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More Wall Street Pundits Caution Against Investing In Bitcoins (cnbc.com)
Peter Boockvar is the Chief Investment Officer of Bleakley Financial Group, a $3.5B wealth management firm -- and he predicts "an epic crash will hit the cryptocurrency market," according to CNBC. "He isn't sure if it'll come to a grinding halt or be a slow and steady drop -- but he says it's coming."
"When something goes parabolic like this has, it typically ends up to where that parabola began," he said on CNBC's "Futures Now." Boockvar, a CNBC contributor, contends bitcoin is in danger of dropping 90 percent from current levels. He calls it a classic bubble. "I wouldn't be surprised if over the next year it's down to $1,000 to $3,000," he added. That's where bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency player, was trading less than 12 months ago. Friday afternoon it was trading above $11,000.
Meanwhile, today the International Business Times chronicled the predictions of tech billionaire Mark Cuban. In June of last year as bitcoin was climbing toward the $3,000 threshold, Cuban cautioned potential investors about jumping in on the bandwagon... "[C]rypto is like gold. More religion than asset. Except of course gold makes nice jewelry." He told his followers at the time that he wasn't questioning the value of Bitcoin but was questioning the "valuation" and said , "I think it's in a bubble. I just don't know when or how much it corrects." Cuban suggested that when everyone is "bragging about how easy they are making [money]," that indicates there is a bubble happening...
Still, the Dallas Mavericks owner was open to the idea of using cryptocurrencies as a volatile investment vehicle. "If you're a true adventurer and you really want to throw the Hail Mary, you might take 10 percent and put it in Bitcoin or Ethereum," he said. Cuban also cautioned, "If you do that, you've got to pretend you've already lost your money"... Showing just have far Cuban has come on bitcoin and cryptocurrency, he announced earlier this week that his Dallas Mavericks will accept bitcoin and Ethereum as a method to pay for tickets starting next season. Even if the tech investor doesn't fully believe in cryptocurrency, he's clearly willing to try to profit off it...
Meanwhile, today the International Business Times chronicled the predictions of tech billionaire Mark Cuban. In June of last year as bitcoin was climbing toward the $3,000 threshold, Cuban cautioned potential investors about jumping in on the bandwagon... "[C]rypto is like gold. More religion than asset. Except of course gold makes nice jewelry." He told his followers at the time that he wasn't questioning the value of Bitcoin but was questioning the "valuation" and said , "I think it's in a bubble. I just don't know when or how much it corrects." Cuban suggested that when everyone is "bragging about how easy they are making [money]," that indicates there is a bubble happening...
Still, the Dallas Mavericks owner was open to the idea of using cryptocurrencies as a volatile investment vehicle. "If you're a true adventurer and you really want to throw the Hail Mary, you might take 10 percent and put it in Bitcoin or Ethereum," he said. Cuban also cautioned, "If you do that, you've got to pretend you've already lost your money"... Showing just have far Cuban has come on bitcoin and cryptocurrency, he announced earlier this week that his Dallas Mavericks will accept bitcoin and Ethereum as a method to pay for tickets starting next season. Even if the tech investor doesn't fully believe in cryptocurrency, he's clearly willing to try to profit off it...
...they may be sane. They abide by buy low sell high. Bitcoin may never be stable enough to ever be a good idea.
[QUOTE]Even if the tech investor doesn't fully believe in cryptocurrency, he's clearly willing to try to profit off it[/QUOTE]
He is taking a risk by accepting it as a form of payment.
of pundit.
if that isn't the pot calling the kettle black I am not sure what is. current crop of crypto is nearly 100% pure speculation and gambling.
Except of course gold makes nice jewelry.
And gold also has uses in electronics, medicine, and aerospace applications.
Pure FUD on your part. All those mentioned work for investment type firms, they do not lose by crypto's success, they will invest in whatever makes sense at the time, property, shares, currency, gold or hell even polished turds if it had a return. So should it make sense I am sure they will happily add cryptos to that, but first that would require some stability in the crypto market of which their is currently none.
