[deleted]
Thoughts on Bitcoin
101–110 of 213 posts
Re: Thoughts on Bitcoin
#102The tulip craze is a myth, I'm surprised people still buy into it. It's stupid that tulips would go that high, and funnily enough it didn't happen.
Citation?
Read the Wikipedia article on Tulipomania, or _Famous First Bubbles_.
OP should too, actually, since his comment that
> The price of tulip bulbs has yet to recover from its 1637 peak.
betrays several fundamental misunderstandings of the tulip market at the time. Of course the top tulip bulbs depreciated. That is like saying 'a patent has never recovered its peak value' or 'Windows 3.1 never recovered its March 1992 peak'.
Re: Thoughts on Bitcoin
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with the majority of your post, but I'm not convinced that inflation should be included in your list of bad things ("do you want inflation, meddling, and regulation?"). A moderate amount of inflation is a very good thing, and this isn't really even open to debate among economists. Its importance has been empirically and theoretically proven many times. Inflation is important because economics is all about cre…
Inflation is not essential. If people hide their money under mattresses, all that means is that they aren't competing to buy the available goods. Inputs for other ventures are cheaper. If the government weren't trying to re-inflate the asset bubble with cheap money, ventures that make more sense would be flourishing instead. Resources are not infinite. When someone accepts a piece of paper and just holds on to it ins…
You have a very good point, and I hadn't considered that aspect. However, if people defer their consumption, surely they'll also have less need to spend money, and thus less incentive to perform economically productive activities in order to earn money to spend? I'm sure people will be quite happy in the short term, but over longer periods (decades) there will be much less effort (not necessarily money) invested in economic activity.
Re: Thoughts on Bitcoin
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Though it seems to be recovering somewhat. Ow. As with most investments, you need to think medium and long term. Barring some kind of final(!) crash, there isn't anywhere to go for BTC but up. Mainstream media and ordinary people are just now starting to talk about it. Stay with your investment, and don't sell before it at least doubled. If it crashes temporarily, that's fine too: chaos is a ladder. Within reasonab…
By your definition of a "mistake", the biggest mistake you probably made in your life was not buying all the Medifast Inc stock you could get your hands on in 1999. It went up 16,210% in ten years. But wait, it gets worse. Even just going back a year, if you had bought and sold the right stocks at the right times, you'd be the richest person on earth by far, even if you only started with a few bucks. But don't worry,…
Really? Is there something a stock or anything accessible by mere mortals that goes up 20+ times it's value every year? :-)
I bought and sold my bitcoins when prices where bellow 100$. Well, given the fact that I doubled the money I should be happy and brag about it, but I'm not. I could be holding 10k now and it hits in the stomach when I'm thinking about it.
On the other hand, I would never invest more than I can afford to lose.
Re: Thoughts on Bitcoin
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wanted to buy right when it hit $850 a few days ago. I redeemed my $11k mutual fund, but the wire transfer took until Friday to go trough. By the time I was able to buy bitcoins, they were $1111 on coinbase. Bought anyway. Got 9.89BTC. Just lost $2k of that investment, according to the markets. Though it seems to be recovering somewhat. Ow. Anyway, I'm long on bitcoin. Maybe it will crash and I'll lose everything.…
> Though it seems to be recovering somewhat. Ow. As with most investments, you need to think medium and long term. Barring some kind of final(!) crash, there isn't anywhere to go for BTC but up. Mainstream media and ordinary people are just now starting to talk about it. Stay with your investment, and don't sell before it at least doubled. If it crashes temporarily, that's fine too: chaos is a ladder. Within reasonab…
"there isn't anywhere to go for BTC but up"
this is utter rubbish right here.
Re: Thoughts on Bitcoin
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with the majority of your post, but I'm not convinced that inflation should be included in your list of bad things ("do you want inflation, meddling, and regulation?"). A moderate amount of inflation is a very good thing, and this isn't really even open to debate among economists. Its importance has been empirically and theoretically proven many times. Inflation is important because economics is all about cre…
Inflation is not essential. If people hide their money under mattresses, all that means is that they aren't competing to buy the available goods. Inputs for other ventures are cheaper. If the government weren't trying to re-inflate the asset bubble with cheap money, ventures that make more sense would be flourishing instead. Resources are not infinite. When someone accepts a piece of paper and just holds on to it ins…
I also believe that a currency must be inflationary for all the good known reasons but every time I think of BTC being inflationary I realize that Satoshi didn't really had a choice.
Why on earth you would buy an unknown inflationary currency? I mean, it would NEVER take off, except for illegal markets where use the privacy offered by a crypto-currency.
But look where we are now? Silk Road gone (well almost) but BTC unaffected and sky-rocketed. You would never have attracted that capital if you haven't a deflationary currency. Actually, by all means it's an asset.
Re: Thoughts on Bitcoin
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Though it seems to be recovering somewhat. Ow. As with most investments, you need to think medium and long term. Barring some kind of final(!) crash, there isn't anywhere to go for BTC but up. Mainstream media and ordinary people are just now starting to talk about it. Stay with your investment, and don't sell before it at least doubled. If it crashes temporarily, that's fine too: chaos is a ladder. Within reasonab…
"there isn't anywhere to go for BTC but up" this is utter rubbish right here.
Thread OP here. Any time someone says that, I immediately know to disregard everything else they say about investing.
Re: Thoughts on Bitcoin
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think much of BTC's valuation come from expectations that money velocity and market penetration will increase. EDIT: Sorry I meant to say the velocity will decrease.
A higher money velocity => lower BTC/USD, but yes, the current price implies a huge future growth of the bitcoin economy. This is what sam is saying and I agree. I happen to think that we will not see that growth/adoption, but that is a different question.
Oops, yeah, I meant the other way around.
Re: Thoughts on Bitcoin
#109[deleted]
Re: Thoughts on Bitcoin
#110The way I value bitcoin is to take the fully diluted market cap (21 million * $850 ~= $18 billion) and apply a money velocity which I assumed to be similar to US M2 velocity of 1.6 ($18 billion * 1.6 ~= $28.5 billion). Since global ecommerce transactions are about $1 trillion / yr this implies that bitcoin should penetrate 2.85% of ecommerce. Big assumption here is that bitcoin does not work for real-world transactio…
I don't understand what you are calculating but it's circular in any case: You can't use the current price of bitcoin to derive a value.