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Bitcoin Jumps Another 10% in 24 Hours, Sets New Record at $19,000 (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes Ars Technica:
Bitcoin's price set a new record on Saturday as the virtual currency rose above $19,000 for the first time on the Bitstamp exchange. The gains came just hours after the currency crossed the $18,000 mark. Bitcoin's value has doubled over the last three weeks, and it's up more than 20-fold over the last year.
Bitcoin's value keeps rising despite a growing chorus of experts who say the currency value is an unsustainable bubble. One CNBC survey this week found that 80 percent of Wall Street economists and market strategists saw bitcoin's rise as a bubble, compared to just two percent who said the currency's value was justified. Another survey reported by The Wall Street Journal this week found that 51 out of 53 economists surveyed thought bitcoin's price was an unsustainable bubble.
Less than a month ago, Bitcoin was selling for $8,000.
Bitcoin's value keeps rising despite a growing chorus of experts who say the currency value is an unsustainable bubble. One CNBC survey this week found that 80 percent of Wall Street economists and market strategists saw bitcoin's rise as a bubble, compared to just two percent who said the currency's value was justified. Another survey reported by The Wall Street Journal this week found that 51 out of 53 economists surveyed thought bitcoin's price was an unsustainable bubble.
Less than a month ago, Bitcoin was selling for $8,000.
Let's play Who's The Greater Fool?
Bitcoin mania: people confuse creation of money with creation of value. Value is food, materials, information, useful work. Dollars/bitcoins are unreliable media for exchange of value, not the value itself. Creation of $300B in bitcoin won't help the world to feed one more mouth.
Bruce Perens.
You can all keep claiming that it's all a house of cards, and someday you might be proven right, but you're all missing out on easy money right now.
I'm sure the Dutch tulip-market investors felt the same way.
Spoiler: It didn't end well.
This is good for tulips.
...for this bubble to burst. I wanna see the look on those investors' faces when they watch the price of their Bitcoin fall.
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
As much as Facebook is for forums and Google is for card catalogs, crypto-currency is to online money.
I think what most of us skeptics are overlooking is that as people move online, they are moving farther and farther from what we would call the "real world." There is absolutely a place for crytp-currencies. I always think -- but what if it all goes away due to a power outage. The problem with that thinking is that most of the planet doesn't think that way, virtual belongings are here to stay. Kitties, coins, UID's are examples.
Is this a bubble? Yes. Is there a base that does make sense? Yes. It may be $10k, it may be $50k. Is it another crypto-currency? I'd guess we will see multiple ones rise to the top as long sustaining currencies. We already do see upward pressure on hundreds of them.
This isn't going to go away. The question is what is the base price vs. what is the bubble price.
--
It's a bird, It's a plane!
dude its all over the internet. something about Mr. Robot .. Mozilla autoinstalls this plugin
Trump's administration is so corrupt, the FBI will find plenty to hang them with - and don't expect any to pull an Ollie North to save the orangutan in charge.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
So what is your view on the difference between the non-value of BTC and the non-value of "real" paper money (which doesn't feed people either, but is equally a convenience).
I mean, is this a non-subtle way to tell everyone they should buy only gold? Or do you mean to say people should trade only using potatoes.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Actually there have been a number of people pointing out from a technical side that there's only evidence of people holding the value artificially down... so they could buy in while it was still relatively low.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Supply and demand explains the value. There's been a huge influx of new buyers and not enough coin being mined and sold to meet the demand.
Who will be the ones left holding the bag?
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Honestly, I'd be able to ignore apk and let him post excessively in peace if he changed his format to be more in line with typical, universally accepted format. Nearly every thing from "see subject" to the "P.S.=>" to the random bold text just gets on my nerves. That's not acceptable in any form of writing. I would be curious if he did have Vatican conspiracies. Not enough Catholics know how dirty the church is/was with the accumulated wealth, Pope poisonings, deals with the Mafia, to pope's and cardinals with children and wives, etc. It's a fucking powerful shit show.
Neck beards are really stuck on this tulip thing. They said the bitcoin bubble would bust at $200, then $2000, and here we are nearly hitting $20,000 and no signs of stopping. Just admit this is new territory and doesn't work the same as traditional stocks.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Creation of $300B in bitcoin won't help the world to feed one more mouth.
