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Bitcoin reaches an all-time trading high of over $33

arstechnica.com

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Re: Bitcoin reaches an all-time trading high of over $33

#61

Post by yaix »

laumars wrote: post #50
rishimoko wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bitcoin is basically useless except for illicit transactions I'd never spend my bitcoins on drugs or gambling. That's what the rapidly devaluing dollar is for. Recall that the US dollar is Narco Currency #1 on the planet. Bitcoins are useful as leverage due to their rapidly expanding (and sometimes deflating) value. I bought my first bitcoins for ~$3 two years ago and held them, even through the first spike and aft…

> Bitcoin is a very useful tool. It's the email of money. I hope not because email should have been replaced a decade ago (no native end-to-end nor encryption. Node-to-node encryption (eg SSL) isn't standard let along the default, no native support for binary objects and base64 MIME increases files sizes by ~30%, and the mess of plain text and half supported HTML across the plethora of clients make designing mailshot…

> email should have been replaced a decade ago

Like HTTP should have been replaced by AOL, right?

Re: Bitcoin reaches an all-time trading high of over $33

#62

Post by guard-of-terra »

yaix wrote: post #60
downandout wrote: post #19

The fact that Bitcoin has flourished despite numerous high profile incidents of theft and fraud, the relative difficulty associated with buying and selling them, and the rather unsavory nature of many of its most popular uses today, is a testament to its long-term viability as a currency. The Bitcoin ecosystem has a long way to go before it is considered mainstream, but I believe its long-term success is almost inevi…

> is a testament to its long-term viability as a currency. Until governments notice they are losing control and outlaw it.

It's not an easy feat to accomplish. You can't reliably outlaw it for citizens because in democratic societies it's kind of very hard to reliably harass citizens. Look at the copyright lobby and still not many people are really scared of persecution.

They can easily take bitcoin-based businesses down but they would just shift to different/distributed jurisdictions (Japan, Eastern Europe) where they will be hell to control or influence.

Re: Bitcoin reaches an all-time trading high of over $33

#63

Post by guard-of-terra »

jasonkolb wrote: post #6

This sucks. I was just about to pick up a bunch last week at $29. Unfortunately it's not very straightforward to obtain.

Register on mtgox and buy them with okpay currency. It's realtime as opposed to having to wait N days. Okpay currency is also obtainable in the realtime.

Re: Bitcoin reaches an all-time trading high of over $33

#64

Post by vetleen »

Looking at the history of Bitcoin and saying “Wow, the price of Bitcoins will never drop because it hasn’t dropped so far” is like looking in the back mirror of your car saying “Wow, there will always be a freeway ahead of me because I have been driving on the freeway for so long now”. The fact that is has flourished can have a million explanations, where one is that it does actually have a long term viability as a currency. We do, however, not have enough information to say with any certainty that that is indeed the case.

What we do know, is that so long as new users flock to the currency there is an increasing demand, and this will drive the price up – until the recruitment halts. Then what will happen? We don’t know. It might disappear, it might drop slightly, and it might stay the same. That will be the true experiment. Right now we don’t have enough data to say whether it is sustainable over the long term.

Re: Bitcoin reaches an all-time trading high of over $33

#65

Post by celticninja »

kjackson2012 wrote: post #39
downandout wrote: post #19

The fact that Bitcoin has flourished despite numerous high profile incidents of theft and fraud, the relative difficulty associated with buying and selling them, and the rather unsavory nature of many of its most popular uses today, is a testament to its long-term viability as a currency. The Bitcoin ecosystem has a long way to go before it is considered mainstream, but I believe its long-term success is almost inevi…

A rising price does not imply long-term viability. A stable price does. For long term viability, people can't just be buying and selling it, they should be transacting with it. It seems like the most active form of Bitcoin use that I've seen is trading. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's a double-edged sword, as people learned last year. Once more and more regular people actually start using it for real purcha…

it has to reach a plateau before it becomes stable, it does this by finding the market rate, which is what is hapenig with the price rise. eventually it will hit a point where daily demand and supply of BTC will match and at that point the price should become steady. Given the scarcity of the product it is not surpising the price is considered low at the moment.

