Do you not understand that reasonable currencies don't behave this way? These are death throes.
Bitcoin is not a currency, it is an asset. An easily transferable asset since it is a digital asset. An asset with no gatekeepers to impede that asset transfer.
Bitcoin is a competitor to PayPal and other such payment vehicles, not to currencies like the US Dollar or the Euro. Not anytime soon despite the enthusiast's fondest wishes. However it is also a speculative trading vehicle, and also a highly speculative investment vehicle. Trading with a timeframe of some small number of years is one thing, investing on the scale of decades is something else entirely. I missed two highly speculative investment opportunities, Bitcoin when it was $0.25, and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back action figures when I worked in a warehouse in the 1980s and unloaded and stocked thousands of cases of those action figures. If only I had the foresight to have bought a couple of cases at the time.:-)
People sometimes conflate the commercial interest in blockchain technology with interest in Bitcoin. They are two very different things. Will blockchain be around in 20 years and be an important part of asset management and the financial industry, quite possibly. Will Bitcoin be around in 20 years, worth tens of thousands of dollars per coin or largely forgotten and worth $0.25 again? Who knows. Bitcoin could be easily displaced that far out. But on a timescale of a few years its got a decent chance to still be around.So maybe its OK for trading but not investing your passive retirement savings in.
What we need is a car analogy. Blockchain is like the internal combustion engine. Bitcoin is like a particular automobile manufacturer. Is it a Maxwell, a former member of the top 3, a peer of General Motors and Ford, who went defunct in 1925, or is it a survivor like Ford? It could go either way. Bitcoin is just one of many consumer products based on a technology, a different product may suit consumer needs better, its only the technology that is likely to persist.
Lets also remember that a few years ago Bitcoin spiked to $1,1000 and then dropped to $250 and spent a couple years around there. Yes, people who bought around $1,000 are up in the long term, but more patient people who were cautious due to the spike and bought a year later at $250 are up 4x more than those who bought on the spike.
The current spike to $5,000 looks a lot like the 2014 spike to $1,100. I am *not* saying we will see a similar $75% drop, merely that waiting to buy might be prudent and even at $3,400 we might still be at an overly enthusiastic level. We seem to currently be on the downward side of the spike, perhaps wait until things stabilize and prices are relatively flat before buying? Waiting on the scale of months not days?
My real hope is not that Apple necessarily opens up the projector making it accessible to developers but that the part is 3rd party and Apple's volume causes a price drop and/or increase in availability. And that this leads to it becoming a Raspberry Pi module.
I'm coming from a computer vision background. Synthetic imagery containing depth information might help with object recognition and scene interpretation, even if the information is minimal. Although this does seem like something that would be very short range. Maybe helpful for things on the desk or table but not so much for looking around the room.
If that 3D dot projector is available to apps that would be amazing. Your phone could scan and generate 3D models of objects. A mini LIDAR in some ways.
They've been well over 1000 for years. I've been invested since 2013, where is TFA getting its info from?
No. BTC was $1,000 in 2013, $450 in 2014 and $250 in 2015. 2013 had an incredible vertical spike like the current spike to $5,000 (which has pulled back to $4,500 by the time this article made it to slashdot), and not surprisingly it popped. Wiser investors than you who don't trust vertical spikes and expect bubbles to pop purchased in 2014 and 2015 and made two to four times as much money as you. Well, assuming they cashed out. If you or they are still holding, you made nothing.
Merchants who accept bitcoin often never see or touch a bitcoin and are largely unaffected by volatility. They can do their account and pricing in USD, EUR, etc as normal. If a rare individual shows up offering BTC they use a BTC payment processor. This processor converts the USD/EUR price to BTC in real time and provides a BTC price and payments address to pass on to the customer. If coins show up at the address the processor informs the merchant and credits the merchant's account for the USD/EUR originally specified. The processor takes on the risk for the minutes the transaction took to verify. The merchant is out nothing more than a processing fee, much like when they accept credit cards.