News at 11
If I remember a recent Ars Technica article correctly, bitcoin has had 4 exponential spikes in prices similar to the current one. After each there was about a 75% drop in price. The last one was in 2014, up to $1,100, then down to $250-300 and staying there for years until the current spike to $19,000 occurred.
But now we have a new variable. Those past spikes were when bitcoin owners were largely geek speculators who were also true believers in bitcoin. This current spike coincided with wall street speculators getting involved and soon followed by speculators from the general public. These "newcomers" may not be as forgiving as the preceding "true believers".
That said, don't conflate blockchain and bitcoin. Blockchain technology is likely to be part of our future. Bitcoin is just one user of blockchain technology, it may or may not be part of our future. "Not" is a serious possibility given that bitcoin has deviated from its design and its assumptions about its blockchain security are no longer valid. Its security required a global distributed community of miners who are regular individuals using their own computers and this has not been true for years. Bitcoin is plausibly vulnerable to mining cartels and government intervention due to the current state of affairs where we have a relatively small number of miners using expensive specialized ASIC hardware that is geographically located in a single country and reliant upon inexpensive government supplied electricity. Are cartels or the government likely to subvert the bitcoin blockchain? Probably not, but it remains plausible, and bitcoin security is based on the assumption that such things are not even remotely plausible.
Bitcoin is entirely replaceable by a another coin with better security, new features and/or better performance. Before anyone makes a "network effect" argument, keep in mind that a network effect needs high switching costs to be effective. There is little to no switching cost to move from bitcoin to a different coin.
Plenty of stability. Crypto on the long run only goes UP.
Could you short them in the usual way, betting that the price will drop against a current owner?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Sadly, they are driving up the cost of high-end video cards...
The valuation of bitcoin surged on the assumption that it will become a major currency. However, it's hard to see how bitcoin is going to be good for much of anything. Transactions are too expensive and too slow for it to become a regular currency. Early on, people believed it was an anonymous form of payment - but in fact every transaction is public. It was also supposed to be a democratic currency, but that promise has failed as well because now a few big players hold most of the bitcoins. By all reports, it wastes a tremendous amount of electricity and contributes to global warming.
To quote one economist, "It's not a currency until people are paid with it." I don't see it ever getting there, especially with governments against it. And if it isn't destined to become a currency, then it it is destined to crash, maybe even disappear.
The thing is, are these people actually giving their opinion or are they trying to sway bitcoin away because it is not in their best interest?
I certainly cannot trust any of these people, they have shown themselves repeatedly to by amoral liars and even criminals.
Take their opinion with a very gracious pinch of salt
Any tech created by the alt coins can always be adopted by Bitcoin. As we see happening now.
Even on the small drops and increases, a person can make 50 bucks here and there. If your out $1000 it isnt the end of the world and watching the numbers and trying to make that 50 is a lot of fun.
"When something goes parabolic like this has, it typically ends up to where that parabola began."
Except the housing market. House prices will never drop, and there is absolutely nothing wrong about that.
Any tech created by the alt coins can always be adopted by Bitcoin. As we see happening now.
Except when inertia, politics and greed stop it from happening. You think those folks with the huge ASIC mining farms are going to support switching to a GPU friendly algorithm?
1. If the total supply of bitcoin remained the same the price would increase because fiat is inflationary. Although the amount of bitcoin in circulation increases over time the total supply decreases as wallets are lost.
2. The utility of bitcoin increases every time someone new obtains some and every time a business agrees to accept it as payment - 2017 saw an explosion in both of these. The utility of bitcoin will increase farther with improvements to the underlying technology - ie. lightning network.
3. Anyone who looks at the US Debt Clock should realize pretty quickly that fiat isn't something to hold long term - there's nothing more liquid than cryptocurrency.
Bright future ahead, boys - the average man will understand soon enough.
