18 ms·

Bitcoin has crossed $6,000 USD for the first time

75 points by electic 9y ago

albertgoeswoof 9y ago
Probably related to http://btcgpu.org/ http://btcgpu.org/ (another fork of the chain coming in 4 days) It's interesting that despite bitcoin being deflationary by design, you can just fork the chain and do quantitative easing that way. Pretty much all the cited benefits of cryptocurrencies are disappearing in implementation, unfortunately.
- aboodman 9y ago
  It only works if people use the forks, which ... doesn't seem to be happening yet.
  - zanny 9y ago
    The incentives are completely backwards on why anyone would want to. All the value is trapped in the blockstream bitcoin core client - deviating from that sets the value of all those coins, all of which were already mined and are already owned by wallets that may never even come on the fork. Thats 80% of all coins. Yeah, your fork can kind of start from scratch, act like the 16.6m coins that came before never happened, that most of them will be dead forever, and start mining from there and treating all the new coins mined (of the remaining 4.4m let) as the monetary base. But then you get any momentum and suddenly "dead" money is flooding the market from legacy wallets. Wallets that didn't contribute to the growth of the fork, that didn't harden the blockchains integrity on the fork, that simply installed a program and had a fortune ready to go with no effort and no commitment to that currency at all. There is already the problem that vast amounts of bitcoins blockchain hasn't moved in years. Millions of coins that are being treated as dead that could come back to life at any time. But there is no way to know what wallets are actually gone - dat files lost, passwords forgotten, etc - and which ones are just waiting to cash out. Fundamentally the problem is there are two groups of people here - futurists that want to overturn fiat, and investors that want to make (fiat) money. It is why we have not seen a cryptocurrency that can behave like real money yet - the closest we have gotten was dogecoin, which started as a joke and was completely abandoned by its original developers and left to rot. To make a cash replacement, it would need enough minting of coins to cause inflation enough to keep people from stockpiling coins. But who wants to mine your cryptocurrency or hold it early on in its life if its depreciating in value from its own algorithms? The whole point of why people adopt early into cryptocurrencies is that if they blow up they just made millions from trivial amounts of effort by just being there first. Classic pyramid scheme. But all crypto today has to be a pyramid scheme to get the adoption to start having momentum to operate as it is intended. Without the gamble of making a fortune how many people would have early on started bitcoin startups or invested in mining? If the promise was that a coin worth a dollar today would be worth a dollar ten years from now because the blockchain itself would generate enough coins to peg the exchange rate, the only first mover advantage you get is in how much less electricity it costs to mine early on assuming the coin takes off and becomes popular. That can still be an incentive. It is still a gamble of course, but it is also an incentive. The problem is when you are one of those investor types with some large cash in a small neighborhood shopping for your next get rich quick scheme the humble coin trying to push the future is a lot less interesting than the pyramid scheme promising ludicrous returns if it can get enough fools to buy into it.
- bdcravens 9y ago
  I've seen zero discussion of that fork, and I'm pretty active on /r/bitcoin (and other places in the community) I did find a few references to it, only on searching, and most seem to think it's a scam. https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/734i6s/as_it_turns_out_adam_backblockstream_may_be/ https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/734i6s/as_it_turns_out...
leoharsha2 9y ago
Can anyone please tell me Is it a good time to buy ETH/BTC or am I too late?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- aqme28 9y ago
  No one knows the future. Do your research and see if you think it'll go up or not. There's still a good chance you'll be wrong. Don't gamble what you cannot lose.
- 0x4f3759df 9y ago
  This was asked recently, answers include {yes, no, maybe, I don't know} https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15491775 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15491775
  - JoelTheSuperior 9y ago
    Can you repeat the question?
- underyx 9y ago