Re: Bitcoin reaches an all-time trading high of over $33

#66

Post by laumars »

yaix wrote: post #61
laumars wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bitcoin is a very useful tool. It's the email of money. I hope not because email should have been replaced a decade ago (no native end-to-end nor encryption. Node-to-node encryption (eg SSL) isn't standard let along the default, no native support for binary objects and base64 MIME increases files sizes by ~30%, and the mess of plain text and half supported HTML across the plethora of clients make designing mailshot…

> email should have been replaced a decade ago Like HTTP should have been replaced by AOL, right?

No. And I resent the fact that you couldn't be bothered to read past my first sentence.

The e-mail protocol (and I'm talking about the entire stack, from SMTP to the client's handling) is old and really not best suited for the modern way we send documents and modern security concerns. Which was the crux of my point.

So I'm not talking about replacing the paradigm nor ownership, just it's the implementation.

Re: Bitcoin reaches an all-time trading high of over $33

#68

Post by yaix »

guard-of-terra wrote: post #62
yaix wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is a testament to its long-term viability as a currency. Until governments notice they are losing control and outlaw it.

It's not an easy feat to accomplish. You can't reliably outlaw it for citizens because in democratic societies it's kind of very hard to reliably harass citizens. Look at the copyright lobby and still not many people are really scared of persecution. They can easily take bitcoin-based businesses down but they would just shift to different/distributed jurisdictions (Japan, Eastern Europe) where they will be hell to co…

I hope you are right. Maybe I am just to pessimistic.

Re: Bitcoin reaches an all-time trading high of over $33

#69

Post by Houshalter »

glesica wrote: post #42
eof wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well your logic is obviously flawed, because people do use bitcoins for transactions and they have changed by hundreds of percentage points. "No one" is patently false. Besides, illicit transactions are still transactions. And.. you are just plain wrong. Bitcoin is also useful for buying many completely legal things. Including a VPN that can't be linked to your identity. (Illicit you say? What about a journalist in a…

Illicit plus grey market and a few special cases. Fine, you win the Pedant's Prize for nitpicking. The point is that they don't make a good general-purpose currency. Just because they're awesome for buying drugs and secret VPNs doesn't mean very much in the grand scheme of things (most transactions, at least in the developed world, do not take place in the grey market). Also, just because some people do something doe…

Well it has a use even in normal transactions since you can avoid any kind of fees or hassles with a centralized service like Paypal. And in the end it doesn't matter if it becomes that mainstream or not. Exchanging between currencies is becoming more common for online shopping and presumably it wouldn't cost that much for the services that do it to support bitcoin too.

Re: Bitcoin reaches an all-time trading high of over $33

#70

Post by neilxdsouza »

glesica wrote: post #42
eof wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well your logic is obviously flawed, because people do use bitcoins for transactions and they have changed by hundreds of percentage points. "No one" is patently false. Besides, illicit transactions are still transactions. And.. you are just plain wrong. Bitcoin is also useful for buying many completely legal things. Including a VPN that can't be linked to your identity. (Illicit you say? What about a journalist in a…

Illicit plus grey market and a few special cases. Fine, you win the Pedant's Prize for nitpicking. The point is that they don't make a good general-purpose currency. Just because they're awesome for buying drugs and secret VPNs doesn't mean very much in the grand scheme of things (most transactions, at least in the developed world, do not take place in the grey market). Also, just because some people do something doe…

Bit Coins represent trade in an Economy independent of the Rot Schild banks.

There is no proof that the 2007 financial crises was not orchestrated on purpose. There is also no proof that that 2007 financial crises was orchestrated on purpose.

But we do know that Goldman Sachs sold financial instruments to their clients which they betted against. When the clients lost that money the profiteers was Goldman Sachs.

1. If you assume that the Rot Schild banks owned the entire English economy since June, 1815 and, If you assume that the Rot Schild bank had a value of USD 1,000,000 at that time, growing at 5% per annum for 200 years it's value would be USD 17.2 Trillion.

If you also consider that the Federal Reserve has been leaking money into the shareholders of the FED at 6% of interest on bonds raised since 1913, and if Rot Schild banks were all part share holders in the founding banks of the Federal reserve this profit has been going to them.

If the Rot Schild banks were the major investors in Goldman Sachs, it would make sense for Goldman to loose their investors money and transfer it to their biggest investors directly through dividend.

We know from 1. above that the Rot Schild holdings should easily be USD 17 trillion + and that the valuations of the banks that went under was about USD 800 billion. Hence it is highly possible that the biggest investor in Goldman is bigger than all the rest combined.

The bitcoins are there for a reason much much more important I think.

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