Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bitcoin exchange rate reached $100 USD per BTC

bitcoincharts.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 600 posts

Re: Bitcoin exchange rate reached $100 USD per BTC

#281

Post by jasonkolb »

deelowe wrote: post #218
lolcraft wrote: post #176

Some people here seem to think that this is temporary, that sometime in the future Bitcoin will stabilize into a glorious future global currency -- never mind the new class of cryptobarons it will have created from its inner circle, through shameless hoarding. My question is, what then will happen when Bitcoin stabilizes, that is, when the time to new coin mined approaches practically infinity? Let's assume the globa…

There are a few replies here that seem to be reacting negatively to the OP due to the tone of the submission instead of the content. To be clear, deflation is categorically bad for a currency. It's terrible, like great depression terrible. The reason it's bad is that deflation makes it more profitable to do nothing than to invest. When this happens, people react by not spending money. The market dies. While inflation…

Deflation is just one form of asset appreciation. If this line of reasoning were true then we would never see anyone selling anything that appreciates in value. But this is a very one-sided way to consider this scenario--it only takes into account the supply side. When the asset is appreciating, the demand side takes this into account as well and is willing to discount their asking price to take this into account. You saw this play out with real estate several years ago, and with gold more recently. It may blow out the bid/ask spread a bit, but eventually there will be people who need to sell their asset to buy something else, or there will be people who want the asset badly enough to pay what people are asking.

I think this argument can be discounted simply by looking at the current state of things--people are still spending bitcoins even though the recent appreciation dwarfs any built-in deflation. Sellers may need to discount their price to get people to pay in bitcoins, but even that doesn't seem to be happening yet.

Re: Bitcoin exchange rate reached $100 USD per BTC

#282

Post by jamoes »

Eliezer wrote: post #110
acabal wrote: post #72

I added a Bitcoin purchase option to Scribophile to test the waters. But I'm interested in a Bitcoin economy, not a USD cash alternative--the situation where a Bitcoin has its own value, not a value dependent on a different currency. For that reason, I decided to fix the price of an upgrade to 2 BTC, not peg it to the dollar like most other sites do. Unfortunately it seems like that's just not going to work at this p…

As ever: Bitcoin is a lovely medium of exchange, a horrible medium of account and hence a purely bubbled store of value.

How low do you think it will crash when the bubble bursts? Do you think it will recover again, like it did last time, or do you this time it will stay low?

Re: Bitcoin exchange rate reached $100 USD per BTC

#283

Post by phillmv »

oleganza wrote: post #181
lolcraft wrote: post #176

Some people here seem to think that this is temporary, that sometime in the future Bitcoin will stabilize into a glorious future global currency -- never mind the new class of cryptobarons it will have created from its inner circle, through shameless hoarding. My question is, what then will happen when Bitcoin stabilizes, that is, when the time to new coin mined approaches practically infinity? Let's assume the globa…

1. Unjustified moral reference to "shameless hoarding". Where is the magical date when your property belongs to you for "too long" and you should give it to someone? And to whom exactly? 2. Why take credit for business if you can save your own earned money which appreciates over time and have 100% stake at your own project? 3. How deflationary spiral is supposed to happen? Will people be paralyzed and dead of hunger…

Property rights are a fiction invented and enforced by society. Therefore, it's not inappropriate for society to occasionally have opinions on how property should work.

Some of the ways people handle their property is detrimental to society. If enough people do it, hoarding capital is one of them.

Re: Bitcoin exchange rate reached $100 USD per BTC

#284

Post by drcode »

blibble wrote: post #251
drcode wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what you mean, since someone who owns a house doesn't have a land lord.

if she owns the property but not the land (i.e. the house is a leasehold instead of a freehold), she has a landlord

Interesting- But in that case the problem (probably) is that you have to pay super high taxes when you sell land (or they wouldn't have such weird arrangements.) This is a separate issue from the deflationary aspects of land I think.

Re: Bitcoin exchange rate reached $100 USD per BTC

#285

Post by aneth4 »

grovulent wrote: post #14

People like Max Keiser are calling 100k to 1mill per bitcoin. Hard to imagine. I left my gpu running for a few weeks a year or so ago and mined myself 1 bitcoin. I figure that should Keiser's prediction comes true - it will be a nice easy pay day - if not, I didn't waste much time, energy on it. I've been looking at it lately though and thinking that it surely must drop back soon. I'm thinking a drop back down to 15…

$1M per bitcoin is $10T in money supply with 10M bitcoins. The current USD money supply is $2.7T. I suspect $10T is around the entire world money supply.

Re: Bitcoin exchange rate reached $100 USD per BTC

#286

Post by dragontamer »

fnordfnordfnord wrote: post #261
wmf wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a common scenario where the customer pays 1% to Coinbase and the merchant pays 2.6% to BitPay, Bitcoin comes out worse than Paypal or credit cards.

