361–370 of 505 posts
Does that mean a miner can only 'create' a bitcoin (or partial bitcoin) when there is a transaction.
So how did it start in the beginning? Someone would have had to be able to create bitcoins.
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Because not everyone is able to hit the same Cost of Production, or wants to put down the upfront investment in equipment, or has the technical know how, etc. If the cost of production was the price ceiling why would anyone start producing? They'd just break even at best . Besides people buy things for $Y >> $X everyday simply for convenience. You could go buy ingredients and make a sandwich for $X dollars, but inste…
You read me as being more precise than I'd meant it. But it's basic economics that competition drives the cost down toward the cost of production (including labor cost and opportunity cost), and there's nothing in bitcoins that's preventing people from competing. And regardless, there's absolutely no conceptual reason cost of production would represent any kind of floor .
Well no sane/rational entity would want to sell for less than cost of production because that would entail a loss (let's keep this simple and say there aren't any ulterior reasons one would receive gains/benefits from selling at below cost).
Since competition drives the price towards the cost of production it's reasonable to consider it or a price just above it as the floor.
Edit: I guess I should state, I'm not trying to say there is a 'hard' floor in which the price can't possibly drop below. I'm more saying it's a relative benchmark for where the lowest price would tend to settle given a healthy bitcoin market/environment.
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That's from a week ago. Is there any evidence that a DDOS happened today?
DDOS with malicious intent, or does a general usage spike count? Just try loading mtgox.com -- it's slow. Try using it to trade. Even slower. Service is being denied. Confidence undermined. I would not take this as a vote that once the server issues are resolved, the price will continue to soar, but if I said that, it's possible that later I would be able to "told you so".
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the efficient market is dead and always has been.
> the efficient market is dead and always has been. This is what people mean when they say "efficient market" in this context: > In finance, the efficient-market hypothesis (EMH) asserts that financial markets are "informationally efficient". In consequence of this, one cannot consistently achieve returns in excess of average market returns on a risk-adjusted basis, given the information available at the time the inv…
Evidently, many hoarders/speculators decided to cash out at once -- much like the audience in a movie theater would try to go through the exit door at the same time if someone were to yell "fire!" The naive souls who recently bought bitcoins to make a 'quick buck' are in for a rude surprise. In the short run, no one knows how Bitcoin's price will fluctuate. In the long run, however, if Bitcoin continues to work as in…
In the long run, yes, there could be a bright future for BTC. In the short run, there are several big challenges, liquidity being a huge one. When it comes to BTC, the activities of speculators/hoarders, and the activities of free exchange and commerce, have shown themselves to be in direct opposition so far. The "store of value" and the "medium of exchange" are not mutually exclusive, of course, but for the time bei…
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Gold is useful stuff in all sorts of electronic applications... I'd say at least 4x that of Bismuth or around $50/pound.
That's ridiculous. Gold is far more valuable as a mammalian decoration than as a conductor.
So while you may feel its value is higher as jewelry etc., its utility is still quite high in electronics.
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> On the contrary this is just the most pronounced in a series of recent coordinated DDOS / aggressive selling attacks designed to (successfully) inspire panic. The bitcointalk forums and /r/bitcoin are full of paranoia like this. After months of stress trying to divine market patterns, people see market manipulation and conspiracies everywhere. The simple truth is that there was an agressive bubble. The doubling per…
> paranoia MtGox has said they were subject to DDoS attacks: https://twitter.com/MagicalTux/status/317423311174909954 > If you looked at the log plot[2], it still looked exponential! Trying to divine future price movement from looking at a graph has been proven definitively, repeatedly to be foolish.
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USD are backed by the fact that US citizens have to pay in USD to pay their taxes. Bitcoins have no such imperative.
My Econ 101 understanding is that the value of USD is not primarily due to taxes, i.e. if the government stopped collecting taxes (or started forcing people to pay taxes in gold or Euros) the value of the dollar would not tank. Instead, we're in a Nash equilibrium where we're all accepting dollars as a means of exchange and it would be costly and have little benefit for individuals to defect. The intrinsic value of t…
Go just a bit past Econ 101, and you'll discover that economists do not universally agree on these things. That being said, here is one popular view:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_monetary_theory
From wiki:
"[Knapp] argued the state could create pure paper money and make it exchangeable by recognising it as legal tender, with the criterion for the money of a state being "that which is accepted at the public pay offices"."
Or in other words, taxes, torts, and other laws give money its value.