  If you get and aggregate everyone's advice you'll get to the conclusion that the correct price for Bitcoin is exactly where it's at now.
  - baddox 9y ago
    Not quite. You’d have to weight each person’s advice for their willingness (and ability) to trade Bitcoin.
  - pmoriarty 9y ago
    You're assuming it's priced fairly and there's no cheating or other manipulation in the price.
- vkou 9y ago
holtalanm 9y ago
wishing i had actually kept my mining program running when I experimentally installed it and ran it for about 30 minutes ~5-6 years ago now.
- lawlessone 9y ago
  if you have an account with any only pool you should probably check just to see,i still had a little in one pool after all that time.
- diminish 9y ago
  I remember those times - does anyone know how many bitcoins one could make per computing time, every year since the beginning to see what opportunity is missed.
- zby 9y ago
  6 years ago it was already too late for CPU mining (at least after March when I tried it).
  - tempay 9y ago
    It could have been using a GPU.
    - holtalanm 9y ago
      correct. It was on a VERY low-end laptop GPU though, so returns probably wouldn't have been very high, which is why I shut it off.
- ttul 9y ago
  Wishing I had not transferred one Bitcoin to someone back in 2011 just to show them how it works. And then erased that old MacBook that was loaded with 10 BTC in its wallet.
- shmageggy 9y ago
  This made me realize I think I just recycled the hard drive with my old bitcoin wallet on it. I had half a bitcoin that I mined in a few nights on my old Geforce 4 GPU. Fuck me!
conn01 9y ago
I think hackernews should rename to vcnews
chollida1 9y ago
I love bitcoin, this rise comes just 3 days after it had its biggest one day drop in a month. At this point it must be a CTA's dream instrument, all it does is seem to trade on momentum:) So if China shutting down exchanges, the CFTC coming out and claiming tokens used in ICO's fall under its jurisdiction, confusing regulations everywhere, and huge recent gains can't stop it, I'm not sure what will. As a side note, if there are any Bloomberg engineers around, come on VCCY<GO> is really awful. Put some time into it, its not like virtual currencies are going away any time soon.
- soVeryTired 9y ago
  CTAs tend to have built in risk control :)
  - chollida1 9y ago
    No one said they didn't:) Not a big deal most people don't understand that industry. The point I was going for is that CTA's, more than anyone else, love good momentum stories as they are the original trend followers.
api 9y ago
I've asked it before but: how is this a desirable characteristic for a currency? This level of deflation is as bad as too much inflation, though the problems it creates are different. Why would anyone actually use Bitcoin if simply sitting on it will yield a greater return than investing it in anything? So far it seems more deflationary than gold. If this keeps happening won't this actually crowd out the currency application and lead to Bitcoin becoming nothing more than a speculative bubble? It's hard to determine but I'd love to see some data on Bitcoin use vs. its price in USD/EUR.
- zby 9y ago
  To be useful money needs some reasonable market cap - because it could not store or move too much value without that.
- baddox 9y ago
  Being a “currency,” for any definition of that term, doesn’t have to be and isn’t the only criterion for success for Bitcoin.
- heelhook 9y ago
  You’re thinking about this wrong; bitcoin is meant to be used more as a store of value rather than as a currency for transactions. You should think about it more as hold than dollars. Also, new assets and specially new asset classes are predictably going to have high volatility at first, until the market knows what to make out of it and finds the right value for it. In relative terms, bitcoin is still a pretty new asset, specially since new people are coming into the market every month.
- rsynnott 9y ago
  > If this keeps happening won't this actually crowd out the currency application and lead to Bitcoin becoming nothing more than a speculative bubble? I think it'd be reasonable to say that this has largely already happened. Beyond the volatility, it's terribly impractical to use as an actual currency due to the transaction fees these days.
  - 9y ago
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
virtuexru 9y ago
I always recommend this article to anyone interested in Bitcoin, it's a great read: https://fee.org/articles/what-gave-bitcoin-its-value/ https://fee.org/articles/what-gave-bitcoin-its-value/
diminish 9y ago
