My dad just texted me today asking if I owned bitcoin and if he should pick some up. I described it as uninsured highly volatile fine art(can be destroyed/lost) with a huge counter-party risk if he doesn't have the technical ability to store his own coins. Does anyone out there have a better analogy to scare family/friends away from it?
Why are you trying to scare them? Just explain to them that it is high risk. But there is a strong potential future for btc, and in spite of all the fear mongering, BTC has so far come back from every crash. You're not just throwing away money if you spend a couple hundred of your otherwise disposable income on some btc. Buying at any point in the past would have yielded a payoff today.
One of the Biggest Bitcoin Exchanges Just Added 100,000 Users in a Single Day
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Re: One of the Biggest Bitcoin Exchanges Just Added 100,000 Users in a Single Day
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except the majority of customers don't want to pre-purchase gift cards to shop at a retailer, but instead want to spend as soon as they make the decision to purchase. Likewise, the frequency of chargebacks is so low it doesn't justify waiting up to 10 minutes to buy something for every purchase.
If both the shopper & retail store are using the same BTC exchange, or exchanges that trust each other, the exchange can just move the coins internally, which is instant. Retail outlets could also share information about scammers & create a blacklist of who not to trust, and then just accept the small amount of risk. Like you said, credit cards also have this problem but the frequency of chargebacks is low enough tha…
Re: One of the Biggest Bitcoin Exchanges Just Added 100,000 Users in a Single Day
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not OP but as someone familiar with BTC tech / history I still haven't discovered any real use for it. As in, issues 99% of people in first-world countries have with fiat that it solves, rather than exacerbate (let alone the other massive hassles with using BTC). It seems to only exist for speculation. Its meteoric rise in the face of all this screams bubble to me. (But.. I've also been saying this for a while.)
For most economic bubbles, one way you can track/detect them via correlated market is signals that diverge. For example, the housing bubble in 2008 was detected when rental and mortgage prices diverged greatly. Since the bare-bones value of Bitcoin is tied to the cost of computation power and electricity to mine, you could theoretically track the price of bitcoin vs. the cost of the computational power to mine bitcoi…
Re: One of the Biggest Bitcoin Exchanges Just Added 100,000 Users in a Single Day
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Meh. If they wanted to they could fine me ten bajillion dollars for having a pirated version of Zootopia on my harddrive. I guess my words could bite me in the ass but I am fairly confident as a non-dealer I'm not exactly a target. Probably on a radar for when the Fed runs out of Big Fish, but for now probably fine.
Forever is what you need to worry about since you’ve posted this on the internet, not for now.
Re: One of the Biggest Bitcoin Exchanges Just Added 100,000 Users in a Single Day
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Two tips: 1. Don't keep your BTC in any exchange account for very long, and check the popular forums for people complaining about transactions being held up before transferring BTC into your account. Lots of people got screwed by MtGox, and it can happen on any exchange. 2. Don't spend any money other than money you would be willing to give away for free (totally discretionary money). The bottom has fallen out of mar…
Hmm, I have a problem with comparing BTC to tulips, houses, or beanie babies, because there never was a powerful and active market for exchanging beanie babies for real world product (i.e. functioning as currency) as we have seen for BTC and buying drugs or software. I also don't like the comparison to .com stocks because those are already an instrument (stocks), which represent company values, and the collapse of an…
To tulips and beanie babies: There were direct substitutes (other flowers and other stuffed animals) in terms of the actual utility, but tulip prices shot up in 1637- even investors bought tulip contracts not because they needed them, but because they were speculating on the value. Eventually demand leveled out, and the prices stopped going up. When the prices stopped going up, the speculators got out, and prices went down fast. The premium status of being the preferred flower or the preferred toy didn't help any more. How could this be like BTC? There are cryptocurrencies that are direct substitutes like LTC, but BTC is preferred and has a lot of investors purely for speculation. Once demand levels off (it must, there are a max of 7 billion people that can buy it), the speculators will get out, and prices will come down. Why hasn't it happened yet? BTC is artificially scarce due to block difficulty increases and fixed BTC being added for each block. The limited supply is maintaining price support for now, but like I said, once demand levels off, the fixed supply won't be as big of a price driver.
Similar to houses and .com stocks: Houses have real utility (you can use it for shelter). Stocks have real utility (you own a piece of a profit making entity). BTC has some real utility (you can transfer wealth outside of the regulation of governments and banks). However, these bubbles happened because instead of trading on a firm foundation value, people started expecting profits. The castle in the sky theory does work, but only if enough people believe in it. Once confidence faltered (either that people would continue to buy houses or that .com stocks would continue to print money), the castles in the sky fell, and prices fell back to their firm foundation value (a house in Las Vegas that I looked at went from $400k down to $100k- basically the price of raw materials and cheap labor). BTC's price right now is WAY over it's firm foundation utility of being a wealth transfer vehicle. It does have some value, but if enough people decide that a couple other cryptocoins can do the job with less risk than BTC, then prices for BTC will go down to it's intrinsic value- mostly related to the price of energy. It's hard to tell where this will settle, because ASICs are getting more efficient, and the block difficulty changes. But I guarantee you it will be way under $6k.
So these things aren't exactly the same, but there are lots of similarities with previous bubbles in the past. I'm not saying to stay away from BTC, but you had better be willing to lose your investment. There are a lot of people in the market that are only looking for a quick buck, and if they get out before you do then you are going to lose most of your investment. If you aren't desperate to make money off your investment, you will be happy with closing a position early instead of riding the crash into the ground. Closing early makes you the person with the quick buck and makes someone else the fool that lost their shirt.
Re: One of the Biggest Bitcoin Exchanges Just Added 100,000 Users in a Single Day
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
But not all gambling is "gambling": Insurance is gambling, for example. Picking mutual funds and ETFs for your retirement plan is gambling. "Gambling" has connotations of immoral behaviour, especially in zero-sum or always-lose scenarios like poker and casinos. I don't think it's fair to describe educated and informed investment or buy-ins with words like that. I think "risky venture" is a less loaded, more neutral,…
>"Gambling" has connotations of immoral behaviour, especially in zero-sum or always-lose scenarios like poker and casinos. I don't think it's fair to describe educated and informed investment or buy-ins with words like that. I think "risky venture" is a less loaded, more neutral, term to describe it instead. This is not a repeat from every bubble ever. This time it's different!
Bitcoin may well be in a bubble, but it isnt mathematically and legally guaranteed to decrease in value overall as compared to what most people consider traditional forms of "gambling".
Re: One of the Biggest Bitcoin Exchanges Just Added 100,000 Users in a Single Day
#77That's a lot of users. How many of them are distinct human beings? How would that be verified?
Probably a tiny fraction. I'd guess that an algorithm recognized that buying 100 Bitcoin spread across 100k accounts is better than from 1 account.
Re: One of the Biggest Bitcoin Exchanges Just Added 100,000 Users in a Single Day
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably a tiny fraction. I'd guess that an algorithm recognized that buying 100 Bitcoin spread across 100k accounts is better than from 1 account.
You need ID verification to trade on the account, I dont think you can make 100s of accounts for one trader
Re: One of the Biggest Bitcoin Exchanges Just Added 100,000 Users in a Single Day
#79Coinbase so dominates cryptocurrency accounts in the US they should just have a way to do internal $ payments between accounts without going through any blockchain. Would be much quicker and cheaper.