Bitcoin Price Pressure • Hacker News Board

Re: Bitcoin Price Pressure

#151

Post by sillysaurus3 » Wed, Apr 30, 2014, 10:46 PM UTC

ars wrote: post #148

obilgic wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This chart isn't even logarithmic.

Agreed. Any time you see a financial graph that isn't logarithmic you can immediately ignore it as garbage.

I don't understand. It's BitcoinWisdom's default chart, and BitcoinWisdom is used by many traders in the Bitcoin community. What relevance does logarithmic scaling have here?

I wasn't saying the price was going to continue to linearly trend to zero. That would be impossible. I was saying I was an idiot for gambling that it wouldn't trend from $1100 to $400.

Re: Bitcoin Price Pressure

#152

Post by jnbiche » Wed, Apr 30, 2014, 10:55 PM UTC

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #78

jnbiche wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For many of us, Bitcoin represents far more than an opportunity to gain or lose money. For us, the freedom from financial and fiscal paternalism is worth the risk.

Agreed. That was actually one of the reasons I originally got into it: I wanted to try to be a part of this movement and help it grow. Even if it was just taking a gamble, I still felt like I was helping it grow into what it will ultimately become (as long as it doesn't fail). Never in the history of the world have people been able to manage a substantial amount of personal wealth without having to trust anyone else.…

I completely agree that Bitcoin is very high-risk. Even if you respect its "dangers", you could still lose whatever you decided to risk.

Which is why you don't risk more than you can afford to lose. People in the Bitcoin community says these words over and over again.

Nonetheless, if you're ideologically sympathetic to Bitcoin, just because you don't risk more than you can afford to lose doesn't mean you don't risk anything. Most of us can afford to put in a few hundred, or (depending on net work) even a few thousand.

Re: Bitcoin Price Pressure

#153

Post by gnaritas » Wed, Apr 30, 2014, 10:55 PM UTC

Ologn wrote: post #129

gnaritas wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have no idea what you're talking about. Bitcoin has value as a remittance network, especially internationally, your argument is trivially invalid.

Can you tell me of any currencies or commodities, from antiquity to 1971, that had any price or value associated with them due to "value as a remittance network"? Bitcoin's market cap was $13.9 billion four months ago. Now it is less than $6 billion. Bitcoin has only grown as a remittance network over the past four months, so if it derives its value from being a remittance network, why is its price sinking? You say m…

> Can you tell me of any currencies or commodities, from antiquity to 1971, that had any price or value associated with them due to "value as a remittance network"?

Can you tell me any currency or commodity, from antiquity to 2009, that is a trust-less distributed payment network? No, that's the point, Bitcoin is something new to the world; your trying to compare it to those things is invalid.

You don't seem to realize Bitcoin is a new asset class that's never before existed, it's simultaniously a stock, a currency, and a commodity because it's a distributed decentralized corporation providing a trustless distributed decentralized service that is of extreme value to anyone on the planet who wants to move money around. Your thinking is stuck in the past and thus blinding you to something new.

> You say my argument is "trivially invalid", but people realizing Bitcoins are worthless has made Bitcoins worth half what they were four months ago.

No, markets generally retrace sudden gains, that's simply the nature of markets and it says nothing about Bitcoin other than that people are speculating on it which was both known, planned for, and has been occurring since it launched. Speculation and hoarding are necessary to create a market cap large enough to function as a payment network.

Re: Bitcoin Price Pressure

#154

Post by ryepdx » Wed, Apr 30, 2014, 10:56 PM UTC

dublinben wrote: post #120

VMG wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://reason.com/blog/2014/04/28/doj-operation-chokepoint-a... > Under "Operation Choke Point," the DOJ and its allies are going after legal but subjectively undesirable business ventures by pressuring banks to terminate their bank accounts or refuse their business. The very premise is clearly chilling—the DOJ is coercing private businesses in an attempt to centrally engineer the American marketplace based on it's o…

That specific article is spreading FUD and perpetuating a hoax. There's no evidence whatsoever that Ms. Presley's case is related to the DoJ. >Bitcoin on the other hand doesn't care about these things. Bitcoin certainly has made itself quite a reputation for being the currency of choice for scammers, hackers, drug dealers, online gamblers, and child pornographers. Merchants who consider accepting BTC might care about…

> That specific article is spreading FUD and perpetuating a hoax. There's no evidence whatsoever that Ms. Presley's case is related to the DoJ.

Who cares if that particular case was tied to Operation Chokepoint? The fact that Operation Chokepoint is real and really targeting perfectly legal businesses should be enough!

> Bitcoin certainly has made itself quite a reputation for being the currency of choice for scammers, hackers, drug dealers, online gamblers, and child pornographers. Merchants who consider accepting BTC might care about those things.

The US dollar is still more popular for those sorts of things, AFAIK. Maybe some merchants will be dissuaded from accepting it for a while by those things. The question is whether enough merchants won't be dissuaded for Bitcoin to reach a critical mass of acceptance and use.