It doesn't really matter what ASIC mining farms want if the POW algo is changed....
Bitcoin was never a serious contender for replacing the dollar. What we need is a cryptocurrency that can maintain a very large volume of transactions. There's a problem with the size of the blockchain. We need the blockchain to maintain trust, but it quickly becomes a serious impediment to new comers. Further, we need a way to reward processors of transactions even after the currency becomes stable and there's no need for new coins.
I feel their investors would be upset if crypto tanks 90% next month and they are told "don't worry, in the long run it always goes UP".
Can you create an algorithm that is sufficiently hard so that coins don't flood the market but sufficiently energy efficient that we don't roast ourselves to death from greenhouse gasses mining computer money? I am opposed to crypto from a purely environmental standpoint, I think there are better things humanity could be spending its limited resources on than a bunch of calculations that prove you did a bunch of calculations.
Monstar L
He's not pricing tickets in BTC, or holding BTC. He's accepting it as a payment METHOD just like Paypal or Visa; it's converted to dollars either shortly after he gets it, or before he even gets it, allowing the payment provider to take the risk of a drop in the hours it takes to convert it.
Bitcoin's high-cost high-latency transactions make it a lot less useful as a currency than everyone hopes. Without some sort of centralized credit agency backing it to amortize those transactions, it'll never be able to take off for e.g. buying a cup of coffee.
It seems obvious the bubble will burst and I'd question how many more bubbles it'll be able to recover from without major changes.
If your out $1000 it isnt the end of the world and watching the numbers and trying to make that 50 is a lot of fun.
Dunno about you all, but I'm guessing this contribution comes to us from a teenager with rich parents.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
anyone that believes that bullshit deserves to lose everything they have
plenty of people cleaning toilets who believed that about the stock market and the housing market and the tulip market and just about any other market you care to name. nothing only goes up, especially when you have to take into account opportunity cost, ROI etc.
It actually does. The Bitcoin network (and all secure distributed networks) depend upon consensus, whomever controls 51% of the mining effort controls the transactions and in turn dictates how things happen. The bigger issue is the politics-heavy update side of the actual protocols which don't change the minting process at all. The new lightning network they've been trying to roll out has some pretty serious security flaws nobody seems to be discussing but to say they don't want to use it (since a hint of insecurity could itself spoil the fun, especially when it's already been technically implemented and it's just that nobody is using it.)
You assume that no solution will come about to this problem. There is a cost to innovation. In order to get there you have to start from somewhere and that starting point may not be as clean and efficient as whats coming. That doesn't mean the cost ultimately isn't worth it. Bitcoin didn't start off anonymous. It started off with users in control. That has pseudo anonymous properties. Ultimately people didn't understand it wasn't anonymous and then started acting like everything is a lie. No, you just didn't understand it. Today we have genuinely anonymous crypto currencies coming into existence. Zen Cash and ZCash are primarily what I'd call truly anonymous. The others are more or less just making it difficult to untangle. As time moves on we'll see the problem of scaling solved. That might be phase 3. Right now we are in phase 2. Maybe phase 4 will by a solution to the environmental. Ultimately removing government and third parties from controlling our transactions is a huge advancement that will have significant positive ramifications for all of society. It's hard for many to understand why this is so important. However I can explain why Bitcoin and whats followed alone has serious value. All current digital payment methods like credit cards, wire transfers, PayPal, etc have significant financial costs to them. Everything you buy with a credit card or other digital payment option increases the prices by 3%+. I'm not even going to pretend to know what government created physical currencies result in added costs to goods. Undoubtedly if we eliminated manufacturing physical currencies and replaced it with a cheap digital solution prices would fall by far more than 3%. We might see a 10% reduction in prices indirectly because now the tax payer isn't paying for the creation and maintenance of a currency that everything is based on.
... "You may think that the cryptocurrency boom has already peaked. You may think you’re too late. But consider this
I recently came back from a blockchain conference in New York. One of the most remarkable comments made was that the “big money” (hedge funds and large money managers) isn’t really in the cryptocurrency market yet.
