This is not correct. First of all, all devices have a life cycle. They wear out, they break, the screen cracks from a fall... with Apple's astronomical customer retention numbers pretty much everyone who owns an Apple device is going to replace it with a new Apple device. If you consider the life cycle extending to around 4 years (up from 2 years). Apple fully expected the life cycle to increase and has planned for it meticulously. The trade-in program, the frequent iOS upgrades, and the longer iOS sustain on older devices are a direct response to the phenomena.
The second problem with your assertion is that I think something like 40% of Apple device buyers are newcomers.
Apple is sitting in a very sweet spot.
p.s. Android vendors are completely screwed from the lengthening device life cycles. Every single android vendor depends on their customers buying a new device on a 2-year cycle or less, so as consumers hold onto their devices longer the Android vendors lose serious sales momentum and then when the customer replaces the device Android vendors lose market share to Apple. Android vendors have not planned for the lengthening cycle and frankly they are stuck between a rock and a hard place because they will lose even MORE sales if they keep Android more up-to-date on their devices.
Your reasoning is just plain incorrect. Obsolescence on Android is far worse than it is on iOS. With Android you might see one, maybe two OS upgrades before the vendor stops supporting the device. App support is even worse... every device has device-specific quirks which many app vendors on Android have NEVER bothered fix.
Developer support on iOS is far better, for far longer. Apple supports their devices far better, and for far longer.
I have an ipad 1, and an ipad 2 (and many other devices). The ipad 1 is too old, period. The cpu is too slow and it only has 256MB of ram. I still see regular developer app updates for my ipad 1 but it just can't run all the apps out there due to the tiny amount of ram it has. It can barely load some web pages. It isn't the OS's fault. The OS version has nothing whatsoever to do with it (other than developers keying off the OS version when making assumptions about RAM use). Even my second-generation ipod touch still runs Pandora, which is all it is really good for with its tiny amount of ram and slow cpu.
And frankly, Apple supported my ipad 1 for far longer than any Android vendor supported my Android devices from that era. My ipad 1 is still usable. My Android devices from that era are not. They are all dead or worthless.
My ipad 2 with 512MB of ram only has trouble with the more bloated games, and its plenty fast enough for me. It is still my go-to device when I travel. If I can only bring one thing (other than my phone), it's the ipad-2 and not the chromebook and not the nexus-7.
More importantly, Apple devices are under Apple's control, not other vendors. In particular not the phone vendors. I've had to remove most of the apps from both my android phone and my nexus 7 because so many of them access *all* my personal data and accounts these days. The telcos install all sorts of crap onto Android phones that I don't want and can't remove.
On Apple you don't have to worry about that. The App has no control over what resources it's allowed to access, the user does. My next phone is going to be an iphone-6 (my current phone is a Motorola Razr M which is great except I can't run any major apps on it any more due to security issues). And, no, running an android app that forces permissions off doesn't work either... that crashes the target app more often than not (when it works at all).
So if your complaint is that Apple is not supporting their customers, it falls flat on its face. Apple is doing a far better job than anyone else.
I don't understand why you are trying to turn a pad into a laptop. Pads aren't laptops. You want to run Debian on something close? Buy a Chromebook that you can load Debian onto, like the Acer c720 or c720p.
Yes, but there's no point doing that. You might as well just get a normal desktop at that point. Or a laptop if you want the portability. Which is part of Microsoft's problem. The Surface Pro is competing against *everything* which means it can get beaten out by anything.
Case in point. The thing weighs 2 lbs (the Surface Pro 2). The ipad air weighs 1 lb.
The real joke here is that the inventory issue was explained in the conference call and anyone who bothered to read the actual source knows that ipad sales were actually down only 3% or so, and roughly flat across two months. The whole tablet space is flattening out but all that means is that Apple will start pulling more market share from Android just as it has been doing with the iphone... in the markets that matter that is. This is more junk like the 'world wide market share' crap that's proven to be such a bad predictor of Apple's business the last year.
