky? ;)
like your mom's panties.
Long delays considered totally unreasonable for credit cards and other mediums of exchange are perfectly normal for Bitcoin.
Credit card transactions can be reversed for months after the fact. Bitcoin transactions can be validated ("Yes, the signed transaction received has valid inputs.") almost instantly, and once it is included in the blockchain (Generally in minutes, sometimes as much as an hour.) it is irreversible. Much faster than PayPal or credit cards. As a merchant, if the value of the transaction is small, accepting unconfirmed transactions is an acceptable risk. If it's a high value transaction (For whatever value of "high" you is important to you.) then wait for a couple of confirmations. Chargebacks will never be an issue.
Oh noes, it's still worth more than a week ago! Let's all panic!
#DeleteFacebook
Sell! Sell! Sell111!!!1ll
http://www.zerohedge.com/sites...
Historically, it would not be unusual for them to not even have the BTC anyway.
If they're caught short, they simply claim a hack, say they're working to find the real killer, then disappear as quickly as they can.
Chargebacks will never be an issue.
This is good for merchants bad for consumers. personally as a consumer a credit card is better, it is much easier to get the charge reversed. with bitcoin if the merchant rips me off then i have little recourse.
That is not the outage. The outage is the exchanges that allow you to trade. Bitcoin network is running just fine.
A lot of people already have an account on the exchange with coins and or cash in it. You can trade those on the exchange without any confirmations or delays.
I just check by measly 0.02..... btcoins and they are with over 300 bucks. Not bad, they cost me $70.00 to make.
No argument, and likely why scams have and continue to be so prevalent in crypto currencies. It's digital cash, and transactions are not reversible.
On the other hand, it's quite literally programmable money. Escrow systems will make a resurgence. It is entirely possible to build a transaction between you, me and a third party where I commit to a payment, and you commit to ship me a physical item. Once I have digitally committed to the payment, I cannot reverse it on my own. On the other hand, you cannot actually claim the payment on your own. Once the item arrives, I can release the payment to you. Or, if it doesn't arrive, the third party can either confirm or reverse the payment.
From the consumer side, this a huge negative. Charge backs are the whole reason I use a credit card instead of debit. I would NEVER buy anything online without the ability to reverse the transaction if the product is unsatisfactory.
Sounds like VISA.
Darn, now we're only at 1000% gain this year instead of 1200%. How will I feed my children?
When the final rush of speculators floods in, the end cannot be far away.
NASDAQ is considering opening bitcoin futures. If that's not a sign to bail, nothing is.
~X~
Congratulations, you've just invented the banking system!
Shesh.. Don't mine using GPU's the ROI is horrible..
In fact.. Don't mine at all because it may be profitable based on the electricity used, but you will be hard pressed to pay for the hardware.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
What if you are willing to assume that BTC will go to one million, or higher? Then the cost of electricity used now would be negligible compared to return.
I used to have a bitcoin miner on a Mac Mini some time ago, that I would turn on every now and again. It was slow, I think I ran it for a few months off and on, and acquired around 0.01 BTC. The thing is, at current prices I definitely made more than it cost in electricity to mine. If you think BTC will really go up, then as a speculative effort it might be worth starting a mining operation, no matter how slow.
Yes purchasing might be more efficient but not as steady, and what if you had a ready supply of solar power to offset costs...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Bitcoin you mine is anonymous, bitcoin you buy generally not. If you think about taxes on a few hundred k even, vs no taxes... the electricity costs you may pay now seem negligible. Same goes for not having to pay the transaction fees for any purchase of BTC, especially if you can only afford to buy a bit every month.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Bitcoin (all cryptocurrency, really) is clearly in a bubble. (You did not need me to tell you this)
You can obtain Bitcoins three ways: by mining, by exchanging it for another currency, or in exchange for a good or service.
Outside of darkweb drug markets and ransomware payments, I don't see much exchange going on for goods/services. That raises some red flags, but isn't itself cause to write it off as a bubble - it can have utility value as an intermediate between other currencies.
The exchange rates, right now, are in the realm of 10,000 USD per Bitcoin.
Getting a USD->XBT conversion rate via mining isn't straightforward, but a Fermi estimate can be done. Mining with current ASICs is about 1W per GH/s, and with electricity prices at roughly 0.10 USD per KW-h, and a mining difficulty of about 1TH, that works out to 1 USD per 36,000 Bitcoin.
Those numbers are drastically, drastically off. This is not an ideal market - the cost of the ASICs is non-zero, currency exchanges take money for overhead, etc. etc.
But these numbers are off by eight orders of magnitude. Any sane person with money to risk on this would be buying mining kit as fast as possible, selling all their bitcoins immediately to buy more electricity and gear, and repeating until the cost of power/ASICs increased, the Bitcoin mining difficulty increased, and the value of Bitcoin dropped, to make the exchange rates more or less equal no matter whether you take your dollars to an exchange, or use your dollars to buy electrons and convert them into Bitcoin.
Many people are doing just that, but the price disparity is instead growing greater, in defiance of every rule of capitalist economics. And that's because the price is not based on Bitcoin's utility as a currency, but instead as an investment vehicle.
mod him down he posts his stupid referral link on every bitcoin article.
Bitcoin Cash is centralised garbage with no plains to scale.
Fucking awful 'advice' you are giving out there.
Congratulations, you've just invented the banking system!
No, the escrow system is a way to get the benefits of a bank without involving a fully-trusted third party. A bank can refuse to process the payment even when the buyer and seller agree, whereas the escrow partner is completely out of the loop in this case. The bank can also take the money and run against the wishes of both buyer and seller, again something the escrow partner cannot do since at least one of them must sign off on the transfer. The only real risk is that the escrow partner fails to act impartially in the event of a dispute, which is mitigated by the fact that both the buyer and the seller agree on the choice of escrow service in advance.
There are also arrangements which do away with the third party entirely—in the event of a dispute the payment (plus an optional deposit to keep things balanced) is either locked up permanently or donated to charity. This implies that both sides lose if either cheats, which isn't really fair to the victim, but this unfairness is minimized by removing the incentive to cheat in the first place.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Creimer affiliate link. Mod down.
1849. make greed great again.
because recommending kryptokeystonekurrency for anything is good advice.
Who is 'They'?
minus the banks.
which is a big plus.
yeah, any escrow middleman needs to be trusted, otherwise they'll just skip town... would you trust some Joe down the street, or would you trust a bank to be the escrow?