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Bitcoin Surges Past $7,000 to Extend Record Rally

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Re: Bitcoin Surges Past $7,000 to Extend Record Rally

#71

Post by ataturk »

agumonkey wrote: post #39
simias wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Big banks are already looking seriously into cryptocurrencies. Like seriously.

Big banks are the absolute epicenter of fraud and public abuse.

Re: Bitcoin Surges Past $7,000 to Extend Record Rally

#72

Post by pawelwentpawel »

jstanley wrote: post #60
weddpros wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Like a hyped startup, it doesn't do much yet It does plenty already. I live almost exclusively on Bitcoin. I only get income in Bitcoin, I pay with Bitcoin whenever possible, and I have a Bitcoin-funded debit card for when that's not possible.

Does the company that you work for receive their income in Bitcoin too?

Re: Bitcoin Surges Past $7,000 to Extend Record Rally

#73

Post by joosters »

vazamb wrote: post #8
Andrenid wrote: post #2

I 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…

(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…

The forked currencies behave very oddly. When bitcoin forked, the bitcoin price didn't change but the new coins had a non-zero value (something like 10-20% of btc, if I remember). So some extra value was created out of thin air. It makes little sense!

Re: Bitcoin Surges Past $7,000 to Extend Record Rally

#74

Post by ataturk »

loceng wrote: post #55
Andrenid wrote: post #2

I 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 is very much like a decentralized global pyramid scheme, unfortunately there's no concise resource to explain it all clearly - primarily because there's no VC money pumped into anti-crypto assets that are structured and incentivized like a pyramid scheme, e.g. the most popular blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum's Ether. The issue is the unreasonable amount of wealth transfer that would occur if and as societ…

And when is the last time you got something for nothing?

Re: Bitcoin Surges Past $7,000 to Extend Record Rally

#75

Post by agumonkey »

madamelic wrote: post #54
agumonkey wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big banks are already looking seriously into cryptocurrencies. Like seriously.

I think you might be confusing cryptocurrency with blockchain. Cryptocurrency uses blockchain but blockchain isn't cryptocurrency. Blockchain technology is already incredibly useful for banks doing interbank currency trading iirc. I guess you could be talking about banks doing crypto trading, then I would guess that they are but a number are still stuck in the stone ages.

I think they're using both, as a mean to scale for billion or more number of accounts.

Re: Bitcoin Surges Past $7,000 to Extend Record Rally

#76

Post by vanderreeah »

Slaul wrote: post #69
vanderreeah wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forgive my total ignorance of bitcoin but - why can't you sell 1 Bitcoin for $7000?

You can, it's confusing but there is Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold, and soon to be another one Bitcoin Segwit2x or some such. Each of these other "versions" of bitcoin were created by a fork. As far as I know, when a fork happens you get an equal number of "new coin" as you have original coin. Seemingly creating value out of nothing.

Ah I missed the different name. Thanks for the clarification. I was thinking of comments I've seen before where people say that if you have 100 bitcoins you'll have a hard time converting them to (e.g.) $700k cash.

Re: Bitcoin Surges Past $7,000 to Extend Record Rally

#77

Post by ataturk »

weddpros wrote: post #48
ForHackernews wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Imagine you don't want a single person to control everything in your country (dictator), and you don't want a single person to control your currency. Against dictators, we have democracy. Against a centrally controlled currency, there's not much but crypto currencies. They're actually democratic, the majority wins. Also, I don't want to be the one who will handle security for the single server with a Postgres databas…

I have a feeling dictators will find brutal ways to burn through whatever stands in their way.

Re: Bitcoin Surges Past $7,000 to Extend Record Rally

#78

Post by psyc »

vanderreeah wrote: post #53
namelost wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The forked currencies are just the same as altcoins, you can't sell 1 Bitcoin Cash for $7000. The fact that people are willing to accept money for them doesn't change the value of one Bitcoin.

Forgive my total ignorance of bitcoin but - why can't you sell 1 Bitcoin for $7000?

Bitcoin Cash is a different, suggestively named currency (it’s not Bitcoin) that was bootstrapped by copying Bitcoin’s blockchain.

Re: Bitcoin Surges Past $7,000 to Extend Record Rally

#79

Post by petercooper »

Andrenid wrote: post #2

I 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…

I probably should've taken the time to mine some back when my friends were doing it and tried convincing me too. Ah well.

The thing I keep telling myself is if I'd mined even 1000 bitcoins (which was viable at the time I first learnt about it) I'd have totally sold out at $10.. there is zero chance I would have made it to $1000 :-D

Re: Bitcoin Surges Past $7,000 to Extend Record Rally

#80

Post by [deleted] »

joefourier wrote: post #31

Notice how almost all news of Bitcoin now are about its price. Bitcoin used to be exciting in both technical and economical aspects, but has now become just a store of value entirely driven by speculation. Other technically superior cryptocurrencies (e.g. Monero, Ethereum) have replaced most of its usecases, boasting much faster and cheaper transactions and real anonymity in the case of Monero. Bitcoin takes more tha…

[deleted]
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