I think the behaviour of Bitcoin price (not the technology) reflects some social phenomenon rather than the real economy. And it is precisely why it is interesting.
Isn't "the real economy" by definition a social phenomenon?
Bitcoin Surges Past $7,000 to Extend Record Rally
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Re: Bitcoin Surges Past $7,000 to Extend Record Rally
#212I 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…
It's a pyramid scheme in a sense that you depend on others to keep buying the bitcoin. If everyone suddenly lost trust in bitcoin you would lose everything, because technically, it has zero real value.
That's why all the "bitcoin enthusiasts" keep hyping it up. They know that once the mania stops, people who didn't cash out will be left holding the bag.
Currently, it's nothing more than a speculative asset. You might as well invest in high-yield risky stocks.
The blockchain itself is pretty great though.
Re: Bitcoin Surges Past $7,000 to Extend Record Rally
#213Earlier 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…
Gold without millenia of collective psychology to give it staying power as a store of value once more useful, cheaper, and faster to transact cryptocurrencies get any uptake.
Bitcoin isn't suffering from a lack of uptake, right now.
Re: Bitcoin Surges Past $7,000 to Extend Record Rally
#214To me an asset that moves 15% in a day, and which no-one knows what it's truly worth, isn't great as a store of value. I'm not going to speculate about where bitcoin will be trading when it becomes a stable, useful asset, but in order to justify a market cap anywhere near this high it will eventually need to generate actual utility for its users. Can someone explain where that will come from? Cheap currency conversio…
Gold, art and wine all have a utility value that's way below their "store of value" value. Bitcoin is just a more convenient store with an equally insignificant utility value. Whether Bitcoin can persist while offering so little value I don't know, just saying these valuations are not unheard of in the asset world. Just look at what people pay for mediocre Van Gogh paintings I wouldn't hang in my toilet..
I'm so tired of people trying to validate and prop up cryptocurrency with horrible comments and logic. Hanging a mediocre Van Gogh above your toilet? Unbelievable.
Re: Bitcoin Surges Past $7,000 to Extend Record Rally
#215Earlier 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.
In some ways we all are but I think we are forgetting the most important aspect. Using it for payments. That utility use case is more important because at some point the price will go down
Re: Bitcoin Surges Past $7,000 to Extend Record Rally
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> a single non-illegal use case that isn't better served by a traditional, centralized database You know how PayPal blocked payments to Wikileaks? (Back when it wasn't yet obviously evil.) That's what traditional, centralized databases can do for you. Note that donations to Wikileaks weren't illegal, governments were just efficient in pressuring PayPal into enforcing rules that didn't even exist officially . Also, tr…
> the possibility of near-instantaneous money transfers.
Maybe the possibility. In actual fact, don't bitcoin transaction confirmations sometimes take >24 hours?
Re: Bitcoin Surges Past $7,000 to Extend Record Rally
#217Notice how almost all news of Bitcoin now are about its price. Bitcoin used to be exciting in both technical and economical aspects, but has now become just a store of value entirely driven by speculation. Other technically superior cryptocurrencies (e.g. Monero, Ethereum) have replaced most of its usecases, boasting much faster and cheaper transactions and real anonymity in the case of Monero. Bitcoin takes more tha…
Bitcoin's value is given by the trust people put in it. Just like with the fiat currencies as a matter of fact, because I don't know of any of them to be backed by anything else than trust. Of course, the US dollar has the whole US economy and the biggest army in the world as its plus, but it also has its minuses: the US treasury can and does print as many as it wants, in the detriment of ALL USD holders. Bitcoin's p…
> Litecoin, zCash, Monero and most of the others are bitcoin forks.
Nope. All of these are derivatives of Bitcoin, but none of them are forks. A fork, by definition, shares a genesis block with the parent currency. This is in contrast to a "client fork", where the Bitcoin codebase was modified to create a new blockchain with or without changes in protocol.
Most forks of Bitcoin have been intentional, and the "lesser" chain has died on purpose. Off the top of my head, existing forks are:
BitcoinXT: created in late 2014, it allowed 8MB blocks instead of the 1MB limit for Bitcoin. As of mid-2016, it died due to lack of miner support.
Bitcoin Classic: created in early 2016, it allowed 2MB blocks. It was effectively dead as of early 2017.
Bitcoin Cash (a/k/a BCash, BCH): created in August 2017. It eschewed SegWit, and increased block size to 8MB. It's not dead yet and seems to have a base level of support both in terms of miners and in terms of price. I expect that it will die eventually... but who knows. It is by far the best-supported Bitcoin fork, and there are many who believe that it's the "real Bitcoin" in the sense that it conforms more closely to the original whitepaper.
There are a couple of other forks planned in the near future as well.
Re: Bitcoin Surges Past $7,000 to Extend Record Rally
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're confusing the present state of cryptocurrency as being its conclusion. Yes, Bitcoin was the first mover, and Bitcoin has the most buy-in. But cryptocurrency in general does not have global buy-in as a way to buy and sell stuff. A) Barriers to initially acquiring crypto coins remain a bit high. B) Expense of transactions remains way too high, C) Transactions are way too slow, and D) For Bitcoin in parti…
Wouldn’t there only be a tiny chance the guy buying your phone is sophisticated enough to double spend? That’s what I never understood about small bitcoin purchases.
Yes. I've transacted quite a bit in person for Bitcoin, and I'm fine with an unconfirmed transaction as long as the value is less than $500 or so and I can see it in the transaction pool.
The way I see it, an unconfirmed Bitcoin transaction is still more trustworthy than a confirmed debit card transaction. At least with Bitcoin, I'm 100% sure the person has the money in the first place, and that once the transaction clears (in ~10 minutes), they can't reverse it later and stick me with the loss.
Re: Bitcoin Surges Past $7,000 to Extend Record Rally
#219Notice how almost all news of Bitcoin now are about its price. Bitcoin used to be exciting in both technical and economical aspects, but has now become just a store of value entirely driven by speculation. Other technically superior cryptocurrencies (e.g. Monero, Ethereum) have replaced most of its usecases, boasting much faster and cheaper transactions and real anonymity in the case of Monero. Bitcoin takes more tha…
Bitcoin's value is given by the trust people put in it. Just like with the fiat currencies as a matter of fact, because I don't know of any of them to be backed by anything else than trust. Of course, the US dollar has the whole US economy and the biggest army in the world as its plus, but it also has its minuses: the US treasury can and does print as many as it wants, in the detriment of ALL USD holders. Bitcoin's p…
Bitcoin's value is given by the trust people put in it.
Currency speculators don't give a damn about trust. They're not in it for the long term value that derives from the usefulness of Bitcoin, and that's the only thing you need trust for. They'll cash out when the price gets to a point where they're happy with their return. At that point either new speculators will get on board and keep the price high or the price will fall back to real value of Bitcoin.
Neither really changes the usefulness of Bitcoin or it's long term value as a currency.
Re: Bitcoin Surges Past $7,000 to Extend Record Rally
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cryptocurrencies have a niche use, mainly to buy things on the black market but also for small peer-to-peer international payments when other options are not practical. For this reason I don't expect that cryptocurrencies will completely disappear any time soon. However the value of bitcoin is mainly driven by speculation at this point, a currency that's so volatile is very difficult to use if you're a business. At b…
Big banks are already looking seriously into cryptocurrencies. Like seriously.
Big banks are looking into all kinds of high-risk speculative assets — as we've seen in 2008.