Bitcoin Starts a New Year by Tumbling, First Time Since 2015 (bloomberg.com)

Bitcoin is already having a bad year. From a report: For the first time since 2015, the cryptocurrency began a new year by tumbling, extending its slide from a record $19,511 reached on Dec. 18. The virtual coin traded at $13,440 as of 3:55 p.m. in New York, down 6.1 percent from Friday, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That's also a fall from the $14,156 it hit Sunday, according to coinmarketcap.com, which tracks daily prices. Bitcoin got off to a much stronger start last year, and then kept that momentum going, eventually creating a global frenzy for cryptocurrencies. In a sign of its phenomenal price gain in 2017, it rose 3.6 percent on the first day of 2017 to $998, data from coinmarketcap.com show. It ended the year up more than 1,300 percent.

Comments

back to value

[iggymanz]

returning to its pre-bubble value in a hurry

that was a good pump n' dump for 2017, big players can prep for more suckers taking the next joyride

Re:back to value

[Anonymous Coward]

Most people saw this coming, there was money to be made but some people got this confused with investing in something that had utility.

It's little more than a decentralized store of value and that value is really based on the hype around it. It doesn't have the transaction speed/cost to replace mainstream currencies nor some of the features of other blockchain technologies, some more dubious than others.

The question often comes up "what do you do with it", well sure you could use it like diamonds, you could trade it for a house or a car or something but you're not going to do your grocery shopping or pay your bills with it. It's just a relatively unstable store of value.

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[Anonymous Coward]

This is more an experiment in Blockchain concepts than a joyride. Economists will be digging through this carnage for a century; at least it will give them something concrete to do for once.
Some of us have identified a critical weakness in anything involving Blockchains, not just involving speculation/gambling. Let's just call it for now "Timer Trust". What means do we have to determine that any "mining", or for that matter any transaction or transfer, actually happened when the Blockchain thinks it did? How does one Blockchain synchronize with all the others? Is there one worldwide Clock, utterly reliable and thoroughly incorruptible, that everybody can trust?
And say accuracy of anything time-critical can be determined to a precise Picosecond... can those Picoseconds be sold or traded?
You just may be hearing something about a concept called Polysynchronous Time in the near future, which involves networks of synchronized Trusted Timers.
It's still a Berkeley thing for now, although, naturally, SLAC wants to do it differently.

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[Nikkos]

"It's little more than a decentralized store of value and that value is really based on the hype around it"

There is little of the internet that has any value besides social value. Bitcoin - particularly the technology behind it - had utility as a way to store and transfer value securely and quickly across the world. It's still cheaper other cryptocurrencies to send 'money' to the other side of the world than it is to use a bank or Western Union. Not to mention that the increased competition has forced Western Union and moneygram to lower their fees, which are now half of what they were just a couple years ago.

Now btc's first mover advantage has placed it as the 'gold standard' of which an entire ecosystem of digital currencies valued at $600 Billion (of which BTC itself is less than half that) are traded against.

Remember that the USD is backed by the 'faith and credit' of the government, as every other world currency is backed by the faith and credit that their respective goverments won't fuck up their economy so much that their currency becomes worthless.

Bitcoin sidesteps all of that 'faith' by having a limited supply, decentralized management and markets, and the inability for any one organization or actor to fuck it all up (China tried, and failed) That has very clear utility for financial markets and economic systems.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Bitcoin - particularly the technology behind it - had utility as a way to store and transfer value securely and quickly across the world. It's still cheaper other cryptocurrencies to send 'money' to the other side of the world than it is to use a bank or Western Union.

Well no, it is not. The cost involved in making a transaction is skyrocketing, the rate at which transactions can be processed is very low and even now there exist many tens of thousands of transactions that are unconfirmed by the network with them even getting dropped after a couple of weeks. And even in the case you describe it is still just an intermediate store of value, you're going to convert your local currency to bitcoin, transfer it to another location and then convert back to the new local currency so you can actually use it for something because bitcoin itself is not useful.

But that is an aside to the fact that bitcoin has no use outside of being a store of value, other stores of value (gold, diamonds, land, etc for example) have many uses which is why they have value. Their value changes based in part on speculation but also as supply and demand for the real uses of those commodities fluctuates. Bitcoin's value changes purely on speculation because it has no actual usefulness. Other blockchain technologies that focus on being currency replacements or decentralized contract verification actually have usefulness as a technology where bitcoin does not and being a 'first mover' does not give it usefulness, it gives speculative value which is why we see the wild fluctuations.

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[iggymanz]

No Bitcoin is a failure, with a bottlenecked architecture that prevents liquidity, high transaction fees far in excess of bank wiring fee, high percentage of use for black market begging for government intervention, and extreme volatility making it useless as store of value

Re:back to value

[PopeRatzo]

had utility as a way to store and transfer value securely and quickly

Unless, of course, you want to transfer some of that value into your pocket so you can buy a loaf of bread and a pound of ground beef. Then, it's not so quick, or so secure, judging from the backlog of transactions.

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[LordKronos]

Bitcoin - particularly the technology behind it - had utility as a way to store and transfer value securely and quickly across the world. It's still cheaper other cryptocurrencies to send 'money' to the other side of the world than it is to use a bank or Western Union.

What? Western Union, maybe (I'm clueless about what their actual fees are so can't speak there), but sending by bank is pretty damn cheap. But more importantly, if Bitcoin is not being used as a currency, then using bitcoin for any sort of uses like this is still terrible. Because now not only do you still have the bank involved taking their cut, but you also have to pay the exchanges their cut, then pay the miners their transaction fees, then at the other end they pay another exchange to transfer back into actual currncy. You have't eliminated anything, but merely added another layer of fees into the transaction.

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[Anonymous Coward]

I can send a wire from my account to any other account in the world and have a guarantee my money arrives no later than the next business day.

Cost? $25 per wire if I do it online but if I call my bank and talk to an actual human being they will do it for me for free.

How is Bitcoin better?

And oh yeah it'll still be worth about the same tomorrow as today when I sent it. Bitcoin, not so much.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Bitcoin sidesteps all of that 'faith' by having a limited supply

So when that limited supply runs out then all those computers participating in the network (mining) lose the incentive to participate and transactions costs need to skyrocket to compensate. It's another of the very poor design choices of bitcoin in terms of it being used to transfer value.

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[ShanghaiBill]

Remember that the USD is backed by the 'faith and credit' of the government

Also remember that the US government has 21 trillion USD of debt and thus has an enormous vested interest in inflating away that debt by devaluing the dollar.

Just last week, we tossed another $1.5 trillion of debt onto the pile with the new tax cut. How much "faith and credit" do you have in Donald Trump?

Re:back to value

[ShanghaiBill]

What? Western Union, maybe (I'm clueless about what their actual fees are so can't speak there), but sending by bank is pretty damn cheap.

Not cheap at all if there is a currency change. Also, Western Union, and the American banking system in general, are restricted from doing business in many areas of the world.

My company employs a graphic artist that lives in Karachi, Pakistan. Bitcoin is by far the easiest and cheapest way to pay her.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Remember that the USD is backed by the 'faith and credit' of the government

No ShanghaiBill, stop quoting shit.

The US dollar isn't backed by the government in any way.

It is backed by the US economy. And that's worth a fuck ton.

Re: back to value

[ShanghaiBill]

It is backed by the US economy.

Inflation goes up when the economy is booming. During the Great Depression, deflation was a serious problem, and the value of the dollar soared.

The strength of the economy and the value of the dollar are negatively correlated.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Hey I invested something like $8500 or so in January 2017 because I wanted to pay for some shit anonymously. (It was not an investment.) I sold it for over $150,000 in December. Fuck the stupid.

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[iggymanz]

Femtosecond synchronization between remote clocks is even possible, the scale where gradient of gravitational potential becomes significant to frequency difference between two clocks according to General Relativity, to the tune of 10E-16 variation in frequency per effective meter of elevation. There is discussion of defining a "chronometric geoid", a mathematical surface around the earth upon which atomic clocks can run at the same rate.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Your company should be dealing with an American graphics designer instead of a Pakistani one.

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[adjensen]

Why anyone would put money into this Ponzi scheme is beyond me.

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[Paradise Pete]

No Bitcoin is a failure, with a bottlenecked architecture that prevents liquidity

Liquidity and high transaction fees gets solved by creating a proxy, in much the same way that a dollar was once a proxy for gold. You can already see it starting. Exchanges have begun to offer bitcoin futures. Dealing in those involves no bitcoin transactions - it's simply an agreement. and there can be as many of those as you like.
Gold is traded the same way. The size of gold futures contracts far exceeds the actual amount of gold in the world. It's not even close.

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[Anonymous Coward]

It is not secure. It is not quick. It is not cheaper. It is terrifying how wrong you can be in such a short paragraph.

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[FrankHaynes]

and the inability for any one organization or actor to fuck it all up (China tried, and failed) That has very clear utility for financial markets and economic systems.

The Internet was designed by DARPA to be decentralized in order to make it impervious to attack. I just read a headline that the Congo has "shut down all Internet access" whatever that means. Our corporate overlords in the US largely dictate what we can and can't do with it now. Feature creep over a couple decades.

We shall see how long it takes until something similar happens to the Bitcoin ecosystem.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Running at the same rate is not really an issue; the proposed 229mTh Nuclear Clock should be accurate within a drift of a Second for the next 34 Billion years; within a Femtosecond synchronization should be good for the next million years or so.
The issue is Trust. GPS spoofing is real, which is Atomic Clock Locked, and that is why various Governments are researching updated land-based "LORAN" Navigation systems; the Facilities can then be be actively secured. Putting Armed Guards around a Satellite, with their own Timing Sniffers, is most inconvenient.

My own little interest in "Gravimetric Geoids" is a bit esoteric; the modeling of Planetary Barycenters in 3 Dimensions based on observations. (Since Butt Head Astronomers stubbornly continue to use Degrees, AUs, and Parsecs, and define each by the other, they can safely be ignored. ("Parsec": "Parallax-Seconds.") It's simply because they can't do Math in Radians, and Barycenters confuse them; that's Astrophysics stuff. Oh, Navigation has the same issue; try to find a Sextant marked off by Radians.)
Earlier today, I was involved in a discussion as to why "Autonomous" Automobile researchers are so interested in Testing at the Gomemtum Station, at the old Concord Naval Weapons Station. The reason: it is probably the most accurately mapped place on Earth. Not down to a blade of grass, but damn close. That is where 38.0000000N and 122.0000000W is located. Those interested in old Maps and Charts know how important the nearby Mt. Diablo Meridian is; for ~150 years it was the primary Optical Surveying reference for the West Coast of the US. USGS Maps and NOAA Charts still refer to it. The problem is, Mt. Diablo moves; long term due to Plate Tectonics, and hourly due to Tidal forces and Barometric pressure. Not much, but it is measurable. So a proposed Project would map the movement of Mt. Diablo in Real Time, and 38N/122W would be one of the proposed Monitoring Stations.
Current off-the-shelf GPS can be accurate to within a couple of meters... which isn't nearly accurate enough when making Lane Changes in traffic at speed. (GPS with RTK can be a lot more accurate, but it is hardly Real Time.) At some point, "Timer Trust" gets to be critically important here for Next Generation Navigation; it not only has to be both Precise and Accurate, the Timer has to be utterly trustworthy, and it can't be possibly spoofed.
Thanks, iggy

Re:back to value

[ceoyoyo]

The US banking system does seem to be pretty screwed up. There are simpler ways to fix that than bitcoin.