Re: Bitcoin Price Pressure

#155

Post by LyndsySimon » Wed, Apr 30, 2014, 10:56 PM UTC

michaelt wrote: post #83

boyaka wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you provide reasons/evidence for why I should not trust Coinbase?

Two words: Mt Gox. In April 2013, Mt Gox handled 70% of bitcoin trading [1] - they were a widely trusted, well known brand, operating in a stable legislative environment. Coinbase today has what Mt Gox had a year ago. Admittedly, coinbase also has some VC investors. If you believe, should they be hacked or robbed by an insider, that the VCs are going to throw good money after bad to compensate customers, you are much…

You're mostly correct, but there were lots of warning signs about MtGox, far before they folded - the repeated suspension of USD withdrawals chief among them.

Re: Bitcoin Price Pressure

#156

Post by mrb » Wed, Apr 30, 2014, 10:56 PM UTC

driverdan wrote: post #136

mrb wrote: post #72

"as far as I can tell, mining is currently unprofitable with any reasonable cost of electricity." I have been mining for 3.5 years. This statement is utterly false. Current mining hardware, such as the KnC Jupiter, can mine at about 500 Ghash/s at less than 600 Watt at the wall. Over a month it mines: 500e9 (hash/sec) * 3600 (sec/hour) * 731 (hour/month) / (2^32 * 8.0e9 (current difficulty)) * 25 (btc/block) * 400 ($…

You're completely ignoring the capital cost of buying the miner.

True, but this is not Altman's point. He clearly refers to operating costs, not capital costs. (This is why he later talks about free electricity, not free hardware.)

Re: Bitcoin Price Pressure

#157

Post by ars » Wed, Apr 30, 2014, 10:57 PM UTC

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #151

ars wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Any time you see a financial graph that isn't logarithmic you can immediately ignore it as garbage.

I don't understand. It's BitcoinWisdom's default chart, and BitcoinWisdom is used by many traders in the Bitcoin community. What relevance does logarithmic scaling have here? I wasn't saying the price was going to continue to linearly trend to zero. That would be impossible. I was saying I was an idiot for gambling that it wouldn't trend from $1100 to $400.

I know it's the default.

Compare: http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/bitstampUSD#rg360zczsg2013-0...

What looks like a huge fall to you in the old graph is actually revealed as a rather small fall compared to its history. Your point in the text on the graph is still correct, but it's not quite as bad as it looks there.

Re: Bitcoin Price Pressure

#158

Post by 3pt14159 » Wed, Apr 30, 2014, 10:58 PM UTC

diogenescynic wrote: post #107

Warren Buffet said this about gold, but it's still relevant to Bitcoin: >“If you put your money into gold or other non-income- producing assets [read: Bitcoin] that are dependent on what someone else values that in the future, you’re in speculation,” he said. “You’re not into investing....” >To illustrate the point, he asked readers to picture the world’s entire gold stock melded together into a cube 68 feet (21 mete…

The medium for exchange grows in value as a side effect of productivity increases and increased faith in its continued stability.

Government fiat money counteracts this mechanism of value growth through inflation. Some argue that this leads to a net benefit to the economy, but if Bitcoin is the currency of the world in the future, then it will gain value as the whole production of mankind grows. And unlike gold, it cannot be synthesized with very large amounts of energy.

Re: Bitcoin Price Pressure

#159

Post by gnaritas » Wed, Apr 30, 2014, 11:05 PM UTC

logicallee wrote: post #150

gnaritas wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't need to succeed as a currency to succeed.

bingo. It can succeed the way beanie babies did, which were never used as a unit of account or medium of exchange. /s

Don't be so simple minded. It can succeed as a remittance mechanism without succeeding as a currency. If it does nothing more than eliminate Western Union for international wire transfers it'll be massively successful.

Re: Bitcoin Price Pressure

#160

Post by philrapo » Wed, Apr 30, 2014, 11:11 PM UTC

Phlarp wrote: post #146

philrapo wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A blockchain is only useful if it is heavily secured by hashing power. Ripple consensus keeps a distributed database in sync without requiring mining. And the network's security has no correlation to the amount of hashing power involved. (There's no 51% attack on Ripple) I actually think PoW based systems, because of the 51% attack, present an extremely undesirable amount of systemic risk for broad adoption in the f…

>the network's security has no correlation to the amount of hashing power involved. (There's no 51% attack on Ripple) I think you are misunderstanding what the majority of users consider "security". Typically it involves a situation where someone else can't arbitrarily change the rules on a whim or influence the outcome of transactions on a one-off basis. I'd also like to point out this account is used almost exclusi…

You are mistaken. The consensus process does not allow for someone to "arbitrarily change the rules on a whim or influence the outcome of a transaction on a one-off basis".

Here is a youtube explanation of consensus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pj1QVb1vlC0

and here is an explanation on the Ripple wiki: https://ripple.com/wiki/Consensus

and a brief explanation on stackexchange: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/7550/how-does-ri...

You are correct that I am involved in the project. I think Ripple consensus is a more practical, faster, more secure, and less wasteful solution to the double spend problem than proof of work. Happy to entertain your arguments to the contrary.