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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

#111

Post by sanswork »

alkimie2 wrote: post #73
sanswork wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do it pretty regularly as I move countries frequently and have bank accounts in 3 countries at the moment. I generally do international transfers 2-4 times a month. The last ~20 times I've transferred money overseas it has been in my receiving account the next morning and it usually costs ~0.3%. Bitcoin isn't better for remittance. Actually moving the money has never been the expensive parts of remittance it is giv…

I have to respectfully disagree. It is not the transaction fees itself, but the currency exchange rates that kill you at one end or the other. (I would agree with you regarding intra-Europe CEPA transfers however.) I'm American and have lived overseas for several years and the currency exchange rates in combination with the 10-20 USD fees are a constant annoyance. And an annoyance for my startup which operates in USD…

With bitcoin you don't get rid of the currency exchange rates you add another one. Source -> Bitcoin -> Destination.

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

#112

Post by grey-area »

alkimie2 wrote: post #73
sanswork wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do it pretty regularly as I move countries frequently and have bank accounts in 3 countries at the moment. I generally do international transfers 2-4 times a month. The last ~20 times I've transferred money overseas it has been in my receiving account the next morning and it usually costs ~0.3%. Bitcoin isn't better for remittance. Actually moving the money has never been the expensive parts of remittance it is giv…

I have to respectfully disagree. It is not the transaction fees itself, but the currency exchange rates that kill you at one end or the other. (I would agree with you regarding intra-Europe CEPA transfers however.) I'm American and have lived overseas for several years and the currency exchange rates in combination with the 10-20 USD fees are a constant annoyance. And an annoyance for my startup which operates in USD…

It is not the transaction fees itself, but the currency exchange rates that kill you at one end or the other.

Wouldn't the incredibly volatile currency exchange rate of Bitcoin also cause problems? It is not immune to this as it is free floating against other currencies.

I'd love to see a world-currency which does away with existing credit card companies and transfer fees worldwide, but Bitcoin is not suitable, and I suspect if we see one emerge it will quickly be regulated and taxed by governments like all other means of storing wealth.

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

#113

Post by simonh »

facepalm wrote: post #86
hueving wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Bitcoin is the electronic version of "let's buy a lot of gold and stash it somewhere". It's even worse than that because normal people at least have a decent idea of when their gold is secure. A non-techie just has to trust that the online bitcoin provider or author of the wallet is doing what he/she really says and in a secure fashion.

Actually I find the problem of stashing gold very tricky. A bank vault seems like a bad idea because of the history when the government seized the gold and people weren't allowed to open their bank safes without a policeman. Hiding it at home seems risky because of burglaries. I haven't found a solution yet, that's why I don't own any gold. With bitcoin, at least I can spread the risk, like putting a part of the "sec…

You can do exactly the same thing with gold, i.e. holding it in different banks in different regulatory districts. If your friend's house is burgled or burned down. The one advantage of Bitcoin in this respect is that you can back it up in case of disk failure, house burning down, etc.

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

#114

Post by yen223 »

olalonde wrote: post #77
tribaal wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Banks can already transfer fund between themselves electronically and efficiently. And a bank account is exactly storing paper currency digitally. Again, I don't see what the innovation here is, except the technical aspects (the blockchain as a distributed system is very clever).

> Banks can already transfer fund between themselves electronically and efficiently. And a bank account is exactly storing paper currency digitally. Sure, but it doesn't matter what benefits Bitcoin offers to banks (although I do think you are overlooking a few). If banks ever were to support BTC denominated accounts, it would be because of consumer demand, not because Bitcoin is more efficient for them to store/tran…

The predictable monetary supply of Bitcoin is precisely why it is doomed to fail. Specifically, Bitcoin's deflationary nature.

In the best case scenario, Bitcoin will continue to experience unstable boom-bust cycles as prices will rise when people start hoarding their coins, then crash again when people dump their Bitcoin en masse once prices hit a high enough peak. This is great for speculators, terrible for everyone else.

In the worst case scenario, Bitcoin prices drop to $0 when everyone gives up using it. Which leads to the second problem: Bitcoin never really solved the chicken-and-egg problem. Not enough merchants accept Bitcoin for customers to bother with yet another currency, and not enough customers use bitcoins for merchants to deal with yet another currency. Services like Coinbase are merely abstractions over the USD - too few merchants deal solely in Bitcoin, and for good reason.

