Bitcoin falls below $300, lowest in 11 months • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by Nursie » Tue, Oct 07, 2014, 8:23 AM UTC

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.

True, it will.

I'm not sure it will win, I have a pretty good/cheap service I used for this in the past already. But I'll at least look at it I guess.

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

#112

Post by Nursie » Tue, Oct 07, 2014, 8:31 AM UTC

ericb wrote: post #77

hawkice wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 globall…

Bitcoin is more than a currency, so reducing opinions about it solely to "speculating on currency" is disingenuous. Bitcoin is a technology. I've made my career by picking winning open source technologies and betting my career on them. If you think some people who spend their lives predicting day-to-day price movements are better at making technology predictions than I am, I question your assumption. There's a reason…

You know what, I have a number of disagreements with BTC as it currently is instantiated - the limited number, rewards skewed to a few early folks etc etc.

But I agree, the tech is really interesting.

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

#113

Post by Aqueous » Tue, Oct 07, 2014, 6:51 PM UTC

tzs wrote: post #94

nivertech wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and non-government backed non-commodity-backed currency I think hashing power is a commodity, just like electricity or bandwidth.

Hashing power may be a commodity, but does it back Bitcoin? Hashing is used to create a new Bitcoin, but that seems more like a resource consumed as part of production, not something that is backing the currency. When a currency is backed by a commodity, such as a currency backed by gold, you can exchange the currency for the commodity at a fixed rate. The currency is a proxy for the commodity. When you hold a unit o…

I think the 'gold' would be the hash collisions that the mining process discovers - this is like gold in the sense that these hash collisions are mathematically scarce and of finite supply, and very difficult to discover/extract. They are unlike gold in that they are not very useful by themselves, whereas gold is used as a material in many things.