Basically I don't see any target value for bitcoins and there's no bubble since this is a once upon a life time opportunity. Basically since number of bitcoins will be limited - total value of all bitcoins must be a fraction to total human wealth. Tech leaders and SV have strongly stood behind bitcoin and blockchain with convincing arguments, and put their credibility behind it and each day by increasing valuation of Bitcoin they prove why tech matters on this planet. Edit: /S If a bubble forms and people's finances get hurt, that'll have very negative effect on the credibility of SV and tech sadly.
- albertgoeswoof 9y ago
  > convincing arguments well, not really Don't get me wrong, blockchain tech is really amazing. But whether it has an actual use in the real world is very much TBD.
- jonknee 9y ago
  > Basically since number of bitcoins will be limited - total value of all bitcoins must be a fraction to total human wealth. Or they could be worth nothing?
  - Jtsummers 9y ago
    0 is a fraction of total human wealth.
    - stcredzero 9y ago
      A fraction is defined as a quantity that is not a whole number. (Going by Google's "define: fraction") Is zero a whole number?
  - kovek 9y ago
    Are there no valuable use cases with Bitcoin?
    - rsynnott 9y ago
electic 9y ago
If it makes anyone feel better. When the Bitcoin whitepaper came out, I read it and thought it was neat. Then came the first mining program and I installed it on my computer and it ran the CPU up. I said, "This is dumb." and uninstalled it. Huge mistake.
- sp00ls 9y ago
  Similarly, I was living in dorms (free electricity) at the time bitcoin made its debut (well not really, but it was still very early). I started mining using my fairly beefy desktop. After months I decided it wasn't worth the small amount of 'money' I had made and just deleted everything. That PC is long gone, wonder how much money I would have now if I still had that wallet. Damn.
- chrisabrams 9y ago
  It's not too late. If you think that it was dumb then, imagine 10 years from now..
  - electic 9y ago
    Oh, I totally agree. It is not too late at all to buy now. However mining, can't do it as an individual.
    - chrisabrams 9y ago
      Yeah profitable mining is going away soon too with all the chains trying to reduce energy consumption with proof of stake :O was fun while it lasted.
      - ktta 9y ago
        Not Bitcoin, no. I think it would be atleast a decade before talks for PoS start.
  - joering2 9y ago
    Unsure why you being downvoted; its actually quite good advise. If you disagree then let's get into time machine and I tell you 10 years ago that one bitcoin will be $6,000. As laughable back then as it is to think one bitcoin will be $25,000, which I believe will become once all coins are mined and there is limited quantity available in circulation.
Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
Remember that bitcoin pizza? Today worth $60 million.
the_stc 9y ago
I do not mind having Bitcoin keep going up. But as a business owner that relies heavily on cryptocurrencies, I would really love it if things were more stable. We are building a business on privacy, anonymity, and cryptocurrency as a backbone. We're extrajurisdictional, so banking to USD or other fiat is very tricky. Tether is a great idea, but the current company looks very unstable. If there's a crash, they seem unlikely to be solvent. Our company would pay a premium to get into a solid, pegged-to-USD coin. At least 5% if not more. Or even a coin that's pegged to an ETF. Of course we cannot satisfy KYC laws so it'd need to be a freely traded token, really. I really hate the "hodlrs" and the complete lack of focus on how this is supposed to work for real businesses that use it as a means to an end, and not an end by itself. I see this a lot talking about the 2x chain. People sometimes discuss it in terms of what's better for the BTC price. Why is that a goal at all? Other than the obvious reason of making current users richer?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- erentz 9y ago
  If you want to transact in USD shouldn’t you use USD rather than a different currency (BTC)? And if you want to use a block chain to transact in USD shouldn’t you use something designed for that like Ripple?
  - the_stc 9y ago
    That'd be swell. As an EJC, transacting in USD is more difficult, hence we must use cryptocurrencies. Is Ripple pegged to USD? I do not want anything complicated, just a coin or token that has a 1:1 ratio with USD. Charge me 5% or 10% to buy them or 5% on cash out.
- ikazaki 9y ago
  I believe this is because we are still very low on the adoption curve. Once it gains mass adoption and it is used more as a form of payment, the price will stabilize. 2x was made by businesses for businesses. It is supposed to solve the high fees and long confirmation times (at least on the short term) which are crippling businesses.