Neither will the creation of one more video game or the invention of some new beauty product. People invest money in lots of useless things, why should Bitcoin be any different?
It's still the early adoption period, that's why so many are jumping on board. Future newcomers will be facing an absurdly expensive and relatively tiny supply of mined coins even compared to today's seemingly inflated prices. Do not discount the possibility that the number of buyers will not run out, and instead continue to increase as it has done consistently since the beginning.
"Your kind" ? You just went on a rascist tirade the other day for no fucking reason. You might want to choose your words better. You keep going on about being anonymous, ignoring the fact you're posting anonymously. I don't understand how you're overlooking this. You go on about others hiding on /., but you're *demonstrating* how you're being anonymous more than other AC's by getting around post limits with proxies and shit.
They said the bitcoin bubble would bust at $200
I remember, right here on Slashdot, people predicting the bubble was going to pop when bitcoin reached $1.
How is that different from the stock market? If I'm making money, someone is losing money
Nonsense. The stock market can go up when productivity improvements (or tax cuts) increase profits. It is not zero sum. In a growing economy, everyone can be a winner.
Bitcoin is negative sum, because someone has to pay for the electricity. Bitcoin mining is a lot more expensive than growing tulips.
Growing in value by 20% per week is totally sustainable. In 52 weeks, each Bitcoin will be worth $260-million and the market cap will be $3-quadrillion.
It looks like cryptocurrencies is becoming a new asset class that is inherently virtual and global. It bear similarities to already established asset classes.
Most cryptocurrencies are directly usable for payments, like a currency. There is also a network effect.
They work as a easy accessible store of value, like gold and silver, but easier to access for most people and can be traded in smaller volumes.
They are exchange tradable, like stocks. Everybode with a smartphone can participate.
Today's cryptocurrencies are worth around 0,6% of the world's stocks, or around 25% of all gold. It's not unreasonable to think that fund managers will need to include cryptocurrencies in index funds, and that people will move some of their assets to cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrencies market cap at 5% of the world's stock is certainly not impossible within a few years. That would probably put bitcoin over 100 000$.
Bitcoin is negative sum, because someone has to pay for the electricity.
You have to offset the costs to the benefit of decentralized currency exchange. With growing utility, everybody can be a winner.
All forms of financial assets function as a form of promissory note: an asset that can later be exchanged for desired goods and services. The "selling point" for BTC was that it going to be some new global payment system replacing credit cards, unbacked by anything but public trust, but with sufficient public trust that it can retain value without physical backing assets or a country behind it. How's that assumption going?
* BTC is a terrible payment system from a technological perspective due to the huge processing cost and delays per transaction. Bitcoin fees aren't high because of gouging, they're high because bitcoin is technologically awful.
* It's far too volatile for such a role
* It already has a market cap as high as the major credit card companies combined, yet is accepted by a minuscule fraction as credit cards for the above reasons - which just screams "massive bubble".
* Indeed, many early "forward thinking" adopters have been going backwards and eliminating bitcoin payment options - the very excuse for justifying its price.
* Bitcoin is favoured target of hackers; it's proven much easier to compromise exchanges and wallets than traditional financial networks.
* Governments have numerous reasons to crack down on bitcoin (drugs, money laundering, deliberately crashing the assets of states with bitcoin reserves like North Korea, trying to pop a bubble gently to prevent a recession, etc), and extensive tools to do so, effectively driving it back to its innate value (a currency for underground criminal activity). Historically, the loss of one market - for example, China - has been compensated for by growth in western markets. But if you take western markets out of the picture, you're taking the vast majority of the world's capital out of the picture, period. It's even worse because western markets have disproportional leverage on the world's global financial systems, and decisions taken by them can reach well beyond their borders.
"Neck beards" also pointed out that the dotcom bubble was, in fact, a bubble, even though they couldn't tell you when it was going to burst. Yes, sometimes "neck beards" may underestimate the general public's willingness to mortgage all of their assets into internet fads when they blinded by a growth curve. But that doesn't change the basic issues underlying it all.