The total cryptocurrency market sits at around $500 billion. But the institutional funds need the market to hit $1 trillion before they can start investing heavily. And when that happens most likely sometime this year the crypto market will really take off.
And the institutional money will first put their dollars to work in the cryptocurrencies that have the largest market capitalizations. That means investors should be looking closely at bitcoin, Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, and Bitcoin Cash, to start.
There will certainly be some pullbacks and high volatility along the way, like we’re seeing today. But I’m here to tell you now’s the time to get in."
Can you create an algorithm that is sufficiently hard so that coins don't flood the market but sufficiently energy efficient that we don't roast ourselves to death from greenhouse gasses mining computer money? I am opposed to crypto from a purely environmental standpoint, I think there are better things humanity could be spending its limited resources on than a bunch of calculations that prove you did a bunch of calculations.
It's already here and has been around for years. Take a look at Peercoin
FWIW, tulip bulbs -- which have some utility -- seem to be selling for about $200 USD per bushel. There are a LOT of tulip bulbs in a bushel (35 liters). AFAICS, Bitcoin has less utility than tulips and you can probably put millions of Bitcoin into a bushel basket. On that basis, I expect the post mania price of Bitcoin to be pretty low.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
People keep saying blockchain is the future... and I just don't get it. It's a way of preventing forking, so great to prevent double-spending. But, and maybe this is me being dense, absent (a) a lack of a central authority and (b) a need to have one and only one block of data being definitive, I don't understand why we care. Transacting in currency/preventing double spending seems to suffer from (b) but not (a), and almost everything else seems to be immune to (b), and probably (a) as well.
I figure if I keep asking, someone will give me the right metaphor, and I can finally grok why blockchain.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
I was agreeing with you there until you got to Ethereum classic - which is a (probably) dead project run by refusniks of the DAO hard fork.
With a real currency you could buy options to buy or sell in the future, eliminating the risk (or, more precisely, shifting it onto someone else who will get paid by you for taking your risk).
Does something like that exist for Bitcoins?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Apparently they either don't think so, or they think that it hasn't reached its low before the eventual rise again.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Creating and maintaining a currency is actually a profit center for most governments.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
The only problem I could see here is that the market itself will only grow based on the currency itself. There is no value added aside of the speculation that the value will rise.
That's not sustainable.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I don't know where you buy and sell your coins, but in most places the fees will make the small pump and drop useless to try to trade them, because what you could possibly earn will be less than the fees...
Only because it deprives the users is it a profit center for government. When that profit is eliminated the user gains.
"...Dallas Mavericks will accept bitcoin and Ethereum as a method to pay for tickets starting next season. Even if the tech investor doesn't fully believe in cryptocurrency, he's clearly willing to try to profit off it..."
He doesn't have to hold the currency longer than a few seconds. So, he doesn't have to "believe in it" at all.
It is called cash...
Bitcoin's proof-of-work is not the only way to implement a blockchain. Real-life applications don't want PoW (and it's an environmental disaster), but you can do interesting blockchain things without it using known identities.
...I recently came back from a blockchain conference in New York.
Shocking that a blockchain conference would fully tout the "advantages" of cryptocurrency. Truly shocking.
Missed the bandwaggon, eh Petey?
Pure FUD on your part. They lose everything by crypto's success. There's been no bigger threat to the traditional banking in history than cryptocurrencies. The importance of traditional bankers if inversely proportional to the success of cryptos.
The crypto space—regardless of what happens to it in the long term—is brim full of intentional Ponzi schemes and pump and dump operations on a scale that would otherwise be difficult to access elsewhere. Operations like Bitconnect collect over a billion dollars from poor sods that don’t know any better and just vanish into the night. Goodbye decades of savings. While far from impossible, it would be very difficult for an illiterate investor to destroy his capital this quickly with the exchange traded instruments.
