Isn't bitcoin trade on like a few million dolars per day globally according to some really rosy estimates ? If I'm reading this correctly it has 1.6M$ on the bid side. Do people realize that with such low liquidity the price is irrelevant ? Real news would be it doing $100M transactions in a day or having $100M on bids, not that it would be significant but that would show some real growth, this is just a few people p…
My guess is that bitcoins are mainly used for college students' and drug hobbyists' $50 purchases of LSD and the like on silk road and not for big transactions.
That's nonsense. Bitcoinica have virtually no effect on the market.
Care to elaborate?
When bitcoinica shut down operation, there wasn't any signficant change in the price of bitcoin in either direction.
Also, it's a really bad idea to use ad-hoc reasoning after-the-fact to explain why the price rose or goes down. There could be multiple reasons and multiple events why the price of bitcoin rose as it did. Sometime, there's no reason at all.
Perhaps a bit off topic, but would a finance nerd recognize this style of graph better? I've never seen such a thing before, and it took a little while to understand what the instructions were saying. But once I got it, I was immediately confused that there aren't more commonly known high information financial visuals beyond the standard two axis graph. Is it just that most exchanges somehow don't publicly publish su…
I thought the same thing. And I don't think it's offtopic since hackernews is a place for development discussion.
Ok but given current pricing of GPUs, is it profitable to mine the coins, given I have access to free electricity (my office building does not charge for that).
Edit to add more info: I'm told the expected generation output, from 1000000 Mhps, at current difficulty 1751454.53534068, is 574.2818 BTC per day or 23.9284 BTC per hour.
Isn't bitcoin trade on like a few million dolars per day globally according to some really rosy estimates ? If I'm reading this correctly it has 1.6M$ on the bid side. Do people realize that with such low liquidity the price is irrelevant ? Real news would be it doing $100M transactions in a day or having $100M on bids, not that it would be significant but that would show some real growth, this is just a few people p…
My guess is that bitcoins are mainly used for college students' and drug hobbyists' $50 purchases of LSD and the like on silk road and not for big transactions.
Silk Road is famous, but it doesn't mean that illegal activities are the main economic activities in bitcoin.
The number of accounts is currently at about 22000, and the largest number of people online at any given time is 126 – a stable community, but much smaller than those who see Silk Road as being the single shadowy force keeping up the Bitcoin economy behind the scenes imagine. -- http://bitcoinmagazine.net/the-silk-road-report/
Perhaps a bit off topic, but would a finance nerd recognize this style of graph better? I've never seen such a thing before, and it took a little while to understand what the instructions were saying. But once I got it, I was immediately confused that there aren't more commonly known high information financial visuals beyond the standard two axis graph. Is it just that most exchanges somehow don't publicly publish su…
I thought the same thing. And I don't think it's offtopic since hackernews is a place for development discussion.
Perhaps a bit off topic, but would a finance nerd recognize this style of graph better? I've never seen such a thing before, and it took a little while to understand what the instructions were saying. But once I got it, I was immediately confused that there aren't more commonly known high information financial visuals beyond the standard two axis graph. Is it just that most exchanges somehow don't publicly publish su…
I'm the original creator of this site. The initial version had no market rate chart (the one in the middle). It was purely a live version of the bids/asks (see bottom graph http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/mtgoxUSD.html). After making that it didn't take much creativity to realize a price chart would fit nicely in the middle.
What goes up could also go down. I've seen it happen in my adult life to gold (in the 1980s), to housing (twice, once mostly in Texas, completely killing off the savings and loan industry nationally, and more recently all over the world), and to petroleum multiple times. As I have posted before here on Hacker News, perhaps the greatest contribution the Bitcoin experiment will make to humankind is to teach you and me and our neighbors more about the realities of economics. Many of the ideas about how to mine Bitcoins, store Bitcoins, and trade with Bitcoins as a medium of exchange illustrate both the strengths and weaknesses of any other medium of exchange in a world full of human beings. Seeing the discussion of Bitcoins here on Hacker News reminds me of the last time that the price of gold (in United States dollars) crashed, and the arguments beforehand that such an occurrence was impossible, for instance. "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" is still an important principle of investment.
My guess is that bitcoins are mainly used for college students' and drug hobbyists' $50 purchases of LSD and the like on silk road and not for big transactions.
Silk Road is famous, but it doesn't mean that illegal activities are the main economic activities in bitcoin. The number of accounts is currently at about 22000, and the largest number of people online at any given time is 126 – a stable community, but much smaller than those who see Silk Road as being the single shadowy force keeping up the Bitcoin economy behind the scenes imagine. -- http://bitcoinmagazine.net/the…
Hmm, I guess those statistics are from the SR forums, a separate site. The actual SR web site doesn't give out such statistics. You could perhaps estimate the usage by listings & reviews.