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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
My Zimbabwe currency holdings did better than that in 2007, over 7,000%. increase. wh0h00
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.
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.
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.
Put your chart to "all data" it sure starts to look a lot like a dotcom bubble chart!
https://bitcoincharts.com/charts/bitstampUSD#tgSzm1g10zm2g25
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.
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' !!
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.
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.
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?
3D printing, AI, IoT, gig economy. Millenials!
Mostly random stuff.
Oh my god, you're sick. Clearly this calls for ketchup.
#DeleteFacebook
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?
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
$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).
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!