Apple is "getting its clock cleaned by Android"? Only if you've had your head stuffed down a rabbit hole for the last 5 years. Helps those of us who actually spend a few minutes doing real research, I suppose, but I'm just flabbergasted at how little posters like you seem to know about Apple's business when you can literally find out with only a few keystrokes in a browser.
No we don't. Hybrid drives are stupid. The added software complexity alone makes them a non-starter for anyone who wants reliability. The disparate failure modes make it a non-starter. The SSD portion of the hybrid drive is way, WAY too small to be useful.
If you care enough to want the performance benefit you either go with a pure SSD (which is what most people do these days), or you have a separate discrete SSD for booting, performace-oriented data, your swap store, and your HDD caching software.
MLPs can be a holy mess if you do partial sales. So basically if you want to own a MLP, either buy and hold forever (pass it on to your kids in your estate), or when you do want to sell you sell the whole thing.
Pretty big tax hit if you've held a MLP a long time and sell since you will owe taxes on all the distributions you received from it over the years (if in a taxable account). If in a retirement account you need to be careful of any positive UBTI (unrelated business taxable income) on the K-1. And there may be multi-state filing requirements as well (usually not an issue for most people as long as the apportioned amount for the other states is less than $1000).
If you still want exposure to the space but don't want to deal with the MLPs, then look at the GPs (the general partners). e.g. KMI, OKE, LNCO, and so forth. Those are C-corps but tend to run up and down along with their MLP partners.
AppleTV had over $1B in revenue last year. It might not be a big segment of the market yet, but it isn't a small niche either and its growing like crazy. Plus the ongoing revenue from the product has insanely high margins.
I had no choice but to deinstall it on all of my Android devices. The old version no longer works and the new one wants permission to access pretty much everything I own... all my contacts, all my accounts, location, phone numbers, make phone calls and texts, god knows what else. Everything.
It's insane. I will not give Facebook access to all of that stuff. They can go stuff it. Nor will I give third party sites FB access for validation since that also means they can snarf my friends list.
I'm still able to run the FB app on IOS because that at least allows me to deny FB permission the access. Android though is out of the question.
That is, unfortunately, a very typical story. Buying during a fall thinking you are getting a good deal because the price was once higher is probably responsible for as many losses as those who buy at market tops and ride their 'investments' down.
It's basically due to the investor either not being able to come up with a reasonable approximation of intrinsic value with which to judge whether valuation is a buying or selling opportunity, or simply running on base emotion thinking that because the commodity was once at a higher price that it must therefore return to that higher price if only one waits long enough.
In the case of BTC, people come up with all sorts of crazy valuations (like '$500,000 per BTC') based on grade-school thinking and onto bandwagons of other's opinions thinking that it must be right because so many people believe it is right. So right that they can't lose even when value is falling through the floor. A lot of these people wind up eventually putting their entire life savings at risk, even if they didn't intend to originally. You see that money and potential profit and lose all semblance of reason. But in the end all they accomplish is to hand their money over to the other, smarter people.
It's not even necessarily an issue of greed... it's a problem of being driven by sentiment or specious arguments... depending on other people's opinions to form the basis for your own instead of generating your own opinion from basic principles (and not fooling yourself or pulling your own punches). Easy fodder for momentum-driven trading.
Consider for the moment that there is a buyer for every sale on an exchange. Who's doing the buying when the market is clearly going down?
Read more carefully. There's a big difference between accepting Bitcoin and pricing something in Bitcoin. Square market is pricing everything in dollars (because, really, no merchant in their right mind would ever price anything in actual BTC unless they were intentionally trying to fleece you).
It's a near meaningless gesture which puts the entire burden and risk on the consumer holding the BTC, who is not only eating the overhead from the transaction and the exchange spread, but is also creating a coincident sale on the exchange at market and is likely causing the whole BTC market to drop.
If you want to know how much it's costing you, consider that bitcoin has lost over half of its value over the last 4 months. Now you can make up all the reasons you like for why it is dropping, but my bet is that people are draining their BTC on goods and creating a field day for short speculators on the exchanges.
I would love to know as well. And also, I wonder if you are recording those purchases since you have to declare each one on your tax return as a capital gain or loss.