koolba 9y ago
What's the volume / liquidity of Bitcoin these days? Say you're Tim Draper and you're sitting on 30K (bought at $600 from the US Gov in 2014 [1]). Would it be possible to offload them for $180M or is the order book too thin? [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Draper#Bitcoin_auction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Draper#Bitcoin_auction
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- dharma1 9y ago
  Pretty good but still prob wouldn't want to dump that in a single day/single exchange https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/volume/24-hour/ https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/volume/24-hour/
todayiamme 9y ago
Say what you will, but this irrational exuberance is precisely that; irrational. I knew about Bitcoin 6+ years ago, when I read a blog about someone buying a sandwich with this newfangled currency. But I didn't rush to mine it. I didn't rush to buy it either. I was simply indifferent to the prospect of it, and I don't regret it. Here's why. Bitcoin's thesis is that it possesses inherent value because it will become a medium of exchange i.e. people will trade in bitcoin, thereby using it as a store of value, and making it valuable. And yet, that hasn't happened yet. While it's hard to estimate the velocity of money for something like Bitcoin, and the "Bitcoin days destroyed" metric isn't accurate either, it is quite clear that as Bitcoin as a store of wealth rises rapidly in value, its utility as a currency correspondingly drops in value; thereby invalidating the central thesis on which the question of its value rests. Here are rough estimations for the velocity of money for BTC; http://charts.woobull.com/bitcoin-velocity/ http://charts.woobull.com/bitcoin-velocity/ https://charts.bitcoin.com/chart/velocity https://charts.bitcoin.com/chart/velocity Even if these are filled with inaccuracies, the general trend seems to be quite clear. People use BTC as an asset not a currency. And as such, the idea that it's a savvy investment belies the fact that it's value as an asset is entirely psychological in nature and completely ungrounded from actual metrics like fiat currency (though again fiat currency does run on trust, but the difference is that it's a marker of exchange thereby measuring the economy and its productivity gives an estimate of its value). Further, even if it was a valid currency, then what we're witnessing over here is hyperdeflation in action, and it is fundamentally irrational to expect it to continue. The reasoning for the above points is quite straightforward and simple. The magic of money and capitalism isn't that you can hoard gold and get rich. No, it's that you can make money. It's the idea that value can be created and destroyed through the economic actions of human beings, and that money as a concept serves as a measure of wealth as opposed to wealth. It's why we moved away from the gold standard - it was fundamentally irrational and in the long run, would have caused the exact phenomena we're seeing with BTC. If you really think that somehow as a store of value BTC is going to become some significant fraction of human wealth, then go ahead buy this. But if you give it any rational thought whatsoever, then you'll see clearly that this is the tulip mania in action and that timing your actions to beat the market is even more irrational. So no I don't regret passing up on buying BTC, precisely because it was and is a lottery ticket and I'm not in the business of buying lottery tickets no matter how well conceived they may be. Right now, the most rational thing to do is to bet for it to fail. And then figure out how to time that bet. Because the farther it rises, the harder it will fall. Good luck.
buttershakes 9y ago
I think this is just the tip of the iceberg for Bitcoin. Time will tell if I am right or wrong. If we think of it as simply a currency, or a store of value we can place limits on its value based on what we know about gold, fiat currency, etc. We can extrapolate and come up with a valuation that we think is appropriate. However, its not just any of those things. It's a paradigm shift in digital ownership of value, and could potentially be a record of and a secure digital token for a huge variety of physical goods, virtual services, etc. Whether this happens is largely dependent on scale, but we will leave that argument for another thread since the troll army will show up. Bitcoin is something entirely new in the history of value transfer and ownership, stop trying to compare it directly with the systems that will be eclipsed by it.

