Ignoring regulators is one reason Bitcoin created. We'll get to see if it actually works in practice.
Bitcoin itself will not be regulated. Exchanges that convert between real currencies (USD, Euro, etc) and bitcoin will be regulated.
The transfer of bitcoins from one bitcoin account/address to another bitcoin account/address remains, by design, beyond government control. As is the decision by the recipient to give the sender a pizza or something. This is essentially a barter transaction, which is taxable so there is government involvement but not government control up front.
Now will people/merchants do their accounting in bitcoin, pay their suppliers in bitcoin, price things in bitcoin natively? Doubtful, these things will most certainly remain in real currencies for anything beyond publicity stunts. So the ability to easily convert between bitcoin and a real currency is essential to commerce involving bitcoin, so government can certainly interfere with bitcoin's use in commerce. However bitcoin is not really used in commerce, merchants who do accept bitcoins are generally doing all accounting and pricing in a real currency and provide a real-time conversion to bitcoin at the moment they provide a bitcoin payment address. Actually a 3rd party payment processor is likely to this, the merchant themselves will likely never see or touch a bitcoin. The payment process will convert from bitcoin to real currency and credit the merchant. Bitcoin is primarily used as a speculative investment vehicle, in past years mostly by nerdy true believers and in recent months by wall street speculators and general pubic speculators. Government regulations can impact this use case but probably to a lesser degree than commerce.
"To solve this, we are renaming it 'Not a Flamethrower'."
Won't work. The presence of the word "flamethrower" will cause problems regardless of context. A friend had the word "laser" in his company name and boxes would occasionally get held up in customs waiting for the "export paperwork". He was not selling lasers. A customs official pulled the packages due to the company name.
I hope Amazon et al shake up the "health care" industry. Making money on providing medical care should be illegal.
Amazon et all seem to just be replicating Kaiser which created not-for-profit hospitals to provide their employees and their families with healthcare about 80 years ago. Today Kaiser is a major healthcare provider for the general public in western states.
Various churches also offer not-for-profit hospitals. Locally we have Loma Linda University Medical Center, a full service and level I trauma center for the county.
Not-for-profit hospitals aren't really anything new. And companies providing medical facilities for employees and their families isn't exactly anything new either. Besides the large scale like Kaiser there are also small clinics on various corporate campuses, some with capabilities on par with small urgent care facilities. Best of luck to Amazon, perhaps they can help modernize these sort of efforts.
I am skeptical that Amazon et al will be successful in this, but I wish them well. If the politicians can't fix healthcare, many nerds can.
This has been done before, Kaiser about 80 years ago. They created their own medical care for on the job heavy construction site injuries, doctors with modern and sufficient equipment to stabilize the injured so they could be transported to a "big city" hospital. This quickly expanded to cover health care in general. Then it expanded to cover the worker's families too. And now we have a major non-profit healthcare provider covering the western US.
Was the guy asked to launch nuclear missiles as a counterattack, not the guy asked to warn civilians to take shelter. The consequences of these two people acting as if an inbound attack was real were quite different.
The message played for the drill said "excercise, exercise, exercise" according to TFA, followed by the real message that would be played, which includes "this is not a drill".
One would presume that someone who was paying attention at the time would at least seek clarification on the mixed message before sending a whole state into a panic.
That is pre-12/7 thinking.
More seriously, missile flight time from North Korea to Hawaii is 20 minutes. How many minutes did military detection and verification consume? How many more minutes to notifying Hawaii Emergency Services? How many for the information to propagate to the worker? How many minutes does it take civilians to take shelter?
Each minute of delay will cost lives in a real attack. In a false alarm people suffered some temporary stress and the government embarrassment. If this is a one off as the government debugs the alert process and procedures there is no real problem here. If its recurring and the public begins to ignore alerts assuming its another false alarm, then there is a problem.
I left out the word "as" accidentally but the absence of the word "Pro" is intentional.:-) I am referring to the basic MacBook, not the MacBook Pro, as moving towards the Air's niche.
Its already happening without government intervention. For several years I've been seeing contracts where a small company's healthcare package is that one's paycheck is your pay plus your payment to an exchanged based healthcare policy.
Maybe they have something else in the pipeline. Or maybe they don't care about losing market-share in the laptop area...
Maybe they see the difference between the current MacBook Air and MacBook minor. When the new MacBook was introduced it did seem to move towards the Air concept.