Your argument is a bit absurd considering bitcoin's volatility, let alone the grade-school economics. Big words might be taken more seriously if not for the clear insanity behind the comment.
You honestly think you are being capital-efficient by using stored BTC as the basis for your working funds? I can't imagine how you plan your finances for the year.
"So what? BTC is a medium of payment. The businesses accepting BTC as payment are largely converting it into their preferred currency, so the volatility isn't very important."
Really. Why don't you name a few? From where I stand no real business is keeping balances in BTC. All their prices are in USD and their payment processor (such as coinbase) is paying them in USD.
You realize how dumb your statement is? You think any business is going to forgo double-digit profits or accept double-digit losses by quoting a stable price in BTC? Good luck with that concept!
You are conveniently forgetting the conversion to and from USD also involves transaction fees. Not only that, but you also have to trust the trading institution that is holding your dollar balance to not abscond with your dollars, otherwise you have to ALSO transfer your dollars into and out of the institution immediately.
So we are now talking about three transaction fees at a minimum, and five transactions if you don't trust the institution doing the dollar conversion. Plus someone has to eat whatever change in trading value occurs during the period where the transaction is being stored in BTC.
This immediately causes numerous problems, not the least of which being that the trade value of BTC is no longer deflationary if nobody doing real commerce is holding a balance in BTC. In addition to the fact that it won't be deflationary anyway because there can be any number of crypto-currencies in existence.
We are considering the question of volatility and whether it matters. The answer is: Yes, it does matter, and for some obvious reasons.
Consider the two holders of BTC. The speculators, and those trying to use it for commerce. You need stability for commerce-users to hold a BTC balance of any significance. Without stability the only people holding BTC are the speculators. When speculators are the only game in town, instability is guaranteed.
Now consider the so-called deflationary property of BTC (which is a phantom property in my view... wishful thinking at best). What happens to the two holders of BTC if you actually get deflation? What you get is hoarding by the commerce users (i.e. it stops being used for commerce) and more speculation by the speculators. Result == even worse volatility. Hoarding can easily destroy any currency as has been proven over and over again throughout history.
And you haven't bought or used bitcoin for anything else since, right?
Fortunately I'm old enough to know just how stupid remarks like yours are. In this unverifiable world of social network postings, anyone can claim anything. It might make for good entertainment, but only a fool actually believes people like you.
"At the other end, the seller receives the amount of the purchased goods or services in the amount of USD advertised to the sellersâ(TM) customer at the time of transaction, and can fulfill their customerâ(TM)s order. In other words, the seller takes no risk on Bitcoin value fluctuation"
In otherwords, all prices are still in US Dollars and neither Square Market nor the seller assume any of the risk. Plus the Bitcoin holder gets to have fun reporting every single last sale's exchange value to the IRS, and has no protection against any fraud that might occur. Which, honestly, doesn't really further the cause.
Bitcoin holders are now learning the hard way that bitcoins are not the magical deflationary stores of value they thought they were.
Ah, you don't understand the scale. Yes, people still do trade like this (manually, that is, though with some computer support for convenience). For very large orders it's still highly effective.
Small orders you can just throw onto an exchange because it's hard to front-run a small order. Large orders... you can't do that without seriously compromising your trade.
No, you didn't read the article carefully enough (or at all). The order did in fact vanish. The HFT has bids or asks up on all the exchanges. When they see a large order fill on one exchange they front-run the order on all the others (which involves canceling the order on the other exchanges and then taking some other action) before the originators order reaches the other exchanges.
The other point here is that many of these exchanges offer special order types designed to allow HFTs to take advantage of normal investors. For example, orders which either match instantly or auto-cancel if instant execution cannot occur. And many other types beyond the standard market, limit, and split-the-difference orders.
So, yes, the potentially matching orders went poof.
Best article on HFT that I've ever read. Explains in fine detail how institutional players get fleeced by high frequency traders. Took a while to read the whole thing, but well worth the time.
One thing to note to all of us retail investors, though... our tiny orders aren't really getting fleeced, and with spreads on most stocks of only $0.01 our trading overheads are miniscule compared to 20 years ago. Standard brokerage fees trump (by several orders of magnitude) HFT losses for people like us.
