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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

#121

Post by dirtyaura »

[deleted] wrote: post #104
adnam wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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]

Huh? Usually it works the other way around. If you increase demand by buying a significant portion of Bitcoins, you INCREASE the price. And if you then don't sell that significant portion, you decrease the supply, which again INCREASES the price.

For example, in the stock market, if there are rumours of hostile take over, the price of the particular stock rises. Think about e.g. Yahoo/Microsoft acquisition rumours.

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

#122

Post by PostOnce »

simonh wrote: post #106
bigbugbag wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

notably, not New Zealand.

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

#123

Post by lordnacho »

From what I can tell, it looks a lot like the oil price collapse. Not that it's directly connected, because BTC holdings are still very low and not really part of any serious investor's portfolio.

But it looks like a lot of people have invested in extraction capacity, and they need to sell to remove their BTC risk. They're buying the mining equipment in dollars after all. And they know that faster and faster chips will come on the market.

On the other side of the equation, demand doesn't seem to have increased quite as much as expected. You still have to go out of your way to find something that you can buy with BTC. Heck, I have a few BTC and I've never used them for anything, and never come across a vendor of something I wanted who wanted BTC for the item. In fact, there are only three categories of people I've met who were interested: nerds, people who wanted drugs, and people who wanted to launder money.

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

#124

Post by pjc50 »

honeybooboo123 wrote: post #47
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 own any bitcoins, but felt like pointing a couple of things out. Whatever shreds of interest your bank gives you will be way, way less than the inflation you're experiencing. In other words, your money's purchasing power keeps decreasing even if you're getting some interest on it, ie. you're losing your wealth. Bitcoin doesn't experience inflation like that, so it should be a better store of value than your f…

There is a "cost per transaction" in bitcoin as well: https://blockchain.info/charts/cost-per-transaction

It costs a certain (very high!) amount of real electricity to process a block. This plus an incentive has to be paid to miners. Miners have to pay for their electricity in real local currency. Therefore for every transaction block processed either someone "buys in" ~$10 worth of bitcoin or the outstanding value of all bitcoin drops by that amount.

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

#126

Post by noname123 »

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 buy shares in GLD ETF which holds physical gold for you. The risk is that SPDR collapses or get their assets stolen.

You can also buy gold futures on the futures/commodity exchange which is a contract that specifies the other party has to deliver gold to you in the future. The risk is that the financial system collapses and the broker/clearing broker cannot uphold the contract anymore.

So it depends on your intention for buying gold, if it's to hedge against inflation or market crashes, buy a gold tracking security will be fine. If it's to be used as a doomsday currency, then I think you're better off hoarding canned tuna, vodka and guns; things that you can either barter with, or use to force other human beings to do your wish.

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

#127

Post by ballpoint »

ploxiln wrote: post #84
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).

Except wire transfers take one or more days and are a huge pain in the ass to initiate online. In the US at least. If you go to a third world country, it's even less convenient to pay for stuff. For example, you can't get a hotel room last-minute with a credit card in Vietnam, where I checked, because they need to verify your ownership/control of your credit card with a pair of small debits, probably because of the f…

As far as I can tell, most UK wire transfers are essentially immediate (at most a couple of minutes), even between different banks.

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

#128

Post by pjc50 »

lordnacho wrote: post #123

From what I can tell, it looks a lot like the oil price collapse. Not that it's directly connected, because BTC holdings are still very low and not really part of any serious investor's portfolio. But it looks like a lot of people have invested in extraction capacity, and they need to sell to remove their BTC risk. They're buying the mining equipment in dollars after all. And they know that faster and faster chips wi…

Izabella Kaminska of the Financial Times has been following this: http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2015/01/09/2084052/bitcoins-upcom...

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

#129

Post by teekert »

rimantas wrote: post #46
teekert wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is expected that relatively new currencies have a turbulent period of a certain time. And as for interest, here in the Netherlands it is less than inflation so you loose money (interest on savings accounts is about 1%, inflation is between 1 and 2% over the past years). Bitcoin has or will have its niche, perhaps it will not be for your savings but sharing money with friends using a bitcoin wallet app is b…

What are the factors which could make bitcoin less turbulent later? As for most frictionless exprience: you do not need new currency for that. My bank offers 'quick send' functionality in their app, basically you just enter amount and select whom to send money to, that's it. You don't even have to login.

Ok, I don't have this option, transferring between my own accounts is easy (requires a pin code) but transferring to someone else's account requires a separate device + your pinpas + your pincode + scanning the screen with this device + typing a generated code into the computer/smartphone.

It would be more stable with more wide spread adoption, I'd guess if shops were to use it they'd en masse refuse to fluctuate/change prices every day, dampening the trade induced fluctuations.

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

#130

Post by davidw »

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…

> Because of that, I think this proof's place should have been to remain on paper.

I'm not really a fan of bitcoin, and wouldn't touch it myself, but I think it's an interesting experiment.

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