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Bitcoin crashes over 25% in 24 hours, under $180

bitcoinity.org

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Re: Bitcoin crashes over 25% in 24 hours, under $180

#101

Post by kijin »

leni536 wrote: post #80
tribaal wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your card is irrelevant. My card is very relevant. If someone steals it, they can use it but it doesn't impact me in any way except having to wait for the new card to come. If someone steals my bitcoins, it means they have a copy of my private key, and there is nothing I can do about it. Zich. Nada. Transaction fees pay for this insurance (among other things, but still).

You can have multiple wallets though. You can have a really secured wallet, maybe signed with a smart card (is it possible? If yes then it's pretty much impossible to steal, unless someone steals it physically.) and have a less secure wallet on your smartphone. Your smartphone plays the role of a "regular wallet" and you only have minimal amounts on it (like what you need for daily purchases).

Sure, but that takes a considerable amount of time and mental energy to set up and maintain. If possible, most people would just outsource the whole operation to some third party so that they can forget about it and get on with their lives. Of course, the third party would charge a fee for the convenience that they offers to their customers...

...and that's how you get a bank.

Re: Bitcoin crashes over 25% in 24 hours, under $180

#102

Post by marincounty »

marincounty wrote: post #53

1. Thought it was a scam. 2. looked into it and realized I was wrong. 3. Looked into building a mining rig. 4. Worrried about ROI, after energy and hardware. 5. Seems like everyone was mining. 6. Knew I competed with entities with deep pockets. 7. T.V. news started to treat bitcoins like gold quotes. 8. Started seeing bitcoins accepted here. 9. Wish I didn't procrastinate years ago. 10. Glad I didn't invest in bitcoi…

Read past the first sentence? Or, was the problem TLDR? "One of the days Alice, POW. Straight to Control-Delete!" I was praising the blessed Bitcoins?

Re: Bitcoin crashes over 25% in 24 hours, under $180

#104

Post by [deleted] »

adnam wrote: post #40
tribaal wrote: post #10

Yeah, as much as I like the concept of bitcoin (and the blockchain), I don't see adoption becoming anything more than anecdotal. No interest rate, and you have to secure it yourself? No thanks. My "big bad bank" guarantees me at least a small interest in saving money, and if my card is stolen, I get a new one in 24 hours and all transactions are cancelled. I'm happy to pay some transaction fees ("extortion!") to get…

"I don't see adoption becoming anything more than anecdotal." Well the value of the whole blockchain is over $2.5Bn, so it's more than anecdotal. http://coinmarketcap.com/

[deleted]

Re: Bitcoin crashes over 25% in 24 hours, under $180

#105

Post by rplnt »

bigbugbag wrote: post #96
tribaal wrote: post #10

Yeah, as much as I like the concept of bitcoin (and the blockchain), I don't see adoption becoming anything more than anecdotal. No interest rate, and you have to secure it yourself? No thanks. My "big bad bank" guarantees me at least a small interest in saving money, and if my card is stolen, I get a new one in 24 hours and all transactions are cancelled. I'm happy to pay some transaction fees ("extortion!") to get…

You may be mistaken here, the day your bank disappear all your deposits and interests disappear with it. You probably this cannot happen which is what people believe until it happened to them, and this happened all around the world. In Europe a 2013 law is now in effect which basically states no more bank bail-outs, from now on it will be bail-ins. In other words if a bank fails it will use its customer's deposits to…

Bailing out bank and paying out deposits are two different things. Even in Europe your deposits are "protected" and will be paid out in the even that the bank can't. To a certain amount that is.