No, not really. It's a waste of power and an unnecessary extra cost to throw a ton of dram into a SSD when the main system is likely going to have far more ram for caching purposes available. Remember that OCZ already tried the large-cache approach and it was a complete failure. It is far, FAR more important for the SSD to have a large enough capacitor to be able to at least flush flash meta-data on power loss, and you can't do that if you have a lot of power-hungry ram or have a lot of dirty data in that power-hungry ram that needs to be flushed.
More to the point, these large caches can't be used to buffer writes without serious data loss. They are really only useful for buffering reads. And, beyond that, nearly all operating systems use asynchronous writes and nearly all operating systems do some manner of write combining themselves, and tend to be IOPS-limited for reads anyway. So there's no point having the SSD cache a large number of writes, and no real benefit from having the SSD cache a large amount of read data either.
Write pipelining is accomplished by limited the number of tags one uses for write commands. The size of the cache available for writes is irrelevant because most OS flushes are going to fill it up nearly instantly anyway when they flush. So if you don't limit the number of tags you use for write commands, you will starve read commands no matter how small or large the SSD's cache is. Generally speaking, 4 tags (out of the 32 supported by SATA) is plenty for writes.
Larger write caches do not improve SSD write throughput at all, and generally won't improve read throughput either.
In other words, you have this insane idea that since a few people have made out like bandits from Bitcoins extreme volatility, that it is somehow this magical deflationary entity that is a better investment than any of the thousands of securities one can purchase on the regulated stock market. That, somehow, magically, is a store of value that can beat inflation and, somehow, will magically be able to beat all the other umpteen crypto currencies out there that anyone can create with a flick of a finger (literally).
You also seem to believe that bitcoin exchanges are somehow magically governed by banking and securities laws that allow people to 'invest' and 'trade' safely, and that one can be insured against theft by putting their trust in unknown third parties running piss-ant little companies who happen to be able to set up a web site and throw some glitter on it.
I will tell you what Bitcoin is. Bitcoin is worthless as a currency (too volatile and too illiquid), meaningless as a commodity (because anyone can create their own crypto currency with a flick of a finger), not even remotely deflationary except in the minds of the true believers, and unusable as any sort of store of value except by idiots who think that quoted numbers on an exchange lend it credibility and back-of-the-hand calculations that someone, somewhere has gotten filthy rich trading it (ignoring the thousands of people who have gone broke trying to do the same).
There are always a few people with crazy views. It doesn't mean the views are any less crazy just because the internet lends them a voice. You actually believe that the stock market is some kind of scam and that bitcoin is somehow magically better? The level of stupidity required to form your opinion is beyond my comprehension.
There are plenty of ways to hedge against inflation through a standard brokerage account. Literally thousands of ways to do it.
Bitcoin is not one of those ways. A whole lot of people seem to think that Bitcoin has a magical deflationary property simply because there's a limited supply of it, and that it can simply be hoarded. That's grade-school thinking at best. It's nature gives it no such property.
Not quite true. Nobody has lost any insured money in a bank failure. Up to the FDIC limit. Plenty of people have lost money due to bank failures who had more than the insured amount in their account.
Strangely enough, very few people with balances over the FDIC limit actually lost any money due to the larger bank failures which occurred in 2008 and 2009, because the U.S. government brokered agreements with other large banks to buy their assets whole in exchange for some big tax breaks. Wells Fargo's purchase of Wachovia, for example.
Wells Fargo took on almost $30B in liabilities which would normally have made the purchase impossible, but the U.S. government relaxed some laws and allowed Wells to declare those liabilities against future profits to reduce their tax bill. Essentially, the U.S. government bailed out the bank customers of Wachovia.
However, a good chunk of the bank failures since 2008 were liquidations and any customer with a balance greater than the FDIC limit will have lost the difference.
Slashdot Mirror
This is not correct. First of all, all devices have a life cycle. They wear out, they break, the screen cracks from a fall... with Apple's astronomical customer retention numbers pretty much everyone who owns an Apple device is going to replace it with a new Apple device. If you consider the life cycle extending to around 4 years (up from 2 years). Apple fully expected the life cycle to increase and has planned for it meticulously. The trade-in program, the frequent iOS upgrades, and the longer iOS sustain on older devices are a direct response to the phenomena.