Your snarky misuse of product names has left your comment completely incomprehensible. MacBook minor == MacBook Pro? MacBook == MacBook? Or what?
Or what? Its a typo, left out a word: "Maybe they see the difference between the current MacBook Air and MacBook as minor.":-)
Maybe they have something else in the pipeline. Or maybe they don't care about losing market-share in the laptop area...
Maybe they see the difference between the current MacBook Air and MacBook minor. When the new MacBook was introduced it did seem to move towards the Air concept.
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.
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.
Perhaps I missed something but I don't think we answered the original question. I'm partly to blame for using "owner" rather than "leasee" in my question. But in an earlier post it was stated:
"If you leased the car with the one-time $300 fee, you don't pay $300. You pay Sales Price minus Residual. And the residual on some of these cars is up to ~60% of sales price. So lets say that the residual on a BMW is 58%, that means Car Play would have cost you $300* 0.42 = $126!"
My question should have been stated as:
"You are assuming that the CarPlay license is part of that residual. Is CarPlay transferable to the new leasee?"
You are assuming that the CarPlay license is part of that residual. Is CarPlay transferable to the new owner? Are you sure the "remainder" of the CarPlay fee goes into the residual value? I expect CarPlay is outside that residual. The residual is supposed to be the wholesale value of the car. If CarPlay is not transferable it can not be part of that value.
BMW will lock CarPlay, though.
That's my point. If CarPlay is not transferable to that next owner/leasee then it does not seem to be part of the residual for BMWs.
They says that for leases, the 'pay per year' method is cheaper, but let's boil that down.
On a three year least, with the 'pay per year' method, you'll pay $0 for your first year and $80 for each of your next two years. So $160 total.
If you leased the car with the one-time $300 fee, you don't pay $300. You pay Sales Price minus Residual. And the residual on some of these cars is up to ~60% of sales price. So lets say that the residual on a BMW is 58%, that means Car Play would have cost you $300* 0.42 = $126! Still cheaper! You'd have to have a residual less than 47% for the new method to be worth it.
You are assuming that the CarPlay license is part of that residual. Is CarPlay transferable to the new owner? Are you sure the "remainder" of the CarPlay fee goes into the residual value? I expect CarPlay is outside that residual. The residual is supposed to be the wholesale value of the car. If CarPlay is not transferable it can not be part of that value.
The fact that Linux is the underlying OS to Android
Its underlying in the sense that it is the host kernel, but not underlying in the sense that Android is based on or dependent upon Linux. Linux could be replaced with Fuchsia and most Android apps would not know or care. For those apps using the NDK they may not really care either, depending on Fuchsia's POSIX support.
eventually you will become a programmer of the blockchain. and then you will be empowered. and then you will innovate and invent new things
The blockchain and bitcoin are two very different things. Blockchain technology is highly likely to be part of our future. Bitcoin maybe not, it could easily be displaced some other coin with better security and better features. Bitcoin has various technical flaws, some make it insecure (ASIC mining), some make it impractical to use (fees). For example bitcoin is built on the assumption that miner cartels and governments can not manipulate it due to distributed mining (blockchain updates), ordinary people mining with their computers. Reality has deviated from this assumption, mining require expensive dedicated hardware (ASICs) that are only in the hands of relatively small number of people and they are overwhelming located in a single country and dependent upon inexpensive government supplied electricity. While cartel and government manipulation is unlikely, bitcoin's design assumes it to be virtually impossible. It is unlikely but plausible, the bitcoin blockchain is vulnerable.
A car analogy: Blockchain technology is like internal combustion engine technology. Bitcoin is like the Model T Ford, the first to get the attention of the public but entire replaceable by something newer, better performing and with more features. Network effect won't help bitcoin since there is little to no switching cost for a user to move to another coin.
OK, bitcoin is seriously running out of use cases. Despite its reported "value," it's becoming more worthless by the day.
"running out"? Its mostly been either a speculative instrument or a money transfer service. The former wants the volatility, the later doesn't really care so much since bitcoins are not held for any appreciable amount of time (immediately bought by person A, transferred, immediately sold by person B). The later is affected by the current high fees.
Buying pizza and other normal products and services is largely a stunt. Why would true believers use the bitcoins for ordinary purchases when they expect bitcoin prices denominated in dollars/euros/etc to jump up significantly? For the gray and dark markets, they're switching to other coins with better anonymity. Its sort of surprising ransomware had not done so, or maybe they still use bitcoin for "customer" convenience and convert to the more anonymous coins on their side?