"The BTC-e website is offline since 25 July 2017, following the arrest of BTC-e staff members and the seizure of server equipment at one of their data centres. In addition, suspected BTC-e operator Alexander Vinnik was arrested while vacationing with his family in Greece and is currently awaiting extradition to the US. These events led to the temporary suspension of the BTC-e service.
On the 28th of July 2017, US authorities seized the BTC-e.com domain name.
On the 14th of August 2017, BTC-e confirmed they would be returning under a different brand name and would be returning 55% of customer funds." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Blockchain technology will survive and likely be incredibly important to the future of banking and finance. However that is something completely different from bitcoin. Bitcoin is just one of many users of the technology.
For Wall Street, the blockchain is the future, bitcoin is just a current speculative instrument. Wall street has played a large role in the current price spike, if their attention moves elsewhere a huge crash is likely.
Keep in mind that bitcoin has already gone off plan. It is no longer under the control of the masses, ordinary people and their computers, with respect to maintaining the public ledger. The ledger is maintain by an ever more concentrated group of people who can afford the expensive hardware necessary to "mine". The is absolutely contrary to the design and security of bitcoin.
Litecoin's verification is faster than bitcoin's. Making it more practical, in theory, for immediate transactions, say a cup of coffee.
The GPU theory didn't work out so well for litecoin. Like bitcoin, it too went ASIC. Although at the current price/difficulty a circa 2014 gridseed ASIC might be economical again.:-)
People were saying that when Bitcoin hit $1. It is now $4857.
Long term gain does not negate bubbles. The people who waited for the 2013 $1,000 bubble to pop and bought at $250 in 2015 have 4x the wealth of those who bought at the 2013 bubble and waited for the long term to bail them out.
Today's $5K spike looks very much like 2013's $1K spike. Very bubble'ish.
As long as bitcoin remains the gold standard backing all other crypto, no one is going to dump it. I am never overly optimistic, but bitcoin has become the gold standard and unless the crypto world disappears again or chooses a new backing standard for trading, its long term direction is only up.
Crypto enthusiasts may persist but the wall streeters who currently drive the price sure as hell can abandon it. Blockchain technology will persist and be critical in the future, but bitcoin is just the flavor of the day using blockchain technology. Its entirely replaceable, its long term viability is wildly speculative.
People will make money in the short term so long as the "greater fools" exist. Its OK to play that game as long as you acknowledge the risk.
The "only up" long term notion is BS spin. Using that logic the economic crisis of 2008 is irrelevant because the long term upward trend of the economy is upward. The internet bubble of 2000 never happened because the long term trend of the stock market is up?
Yes. In 2014. It's far more difficult today. Although a consortium of mining pools can reach 51% each pool is made up of thousands of individual miners.
There is little difference between 2014 and today, if anything its slightly worse today. We are even farther from the point where the masses could economically participate in mining; it is an even more specialized, an even more commercialized, effort that it once was. We are every bit as vulnerable to the good intentions of pool operators today as we were in 2014.
And anything that shakes confidence in cryptocurrencies will destroy that confidence and subsequently destroy it's price.
Especially given that the current spike in price is largely due to the influx of wall street investors, people whose automatic trading platforms will be dumping bitcoin at the speed of a natural language parser seeing a negative story floating across news sources.
The point being that $1,000 was a very brief bubble, followed by years of collapse. $4,600 may also be a very brief bubble, followed by years of collapse.
Using your logic the financial crisis of 2008 was irrelevant since on the scale of decades the economy will be up.
You are quite correct in labeling those investing in Bitcoins with a decades long time frame as speculators. It is very risky speculation. Bitcoin has flaws, for example vulnerability to 51% attacks, mining being in the hands of a select few (ASICs) rather then its design assumption of mining being in the hands of the masses (CPUs, GPUs).