And you can never lose with real estate. /sarcasm
Showing just have far Cuban has come on bitcoin and cryptocurrency, he announced earlier this week that his Dallas Mavericks will accept bitcoin and Ethereum as a method to pay for tickets starting next season. Even if the tech investor doesn't fully believe in cryptocurrency, he's clearly willing to try to profit off it...
Many/most retailers that previously accepted Bitcoin have walked away from the cryptocurrency because the valuation is too erratic - there is a fair to better chance any bitcoins accepted today as payment for goods and services will go down in value before the retailer can convert them to US currency tomorrow, costing retailers rather than profiting them. .
Ken
The network effect is easy, first, you can't accept 100 coins (not practical) and second, BTC is listed as a pair for almost all other crypto tokens and coins. There are better designed bills but sorry, I will keep my dollars anyway.
That's just it. You can't always convert it right away. The transaction fees means you only want to do conversions when you have $2000 or so to convert otherwise a business is losing money.
Remember there are two fees for a business to deal with in accepting Bitcoin. The first transaction fee which gets covered by the payer most of the time. The second is converting it back to cash. With high fees and long transaction times . The day in and day voltiity is much much to high.
You want to keep your feed at 1 to 2%
That is how you maximize revenue. Bit in is too unstable to use as a transaction medium. The majority of current trading is speculator's looking for a quick buck.
Going around and saying you should invest, instead of gamble is meaningless.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
I wouldn't go anywhere near that! They make all these claims, but what is my recourse if they are full of shit? Sue? Who? Where? And it'll probably cost more to hunt them down - if I could - than it's worth.
Invest in Gold plated bullets, dual use, for when Global Markets crash
https://www.zerohedge.com/news...
Yeah. Gold is "like a religion" they say. Hah!
Life is not for the lazy.
The Bitcoin network (and all secure distributed networks) depend upon consensus, whomever controls 51% of the mining effort controls the transactions and in turn dictates how things happen.
I would still think they would consider POS or a lower-cost mining algorithm. They likely already have a large stake, and more efficient mining = less cost of electricity = more profit per coin mined.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
One can do things like the Lightning Network, but I would probably say that another cryptocurrency may be better for making transactions, if only due to the overhead of the Bitcoin blockchain, having to pay a "tip" so your transactions are processed reasonably, and the fact that Bitcoin's value is being hit hard by speculators.
What would be ideal would be a currency that has less overhead, perhaps a way of obscuring of who did what in its blockchain for privacy's sake. That way, if someone bought an item today, 20-30 years from now, they wouldn't having to defend themselves for that purpose, especially if statute of limitations laws get repealed.
Let Bitcoin be where people play with the tulips, while "real work" (i.e. payments and exchanges) get done in another currency that is more stable.
If you have any amount (and many do) of offline Satoshi the best technique is to punch your key / words into a metal plate.
This will be good for as long as the gold. Or hell, punch it into gold.
Cryptocurrency may be here to stay but not Bitcoin. Btc is an interesting first academic quality effort from which we have already learned so much about how NOT to design a cryptocurrency.
The coiner types always so sound cultishly desperate when talking about Bitcoin's value and future.
Do not fall in love with your investments and speculations. Keep a cool and rational head on your shoulders or you'll be the one losing everything to someone more mercenary than you.
If you want to get in on the cryptocurrency mining scene, you need a good motherboard that allows for multiple GPUs: ASRock H110 Pro BTC+, ASUS B250, Biostar TB350-BTC, and GIGABYTE GA-H110-D3A.
The sad thing about bitcoin is there's too many programmers that see a shiny coin and then don't realize that coin in on the Titanic. The electricity required to mine bitcoin is fucking stupid and you'll probably never break even. Ignoring the huge ecological and economic impact of wasting so much electricity on mining bitcoins, it's a den of illegal activity and money laundering. Then there's all these people claiming to be "cryptocurrency experts". Well go fuck yourself. The world doesn't need another form of currency. What the world needs is more wisdom, intelligence, understanding and compassion. There are several articles that point out at the current rate, mining bitcoins will need all the electricity generated in the US in like 2025. How the fuck does that make any sense to a programmer? What fucking drug are you taking and please stop it!
