Live data from Hacker News

Bitcoins reached $300

news.ycombinator.com

131–134 of 134 posts

Re: Bitcoins reached $300

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People can find out about your coins the same way as they find out how much gold you have.

What website would you go to to find out how much gold I hold?

What website will tell you how much BTC do I hold? If you can trace from some exchange or a merchant my identity linked to some bitcoins, you can equally do that with a gold dealer. Of course, you can see where bitcoins are moved, but that won't tell you much: they could be equally sold or simply relocated.

Re: Bitcoins reached $300

#132
post #83
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I may be wrong, but due to the deflationary nature of BTC (limited supply, increasing demand), when that happens, those fees are worth more (in government backed fiat currencies) than they are today. It's like being upset that the original miners could get a block reward of 50 BTC for mining on a CPU but today you have to use specialized hardware for less BTC. But as competition increased (and difficulty increased),…

Would something like FreiCoin help? (bitcoin with demurrage - coins 'evaporate' over time so that there are always new ones to be mined and lost coins eventually go back into the pool)

The only way for coins to evaporate is for the wallets to get lost. It happens. The thing people seem to get stuck on is that a coin isn't divisible. It is. Even if there was only a single coin available to the market, it would still function, albeit the real value of that one coin would be equal to the size of the market.

Re: Bitcoins reached $300

#133
post #109

where do you personally buy/sell BTC ?

The easiest for the US is coinbase.com. Unless you want to buy a lot. But they are not an exchange so you can't setup buy/sell orders.

Not really if you want to trade. They are playing safe instead of having balances in USD and BTC so that you don't need an ACH for each buy/sell, which takes a week.

Re: Bitcoins reached $300

#134
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's becoming "too valuable" in terms of the goods a person would normally buy with it. It is more convenient to quote prices in whole number units than in tiny fractions of a unit. The USD is irrelevant here.

At the beginnings of 20th century ~310USD (which coincedentally is 1BTC at today's - or this hour's - prices) would feed an average american family for a whole year. http://libraryguides.missouri.edu/content.php?pid=298741&sid... People used cents in day-to-day dealings and I doubt anyone found it inconvenient. Same stuff with BTC and satoshis. People will get used to that sooner than you'd think.

Ya, I don't disagree. satoshies or mBTC or whatever. I'm just saying that the argument has to do with cost of goods in BTC, not anything related to USD.
Post reply on HN