That doesn't mean that nothing will survive. Some of the dotcom crash's survivors became giants today eBay, Google, Amazon, etc. But most people who had their money lost their shirts. Perhaps some "coin" future may survive and even ultimately flourish. But what I can say is that BTC itself is going to pop at some point or another.
"This wallpaper is killing me. One of us has got to go." -- Oscar Wilde on his deathbed
But what I can say is that BTC itself is going to pop at some point or another
No doubt it will. The big question is, after it pops, what will the price be ?
You have to offset the costs to the benefit of decentralized currency exchange. With growing utility, everybody can be a winner.
As long as most of our electricity generation is coming from polluting sources, Bitcoin is helping to destroy the biosphere. From that perspective alone, it is evil and should be destroyed.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Of course they said that and of course they were wrong. Nobody knows exactly when the bubble will burst, otherwise they'd be milking it for all it's worth. Though maybe a good many speculators are actually realistic about the long term prospects of BTC and are in fact just milking it while the going's good. Just keep in mind: when the crash comes, don't think you can unload gradually on the way down. When it comes, it will be extremely hard to get rid of your coins at any price...
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Everything we do helps to destroy the biosphere. Better stop living.
Everything we do helps to destroy the biosphere. Better stop living.
That is provably false, so the only question left to ask is whether you're an idiot or a troll. I'm pretty sure you're a troll, but I'm too lazy to check your posting history. Start here.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The only important part is that it will be very little and that it's best not to hold the currency for much longer. Same as for any bubble stock.
How is that different from the stock market?
Not much different at all, which is why everyone knows what a bubble looks like.
I agree.
I'm speculating a fairly paltry amount in altcoins. So far I've made a modest gain. If I lose it all, my investment is small enough not to worry about.
Personally I think it's all horribly overvalued right now, but I know nothing about this,and how it works.
If you believe the hippie crap from that website, I'm afraid that you're the idiot.
A whole new paradigm? This time it really is different!
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
- Huge transaction fees
You're free to set zero transaction fee and it is still going to be confirmed. This will only change in ~100 years when transaction fees are the only reward for mining.
- Huge power requirements
I'm pretty sure all the banks in the world consume more power.
- painfully slow transactions
It's not that slow actually. Couple minutes - maybe a day, depending on whether you set (and if so how large) a transaction fee.
Now, on the pro side, it's decentralized. If that alone isn't reason enough, I don't know what is.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Oh, so you believe you're not anonymous because apk is your initials? Like that matters. My understanding is that Judaism is a religion, Jews are a race. In your rascist tirade, you didn't say Judaism. You have no fucking idea if a Jewish person believes and practises Judaism yet you still have prejudices. Non Jews can convert to Judaism, not convert to being a Jew. Others, correct me if I'm wrong on the difference.
It will pop at $21000 and afterwards be completely worthless.
If you truly believe that, I invite you to open up a short position @ $21k.
"what is your malfunction w/ your trolling stalking of me anyhow?))" I've said lots of times, that you spam and misrepresent the benefits of hosts file and the format of your posts. But if you just fucking write normally, I'll refrain from replying to you forever. You can still spam us, just in a proper format. Deal?
Actually, the bigger question is, how much of that BTC will you be willing to part with in order to cash out? Remember, the system is massively overloaded right now to process transactions, and you have to pay quite a bit to get "priority" processing. When the bubble pops, and everyone wants to cash out - what will be the price to process? How much would you be willing to lose in order to get your transaction processed now, not 3 days from now (when the price could be 3 times lower)?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
If you believe the hippie crap from that website, I'm afraid that you're the idiot.
If you don't believe regenerative farming is possible, riddle me this: how did "nature" "do it" before we were here?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Bitcoin mining is estimated toconsume around 34 TWh of power. Sort this list by TWh consumption and you'll find that BTC mining consumes more power than 75% of all the nations on the face of the Earth. More power than places like Denmark, Ireland, Serbia, Myanmar. It's not sustainable - and I'm surprised so many strong climate-change proponents are accepting of this clear waste of energy (note that most of those countries are poor, and get a majority of their power from coal and other fossil fuels).