75 points by electic 9y ago

Probably related to http://btcgpu.org/ http://btcgpu.org/ (another fork of the chain coming in 4 days) It's interesting that despite bitcoin being deflationary by design, you can just fork the chain and do quantitative easing that way. Pretty much all the cited benefits of cryptocurrencies are disappearing in implementation, unfortunately.

aboodman 9y ago
It only works if people use the forks, which ... doesn't seem to be happening yet.
- zanny 9y ago
  The incentives are completely backwards on why anyone would want to. All the value is trapped in the blockstream bitcoin core client - deviating from that sets the value of all those coins, all of which were already mined and are already owned by wallets that may never even come on the fork. Thats 80% of all coins. Yeah, your fork can kind of start from scratch, act like the 16.6m coins that came before never happened, that most of them will be dead forever, and start mining from there and treating all the new coins mined (of the remaining 4.4m let) as the monetary base. But then you get any momentum and suddenly "dead" money is flooding the market from legacy wallets. Wallets that didn't contribute to the growth of the fork, that didn't harden the blockchains integrity on the fork, that simply installed a program and had a fortune ready to go with no effort and no commitment to that currency at all. There is already the problem that vast amounts of bitcoins blockchain hasn't moved in years. Millions of coins that are being treated as dead that could come back to life at any time. But there is no way to know what wallets are actually gone - dat files lost, passwords forgotten, etc - and which ones are just waiting to cash out. Fundamentally the problem is there are two groups of people here - futurists that want to overturn fiat, and investors that want to make (fiat) money. It is why we have not seen a cryptocurrency that can behave like real money yet - the closest we have gotten was dogecoin, which started as a joke and was completely abandoned by its original developers and left to rot. To make a cash replacement, it would need enough minting of coins to cause inflation enough to keep people from stockpiling coins. But who wants to mine your cryptocurrency or hold it early on in its life if its depreciating in value from its own algorithms? The whole point of why people adopt early into cryptocurrencies is that if they blow up they just made millions from trivial amounts of effort by just being there first. Classic pyramid scheme. But all crypto today has to be a pyramid scheme to get the adoption to start having momentum to operate as it is intended. Without the gamble of making a fortune how many people would have early on started bitcoin startups or invested in mining? If the promise was that a coin worth a dollar today would be worth a dollar ten years from now because the blockchain itself would generate enough coins to peg the exchange rate, the only first mover advantage you get is in how much less electricity it costs to mine early on assuming the coin takes off and becomes popular. That can still be an incentive. It is still a gamble of course, but it is also an incentive. The problem is when you are one of those investor types with some large cash in a small neighborhood shopping for your next get rich quick scheme the humble coin trying to push the future is a lot less interesting than the pyramid scheme promising ludicrous returns if it can get enough fools to buy into it.
bdcravens 9y ago
I've seen zero discussion of that fork, and I'm pretty active on /r/bitcoin (and other places in the community) I did find a few references to it, only on searching, and most seem to think it's a scam. https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/734i6s/as_it_turns_out_adam_backblockstream_may_be/ https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/734i6s/as_it_turns_out...

leoharsha2 9y ago

Can anyone please tell me Is it a good time to buy ETH/BTC or am I too late?