And with bitcoin you probably have to deal with TWO currency changes, not one, plus any bitcoin fees. Those online exchanges aren't it it for charity.

Re:back to value

[pezpunk]

"back to preibubble"? nope, it's still up more than 1,000% over one year.

Re:back to value

[jargonburn]

I work at a small IT services company. A client I was working with asked me what I thought of Bitcoin and whether he should invest in it.

I laughed. I warned him that I was not a reliable source for investment advice, and that while I thought Bitcoin prices were going to continue to rise, I had no way to predict when it would crash. Except, that I thought it would be pretty soon (this was at ~$17-18k/bc).

And then I laughed, again, and tried to remember if I had any old Bitcoin wallets in my old files.

Re: back to value

[Anonymous Coward]

Strictly inflation is an increase in money supply, not prices. Inflation (increase in money supply) can be high when the economy is doing badly, with Germany in 1923 being the classic example. Ideally the increase in money supply matches the increase in GDP and veloicity of money and CPI is used as a proxy for this, and central banks target a margin above to avoid the risk of insufficient money supply.

A significant problem with Bitcoin as a currency is that supply cannot be increased by market demand in a responsive way. It can be split, but that mostly benefits early adopters.

Re:back to value

[religionofpeas]

(gold, diamonds, land, etc for example) have many uses which is why they have value.

Their many uses is why they have *some* value. They are traded well above that, though. Industrial diamonds are a lot cheaper than jewelry diamonds. Cheap gold mines can produce gold at $400/oz, but people are willing to pay $1200 for it and put it in a vault. Why is that ? The only time that happens is when there's a supply shortage, but we're mining 10 times the amount of gold that is needed for industry, so there's no shortage. And we already have a 50 year stockpile of the stuff.

Re:back to value

[Interfacer]

It's only cheap if you stay within boundaries. Sending money from Europe to the US is ridiculously expensive. Even sending money from the EU to the UK is stupid expensive because the currency conversion costs a ridiculous amount of money. With most crypto, the fees are much, much smaller. Granted, BTC fees are getting silly. But I can buy litecoin or ethereum with euros, send it to the US for a very small fee, and the receiving party can convert it to USD for a very small fee.

Re: back to value

[houghi]

In Europa they start working on making bank transfers faster. They worked on it in 20000, but then .... terrorism.
The Americans needed to know my transfers, so the transfer needed to go past a database they could read.

As the banks are not the asking ones, nobody really cared. Technically it is pretty easy to do. We just need people willing to push the banks to do it by a specific day. E.g 1 year from now, so it will be done in 2.

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[Anonymous Coward]

If there is a currency exchange (except Euro which is free), my bank charges me SEK 30 ($4); the exchange rate is the same whether you are buying or selling (average of FX buy/sell). That's quite a lot cheaper than trading BTC, and in have a consumer bank account with no services to reduce fees (like companies have; international transfers then cost pennies). Transferring money from China to Sweden using the international banking system takes 1 hour provided the banks in both countries are open (which is faster than the national banking system in Sweden which is 1 day transfer time).

Re: back to value

[Anonymous Coward]

Your company should be dealing with an American graphics designer instead of a Pakistani one.

It's a lot more convenient to use a Pakistani artist though, as all Americans will soon be dead.

Re:back to value

[qubezz]

There's actually no tumble at all, the story is BS. It's bounced between 13000 and 14000 several times in the last four days.

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[Anonymous Coward]

t's little more than a decentralized store of value

No, it is a medium of exchange. It stores no value as demonstrated by the wild swings in, wait for it, value.

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[Oswald McWeany]

There's actually no tumble at all, the story is BS. It's bounced between 13000 and 14000 several times in the last four days.

That's still a tumble from when it topped 19,000. (Granted, it's still a lot higher than it was a few months ago- so most people who own some are still ahead). It sounds likely that bitcoin is finding it's price. And for now, that price is in the 13,000-14,000 range. With banks and futures, and big financial vehicles coming in to place, bitcoin is going to be more stable. Less fluctuation, but also less growth. This time next year it will probably be unusual for bitcoin to fluctuate more than 10% in a month.

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[MachineShedFred]

At least with diamonds you can shine them up and put them in rings and stuff. Can't even do that with bitcoin.

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[StormReaver]

[R]eturning to its pre-bubble value in a hurry....

Not even close. When the value of Bitcoin is around $3.00, then it will return back to its pre-bubble (and actual, defensible) value. Every single penny of "value" above that is just hot air.

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[Anonymous Coward]

"Now btc's first mover advantage"

The problem is that there are many cryptocurrencies that are much better than bitcoin. Bitcoin is obsolete, it doesn't scale very well and like IPv4 wasn't really designed to blow up this much. Now we have a splinter of all sorts of newer and better cryptocurrencies but there are so many to choose from, which one do you choose? Which one is accepted where? I'm confused and I doubt I'm the only one. I read about Iota, comparing it to bitcoin, and think the technology is a huge improvement but I am unfamiliar with the others to make a comparison and am I going to study the pros and cons of every cryptocurrency that anyone ever makes? Not that it matters, it's not like the people buying and accepting cryptocurrencies are really going to know the difference to choose which one is the best.

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[Bing Tsher E]

I will tag on:

"At least with Beanie Babies and Magic The Gathering cards you can sell them in flea markets. Can't even do that with bitcoin (though I guess you could sell old hard drives or USB flash drives with useless data on them in the flea market)

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[aaarrrgggh]

Diamonds might not be a good example, but gold's value as a store of vale has more to do with its history as an item with value. The use for jewelry is also significant, especially in some cultures.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Bitcoin doesn't sidestep anything at all. It only has value because people perceive it to have value, because reasons. If you have a limited supply of dogshit, it's still dogshit and nobody will want it.

The entire value of Bitcoin is based on hype and hysteria, just like any other currency, and at least a little of that hype was just released from the bubble.

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[Anonymous Coward]

"Bitcoin sidesteps all of that 'faith' by having a limited supply" backed by nothing at all.

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[MachineShedFred]

You are extolling the creation of fabricated financial instruments, that outstrip the available supply (according to you) of a completely made up thing on the Internet with amazing volatility (according to TFA), and backed by nothing by blind faith, from fly-by-night institutions that mostly didn't exist 5 years ago, some of which already do not exist today due to borderline (if not outright) criminal behavior.

I see no problems with this whatsoever. Next up: Jesus futures. Buy today and get in on the ground before it ascends into the clouds!

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[Anonymous Coward]

Get a brokerage account. It's not so hard and you eliminate the middleman. Then sending money between EU UK US is very cheap and still quite fast.

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[MachineShedFred]

[Citation Needed]

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[Anonymous Coward]

Futures are for speculation and hedging. They're an agreement to buy something in the future at an agreed on price. There is no real-time value in futures so they're useless for buying skinny jeans.

Re:back to value

[MachineShedFred]

Don't forget that the supply isn't really that limited if everything is paid for in fractional bitcoin, and there's no effective limit to how small the fractions get. At least with regular government currencies, the denominations are limited to whatever the government creates, e.g. the penny, nickel, dime, quarter, $1, $2, $5, $10, $20, and $100.

Hey look guys, I just came up with my own crypto-currency that uses blockchain and many other buzzwords called CryptoBlock! It has a limited supply of 10 blocks, and each block is worth $10M because I say so! Of course, you can still buy a loaf of bread for 0.0000004 CryptoBlocks! Now get to 'mining' and spending a shit ton of real money on energy and equipment in order to accomplish essentially nothing!

Re: back to value

[Anonymous Coward]

It's backed by idiots willing to exchange cash for it. As long as some hipster with daddy's money thinks it's worth something, it's worth something.

If you're a rich fellow and want doge coin to be worth something, announce that you'll buy doge coins for 20 bucks each for the next ten years and it will suddenly be worth 20 bucks.

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[Actually, I do RTFA]

There is little of the internet that has any value besides social value

How right you are. Now, excuse me, I have to use PayPal to finish sending money to an artist whose work I want to encourage but doesn't accept Patreon, then I'm going to Amazon to get shipped to me some things I want and go to Kickstarter to get some things maybe shipped to me a I really want. Hopefully my Lyft gets here after I finish the food I ordered from [too many competing sites ordering food delivery].

Yup, glad there is nothing on the internet of actual tangible value. Oh wait, my telecommuting work is interrupting my tirade.

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[Anonymous Coward]

If they have such an enormous vested interest in doing that, then why haven't they? Everyone at the mint on union break or something, and there's nobody around to fire up the printing presses and cranking out the 22T needed to just pay everyone back?

Or is it that there are people at the Department of the Treasury that have a much better understanding of what's going on?

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[michelcolman]

Actually, CBOE and CME have existed for a wee bit longer than 5 years.

This is the scary bit: actual financial institutions are getting in.

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[Paradise Pete]

The skinny jeans purchases would come after the (hoped-for) success in that speculation you mentioned. A lot of people, a whole lot, are in bitcoin simply in the hope that it's worth more later. They're treating futures contracts the same way.

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[Anonymous Coward]

You can argue the same thing about the U.S. dollar. Just like any other currency. All currencies have their pros and cons I guess. Pretty much all currency receives its value because we artificially ascribe value to it (unless it's something you can actually use for something like gold).

Some argue that the success of bitcoin has more to do with the failure of the dollar. Bitcoin has been successful relative to the dollar, not that it's successful in general. Prices of everything have been going up relative to the dollar but perhaps some currencies can maintain their value better than the dollar relative to what you can buy with them. Otherwise you are simply losing value in the dollars that you are saving. You can argue that part of the success of the stock market is really a reflection of the fact that everything, including stock prices, are simply getting more expensive.

