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Bitcoin falls below $300, lowest in 11 months

bitcoinwisdom.com

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Re: Bitcoin falls below $300, lowest in 11 months

#61

Post by hawkice »

ericb wrote: post #17
hawkice wrote: post #12

The exchange rates of normal currencies are primarily interesting as tools to look at trade deficits &c. I can't think of an analogy with Bitcoin. I think the only reason this is interesting is because so many people treated as an investment. Using it as a store of wealth is clearly silly -- much too volatile. But Bitcoin as investment seems very common. It's hard to emphasize how bizarre that choice is, but suffice…

Why is it bizarre to use it as an investment choice? If you have a sense for what makes a technology prevail and think that bitcoin will, it isn't a big leap to look at the value that can be transferred through bitcoin and say "in the success scenarios, it will have to grow to be many times larger." Like any investment, you have to be prepared to be wrong, though.

That's remarkably similar to saying: 'If you have a sense for what makes a trade deficit occur and think that one will, it isn't a big leap to look at the value that can be transferred through international trade and say 'in the scenarios where I am right, it will have to grow many times larger''.

The analysis above is completely correct... and also available to precisely everyone, and is how the price is set globally. You aren't buying at a nerds-only price. So what you are really saying is that you are a more accurate speculator on currencies than people who do it for a living and have large trading and research apparatuses at their disposal. Could be true, but if you haven't attempted to speculate on currency before, there's no way for you to know that (and the prior probability is low).

Re: Bitcoin falls below $300, lowest in 11 months

#62

Post by forthefuture »

Aqueous wrote: post #57
bdcravens wrote: post #29

The easier it gets to buy Bitcoin, and accept Bitcoin, the worse it will be. Even if you wanted to spend Bitcoin, you had to think ahead. Now Circle lets you buy within minutes (in most cases) of setting up your account. On the other side of things, Bitpay and Coinbase let merchants convert back to USD (or other currency) right away. So it's possible to do "just in time Bitcoin": Bitcoin is merely the payment protoco…

That's not true at all. The need to convert to dollars is present only most assets are denominated in dollars, taxes are paid in dollars, and our basic needs are paid for in dollars. What happens when vendor adoption expands to the point where you can buy enough from vendors - food, clothing, housing - with BitCoin that it is no longer absolutely necessary to convert to dollars, because you can subsist entirely on Bi…

You're still paid in dollars.

Re: Bitcoin falls below $300, lowest in 11 months

#63

Post by Estragon »

jaequery wrote: post #18
Nursie wrote: post #8

Maybe as the last big wave of people flocking to BTC figured out there's not a lot to do with it and lose interest? Because we've got to have moved past the point where it's all currency enthusiasts, and if you're not enthusiastic about alt. currency in general, is there any reason yet to prefer it?

bitcoin will be on your mind the next time you want to send/receive money oversees, i guarantee you that.

The price difference between BTCAUD and BTCUSD is very close to the cost of transferring money from an Australian bank to a US bank.

Re: Bitcoin falls below $300, lowest in 11 months

#64

Post by notabubble »

jaequery wrote: post #18
Nursie wrote: post #8

Maybe as the last big wave of people flocking to BTC figured out there's not a lot to do with it and lose interest? Because we've got to have moved past the point where it's all currency enthusiasts, and if you're not enthusiastic about alt. currency in general, is there any reason yet to prefer it?

bitcoin will be on your mind the next time you want to send/receive money oversees, i guarantee you that.

I regularly send money to Indonesia, and found that Ria is simpler and less expensive than BTC. End to end (including the margin on the USD/IDR conversion) the transaction costs for RIA around 2%. BTC for this transaction works out to around 3.5%, and it's harder to use to boot.

BTC isn't useless, but your post is typical of BTC proponents. It sounds plausible, but it's actually bullshit.

Re: Bitcoin falls below $300, lowest in 11 months

#65

Post by davidgerard »

chatmasta wrote: post #2

Last time Bitcoin fell significantly, BitPay announced three days later they were partnering with PayPal. BitPay has a lot of Bitcoins floating in their accounts (since they need to exchange USD BitCoin). They also could predict that announcing a partnership with PayPal would spike the price of BitCoin. It makes me wonder if some of these price drops could be market manipulation by insiders who have a big announcemen…

December - Just a small market correction after bubble, soon we go up uP UP!

February - Price dropped because Mark Karpeles is a incompetent thief, now that Goxy is closed we go up uP UP!

May - China dropped the price, now all Chinese is priced in, we go up uP UP!

August - Wall Street dropping the price because they want to enter cheap. HODL and we go up uP UP!

October - THE B3ARWHAL3 DROPPED THE PRICE, CHEAP COINS!!1 up uP UP!

http://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/2idb3s/looks_reall...