That said, don't conflate blockchain and bitcoin. Blockchain technology is likely to be part of our future. Bitcoin is just one user of blockchain technology, it may or may not be part of our future. "Not" is a serious possibility given that bitcoin has deviated from its design and its assumptions about its blockchain security are no longer valid. Its security required a global distributed community of miners who are regular individuals using their own computers and this has not been true for years. Bitcoin is plausibly vulnerable to mining cartels and government intervention due to the current state of affairs where we have a relatively small number of miners using expensive specialized ASIC hardware that is geographically located in a single country and reliant upon inexpensive government supplied electricity. Are cartels or the government likely to subvert the bitcoin blockchain? Probably not, but it remains plausible, and bitcoin security is based on the assumption that such things are not even remotely plausible. Bitcoin is entirely replaceable by a another coin with better security, new features and/or better performance. Before anyone makes a "network effect" argument, keep in mind that a network effect needs high switching costs to be effective. There is little to no switching cost to move from bitcoin to a different coin.
Why will blockchain be a part of the future? The future is very difficult to predict with regards to technology. Blockchain is essentially a football stadium filled with accountants keeping ledger books. Someone goes up to a microphone and announces a transaction, everyone records the transaction in the ledger (if the transaction checks out). And everyone's ledger book essentially must hold all the transactions which have ever happened.
This is far too much redundancy for most applications, and the data starts to get unmanageable after a relatively short number of transactions (compared to current systems). It's as if everyone had a Usenet server and stored all the posts back to the start of Usenet. For a distributed system where nobody trusts each other, maybe it is a useful (but inefficient) solution. But we live in a world where companies and financial institutions have credit ratings & escrow accounts. Normal databases are very good at tracking packages, money, inventory, and other things that need to be tracked. Blockchain doesn't seem to bring any value to most systems already in place.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
The number of bitcoins issues weekly are fixed for that week, regardless of how many miners there are or how much power is in the system. The hardware costs they incur are from competing with eachother.
Actually can someone much wiser than me quickly guesstimate how much it would cost to own 51% of Bitcoin mining, and, is the cost less than it would be worth to hijack all the current coins? Could it eventually be a no brainer to attempt such an attack? ie: spend millions to make billions?
They may be sane and indeed correct but I have trouble trusting financial advice from someone who does not know the difference between a parabola or an exponential. I expect the problem comes from the habitual use of too much hyperbola.
I'm sure the people who traded property deeds for single bulbs are very impressed by your reminder that their post-crash bulbs would "still have utility value"
Don't be pedantic about "crashed to nothing". Trading a post-pop bulb for a chicken egg means fuckall, bringing up "utility" is relevant to fuckall. Crypto will bubble/pop with or without utility.
Do we even need to? Cryptocurrency has proven itself pretty useless when it comes to both storing wealth and making day to day transactions.
because wallets can be lost/stolen/hacked.
That's why they created multisignature. You need cooperation between multiple people to perform an transaction.
You can also make a paper wallet, cut it into pieces and give each piece to a different person.
I've seen some "proof of burn" ideas ,but I'm not sure how else to replace PoW. Any other papers you can show me. Also, what can I do on a blockchain I cannot do without one, other than preventing double spending without a central authority?
Your ad here. Ask me how!
It's arguable that those coins already exist but for whatever reason (first mover advantage, niche exchanges) the masses haven't caught on. I'm on board with the semi-centralized (currently) in Stellar/Ripple, with a strong interest in RaiBlocks once they get onto more exchanges and Cardano has me a little excited on the purely speculation front (let's see if they can deliver). Anyway, I've often echoed your sentiments: The future may be cryptocurrency, but bitcoin will not be it.