The current spike to $4,600 is largely driven by a new class of speculators, wall street. However the "hype" over bitcoins on wall street is partly based on their misunderstanding of the technology. It is really blockchain technology, not bitcoin itself, that will revolutionize finance and the transfer of money. Bitcoin is merely one user of blockchain technology, the user that brought the underlying technology to the attention of the masses. Something based on blockchain technology will be used decades from now, whether that something is bitcoin is wildly speculative and frankly unlikely.
Now none of this prevents speculators from making money, so long as there are still "greater fools" to sell to.
No. There is an inherent flaw in the design, the 51% attack.
"The mining pool ghash.io briefly exceeding 50% of the bitcoin network's computing power in July 2014, leading the pool to voluntarily commit to reducing its share of the network. It said in a statement that it would not reach 40% of the total mining power in the future." http://www.investopedia.com/te...
Another flaw in bitcoin is that its design assumes that anyone can be a miner. That was an incorrect assumption. CPUs and GPUs can not economically mine bitcoin, specialized ASIC hardware is necessary. So mining is not done by the masses as assumed, it is done by a specialized few.
Re 51% attack - that's getting pretty close to impossible even for governments.
It wasn't a government, but Bitcoin has already had a single entity in a position to launch a 51% attack, fortunately they did not desire to "attack".
"The mining pool ghash.io briefly exceeding 50% of the bitcoin network's computing power in July 2014, leading the pool to voluntarily commit to reducing its share of the network. It said in a statement that it would not reach 40% of the total mining power in the future." http://www.investopedia.com/te...
The cloud backups don't need to be your complete system backups. For example in your "documents" folder keep an "important" subfolder. Archive and encrypt the "important" subfolder, upload that to Amazon's or Google's cloud storage.
Slashdot Mirror
Penny for your thoughts is just a saying, nobody ever pays the penny.
US$0.000864 for your doge coin. :-)
A case only had 24, but yeah eBay slowly. Same with bitcoins, large holders have to sell slowly. :-)
Do you not understand that reasonable currencies don't behave this way? These are death throes.
Bitcoin is not a currency, it is an asset. An easily transferable asset since it is a digital asset. An asset with no gatekeepers to impede that asset transfer.
:-)
Bitcoin is a competitor to PayPal and other such payment vehicles, not to currencies like the US Dollar or the Euro. Not anytime soon despite the enthusiast's fondest wishes. However it is also a speculative trading vehicle, and also a highly speculative investment vehicle. Trading with a timeframe of some small number of years is one thing, investing on the scale of decades is something else entirely. I missed two highly speculative investment opportunities, Bitcoin when it was $0.25, and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back action figures when I worked in a warehouse in the 1980s and unloaded and stocked thousands of cases of those action figures. If only I had the foresight to have bought a couple of cases at the time.
People sometimes conflate the commercial interest in blockchain technology with interest in Bitcoin. They are two very different things. Will blockchain be around in 20 years and be an important part of asset management and the financial industry, quite possibly. Will Bitcoin be around in 20 years, worth tens of thousands of dollars per coin or largely forgotten and worth $0.25 again? Who knows. Bitcoin could be easily displaced that far out. But on a timescale of a few years its got a decent chance to still be around.So maybe its OK for trading but not investing your passive retirement savings in.
What we need is a car analogy. Blockchain is like the internal combustion engine. Bitcoin is like a particular automobile manufacturer. Is it a Maxwell, a former member of the top 3, a peer of General Motors and Ford, who went defunct in 1925, or is it a survivor like Ford? It could go either way. Bitcoin is just one of many consumer products based on a technology, a different product may suit consumer needs better, its only the technology that is likely to persist.
Lets also remember that a few years ago Bitcoin spiked to $1,1000 and then dropped to $250 and spent a couple years around there. Yes, people who bought around $1,000 are up in the long term, but more patient people who were cautious due to the spike and bought a year later at $250 are up 4x more than those who bought on the spike.
The current spike to $5,000 looks a lot like the 2014 spike to $1,100. I am *not* saying we will see a similar $75% drop, merely that waiting to buy might be prudent and even at $3,400 we might still be at an overly enthusiastic level. We seem to currently be on the downward side of the spike, perhaps wait until things stabilize and prices are relatively flat before buying? Waiting on the scale of months not days?
