171–180 of 191 posts
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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.
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Can you provide reasons/evidence for why I should not trust Coinbase?
Indeed: https://hn.algolia.com/#!/comment/forever/0/author%3Asillysa... (I want to preface this by saying that I'm talking about people storing their savings in Bitcoin. If you don't care about what happens to your money, then it doesn't matter whether you trust Coinbase.) The most convincing argument, I think, is that you're putting your faith in an entity that's not FDIC insured to hold onto your entire future and…
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> If someone gets access to your bitcoin wallet or whatever storage mechanism you are using fails, then that money is gone forever with no way to recover it. Keep in mind that you're comparing two different markets in terms of maturity. One day, there may be a number I can call too when my bitcoin goes missing. I'm sure people made similar arguments before e-commerce. Surely it had to seem easier to just buy a produc…
> One day, there may be a number I can call to when my bitcoin goes missing. Genuinely curious--how would this work?
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Yeah but my credit card company protects me from that sort of fraud so it really isn't a practical concern.
Only if you notice and report it, people get skimmed all the time and never notice.
> And even if bitcoin itself fails, I think the blockchain will be one of key technical innovations of this time period. A blockchain is only useful if it is heavily secured by hashing power. This is only the case if there is significant mining equipment devoted to validating blocks. That in turn only happens if there is a reward for validating a block. Long story short, it's currently very difficult to use a secure…
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By providing you an alternative store of value that isn't controlled by a handful of people in government. Look at Zimbabwe Dollars or the Weimar Republic. There's no reason that can't happen in any other country and Bitcoin provides an alternative to government issued currencies or any other currency. Edit: downvote for ...?
There's no reason that can't happen elsewhere, but there are a lot of reasons that it doesn't . Hyperinflation is actually a pretty rare event, which is why we keep seeing the same two examples over and over - and stated as if they had come out of the blue in what seemed to be a well-functioning economy, rather than being the result of extreme political conditions. Ironically enough, the old Deutschmark is still trad…
Citation please?
Because I'm not even 30 and it's happened in some country at five times in my lifetime - that I'm aware of. Yugoslavia, Brazil, Argentina, Zimbabwe, Venezuela. I guess if you stay away from the ends of the alphabet you'll be fine. The US and Canada better watch out.
It’s important to understand that the default price pressure of the bitcoin ecosystem is down. Only if you assume demand is static. With a mathematically-fixed supply, expanding global population, and the supposed inherently inflationary nature of fiat currencies, the default price pressure should arguably be upward. Let's face it, a great number of the early adopters are digital goldbugs with a jaundiced view of cen…
What's really hard to comprehend is the all of the "smart" VC money funding related startups -- this is pretty basic economics. Although, I suppose a Coinbase investment does provide some hedge against Bitcoin.
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There's no reason that can't happen elsewhere, but there are a lot of reasons that it doesn't . Hyperinflation is actually a pretty rare event, which is why we keep seeing the same two examples over and over - and stated as if they had come out of the blue in what seemed to be a well-functioning economy, rather than being the result of extreme political conditions. Ironically enough, the old Deutschmark is still trad…
Hyperinflation is actually a pretty rare event Citation please? Because I'm not even 30 and it's happened in some country at five times in my lifetime - that I'm aware of. Yugoslavia, Brazil, Argentina, Zimbabwe, Venezuela. I guess if you stay away from the ends of the alphabet you'll be fine. The US and Canada better watch out.
I think it is unusual relative to the number of countries in the world and the time involved. There's a list here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflatio I count 21 examples in the last 50 years, of which half were directly corrleated with the collapse of the Soviet Union and most of the rest were in Latin America, a region with a long history of poor governance.
Of course Bitcoin can function as a hedge or a store of value, like gold historically has. But the majority of people who extol it for this purpose as in the developed world and the US in particular, where the probability of hyperinflation is very low. The closest we've come to a crisis of that kind in recent years is Cyprus, and (again) that's a place with an unusual political problem.
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The value of a currency is a measurement of the faith of people holding it. That's all it is. If people have no faith in a currency, they'll drop it like bad habit. If people have a ton of faith in a currency, they'll hoard it like crazy. Everything you buy with a currency is, again, a decision you make based upon faith. You have _faith_ that a house will be a good place to live, that it'll provide for your needs and…
You're not understanding my point. Dollar / BTC is a terrible measurement of faithfulness. You're so fixated on dollars per BTC that you've lost sight of what BTC is supposed to be: a currency. You should be watching THIS chart: https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions-excluding-popu... NOT this chart: https://blockchain.info/charts/market-price
it could be many things. as to what it's 'supposed' to be, i'm not sure what you mean. the inventors of the system can't know exactly what will happen.
i agree that the dollar/btc exchange is a terrible measure of faitthfulness. a good measure would be 'how many addresses have had hundreds of coins for over a year' - because whoever holds each of those addresses has 1) a lot of faith in bitcoin and 2) enough resources to live their daily lives.
that says something. i'd rather have the currency be the main 'storage' of people's faith in the world - which would mean it'd be just as volatile and crazy as the stock market, because people's faith changes every day. if that kept the volume low - so that most people saw it as 'confusing hacker money that seems to get wealthy but is hard to use daily if you don't understand security' then the daily volume of transactions will be close to nothing.
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Indeed: https://hn.algolia.com/#!/comment/forever/0/author%3Asillysa... (I want to preface this by saying that I'm talking about people storing their savings in Bitcoin. If you don't care about what happens to your money, then it doesn't matter whether you trust Coinbase.) The most convincing argument, I think, is that you're putting your faith in an entity that's not FDIC insured to hold onto your entire future and…
So Coinbase is fine for the amounts that everyone would actually consider storing there? Nice hedge.
You could counter that by saying "Oh, those are just drug addicts. Normal people aren't that dumb." To that, I can point at the example of the Mt. Gox collapse. There you have a case of people going from millionaire status to "looks like I'll have to find a job and keep it for a long time" status in the blink of an eye. One of the bigger losses was 4,700 BTC: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1yv26o/gox_horror_s...
And lastly, you can't have it both ways. Either Coinbase is trustworthy enough to keep your personal savings safe, or it's insane to trust them with any amount of money that you care about not-vanishing.