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
That fee is $30 now though right?
So it should get picked up.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
I doubt they'd go down permanently.
Didn't one exchange have a flash crash down to $200 and keep up?
All of the money on the exchanges came from other people, they take 0.02% on a transaction, over time they accumulate a lot of Bitcoin (maybe selling some to find themselves).
An honestly run exchange should be fine with a crash, since as people make a run, the $ value of Bitcoin drops, reducing their cash liability.
Their real risk is if everybody wants to pull their bitcoins out, but that is limited by blockchains ability to process transactions, so it shouldn't be a problem either.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
BitCoin is backed by a large productive workforce also. In face I would argue that BitCoin is MORESO backed in that way, because all people keeping it going are productive and intelligent members of society - in the U.S. you have millions on welfare for example, that are not productive members of society in that they do not produce, just consume. Bitcoin has zero such overhead.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Say it all with me "Bubble"...
Seriously, Bitcoin is nothing but a string of unique numbers at it's core. There is no tangible value, not even a government fiat supporting it. The only thing propping up the value is it's meteoric increase in value. If any of the major holders of Bitcoin decide to divest, the value will go down and all the speculators that are leveraged to the hilt will try to sell and the value will drop to nothing overnight. If it were a stock, I would short the hell out of it.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
1/1/2019:
Bitcoin just passed $1m per coin and governments worldwide have banned its use under penalty of death as it's too disruptive to existing economic norms. many "bit billionaires" are afraid of cashing in due to publicity and government scrutiny. Think this is unlikely, look at https://www.coindesk.com/price... (1 year) and do a linear regression of the trajectory. Makes tulips look like sawdust,
Organization? You must be joking..
because Trump thinks
I'm quite certain that's not an explanation for anything that's occurred so far.
Oh boy a 10x return since like a year ago. Wooow. Great, you missed that train. If you think t hey'll hit $100,000, they won't. That's basically impossible. If you want a return better than some 10% shift buy Sia, BCC, or LTC.
You really have points at all. You are strawmanning and making fluffy statements, that's all.
You have no concept of the selling point of Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies.
If we are going to be as reductive as you prefer to be, the point is to replace the global central banking system and free people from debt slavery.
*It doesn't matter if Bitcoin is bad for daily transactions. It can still hold value. It is finding a role as a reserve currency that is sold to obtain other currencies that are better used for instantaneous transactions.
*This is a new system in the process of being hammered out. Volatility is a precursor to stability. The fact that it is volatile cannot be used to predict its future.
*Bitcoin is being used to trade for more instantaneously usable currencies
*Again
*Cash money and transportable assets are the favored targets of thieves. So what?
*Governments have absolutely no way to stop this. What are you talking about? If there are restrictive regulations people will just do it anyway.
Basically you just seem to be terrified of anything changing and are trying to justify your irrationality. You are anything but "Insightful".
My karma was manually wiped by site staff https://slashdot.org/~slshdtisctrldbysjws 18 mod up, 10 mod down = bad karma
Trump's administration is so corrupt, the FBI will find plenty to hang them with
In this arena, the level of "corruption" is entirely orthogonal to whether or not a puppet is made an example of... and if that's not perfectly clear at this point, you either haven't studied any political history or you didn't learn anything useful from it...
Jews are a race.
Merely a culture and a religion (a religion that has greatly ignored the self-evident need to remain separate fom government: theocracies- even indirect theocracies - not good). True Isrealites (Semitic Jews) are long extinct; living Jews are either Sephardic (Persian descent) or more likely Ashkenazi (Central Asian/Eastern European; mongrels like the rest of us)...
With no farming?
Irrelevant. The land produced food for animals and became richer and richer, not more and more barren. The "secret" is that feces has to be returned to the field. If you just let it lie around for a year, poop turns into soil. It cooks its own pathogens to death and becomes more earth. You can do it faster with various kinds of reactor, and you can then actually capture the methane. We are doing this more and more now; it's called "sewage sludge". However, we can do it basically for free using technologies like AIWPS. You also have to grow crops in guilds, with integrated pest management. This is how nature grows plants; a plant which needs nitrogen naturally thrives in the presence of plants which fix it in the soil, making it bioavailable to their neighbors.