My real hope is not that Apple necessarily opens up the projector making it accessible to developers but that the part is 3rd party and Apple's volume causes a price drop and/or increase in availability. And that this leads to it becoming a Raspberry Pi module.
I'm coming from a computer vision background. Synthetic imagery containing depth information might help with object recognition and scene interpretation, even if the information is minimal. Although this does seem like something that would be very short range. Maybe helpful for things on the desk or table but not so much for looking around the room.
This is stupid, what happens if the face detection does not work?
This was covered in the demo. You pick up your other iPhone that is configured for a passcode only. ;-)
If that 3D dot projector is available to apps that would be amazing. Your phone could scan and generate 3D models of objects. A mini LIDAR in some ways.
They've been well over 1000 for years. I've been invested since 2013, where is TFA getting its info from?
No. BTC was $1,000 in 2013, $450 in 2014 and $250 in 2015. 2013 had an incredible vertical spike like the current spike to $5,000 (which has pulled back to $4,500 by the time this article made it to slashdot), and not surprisingly it popped. Wiser investors than you who don't trust vertical spikes and expect bubbles to pop purchased in 2014 and 2015 and made two to four times as much money as you. Well, assuming they cashed out. If you or they are still holding, you made nothing.
Merchants who accept bitcoin often never see or touch a bitcoin and are largely unaffected by volatility. They can do their account and pricing in USD, EUR, etc as normal. If a rare individual shows up offering BTC they use a BTC payment processor. This processor converts the USD/EUR price to BTC in real time and provides a BTC price and payments address to pass on to the customer. If coins show up at the address the processor informs the merchant and credits the merchant's account for the USD/EUR originally specified. The processor takes on the risk for the minutes the transaction took to verify. The merchant is out nothing more than a processing fee, much like when they accept credit cards.
you can't regulate internationnal crowd.
Yeah, that is what users of BTC-e thought.
"The BTC-e website is offline since 25 July 2017, following the arrest of BTC-e staff members and the seizure of server equipment at one of their data centres. In addition, suspected BTC-e operator Alexander Vinnik was arrested while vacationing with his family in Greece and is currently awaiting extradition to the US. These events led to the temporary suspension of the BTC-e service.
On the 28th of July 2017, US authorities seized the BTC-e.com domain name.
On the 14th of August 2017, BTC-e confirmed they would be returning under a different brand name and would be returning 55% of customer funds."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Blockchain technology will survive and likely be incredibly important to the future of banking and finance. However that is something completely different from bitcoin. Bitcoin is just one of many users of the technology.
For Wall Street, the blockchain is the future, bitcoin is just a current speculative instrument. Wall street has played a large role in the current price spike, if their attention moves elsewhere a huge crash is likely.
Keep in mind that bitcoin has already gone off plan. It is no longer under the control of the masses, ordinary people and their computers, with respect to maintaining the public ledger. The ledger is maintain by an ever more concentrated group of people who can afford the expensive hardware necessary to "mine". The is absolutely contrary to the design and security of bitcoin.
Litecoin's verification is faster than bitcoin's. Making it more practical, in theory, for immediate transactions, say a cup of coffee.
:-)
The GPU theory didn't work out so well for litecoin. Like bitcoin, it too went ASIC. Although at the current price/difficulty a circa 2014 gridseed ASIC might be economical again.
People were saying that when Bitcoin hit $1. It is now $4857.
Long term gain does not negate bubbles. The people who waited for the 2013 $1,000 bubble to pop and bought at $250 in 2015 have 4x the wealth of those who bought at the 2013 bubble and waited for the long term to bail them out.
Today's $5K spike looks very much like 2013's $1K spike. Very bubble'ish.
As long as bitcoin remains the gold standard backing all other crypto, no one is going to dump it. I am never overly optimistic, but bitcoin has become the gold standard and unless the crypto world disappears again or chooses a new backing standard for trading, its long term direction is only up.
