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Bitcoin exchange rate reached $100 USD per BTC
571–580 of 600 posts
Re: Bitcoin exchange rate reached $100 USD per BTC
#572Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, apple is obviously so much more valuable than bitcoin because having computers in prettier cases or phones with prettier user interfaces is incalculably more valuable than access to a provably fair and reliable financial system not captive to the global banking cartels or their crony governments. This place is really starting to depress me.
Are you seriously trying to say Bitcoin has more value than a multi-billion dollar consumer company? Lol.
Imagine reading a comment in 1995 that reads:
"Are you seriously trying to say the Internet has more value than a multi-billion dollar retail company?"
Bitcoin is like the Internet. It's an open protocol that changes the way we think about money, just like the Internet changed the way we thought about communication.
Re: Bitcoin exchange rate reached $100 USD per BTC
#573Some 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…
Deflation generally benefits almost everyone. Things get cheaper and cheaper over time, while the amount of money you make stays the same. Technology is a beautiful example of this. Almost every year technology gets cheaper and cheaper, and better and better for the same amount of money spent. And of course this is great for everyone and I don't think many would dispute that. Imagine a world where that wasn't true. I…
> Things get cheaper and cheaper over time, while the amount of money you make stays the same.
This can't be universally true. If food gets continually cheaper, unless the cost of owning land and farming it goes down by the same amount, farmers must eventually make less money than before (or be driven out of business entirely).
And I don't quite buy the comparison between technological progress (where things get cheaper due to massive amounts of competition and research) and switching to a fiat currency which is arbitrarily limited (bitcoin). Using bitcoin doesn't guarantee technological progress.
> Inflation as you are talking about it is caused by the money supply increasing. Usually due to the government printing more. Whoever gets the money first is suddenly richer, because prices haven't increased in response to inflation yet. The amount of money they have relative to everyone else has increased. Therefore everyone else has become poorer relative to them.
Yes, printing money is in effect a government tax for usage of that currency.
Re: Bitcoin exchange rate reached $100 USD per BTC
#574Earlier quoted context omitted.
The price of Bitcoin won't stabilise. The best you could hope for would be a similar volatility to a commodity like gold or silver. So products and services will never be priced in Bitcoin while there is a better alternative like the dollar which is relatively stable. A mistake 'economists' make with bitcoin is to draw macroecomic conclusions based on theories suited to single currency economies. Actually we need the…
Agreed, but isn't international trade economics the study of economics over multiple currencies?
What we're seeing there is competitive devaluations through printing and recently confiscations. Fixed supply commodities like gold fare well, but their existence doesn't drag the world into a deflationary spiral. Bitcoin's existence won't have macroeconomic implications either.
Re: Bitcoin exchange rate reached $100 USD per BTC
#575Some 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…
It's thoughtful yet mistaken posts like this one that make it clear how early we still are in the Bitcoin game.
Capitalism doesn't need inflation. Capitalism works best with a hard currency. Money gaining 4% per year in purchasing power isn't "deflation". The notion of "4% growth" is ill-posed.
I could back these statements up with logic and evidence, but experience shows that virtually no amount of rational argument ever convinces anyone of these points. Luckily, rather than arguing till we are hoarse, those of us who have swallowed the hard-money red pill can now put our money where our mouth is and buy some bitcoins.
Re: Bitcoin exchange rate reached $100 USD per BTC
#576Earlier quoted context omitted.
"In addition, the amount of computing power available to the bitcoin network is becoming significant enough that it would be hard to exceed, even with a botnet." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TICOM I agree that people may very well use Bitcoin despite a successful attack (plenty of people still use Hushmail), although I think a lot of confidence would be lost. Bitcoin has a lot of hurdles to overcome as it is, and th…
What does TICOM have to do with anything? A 51% attack is a possibility, and might be currently possible with the largest botnets known to exist today, but it would be pushing it. In future it becomes even more difficult.
That is exactly the sort of argument the Germans made: that Enigma had known cryptographic flaws, but that they did not think anyone would actually expend the effort needed to attack it. You are saying that Bitcoin has a known flaw, but that nobody is going to amass the computing power needed to exploit that flaw. That is a bad way to approach security.