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[Paradise Pete]

You are extolling the creation of fabricated financial instruments, that outstrip the available supply (according to you) of a completely made up thing

I'm not actually extolling anything. I'm just saying that's what will happen. Do you know that there's only somewhere around $42B worth of gold in the world and yet trillions of dollars of gold gets traded in these "paper" instruments every year?

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[MachineShedFred]

Gee, it's almost like there are exactly zero countries that tie their currency to gold anymore.

Your point?

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[LynnwoodRooster]

Gold actually had a finite supply at this time, unless someone has become the mythical alchemist of lore. Bitcoins? No problem - make a new cryptocurrency and start over!

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[religionofpeas]

Gold is desirable in jewelry mostly because of its value. It's an investment you can wear (and show off). In the early days of aluminum it was also used in jewelry, until someone figured out how to make it cheaply, and then people lost interest.

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[LynnwoodRooster]

Well damn! Your company needs to learn about this small organization I use. It's called the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, better known as HSBC. Having an account open in Hong Kong, you can wire money anywhere in the world, with delivery within 1 business day, and the cost is only HKD$100 (about $14.50 US). Any amount, fixed price. In any currency, in and out.

For example, some of my clients pay in RMB, some in USD, some in EUR, some SGD, and so on. I can forex the funds for free, into one single account - or I can pay from any of those accounts into any other currency, like PKR, with zero extra fee or time. So you may me in USD, I pay a supplier in EUR from my USD funds (at today's exchange rate). Another customer in Singapore pays me in SGD, I pay a contractor in Ukraine in UAH from my SGD funds (at today's exchange rate). And then I sweep the entire balance at the end of the day into RMB because I have a large payment coming next week.

International banking is really simple and cheap these days; the only confusion is sometimes your funds may be disbursed across multiple currency accounts, but with free currency exchanges (at the published rates, at time of order of transfer), it's trivial to dump all your funds into a single account.

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[LynnwoodRooster]

Just last week, we tossed another $1.5 trillion of debt onto the pile with the new tax cut. How much "faith and credit" do you have in Donald Trump?

Huh, I go to the Federal Government and I see our debt has increased by about $360 million since the passage of the tax reform bill. Nope, not $1.5 trillion! That debt doesn't exist yet, does it?

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[LynnwoodRooster]

Showing up with a diamond ring or bracelet may get some attention of ladies; Beanie Babies and MtG cards? Not so much...

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[cstacy]

It is not secure. It is not quick. It is not cheaper. It is terrifying how wrong you can be in such a short paragraph.

And I am not the last Jedi!

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[Anonymous Coward]

The original point of the resilience was that you could nuke Congo and the rest of the internet would still work.

Congo nuked itself and the rest of the Internet still works. Nice job, the Internet.

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[Anonymous Coward]

You have to be careful about missing transactions though. My company tried the same setup, and after the eighth transaction just vanished with the bitcoins being missing, we reverted back to wiring money to our offshore resources. If Bitcoin works 100% of the time, then swell. I don't think anyone can afford to lose that many transactions though, and it happens terrifyingly often.

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[geekoid]

People just cashed out to buy Xmas stuff.

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[geekoid]

Yeah, it's no secure, but people love to think that.

When people are talking secure, they don't just mean the block chain, but bitcoins fans can't seem to grok that.

Remember 50btc? suddenly, and without evidence, they had a DDOS attack and could move coins out. Then they were down, and then the disappeared; with peoples coins. OS yeah, real secure.

How many wallets have been stolen from?

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[geekoid]

Thanks for letting us know you don't understand government economics.

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[jbengt]

At least with regular government currencies, the denominations are limited to whatever the government creates, e.g. the penny . . .

You ever notice that you can pay in mills (1/10ths of a cent), like at a gas pump?

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[Paradise Pete]

Never mind. Clearly it's not worth explaining further. Perhaps you could re-read the thread.

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[Anonymous Coward]

You ever notice that you can pay in mills (1/10ths of a cent), like at a gas pump?

No. That has never happened.

Please give me an example of you paying a mil for gas. Can't give one, can you?

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[Anonymous Coward]

Inflation goes up when the economy is booming. During the Great Depression, deflation was a serious problem, and the value of the dollar soared.

The strength of the economy and the value of the dollar are negatively correlated.

So you've done a complete backflip and are now arguing it is indeed the economy that fucks the dollar.

You didn't mention the government once. How strange you are.

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[MachineShedFred]

It may be priced that way, but take a look at the transaction record of every single time you've ever bought fuel - it's always in dollars and cents, rounded.

I have no idea what the significance of the use of mils is other than "that's how it's always been done" and it probably makes a difference if buying more than 100 gallons at a time. It's also common in kWh rates, but you buy hundreds per month, but still pay in dollars and cents, rounded.

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[Anonymous Coward]

No not at all. They could simply make it illegal, like gold was made illegal to own in the U.S. between 1933 and 1974 or so. It's amazing how fast a financial instrument loses value when it can't be legally used.

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[Nikkos]

"The cost involved in making a transaction is skyrocketing, the rate at which transactions can be processed is very low and even now there exist many tens of thousands of transactions that are unconfirmed by the network with them even getting dropped after a couple of weeks. And even in the case you describe it is still just an intermediate store of value, you're going to convert your local currency to bitcoin, transfer it to another location and then convert back to the new local currency so you can actually use it for something because bitcoin itself is not useful."

A. The costs can be mitigated, either simply by increasing the blocksize, or through side-chains. There are discussions/competing ideas, eventually the problem will be solved. I'm actually OK with the transaction costs remaining high, it will cement bitcoin as a store of value rather than a currency, while side-chains and/or altcoins take up the currency slack - many of them are far better suited for it.

B. The cheap-asses who tried to pay lower fees get what they deserve. They existed back in 2013 too, I was one of them. Took 2 weeks to get my BTC back, lesson learned.

C. Western union converts your 'dollars' to electronic bits, sends the bits to the other side of the world, reconverts back to dollars, and then you have to go convert those dollars to local currency. I send money to family Eastern Europe all the time, the stores don't take US dollars any more than they take bitcoin.

But that is an aside to the fact that bitcoin has no use outside of being a store of value, other stores of value (gold, diamonds, land, etc for example) have many uses which is why they have value. Their value changes based in part on speculation but also as supply and demand for the real uses of those commodities fluctuates. Bitcoin's value changes purely on speculation because it has no actual usefulness.

You just proved my point! None of the stores of value you mention are easily portable. In many instances transporting such is either outright illegal and/or must be declared for inspection/investigation.

Moreover, these 'stores of value' are often just as much hype as you decry bitcoin for. Retail diamonds are priced purely on market manipulation, hype, and marketing. Industrial diamonds are cheap as hell - you can get them on Ebay for $5.50/carat. Gold's price is NOT based on its utility, in fact only 12% of the global demand for gold is industrial/medical use. The rest is jewelry/wealth storage, and that wealth storage is based on its social acceptance and its limited supply/stable production.

Land is only valuable based on commercial potential - cropland, mineral rights, or proximity to urban centers for business/residential development - and that too is subject to bubbles and market shifts, not to mention it's not easily convertible to cash.

Re:back to value

[iggymanz]

running at the same rate *is* an issue, when your clock in Denver is off a picosecond every ten seconds compared to your one in Chicago

Re:back to value

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget that the supply isn't really that limited if everything is paid for in fractional bitcoin, and there's no effective limit to how small the fractions get.

No the supply really is that limited, the supply is 21 million bitcoins, how you divide that up and what denomination you transact in is completely disconnected from the fact that once the 21 million bitcoins have been mined there is no more mining and hence no more incentive for participating in the network aside from transaction fees, which will skyrocket in order to compensate for the lack of mining reward.

Re:back to value

[Anonymous Coward]

...and you are beginning to grasp the issue and the implications: Which Clock do you trust, Denver, or Chicago? Timing is not a Democracy or a Shareholders meeting; there is no voting on the ownership of Picoseconds... yet. (Ownership is a key point here, although not Personal ownership. At Berkeley nearly four decades back, they were working on a new type of OS, which was Timing Based. There was a Master Clock that issued Time Signatures, and these Signatures were "Owned" by whatever process explicitly claimed them, and only by them. Files and Directories ceased to have any conventional meaning; the core Databases were strictly linear, and related when two or more processes linked to a particular Signature, this process in itself claimed a new Signature... and then came UNIX, which barely gave a fiddle about Timing. UNIX principles can never be a part of a Real Time OS, except for utterly trivial reasons, like coding.)
Interesting that you mentioned Denver; for historical reasons, nearby Fort Collins is the proposed site where The Clock That Must Be Obeyed would reside. WWV would not go away; it is far too important for other related reasons. But this is a critical point, after which I will shut the fuck up already dammit:
WWV Time Signals can't go through the Earth.

Re:back to value

[Anonymous Coward]

A. The costs can be mitigated, either simply by increasing the blocksize, or through side-chains. There are discussions/competing ideas, eventually the problem will be solved.

No. Increasing the blocksize is only a temporary solution and causes the problem of massively increasing the rate at which the chain grows and decreases the ability of people to run full nodes and thus have trust. Side chains still require a bitcoin-based blockchain solution to the scaling problem and aren't of themselves a solution. Segregated witness has issues in that the signature is no longer stored with the transaction (optionally not even stored at all) which is a massive trust issue.

B. The cheap-asses who tried to pay lower fees get what they deserve. They existed back in 2013 too, I was one of them. Took 2 weeks to get my BTC back, lesson learned.

And those fees are going way up because the incentive to mine, and thus participate in the network, is going down. As this happens it further opens the possibility of 51% attacks.

C. Western union converts your 'dollars' to electronic bits, sends the bits to the other side of the world, reconverts back to dollars, and then you have to go convert those dollars to local currency.

And it is cheaper, faster and more reliable than doing it via Bitcoin.

You just proved my point! None of the stores of value you mention are easily portable.

Wrong, they don't need to be portable.

Moreover, these 'stores of value' are often just as much hype as you decry bitcoin for.

Wrong again, they all have a base value in their physical utilitarian uses which bitcoin does not have.

Land is only valuable based on commercial potential - cropland, mineral rights, or proximity to urban centers for business/residential development - and that too is subject to bubbles and market shifts

But that is a base value to which you add the speculative value, bitcoin has zero base value because it isn't actually useful for anything. Unlike physical commodities, with bitcoin if the speculative value drops to zero then all you're left with is a string of characters.

Re:back to value

[Bing Tsher E]

Oh, I think you could probably attract a certain kind of woman with a plastic bag full of Beanie Babies.

I'm not saying it would be the type of woman I would want to attract. But there's some appeal there for certain types of women.

