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Bitcoin just crossed $7.00.

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Re: Bitcoin just crossed $7.00.

#41

Post by base698 »

tokenadult wrote: post #38

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…

Last year it went up to over $30 before hitting $3 over the course of a few months--no one knows what goes up just come down more than bitcoin.

It's steadily risen back to $7 on a much more stable trajectory. The interesting thing this time is the relative stability over the last 6 months.

Re: Bitcoin just crossed $7.00.

#42

Post by sp332 »

petemc_ wrote: post #34
joering2 wrote: post #18

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).

http://www.butterflylabs.com/order-form-bitforce-sc-mini-rig... This might make a lot of GPU setups obsolete. 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.

$4,000/day at current exchange rates, it should pay for itself in less than 8 days. Of course the rate of BTC generation will go down over time, but it looks like these rigs would easily pay for themselves for several years yet.

Re: Bitcoin just crossed $7.00.

#43

Post by javert »

vannevar wrote: post #25

Apparently we're in the "pump" phase of the Bitcoin pump-and-dump cycle. Really, the entire Bitcoin market would fit comfortably inside the volume of your average OTC penny stock. Does anyone not think the Bitcoin game is rigged?

Does anyone not think the Bitcoin game is rigged?

There are significant reasons why having a deflationary, digital currency (or commodity) would be quite useful, at least for certain people and use cases.

If there were no use case for Bitcoin, calling it a scam without presenting evidence would be much more reasonable. Given that there are use cases, calling Bitcoin a scam without presenting evidence is completely arbitrary.

To make an analogy - if I ask you to invest in my company that makes a brand new food item with no nutritional value or flavor, it's probably a scam. However, if I ask you to invest in my company that makes a tasty and nutritional food item, regardless of whether you think my food will do well in the market in the long run, it requires evidence to claim that it is a scam.

Re: Bitcoin just crossed $7.00.

#44

Post by rmc »

base698 wrote: post #41
tokenadult wrote: post #38

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…

Last year it went up to over $30 before hitting $3 over the course of a few months--no one knows what goes up just come down more than bitcoin. It's steadily risen back to $7 on a much more stable trajectory. The interesting thing this time is the relative stability over the last 6 months.

Ah so this time it's different! The battle cry of every bubble.

Re: Bitcoin just crossed $7.00.

#46

Post by morsch »

For further amusing reading, look at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=91661.20

User pirateat40 is running a BTC investment scheme with super-high returns (BS&T: Bitcoin Savings & Trust, a name suggested by investors). So high, that the community is split between the believers who can't resist the ROI and the non-believers who are convinced that Pirate is running a Ponzi scheme.

But that's not the fun part. The fun part is that pirateat40 and another member have agreed to participate in a sort of bet to settle the issue, which involves certain payouts under certain conditions. Mostly it's a bet that pirateat40/BS&T will default within a couple of months. Both have put 5000 BTC, ie. roughly 30k USD on the line.

Re: Bitcoin just crossed $7.00.

#47

Post by jerguismi »

rmc wrote: post #44
base698 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last year it went up to over $30 before hitting $3 over the course of a few months--no one knows what goes up just come down more than bitcoin. It's steadily risen back to $7 on a much more stable trajectory. The interesting thing this time is the relative stability over the last 6 months.

Ah so this time it's different! The battle cry of every bubble.

If the bubble keeps repeating, it is still an opportunity for speculators who can do the timing right.

Personally I'm long on bitcoins, I do dollar-cost-averaging. Good way to do this is for example bitcoinbuilder.com, or 10-line python script will do the same thing.

Re: Bitcoin just crossed $7.00.

#48

Post by a-priori »

dvanduzer wrote: post #30

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…

It is a bit confusing, but here goes:

Ignore the green curve for a second. The gold curve is the 'bid' curve. It shows, at any given USD value (horizontal axis), how many Bitcoins people are willing to buy (vertical axis). So it says that, based on the orders currently in the market's books, at the $6.00/Bitcoin price point, you could sell up to 23,282 Bitcoins to get $549,907. This trade could happen immediately, because the matching buy orders already exist.

Similarly, the blue curve is the 'ask' curve. It shows how many Bitcoins people are currently willing to sell at any given price. So right now, at the $8.00/Bitcoin price point, you could buy 19,242 Bitcoins at a cost of $144,682.

Obviously, you'd be stupid to do either of those trades because they're far from the market rate. The action happens where those curves meet, currently at $7.10362-7.18242. This means that, currently, someone could buy at least one Bitcoin at $7.18242, or sell one at $7.10362. If someone were to put either a buy or sell order in between those numbers, then it would sit there until a match came in.

Which brings us to the green curve. This is the trade history. Like the other curves, the horizontal axis is the price, but here the vertical axis is time. It shows, trade by trade, what prices Bitcoins have actually traded at. Right now, the most recent is $7.10110; this is what people quote as the market price.

Re: Bitcoin just crossed $7.00.

#50

Post by andrewla »

petemc_ wrote: post #34
joering2 wrote: post #18

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).

http://www.butterflylabs.com/order-form-bitforce-sc-mini-rig... This might make a lot of GPU setups obsolete. 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.

Haven't looked more closely at the numbers here, but there are only 50 * 6 = 300 BTC created per hour. If each of these is averaging 24 BTC per hour, then that's practically 8% of the total computing power in the bitcoin network. That would mean that 13 of these would have more power than the entire network.

Even if this were the case, the gains from such a scheme would be short-lived, though, as the difficulty adjusted to compensate. Then you're competing with everyone else who has bought these, and fighting over the marginal cost of electricity vs. the upcoming reduction in the reward.

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