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Coinbase Is Now Selling Over $1M USD Of Bitcoin Per Month

blog.coinbase.com

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Re: Coinbase Is Now Selling Over $1M USD Of Bitcoin Per Month

#61

Post by devonbarrett »

jerguismi wrote: post #25
DanBC wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate to "me too", but "me too". I'd love to be able to use coinbase but I'm UK only. I'm unlikely to get involved with Bitcoin until something like Coinbase allows UK bank accounts. (having said all that I'm going to be buying very small quantities of Bicoin.)

You might want to check out localbitcoins.com - our online buying process is pretty fluid, and we have lots of sellers selling for UK bank transfer. https://localbitcoins.com/location/GB/London/

Second these guys, managed to find a seller and complete the transaction in under ten mins! Although was only a small amount.

Re: Coinbase Is Now Selling Over $1M USD Of Bitcoin Per Month

#62

Post by nullc »

thefreeman wrote: post #54
Jd wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with all fiat currencies is they have no inherent value; it is all in the eye of the beholder. So what is an "appropriate" price is quite difficult to determine. Most currencies are driven by being effective monopolies wherever they are issued, so the market price remains somewhat stable. Even so, many professional economists have opined that the exchange rates even between major currencies are way too vo…

To say Bitcoin has no inherent value is not quite accurate. The inherent value of the Bitcoin comes from the electricity required to power the computational cycles to "create" it.

That is confused.

If I smash the hope diamond and then get the pope and four world leaders to urinate on it— then surely the resulting mush would be the most rare and costly constructed substance on earth. It would also be worthless.

Re: Coinbase Is Now Selling Over $1M USD Of Bitcoin Per Month

#63

Post by jlgreco »

nullc wrote: post #62
thefreeman wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To say Bitcoin has no inherent value is not quite accurate. The inherent value of the Bitcoin comes from the electricity required to power the computational cycles to "create" it.

That is confused. If I smash the hope diamond and then get the pope and four world leaders to urinate on it— then surely the resulting mush would be the most rare and costly constructed substance on earth. It would also be worthless.

Film it and it would be some pretty great performance art. ;)

Re: Coinbase Is Now Selling Over $1M USD Of Bitcoin Per Month

#64

Post by mrb »

unix-dude wrote: post #18

I think bitcoin is an extremely interesting concept, and the economics around it are equally interesting. I bought a tiny amount when the prices were around the $11 mark, and its insane to think of the price-shift. I made a couple bucks off the price shift, but now I'm honestly thinking that the price will fall back down. Despite serving the needs of many SR/SatoshiDice people, I dont think they're quite at the point…

The price jumped from $13 to $22 over 1 month, not 12 hours. http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg60ztgSzm1g10zm2g2...

Re: Coinbase Is Now Selling Over $1M USD Of Bitcoin Per Month

#65

Post by cookiecaper »

toomim wrote: post #51
cookiecaper wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fwiw I agree that Bitcoin is a useful prototype but I seriously question its long-term viability outside of a niche. That niche, however, may be sufficient to continue to sustain high values for a while to come. Bitcoin shows us some cool stuff, but it's not sufficient for real-world everyday use. It will be an ancestor to a truly disruptive online currency imo. The network has too many fundamental inaccessibilities…

It sounds like you have a feeling that bitcoin isn't good enough, but don't have any actual reasons for it.

"The network has too many fundamental inaccessibilities"

Just because I didn't rattle all of these off doesn't mean "I don't have any actual reasons for it". I suggest you ask more politely for exposition next time.

The blockchain is huge, and splitting it is ad-hoc patchwork. The network was obviously not designed for such a thing and I'm not really optimistic about it. At this point it takes 6+ days to bootstrap a bitcoin client.

There is still no easy integration method with extant payment systems. It takes weeks to transfer money in and out, or you have to make the trade in person. In many cases you must supply a lot of personal documentation to do anything meaningful on the exchanges. This could hypothetically be resolved, but given the stubbornness of banks and the fact that no one has done it yet gives me relatively little hope.

The system of block verification makes it impossible to do truly instantaneous transfers. This is a big one. Double-spend attacks are real, and people want their transactions to go through immediately.

The system is vulnerable to 51%+ attacks. Not a problem thus far, but I seriously believe it's a huge gaping weakness if btc wants to be taken seriously.