The second problem with your assertion is that I think something like 40% of Apple device buyers are newcomers.
Apple is sitting in a very sweet spot.
p.s. Android vendors are completely screwed from the lengthening device life cycles. Every single android vendor depends on their customers buying a new device on a 2-year cycle or less, so as consumers hold onto their devices longer the Android vendors lose serious sales momentum and then when the customer replaces the device Android vendors lose market share to Apple. Android vendors have not planned for the lengthening cycle and frankly they are stuck between a rock and a hard place because they will lose even MORE sales if they keep Android more up-to-date on their devices.
-Matt
Your reasoning is just plain incorrect. Obsolescence on Android is far worse than it is on iOS. With Android you might see one, maybe two OS upgrades before the vendor stops supporting the device. App support is even worse... every device has device-specific quirks which many app vendors on Android have NEVER bothered fix.
Developer support on iOS is far better, for far longer. Apple supports their devices far better, and for far longer.
I have an ipad 1, and an ipad 2 (and many other devices). The ipad 1 is too old, period. The cpu is too slow and it only has 256MB of ram. I still see regular developer app updates for my ipad 1 but it just can't run all the apps out there due to the tiny amount of ram it has. It can barely load some web pages. It isn't the OS's fault. The OS version has nothing whatsoever to do with it (other than developers keying off the OS version when making assumptions about RAM use). Even my second-generation ipod touch still runs Pandora, which is all it is really good for with its tiny amount of ram and slow cpu.
And frankly, Apple supported my ipad 1 for far longer than any Android vendor supported my Android devices from that era. My ipad 1 is still usable. My Android devices from that era are not. They are all dead or worthless.
My ipad 2 with 512MB of ram only has trouble with the more bloated games, and its plenty fast enough for me. It is still my go-to device when I travel. If I can only bring one thing (other than my phone), it's the ipad-2 and not the chromebook and not the nexus-7.
More importantly, Apple devices are under Apple's control, not other vendors. In particular not the phone vendors. I've had to remove most of the apps from both my android phone and my nexus 7 because so many of them access *all* my personal data and accounts these days. The telcos install all sorts of crap onto Android phones that I don't want and can't remove.
On Apple you don't have to worry about that. The App has no control over what resources it's allowed to access, the user does. My next phone is going to be an iphone-6 (my current phone is a Motorola Razr M which is great except I can't run any major apps on it any more due to security issues). And, no, running an android app that forces permissions off doesn't work either... that crashes the target app more often than not (when it works at all).
So if your complaint is that Apple is not supporting their customers, it falls flat on its face. Apple is doing a far better job than anyone else.
-Matt
I don't understand why you are trying to turn a pad into a laptop. Pads aren't laptops. You want to run Debian on something close? Buy a Chromebook that you can load Debian onto, like the Acer c720 or c720p.
-Matt
Yes, but there's no point doing that. You might as well just get a normal desktop at that point. Or a laptop if you want the portability. Which is part of Microsoft's problem. The Surface Pro is competing against *everything* which means it can get beaten out by anything.
Case in point. The thing weighs 2 lbs (the Surface Pro 2). The ipad air weighs 1 lb.
-Matt
The real joke here is that the inventory issue was explained in the conference call and anyone who bothered to read the actual source knows that ipad sales were actually down only 3% or so, and roughly flat across two months. The whole tablet space is flattening out but all that means is that Apple will start pulling more market share from Android just as it has been doing with the iphone... in the markets that matter that is. This is more junk like the 'world wide market share' crap that's proven to be such a bad predictor of Apple's business the last year.
Apple is "getting its clock cleaned by Android"? Only if you've had your head stuffed down a rabbit hole for the last 5 years. Helps those of us who actually spend a few minutes doing real research, I suppose, but I'm just flabbergasted at how little posters like you seem to know about Apple's business when you can literally find out with only a few keystrokes in a browser.