So no, bitcoin is not very different now than in the past. These huge price drops are "normal". If I remember an Ars Technica article correctly the exponential price increases are typically (4 occurrences ?)) followed by a 75% drop in price. Ex the previous spike to around $1,000 a few years ago followed by a drop to around $250. If the pattern holds we might see something around $5,000 yet.
Sounds like normal retailers who accept bitcoin, do all the accounting and pricing in fiat (dollar, euro, etc) and if someone wants to use bitcoin then the real-time exchange rate is used to find the equivalent number of bitcoins. Many bitcoin accepting merchants never even see or touch a bitcoin, farming the payment processing out to a processor who determines the equivalent number of bitcoins and provides a payment address, when the coins show up and are verified the merchant is informed so they can deliver the goods/service and the merchant's account is credited with the dollars, euros, etc.
Just compare the charts for the last 5 years. It drops off like this every year about this time. This is not that unusual.
Sort of, but not the time of year, its the reaction to an extremely fast exponential rise. If I remember an Ars Technica article correctly... there have been four huge exponential spikes and they are typically followed by a 75% drop. Recall 2014, exponential rise to $1,100 followed by a drop to $250, followed by hovering in the $250-300 range for years. If the current exponential risk to $19,000 keeps this pattern then something in the area of $5,000 can be expected.
Of course there is something different compared to the past 4 spikes and collapses. The geek speculators have been replaced by wall street speculators and ordinary people speculators. We'll see how the new masters of bitcoin's fate behave compared to those true believers of previous years.
If I were a gambling man, I'd be tempted to invest now. Seems a big overreaction to cause this to make it drop 50% of value.
If I remember a recent Ars Technica article correctly, bitcoin has had 4 hyperbolic 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".
A suggestion to those new to all this. 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.
Before anyone makes
Slashdot Mirror
Ignoring regulators is one reason Bitcoin created. We'll get to see if it actually works in practice.
Bitcoin itself will not be regulated. Exchanges that convert between real currencies (USD, Euro, etc) and bitcoin will be regulated.
The transfer of bitcoins from one bitcoin account/address to another bitcoin account/address remains, by design, beyond government control. As is the decision by the recipient to give the sender a pizza or something. This is essentially a barter transaction, which is taxable so there is government involvement but not government control up front.
Now will people/merchants do their accounting in bitcoin, pay their suppliers in bitcoin, price things in bitcoin natively? Doubtful, these things will most certainly remain in real currencies for anything beyond publicity stunts. So the ability to easily convert between bitcoin and a real currency is essential to commerce involving bitcoin, so government can certainly interfere with bitcoin's use in commerce. However bitcoin is not really used in commerce, merchants who do accept bitcoins are generally doing all accounting and pricing in a real currency and provide a real-time conversion to bitcoin at the moment they provide a bitcoin payment address. Actually a 3rd party payment processor is likely to this, the merchant themselves will likely never see or touch a bitcoin. The payment process will convert from bitcoin to real currency and credit the merchant. Bitcoin is primarily used as a speculative investment vehicle, in past years mostly by nerdy true believers and in recent months by wall street speculators and general pubic speculators. Government regulations can impact this use case but probably to a lesser degree than commerce.
"To solve this, we are renaming it 'Not a Flamethrower'."
Won't work. The presence of the word "flamethrower" will cause problems regardless of context. A friend had the word "laser" in his company name and boxes would occasionally get held up in customs waiting for the "export paperwork". He was not selling lasers. A customs official pulled the packages due to the company name.
"Or maybe 'Temperature Enhancement Device.'"
Better.
Err...if you didn't allow anyone to make money (a profit) with healthcare, why would anyone go into that industry for a lively hood?
The employees at not-for-profits get paid.
I hope Amazon et al shake up the "health care" industry. Making money on providing medical care should be illegal.
Amazon et all seem to just be replicating Kaiser which created not-for-profit hospitals to provide their employees and their families with healthcare about 80 years ago. Today Kaiser is a major healthcare provider for the general public in western states.
Various churches also offer not-for-profit hospitals. Locally we have Loma Linda University Medical Center, a full service and level I trauma center for the county.
Not-for-profit hospitals aren't really anything new. And companies providing medical facilities for employees and their families isn't exactly anything new either. Besides the large scale like Kaiser there are also small clinics on various corporate campuses, some with capabilities on par with small urgent care facilities. Best of luck to Amazon, perhaps they can help modernize these sort of efforts.