Re:back to value

[Anonymous Coward]

These are products/services facilitated by the internet. Not the internet per-se. People complain about bitcoin, then are happy to invest in companies whose only 'product' is the ability to send duckface pictures to their friends.

Scam. Pyramid scheme. No value.

[Anonymous Coward]

The shoeshine boys ran wild with this one! The smart money is pulling out as fast as they can without triggering a full on hard crash.

The shoeshine boys will tell you it's "a buying opportunity" and to "buy on the dips" because "it can only go up"

Good luck, suckers! If you're not the smart money but lucked into lower priced coins then get out now while there's still a market of dumb buyers to fork over real money for your digital trash.

1300 pct

[Anonymous Coward]

That should tell you it is bogus. Nothing should rise 1300 pct in one year.

Re:1300 pct

[iggymanz]

My Zimbabwe currency holdings did better than that in 2007, over 7,000%. increase. wh0h00

Re: 1300 pct

[Anonymous Coward]

Inflation is not a rise in value, appreciation is. I'm guessing your currency value didn't appreciate. Also that you don't have any.

Re:1300 pct

[arth1]

Agreed. Furthermore what goes up must come down and if it went up that fast in one year it will not take it long for it to crash. Problem is BC may crash hard, and if/when it does the rest of the stock market might go with it

And nothing of value will be lost.

Re: 1300 pct

[iggymanz]

I'm guessing you thought I was serious

I do have one bill as a novelty, I truly can't remember how many zeroes it has. .....lots

Re:1300 pct

[gravewax]

why would the stock market go with it? BC even at current price is little more than a hiccup compared to most stock markets. would a single company collapsing cause the entire stock market to crash?

Re:1300 pct

[sheramil]

Agreed. Furthermore what goes up must come down and...

Pioneer 10.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_10

Re: 1300 pct

[Anonymous Coward]

Because people are transferring their money from stocks and savings into digital money. Except for central banks no one will be left to buy stocks. Banks will become undercapitalized will try to issue new stocks but won't get any investors. It will result in massive stock crash of global proportions.

Re: 1300 pct

[houghi]

Because people buy and sell it. For them it is just another 4 letters. They do not care if they trade stock, porkbelly, camels, christmas trees or bitcoin. All they are interested in is enough trading.
Or did you thing Wall Street (and others) are some altruic government entity?

Re: 1300 pct

[gravewax]

LOL Bull fucking shit. The entire market value of bitcoin even at its peak isn't even more than some of the top company market caps let alone significant enough to impact an entire market.

Re: 1300 pct

[gravewax]

No I am simply realistic. Bitcoins market cap is tiny compared to any world market, hell most of the top companies of the world are worth more and the collapse of any of them also would not result in a complete market meltdown.

Re:1300 pct

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a tip: Bitcoin didn't so much rise, as the fiat currencies fell - began to collapse in fact. That should being to tip you off as to what the US and UK governments are doing. They are printing money to pay off their debts.

Re:1300 pct

[91degrees]

would a single company collapsing cause the entire stock market to crash?

Well, VW or Exxon collapsing probably would cause a bit of panic. They have the same sort of market cap as bitcoin.

I guess they're different in that they'd pull down a bunch of other companies with them, whereas bitcoin will just take coinbase and a few other similar companies.

Re: 1300 pct

[Oswald McWeany]

LOL Bull fucking shit. The entire market value of bitcoin even at its peak isn't even more than some of the top company market caps let alone significant enough to impact an entire market.

At one point, total value of bitcoin was coming close to half a trillion USD. Total world GDP is about 80 trillion.

Bitcoin's total value was therefore equal to 1/160th of the world GDP. That's a significant value; but probably not enough to sink the economy for a few reasons:

1) A lot of that value is lost for all time. Lost keys, etc.
2) The number of bitcoin investors is still pretty low. A lot of that wealth is in the hands of a relatively small number of people. Not many people would be significantly hurt by the loss of bitcoin.

I would argue, if bitcoin crashed, people would transfer money to the stock market and it would HELP the stock market. Even though, BTC is probably most similar to gold in term of scarcity and investment, people who are currently investing in it are investing in it hoping to make a quick return and understand there is volatility, not as a long term stable investment. That sounds more like stock market trading than gold trading. If you take your money out of BTC you're probably going to put it in gold.

Re: 1300 pct

[LynnwoodRooster]

$70 trillion in market cap for all publicly traded companies. Bitcoin? $240 billion. Bitcoin is around 0.3% of the market cap of publicly traded companies, I don't think people are rushing from stocks to BTC, and I don't think a BTC crash to $0 would create much of any issue for stocks (other than people trying to jump back in to stocks, to stem their losses from BTC).

Re: 1300 pct

[gravewax]

half a trillion dollars was merely the paper figure, it has not had anywhere near that sort of money invested in it. even so that still only puts it equal to large market cap companies assuming you ignore all the problems, lack of real investment etc. Its collapse would not have any affect on stock markets, it is just to insignificant a sum of investment money that would be lost.

Re:1300 pct

[Anonymous Coward]

Exxon and VW have real money invested that is exponentially more than what bitcoin investers have committed. Even then neither of those companies dieing would cause a market collapse.

Re: 1300 pct

[Anonymous Coward]

don't forget that paper figure of 240 billion actually represents only a fraction of that amount in real investment. I would think actual investment in bitcoin is well under the 10 billion number. the paper value artificially inflates the real life effect of its crash.

Best Sell Now While You Still Can

[Anonymous Coward]

Those exits are going to get crowded real soon.

Re: Best Sell Now While You Still Can

[Anonymous Coward]

Good thing my banks are FDIC insured. Fuck Bitcoin and fuck Bitcoin stories on Slashdot. Hilary 2018.

Re:Best Sell Now While You Still Can

[Anonymous Coward]

Heard that for over five years now. My new car and boat bought this year and my remaining Bitcoin is still worth more than it was a year ago.

Re: Best Sell Now While You Still Can

[FormOfActionBanana]

There is no US presidential election in 2018.

Re:Best Sell Now While You Still Can

[Anonymous Coward]

My new car and boat bought this year...

It's on the internet, so it must be true!

Re:Best Sell Now While You Still Can

[Anonymous Coward]

So you are selling as opposed to buying. That says something about your opinion of the valuation.

Re:Best Sell Now While You Still Can

[DontBeAMoran]

His opinion is clearly stated at the end of his post:

my remaining Bitcoin is still worth more than it was a year ago.

If he thought it was all going to crash down he would have sold all of it.

Re:Best Sell Now While You Still Can

[Anonymous Coward]

Heard that for over five years now. My new car and boat bought this year and my remaining Bitcoin is still worth more than it was a year ago.

You're as dumb as the "it can only go up" guy.

Reminds me of the realtor that told me the value of my house can only go up, because houses have always gone up in value.

My house didn't just go up in value, but in the case of a house, at least it still has some actual value in that I can live in it and can at least sell it for something.

Who is going to buy your bitcoin in a few years?

Re: Best Sell Now While You Still Can

[Anonymous Coward]

You know the saying, pics or it didn't happen.

And if it did all that means is you were smart enough to cash out and take the money from the next bunch of morons on the sucker list.

Musical chairs has only one winner. Bitcoin will have 1% of winners and 99% crying into their keyboards.

Re: Best Sell Now While You Still Can

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no US presidential election in 2018.

Unless Trump, Pence and Paul Ryan are found guilty of treasonous acts. Paul Ryan is the only one that MIGHT not have left a trail.

If all three go down, the House will elect a new Pres.

Re:Best Sell Now While You Still Can

[Anonymous Coward]

If he spent $10 on a coin, and it crashes back to $1000 he might argue he's up $990, rather than seeing it as a $19000-$1000 loss, and consider it an acceptable risk against some chance of it going back up to more than $19000 in future. Taking some profit was probably sensible, though.

Re: Best Sell Now While You Still Can

[toddestan]

That's only a minor detail.

Re: That's why I invest in art

[Anonymous Coward]

That has more long term value than Bitcoin. You can wipe your ass with it.

Well, its valuation is still absurd.

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that transactions have become too expensive to make it useful as base for a currency. Admittedly, gold is still being used as currency backup and moving significant amounts of it around is even more expensive because of security. So Bitcoin may make more sense as backup, rarely actually requiring to transfer it. And futures trading on it is moving in that direction.

But it's still absurd.

Re:Well, its valuation is still absurd.

[Anonymous Coward]

Admittedly, gold is still being used as currency backup and moving significant amounts of it around is even more expensive because of security.

But gold also has many many uses beyond just being a store of value, bitcoin does not.

Re:Scam. Pyramid scheme. No value.

[Opportunist]

aka "if you don't know a sucker to take your fall, you're someone else's".

Unrealistic Expectations

[Anonymous Coward]

The expectation of every finance person, every investor, and every politician is that nothing can ever go down. If something goes down, it's the end of the world as we know it.

They live by a false dichotomy created by unrealistic expectations. Let's just completely ignore the fact that bitcoin went up by some absurd amount to begin with, and that the valuations seen in December were not only just ludicrous, but completely unsustainable.

People are retarded, and I have no idea how the human race has gotten this far with people like that in charge of everything.

Re:Unrealistic Expectations

[Anonymous Coward]

Economics and finance are a gigantic exercise in ignoring the first law of thermodynamics.

Fiat blockchain

[Anonymous Coward]

Blockchain, privacy fiat currency. Bitcoin boom, new digital gold investors. Proof of work hashing, bitcoin Ethereum dogecoin. Increasing value suckers $120,000! SHA256 double hash, verification of distributed public ledger. Futures, pathetic fiat! Digital future promotion. Buzzword buzzword.

Re:Fiat blockchain

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on this is pretty funny.

Re:Fiat blockchain

[50000BTU_barbecue]

3D printing, AI, IoT, gig economy. Millenials!

Re:Fiat blockchain

[Anonymous Coward]

Pardon me sir, have you seen my ISDN modem anywhere?

Re:Fiat blockchain

[Oswald McWeany]

pathetic fiat!

Never trust an Italian car! Sure, some may look really fancy, but underneath it all; whether its a crappy Fiat or an expensive Ferrari, its still going to leave you stranded on the side of the road.

Can't understand why people would want fiat currency.

/ yes I know that's not what it means before anyone jumps on me

Is there an actual practical use for blockchain?

[Mr307]

As a currency its a complete failure so far.

I was doing some research and some companies are trying to make it work as an inventory tracker.

Every time I see the tech in practice, it seems to be easily replaceable by a secure database, which appears to have all the features of blockchain except the supposed anonymity, and a secure database doesn't have problems like a 51% attack, nor the ridiculous time per transaction or cost per transaction problems.