Re: Bitcoin crashes over 25% in 24 hours, under $180

#106

Post by simonh »

bigbugbag wrote: post #96
tribaal wrote: post #10

Yeah, as much as I like the concept of bitcoin (and the blockchain), I don't see adoption becoming anything more than anecdotal. No interest rate, and you have to secure it yourself? No thanks. My "big bad bank" guarantees me at least a small interest in saving money, and if my card is stolen, I get a new one in 24 hours and all transactions are cancelled. I'm happy to pay some transaction fees ("extortion!") to get…

You may be mistaken here, the day your bank disappear all your deposits and interests disappear with it. You probably this cannot happen which is what people believe until it happened to them, and this happened all around the world. In Europe a 2013 law is now in effect which basically states no more bank bail-outs, from now on it will be bail-ins. In other words if a bank fails it will use its customer's deposits to…

>...all your deposits and interests disappear with it

The US, EU and many other countries have deopsit insurance* schemes that limit risk to depositors. You may not get all your money back if you have large deposits, but for example in the EU you're generaly guaranteed to get at least the first 50,000 Euros.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deposit_insurance

Re: Bitcoin crashes over 25% in 24 hours, under $180

#107

Post by ema »

sanswork wrote: post #5

Not really surprising. 2014 was meant to be the year of bitcoin and it flopped as far as the general public was concerned. Bitcoin picked up some more merchants but they almost universally saw disappointing sales or dramatic drop offs(Overstock the poster child which at one point was claiming serious expectations of $15-20m in bitcoin sales ended up with a 5th of the lower end of their claim). Mining companies are cl…

In the case that bitcoin succeeds we shouldn't expect it to be a smooth ascend. After the dot-com bubble it too seemed like we had seen peak internet. A bunch of people underestimated how hard it is to do something useful with bitcoin, that doesn't necessarily mean that it will be a failure. I'm not confident that bitcoin will succeed, but neither am I confident that it won't.

Re: Bitcoin crashes over 25% in 24 hours, under $180

#109

Post by rprospero »

throwawaymsft wrote: post #43
IvyMike wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most people(in western nations) learn about it and respond almost unanimously with 'Meh'. I have very mundane needs, and I've never figured out a compelling case for me to use bitcoin. In general, it's always been more trouble than convenience. I know there are people with exotic needs, but I think the majority of people are more like me.

When was the last time you transferred money to someone (esp. out of country), how much did it cost, and how long did it take? Now, imagine you're poor, your family lives abroad, and a $20 fee on a $500 transfer is indeed a big issue. There are usability concerns (a bitcoin ATM to deposit money and have it sent to an address would be nice) but the use case of near-zero, same-day money transfers is enormous. In the af…

I am living abroad and while I'm not truly poor, a couple of months ago I had less that £20 to my name, so I'm quite cost conscious.

I needed to send some money overseas and I looked at bitcoin for exactly the same reasons that you described. However, I found that sending the money via bit coin would take longer and wind up costing me more in transaction fees than just using transferwise. While the actual bitcoin transfer itself was free and instantaneous, there were multiple days of waiting and percentage fees to convert from or to fiat currency at each end of the transaction.

Re: Bitcoin crashes over 25% in 24 hours, under $180

#110

Post by TheDong »

tribaal wrote: post #10

Yeah, as much as I like the concept of bitcoin (and the blockchain), I don't see adoption becoming anything more than anecdotal. No interest rate, and you have to secure it yourself? No thanks. My "big bad bank" guarantees me at least a small interest in saving money, and if my card is stolen, I get a new one in 24 hours and all transactions are cancelled. I'm happy to pay some transaction fees ("extortion!") to get…

It's worse than that. To me, the biggest flaw of bitcoin is that you have to constantly spend energy on it (as in computation power / burn coal) for it to remain viable. As soon as enough people get tired of throwing away money at their miners someone can pull a 51% attack, so everyone must put more energy into their miners to protect their investment... forever.

Over time the amount of energy wasted by bitcoin could become stupendously dumb. We could be using our spare processor cycles to fold proteins or aid in numerous other research, and yet we're using it to allow people to send bits of data to each other without a need for centralized trust.

Compare that to the centralized bank where you have a single centralized trusted source which allows transferring money from one person to another to take no more energy than a modest server and some backups -- far less than the power consumption of a single GPU miner.

The above problem also won't get better. Even after you're no longer mining for new coins, you must keep up the mining volume to protect existing coins and allow transactions to occur at all. I personally find the above to be a fundamental problem with the "proof of work" solution. Sure, on paper you've solved the General's problem, but the reality is that you're throwing massive amounts of energy out the window. Because of that, I think this proof's place should have been to remain on paper.

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