I am skeptical that Amazon et al will be successful in this, but I wish them well. If the politicians can't fix healthcare, many nerds can.
This has been done before, Kaiser about 80 years ago. They created their own medical care for on the job heavy construction site injuries, doctors with modern and sufficient equipment to stabilize the injured so they could be transported to a "big city" hospital. This quickly expanded to cover health care in general. Then it expanded to cover the worker's families too. And now we have a major non-profit healthcare provider covering the western US.
Stanislav Petrov.
Was the guy asked to launch nuclear missiles as a counterattack, not the guy asked to warn civilians to take shelter. The consequences of these two people acting as if an inbound attack was real were quite different.
The message played for the drill said "excercise, exercise, exercise" according to TFA, followed by the real message that would be played, which includes "this is not a drill".
One would presume that someone who was paying attention at the time would at least seek clarification on the mixed message before sending a whole state into a panic.
That is pre-12/7 thinking.
More seriously, missile flight time from North Korea to Hawaii is 20 minutes. How many minutes did military detection and verification consume? How many more minutes to notifying Hawaii Emergency Services? How many for the information to propagate to the worker? How many minutes does it take civilians to take shelter?
Each minute of delay will cost lives in a real attack. In a false alarm people suffered some temporary stress and the government embarrassment. If this is a one off as the government debugs the alert process and procedures there is no real problem here. If its recurring and the public begins to ignore alerts assuming its another false alarm, then there is a problem.
Funny, it said it wasn't a drill, so the worker treated the alert as the real deal.
For some reason people in Hawaii take the phrase "this is not a drill" seriously.
https://www.archives.gov/bosto...
Not sure if you care, but the best possible score is 5.57 seconds. That's how he got found out.
So his crappy early 1980s dot matrix printer and/or used up ink ribbon lost a few dots and the 7 looked like a 1? ;-)
I left out the word "as" accidentally but the absence of the word "Pro" is intentional. :-) I am referring to the basic MacBook, not the MacBook Pro, as moving towards the Air's niche.
Its already happening without government intervention. For several years I've been seeing contracts where a small company's healthcare package is that one's paycheck is your pay plus your payment to an exchanged based healthcare policy.
Maybe they have something else in the pipeline. Or maybe they don't care about losing market-share in the laptop area ...
Maybe they see the difference between the current MacBook Air and MacBook minor. When the new MacBook was introduced it did seem to move towards the Air concept.
Your snarky misuse of product names has left your comment completely incomprehensible. MacBook minor == MacBook Pro? MacBook == MacBook? Or what?
Or what? Its a typo, left out a word: "Maybe they see the difference between the current MacBook Air and MacBook as minor." :-)
Maybe they have something else in the pipeline. Or maybe they don't care about losing market-share in the laptop area ...
Maybe they see the difference between the current MacBook Air and MacBook minor. When the new MacBook was introduced it did seem to move towards the Air concept.
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.
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.
Perhaps I missed something but I don't think we answered the original question. I'm partly to blame for using "owner" rather than "leasee" in my question. But in an earlier post it was stated:
"If you leased the car with the one-time $300 fee, you don't pay $300. You pay Sales Price minus Residual. And the residual on some of these cars is up to ~60% of sales price. So lets say that the residual on a BMW is 58%, that means Car Play would have cost you $300* 0.42 = $126!"
My question should have been stated as:
"You are assuming that the CarPlay license is part of that residual. Is CarPlay transferable to the new leasee?"
Owners, non-BMWs are not answering the question.
You are assuming that the CarPlay license is part of that residual. Is CarPlay transferable to the new owner? Are you sure the "remainder" of the CarPlay fee goes into the residual value? I expect CarPlay is outside that residual. The residual is supposed to be the wholesale value of the car. If CarPlay is not transferable it can not be part of that value.
BMW will lock CarPlay, though.
That's my point. If CarPlay is not transferable to that next owner/leasee then it does not seem to be part of the residual for BMWs.
They says that for leases, the 'pay per year' method is cheaper, but let's boil that down.
On a three year least, with the 'pay per year' method, you'll pay $0 for your first year and $80 for each of your next two years. So $160 total.
If you leased the car with the one-time $300 fee, you don't pay $300. You pay Sales Price minus Residual. And the residual on some of these cars is up to ~60% of sales price. So lets say that the residual on a BMW is 58%, that means Car Play would have cost you $300* 0.42 = $126! Still cheaper! You'd have to have a residual less than 47% for the new method to be worth it.