Seems like blockchain so far is workable as a very expensive type of unregulated gambling.

Re:Is there an actual practical use for blockchain

[Anonymous Coward]

You are precisely correct sir. Blockchain is only useful for publicly distributed ledgers with no central authority. Outside of this scenario, it doesn't make much sense. In your case, you describe a central authority, so yeah, no point.

They have a name for the private ones: banks and exchanges, and they have worked well for a thousand years.

Meaningless noise

[Anonymous Coward]

It got almost as low as on December 30. Turns out December 31 was an up day, and January first was a bit of up and down.

https://bitcoincharts.com/charts/bitstampUSD#rg10ztgSzm1g10zm2g25

With that much noise, details such as 4 percent are meaningless. And with transaction fees so high, bitcoin is an unstable expensive to use currency. Its pretty much only useful for high risk investments.

Re:Meaningless noise

[Anonymous Coward]

Put your chart to "all data" it sure starts to look a lot like a dotcom bubble chart!

https://bitcoincharts.com/charts/bitstampUSD#tgSzm1g10zm2g25

Re:Meaningless noise

[Anonymous Coward]

butt muh log chart!

Re:Correction: Just a correction

[Anonymous Coward]

Bitcoin is only going to go up...

Good luck with that.

Why Bitcoin will fail

[davidwr]

Cryptocurrencies may succeed, but Bitcoin has too many limitations in it that newer cryptocurrencies don't have. In the long run, this will doom BC unless it makes significant changes.

In the short run, political forces like in South Korea and the high transaction costs will push it down. I don't see it crashing below January 2017 levels any time soon, but it will be below $5000 by the end of the decade.

The one thing it does have is market dominance and relatively wide acceptance.

The future of cryptocurrencies will be in:
1) Bank/government/other-big-corporation-backed currencies
2) A cryptocurrency that is what Bitcoin was in the beginning - a hard-to-track, very-low-transaction-cost currency that doesn't give people with special equipment a significant advantage.

The one thing that may hamper 2) is if mining is concentrated in one part of the world due to cheap energy. That can lead to cartels and loss of trust as a "nearly anonymous" medium of exchange.

Re:Why Bitcoin will fail

[quantaman]

Cryptocurrencies may succeed, but Bitcoin has too many limitations in it that newer cryptocurrencies don't have.

Which ones? There was recently an article about Iota but it sounds like it has some serious technical flaws. As to newer blockchain cryptocurriencies, my understanding is they generally improve on bitcoin's technical issues, but they don't actually solve them. If they had one of them would have probably overtaken bitcoin.

I don't see it crashing below January 2017 levels any time soon, but it will be below $5000 by the end of the decade.

The one thing it does have is market dominance and relatively wide acceptance.

I don't think it will crash entirely because a lot of big bitcoin owners don't really need their bitcoin wealth, and so given the choice are unwilling to cash out at current market prices. But at some point people will start wondering what bitcoin is actually supposed to be good for.

The future of cryptocurrencies will be in:
1) Bank/government/other-big-corporation-backed currencies

Wasn't the purpose of bitcoin to take the power away from banks and central governments?

2) A cryptocurrency that is what Bitcoin was in the beginning - a hard-to-track, very-low-transaction-cost currency that doesn't give people with special equipment a significant advantage.

The one thing that may hamper 2) is if mining is concentrated in one part of the world due to cheap energy. That can lead to cartels and loss of trust as a "nearly anonymous" medium of exchange.

The low transaction cost was due to its obscurity, the high transaction cost seems to be a fundamental feature of the blockchain and high throughput.

Re:Why Bitcoin will fail

[ceoyoyo]

"I don't think it will crash entirely because a lot of big bitcoin owners don't really need their bitcoin wealth, and so given the choice are unwilling to cash out at current market prices."

Someone refusing to sell doesn't determine the price, someone willing to buy (or sell) does. If bitcoin devolves to the point where nobody who's got it is willing to sell, then it's really dead.

Re:Why Bitcoin will fail

[quantaman]

"I don't think it will crash entirely because a lot of big bitcoin owners don't really need their bitcoin wealth, and so given the choice are unwilling to cash out at current market prices."

Someone refusing to sell doesn't determine the price, someone willing to buy (or sell) does. If bitcoin devolves to the point where nobody who's got it is willing to sell, then it's really dead.

Ultimately yes. But the fewer people willing to sell the lower the supply for people who want to buy, and that will keep the price up.

I expect bitcoin to keep yo-yo-ing for a bit, there will be a lot of people getting back in hoping for it to hit $20k again, and they may be right. Since bitcoin is pure speculation there is no proper value, $100 was a bubble, as was $1000, as was $20k. I think the sheer amount of capital is going to limit another big jump, but if common sense didn't halt it previously why should it now?

Re:Correction: Just a correction

[Anonymous Coward]

Bitcoin is only going to go up because there are only so many coins to go around

No, just because the supply of something is limited does not mean its value will increase. Bitcoin doesn't actually have a practical use.

and countries are putting actual value into the currency.

What countries? And specifically how are they "putting value into it"?

I don't get what bitcoin is supposed to do well

[quantaman]

Because the blockchain is centralized I don't see how it could ever scale to the levels needed for a regular currency.

And as a store of value, ie digital gold, they're really hard to store and really easy to steal.

I can only see two good functions for bitcoin.

1) The black market, I think this is low volume enough to make bitcoin feasible.

2) If anyone ever solves the scalablility issues bitcoin has a ton of invested parties and will likely integrate the fix. Giving it legitimate value.

Re:I don't get what bitcoin is supposed to do well

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the blockchain is centralized

Blockchain isn't centralized.

Re:I don't get what bitcoin is supposed to do well

[TheRealMindChild]

Don't feed the troll

Re:I don't get what bitcoin is supposed to do well

[Anonymous Coward]

but it is centralized.

Re:I don't get what bitcoin is supposed to do well

[Anonymous Coward]

They also have irreversible transactions, so it is convenient for political dissidents and money laundering.

Re:I don't get what bitcoin is supposed to do well

[geekpowa]

Maybe the OP meant unsharded. Not centralised.

A blockchain ledger in an entirely trustless network needs to be replicated on every participating node. This is a massive scalability issue. Imagine a sizable % of worlds economy running on any given crypto coin for 20+ years. The size of that ledger, the size of updates coming through every second would be staggering.

The traditional banking infrastructure is sharded. The ledger representing my personal bank account is not mixed in with ledgers of customers for a bank in other far flung countries. Alot of things need to evolve WRT crypto coins in order for them overcome/sidestep their present, by design, scaling issues, in this respect the OP is correct I believe.

Re:I don't get what bitcoin is supposed to do well

[quantaman]

Because the blockchain is centralized

Blockchain isn't centralized.

Bad phrasing on my part.

It's centralized in the sense that the blockchain is a distributed database. There's a limit to how much throughput the system can handle.

As the followup comment suggested unsharded is a better description of what I meant.

Re:I don't get what bitcoin is supposed to do well

[psnyder]

Delivering Liberty, at Scale

Re:I don't get what bitcoin is supposed to do well

[Anonymous Coward]

It's centralized to a single ledger, which is distributed among many clients.

Re:Correction: Just a correction

[arth1]

No, just because the supply of something is limited does not mean its value will increase.

I know people who still cling on to their Beanie Babies, believing they one day will recover their losses and come out ahead.

Re:Is there an actual practical use for blockchain

[quantaman]

As a currency its a complete failure so far.

I was doing some research and some companies are trying to make it work as an inventory tracker.

Every time I see the tech in practice, it seems to be easily replaceable by a secure database, which appears to have all the features of blockchain except the supposed anonymity, and a secure database doesn't have problems like a 51% attack, nor the ridiculous time per transaction or cost per transaction problems.

Seems like blockchain so far is workable as a very expensive type of unregulated gambling.

There's a lot of places thinking about using the blockchain for land ledgers. The trouble with land ledgers is a lot of people and groups need access but it's really hard to keep track of and keep everything updated, especially in less developed countries. The blockchain solves this by making the information both widely accessible and trustworthy. Best part is land doesn't change hands much so you don't have the scalability issues of bitcoin.

Re:Is there an actual practical use for blockchain

[TheRealMindChild]

A blockchain will be great for things you want "written in stone" and consensus of what is written is reached, like property ownership would be a good example.

Re:Is there an actual practical use for blockchain

[Mr307]

Is there a version of a blockchain tech that doesn't have the 51% vulnerability? If not imagine having property sold 2 times because someone was able to attain 51% of the public compute rate, or as I understand it the block history can be rewritten as well.

OR were you suggesting a private compute network of some kind, in which case why not use a database?

Tumbling?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where is this tumbling you're all talking about happening? My cryptos I found lying on some backup disk 2-3 months ago are still valued circa 10x more than when I found them. If that's what tumbling means, it can tumble all year all along if you ask me.

Re:Tumbling?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where is this tumbling you're all talking about happening? My cryptos I found lying on some backup disk 2-3 months ago are still valued circa 10x more than when I found them. If that's what tumbling means, it can tumble all year all along if you ask me.

That is an idiotic statement.
For example (totally made up numbers here): Your bitcoin was worth $1000 three months ago, and it spiked to $100000 for a two month period. You only just checked and it was back at $10000. "Huh, I guess it's been stable for three months now!"

Re:Is there an actual practical use for blockchain

[Mr307]

I found it from:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Block...

"For example in MultiChain, they introduce a permission based mining (not mandatory) and a round-robin style, where a certain miner can mine limited number of blocks. This means different miners will be mining the blocks. Additionally, most private blockchains do not use the concept of "mining" at all - they have KNOWN identities, who will create the block and KNOWN identities, who will confirm that the block is indeed valid."

So you can have known entities only on a round robin style system so no one would be able to mount an attack that way.

But I still dont see the point compared to a database.

Re:Is there an actual practical use for blockchain

[Kremmy]

The problem seems to be that you only see Bitcoin and the problems that it is facing, ignoring the rest of the cryptocurrency iceberg.
Bitcoin is less than 50 percent of the cryptocurrency market. The problems that are cited with it have been solved in a myriad of ways by various coins.
The volume of those coins is increasing every day, the ecosystem is blooming hard and most people just see Bitcoin and totally miss it.

puh-lease

[weedjams]

stop.

reporting on crypto.

We have a hard enough time fleecing the sheep without you upsetting them with scare stories.

hodl my beer and watch this!

foo!

Re:puh-lease

[DontBeAMoran]

hodl my beer and watch this!

I think you've already had one beer too many.

Dogecoin to the moon!*

* the moon equals one ten dollars.