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
aqme28 9y ago
No one knows the future. Do your research and see if you think it'll go up or not. There's still a good chance you'll be wrong. Don't gamble what you cannot lose.
0x4f3759df 9y ago
This was asked recently, answers include {yes, no, maybe, I don't know} https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15491775 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15491775
- JoelTheSuperior 9y ago
  Can you repeat the question?
underyx 9y ago
If you get and aggregate everyone's advice you'll get to the conclusion that the correct price for Bitcoin is exactly where it's at now.
- baddox 9y ago
  Not quite. You’d have to weight each person’s advice for their willingness (and ability) to trade Bitcoin.
- pmoriarty 9y ago
  You're assuming it's priced fairly and there's no cheating or other manipulation in the price.
vkou 9y ago

holtalanm 9y ago

wishing i had actually kept my mining program running when I experimentally installed it and ran it for about 30 minutes ~5-6 years ago now.

lawlessone 9y ago
if you have an account with any only pool you should probably check just to see,i still had a little in one pool after all that time.
diminish 9y ago
I remember those times - does anyone know how many bitcoins one could make per computing time, every year since the beginning to see what opportunity is missed.
zby 9y ago
6 years ago it was already too late for CPU mining (at least after March when I tried it).
- tempay 9y ago
  It could have been using a GPU.
  - holtalanm 9y ago
    correct. It was on a VERY low-end laptop GPU though, so returns probably wouldn't have been very high, which is why I shut it off.
ttul 9y ago
Wishing I had not transferred one Bitcoin to someone back in 2011 just to show them how it works. And then erased that old MacBook that was loaded with 10 BTC in its wallet.
shmageggy 9y ago
This made me realize I think I just recycled the hard drive with my old bitcoin wallet on it. I had half a bitcoin that I mined in a few nights on my old Geforce 4 GPU. Fuck me!

conn01 9y ago

I think hackernews should rename to vcnews

chollida1 9y ago

I love bitcoin, this rise comes just 3 days after it had its biggest one day drop in a month. At this point it must be a CTA's dream instrument, all it does is seem to trade on momentum:) So if China shutting down exchanges, the CFTC coming out and claiming tokens used in ICO's fall under its jurisdiction, confusing regulations everywhere, and huge recent gains can't stop it, I'm not sure what will. As a side note, if there are any Bloomberg engineers around, come on VCCY<GO> is really awful. Put some time into it, its not like virtual currencies are going away any time soon.

soVeryTired 9y ago
CTAs tend to have built in risk control :)
- chollida1 9y ago
  No one said they didn't:) Not a big deal most people don't understand that industry. The point I was going for is that CTA's, more than anyone else, love good momentum stories as they are the original trend followers.

api 9y ago

I've asked it before but: how is this a desirable characteristic for a currency? This level of deflation is as bad as too much inflation, though the problems it creates are different. Why would anyone actually use Bitcoin if simply sitting on it will yield a greater return than investing it in anything? So far it seems more deflationary than gold. If this keeps happening won't this actually crowd out the currency application and lead to Bitcoin becoming nothing more than a speculative bubble? It's hard to determine but I'd love to see some data on Bitcoin use vs. its price in USD/EUR.

zby 9y ago
To be useful money needs some reasonable market cap - because it could not store or move too much value without that.
baddox 9y ago
Being a “currency,” for any definition of that term, doesn’t have to be and isn’t the only criterion for success for Bitcoin.
heelhook 9y ago
You’re thinking about this wrong; bitcoin is meant to be used more as a store of value rather than as a currency for transactions. You should think about it more as hold than dollars. Also, new assets and specially new asset classes are predictably going to have high volatility at first, until the market knows what to make out of it and finds the right value for it. In relative terms, bitcoin is still a pretty new asset, specially since new people are coming into the market every month.
rsynnott 9y ago
> If this keeps happening won't this actually crowd out the currency application and lead to Bitcoin becoming nothing more than a speculative bubble? I think it'd be reasonable to say that this has largely already happened. Beyond the volatility, it's terribly impractical to use as an actual currency due to the transaction fees these days.
- 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

virtuexru 9y ago

I always recommend this article to anyone interested in Bitcoin, it's a great read: https://fee.org/articles/what-gave-bitcoin-its-value/ https://fee.org/articles/what-gave-bitcoin-its-value/

diminish 9y ago

Basically I don't see any target value for bitcoins and there's no bubble since this is a once upon a life time opportunity. Basically since number of bitcoins will be limited - total value of all bitcoins must be a fraction to total human wealth. Tech leaders and SV have strongly stood behind bitcoin and blockchain with convincing arguments, and put their credibility behind it and each day by increasing valuation of Bitcoin they prove why tech matters on this planet. Edit: /S If a bubble forms and people's finances get hurt, that'll have very negative effect on the credibility of SV and tech sadly.

