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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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