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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.
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
That should tell you it is bogus. Nothing should rise 1300 pct in one year.
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.
aka "if you don't know a sucker to take your fall, you're someone else's".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
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"?
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.
I stole this Sig
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.
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.
I stole this Sig
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.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
There is no US presidential election in 2018.
Take off every 'sig' !!
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!
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,
I stole this Sig
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.
#DeleteFacebook
It's like people in 1990 who saw AOL and just shrug "Internet is a fad and will die soon".
#DeleteFacebook
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.
Bitcoins price will be 25000 by feb 1 , or i'll eat my dick... J.M
Shall I pass the mustard?
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.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
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.
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.
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.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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?
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
Oh my god, you're sick. Clearly this calls for ketchup.
#DeleteFacebook
Oh brother. And tomorrow will be the first January 2nd it fell in in value since 2015.
His opinion is clearly stated at the end of his post:
If he thought it was all going to crash down he would have sold all of it.
#DeleteFacebook
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.
...and if you don't pay a big enough transaction fee, your ballot may only be processed after the election.
Sounds like a plan.
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%...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
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!
down 1 out of 4 years on a single day.. better write a story.
Well based on the recent story of the Blockchain Tea company, maybe if they change the name to blockchain coin it will soar again....
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
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.
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?
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
But is it a sandwich??
slashdot: A failed experiment.
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...)
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.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
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.
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.
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.
How would you achieve anonymity with that?
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
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.
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.
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.
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".
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?
Your ad here. Ask me how!
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.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
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!
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
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"
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
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.
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.
No need for either; with his cranium so firmly rectally implanted, he's already shown he has the flexibility needed for his promised meal...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
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?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
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.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
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.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
So known, trusted entities who will do the ledger maintenance for us. Isn't that what a bank does?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
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.
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Because both have fad based value.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
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.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
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".
That's only a minor detail.
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.
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...
Let me just reiterate, too. Apparently, nobody has been paying attention. You proved this to me.