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Bitcoin Surges Past $7,000 to Extend Record Rally

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

#241

Post by ringaroundthetx »

davidmanescu wrote: post #88

To 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…

> To me an asset that moves 15% in a day

Perhaps the biggest derivatives house on the planet announcing that they are going address the specific concern makes it more useful? Because your exact rebuttal won't exist anymore.

CME Group is offering futures and options.

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

#242

Post by 3pt14159 »

duiker101 wrote: post #51

I don't know much about bitcoin i'll admit. And I was surpised the other day to read some comments where the poster was saying that the transaction price is somewhere in between 5$ - 20$. Isn't that like... a LOT? I thought the idea of Bitcoins was how easy it would be to make transactions but with a price like that I can image most smaller transactions are discouraged. Also, after the initial hype I haven't really s…

Here is what will happen in the long run:

Lightning networks will allow common people to transact and will semi-centralize the blockchain across a couple partners, kinda like banks. Over time and for the people that don't really need to be on chain, these banks will start taking over the transactions between each other and just broadcasting signatures from their bitcoin keys to match deposits vs obligations so that people can be assured that they have what they say they have. If you need to move $100k, you can always do it on the real blockchain, or from your bank to the real blockchain, but the chain is going to turn into the banking system.

Originally I thought there could only be one cryptocurrency, and that is at least for now looking to be incorrect. But I don't really know how all this plays out. There is a huge market incentive to get in on a coin early, but if there are infinite crytpocurrencies then they all get devalued. Probably the winners of the current system will use their money to push for regulations to stop new currencies from coming out. So Bitcoin, Etherium, etc will get entrenched. Then I'd guess maybe 3 to 10 currencies survive in the long run, provided they don't get regulated out of existence in the first place.

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

#243

Post by matthewmarkus »

vazamb wrote: post #8
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…

(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…

Bitcoin IS a central bank. It is an "alternative" central bank with a "deflationary" bias written in code and run and administered by a collective. Is that a good thing? Probably, from the perspective of providing competition to other central banks. Also, that's Bitcoin's core value proposition. Everything else (e.g., transaction speed) is secondary. Bitcoin will be a store of value as long as people believe its rules for creating Bitcoin are sound.

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

#244

Post by icahnvalyou »

eigenvalue wrote: post #225
LyndsySimon wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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"…

I believe the parent poster meant fork in the sense of forking the codebase, not a currency fork. And in the case of Litecoin at least, that is true.

YOU. Fucking hell. You took my go-to username.

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

#245

Post by mattpk »

jstanley wrote: post #60
weddpros wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Like a hyped startup, it doesn't do much yet It does plenty already. I live almost exclusively on Bitcoin. I only get income in Bitcoin, I pay with Bitcoin whenever possible, and I have a Bitcoin-funded debit card for when that's not possible.

Why? At the moment this seems like hassle, and possibly more expensive due to txn fees.

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

#246

Post by loki0505 »

I believe once you can start using your cryptocurrency as collateral for a loan, this space is going to go into the trillion(s).

check out Salt Lending. I know many waiting for it to open so they can get a 100k loan and put it back into crypto. This project has been fully licensed and regulated, and owned by the founder of shapeshift (erik vorhees)

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

#247

Post by kgwgk »

kibrad wrote: post #44
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

Regular money doesn’t climb.

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

#248

Post by abetusk »

110011 wrote: post #229

It's scary to see so much faith in bitcoin given it's horrendously wasteful proof-of-work scheme to avoid double spending. There are better alternatives that minimize latency nearly a hundred-fold and avoid proof-of-work altogether. Example: Algorand ( https://people.csail.mit.edu/nickolai/papers/gilad-algorand-... ) Even if this new cryptocurrency is "just" a proof of concept there are many others like it that are m…

Thanks for the link, I hadn't heard about Algorand. I don't claim to be really knowledgeable but I found an article on Coinbase that raises the question of whether Algorand needs (or should have?) incentives, so it looks like there's some debate as to whether Algorand is really viable?

[1] https://www.coindesk.com/no-incentive-algorand-blockchain-sp...

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

#249

Post by mcv »

jesusthatsgreat wrote: post #94
nickjj wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's pretty much what happened 500 years ago when people were selling everything they owned (including houses) to buy tulip bulbs[0]. Maybe it's not that bad yet, but it's looking to get that way. Spoiler alert: It ended really badly, but the people who got out early enough did make a lot of money. Plot twist: I did invest in bitcoins back when they were hovering around 2k and sold them for a small profit (~10%…

Tulips aren't finite in number nor can they be transferred on a decentralised ledger. Anyone can grow tulips and grow fake tulips that may look like tulips but are cheaper quicker to buy / make. You can't fake Bitcoin nor can you grow it indefinitely in your garden. People who make the tulip comparison simply don't understand the revolutionary aspect of the technology. It's like calling the internet tulip mania back…

What are "fake tulips"? There are many types of flower, but I've never heard any described as fake tulips. And why grow fake tulips when you can grow real ones?

And why is a decentralised ledger even relevant to tulips? They're not bits of code, they're real things you own irrespective of whether other people know you own it.

Also, you need to distinguish between the blockchain technology and the value of bitcoins. Blockchain does not depend on bitcoin. Bitcoin can fail while blockchain continues to change the world.

The real value of bitcoin at this moment comes from trust that the hype will continue. It might. Or it might not.

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

#250

Post by kgwgk »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #81
omgbananas wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I save more than I spend, so wouldn't I be mainly using it as a store of value rather than a medium of exchange?

Are you investing your savings? No. Are you just holding it in a bank with little or no interest, then yes.

Even holding it in a bank for low interest is investing. Using it as a store of value would be keeping it in your wallet or in a safe (as you would do with gold, for example).
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