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Bitcoin value falls from above $33 to below $3

betabeat.com

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Re: Bitcoin value falls from above $33 to below $3

#131

Post by zby »

noduerme wrote: post #78
Murkin wrote: post #63

Can someone give a concrete example of themselves using Bitcoins for something other than speculative trade ?

Seconding hippich -- gambling, for one thing. All gambling sites require you to ship currency on and offline. Normally the site swallows a 5-7% fee for that each way, which is why it takes so long -- to prevent you from doing it too often. With Bitcoin you can deposit, win, withdraw in an hour and you'll get better odds because the casino's got 10% more money to throw at the games. Sorry to hear betco.in's going down…

This make me think - there was recently a huge scam in the poker world - some of the major sites (FullTilt for example) were using clients money as their revenue. With bitcoins the clients could check that the bitcoins were not transfered from the company address.

Re: Bitcoin value falls from above $33 to below $3

#132

Post by jquery »

mrb wrote: post #90
lurch00 wrote: post #19

Bitcoin is essentially a giant pyramid scam. The early adopters have cashed out long ago. As mining gets more and more difficult, less people will cling to the liquid currency. Why trade with a deprecating currency, anonymous or not? The fact that the exchange rate is below the cost of mining should be alarming for many reasons. I'd assume the creator/first adopters do not care, either way.

No, the exchange rate ($2.6/BTC) has still not fallen under the cost of mining for the average miner who selects the right GPUs ($1.8/BTC). The current difficulty is 1468e3. It takes 2^32 * 1468e3 Bitcoin hashes to solve a block of 50 BTC. The majority of people mine with HD 5000 or 6000 series. If you pick efficient ones, you can count on 2 Mhash per Joule. The average worldwide domestic electricity price is $.10/kW…

There's a lot more to computing costs than $/kh.

Re: Bitcoin value falls from above $33 to below $3

#133

Post by jquery »

aero142 wrote: post #70
dudurocha wrote: post #12

this reminds me about the quora post about bitcoin. In a world of where there is no regulation in currency, you dont have a FED, this money will crash. We dont have liquidity in this currency, as so, nobody can 'inject' money in the market.

Gold also has no fed to 'inject' money. It does have miners though. It has not crashed and appears to be more stable that fiat currencies, not less. (not a bit coin or gold standard fan here, just confused.)

We can disprove that pretty quickly and easily: show me a broad basket of goods that costs the same in gold ten years ago as it does today. Or tell me this: did everything suddenly go on sale or shoot up in price when gold recently shot up and then dropped 10-15%? No.

Re: Bitcoin value falls from above $33 to below $3

#134

Post by morsch »

VladRussian wrote: post #65
DiabloD3 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Satoshi's white paper disproves everything you just said. Either your comment is out of ignorance or out of malice. Go read the white paper.

our reading of the same paper seems different (i mean if you did really read it). Well, don't believe me, check this out: http://gawker.com/5805928/the-underground-website-where-you-... "Jeff Garzik, a member of the Bitcoin core development team, says in an email that bitcoin is not as anonymous as the denizens of Silk Road would like to believe. He explains that because all Bitcoin transactions are recorded in a pub…

See Fergal Reid, Martin Harrigan, An Analysis of Anonymity in the Bitcoin System for an example of network analysis: http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.4524

Re: Bitcoin value falls from above $33 to below $3

#135

Post by jerguismi »

alexhaefner wrote: post #51
powertower wrote: post #25

> It now appears the $3 to $33 prices for Bitcoin were due to speculation. Come on. Was it ever attributed to anything but speculation.

yeah, I don't understand all the attention given to bitcoin. It's not like it's a system that's immune to systematic manipulation. Anyone operating under the assumption that bitcoin is a stable system is naive. I'm open to being wrong about my assumptions.

> Anyone operating under the assumption that bitcoin is a stable system is naive.

"Stable" as in exchange rate, no. But the bitcoin technology in itself is really solid, and will continue to work well.

Re: Bitcoin value falls from above $33 to below $3

#136

Post by dolphenstein »

runn1ng wrote: post #79

Every bitcoin opposer repeats, that the money will artificially start going up and that is why it will crash. Right now, it is going down, for a long time. So that is not why it will fail. It will fail because noone actually needs it. It has no real value over other means of electronically exchanging money - paypal, for example, is much faster, easier to use and, dwhile it is not free, thanks to the wild exchange rat…

Value is arbitrary. None of the major world fiat currencies have any inherent value. They are backed by nothing.

Reminds me of an episode of This American Life. Brazil's currency was down the toilet, so they invented a new currency and tricked the populace into thinking it had value.

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/423/t...

Re: Bitcoin value falls from above $33 to below $3

#137

Post by rb2k_ »

Murkin wrote: post #63

Can someone give a concrete example of themselves using Bitcoins for something other than speculative trade ?

I bought iTunes gift card codes for the US store.

While there is an iTunes store in Germany, some of the apps aren't available (e.g. TV Station apps that I could use with a VPN) and with the current euro/usd ration, the US store is cheaper.

Re: Bitcoin value falls from above $33 to below $3

#139

Post by WA »

rb2k_ wrote: post #137
Murkin wrote: post #63

Can someone give a concrete example of themselves using Bitcoins for something other than speculative trade ?

I bought iTunes gift card codes for the US store. While there is an iTunes store in Germany, some of the apps aren't available (e.g. TV Station apps that I could use with a VPN) and with the current euro/usd ration, the US store is cheaper.

This is even more useful for renting US movies, because the German iTunes movie store completely sucks. I hate it that there's no good streaming service in Germany. Or do you know one?

Re: Bitcoin value falls from above $33 to below $3

#140

Post by epscylonb »

joejohnson wrote: post #73
Murkin wrote: post #63

Can someone give a concrete example of themselves using Bitcoins for something other than speculative trade ?

Silkroad. It has consistant business and I know people who have used this website. However, it fails to use bitcoin as a currency in the sense that other stores use dollars as a currency. The prices on Silkroad are adjusted to mirror the USD->BTC exchange rate dialy. And, I would suspect that the majority of the users are buying bitcoins to buy goods on Silkroad, and that venders on Silkroad turn their BTC back into…

If a lot of people are buying bitcoins then that should push the value of them up (depending on the available supply of bitcoins) regardless of whether they exchange them back in to traditional currency shortly afterwards. It is a form of utility.

All currencies are valued against each other, it is no surprise to see the dollar value used most frequently to determine value, since dollars are the worlds reserve currency.

My opinion is that bitcoin is probably ahead of its time, the technology is amazing, and could be used in many different ways, and I am not yet ready to count bitcoin out just yet.

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