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Bitcoin exchange rate reached $100 USD per BTC

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Re: Bitcoin exchange rate reached $100 USD per BTC

#321

Post by baddox »

wmf wrote: post #131
baddox wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Give it time. I happen to think that bitcoin is still stabilizing. Whether it will stabilize at an even higher price than it is now, or "crash" and stabilize at a much lower price, I think it will eventually stabilize.

Since Bitcoin's monetary supply is totally disconnected from economic activity, I wonder how it can ever stabilize (except perhaps by accident).

Isn't the point of bitcoin that its monetary supply is disconnected from economic activity? I thought the "mining" is supposed to be analogous to actual gold mining, so that increases in supply happen very slowly, get more difficult over time, and eventually cease completely. Obviously, many (perhaps most) people think that centralized government currencies (where the government can essentially increase the money supply at a whim) is the best system, but the point of bitcoin is to challenge that system.

Re: Bitcoin exchange rate reached $100 USD per BTC

#322

Post by baddox »

davidw wrote: post #240
oleganza wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right now a landgrab is going on. People want to hold some btc. At some point in the future, when everyone knows about btc and purchased as much as they want/can, the price will be more stable and grows only as much as new wealth is created by the global economy and new people are born.

> Right now a landgrab is going on. People want to hold some btc. How's that different from tulips? > the price will be more stable and grows only as much as new wealth is created by the global economy and new people are born. Err...how so? Fiat money can do that, but how does bitcoin correlate to much of anything?

> How's that different from tulips?

The key difference is that the tulip burst happened in the past, so you can be quite certain that it was a speculative bubble.

Re: Bitcoin exchange rate reached $100 USD per BTC

#323

Post by jellicle »

PassTheAmmo wrote: post #36
Atropos wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole "Cyprus people are getting into Bitcoin" narrative is a total lie as well. But I guess Bitcoin is a great learning opportunity for spotting Scams etc., as long as people don't lose too much money, it might even be beneficial.

Actually for me bitcoin proves just how few people can ACTUALLY spot a pyramid scheme or a pump and dump - instead resorting to calling everything that seems too good to be true a scam. It may work 99.9% of the time, but BTC is the false positive IMO. I totally agree that the Cyprus thing is totally bogus though, journalists are uninformed and lazy as usual. The real reason is that it seems more and more likely that…

> It may work 99.9% of the time, but BTC is the false positive IMO.

That's one of the major markers of a bubble - people convincing themselves that this time is different. There's a book about bubbles with that title.

Re: Bitcoin exchange rate reached $100 USD per BTC

#324

Post by leot »

jamoes wrote: post #188
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…

> shameless hoarding Hoarding is a derogatory term, intended to evoke an emotional response from the reader. I prefer the term "saving". > Why lend, why build new companies, when simply storing it is more than enough? Take shocks such as bubbles and demand-side crises. Most bitcoin proponents to indeed reject Keyensian, demand-side economics. I, for one, think entrepreneurs would typically benefit from not relying on…

"Saving" fails to distinguish between different uses of assets.

"Investing" one's resources means putting them to work to create value. "Hoarding" them means the assets are as good as if they were buried in the ground. Investing is riskier and takes more work and more smarts, but any idiot can hoard.

What creates (or is more likely to create) more value? 1 million dollars distributed among promising startups, or 1 million dollars spent on mining gold? 1 billion dollars spent creating an airline, or 1 billion dollars spent on vast swaths of real estate?

Re: Bitcoin exchange rate reached $100 USD per BTC

#325

Post by yxhuvud »

balakk wrote: post #80

What would it take for somebody like Amazon or eBay to (even partially) support bitcoins? How much of a risk could it be?

For starters, there will need to be a lot of court cases that will decide how the legal repercussions will look like before any major players will take the risk it involves.

Re: Bitcoin exchange rate reached $100 USD per BTC

#326

Post by aneth4 »

teebs wrote: post #295
aneth4 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can buy a 2014 Cadillac or iPhone 5 next year for 30% less than I can this year. People seem to be buying these things. In a deflationary environment, people buy less stuff they don't need today, which leads to a higher quality of economic growth.

What do you mean "higher quality"? Almost everything everyone buys is something they don't need. I would guess that almost everyone using Hacker News produces things people don't need. No one needs Google or Amazon or whatever your favorite tech company is.... The economy is built on things people don't need. The problem is that if I won't buy it for $100 today because I can buy it for $50 tomorrow, I won't buy it fo…

Except I do buy an iPhone. Because I want one. Today.

Technology always gets cheaper rapidly. Lots of people seem to buy it.

A 4% annual deflation rate would stop unhealthy debt expansion, which only stimulates short term growth and long term pain.

Higher quality growth comes when real economic value is created through transactions rather than speculation or inefficient investment.

Re: Bitcoin exchange rate reached $100 USD per BTC

#327

Post by adventured »

pg_bot wrote: post #279
randallsquared wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The reason it's bad is that deflation makes it more profitable to do nothing than to invest. This makes no sense to me. If keeping 100 units makes one richer because they are worth more in a year, then any investment which has a positive return (that is, you end up with more than 100 units in a year) must be that much better... What am I missing?

Deflation increases the value of holding cash. By definition deflation occurs when the price of a basket of goods decreases. Why invest your money in a basket of goods today when it is going to be cheaper to buy that same basket tomorrow?

Nope, by definition deflation occurs when the authority controlling the money supply (eg the Fed) contracts said money supply.

Prices going down is merely a symptom of deflation, but it is not deflation.

Re: Bitcoin exchange rate reached $100 USD per BTC

#328

Post by aneth4 »

dragontamer wrote: post #298
aneth4 wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

USD is a worse investment, and it seems like Real Estate is not much better than Gold :-p Stocks as investment: http://www.macrotrends.org/1378/dow-to-gold-ratio-100-year-h... And of course, ycombinator. You know... the angel fund / venture capitalist firm that runs this website? We're all here because of investors investing into technology. They do so because they believe they can ultimately make money with technolo…

Indeed. And a 4% deflation rate would not seem to deflate their appetite for 100x gains.

Re: Bitcoin exchange rate reached $100 USD per BTC

#329

Post by iso-8859-1 »

nawitus wrote: post #23
cheeze wrote: post #8

That's insane. Only a few months ago 1BTC was going for about $30 USD. There were threads discussing $30/BTC where people were saying that it was too late to get on the wagon...

If bitcoin ever gets widely adopted, one bitcoin will be worth atleast thousands of dollars.

did you do the math or are you just pulling numbers out of your hat?

Re: Bitcoin exchange rate reached $100 USD per BTC

#330

Post by Lerc »

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…

Isn't the value(not necessarily the price) of a currency the size of the market in which it trades divided by the number of units of currency in circulation.

If the market reduces because of a lack of investment, wouldn't the currency reduce because you hold the same proportion of a smaller thing, creating an incentive to stop negative growth.

There is also the factor of the OP's so-called CryptoBarons. Money is just an idea until you actually spend it. If there are a number of people living it up because they got a bunch of bitcoin really early the result would be essentially another form of bitcoin creation. Those CryptoBarons would be adding currency into circulation as they spend, currency that was effectively frozen before that point.

I'm not sure what will happen in the end, but it will certainly be an interesting ride.

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