I'm afraid that when bitcoin becomes more mainstream there is going to be serious amounts of fraud and scamming.
Bitcoin breaks $200
81–90 of 209 posts
Re: Bitcoin breaks $200
#82Who wants to talk about china? Over the last few days the volume of transactions on btcchina has doubled. Gov run chinese media outlets have been surprisingly positive about btc. What is going on? One of the potential uses of btc is capital flight, and that is something that china has been incredibly strict about with their capital controls. Why aren't they clamping down? edit: some commentary from someone in china f…
Various banks have programs to collateralize chinese assets and offer a loan based on those assets. eg. You collateralize $10 million in Chinese assets, you get a $8 million dollar loan from a bank branch in another jurisdiction. Capital controls have already essentially be thwarted by the market, the second item is that BTC actually provides a great public ledger for amounts that would be unfeasible for the usual co…
Do loans like that really defeat capital controls? The "owner" of the money has changed, but the location hasn't. The bank giving you the loan is playing a very long game, because they still can't move the collateral out. Right, wrong?
Re: Bitcoin breaks $200
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
People care about Bitcoin. They don't care about other variants much. This gives Bitcoin value and not the other variants. In other words, creating another blockchain is easy but convincing enough people that the variant coins are worth something is hard. Very hard.
"convincing enough people that the variant coins are worth something is hard. Very hard." Somehow, people managed to be convinced that Bitcoin was worth something back in 2009. What makes the current situation different? Whatever convinced people that Bitcoin had any value in the first place might convince people that some new alternative you started this morning has some value.
> What makes the current situation different?
Bitcoin.
Re: Bitcoin breaks $200
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Asics? There will be a flood of new coins.* the rate of production is fixed, so no one would have predicted that. asic would increase the difficulty level significantly though.
>the rate of production is fixed, so no one would have predicted that. IIRC, the arguments actually went that GPU miners had their equipment already paid for, and so could afford to hoard their mined coins, but that ASIC miners, who were paying thousands of dollars for their equipment, would be forced to sell their coins immediately to pay for their equipment & electricity.
I'd dare say the majority of GPU miners did invest in new equipment. I'd venture that there were plenty of nerds who were interested in mining that didn't already have rigs with decent GPUs already.
Re: Bitcoin breaks $200
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Various banks have programs to collateralize chinese assets and offer a loan based on those assets. eg. You collateralize $10 million in Chinese assets, you get a $8 million dollar loan from a bank branch in another jurisdiction. Capital controls have already essentially be thwarted by the market, the second item is that BTC actually provides a great public ledger for amounts that would be unfeasible for the usual co…
Do loans like that really defeat capital controls? The "owner" of the money has changed, but the location hasn't. The bank giving you the loan is playing a very long game, because they still can't move the collateral out. Right, wrong?
It doesn't have to be a long game as long as they can unwind their position over a longer time frame and with less frictional costs than the individual, which wouldn't be surprising for a large institution.
Re: Bitcoin breaks $200
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can't just 'up' a price.
You can most certainly up your price. The only question is how the market responds. Miners have zero incentive to sell their bitcoins for less than the cost of producing them. Left to themselves, the price should approach the minimum cost of producing bitcoins (since they do have incentive to undercut each other as much as possible). Speculators could respond to a price increase by miners by dumping their inventory o…
Miners have zero incentive to sell their bitcoins for less than the cost of producing them.
Unless bills are due and the credit card is already maxed out.
Re: Bitcoin breaks $200
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's what the btc crowd has said every time it bubbles How about you guys go 12 months without losing 25%+ of value in a single day before you start talking about being "here to stay".
Bitcoins bought with US dollars last year buy over 40x more than if the dollars had been saved. Bitcoin is here to stay for as long as the internet is.
If I had a Bitcoin for every dotcom company that saw a >40x YoY increase in market cap that hasn't stayed around as long as the internet...
Re: Bitcoin breaks $200
#88For once my general laziness looks like it is paying off. Mined a couple bitcoins years and years ago, and was too lazy to sell them at the time.
Re: Bitcoin breaks $200
#89I've been wondering whether people benefiting from bitcoin stability (silk road?) mightn't have been manipulating exchange rates. This seems to be weak evidence in support of that (though I still wouldn't say it seems likely).
Re: Bitcoin breaks $200
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
People care about Bitcoin. They don't care about other variants much. This gives Bitcoin value and not the other variants. In other words, creating another blockchain is easy but convincing enough people that the variant coins are worth something is hard. Very hard.
"convincing enough people that the variant coins are worth something is hard. Very hard." Somehow, people managed to be convinced that Bitcoin was worth something back in 2009. What makes the current situation different? Whatever convinced people that Bitcoin had any value in the first place might convince people that some new alternative you started this morning has some value.
Obviously an altcoin would have to be as much better than Bitcoin (in the ways people care about) as Bitcoin was better than the preceding stuff. A system that is decentralized and doesn't require mining could have this property.