-Matt
Sales in this quarter only dropped around 3%, and frankly it's a big NOP. The production numbers you are quoting are including inventory effects.
-Matt
No we don't. Hybrid drives are stupid. The added software complexity alone makes them a non-starter for anyone who wants reliability. The disparate failure modes make it a non-starter. The SSD portion of the hybrid drive is way, WAY too small to be useful.
If you care enough to want the performance benefit you either go with a pure SSD (which is what most people do these days), or you have a separate discrete SSD for booting, performace-oriented data, your swap store, and your HDD caching software.
-Matt
MLPs can be a holy mess if you do partial sales. So basically if you want to own a MLP, either buy and hold forever (pass it on to your kids in your estate), or when you do want to sell you sell the whole thing.
Pretty big tax hit if you've held a MLP a long time and sell since you will owe taxes on all the distributions you received from it over the years (if in a taxable account). If in a retirement account you need to be careful of any positive UBTI (unrelated business taxable income) on the K-1. And there may be multi-state filing requirements as well (usually not an issue for most people as long as the apportioned amount for the other states is less than $1000).
If you still want exposure to the space but don't want to deal with the MLPs, then look at the GPs (the general partners). e.g. KMI, OKE, LNCO, and so forth. Those are C-corps but tend to run up and down along with their MLP partners.
-Matt
The press blurb is full of nonsense. Not one real performance statistic. Not one.
-Matt
AppleTV had over $1B in revenue last year. It might not be a big segment of the market yet, but it isn't a small niche either and its growing like crazy. Plus the ongoing revenue from the product has insanely high margins.
-Matt
I had no choice but to deinstall it on all of my Android devices. The old version no longer works and the new one wants permission to access pretty much everything I own... all my contacts, all my accounts, location, phone numbers, make phone calls and texts, god knows what else. Everything.
It's insane. I will not give Facebook access to all of that stuff. They can go stuff it. Nor will I give third party sites FB access for validation since that also means they can snarf my friends list.
I'm still able to run the FB app on IOS because that at least allows me to deny FB permission the access. Android though is out of the question.
-Matt
That is, unfortunately, a very typical story. Buying during a fall thinking you are getting a good deal because the price was once higher is probably responsible for as many losses as those who buy at market tops and ride their 'investments' down.
It's basically due to the investor either not being able to come up with a reasonable approximation of intrinsic value with which to judge whether valuation is a buying or selling opportunity, or simply running on base emotion thinking that because the commodity was once at a higher price that it must therefore return to that higher price if only one waits long enough.
In the case of BTC, people come up with all sorts of crazy valuations (like '$500,000 per BTC') based on grade-school thinking and onto bandwagons of other's opinions thinking that it must be right because so many people believe it is right. So right that they can't lose even when value is falling through the floor. A lot of these people wind up eventually putting their entire life savings at risk, even if they didn't intend to originally. You see that money and potential profit and lose all semblance of reason. But in the end all they accomplish is to hand their money over to the other, smarter people.
It's not even necessarily an issue of greed... it's a problem of being driven by sentiment or specious arguments... depending on other people's opinions to form the basis for your own instead of generating your own opinion from basic principles (and not fooling yourself or pulling your own punches). Easy fodder for momentum-driven trading.
Consider for the moment that there is a buyer for every sale on an exchange. Who's doing the buying when the market is clearly going down?
-Matt
Read more carefully. There's a big difference between accepting Bitcoin and pricing something in Bitcoin. Square market is pricing everything in dollars (because, really, no merchant in their right mind would ever price anything in actual BTC unless they were intentionally trying to fleece you).
It's a near meaningless gesture which puts the entire burden and risk on the consumer holding the BTC, who is not only eating the overhead from the transaction and the exchange spread, but is also creating a coincident sale on the exchange at market and is likely causing the whole BTC market to drop.
If you want to know how much it's costing you, consider that bitcoin has lost over half of its value over the last 4 months. Now you can make up all the reasons you like for why it is dropping, but my bet is that people are draining their BTC on goods and creating a field day for short speculators on the exchanges.