Mining is prohibitively difficult for the layman. These days not even reasonable single-home GPU farms are going to be enough to compete. The reward for mining is diminishing quickly.

Many of the perceived benefits of bitcoin are illusory or misunderstood. For instance, people claim bitcoin is private and/or anonymous when in reality, every transaction ever made with bitcoin is published publicly. This has serious implications for practical privacy deployments. The currency, like the US dollar, still has a baked-in elite class, which is the group of people that own the most compute power. This could hypothetically change, but in real life, it probably won't.

I could keep going (have barely mentioned client-side stuff), but I think this is sufficient. I have "actual reasons" for it. I understand the bitcoin guys know about all of this and think it's not a problem, but I disagree with them. A currency that doesn't have (at least most of) these issues will be super awesome, and bitcoin is an important predecessor, but it's not the end of the story.

Re: Coinbase Is Now Selling Over $1M USD Of Bitcoin Per Month

#66

Post by meh02 »

tocomment wrote: post #35

So I just bought 2 bitcoins on Coinbase (my first purchase congrats to me!) but it's been pending for 5 days and says it will clear today. My question, is how can they lock in the price 5 days ago for me. Are they selling me the coins 5 days ago and buying it on the market today? It seems like there would be a lot of risk in doing that.

They lock it in and hope the price goes up so they can make a profit.

This is pretty much exactly how FX wire services work.

Re: Coinbase Is Now Selling Over $1M USD Of Bitcoin Per Month

#67

Post by Spooky23 »

thefreeman wrote: post #54
Jd wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with all fiat currencies is they have no inherent value; it is all in the eye of the beholder. So what is an "appropriate" price is quite difficult to determine. Most currencies are driven by being effective monopolies wherever they are issued, so the market price remains somewhat stable. Even so, many professional economists have opined that the exchange rates even between major currencies are way too vo…

To say Bitcoin has no inherent value is not quite accurate. The inherent value of the Bitcoin comes from the electricity required to power the computational cycles to "create" it.

That's the printing/minting cost of conventional currency.

To have "inherent" or "intrinsic" value means that the actual material has marketable value. For a US dollar coin, if you melted it down, the copper, maganese, nickel and zinc is worth about $0.06. The value of the paper of a US dollar is a fraction of a penny for recycling purposes.

A bitcoin is more like paper currency -- it has no intrinsic value. But because of the predetermined control of new coin production, it will display characteristics similar to silver or gold coinage.

Those characteristics include something that nobody talks about -- the "discovery" of new coins. There are likely large dark pools of bitcoin that the initial adopters generated very cheaply. Dumping those pools on the market will have similar effects that gold rushes had.

Re: Coinbase Is Now Selling Over $1M USD Of Bitcoin Per Month

#69

Post by pixie_ »

nullc wrote: post #60
pixie_ wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. People take note - Bitcoin is NOT fiat currency. Fiat is latin for 'let it be done.' As in governments can create new money at will. New bitcoins can't be created on demand by anyone.

You've misunderstood that defintion. Economically speaking fiat is a currency that exists by rulemaking instead of having an inherent value— it's constructed. The definition doesn't say who does the constructing or how. Bitcoin is a fiat currency— the fiat is embedded in the software that runs on and is enforced by all the Bitcoin nodes, it's the rules that make the currency exist and work. It's largely immutable, pa…

Fiat does not imply constructed. The notion that gold (or tulips) are valuable are equally constructed ideas by humans. Nothing has 'inherent' value apart from the value humans perceive these things to have. No, the only thing fiat implies is manipulation - the ability for a government or person to mess with the value of a currency by 'willing it to be.' Bitcoin is not fiat.

Re: Coinbase Is Now Selling Over $1M USD Of Bitcoin Per Month

#70

Post by Dylan16807 »

sliverstorm wrote: post #50
johnmurch wrote: post #4

Crazy to think BTC have doubled in price since August. I wonder how many people are just buying up BTC and waiting

It isn't that surprising to me, considering the payout for miners was halved a month or two ago.

Do you really think the price would change very much if the miner payout was raised or dropped by a factor of ten? Over half the bitcoins have already been mined; expecting the price to be based on the trickle of new ones is unrealistic.
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