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Bitcoins reached $300

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Bitcoins reached $300

#61

Post by gnerd »

crassus wrote: post #59
dwaltrip wrote: post #29

Damn. Sometimes I can't believe it. I have been following bitcoin quite closely for over 18 months now. The ecosystem is growing in ways only a few bold people have predicted. Fundamentally, it is about belief and trust. The protocol has largely proven itself. People are starting to believe in bitcoin. This is why the price is going up. For those who say "It isn't being used as a currency!" here is my response: Bitco…

The only thing I don't like about bitcoin is that the mining reward goes to 0. Sure, there will be fees, but fees reduce the usefulness of a currency. And if people don't mine, bitcoin dies. Perhaps something else will take its place?

I may be wrong, but due to the deflationary nature of BTC (limited supply, increasing demand), when that happens, those fees are worth more (in government backed fiat currencies) than they are today.

It's like being upset that the original miners could get a block reward of 50 BTC for mining on a CPU but today you have to use specialized hardware for less BTC. But as competition increased (and difficulty increased), the BTC is worth way more than it was and is less risky (although, still risky).

Profit is profit and some people/organizations will still have incentives to mine. Of course, there are problems that need to be sorted out before then though, like having more transactions included in each block to make it worth while for miners and cheap for users.

Re: Bitcoins reached $300

#62

Post by pja »

atmosx wrote: post #42

Awesome. I wish (as always) I hadn't sold mine earlier. But if I didn't I would probably sold them now and wait to see what happens. Thing is, this fluctuations are not connected with any sort of events that make sense or justify the price sky-rocketing which makes me think that the whole thing is driven, manually. When the whale leaves the sea, BTC will turn into peanuts. Till then...

It's something of a paradox isn't it: If nobody had ever sold their bitcoins in return for something else, then there would be no market for bitcoins at all and bitcoins would be irrelevant.

Re: Bitcoins reached $300

#63

Post by gnerd »

grey-area wrote: post #57

If I had money in bitcoin I'd find this movement terrifying. It is not correlated with broader economic movements or the inflation rate of USD, and has all the classic hallmarks of a bubble, including true believers telling everyone it is different this time, increasingly wild oscillations, and exponential growth. I find bitcoin really interesting, love the idea of a cryptocurrency, and also find the idea of a deflat…

When dealing with an entirely new concept, isn't everyone an amateur?

Re: Bitcoins reached $300

#64

Post by grey-area »

gnerd wrote: post #63
grey-area wrote: post #57

If I had money in bitcoin I'd find this movement terrifying. It is not correlated with broader economic movements or the inflation rate of USD, and has all the classic hallmarks of a bubble, including true believers telling everyone it is different this time, increasingly wild oscillations, and exponential growth. I find bitcoin really interesting, love the idea of a cryptocurrency, and also find the idea of a deflat…

When dealing with an entirely new concept, isn't everyone an amateur?

Securing money or valuable info is not an entirely new concept. There are basic precautions, like complete physical control of the server for a start, basic precautions which many of these exchanges neglect (see inputs.io, run on a VPS!). They could learn a lot from banks, who have been doing this for decades.

Re: Bitcoins reached $300

#65

Post by Mchl »

tempestn wrote: post #52
Mchl wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's becoming 'too valuable' in USD. There are other currencies, and the world does NOT in fact turn around US.

No, it's becoming "too valuable" in terms of the goods a person would normally buy with it. It is more convenient to quote prices in whole number units than in tiny fractions of a unit. The USD is irrelevant here.

At the beginnings of 20th century ~310USD (which coincedentally is 1BTC at today's - or this hour's - prices) would feed an average american family for a whole year. http://libraryguides.missouri.edu/content.php?pid=298741&sid...

People used cents in day-to-day dealings and I doubt anyone found it inconvenient. Same stuff with BTC and satoshis. People will get used to that sooner than you'd think.

Re: Bitcoins reached $300

#66

Post by jcfrei »

jaibot wrote: post #50

In this thread - people confusing up arrows with "good". (Rapid deflation is not a great thing for a currency in general)

But it might be for a world reserve currency - and replace gold to a large extent.

Re: Bitcoins reached $300

#67

Post by nikcub »

valevk wrote: post #43
ck2 wrote: post #13

Somewhere buried on my hard drive I have a fraction of a bitcoin that people were giving out for free when bitcoin first came out to encourage adoption. I really need to find it, it's actually worth money now... ps. that pizza is now worth $3 Million

What about Ebay announcing that they might accept Bitcoins?

I've been buying up in the last week (previously I was in at 5, 10, 12$ and sold at the last peak at $240) because I think PayPal will jump in soonish.

Re: Bitcoins reached $300

#69

Post by theklub »

ck2 wrote: post #13

Somewhere buried on my hard drive I have a fraction of a bitcoin that people were giving out for free when bitcoin first came out to encourage adoption. I really need to find it, it's actually worth money now... ps. that pizza is now worth $3 Million

Yeah, I did the same exact thing. I have a few "lost" bitcoins from the early days.

Re: Bitcoins reached $300

#70

Post by Mahn »

grey-area wrote: post #57

If I had money in bitcoin I'd find this movement terrifying. It is not correlated with broader economic movements or the inflation rate of USD, and has all the classic hallmarks of a bubble, including true believers telling everyone it is different this time, increasingly wild oscillations, and exponential growth. I find bitcoin really interesting, love the idea of a cryptocurrency, and also find the idea of a deflat…

If I had money in bitcoin I'd find this movement terrifying. It is not correlated with broader economic movements or the inflation rate of USD, and has all the classic hallmarks of a bubble, including true believers telling everyone it is different this time, increasingly wild oscillations, and exponential growth.

I have money in bitcoin, I believe in its future, and I acknowledge we are in a bubble. Nothing to be terrified of; the aftermath of the last April bubble left the prices much higher than when it started. And with every single bubble bitcoin kept going no matter how big the crash was.

Those two things mean people can engage in bitcoin theft, fraud, laundering, cornering the market, setting up bogus or insecure exchanges/banks, with impunity and anonymity. Without proper regulation, insurance, compensation, which means identification of users and verification of transactions and everything that goes with that, I can't see bitcoin spreading beyond enthusiasts.

You have to consider that this is a new way of thinking of money. No regulation and a decentralized nature does not necesarily mean all sort of bad things will happen at once; this thought is what comes naturally when you think of money in a traditional sense, but people can adapt and start seeing and thinking of money in a different way.

Let me give you an example: Email. It's unregulated and decentralized, and anyone, anytime, can write anything to any email address with almost zero effort. In paper this sounds like a terrible idea, because the moment my email address is public anyone can send all sorts of crap to it, not to mention that malicious people could completely trash my inbox by sending thousands of crap emails having no repercussions. But, as a society, we still adapted and embraced it.

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