-Matt
I would love to know as well. And also, I wonder if you are recording those purchases since you have to declare each one on your tax return as a capital gain or loss.
Your argument is a bit absurd considering bitcoin's volatility, let alone the grade-school economics. Big words might be taken more seriously if not for the clear insanity behind the comment.
You honestly think you are being capital-efficient by using stored BTC as the basis for your working funds? I can't imagine how you plan your finances for the year.
-Matt
"So what? BTC is a medium of payment. The businesses accepting BTC as payment are largely converting it into their preferred currency, so the volatility isn't very important."
Really. Why don't you name a few? From where I stand no real business is keeping balances in BTC. All their prices are in USD and their payment processor (such as coinbase) is paying them in USD.
You realize how dumb your statement is? You think any business is going to forgo double-digit profits or accept double-digit losses by quoting a stable price in BTC? Good luck with that concept!
-Matt
You are conveniently forgetting the conversion to and from USD also involves transaction fees. Not only that, but you also have to trust the trading institution that is holding your dollar balance to not abscond with your dollars, otherwise you have to ALSO transfer your dollars into and out of the institution immediately.
So we are now talking about three transaction fees at a minimum, and five transactions if you don't trust the institution doing the dollar conversion. Plus someone has to eat whatever change in trading value occurs during the period where the transaction is being stored in BTC.
This immediately causes numerous problems, not the least of which being that the trade value of BTC is no longer deflationary if nobody doing real commerce is holding a balance in BTC. In addition to the fact that it won't be deflationary anyway because there can be any number of crypto-currencies in existence.
We are considering the question of volatility and whether it matters. The answer is: Yes, it does matter, and for some obvious reasons.
Consider the two holders of BTC. The speculators, and those trying to use it for commerce. You need stability for commerce-users to hold a BTC balance of any significance. Without stability the only people holding BTC are the speculators. When speculators are the only game in town, instability is guaranteed.
Now consider the so-called deflationary property of BTC (which is a phantom property in my view... wishful thinking at best). What happens to the two holders of BTC if you actually get deflation? What you get is hoarding by the commerce users (i.e. it stops being used for commerce) and more speculation by the speculators. Result == even worse volatility. Hoarding can easily destroy any currency as has been proven over and over again throughout history.
-Matt
And you haven't bought or used bitcoin for anything else since, right?
Fortunately I'm old enough to know just how stupid remarks like yours are. In this unverifiable world of social network postings, anyone can claim anything. It might make for good entertainment, but only a fool actually believes people like you.
-Matt
"At the other end, the seller receives the amount of the purchased goods or services in the amount of USD advertised to the sellersâ(TM) customer at the time of transaction, and can fulfill their customerâ(TM)s order. In other words, the seller takes no risk on Bitcoin value fluctuation"
In otherwords, all prices are still in US Dollars and neither Square Market nor the seller assume any of the risk. Plus the Bitcoin holder gets to have fun reporting every single last sale's exchange value to the IRS, and has no protection against any fraud that might occur. Which, honestly, doesn't really further the cause.
Bitcoin holders are now learning the hard way that bitcoins are not the magical deflationary stores of value they thought they were.
-Matt
Ah, you don't understand the scale. Yes, people still do trade like this (manually, that is, though with some computer support for convenience). For very large orders it's still highly effective.
Small orders you can just throw onto an exchange because it's hard to front-run a small order. Large orders... you can't do that without seriously compromising your trade.
-Matt
No, you didn't read the article carefully enough (or at all). The order did in fact vanish. The HFT has bids or asks up on all the exchanges. When they see a large order fill on one exchange they front-run the order on all the others (which involves canceling the order on the other exchanges and then taking some other action) before the originators order reaches the other exchanges.
The other point here is that many of these exchanges offer special order types designed to allow HFTs to take advantage of normal investors. For example, orders which either match instantly or auto-cancel if instant execution cannot occur. And many other types beyond the standard market, limit, and split-the-difference orders.
So, yes, the potentially matching orders went poof.
-Matt
Best article on HFT that I've ever read. Explains in fine detail how institutional players get fleeced by high frequency traders. Took a while to read the whole thing, but well worth the time.