You are assuming that the CarPlay license is part of that residual. Is CarPlay transferable to the new owner? Are you sure the "remainder" of the CarPlay fee goes into the residual value? I expect CarPlay is outside that residual. The residual is supposed to be the wholesale value of the car. If CarPlay is not transferable it can not be part of that value.
The fact that Linux is the underlying OS to Android
Its underlying in the sense that it is the host kernel, but not underlying in the sense that Android is based on or dependent upon Linux. Linux could be replaced with Fuchsia and most Android apps would not know or care. For those apps using the NDK they may not really care either, depending on Fuchsia's POSIX support.
eventually you will become a programmer of the blockchain. and then you will be empowered. and then you will innovate and invent new things
The blockchain and bitcoin are two very different things. Blockchain technology is highly likely to be part of our future. Bitcoin maybe not, it could easily be displaced some other coin with better security and better features. Bitcoin has various technical flaws, some make it insecure (ASIC mining), some make it impractical to use (fees). For example bitcoin is built on the assumption that miner cartels and governments can not manipulate it due to distributed mining (blockchain updates), ordinary people mining with their computers. Reality has deviated from this assumption, mining require expensive dedicated hardware (ASICs) that are only in the hands of relatively small number of people and they are overwhelming located in a single country and dependent upon inexpensive government supplied electricity. While cartel and government manipulation is unlikely, bitcoin's design assumes it to be virtually impossible. It is unlikely but plausible, the bitcoin blockchain is vulnerable.
A car analogy: Blockchain technology is like internal combustion engine technology. Bitcoin is like the Model T Ford, the first to get the attention of the public but entire replaceable by something newer, better performing and with more features. Network effect won't help bitcoin since there is little to no switching cost for a user to move to another coin.
OK, bitcoin is seriously running out of use cases. Despite its reported "value," it's becoming more worthless by the day.
"running out"? Its mostly been either a speculative instrument or a money transfer service. The former wants the volatility, the later doesn't really care so much since bitcoins are not held for any appreciable amount of time (immediately bought by person A, transferred, immediately sold by person B). The later is affected by the current high fees.
Buying pizza and other normal products and services is largely a stunt. Why would true believers use the bitcoins for ordinary purchases when they expect bitcoin prices denominated in dollars/euros/etc to jump up significantly? For the gray and dark markets, they're switching to other coins with better anonymity. Its sort of surprising ransomware had not done so, or maybe they still use bitcoin for "customer" convenience and convert to the more anonymous coins on their side?
So no, bitcoin is not very different now than in the past. These huge price drops are "normal". If I remember an Ars Technica article correctly the exponential price increases are typically (4 occurrences ?)) followed by a 75% drop in price. Ex the previous spike to around $1,000 a few years ago followed by a drop to around $250. If the pattern holds we might see something around $5,000 yet.
Sounds like normal retailers who accept bitcoin, do all the accounting and pricing in fiat (dollar, euro, etc) and if someone wants to use bitcoin then the real-time exchange rate is used to find the equivalent number of bitcoins. Many bitcoin accepting merchants never even see or touch a bitcoin, farming the payment processing out to a processor who determines the equivalent number of bitcoins and provides a payment address, when the coins show up and are verified the merchant is informed so they can deliver the goods/service and the merchant's account is credited with the dollars, euros, etc.
Just compare the charts for the last 5 years. It drops off like this every year about this time. This is not that unusual.
Sort of, but not the time of year, its the reaction to an extremely fast exponential rise. If I remember an Ars Technica article correctly ... there have been four huge exponential spikes and they are typically followed by a 75% drop. Recall 2014, exponential rise to $1,100 followed by a drop to $250, followed by hovering in the $250-300 range for years. If the current exponential risk to $19,000 keeps this pattern then something in the area of $5,000 can be expected.
Of course there is something different compared to the past 4 spikes and collapses. The geek speculators have been replaced by wall street speculators and ordinary people speculators. We'll see how the new masters of bitcoin's fate behave compared to those true believers of previous years.
If I were a gambling man, I'd be tempted to invest now. Seems a big overreaction to cause this to make it drop 50% of value.
If I remember a recent Ars Technica article correctly, bitcoin has had 4 hyperbolic 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".
A suggestion to those new to all this. 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. Before anyone makes
the market is completely different in 2017 vs 2013
Yes, in 2013 we only had geek speculators, today we have wall street and non-geek general public speculators. A far healthier environment. ;-)