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Bitcoin hits $10,000

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Re: Bitcoin hits $10,000

#291

Post by drewmol »

modeless wrote: post #68
quickthrower2 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does a government stop it? And if they could, could they also stop illegal file sharing in a similar way?

They ban exchanging Bitcoin for fiat currencies, which completely disconnects Bitcoin from the traditional financial system. Underground and in-person exchanges would continue but at much lower volumes with higher friction and fees, and the value of Bitcoin would crash. This is diffrerent from file sharing because file sharing does not need a connection to the traditional financial system to be useful for most people…

I agree, and if you look at online poker in the US, they were able to drastically reduce the amount of people playing and money involved by simply restricting payment processors' involvement.

Re: Bitcoin hits $10,000

#292

Post by wils1245 »

sanxiyn wrote: post #263
wils1245 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitfinex controls Tether, a single source cryptocurrency supposedly backed by and pegged to the US dollar. The market cap of Tether has risen $188 million dollars to $678 million in one month: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tether/ If Tether is what they say it is, this can only come from investments of US dollars. Ie nearly $400 million dollars of investment in one month. On November 21 Tether announced a hack…

Tether announced a hack in which they lost 30 million USDT, not USD. As they don't plan to redeem those USDT to USD, in no sense Tether lost 30 million USD. As far as I can tell, Tether lost nothing.

Do you still think the Tether is still held by the thieves? They traded it for other cryptocurrencies, out of Bitfinex, the second they stole it.

That is, of course, if it actually was a theft, and it was actually for $30 million. It's a single source currency, no one but the people running Tether knows what's actually behind it.

Re: Bitcoin hits $10,000

#293

Post by scott_karana »

wallace_f wrote: post #112

Can someone explain to me why bitcoin should be priced so high relative to other cryptocurrencies? The conspiracy theorist in me wants to say that the best way to undermine trust in cryptocurrencies is to create market turmoil. This would not just undermine trust in cryptocurrency, but serve to embolden the Fed's 'Price Stability' justification.

Popularity, and all that naturally follows.

Re: Bitcoin hits $10,000

#294

Post by cjensen »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #275
cjensen wrote: post #71

I wonder how many tulips you can buy with a bitcoin?

This is such a lazy comment and it comes up every time. It contributes absolutely nothing.

Pointing out the obvious in a minimum of words is not lazy.

Expecting people to stop pointing out the obvious is optimistic at best.

Re: Bitcoin hits $10,000

#296

Post by Joeboy »

uncoder0 wrote: post #285
Joeboy wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wish Bitcoin was as decentralized as everyone says it is. I'm trying to cash out some of mine and I've been downloading the blockchain for four days now. I had to buy a new hard drive before I could even start. I've read that it takes over an hour to do a transaction now, although I'm not yet in a position to verify that. If you look on the btc related subreddits nobody recommends using a proper client as Satoshi…

Took me a few hours. Use `-dbcache=n` where n = bytes of memory... will make sync super fast if you have +8GB of RAM. I think default is pretty low.

Ah cool, I set it to 4000 and it looks to have sped it up a bit (currently saying 16 hours to go, down from "two days"). I'm still not convinced it's a very practical decentralized currency though.

Re: Bitcoin hits $10,000

#297

Post by arglebarnacle »

deepsun wrote: post #273
cs702 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gold's market cap in US dollars is currently $7.1 trillion; Bitcoin's is under $0.2 trillion: Current market capitalization in US dollars Global money supply (broad) over $90.0 trillion [a] US dollar money supply (M2) $13.8 trillion [b] Euro money supply (M2) $13.2 trillion [c] All coins and banknotes in circulation $7.6 trillion [d] All gold ever mined $7.1 trillion [e] Bitcoin under $0.2 trillion [f] Sources: [a] h…

However, if you try to liquidate those assets, they fall in price. But some more than others. E.g. there's no even $100 billion in Bitcoin invested. If someone tries to sell, say, $1 billion worth (1%) of Bitcoin, the price falls down rapidly and they never going to get anything close to the billion $. Not so with gold. The price will fall down too, but not so much. One can easily sell 1% of the world gold reserves,…

I'm inclined to agree that bitcoin markets are far less robust than gold markets on the whole because of the long history and entrenched social position of gold. I do think you underestimate the effect on gold markets if they were flooded with someone trying to offload $70b of gold.

That's about 7 times more gold than the entire contents of the U.S. gold reserve of 8,134 metric tons of gold. I really don't understand why you think it would be easy to sell that much gold at the prevailing price.

Some random googling turned up about $100b/day of all gold changing hands worldwide, so you would have to sell it over a long period of time to avoid moving the price. If you were to try to keep your trades under say 0.5% of daily volume, or $500M, this would be the equivalent of trying to sell 1/14,000 of the total market cap each day, which would work out to about $12.5M/day if applied to bitcoin's market cap. Selling 0.5% of the daily volume of bitcoin would be more like $36.7M/day.

The reason for the difference in those numbers is that bitcoin turns over more of its market cap daily than gold, proportionally. So dollar for dollar, of course $1B affects bitcoin more than gold, but in terms of turning over 1% of the market cap the data suggests this might actually be easier in bitcoin.

Re: Bitcoin hits $10,000

#298

Post by wallace_f »

giarc wrote: post #144
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1lfobc/i_am_a_time...

Wait - is that user in any relation to this Luka Magnotta? ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luka_Magnotta )

Jesus Christ, that is a psychopath.

"During the video, the 1987 New Order song "True Faith"

He must have liked American Psycho

What was his motive? The Wikipedia doesn't seem to say

Re: Bitcoin hits $10,000

#299

Post by cocktailpeanuts »

nly wrote: post #52
cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I learned since learning about cryptocurrencies: NEVER trust "something you read somewhere". A lot of them are propaganda or people who have no idea how it actually works scratching the surface. Do your own research if you're curious about it and don't want to feel left out. It's never too late to make an actual informed decision afterwards. I've seen so many otherwise intelligent people just keep dismissin…

Oh, I'm well aware of how Bitcoin works. All the way down to the cryptographic constructs. I studied it for a while, and it lead me on to some more interesting topics, but the currency itself doesn't interest me. Understanding Bitcoin to assess "whether it's a scam" makes about as much sense as learning about the mechanics of an electronic exchange to figure out whether it's a good idea to invest in Facebook.

Not a great analogy.

Re: Bitcoin hits $10,000

#300

Post by vesak »

Joeboy wrote: post #296
uncoder0 wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Took me a few hours. Use `-dbcache=n` where n = bytes of memory... will make sync super fast if you have +8GB of RAM. I think default is pretty low.

Ah cool, I set it to 4000 and it looks to have sped it up a bit (currently saying 16 hours to go, down from "two days"). I'm still not convinced it's a very practical decentralized currency though.

Check out https://electrum.org/#home -- doesn't require clients to download the full blockchain.
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