albertgoeswoof 9y ago
> convincing arguments well, not really Don't get me wrong, blockchain tech is really amazing. But whether it has an actual use in the real world is very much TBD.
jonknee 9y ago
> Basically since number of bitcoins will be limited - total value of all bitcoins must be a fraction to total human wealth. Or they could be worth nothing?
- Jtsummers 9y ago
  0 is a fraction of total human wealth.
  - stcredzero 9y ago
    A fraction is defined as a quantity that is not a whole number. (Going by Google's "define: fraction") Is zero a whole number?
- kovek 9y ago
  Are there no valuable use cases with Bitcoin?
  - rsynnott 9y ago

electic 9y ago

If it makes anyone feel better. When the Bitcoin whitepaper came out, I read it and thought it was neat. Then came the first mining program and I installed it on my computer and it ran the CPU up. I said, "This is dumb." and uninstalled it. Huge mistake.

sp00ls 9y ago
Similarly, I was living in dorms (free electricity) at the time bitcoin made its debut (well not really, but it was still very early). I started mining using my fairly beefy desktop. After months I decided it wasn't worth the small amount of 'money' I had made and just deleted everything. That PC is long gone, wonder how much money I would have now if I still had that wallet. Damn.
chrisabrams 9y ago
It's not too late. If you think that it was dumb then, imagine 10 years from now..
- electic 9y ago
  Oh, I totally agree. It is not too late at all to buy now. However mining, can't do it as an individual.
  - chrisabrams 9y ago
    Yeah profitable mining is going away soon too with all the chains trying to reduce energy consumption with proof of stake :O was fun while it lasted.
    - ktta 9y ago
      Not Bitcoin, no. I think it would be atleast a decade before talks for PoS start.
- joering2 9y ago
  Unsure why you being downvoted; its actually quite good advise. If you disagree then let's get into time machine and I tell you 10 years ago that one bitcoin will be $6,000. As laughable back then as it is to think one bitcoin will be $25,000, which I believe will become once all coins are mined and there is limited quantity available in circulation.

Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago

Remember that bitcoin pizza? Today worth $60 million.

the_stc 9y ago

I do not mind having Bitcoin keep going up. But as a business owner that relies heavily on cryptocurrencies, I would really love it if things were more stable. We are building a business on privacy, anonymity, and cryptocurrency as a backbone. We're extrajurisdictional, so banking to USD or other fiat is very tricky. Tether is a great idea, but the current company looks very unstable. If there's a crash, they seem unlikely to be solvent. Our company would pay a premium to get into a solid, pegged-to-USD coin. At least 5% if not more. Or even a coin that's pegged to an ETF. Of course we cannot satisfy KYC laws so it'd need to be a freely traded token, really. I really hate the "hodlrs" and the complete lack of focus on how this is supposed to work for real businesses that use it as a means to an end, and not an end by itself. I see this a lot talking about the 2x chain. People sometimes discuss it in terms of what's better for the BTC price. Why is that a goal at all? Other than the obvious reason of making current users richer?

