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Is Bitcoin a Bubble? Economists Say ‘Yes’

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231–238 of 238 posts

Re: Is Bitcoin a Bubble? Economists Say ‘Yes’

#231
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should expire in 3-4 days. You can also try importing the keys to another compatible wallet and redo the transaction with higher fee.

Thanks! Currently trying to find a wallet that will let me double spend. Any recommendations?

Actually I don't think any wallet will let you do that. How ever, you can install breadwallet on another phone/device (don't mess with your existing one) and restore with your backup seed (12 or 24 words one). Electrum is another good wallet for desktop that supports all kinds of seed words where you can again import your seed words and re-spend them. The newly installed wallets will let you spend it again because it has no way of knowing that you already spent it.

Good luck.

Re: Is Bitcoin a Bubble? Economists Say ‘Yes’

#232
post #18

Everyone that I've talked to seems to be aware of the (seemingly) inevitable price drop, but that doesn't seem to be stopping them from buying in. Most people just assume they'll be able to sell what they have when the price drops before all the 'dumb' people have a chance to do the same. They just assume they'll be the lucky ones. I don't think everyone can be the lucky ones though. I think after this all calms down…

That's textbook bubble behavior. One caveat with Bitcoin is that the network is so slow (effectively just 3 transactions per second) that a crash would be spread out over time. If a panic starts you won't be able to get a slot to sell your bitcoins unless you pay an enormous transaction fee. It could be an interesting situation where the rich literally pay to get to the head of the line and avoid the crash.

The fact that you can only do 3 transactions per second is totally besides the point.

Selling things requires a buyer. In case of a crash, you are trying to sell to the lowest bidder. If one even exists. Everybody in a situation like that is trying to sell and no one is trying to buy.

So whom are you going to sell to?

Re: Is Bitcoin a Bubble? Economists Say ‘Yes’

#233
post #18

Everyone that I've talked to seems to be aware of the (seemingly) inevitable price drop, but that doesn't seem to be stopping them from buying in. Most people just assume they'll be able to sell what they have when the price drops before all the 'dumb' people have a chance to do the same. They just assume they'll be the lucky ones. I don't think everyone can be the lucky ones though. I think after this all calms down…

It’s next to impossible to say who’s doing the buying. With regulated financial instruments like ETFs or mutual funds there’s a concept of inflows and outflows where fiat cash changes hands.

With Bitcoin exchanges a trade could be new money, formerly sitting as cash in a bank account, could be a miner converting his other currencies to BTC, could be a dude trading with himself with two accounts on the same exchange.

We have no clear indication of actual new money coming into the ecosystem.

Re: Is Bitcoin a Bubble? Economists Say ‘Yes’

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gold has a floor value though, sure it has a value above that based on being used as a store of wealth but the whole thing is predicated on the fact that gold is actually useful and has thousands of years of human history of being valued.

bitcoin will still have a sort of floor value for the various illegal things it was and is still use for. Obviously though that is far far lower than what it is now.

People who do various illegal things hate volatility. They are already dealing with a number of risks, they don’t need another one added to the mix, where the supplier/boss can bust their kneecaps if the underlying cryptocurrency just went through a 5% “correction”.

Re: Is Bitcoin a Bubble? Economists Say ‘Yes’

#236
post #131

"Experts" predicting bitcoin's impending doom is nothing new. Does anyone remember Professor Mark Williams, a top economist who is so well regarded that he has been called to testify before Congress many times? In late 2013, he predicted that bitcoin would crash from $1200 to under $10 within the next 6 months [1]. After he was proven wrong, he revised his claim to say that the crash would happen eventually. I guess…

This is true of every bubble ever. No one knew how to predict when the real estate bubble was going to collapse. And they wouldn't have been able to make any specific predictions, despite real estate being an obvious bubble. It was very easy to see that the price did not reflect the fundamentals. And Bitcoin is similar. The fundamentals of Bitcoin do not support the price. Also in terms of putting your money where yo…

I'm both someone who believes Bitcoin is in a bubble, and someone who holds a decent amount of it.

I never liked the word "Bubble" do describe these things because they rarely pop like bubbles. Physical bubbles inflate relatively gradually and pop very rapidly. Asset bubbles usually don't. The Nasdaq bubble took roughly 6 years to inflate and 3 years to "pop". The real estate bubble took about 11 years to inflate and 6 years to fully deflate. IMHO "balloon" might be a better term.

It's possible we could wake up tomorrow in a world where Bitcoin is trading for $10, but I doubt it. Even if today ends up representing the peak in hindsight, I'm (literally) betting that it will take years to fully deflate.

Re: Is Bitcoin a Bubble? Economists Say ‘Yes’

#238
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Raiblocks [1] offers zero fee transactions. It will be interesting to see if node operators can be motivated by the same decentralization/benevolence that causes people to run bitcoin nodes today. [1] https://raiblocks.net/media/RaiBlocks_Whitepaper__English.pd...

RaiBlocks has PoS consensus so node operators are incentivized. It also has PoW as a spam prevention mechanism (transactions are not completely free (few seconds on commodity CPU), and you can also "cache" PoW). I think it makes sense, unlike IOTA for example.

I have to correct that actually PoS is voluntarist. Node operators don't collect fees in RaiBlocks. They operate just to secure the network and their own investment.
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