Re:Correction: Just a correction

[Anonymous Coward]

" Bitcoin is only going to go up because there are only so many coins to go around,"
And once they've all been mined, the miners will cash out, stop mining, no payments will be processed, and your wallet will just be a string of bits taking up space on your HDD.

Re:Is there an actual practical use for blockchain

[quantaman]

Yeah, I assume a private network, or a network comprised of only certain parties (ie levels of government with the authority to modify the ledger).

As to the the advantage over a database, the blockchain is distributed and has a history of transactions for units (and a way to break up units) by design. Just like any tech you can do that stuff with a DB, but it might be more natural to pull off with a blockchain,

Re:Is there an actual practical use for blockchain

[DontBeAMoran]

What if it's a conglomerate of private networked computers but you can never be 100% you can trust any of them? Someone can hack a database by accessing one computer. Much harder to hack the blockchain since you'd need to hack 51% of the computers almost all at the same time.

Re:Is there an actual practical use for blockchain

[Anonymous Coward]

51%? There does not exist a solution to generalized BFT that doesn't have a 33.3% problem -- blockchain included. Anyone who claims otherwise is provably wrong.

It just happens that in a blockchain based implementation, gaining that share of a network is supposed to be

1) prohibitively costly
2) exponentially costly to falsify a longer blockchain

Which is the way modern cryptography works -- there's very few guarantees other than "computational complexity" or "exponentially diminishing probability of..."

If you don't know the answer to "why not use a database", then I suspect you haven't thoroughly understood distributed consensus. Any idiot can who can implement a mutex can build a simple database. To have a system reach eventual consensus is the hard part.

If you believe that it's possible to sell something twice with a blockchain/ledge, *and* that that is the problem -- you've failed to really understand the difference between this technology and a bank, ATM, or any other ledge. YES -- it's possible to publish two contradicting transactions in blockchain (It's also possible to overdraw bank accounts on ATMs -- criminal gangs in Europe have made millions doing it). It's even _possible_ that both contradicting transactions go through in a fork in the network if two miners pick them both up and complete a block. Give it a few minutes for the the next block to update the chain -- and only one of the transactions will win. After three, four, five transactions -- the cost to forge or race the blockchain becomes incomprehensible (such that you would probably make more profit using that computing resource to verify legitimate transactions).

That's why this is different from other centralized systems -- the remote processing can happen slowly or quickly, but it requires a proof of actual work and expenditure -- but it in processor or memory. As a result, it's _supposed_ to remain more economically efficient to 'play nicely' than to try to cheat. So far, it's held up.

As a p.s -- remember that blockchain works better when any node can independently verify the entirety of the blockchain for correctness.

Re:Is there an actual practical use for blockchain

[DontBeAMoran]

It's like people in 1990 who saw AOL and just shrug "Internet is a fad and will die soon".

Re:Correction: Just a correction

[Applehu Akbar]

Bitcoin is only going to go up because there are only so many coins to go around...

The price bubble in Bitcoin has brought forth a plethora of other cryptocurrencies, most of them with the same algorithmically limited money supply as Bitcoin. Even putting aside such minutiae as having to figure out what in hell "tethers" are, with each new currency and with each new fork of every existing cryptocurrency, there is an additional new store of possible units that can be created. Instead of a limited money, we are approaching digital Zimbabwe.

Re:Correction: Just a correction

[Applehu Akbar]

Bitcoins price will be 25000 by feb 1 , or i'll eat my dick... J.M

Shall I pass the mustard?

Re:Correction: Just a correction

[Anonymous Coward]

Bitcoin is only going to go up because there are only so many coins to go around

LOL. I'm now in my 40s, so there will never be any more of my drawings from when I was 5 years old. Since there are only so many of those masterpiece from 5-year-old-me to go around, I can conclude that the value of them is only going to go up.

Re:Is there an actual practical use for blockchain

[mnemotronic]

Just thinking out loud ...

How about as a mechanism for counting votes? I.e. an electronic voting machine tallies Joe Schmoe's vote and submits that to to the chain. I'm not sure if Joe has a private key or the private key is associated with the machine. The private key needs to be setup so that it cannot be associated with Joe; but with Joe's vote.

Ah, but alts are BOOMing

[huwiler]

Ah, but the alt-coins are BOOMing. A modest $3k investment in raiblocks in November and you'd be a millionaire today. Amazing time to be in crypto.

Re:BITCOIN MOTHERFUCKER!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm still waiting for some rapper to come out with "BITCOIN KANG" mixtape or something

Re:Is there an actual practical use for blockchain

[maybe111]

You really don't understand what Bitcoin is.... but Bitcoin is trying to become what you are describing (with the lightning network, transactions will get stored off the blockchain, almost like a database on the side). You probably should talk about Bitcoin-Cash instead... Bitcoin Cash scaled by doing what the creator of Bitcoin described... by increasing the block size to keep up with demand.

Re:Is there an actual practical use for blockchain

[phantomfive]

Is there an actual practical use for blockchain?

The use case is basically everything e-gold was used for, before the feds shut that down.

How do you define failure?

[Okian Warrior]

No Bitcoin is a failure, with a bottlenecked architecture that prevents liquidity, high transaction fees far in excess of bank wiring fee, high percentage of use for black market begging for government intervention, and extreme volatility making it useless as store of value

Your claim reads "Bitcoin is a failure", but your explanation is roughly "Bitcoin has problems".

Bitcoin is in widespread use, people are looking into fixing the problems, and... what's your definition of a failure?

Is Twitter a failure in your book?

Re: How do you define failure?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your claim reads "Bitcoin is a failure", but your explanation is roughly "Bitcoin has problems".

But you're not willing, or, more likely, not capable, of offering any explanation about the problems.

You know what's that called? Bullshit. And you are full of it.

Re:How do you define failure?

[iggymanz]

False, not in widespread use at all, compared to say dollars or euros, too illiquid. waiting days for a transaction cripples it.

Bringing up Twitter, you are funny. Yes Twitter is losing money, not making it. Failure as a business.

Re: How do you define failure?

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm, I'm not that AC, but yeah, Twitter is a huge fucking failure.

The fact that you use Twitter as the first example of a non-failure is so telling it should have anyone considering investing in bitcoin running, far and fast.

Re:How do you define failure?

[Anonymous Coward]

I see you have never done a Telegraphic Transfer in your entire life.

Re: How do you define failure?

[acrimonious howard]

Your claim reads "Bitcoin is a failure", but your explanation is roughly "Bitcoin has problems".

But you're not willing, or, more likely, not capable, of offering any explanation about the problems.

You know what's that called? Bullshit. And you are full of it.

Idk, maybe that's going a bit far. 15 million people use bitcoin. I bet less than 6.5 million use the Sierra Leonean Leone. I can see it's easy to call anything a failure. The US dollar doesn't even represent gold any more. Therefore I curse you.

Re:How do you define failure?

[Anonymous Coward]

How long do merchants wait for the settlement from VISA - the actual money?

Clue: about 30 days.

You = moron.

Re: How do you define failure?

[Anonymous Coward]

I work in the industry. Many merchants have next day funding. But that requires a fee and an application.

Most merchants have a couple of days.

You're probably thinking of reserves, where the acquirer holds on to ten percent of it as insurance against fraud.

Re: How do you define failure?

[Anonymous Coward]

Lol. 30 days? 10 years ago I had a really crappy low end merchant account. It was the kind where you took impressions of the physical card on carbon paper and called in the transaction on you cell phone to key in the card number, expiration, amount, and zip code. Even with that primitive system 10 years ago, I got the money deposited in my bank account 2 days later. I highly doubt anyone is waiting 30 days for funding these days unless they are running transactions via carrier pidgeon.

Re: How do you define failure?

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL

Amusing that you think this is a defense and backs up the criticism of Bitcoin taking hours to confirm.

Must be a slow news day

[Pluvius]

Six percent is just standard volatility for Bitcoin. This is nothing compared to the 20+% drop it had over the course of a few hours a couple of weeks ago. Not to mention that it's already back up to $14k again. This is just someone trying to smear Bitcoin with facts that everyone has already known about it for years, and I say that as someone who recognized Bitcoin as a massive Ponzi scheme a long time ago.

Rob

Re:Must be a slow news day

[Anonymous Coward]

>Ponzi scheme

So you're mentally disabled.

Re: Must be a slow news day

[Anonymous Coward]

I say that as someone who recognized Bitcoin as a massive Ponzi scheme a long time ago.

Oh Boo Boo, you missed the boat? It sucks to be you.

"No practical use"

[SuperKendall]

Ignoring the variety of illegal goods and services which will always have value to others and can be bought with Bitcoin, what about all of the legit companies that accept Bitcoin? Or the fact that as economies falter and the native currencies turn to dust and banks fail/are seized, people turn to Bitcoin...

Re:"No practical use"

[Anonymous Coward]

what about all of the legit companies that accept Bitcoin?

That is a shrinking list precisely because of the rapid fluctuation of the currency, the ballooning transaction cost and the length of time it takes to process the transactions.

In fact what you will find is that most of these companies are not accepting bitcoin at all, they are transacting in US dollars you are simply using a service like coinbase to sell bitcoin for US dollars that are then transferred to the company. This also comes with a number of caveats and additional restrictions due to the problems with using bitcoin as a currency.

Or the fact that as economies falter and the native currencies turn to dust and banks fail/are seized, people turn to Bitcoin...

Again, when you put this into practise you find the exorbitant fees and long transaction times to be prohibitive. Yes the case study points out that the number of bitcoin users has increased in Venezuela because the inflation is so bad that finding anywhere to park your investment, even if it is as highly volatile as bitcoin, is a relative win.

As the supply of bitcoins becomes exhausted the problem of transactions becomes much worse, the incentive for mining goes away and transaction fees need to skyrocket just to have incentive for the network to continue operating. You are suggesting its practical use is as a currency however you seem unaware of limitations of the architecture of bitcoin.

Re:"No practical use"

[Anonymous Coward]

From your humblebundle.com link:

"Currently, Bitcoin is disabled for certain purchases on our site. We are very sorry for the inconvenience!"

Re:"No practical use"

[MachineShedFred]

So all we need to do is wait for the global banking system to fail, and count on no action being taken by anyone to prevent it, as well as all governments to sit on their hands and do absolutely nothing while billions of people are plunged into poverty.

That should happen Real Soon Now(tm)...

But hey, at least you'll have some outrageously valued bits on your SSD that you won't be able to access because the electricity is shut off due to the global economic collapse! That should keep you warm and your belly full!