It is not just about botnets (CPU "mining" is pretty slow); what do you think stops someone from spending their money on enough ASICs to pull off the attack? It is not all that expensive, maybe tens of millions of dollars in chips. Even if it were hundreds of millions of dollars, if Bitcoin were as threatening to the financial system as some people seem to think it is, that would not be a lot to spend on attacking it.
It is also important to recognize that the existence of an obvious polynomial time attack does not in any way rule out the existence of faster attacks, it only establishes an upper bound on the attack effort. The reason proofs of security in modern cryptography involve a reduction to an (assumed) infeasible problem is that it rules out all practical attacks (in fact, all theoretically feasible attacks).
Re: Bitcoin exchange rate reached $100 USD per BTC
#577Re: Bitcoin exchange rate reached $100 USD per BTC
#578Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Only the Austrians use that definition and they're not a serious school of economics.
And python is not a serious language. Java is.
Re: Bitcoin exchange rate reached $100 USD per BTC
#579Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If they don't then the money disappears from the system, but in most booming economic times, more money is created, and eventually more money is printed to provide more base money in order to pay back all that interest. The financial systems works different. You seem to be conflating wealth and money. Money doesn't disappear from the system when someone fails to repay a loan. (Unless you are taking a rather wide, b…
I am talking about M2 money supply shrinking when borrowers default and/or banks fail, as in the great depression -- right? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply#United_States Also I am not sure what mechanism you are describing when you say that central banks pay dividends to their governments. On the contrary, governments like the US use their central banking system to do open market operations on bonds they is…
> Also I am not sure what mechanism you are describing when you say that central banks pay dividends to their governments.
Please see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_bank#Currency_issuance:
"The European Central Bank remits its interest income to the central banks of the member countries of the European Union. The US Federal Reserve remits all its profits to the U.S. Treasury."
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Bundesbank#Gewinn has some more information, but you have to speak German (or use Google Translate). Lower than expected profits of the Bundesbank have been in the news in 2011.
Re: Bitcoin exchange rate reached $100 USD per BTC
#580Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty much every big economy is trying to inflate away its debts. The Bank of England recently revised their inflation target upwards. Now Japan's central bank is talking about doing the same thing. As far as the US goes: I've got two words for you: quantitative easing. Meanwhile, most consumer price indices don't include the things which increase in price the most, like fuel and food. So the inflation numbers you'r…
Get your facts straight. Have you ever read a CPI report? Do you even know how the CPI is calculated? Here's the list of CPI weights. ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/cpi/cpiri2010.txt Food: 14.792% Housing: 41.460% Fuel: 5.079% Energy (included inside of "housing category"): 5.096% If you're curious, you can further subdivide that into milk and eggs. But the list becomes way too unwieldy at that point. The ave…
According to wikipedia: "The core CPI index excludes goods with high price volatility, such as food and energy. This measure of core inflation systematically excludes food and energy prices because, historically, they have been highly volatile and non-systemic. More specifically, food and energy prices are widely thought to be subject to large changes that often fail to persist and do not represent relative price changes."
The Core CPI is used to calculate "Core Inflation," which is the main thing that the Federal Reserve tries to monitor. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_inflation. So although there are alternative CPIs which do include food and energy prices, they are not as important to the people making monetary policy in the United States.
I'm not really sure what you're trying to show with that graph of deflation probabilities. If I'm reading it right, the probability of deflation through 2017 is currently 0%. Since the year is currently 2013, the "probability of deflation between 2008 and 2012" is also 0%, since I just lived through those years, and... it didn't happen.
The reason why people were buying treasury bonds in 2008-2012 is because the rest of the economy was imploding and they wanted a safe port in the storm. I lived through those years and so did you. You ought to know this already.
I don't really know what else to say. If you think it's a good idea to buy a bunch of treasury bonds with super-low interest rates in 2013, knock yourself out! I think anyone with an ounce of sense can see that our government is going to inflate away its debts over the next few years. In the meantime, you'll be helping to keep USGov in the black, so... thanks, I guess.