We have the intellect necessary to develop the technology to remediate the biosphere. Alas, we seem to lack the intellect to actually make that happen. No laws of nature prevent it, unless perhaps they are laws of human nature.
With our current level of technology, we could probably support many more humans on this planet. Probably twice as many, just at a glance. But we'd have to rethink a lot of our basic assumptions about how the underpinnings of society would function, and we'd have to plant a lot more trees.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Whoever mods this Offtopic is wrong.
Trump being president is a big part of why Bitcoin is rising this year.
Instability and uncertainty over possible war in Korea is driving people there to buy a currency that they'll be able to access if they have to suddenly flee the country.
Eastern Europeans afraid of Russia now the the US has all but abandoned NATO.
The US is losing it's global influence, so the Dollar is losing some of it's Store of Value ability.
How is that different from the stock market?
Simple: Shares in a company don't go up day after day like bitcoin does.
(and if they did you'd think something was wrong and not buy them)
No sig today...
You piss yourself off? Yep, your hero is prison bound, not mine. Maybe you could keep her company.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
Trump's administration is so corrupt, the FBI will find plenty to hang them with
In this arena, the level of "corruption" is entirely orthogonal to whether or not a puppet is made an example of... and if that's not perfectly clear at this point, you either haven't studied any political history or you didn't learn anything useful from it...
Here's some "political history" for you - Richard Nixon. He was a much more wily & savvy player than Trump and couldn't save his presidency despite hanging on for a couple years.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Slashdot has really gone downhill with this Bitcoin hits $19000 crap. How is it news for nerds that Bitcoin hits $17000? If I wanted to read about Bitcoin hitting $23000 I would be on Reddit.
Yes, of course, anytime someone points out your blatant hypocrisy it's "whataboutism". Basically, when someone cries "whataboutism" what they are saying is "yes i'm a big hypocrite but so what".
As for Bitcoin, I don'know if I even want to use it now, in case it's involved in some way with my Firefox getting compromised and this weird extension showing up without me installing it.
I understand your frustration. And I can help. Just send your Bitcoin to this address: 1Q8HcFA3GgTuL1NWr6PYB6mtYgdFgXRfGc and I'll take care of the rest.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
I live in Houston, which was devastated by Hurricane Harvey this year. As the storm approached, we could all see (on radar) the progress of the storm, getting closer and closer. We knew it was going to cause a lot of damage, we just didn't know exactly when, or how much, or exactly where.
Bitcoin is going to be a disaster just as surely as Hurricane Harvey. It's going to hurt a lot of people, leave others unscathed, and help a few. But a collapse is certainly coming.
The best thing we can do for our friends is warn them away from investing money in Bitcoin that they can't afford to lose.
Again, the problem is *you* and your *spam*. No one gives a shit what people no one knows says about your program. I need to remind myself to stop arguing with the mentally disabled. I do kinda feel bad. But I do hope the Polish equivalent of the FBI monitors you so you're stopped before physically harming someone.
Bubbles like this are basically just gambling at this point. Sure some idealists might believe in bitcoin, but I'd guess most of those investing are simply looking for the next get rich quick scheme. I have no doubt some will. Some very few will. It is like a lotto ticket, but a bit different in that the earlier you bought your ticket, the greater your chances of winning.
You mention the .COM bubble. Indeed as an investment analogy it isn't wrong. I've seen these investment pundits out there giving out their sage investment and business advice, and hey they must be knowledgeable because they are worth many millions or even billions. Then you look into their background a bit and see that they basically owned some sketchy dotcom website that they sold for hundreds of millions of dollars to some stupid established company with too much money just before the bubble burst. At which point the useless turd was exposed for what it was, and the loss written off. Then said person essentially invests their now massive wealth into safe investments now that they can leverage their increased wealth. That said, those people exist, and those people investing in BC would like nothing more that to become the next one of those guys. That said, for everyone of of those people who got lucky (and by lucky, usually also did something unscrupulous along the way like misstated accounting prior to sale for example), there were probably many thousands of losers.
I'd not invest in Bitcoin unless its a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrocurrency
Casteism