One thing to note to all of us retail investors, though... our tiny orders aren't really getting fleeced, and with spreads on most stocks of only $0.01 our trading overheads are miniscule compared to 20 years ago. Standard brokerage fees trump (by several orders of magnitude) HFT losses for people like us.
-Matt
No, not really. It's a waste of power and an unnecessary extra cost to throw a ton of dram into a SSD when the main system is likely going to have far more ram for caching purposes available. Remember that OCZ already tried the large-cache approach and it was a complete failure. It is far, FAR more important for the SSD to have a large enough capacitor to be able to at least flush flash meta-data on power loss, and you can't do that if you have a lot of power-hungry ram or have a lot of dirty data in that power-hungry ram that needs to be flushed.
More to the point, these large caches can't be used to buffer writes without serious data loss. They are really only useful for buffering reads. And, beyond that, nearly all operating systems use asynchronous writes and nearly all operating systems do some manner of write combining themselves, and tend to be IOPS-limited for reads anyway. So there's no point having the SSD cache a large number of writes, and no real benefit from having the SSD cache a large amount of read data either.
Write pipelining is accomplished by limited the number of tags one uses for write commands. The size of the cache available for writes is irrelevant because most OS flushes are going to fill it up nearly instantly anyway when they flush. So if you don't limit the number of tags you use for write commands, you will starve read commands no matter how small or large the SSD's cache is. Generally speaking, 4 tags (out of the 32 supported by SATA) is plenty for writes.
Larger write caches do not improve SSD write throughput at all, and generally won't improve read throughput either.
-Matt
In other words, you have this insane idea that since a few people have made out like bandits from Bitcoins extreme volatility, that it is somehow this magical deflationary entity that is a better investment than any of the thousands of securities one can purchase on the regulated stock market. That, somehow, magically, is a store of value that can beat inflation and, somehow, will magically be able to beat all the other umpteen crypto currencies out there that anyone can create with a flick of a finger (literally).
You also seem to believe that bitcoin exchanges are somehow magically governed by banking and securities laws that allow people to 'invest' and 'trade' safely, and that one can be insured against theft by putting their trust in unknown third parties running piss-ant little companies who happen to be able to set up a web site and throw some glitter on it.
I will tell you what Bitcoin is. Bitcoin is worthless as a currency (too volatile and too illiquid), meaningless as a commodity (because anyone can create their own crypto currency with a flick of a finger), not even remotely deflationary except in the minds of the true believers, and unusable as any sort of store of value except by idiots who think that quoted numbers on an exchange lend it credibility and back-of-the-hand calculations that someone, somewhere has gotten filthy rich trading it (ignoring the thousands of people who have gone broke trying to do the same).
There are always a few people with crazy views. It doesn't mean the views are any less crazy just because the internet lends them a voice. You actually believe that the stock market is some kind of scam and that bitcoin is somehow magically better? The level of stupidity required to form your opinion is beyond my comprehension.
-Matt
There are plenty of ways to hedge against inflation through a standard brokerage account. Literally thousands of ways to do it.
Bitcoin is not one of those ways. A whole lot of people seem to think that Bitcoin has a magical deflationary property simply because there's a limited supply of it, and that it can simply be hoarded. That's grade-school thinking at best. It's nature gives it no such property.
-Matt
Not quite true. Nobody has lost any insured money in a bank failure. Up to the FDIC limit. Plenty of people have lost money due to bank failures who had more than the insured amount in their account.
Strangely enough, very few people with balances over the FDIC limit actually lost any money due to the larger bank failures which occurred in 2008 and 2009, because the U.S. government brokered agreements with other large banks to buy their assets whole in exchange for some big tax breaks. Wells Fargo's purchase of Wachovia, for example.
Wells Fargo took on almost $30B in liabilities which would normally have made the purchase impossible, but the U.S. government relaxed some laws and allowed Wells to declare those liabilities against future profits to reduce their tax bill. Essentially, the U.S. government bailed out the bank customers of Wachovia.
However, a good chunk of the bank failures since 2008 were liquidations and any customer with a balance greater than the FDIC limit will have lost the difference.
-Matt