In a common scenario where Paypal freezes your account for dubious reasons and then refuses to answer your telephone calls or emails, Bitcoin comes out ahead. In another common scenario where a Senator named Lieberman makes a press release accusing Wikileaks of criminal activity, and other payment processors simply refuse to conduct transactions for you, Bitcoin also comes out ahead.

In the common scenario where my supplier screws me over on Ebay, I can put a "cancel order" on my credit card. I have no such recourse to do that with Bitcoins.

Bitcoins offer no consumer protection right now. Once exchanged, the other party holds the money.

Re: Bitcoin exchange rate reached $100 USD per BTC

#287

Post by jamoes »

tvladeck wrote: post #236

Currencies have existed in a huge variety of forms over time. Basically anything can work as a medium of exchange as long as everyone has a high degree of confidence that if they are paid in the currency, that they too can pay someone else in that currency. But that's not to say all currency regimes are created equally -- we've learned a number of lessons, painfully, about how to manage currencies. For a small-scale,…

> If so, then is a successful BTC economy just a different gold standard (and all its associated problems)?

The main problem with gold standards, is that governments don't like them, because it makes it really hard to fund wars and other expenditures. Eventually, this leads to gold confiscations [1], and the effective end of a gold standard. Bitcoin solves this by being resilient to confiscation, and also by having a value transfer mechanism built-in, so that you don't need to replace gold with paper receipts for the sake of convenience.

In essence, bitcoin has all the upsides of a gold standard, with none of the downsides.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102

Re: Bitcoin exchange rate reached $100 USD per BTC

#288

Post by joshaidan »

lolcraft wrote: post #176

Some people here seem to think that this is temporary, that sometime in the future Bitcoin will stabilize into a glorious future global currency -- never mind the new class of cryptobarons it will have created from its inner circle, through shameless hoarding. My question is, what then will happen when Bitcoin stabilizes, that is, when the time to new coin mined approaches practically infinity? Let's assume the globa…

"My question is, what then will happen when Bitcoin stabilizes, that is, when the time to new coin mined approaches practically infinity? Let's assume the global economy grows at 4% per year. Do Bitcoin's proponents believe a constant 4% deflation rate will be somehow compatible with capitalism? Why lend, why build new companies, when simply storing it is more than enough? Take shocks such as bubbles and demand-side crises. Could a economy based on Bitcoin survive them, and not crash inevitably into a deflationary spiral? I claim it won't."

This makes the assumption that people won't make their own forks of bitcoin. If there's a shortage of bitcoins, and not enough is being mined to meet demand, I think that will give more incentive to people to make their own forks of the currency. Maybe will see various communities forming their own currencies for their own trading purposes.

Re: Bitcoin exchange rate reached $100 USD per BTC

#289

Post by dobbsbob »

aneth4 wrote: post #262
dobbsbob wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bought 30,000 bitcoins when they were worth less than a penny and sold them all when the value went up to $0.80. Lol, oops. If you don't want to miss out again, buy Litecoins and Namecoins. Litecoin will never be worth as much as BTC (because there will be 80million of them as opposed to 20something million BTC) but it will slowly gain in value as it has some impressive features especially suited for online gaming…

What you should be worrying about is the money supply, not the individual coin value. Is there any acceptance in commerce of these competitors? Unless there is an underlying demand created by available products, these coins will be worth nothing. In my opinion, features won't matter. Bitcoin has critical mass, and it's unlikely to face real competition.

Read about namecoin here: http://dot-bit.org/Main_Page It works perfectly as an open DNS p2p system, a decentralized p2p magnet tracker (think pirate bay but impossible to shut down), secure online voting, plenty of other possible uses.

There's also PPcoin a low energy coin compatible with BTC miners that's getting more popular.

Another advantage to Litecoin is you don't see it in the news everyday with the words 'Drugs' and 'Blackmarket' beside it, meaning correspondent banks will still deal with you if you want to set up an exchange whereas a lot of banks now are dumping bitcoin startups out of paranoia

Re: Bitcoin exchange rate reached $100 USD per BTC

#290

Post by aneth4 »

dragontamer wrote: post #268
aneth4 wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is one theory, and is the prevailing one. It is not necessarily correct. Regardless, it is certainly a consumer's right to store their assets in something that is not inflationary, as most do. Is the population holding empty real estate or gold instead of currency really that much better for the economy? No. Smart money will simply shift out of cash in an inflationary environment, and the value will not necessar…

Gold is a piss poor investment. Owning Real Estate (and making money off of it) entails taking care of it. People taking care of their land (so that it can appreciate in value) is a good thing. The typical Real Estate "investor" adds a ton of value to their home, not just through maintenance, but also additions (ie: a new deck). This maintenance is true value added to the economy. True value that wouldn't have been a…

> Gold is a piss poor investment.

Relative to what? The USD?

http://pricedingold.com/us-dollar/

Real estate?

http://pragcap.com/real-estate-gold-ratio-falls-to-30-year-l...

Gold is an asset that holds its purchasing power pretty well. It is what it is. It is not however a "piss poor" investment.

Post reply on HN