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Bitcoin Surges Past $7,000 to Extend Record Rally

bloomberg.com

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Re: Bitcoin Surges Past $7,000 to Extend Record Rally

#41

Post by 0bsidian »

romanovcode wrote: post #32
0bsidian wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most of the people putting larger checks into Bitcoin are betting that it will become a store of value asset. Going from memory, a recent Bloomberg article called Bitcoin: "Gold for millennials". Or, similarly, Peter Thiel said recently [1]: "it's like a reserve form of money, it's like gold, and it's just a store of value. You don't need to use it to make payments." [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/26/bitcoi…

All people who are owning Bitcoin are betting.

Agreed, I was just trying to say that currently, one of the most popular investment theses for Bitcoin is "Gold for millennials", not "anonymous paypal" or "decentralised stripe".

Re: Bitcoin Surges Past $7,000 to Extend Record Rally

#42

Post by countryqt30 »

weddpros wrote: post #25
Andrenid wrote: post #2

I consider myself pretty tech-savvy, but I'm still completely lost as to whether Bitcoin is basically a pyramid scheme set to crash massively, or something huge that will continue climbing. I probably should've taken the time to mine some back when my friends were doing it and tried convincing me too. Ah well. (Queue heated comments from both sides. Discussing bitcoin is like bringing up religion AND politics at the…

There's no pyramid scheme. It's a hyped asset, to say the least, but there's no pyramid. Like a hyped startup, it doesn't do much yet, but it is promising, so people buy it. It may be "worth" much or zero in the end, it all depends on the final outcomes. It's also the easiest/cheapest/most open asset to trade (depending on where you trade). In the long term, Bitcoin can be seen as a safe heaven in case of economic ch…

Lmao. "Bitcoin" and "safe heaven" in one sentence. You made my day. #thehypeisreal

Re: Bitcoin Surges Past $7,000 to Extend Record Rally

#43

Post by charlesdm »

simias wrote: post #37
jypepin wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think with some sort of blockchain technologies, it would be harder for central banks to do things like what happened in Argentina, Greece or Zimbabwe.

That's a very broad claim. What "things" are you referring to and how would blockchain technology have prevented them? Very simply put the Greek financial crisis was mainly due to poor bookkeeping by the Greek institutions (that's being kind), rampant tax evasion and foreign governments (especially within the EU) not wanting to keep footing the bill. I'm not sure how a clever use of SHA-256 would solve these systemic…

I think he meant the fact that banks were locked down by the Central Bank and Greek people couldn't withdraw cash they legally owned (yet foreigners, with foreign cards etc could).

Re tax evasion, perhaps for small amounts, but not meaningful sums. That money still has to show up somewhere in the banking system, at some point, if a counterparty accepts it. You could make the same argument about diamonds or gold ingots (though those are obviously less convenient to move around)

Re: Bitcoin Surges Past $7,000 to Extend Record Rally

#44

Post by kibrad »

Andrenid wrote: post #2

I consider myself pretty tech-savvy, but I'm still completely lost as to whether Bitcoin is basically a pyramid scheme set to crash massively, or something huge that will continue climbing. I probably should've taken the time to mine some back when my friends were doing it and tried convincing me too. Ah well. (Queue heated comments from both sides. Discussing bitcoin is like bringing up religion AND politics at the…

"whether Bitcoin is basically a pyramid scheme set to crash massively, or something huge that will continue climbing" --- you can say the same thing about regular money

Re: Bitcoin Surges Past $7,000 to Extend Record Rally

#45

Post by tixocloud »

weddpros wrote: post #25
Andrenid wrote: post #2

I consider myself pretty tech-savvy, but I'm still completely lost as to whether Bitcoin is basically a pyramid scheme set to crash massively, or something huge that will continue climbing. I probably should've taken the time to mine some back when my friends were doing it and tried convincing me too. Ah well. (Queue heated comments from both sides. Discussing bitcoin is like bringing up religion AND politics at the…

There's no pyramid scheme. It's a hyped asset, to say the least, but there's no pyramid. Like a hyped startup, it doesn't do much yet, but it is promising, so people buy it. It may be "worth" much or zero in the end, it all depends on the final outcomes. It's also the easiest/cheapest/most open asset to trade (depending on where you trade). In the long term, Bitcoin can be seen as a safe heaven in case of economic ch…

The big risk for banks is that they need to know who you are and to a certain extent how to reach you if there ever was an investigation into your activities.

