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Bitcoin’s Price Falls 12%, to Lowest Value Since May

dealbook.nytimes.com

21–30 of 85 posts

Re: Bitcoin’s Price Falls 12%, to Lowest Value Since May

#21
post #17
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bitcoin market is worthwhile $6.3B at the current time so its value is not that negligible and might have an economical impact. NB: I'm saying that "it may have" not that "it has".

Not massively useful, but interested me enough to look it up: $6.3B is more than the market cap of 40 companies in the FTSE 100

I suspect you may have forgotten to do the USD to GBP conversion - I make it ~12 companies :-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTSE_100_Index

Re: Bitcoin’s Price Falls 12%, to Lowest Value Since May

#22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Highly misleading if you don't know what you're looking at, and of dubious value for prices of most things even if you do.

A log scale plot shows fluctuations of equal percentage with equal visual size, so it is particularly useful in the case of bitcoin, where you may be interested in comparing price swings at $100 levels and $1 levels. Eg. A log scale plot shows a $1 to $2 increase as the same vertical hight as a $100 to $200 increase. In a linear scale plot, all you notice is the $100 to $200 increase and the $1 to $2 swing looks like…

Bitcoin's no longer really fluctuating at such a rate that this feature is valuable enough to offset potential confusion in a news article for general consumption, though.

Re: Bitcoin’s Price Falls 12%, to Lowest Value Since May

#23
post #17
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bitcoin market is worthwhile $6.3B at the current time so its value is not that negligible and might have an economical impact. NB: I'm saying that "it may have" not that "it has".

Not massively useful, but interested me enough to look it up: $6.3B is more than the market cap of 40 companies in the FTSE 100

Yeah, but a 12% decline in the stock price of a company worth ~$6bn probably wouldn't rate an NYT story unless there was some additional element to the story (like fraud or scandal.)

Look at the ~10 companies on the NASDAQ between ~6bn and ~6.5bn -- I've only ever even heard of one (Flextronics), much less seen NYT articles about them. (Use Google stock screener, I can't seem to generate a link to the screen.)

Re: Bitcoin’s Price Falls 12%, to Lowest Value Since May

#24

This is pretty much a cheap and default comment, but I would be so happy if everybody ( especially websites calling themselves the "DealBook") would start plotting prices on a logarithmic scale.

Currency exchange rates aren't supposed to need a logarithmic scale. That would be a visual equivalent of burying the lede.

Logarithmic scale makes sense for everyone. If you buy at X dollars and has 100% return when the price is 2X it does not matter what X actually is. Logarithmic scale reflects relative changes which is the only interesting metric for investors. If Bitcoin was traded at $98 12 months ago and now trades at $480, it shows relative change of 400% while the prices themselves do not tell you much.

Re: Bitcoin’s Price Falls 12%, to Lowest Value Since May

#25
post #3

This isn't the end of it either. In a month or two, 475 dollars will look nice.

> In a month or two, 475 dollars will look nice. Based on what? Serious question. When people say this about stocks they are either: 1) pulling it out of their ass.. 2) They have done some quantitative analysis, based on some sort of CFA teachings. I'm assuming you are in camp 1 here. Not that there is anything wrong with a "gut feeling", I"m just not going to invest based on it:) As a question to anyone, what sort o…

Well, if you're willing to ignore the existing base of bitcoin already mined (and even in some cases the sunk cost of buying hardware that can be used to mine them) go ahead and do your calculation based solely on the price per unit energy as a starting point.

If you use this calculator[1] you can see that if your 50GH/s array spends 300w which you had to pay for, you are burning about $0.48/day at the current price, assuming all of that from before. This is not top-of-the-line, but it is some relatively modern ASIC equipment from BFL. Previous generation miners, 5 and 10GH/s "Jalapenos" from the 65nm fab. They are supposedly rolling out 28nm "Monarch" now which are at least 10x as powerful and certainly more than just marginally better at power efficiency.

If you look at this chart[2] you can see an estimate of the next difficulty and adjust your calculations for next week, it becomes pretty clear that more people are turning on their Gigahashes than turning them off, even if that was only marginally the case two weeks ago. You have to imagine those people are mostly those with newer equipment.

I don't have a graph of price overlaid with difficulty, but it can't be too hard to find one. A few months ago it was possible to scale them and demonstrate a relatively good fit where price and difficulty were roughly correlated, but since difficulty shows no signs of falling yet, I suspect that fit is not so good anymore.

[1]: http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/ [2]: https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty

Re: Bitcoin’s Price Falls 12%, to Lowest Value Since May

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Highly misleading if you don't know what you're looking at, and of dubious value for prices of most things even if you do.

A log scale plot shows fluctuations of equal percentage with equal visual size, so it is particularly useful in the case of bitcoin, where you may be interested in comparing price swings at $100 levels and $1 levels. Eg. A log scale plot shows a $1 to $2 increase as the same vertical hight as a $100 to $200 increase. In a linear scale plot, all you notice is the $100 to $200 increase and the $1 to $2 swing looks like…

Doh! I somehow after 16 years of education never managed to understand the point of the log scale. Thank you.

Re: Bitcoin’s Price Falls 12%, to Lowest Value Since May

#27
This price fluctuations will not end until the destiny of Bitcoin has been decided, either fail and drop to zero or succeed and rise probably well above 1000 dollars. It's kind of remarkable that it did not die within the first 5 years if you consider all the small and big disasters but in my opinion Bitcoin is still in is infancy and it is far from clear where the journey will end. Compared with other means of payment Bitcoin still plays no important role at all - its still a very nerdy thing only a tiny fraction of people know about and the hand full of opportunities to do something meaningful with your Bitcoins besides speculating with them is not even a drop in the ocean of the world's economy.

Re: Bitcoin’s Price Falls 12%, to Lowest Value Since May

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Currency exchange rates aren't supposed to need a logarithmic scale. That would be a visual equivalent of burying the lede.

Logarithmic scale makes sense for everyone. If you buy at X dollars and has 100% return when the price is 2X it does not matter what X actually is. Logarithmic scale reflects relative changes which is the only interesting metric for investors. If Bitcoin was traded at $98 12 months ago and now trades at $480, it shows relative change of 400% while the prices themselves do not tell you much.

If bitcoin can go from $98 to $480 in twelve months, that's a glowing sign to merchants saying "BITCOIN TOO VOLATILE TO USE". Investors are not the only audience. I want that big, scary, spiky graph.

Re: Bitcoin’s Price Falls 12%, to Lowest Value Since May

#29
I think the true colors of Bitcoin "believers" become pretty obvious when they are all so very preoccupied with the price per piece. I read some pretty ridiculous explanations that volatility is good, because it attracts "investors", and this is supposed to be good for it.

Re: Bitcoin’s Price Falls 12%, to Lowest Value Since May

#30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Logarithmic scale makes sense for everyone. If you buy at X dollars and has 100% return when the price is 2X it does not matter what X actually is. Logarithmic scale reflects relative changes which is the only interesting metric for investors. If Bitcoin was traded at $98 12 months ago and now trades at $480, it shows relative change of 400% while the prices themselves do not tell you much.

If bitcoin can go from $98 to $480 in twelve months, that's a glowing sign to merchants saying "BITCOIN TOO VOLATILE TO USE". Investors are not the only audience. I want that big, scary, spiky graph.

Merchants don't care (except to the extent consumers care), they almost all use BitPay / Coinbase to insulate themselves from volatility.
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