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

#115

Post by sanswork »

pmorici wrote: post #81
k-mcgrady wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is nothing to do with Bitcoin. You basically won the lottery. Some people mined or bought Bitcoin, it got a lot of media hype so the price sky rocketed, and then your coins were worth a lot of money. If I bought 200 BTC now and waited a few years I doubt I'd have the same experience. I'm happy for you that you got to use that to help you start a business but it was a lottery win.

"If I bought 200 BTC now and waited a few years I doubt I'd have the same experience." Why? This is like the 5th or 6th boom bust cycle in Bitcoin and each boom has been bigger than the last. even the current long price decline is not unprecedented.

Because this boom was the first time it was really in the publics eye. The previous ones happened when very few people had ever heard of bitcoin. This one happened when most people in the western world have heard of it. If they were going to get on board they would have done it but they didn't because for most people with money bitcoin offers very little upside over their existing systems with huge risk.

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

#116

Post by ekianjo »

facepalm wrote: post #86
hueving wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Bitcoin is the electronic version of "let's buy a lot of gold and stash it somewhere". It's even worse than that because normal people at least have a decent idea of when their gold is secure. A non-techie just has to trust that the online bitcoin provider or author of the wallet is doing what he/she really says and in a secure fashion.

Actually I find the problem of stashing gold very tricky. A bank vault seems like a bad idea because of the history when the government seized the gold and people weren't allowed to open their bank safes without a policeman. Hiding it at home seems risky because of burglaries. I haven't found a solution yet, that's why I don't own any gold. With bitcoin, at least I can spread the risk, like putting a part of the "sec…

> Actually I find the problem of stashing gold very tricky.

This, and plus the fact that in almost every country on Earth now, buying Gold needs an ID of some sort so that governments know exactly where to look for Gold the day they want to seize it. I think one of the last places where you can buy Gold anonymously is Switzerland.

EDIT: and you have to trust that the Gold you buy is real. There's always the risk it's gold plated tungsten or something.

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

#117

Post by tlrobinson »

hueving wrote: post #90
facepalm wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually I find the problem of stashing gold very tricky. A bank vault seems like a bad idea because of the history when the government seized the gold and people weren't allowed to open their bank safes without a policeman. Hiding it at home seems risky because of burglaries. I haven't found a solution yet, that's why I don't own any gold. With bitcoin, at least I can spread the risk, like putting a part of the "sec…

Unless you had a virus on your computer when you generated the keys, in which case it doesn't matter.

See my comment about hardware wallets: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8885114

For the truly paranoid you could even generate your seed using coin flips or dice rolls... http://www.swansontec.com/bitcoin-dice.html

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

#118

Post by brazzy »

TheDong wrote: post #110
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…

Do you have any idea how much energy, work and time is being spent on the infrastructure of regular currencies? Minting, ATMs, secure transport, brank branches, all kind of mainframe dinosaurs running 40 year old COBOL code?

Even if scaled up to global usage, I very much doubt Bitcoin mining would be worse.

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

#119

Post by tlrobinson »

simonh wrote: post #113
facepalm wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually I find the problem of stashing gold very tricky. A bank vault seems like a bad idea because of the history when the government seized the gold and people weren't allowed to open their bank safes without a policeman. Hiding it at home seems risky because of burglaries. I haven't found a solution yet, that's why I don't own any gold. With bitcoin, at least I can spread the risk, like putting a part of the "sec…

You can do exactly the same thing with gold, i.e. holding it in different banks in different regulatory districts. If your friend's house is burgled or burned down. The one advantage of Bitcoin in this respect is that you can back it up in case of disk failure, house burning down, etc.

That's different than using Shamir's Secret Sharing [1] to split the private key/seed across multiple safe deposit boxes.

If one safe deposit box full of gold is stolen, that portion of the gold is gone. If a safe deposit box containing 1/5th of a Shamir's Secret Sharing secret is stolen, the secret can't be reconstructed by the thief, but can be reconstructed by the owner if they still have access to 3 of the 5 pieces (for example).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir's_Secret_Sharing

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

#120

Post by whiskyant »

ygmelnikova wrote: post #42

Went to purchase $100 worth of Bitcoin back in the day at $0.03 ea. CC didn't go through. Thought I would try again the next morning with a different card. After sleeping on it, decided it was probably a waste of $100. I'm even less inclined to spend $100 now.

Oh man, lost the opportunity to snag an easy $3M... although I suppose you would've sold it quickly when the price when up and not held until $1k+.
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