That being said, is there a way for a bank to always contact you? A bank designed for digital nomads would be a very interesting proposition for me given I'm in banking and am looking to discover new models.

Re: Bitcoin Surges Past $7,000 to Extend Record Rally

#46

Post by markatkinson »

The technology that spawned Bitcoin, and the technology that is being developed in its wake is the really exciting part of all of this.

So long as some catastrophic event doesn't completely tarnish the masses opinion on crypto's I think we are in for a wild ride (wild ride either way I suppose). Traditional banks, asset managers and transaction facilitators need to watch themselves.

I get the feeling that younger generations (Cant wait and fingers crossed.

Re: Bitcoin Surges Past $7,000 to Extend Record Rally

#47

Post by eterm »

artur_makly wrote: post #10

whats baffling to me is its lack of utlitity, application, and overall adoption when compared to ETH. So at this point (to me) BTC is a pure pyramid scheme — a digital casino

It has utility for ransomware. Even a niche utility can bootstrap an ecosystem. Add layers and layers of speculation above that kernel and it is a feedback loop.

As long as speculators refuse to sell, people need to spend more and more for ransoms (or equivalently ransomware writers have to demand less denominated by bitcoin), driving up the price as long as those destroyed through ransomware outstrips those created by mining.

Re: Bitcoin Surges Past $7,000 to Extend Record Rally

#48

Post by weddpros »

ForHackernews wrote: post #15
vazamb wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(i am somewhat familiar with the tech but don't follow the business side of bitcoin) what I find weird is the forks. A major selling point of bitcoin is that there will ever be only 21 Mio coins. You know, unless there is a hard fork and now there are suddenly twice as many coins. Presumably one of the resulting coins' value will drop but you are still creating value out of thin air, something that the crypto people…

> I am sure blockchain tech will be hugely successful in the banking and government sector Are you? Why? So far, no bitcoin/blockchain advocates have been able to explain to me a single non-illegal use case that isn't better served by a traditional, centralized database. A single large Postgres instance could handle all the global transaction volume of bitcoin, and it would be faster and orders of magnitude more ener…

Imagine you don't want a single person to control everything in your country (dictator), and you don't want a single person to control your currency.

Against dictators, we have democracy.

Against a centrally controlled currency, there's not much but crypto currencies. They're actually democratic, the majority wins.

Also, I don't want to be the one who will handle security for the single server with a Postgres database that has 100B$ in it. Do you? Do you want to be on call when the RAID array crashes or the datacenter goes dark?

I do believe there will be alternatives to proof of work, but a single database server isn't one of them.

Re: Bitcoin Surges Past $7,000 to Extend Record Rally

#49

Post by marcosscriven »

There’s no way I’d take this level of risk for a significant sum, but just to play with Bitcoin, and see my own transaction in the blockchain, I bought £100 in September that’s now worth £200.

It’s of course tempting to imagine doubling my entire savings in just two months, but so too could they have halved, or worse.

Re: Bitcoin Surges Past $7,000 to Extend Record Rally

#50

Post by pbhjpbhj »

romanovcode wrote: post #32
0bsidian wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most of the people putting larger checks into Bitcoin are betting that it will become a store of value asset. Going from memory, a recent Bloomberg article called Bitcoin: "Gold for millennials". Or, similarly, Peter Thiel said recently [1]: "it's like a reserve form of money, it's like gold, and it's just a store of value. You don't need to use it to make payments." [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/26/bitcoi…

All people who are owning Bitcoin are betting.

Ultimately that's true of any non-backed currency (and those too I suppose) isn't it, it's just the bet looks far safer for a country/region wide fiat currency.

I wonder if much of the medium term success of Bitcoin has been because the money put in couldn't be laundered readily in any other way, so whilst Bitcoin is a relatively high risk the alternative was just to dump the money without a way to use it?

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