Re:"No practical use"

[LynnwoodRooster]

About the second point - how to do you get or use the value? Say you're in a nation where the economy crashes - but it is illegal to use BTC (like in China). How do you turn that into a currency you can use? How do you get that currency into the country? How do you pay for things locally?

Re:"No practical use"

[Anonymous Coward]

Or the fact that as economies falter and the native currencies turn to dust and banks fail/are seized, people turn to Bitcoin...

Ah yes the apparent users of bitcoin in Venezuela really skyrocketed up to a massive 0.2% of the population and from the link a whole ONE company, a travel company, is taking payment in Bitcoin which is more problematic than if I just used any other currency. It make much more sense to convert to an alternative fiat currency (like US dollars) that is far less volatile then either bitcoin or bolivar and actually works effectively as a currency without massive transaction fees and long transaction delays.

Re:Correction: Just a correction

[DontBeAMoran]

Oh my god, you're sick. Clearly this calls for ketchup.

How is this even relevant?

[Excelcia]

Oh brother. And tomorrow will be the first January 2nd it fell in in value since 2015.

Re:Correction: Just a correction

[Anonymous Coward]

Bitcoins price will be 25000 by feb 1 , or i'll eat my dick... J.M

So, do you want a single Ritz cracker to serve that on? Half a Ritz?

Every second or third Wednesday

[burtosis]

Bitcoin has never been stable, the entire crypto currency market seems to fare slightly better than a sim in a drunken game of roller coaster tycoon.

Re:Is there an actual practical use for blockchain

[Anonymous Coward]

...and if you don't pay a big enough transaction fee, your ballot may only be processed after the election.

Sounds like a plan.

im a millionaire

[Anonymous Coward]

i bought bc when it was trading at $9.00. i'm a millionaire now.

Re: im a millionaire

[Anonymous Coward]

i bought bc when it was trading at $9.00. i'm a millionaire now.

When Bitcoin was 'worth' $9 there didn't exist a single exchange on the planet...

What a load of shitheads have taken over Slashdot.

Re: im a millionaire

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you sell them?

If yes then congrats on getting out and taking all that sucker money with you.

If no then you're the greater fool and greedy as fuck hoping it goes up even higher. You'll be crying when your paper millions go to zero.

What do you define as "Pre Bubble"???

[SuperKendall]

The value is still thousands higher than it was at the first of December 2017, and doesn't seem to be diminishing further. I find it hard to call what just happened a "bubble", which would imply a drop of something more like 80-90%, not 20-30%...

Re:What do you define as "Pre Bubble"???

[LynnwoodRooster]

I trust you were around during the dot-bomb days of 1999 through 2001? Take a look at the NASDAQ from say, August 1998 to September 2001. You'll see most of the deflation of the dot-com bubble was in 20-30% chunks, and recoveries that only made back half the loss. That was a pop of a big bubble... 6800 to 4900 in 4 months. 6000 to 3600 in 5 months. 4000 to 2500 in 2 months. Then 3000 to 2000 in 3 months. That's a 70% loss in 14 months - all done with 20-30% slides, each time with a small (10-20%) gain preceding the next slide.

Re:What do you define as "Pre Bubble"???

[geekoid]

Then you should use your PhD in economics and right a book correcting every other expert in the field.

Re:Is there an actual practical use for blockchain

[Mr307]

See that idea sounds interesting, it would create a one time record of voting, but that will never fly as for some reason there are people who dont like requiring some kind of proof of ID (or private key) to vote.

Re: Correction: Just a correction

[Anonymous Coward]

So, you will chop it off first, or remove your bottom ribs to reach it?

Ask them about their gold, too.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ask them about their gold, too.

Coin lands on heads for the first time since 2015

[thecombatwombat]

Perhaps my math is wrong, but isn't "first time since 2015" the same as saying "so it's been up and down 50% of the time in the last four years?"

2015: down
2016: up
2017: up
2018: down

But hey, blockchain! cryptocurrency! news!

since 2015, so 4 years then?

[xcfmx]

down 1 out of 4 years on a single day.. better write a story.

Pure Horse Hockey

[Anonymous Coward]

These news stories are incredibly lame and touting things which are utterly inconsequential. First time (out of a total of 3) since 2015 that BTC decreased 7% to start a new year? I'm amazed.

Re:Coin lands on heads for the first time since 20

[EvilSS]

Well based on the recent story of the Blockchain Tea company, maybe if they change the name to blockchain coin it will soar again....

Re:Is there an actual practical use for blockchain

[Mr307]

I know exactly what bitcoin is, a greater fool bubble.

It has been interesting to notice though that every time I see someone say 'you really dont understand bitcoin', or whatever variation of the same, I dont recall ever seeing a description of whatever the person was supposed to be missing or not understanding. Just a blanket 'you dont get it', almost as if there is some kind of true believer faith requirement for bitcoin.

False Premise

[Anonymous Coward]

By stating Bitcoin gained 1300% value in 2017 and relating it to gains made on the first day of 2017 and comparing those first day gains to the first day losses of 2018 this article tries to suggest/assert the claim that Bitcoin will not gain value in 2018. Pure FUD.

Re:Is there an actual practical use for blockchain

[Mr307]

Even if we pretend its impossible for a 51% attack (and I dont believe this, I expect it to happen at some certain thresholds of value where the hardware is cheap enough compared to the perceived value of the coins), attacks could be made on the nodes or consensus or who knows what.

As the perceived value rises, who knows what lengths people or groups will go to attack the network, especially since its supposedly untraceable.

Then I also would find it interesting if all this perceived value is believed, how does a public blockchain die? Is there some need for a critical mass of computers to maintain a 'live' blockchain, and what happens when it falls below that number because people have moved on to SuperDuperMoGoodererCoin?

Re: Is there an actual practical use for blockchai

[Anonymous Coward]

At the same time think of the people back in the 90s who said "AOL has nowhere to go but up!" (Because it's the Internet and it's all different.)

Re:Is there an actual practical use for blockchain

[Anonymous Coward]

How's your Netscape stock doing these days, bro?

Re: Correction: Just a correction

[Anonymous Coward]

A Rice Krispie will do.

Re:Is there an actual practical use for blockchain

[geekpowa]

The coin ecosystems currently is reminiscent of the wildcat banking era

Proponents of coins say this is a feature, not a bug.

Bitcoin is singled out because it is the oldest, most established, and if you naively believe that true value of all coins in circulation = spot price * number of coins, also the most valuable.

Sure other coins solve (or alleviate) some of the more glaring problems with bitcoin, yet other significant structural problems remain with the whole concept. One example: sometimes mediation is actually needed to resolve real disputes becasue we are afterall only human and bad actors are out there. The only way, by design, crypto coins do this is forking blockchains, a la The Dao and ETH/ETC split. Again proponents see this is a feature, not a bug.

Alot of wheel reinventing going on, done in ignorance of what has happened in the past WRT banking and finance. IT innovation in banking and finance is wild west stuff and an honest appraisal of things would be that noone knows what the fuck they are doing

Re:Correction: Just a correction

[FrankHaynes]

But is it a sandwich??

Re:Is there an actual practical use for blockchain

[cheesyweasel]

Have you been hiding under a rock? It's all about Crypto Kitties! It accounts for around 15% of all ethereum traffic (source: https://www.investopedia.com/n...)

Re:Is there an actual practical use for blockchain

[mnemotronic]

Forget transaction fees. This is crypto-balloting -- independent from cryptocurrencies. Blockchain maintenance would not be a for-profit business.

Are you saying that counting a ballot after the election is bad?? Traditionally, ballots were processed after the election except for absentee ballots and other special cases.

Re:Is there an actual practical use for blockchain

[Anonymous Coward]

Bitcoin flaws (e.g. transaction cost and delays) are handled by spam posting about how Lightning Network will fix them, by not using Bitcoin or the blockchain weaknesses.

The obvious "not-an-inside-job" hack of Lightning being hacked risk is handled by spam posting about "use an offline wallet".. which requires 2x as many Bitcoin transactions...

It's Turtles all the way down.

Re:Is there an actual practical use for blockchain

[ceoyoyo]

That seems like a particularly silly idea. The registry is only meaningful if there's a strong enough central government. If there is, you might as well just have a secure server. Have two (or ten) independent ones that integrity check each other if you're worried about them being hacked.

How'd that work out?

[Anonymous Coward]

BTC opened Jan 1, 2015 at $314 and closed Jan 1, 2016 at $434.

About a what, 28% gain?

My savings accounts got about a .04% return in the same year.

Re:Is there an actual practical use for blockchain

[Interfacer]

Currently, the predominant feature of bitcoin is not the tech as such, but the fact that it is the 1 coin you can trade against any other crypto asset on every exchange. In many cases, if you want to buy coin xyz, you have to buy bitcoin first. Likewise, if you sell coin xyz, you have to cash out to bitcoin and then convert to fiat.

As long as that remains the case, bitcoin is more or less guaranteed to have 'a' significant value. But if more and more people start to trade against Ethereum for example, then eventually Ethereum will take over from bitcoin, and bitcoin will wither.

That is, as long as the crypto space grows, there will be dominant assets with a high value, simply because there are exchanges that ONLY have crypto trading pairs and not fiat trading pairs.

Re: Correction: Just a correction

[Anonymous Coward]

What's even stranger is that it's theoretically possible to destroy all Bitcoins. Each day some mined Bitcoins are lost forever due to destroyed wallets or forgotten passwords. They day will eventually come when all Bitcoins have been lost to entropy.

Re:Correction: Just a correction

[religionofpeas]

Beanie Babies are a mass produced item made from cheap materials. There's no reason for the value to be substantially detached from manufacturing cost.

Bitcoin is not mass produced.

Why you'd think that the two have anything in common is puzzling.

Re:Is there an actual practical use for blockchain

[Anonymous Coward]

A secure database means centralisation - you have to trust the organisation running the database... which is the STATED thing that blockchain is designed to avoid. It's for providing a distributed consensus and immutability with no centralised store or trust involved.

If you're using it for other reasons, you're an idiot. A real, genuine, fucking idiot.

Or you're lying.

Re:Is there an actual practical use for blockchain

[Anonymous Coward]

Because then you can be forced to vote for someone, because criminals can check you've voted correctly.

Re:Is there an actual practical use for blockchain

[MartinG]

How would you achieve anonymity with that?

Re:Is there an actual practical use for blockchain

[Anonymous Coward]

They seem to be taking your database analogy literally. I'm quite sure they've totally missed your point.

Isn't this what we expect from fluctuations

[91degrees]

Out of the last 4 new years, Bitcoin rose for two of them (2016, 2017) and fell for the other 2 (2015, 2018). Don't think there's really any pattern here. Looking at coinmarketcap, there seem to be some bubbles and dips around new year but those happen all over the place so could be a coincidence.

