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The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

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Re: The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

#121

Post by charlesdm »

brianwawok wrote: post #101
xTrader wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But inevitably, people die, and the knowledge of their private key with them, removing bitcoins from circulation. The amount of bitcoin will therefore decrease impredictably Maybe a bit late, but you finally understood why Bitcoins get more valuable over time: their number grows slowly or maybe decreases, while the number of people wanting them increases. That's why Bitcoin is the best Store Of Value ever devised.

Ok put your entire life savings in BC, i will put mine in the SP500. Lets see how things look in 40 years?

Honestly, and this is coming from a Bitcoin bear, it will probably generate outsized returns in comparison to the S&P500 over the next 2 to 4 years. If it truly is a bubble then it will have a long way to run. The market cap at the moment is tiny, but probably too high to disregard now, and if institutional money starts buying in, it can probably easily go 10-20-30x again.

Don't forget it's still relatively hard for average folk to purchase crypto. But once you have acceptable ETFs and funds that you can purchase at a click of a button through your brokerage account -- a lot of people (and pension funds!) will probably allocate 1-2% of their portfolio to crypto. That is 1-2% of $300tn or so, or 30 to 60 times the amount of money in the space today (in terms of market cap).

If you think this bubble will run for a while, then I also think it's not unreasonable to assume you can multiple your initial investment by 10x by investing in either Bitcoin or Ethereum. But that's my opinion (and this is obviously not investment advice).

Whether it'll be around in 40+ years, I don't dare make that bet. But no one is saying you can't move money around to the better investment opportunity at a specific time.

Re: The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

#123

Post by wwwtyro »

sidko wrote: post #118
haywirez wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People also don't appreciate that Bitcoin is infinitely divisible, so the total numbers are meaningless. At the same time, inflation is super low and decreases over time, giving it more and more edge over nation-state currencies.

Bitcoin is NOT infinitely divisible. Each Bitcoin is divisible into 10^8. There were reasons to choose this number and isn't arbitrary [1]. [1] https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/31933/why-is-bit...

It is arbitrarily divisible. Fitting inside 64 bits is convenient, but hardly an insurmountable engineering challenge. There's libraries that handle this sort of thing with ease.

Re: The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

#124

Post by FeepingCreature »

Alex3917 wrote: post #4

The interesting thing is that unlike in July where the price crashed, this time the price is completely stable despite the fact that it's a much bigger clusterfuck. It seems like perhaps the "you can't bet against the apocalypse" rule is being applied.

The rule only applies to global apocalypses.

You can easily bet against local apocalypses.

You can't trade, on a market, on the market ceasing to exist. You can of course trade on other markets against the first market, if they're connected.

Re: The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

#125

Post by psyc »

DennisP wrote: post #111
kbaker wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SegWit was an upgrade though, this is more like a coup. SegWit2x is basically the mining faction stealing the network away from the Core development group, forcing everyone in Bitcoin to switch software if they still want their transactions confirmed. Not that I really disagree with them - as _something_ needed to happen, as demand (whether real or manufactured) has led to 100% full blocks for months, resulting in lo…

The "mining faction" is just carrying out the governance model described in Satoshi's Bitcoin paper: "The proof-of-work also solves the problem of determining representation in majority decision making. If the majority were based on one-IP-address-one-vote, it could be subverted by anyone able to allocate many IPs. Proof-of-work is essentially one-CPU-one-vote. The majority decision is represented by the longest chai…

Obviously, this refers to how automated ‘decisions’ are made by the software, and does not mean that hash power gives you weight in social decisions in the real world. More importantly, there are two levels of decision making that people tend to conflate.

Hash power is relevant to 'regular' forks, as the longest chain that follows the rules will be followed. However hash power is not relevant for deciding what those rules are. That is done by full nodes, whether miners or not, and doesn’t depend on costly work or anything else. Nodes that don’t agree on the rules just stop talking to each other, and the network splits.

Then, the final decision about which network and chain trades as “BTC” is made by ordinary real world consensus, probably mainly among exchanges, wallets, and users in general.

Edit: Changed 'soft fork' to 'regular fork' because a soft fork is a protocol change. POW chain-following doesn't even rise to that level.

Re: The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

#126

Post by [deleted] »

psyc wrote: post #125
DennisP wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "mining faction" is just carrying out the governance model described in Satoshi's Bitcoin paper: "The proof-of-work also solves the problem of determining representation in majority decision making. If the majority were based on one-IP-address-one-vote, it could be subverted by anyone able to allocate many IPs. Proof-of-work is essentially one-CPU-one-vote. The majority decision is represented by the longest chai…

Obviously, this refers to how automated ‘decisions’ are made by the software, and does not mean that hash power gives you weight in social decisions in the real world. More importantly, there are two levels of decision making that people tend to conflate. Hash power is relevant to 'regular' forks, as the longest chain that follows the rules will be followed. However hash power is not relevant for deciding what those…

[deleted]

Re: The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

#127

Post by koonsolo »

brianwawok wrote: post #101
xTrader wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But inevitably, people die, and the knowledge of their private key with them, removing bitcoins from circulation. The amount of bitcoin will therefore decrease impredictably Maybe a bit late, but you finally understood why Bitcoins get more valuable over time: their number grows slowly or maybe decreases, while the number of people wanting them increases. That's why Bitcoin is the best Store Of Value ever devised.

Ok put your entire life savings in BC, i will put mine in the SP500. Lets see how things look in 40 years?

Having your life savings in BC is just as stupid as having no cryptocurrency at all.

Re: The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

#129

Post by tlrobinson »

Alex3917 wrote: post #28
jacquesm wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does that have to do with bitcoin?

The current price of Bitcoin is mostly driven by the fraud taking place within the Ethereum ecosystem. Let's see where the price is after a few rounds of SEC crackdowns.

Or could the frothy ICO market be due to successful cryptocurrency investors throwing money at anything to try to "diversify" their portfolios?

Re: The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

#130

Post by tlrobinson »

AgentME wrote: post #25

As a Bitcoin fan (and someone who owns a little), I think it's a pretty good article. Some more tidbits of information from my perspective: >The anti-2Xers argue that the NYA should not be binding because it was negotiated behind closed doors, and that a change of this magnitude needs to be more carefully considered before it is adopted. No active developers were part of the NYA. Some in the NYA have said that they a…

> they have no interest in contributing to the Segwit2x fork's software. (The big-blocker anti-segwit movement stalled work for years, politicized the Bitcoin space, and contributed to making many of the core devs be the target of harassment; imagining that unpaid volunteers are going to switch to working on a project made by the latest iteration of that is ... to call it wishful thinking seems too kind.)

So just merge (or reimplement) segwit2x's consensus changes back into Core and continue as if nothing happened?

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