Re: Bitcoin falls below $300, lowest in 11 months

#66

Post by Aqueous »

forthefuture wrote: post #62
Aqueous wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not true at all. The need to convert to dollars is present only most assets are denominated in dollars, taxes are paid in dollars, and our basic needs are paid for in dollars. What happens when vendor adoption expands to the point where you can buy enough from vendors - food, clothing, housing - with BitCoin that it is no longer absolutely necessary to convert to dollars, because you can subsist entirely on Bi…

You're still paid in dollars.

Some people already aren't paid in fiat. I'm not one of those people - because I realize BitCoin still has a ways to go before I start to put more than the money I can afford to lose into it.

Re: Bitcoin falls below $300, lowest in 11 months

#67

Post by georgemcbay »

zanny wrote: post #38
pron wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> like a serious event creating major doubt in USD. I think you are way overestimating Bitcoin's (current) significance. If something major happens to the USD -- i.e. something major happens to the US economy -- Bitcoin will be the last thing people think about, and there are quite a few other currencies (with much better track records) that people will prefer before betting their money on Bitcoin. > It's entirely po…

> there are quite a few other currencies (with much better track records) that people will prefer before betting their money on Bitcoin. So I'm in the US. Assuming hyperinflation starts tomorrow, the only money I have, or anyone else will accept broadly enough to keep me able to exchange in the market, is bitcoin. Nobody has Euros, nobody takes them, nobody takes Canadian dollars on the boarder, and nobody would acce…

"the only money I have, or anyone else will accept broadly enough to keep me able to exchange in the market, is bitcoin"

Virtually nobody really "takes" bitcoin, it just seems like they do because they are using a 3rd party service which abstracts those transactions into USD for them. How long this sort of acceptance would last if the USD tanked is left as an exercise for the reader.

As goofy as I think it is that people speculate in gold as a good "collapse" currency, at least if a US Dollar destroying event takes place gold will still be shiny, whereas good luck trading bitcoin when the power and wired networking infrastructure is no more.

Re: Bitcoin falls below $300, lowest in 11 months

#68

Post by krschultz »

pron wrote: post #44
zanny wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there are quite a few other currencies (with much better track records) that people will prefer before betting their money on Bitcoin. So I'm in the US. Assuming hyperinflation starts tomorrow, the only money I have, or anyone else will accept broadly enough to keep me able to exchange in the market, is bitcoin. Nobody has Euros, nobody takes them, nobody takes Canadian dollars on the boarder, and nobody would acce…

Assuming this Glen Beckian Armageddon, I doubt you'll be able to use Bitcoin much at all, as it requires internet access and electricity, both could experience disruptions in the chaos that will surely ensue when world's leading economy collapses (remember, nobody (seriously) lost faith in the USD even during the 2008 meltdown, so nothing short of a '29-like collapse will do it). If that world-changing catastrophe ha…

In retrospect, it seems that 2008 was the same order of magnitude as 1929. Sure, the safety net was there to prevent bread lines, but the economic damage was pretty close. Europe's lack of recovery is especially alarming.

Which only reinforces your point, we've gone through one of the worst recession/depressions of all time, and USD survived. I really can't imagine what would change it other than insanely reckless monetary & fiscal policy - which is absolutely not happening right now.

Re: Bitcoin falls below $300, lowest in 11 months

#69

Post by notabubble »

jcfrei wrote: post #50
Nursie wrote: post #8

Maybe as the last big wave of people flocking to BTC figured out there's not a lot to do with it and lose interest? Because we've got to have moved past the point where it's all currency enthusiasts, and if you're not enthusiastic about alt. currency in general, is there any reason yet to prefer it?

It'll take a lot of time and it'll probably show up in places where we didn't really expect it. I believe 10 years down the road BTC will be pretty big in Africa.

I think it'll be popular in the same way that myspace will be a popular social network, and that webcrawler will be a game-changing search engine.

Some of the best ideas will be adopted by something much, much better.

Re: Bitcoin falls below $300, lowest in 11 months

#70

Post by aftbit »

imaginenore wrote: post #46
bdcravens wrote: post #29

The easier it gets to buy Bitcoin, and accept Bitcoin, the worse it will be. Even if you wanted to spend Bitcoin, you had to think ahead. Now Circle lets you buy within minutes (in most cases) of setting up your account. On the other side of things, Bitpay and Coinbase let merchants convert back to USD (or other currency) right away. So it's possible to do "just in time Bitcoin": Bitcoin is merely the payment protoco…

> When Bitcoin becomes a pure cash equivalent, no one will care about the price. I believe that once the price becomes irrelevant, it'll trend downward Assuming world wide adoption scenario, that's mathematically impossible. People generally have some amount of wealth (most of us have it in a bank). If you have, let's say, 100 million people (a small fraction of the world really) using bitcoin instead of fiat, and, l…

The idea is that rather than hold your wealth in Bitcoin, you would continue to hold it in your local fiat, and only use Bitcoin for the payment protocol.

Imagine if Paypal operated in "PPBUX" instead of local currency. Because of the large volume and high speed of transactions, PPBUX USD would not be a very important number. You would only hold PPBUX for the few minutes required to make the transaction, during which it's pretty unlikely to move against you.

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