I think the behaviour of Bitcoin price (not the technology) reflects some social phenomenon rather than the real economy. And it is precisely why it is interesting.
Bitcoin Surges Past $7,000 to Extend Record Rally
21–30 of 437 posts
Re: Bitcoin Surges Past $7,000 to Extend Record Rally
#22What scares me is the amount of people investing all their life savings in this.
Somebody will get hurt, sooner or later.
Re: Bitcoin Surges Past $7,000 to Extend Record Rally
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
(i am somewhat familiar with the tech but don't follow the business side of bitcoin) what I find weird is the forks. A major selling point of bitcoin is that there will ever be only 21 Mio coins. You know, unless there is a hard fork and now there are suddenly twice as many coins. Presumably one of the resulting coins' value will drop but you are still creating value out of thin air, something that the crypto people…
> I am sure blockchain tech will be hugely successful in the banking and government sector Are you? Why? So far, no bitcoin/blockchain advocates have been able to explain to me a single non-illegal use case that isn't better served by a traditional, centralized database. A single large Postgres instance could handle all the global transaction volume of bitcoin, and it would be faster and orders of magnitude more ener…
I think with some sort of blockchain technologies, it would be harder for central banks to do things like what happened in Argentina, Greece or Zimbabwe.
Re: Bitcoin Surges Past $7,000 to Extend Record Rally
#24I consider myself pretty tech-savvy, but I'm still completely lost as to whether Bitcoin is basically a pyramid scheme set to crash massively, or something huge that will continue climbing. I probably should've taken the time to mine some back when my friends were doing it and tried convincing me too. Ah well. (Queue heated comments from both sides. Discussing bitcoin is like bringing up religion AND politics at the…
It's a virtual currency with a limited supply, but with a constantly growing interest(demand). This interest is not primarily driven by bitcoin's inherent qualities but more through:
1. Using bitcoin to acquire other cryptocurrencies 2. Promises of future profits 3. Getting "free money" by having bitcoin (Bitcoin cash, bitcoin gold)
The first one might actually be healthy, while 2 and 3 are most close to a pyramid scheme / "tulip mania" style scenario.
One thing is for sure. No one knows what exactly is going to happen.
Re: Bitcoin Surges Past $7,000 to Extend Record Rally
#25I consider myself pretty tech-savvy, but I'm still completely lost as to whether Bitcoin is basically a pyramid scheme set to crash massively, or something huge that will continue climbing. I probably should've taken the time to mine some back when my friends were doing it and tried convincing me too. Ah well. (Queue heated comments from both sides. Discussing bitcoin is like bringing up religion AND politics at the…
There's no pyramid scheme. It's a hyped asset, to say the least, but there's no pyramid. Like a hyped startup, it doesn't do much yet, but it is promising, so people buy it. It may be "worth" much or zero in the end, it all depends on the final outcomes.
It's also the easiest/cheapest/most open asset to trade (depending on where you trade).
In the long term, Bitcoin can be seen as a safe heaven in case of economic chaos, like gold, but way easier to buy and hold. It can also be seen as an interesting economic experiment: what if currency wasn't managed by a government? Or you can give trading a try for a few $$ as a gamble (with more chances of success than in a casino).
It's also a useful currency in some cases: I'm a "digital nomad" which my bank can't seem to understand. Getting my Debit Card to work online from a foreign country, with an ever changing phone number (they insist on using SMS as a 2FA), sounds like an obstacle to them, but not to BTC.
Re: Bitcoin Surges Past $7,000 to Extend Record Rally
#26I consider myself pretty tech-savvy, but I'm still completely lost as to whether Bitcoin is basically a pyramid scheme set to crash massively, or something huge that will continue climbing. I probably should've taken the time to mine some back when my friends were doing it and tried convincing me too. Ah well. (Queue heated comments from both sides. Discussing bitcoin is like bringing up religion AND politics at the…
Best advice I have heard is to learn about the blockchain and look at something like Ethereum. If buying Bitcoins feels to risky, don't invest, but blockchain technologies will certainly have a role to play in the future.
Re: Bitcoin Surges Past $7,000 to Extend Record Rally
#27A few years back I had 10 bitcoins and bought weed on the Silk Road with them. Hmm, imagine I held onto it :)
Re: Bitcoin Surges Past $7,000 to Extend Record Rally
#28I consider myself pretty tech-savvy, but I'm still completely lost as to whether Bitcoin is basically a pyramid scheme set to crash massively, or something huge that will continue climbing. I probably should've taken the time to mine some back when my friends were doing it and tried convincing me too. Ah well. (Queue heated comments from both sides. Discussing bitcoin is like bringing up religion AND politics at the…
Cryptocurrencies have a niche use, mainly to buy things on the black market but also for small peer-to-peer international payments when other options are not practical. For this reason I don't expect that cryptocurrencies will completely disappear any time soon. However the value of bitcoin is mainly driven by speculation at this point, a currency that's so volatile is very difficult to use if you're a business. At b…
Your first sentence mostly fits Bitcoin, but misses the point on most of the other cryptocurrencies.
Re: Bitcoin Surges Past $7,000 to Extend Record Rally
#29I consider myself pretty tech-savvy, but I'm still completely lost as to whether Bitcoin is basically a pyramid scheme set to crash massively, or something huge that will continue climbing. I probably should've taken the time to mine some back when my friends were doing it and tried convincing me too. Ah well. (Queue heated comments from both sides. Discussing bitcoin is like bringing up religion AND politics at the…
There's no pyramid scheme. It's a hyped asset, to say the least, but there's no pyramid. Like a hyped startup, it doesn't do much yet, but it is promising, so people buy it. It may be "worth" much or zero in the end, it all depends on the final outcomes. It's also the easiest/cheapest/most open asset to trade (depending on where you trade). In the long term, Bitcoin can be seen as a safe heaven in case of economic ch…
I think most of the people putting larger checks into Bitcoin are betting that it will become a store of value asset.
Going from memory, a recent Bloomberg article called Bitcoin: "Gold for millennials".
Or, similarly, Peter Thiel said recently [1]: "it's like a reserve form of money, it's like gold, and it's just a store of value. You don't need to use it to make payments."
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/26/bitcoin-underestimated-peter...
Re: Bitcoin Surges Past $7,000 to Extend Record Rally
#30To all the naysayers in this thread, I suggest you watch "Banking on Bitcoin" on Netflix, which is a great introduction to Bitcoin. It might change your thinking.
Also check out Andreas Antonopoulos' videos on YouTube, which are easy to digest and very informative. Here's the place to start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1si5ZWLgy0