LOL, you're all idiots. People are profiting on this beyond your imagination. You're puppets.
Yup.
Ripple (XRP) works like this in that it's (currently) a centralized ledger. All coins are pre-mined and most nodes are owned by Ripple, Inc but with plans to retire their nodes as independent nodes come online. This allows super fast transaction throughput (thousands per second vs. bitcoins.. uh.. we'll get around to it eventually) and stupid low transaction fees. Such is the price of rejecting purity over practicality. Someone tossed around several billion XRP the other day with a whopping fee of less than a penny. And it happened in seconds. This, to me, shows great promise of what crypto can be if you get past all the idiot crypto anarchists/liberbittards. Banks like to make money. If XRP makes them money, then that's where I want to be.
Stellar (XLM), by contrast, is designed very similarly to XRP with similar transaction speeds and costs and is trying to position itself as an everyday currency for the masses. Also semi-decentralized, but more "democratic" for whatever that's worth.
Disclaimer: I HODL both and am greatly hopeful that if crypto is going to go legit vs. the current pump and dump scamcoin, it'll be similar to one of these. XRB is still tied up on some really fucking dodgy exchanges, ADA is still in development (although I like what they're trying to do, so I have some, as well).
Now we just need a 3rd gen privacy coin that offers fast transactions and low fees.
They AREN'T traditional banking retard, they are investment firms. learn the fucking difference.
It's time for you to buy some futures, then.
..and, after the BC bubble is over, so will Bitcoin be.
Organization? You must be joking..
People keep saying blockchain is the future... and I just don't get it. It's a way of preventing forking, so great to prevent double-spending. But, and maybe this is me being dense, absent (a) a lack of a central authority and (b) a need to have one and only one block of data being definitive, I don't understand why we care. Transacting in currency/preventing double spending seems to suffer from (b) but not (a), and almost everything else seems to be immune to (b), and probably (a) as well. I figure if I keep asking, someone will give me the right metaphor, and I can finally grok why blockchain.
A lack of central authority means redundancy of data, avoiding a single point of failure. To borrow from Torvalds who had borrowed form someone earlier: Don't backup data, upload their important data to the internet and let the rest of the world mirror it. It also allows peer-to-peer transactions, middlemen not necessarily necessary.
One definitive block defining ownership of a thing, its not just about coins, its about anything that can be owned. Note that one definitive block avoids the problem of different databases of different authorities/agencies being out of sync. And the problem of being able to access the authority/agency's data, data loss, denial of service, etc.
So blockchains allow owned things to be be transfered from one owner to the next, without middlemen, with the current owner always defined and discoverable.
Actually can someone much wiser than me quickly guesstimate how much it would cost to own 51% of Bitcoin mining, and, is the cost less than it would be worth to hijack all the current coins? Could it eventually be a no brainer to attempt such an attack? ie: spend millions to make billions?
I guess costs would be sending armed police and technicians to the mining farms. 70% of the mining hashrate is physically located in China.
Also the big farms and collocation facilities are owned by a small number of people. Many private individuals in the US and EU collocate in these same facilities. They buy from the manufacture and have it delivered to the mining collocation facility. They get to configure their miner from the US/EU but they do not have physical access or control. If the ASIC manufacturers and mining farms create a cartel and reconfigure all the miners no one other than the Chinese government could do much about it. What's the cost of a cartel, dinner and drinks for the players? Whatever it costs to pressure the farms, assuming they don't already own the farms.
Bitcoin has not caught on with the masses yet either. :-)
The Bitcoin mining network consumes something like 1.8 GW of electricity on average, so enough computers to fully load a ~901MW power plant. At scale you're likely looking at about $1.25 per W so about 1.1 billion dollars worth of hardware dedicated to the task. The big issue is that there aren't actually that many people in the 51%, one guy in Russia actually has a coal fired power plant dedicated to nothing but his mining operations.
I'll not invest in BTC till OPEC sells Oil in it
Casteism