Crypto enthusiasts may persist but the wall streeters who currently drive the price sure as hell can abandon it. Blockchain technology will persist and be critical in the future, but bitcoin is just the flavor of the day using blockchain technology. Its entirely replaceable, its long term viability is wildly speculative.
People will make money in the short term so long as the "greater fools" exist. Its OK to play that game as long as you acknowledge the risk.
The "only up" long term notion is BS spin. Using that logic the economic crisis of 2008 is irrelevant because the long term upward trend of the economy is upward. The internet bubble of 2000 never happened because the long term trend of the stock market is up?
Yes. In 2014. It's far more difficult today. Although a consortium of mining pools can reach 51% each pool is made up of thousands of individual miners.
There is little difference between 2014 and today, if anything its slightly worse today. We are even farther from the point where the masses could economically participate in mining; it is an even more specialized, an even more commercialized, effort that it once was. We are every bit as vulnerable to the good intentions of pool operators today as we were in 2014.
And anything that shakes confidence in cryptocurrencies will destroy that confidence and subsequently destroy it's price.
Especially given that the current spike in price is largely due to the influx of wall street investors, people whose automatic trading platforms will be dumping bitcoin at the speed of a natural language parser seeing a negative story floating across news sources.
The point being that $1,000 was a very brief bubble, followed by years of collapse. $4,600 may also be a very brief bubble, followed by years of collapse.
Using your logic the financial crisis of 2008 was irrelevant since on the scale of decades the economy will be up.
You are quite correct in labeling those investing in Bitcoins with a decades long time frame as speculators. It is very risky speculation. Bitcoin has flaws, for example vulnerability to 51% attacks, mining being in the hands of a select few (ASICs) rather then its design assumption of mining being in the hands of the masses (CPUs, GPUs).
The current spike to $4,600 is largely driven by a new class of speculators, wall street. However the "hype" over bitcoins on wall street is partly based on their misunderstanding of the technology. It is really blockchain technology, not bitcoin itself, that will revolutionize finance and the transfer of money. Bitcoin is merely one user of blockchain technology, the user that brought the underlying technology to the attention of the masses. Something based on blockchain technology will be used decades from now, whether that something is bitcoin is wildly speculative and frankly unlikely.
Now none of this prevents speculators from making money, so long as there are still "greater fools" to sell to.
It's been in a bubble since 2012 apparently. Still waiting for it to burst.
Wrong, it crashed from $1,000 to $250 from 2013 to 2015.
Is it unhackable?
No. There is an inherent flaw in the design, the 51% attack.
"The mining pool ghash.io briefly exceeding 50% of the bitcoin network's computing power in July 2014, leading the pool to voluntarily commit to reducing its share of the network. It said in a statement that it would not reach 40% of the total mining power in the future."
http://www.investopedia.com/te...
Another flaw in bitcoin is that its design assumes that anyone can be a miner. That was an incorrect assumption. CPUs and GPUs can not economically mine bitcoin, specialized ASIC hardware is necessary. So mining is not done by the masses as assumed, it is done by a specialized few.
2012:~$30 lol bubble
2013:~$1000 lol bubble
2017:~$4600 lol bubble
You left out:
2014: ~$450
2015: ~$230
Re 51% attack - that's getting pretty close to impossible even for governments.
It wasn't a government, but Bitcoin has already had a single entity in a position to launch a 51% attack, fortunately they did not desire to "attack".
"The mining pool ghash.io briefly exceeding 50% of the bitcoin network's computing power in July 2014, leading the pool to voluntarily commit to reducing its share of the network. It said in a statement that it would not reach 40% of the total mining power in the future."
http://www.investopedia.com/te...
Swap the disks through a bank safe deposit box too.
Also be aware that many home fire safes are only designed/rated for paper, make sure the safe is rated for electronics/media.
The cloud backups don't need to be your complete system backups. For example in your "documents" folder keep an "important" subfolder. Archive and encrypt the "important" subfolder, upload that to Amazon's or Google's cloud storage.