Re: Correction: Just a correction

[91degrees]

Or just the worthlessness of them. I have around 0.003 bitcoins kicking about in my wallet. If I want to convert that to hard cash, it will cost most of the value just to sell it within a reasonable time.

Re:Is there an actual practical use for blockchain

[91degrees]

The only reason there hasn't been a 51% attack is that nobody has worked out a way to do it cheaply enough to make a profit. According to one estimate, you'd need somewhere in the region of $2 billion in hardware and power costs for 24 hours mining. That sort of spending is difficult to hide.

Um?

[circularWaffle]

What's down? The prediction was, by the end of 2017 it was going to be $10k. It's over $13k. Just because there was a spike of $19k+, doesn't mean it's "down" lol. I guess nobody has been paying attention. At the turn of 2017, it was just over $1,000. At the turn of 2018, it's over $13k. Wow, what a "tumble".

Re:Coin lands on heads for the first time since 20

[Anonymous Coward]

down up up down left left left right jump win!

Derp

[Anonymous Coward]

Who, exactly, predicted $10K at the end of 2017? Got any sources, besides the tiny voices in your head?

Re:Derp

[circularWaffle]

If you're so smart, you could go Google it yourself. Instead, I'll enlighten you. Does it really matter? Not really, because it outperformed that prediction anyways. But, here ya go, lazy: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitco...

Re:Derp

[circularWaffle]

Let me just reiterate, too. Apparently, nobody has been paying attention. You proved this to me.

Keep clam

[Anonymous Coward]

and HODL

Re:Is there an actual practical use for blockchain

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Isn't it amazing how the same people who think "proof of ID" should exist for voting are the same people who will jump to "Papers Please" whenever they hear about any new government program?

Re:Correction: Just a correction

[MachineShedFred]

Maybe because both of their values during their respective hype bubbles far outstripped their real value?

At least with the beanie baby, you have a tangible, physical thing that you could potentially burn to release energy, level a shaky piece of furniture, or use to wedge open a door - so it still has some marginal residual value. You can't ever recover the energy spent to "mine" bitcoin, it doesn't physically exist anywhere except as a pattern of electrons in a computer, and it only has any value because of the delusion of the masses.

If energy cost was factored into bitcoin, it would probably have negative value.

Re:Correction: Just a correction

[MachineShedFred]

Building on your hilarious analog:

You forgot that there are other 5-year-olds that are "forking" your drawings, which creates an essentially unlimited supply. Just like Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Etherium, et. al.

"Only so many coins to go around" == "only so much hype to inflate the bubble before it all comes crashing down in hilarity for those smart enough to not get involved"

Re:Correction: Just a correction

[religionofpeas]

Maybe because both of their values during their respective hype bubbles far outstripped their real value?

How do you determine the real value ? And, using your method, what's the real value of gold ?

it doesn't physically exist anywhere except as a pattern of electrons in a computer, and it only has any value because of the delusion of the masses.

Your "real" money in your bank account doesn't physically exist either. These are also just patterns on a computer.

Re:Correction: Just a correction

[religionofpeas]

You forgot that there are other 5-year-olds that are "forking" your drawings, which creates an essentially unlimited supply

You may be forking the code, but you're not forking the infrastructure it runs on.

Re: Correction: Just a correction

[LynnwoodRooster]

No need for either; with his cranium so firmly rectally implanted, he's already shown he has the flexibility needed for his promised meal...

Re:Correction: Just a correction

[MachineShedFred]

No, just duplicating it, wasting even more resources and causing more market confusion.

But I'm sure the next few "initial coin offerings" of the next hype-chain crypto currencies will fix all of that.

You are of less than no practical use

[Anonymous Coward]

You just don't learn do you. It's not illegal to use bitcoin in China. Show the slightest evidence for your made up claims.

Re:Is there an actual practical use for blockchain

[LynnwoodRooster]

Not for a Government that decided it wanted to "take" a big chunk of currency, or disrupt another economy that has become dependent upon BTC. $2 billion would be chump change...

Heck Wells Fargo made $21 billion in 2016, they could take about 10% of their profit and destroy BTC whenever they choose.

Visa made about $12 billion in operating income; spend $2 billion of that and goodbye BTC...

If anything, having such a low bar to entry, when the private and public institutions that are supposedly threatened by BTC could easily and affordably break the entire system, should put a pause in the BTC hysteria.

Re:Is there an actual practical use for blockchain

[LynnwoodRooster]

So known, trusted entities who will do the ledger maintenance for us. Isn't that what a bank does?

Fake news

[slashmydots]

It's up 4% on the month actually. Never make a story about BTC dropping. It won't stay that way and that's no the long term trend. It's just headline bait nonsense.

How do you not?

[SuperKendall]

but it is illegal to use BTC (like in China)

It's not illegal in China, they just shut down an exchange.

But it doesn't matter if it's legal or not, how exactly would they stop you? It's illegal to use drugs most places too, would you say no-one uses drugs? Or speeds? or crosses the street against a light? In a failing economy people are doing a LOT of illegal things, using bitcoin is a small blip on the list.

Re:How do you not?

[LynnwoodRooster]

Nice! So you can't exchange it for the local currency, but you can use it? How useful is a currency that cannot be exchanged for something useful like rent, food, clothing?

Re:Is there an actual practical use for blockchain

[Anonymous Coward]

The objection to requiring proof of ID is that the proposals are poorly designed as a solution to voter fraud and very well designed as a means of suppressing the ability of the poor (particularly urban racial minorities) to vote. The main issue being that they use existing optional ID's as the standard meaning you need to navigate additional beurocratic red tape to get the ID you need to vote.

If the ID you needed to present was based on the information and photo you provided when you registered to vote and was issued alongside the sample ballot and notification of your polling place, you would get an entirely different set of people complaining about it.

Yes you can

[SuperKendall]

Nice! So you can't exchange it for the local currency

What makes you think that? You just can't use an exchange to do so, you can buy BTC from anyone willing to sell it for real currency, and vice versa.

How useful is a currency that cannot be exchanged for something useful like rent, food, clothing?

IDK, ask Venezuelans.

The difference being NO-ONE wants the currency they have, because it's tied to a failing state, while BTC is valuable to people around the world so you can always find a buyer even if your corner of the world has issues.

Re:Yes you can

[geekoid]

I do, it's not tied to a failing state, and BTC is becoming too expensive to mine, trade and sell.

Wallets and exchanges aren't secure, and all your trade our public. There are business that specialize in tracking people down who made specific trades or purchases.

Re:Yes you can

[Anonymous Coward]

you can buy BTC from anyone willing to sell it for real currency, and vice versa.

As is the case with almost everything, bitcoin is not special in this regard.

How useful is a currency that cannot be exchanged for something useful like rent, food, clothing?

IDK, ask Venezuelans.

In Venezuela BTC a very small percentage of the population are using it as a store of value because, despite the volatility of bitcoin, it is still less problematic than their local currency and easier than investing in physical goods to store value. Of course they aren't actually using it to pay for things like rent, food and clothing because of the obvious problems of using bitcoin as a currency. Not to mention the huge amounts of money people have lost as bitcoin's value has plummeted from its recent highs.

Re:Correction: Just a correction

[geekoid]

Yes. Even the person in charge of definition at Oxford out together and argument on why it's a sandwich.

Please stop feeding into the ass hats attempt to stay relevant.

Re:Correction: Just a correction

[geekoid]

Because both have fad based value.

On Expertise

[SuperKendall]

use your PhD in economics and right a book

Pretty sure a PhD would qualify me to do more that upright an overturned book.

Though frankly with some PHD's, I'm not so sure...

correcting every other expert in the field.

Including the ones that predict the continued rise of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies? Not sure how I can single-handedly correct people arguing different sides of an issue.

Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

The first time since 2015?

So the value dropped on New Years 2015, went up on New Years in 2016 and went down again this New Years.

The first time since two times ago?

How the fuck is this news?

Re:Really?

[werepants]

How the fuck is this news?

Thank you for pointing this out. In sports reporting and politics reporting, and apparently now bitcoin reporting, people love to make oddly specific observations to suggest some sort of pattern or narrative in the random noise of outcomes. Flipping a coin 3 times and getting a tails on the 3rd time is not notable, surprising, or meaningful. Same with this "news".

... but it's not. Keep up!

[Anonymous Coward]

... but it's not. Keep up!

Re:Is there an actual practical use for blockchain

[91degrees]

But how do you make $2 billion profit from destroying Bitcoin? It's not causing Wells Fargo or Visa any serious problems. And that's assuming you can with 24 hours of control. Also, lot of disgruntled bitcoin owners would have good cause to sue for any losses, as well as potential fines in the very likely case that this is illegal.

A government could destroy it if they wanted but there's not a lot to gain, and even for a fairly large country, that's enough money to do something useful with. It's more than enough for a naval destroyer.

Re:Is there an actual practical use for blockchain

[LynnwoodRooster]

BTC is often touted as a replacement to normal bank fees and transfers. VISA makes most of their money on credit card clearance fees; Wells Fargo does a good amount as well. I'd wager either would stand to lose more than $2 billion per year if normal credit card/bank fees went away...

As far as governments go, imagine a goodly chunk of the US (or German, or Japanese) economy becomes dependent upon blockchain. For a mere $2 billion investment, Iran/North Korea/SPECTRE could destabilize an entire country's economy, potentially affecting the entire world, and make any moves it chooses to make. That's a LOT more power for the dollar than getting a destroyer or two.

tax selling

[Anonymous Coward]

People owe taxes. Some will sell bitcoins to pay those taxes. bitcoin drops. Tax selling is common around tax season, even in the stock market. Dow theory says buy the dip. I do great in the stock market.

Re:Is there an actual practical use for blockchain

[91degrees]

Bitcoin doesn't have a hope of competing with Visa though. Visa is way faster and way cheaper, and a lot more reliable.

The $2 billion is current estimates. By the time governments become dependent on blockchain, they'll be running a good chunk of the mining operation, and the cost will be higher.

your lie still isnt true in 2018

[Anonymous Coward]

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/0...

Chinese investors have also taken to unregulated peer-to-peer exchanges, where sellers and buyers of bitcoin negotiate prices on a one-on-one basis.
There were just four such platforms in October after the crackdown, but the number had risen to 21 by the end of November, according to the state-run National Committee of Experts on Internet Financial Security Technology. The platforms include two formed by Huobi and OKCoin, China's two biggest bitcoin exchanges before the crackdown.

What! the government knows about them but they more than quintupled in number and are all A OK.

Stop peddling your lies.