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
erentz 9y ago
If you want to transact in USD shouldn’t you use USD rather than a different currency (BTC)? And if you want to use a block chain to transact in USD shouldn’t you use something designed for that like Ripple?
- the_stc 9y ago
  That'd be swell. As an EJC, transacting in USD is more difficult, hence we must use cryptocurrencies. Is Ripple pegged to USD? I do not want anything complicated, just a coin or token that has a 1:1 ratio with USD. Charge me 5% or 10% to buy them or 5% on cash out.
ikazaki 9y ago
I believe this is because we are still very low on the adoption curve. Once it gains mass adoption and it is used more as a form of payment, the price will stabilize. 2x was made by businesses for businesses. It is supposed to solve the high fees and long confirmation times (at least on the short term) which are crippling businesses.

koolba 9y ago

What's the volume / liquidity of Bitcoin these days? Say you're Tim Draper and you're sitting on 30K (bought at $600 from the US Gov in 2014 [1]). Would it be possible to offload them for $180M or is the order book too thin? [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Draper#Bitcoin_auction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Draper#Bitcoin_auction

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dharma1 9y ago
Pretty good but still prob wouldn't want to dump that in a single day/single exchange https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/volume/24-hour/ https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/volume/24-hour/

todayiamme 9y ago

Say what you will, but this irrational exuberance is precisely that; irrational. I knew about Bitcoin 6+ years ago, when I read a blog about someone buying a sandwich with this newfangled currency. But I didn't rush to mine it. I didn't rush to buy it either. I was simply indifferent to the prospect of it, and I don't regret it. Here's why. Bitcoin's thesis is that it possesses inherent value because it will become a medium of exchange i.e. people will trade in bitcoin, thereby using it as a store of value, and making it valuable. And yet, that hasn't happened yet. While it's hard to estimate the velocity of money for something like Bitcoin, and the "Bitcoin days destroyed" metric isn't accurate either, it is quite clear that as Bitcoin as a store of wealth rises rapidly in value, its utility as a currency correspondingly drops in value; thereby invalidating the central thesis on which the question of its value rests. Here are rough estimations for the velocity of money for BTC; http://charts.woobull.com/bitcoin-velocity/ http://charts.woobull.com/bitcoin-velocity/ https://charts.bitcoin.com/chart/velocity https://charts.bitcoin.com/chart/velocity Even if these are filled with inaccuracies, the general trend seems to be quite clear. People use BTC as an asset not a currency. And as such, the idea that it's a savvy investment belies the fact that it's value as an asset is entirely psychological in nature and completely ungrounded from actual metrics like fiat currency (though again fiat currency does run on trust, but the difference is that it's a marker of exchange thereby measuring the economy and its productivity gives an estimate of its value). Further, even if it was a valid currency, then what we're witnessing over here is hyperdeflation in action, and it is fundamentally irrational to expect it to continue. The reasoning for the above points is quite straightforward and simple. The magic of money and capitalism isn't that you can hoard gold and get rich. No, it's that you can make money. It's the idea that value can be created and destroyed through the economic actions of human beings, and that money as a concept serves as a measure of wealth as opposed to wealth. It's why we moved away from the gold standard - it was fundamentally irrational and in the long run, would have caused the exact phenomena we're seeing with BTC. If you really think that somehow as a store of value BTC is going to become some significant fraction of human wealth, then go ahead buy this. But if you give it any rational thought whatsoever, then you'll see clearly that this is the tulip mania in action and that timing your actions to beat the market is even more irrational. So no I don't regret passing up on buying BTC, precisely because it was and is a lottery ticket and I'm not in the business of buying lottery tickets no matter how well conceived they may be. Right now, the most rational thing to do is to bet for it to fail. And then figure out how to time that bet. Because the farther it rises, the harder it will fall. Good luck.

buttershakes 9y ago

I think this is just the tip of the iceberg for Bitcoin. Time will tell if I am right or wrong. If we think of it as simply a currency, or a store of value we can place limits on its value based on what we know about gold, fiat currency, etc. We can extrapolate and come up with a valuation that we think is appropriate. However, its not just any of those things. It's a paradigm shift in digital ownership of value, and could potentially be a record of and a secure digital token for a huge variety of physical goods, virtual services, etc. Whether this happens is largely dependent on scale, but we will leave that argument for another thread since the troll army will show up. Bitcoin is something entirely new in the history of value transfer and ownership, stop trying to compare it directly with the systems that will be eclipsed by it.