Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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?
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!