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> "The last 24 days mark the longest period in which bitcoin prices have been less volatile than gold prices, going back to 2010." Twenty-four days is not enou
by JamilD 10y ago
> "The last 24 days mark the longest period in which bitcoin prices have been less volatile than gold prices, going back to 2010."
Twenty-four days is not enough time to extrapolate any real meaning. It could be just chance, it could be indicative of a long-term trend, but I'd file this headline under the category of "questions to which the answer is no".
- cloudjacker 10y agoTwenty four days is pretty arbitrary, but the main takeaway is that it is a very non-volatile period in bitcoin's price history Unfortunately extremely boring
- Caprinicus 10y agoBeing stable for 24 days is probably the craziest thing bitcoin has ever done
- Phlarp 10y agoYea, but bitcoin used to be fun! You can't have any fun with a stable commodity! Apologies to sillysarus.
- clamprecht 10y agoSell options, if you're brave.
- cloudjacker 10y agowhere? the options market for bitcoin hasn't changed since 2014, high premiums, spreads 100 points wide, non-standard contracts with hard to decipher conditions.... If it were high premiums and spreads 5-15 points wide, I'd play.
- zappo2938 10y agoCan I talk to you about Dogecoin?
- cloudjacker 10y agosuch Lord such Savior
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- tedks 10y ago>I'd file this headline under the category of "questions to which the answer is no". Obviously if Bitcoin goes tits-up it will not be more stable than gold. There seems to be a non-trivial probability Bitcoin will go tits-up from shitty governance alone, but barring that it seems to me that Bitcoin has the potential to be far more stable than gold. Access to gold is dependent on a large amount of geopolitical factors that could all change at any time, as well as mineral extraction technology that is getting better all the time. Extrapolating far enough, we'll never find an asteroid that's miraculously made almost entirely out of Bitcoin. I'm curious as to whether your viewpoint is the same for all cryptocurrency or just Bitcoin.
- cbr 10y agowe'll never find an asteroid that's miraculously made almost entirely out of Bitcoin I think we're more likely to find a very fast way to compute sha256 hashes than a 10T+ gold asteroid.
- ikeboy 10y agoAs long as we can't preimage arbitrary hashes, the difficulty will adjust. There are contingency plans for if a preimage becomes possible, and I suspect they'll move to a stronger hash before it's needed.
- cbr 10y agoIf you figure out how to hash 1000x more efficiently than other people and put that into practice without sharing your knowledge then you can cheaply get and maintain a hashpower supermajority. (I'm not saying this is likely, just more likely than finding a large gold asteroid.)
- ikeboy 10y agoPeople will notice soon enough, and they'll switch to a different algorithm. It takes time for the difficulty to go up, it only resets every 2016 blocks and is limited.
- cb18 10y agoNot only is it not enough time to extrapolate any real meaning, but to choose a period of 24 days that correspond to a period of diminishing interest in bitcoin and heightened interest in gold because of roiling in the broader markets and then to suggest bitcoin is now more stable than gold is reaching the heights of absurdity. Which is more 'stable'? A commodity on which economies have rested for millennia along with many other established uses, or a commodity less than a decade old that has yet to establish any sustainable use? hmmm..
- pyrophane 10y agoYea, there are now many crypto currencies that are very similar in design to Bitcoin, but gold has unique properties that cannot truly be copied.
- ptrincr 10y agoTo be fair, Bitcoin is also unique within the crypto currency world, just like gold is unique within the elements. Nothing will ever change the fact that Bitcoin was first, it has first-mover advantage over other implementations. You could also argue it currently has the most investment, both in monitory terms and development effort.
- cb18 10y agoIt's not quite so easy to create iterative improvements on the basic elements of the universe, as it is to iteratively improve crypto currency software. It could be just as easily argued, probably more persuasively, that bitcoin's first mover status is more of a negative to its future prospects than a positive. This owing in large part to the hugely concentrated nature of the bitcoin currency. It's hard to see how a bitcoin economy gets off the ground in any meaningful sense when the distribution is arranged like that. It's unlikely to get any enthusiastic buy in when people doing so understand that the value of their currency would be subject to the whims of just a few major players in the bitcoin game. And any rich person capable of make a large bitcoin buy in would be hesitant to do so because their essentially making themselves relatively poorer than the bitcoin barons in doing so. Figuring out a distribution model that works in concert with a growing digital economy is an open question in crypto currencies.
- aab0 10y agoIf you look at the historical graphs, it's hard to escape the conclusion that the past year has in fact been the stablest period in Bitcoin history: https://btcvol.info/ https://btcvol.info/
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- JPBetteride 10y agoAny headline that ends with a question mark imho. News orgs, if something is actually news and actually true, would just write "BITCOIN MORE STABLE THAN GOLD" or what have you. Any headline that ends with ? is the news org being like, "Welp, this isn't true but we still want to write about it."
- joshschreuder 10y agoJust in case you didn't know, there is an actual name for it! https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines