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Bitcoin crosses $10B market cap again
- statoshi 10y ago$10B down, a few trillion to go.
- oh_stasi_tokama 10y agoShould be a matter of weeks.
- curiousgal 10y agoSurpassing Western Union's market cap.
- underyx 10y agoI've seen this comparison a lot but I have no idea what the significance is. Why does this matter?
- lordnacho 10y agoProbably because WU is a money transmission network, so somewhat comparable to what Bitcoin does.
- underyx 10y agoBut doesn't market cap mean two entirely different things for a company and a currency?
- throwawaysocks 10y agoYes. A more meaningful comparison would be the market cap of various bitcoin exchanges; the flaws with that comparison are pretty much the same as the flaws with comparing bitcoin to WU in general.
- dantudor 10y agoBitcoin transaction volume in USD for the last 24 hours was $ 224 million. Not sure how much WU turnover in transaction value a day...
- underyx 10y agoThe best data I could find on this is in their 2015 annual report, which says they've had $81.6 billion in consumer-to-consumer transfers[0], which made up 79.21% of their revenue[1], so I guess we can estimate an annual turnover of $103 billion, which comes out to $282 million per day over the year of 2015. [0]: http://s1.q4cdn.com/568883301/files/doc_financials/2015Annual/2015-Annual-Report.pdf http://s1.q4cdn.com/568883301/files/doc_financials/2015Annua... - page 66 [1]: http://s1.q4cdn.com/568883301/files/doc_financials/2015Annual/2015-Annual-Report.pdf http://s1.q4cdn.com/568883301/files/doc_financials/2015Annua... - pages 59 & 64
- throwawaysocks 10y agoMost of their revenue = Most of their volume is questionable. Do you have any sense for whether revenue and vole are roughly correlated here?
- underyx 10y agoNope, I'd assume that B2B has lower fees/margins, so the actual daily volume should be higher than my calculation said above. Still, it should be enough to establish that WU is still a fair bit ahead of BTC.
- bdcravens 10y agoKeep in mind though that anyone with reason, could easily fake a lot of volume: 2 address, starting amount, swap back and forth until you eat up the whole thing with fees.
- kalleboo 10y agoDoesn't that by necessity include all the change as well? So it's a misleading number if you want to take it for "this is how much people are paying each other with bitcoin"
- retube 10y agoI've no idea. Is utterly meaningless. A more meaningful comparison would be "what $ value has been transferred using each network over the last 12 months"
- LAMike 10y agoAlso bigger than Twitter. Bitcoin has maybe 3 million users (maybe). Twitter has 300 million. I'm investing in both, and I wonder how much Bitcoin would be worth at 300 million users. The network effects are going to be fun to watch
- LAMike 10y agoLol HN really doesn't like Bitcoin. Sour grapes I guess
- bdcravens 10y agoNo, I think HN realizes Bitcoin price isn't correlated to number of users. After all, the number of "users" hasn't grown that much over the past 30 days, even though the price is up 50%.
- tveita 10y agoHacker News has been the most Bitcoin friendly of the communities I visit on a regular basis. It probably has the highest ratio of Bitcoin enthusiasts you'll find in a mainstream community outside of drug fora and the Bitcoin community itself. If this story can't find an audience here, it's not going to do better elsewhere.
- NobleSir 10y agoThis is inevitable as everyone saw what happened at the litecoin halving last summer (if you don't pay attention to such things, it was a massive spike then dump).
- partiallypro 10y agoA lot of this has to do with unease within the Chinese economy. Gold is also being bought around the same clip, and long term bonds have yields that are plummeting despite a possible rate hike.
- davidgerard 10y agoThere is question as to whether this is even real, or just Willybotted up. This article is from March, but it hasn't stopped: http://www.bitcoinfuturesguide.com/bitcoin-blog/reminder-chinese-bitcoin-spot-exchanges-okcoin-and-huobi-are-faking-a-majority-of-their-trading-volume http://www.bitcoinfuturesguide.com/bitcoin-blog/reminder-chi... What happens if you try to cash in at these prices? There's no actual demand, so the price flash-crashes: http://qntra.net/2016/06/mere-265-bitcoin-sell-causes-flashcrash-at-coinbase-chronically-thin-orderbook-to-blame/ http://qntra.net/2016/06/mere-265-bitcoin-sell-causes-flashc...
- dwaltrip 10y agoOKcoin is not the only exchange... Yes, you can't trust many of the Chinese exchanges. But there are 10s of thousands of bitcoins being traded daily on many different (non-Chinese) exchanges that don't fake their volume. Coinbase, Bitstamp, and Kraken, three of the more reputable USD exchanges, have had a combined volume of over 30k BTC alone in the past 24 hours. http://bitcoinity.org/markets/list?currency=USD&span=24h http://bitcoinity.org/markets/list?currency=USD&span=24h.
- bencxr 10y agoit wouldn't be a flash crash if there was no demand. it would be a crash. the flash crash happened because there was insufficient liquidity on one exchange - as soon as the market sought to fill the gaps, it went right back up.
- wildchild 10y agoNew wave of cryptocurrency scam started in May. How long it will last this time?
- fiiiauuush 10y agoAs long as there is criminal activity, there will be cryptocurrencies.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- tdurden 10y ago...and fiat currencies
- vinchuco 10y agoI want to see what happens after 28 days: http://www.thehalvening.com/ http://www.thehalvening.com/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3o89yz/the_halvening/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3o89yz/the_halveni...
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- polard2 10y agoI wouldn't be so sure. The reason ETH has be rising is because bitcoin has become clogged and the developers refuse to unclog it. Most likely very few people have even heard of Homestead yet or will hear about it on Monday. Bitcoin's price was about to break out from last year's bottom until the network got clogged on November 5th. The exact same thing will happen every time the price tries to shoot back to the ATH and it will never do anything different until the network capacity is increased.
- Inthenameofmine 10y agoAs someone actively working in this space for the past 3 years, I have a few observations on Bitcoin's price movements: * The only parameter that in any way is correlating to Bitcoin's price is it's transaction count over time. In fact, if you take out Bitcoin's extreme price spikes they almost completely match up. number of transactions should go through the roof one the Lightning Network is functional. * The only real world application of Bitcoin that I have seen so far has been 1) Black markets; 2) International money transfer (it's faster to do Bank-Exchange-Bitcoin-Exchange-Bank in most cases than direct bank to bank transfers. That should tell you something about the current state of banking. * Using market caps for a commodity is ridiculous. The only meaningful parameters to track is nr of transactions, depth of order books globally, nr of exchanges in countries. Side note: I don't hold any crypto currencies anymore. I don't invest in things which I can't have direction over.
- ChuckMcM 10y agoThe reason for slower bank-to-bank over international borders is probably more related to managing liability than it is to inefficiency.
- brighton36 10y agoLong settlement times are a feature, not a bug. It reduces externality costs (drugs and terror) and reduces insurance costs. (reverseability)
- celticninja 10y agoPlus the bank gets to charge interest while they hold it, a week at my bank and a week at the receiving bank, for multiple transactions is a nice little earner.
- kalleboo 10y agoWow, what bank takes a week to do an international wire? For me it always seems to arrive the next business day.
- Mahn 10y agoIt's kind of a pity that three years have passed since it arguably went mainstream (among the tech literate at least) and the most prevalent use case is still by and large speculation. Making money is cool and all but the technology had a lot more promise than this.
- brighton36 10y agoUp until this month - most of the speculation has been dead. That's why coinbase is pivoting. The majority of bitcoin is being used by people who need it in order to run their businesses.
- mifreewil 10y agoPivoting? Adding Ethereum as another asset on their exchange is not pivoting.
- justifier 10y agoi tend to think the two sides of the bitcoin: currency and tech; are at odds when one is useless the other is valuable there is value to bitcoin because mining is expensive expensive nonce detection renders the blockchain inefficient if we had superficial nonce detection the currency would be useless but the tech would become practical
- csomar 10y agoWhat? Living in a country with a broken financial and banking system I'm relying on Bitcoin for storing and transferring value. Check out Bitcoin search trend for South Africa, North African countries, Pakistan, and Venezuela. Other reasons to use bitcoin: Drugs, Money Laundering, CryptoLocker, Capital flights, etc...
- throwoverflow 10y agoI wonder if Chinese price manipulation has anything to do with the upcoming Australian Bitcoin auction in late June.
- brighton36 10y agothere is no such thing as price manipulation.
- throwoverflow 10y agoOkay then: Chinese Bitcoin activity
- shitshow 10y agoI will assume this is some sort of sarcastic comment.
- bdcravens 10y agoOnly volume manipulation.
- nikolay 10y agoChinese second-class investors are doing another pump-and-dump scheme now using the #HalvingHype. Bitcoin has gained no consumer adoption, most new development is happening with Ethereum, and Bitcoin got replaced in headlines with Blockchain. I see this final pump-and-dump as a desperation move. Imagine this applied to stocks as "Let's pump AMZN, because if we don't, it will go out of business." This time, the pump is done by miners predominantly and the volumes are small as people moved to more profitable investments long ago
- googletazer 10y agoExplain to me why Ethereum isn't just hype.
- nikolay 10y agoN.B. This here is HN, not Reddit. It's like asking - is the next major version of something just a hype. Okay, Bitcoin was good, it introduced the concept of the blockchain and solved a long-standing issue in a very energy inefficient way. To run all this computing power just so that Chinese thieves and speculators can sneak out stolen money or increase it as they either lack means to invest elsewhere or it'd be just too sophisticated for them to do, is a ridiculous concept that cannot be sustained for too long! P.S. By promoting Bitcoin, you support Climate Change, illicit businesses, and stinky speculation.
- googletazer 10y agoJust by breathing you can also say I support Climate Change, illicit businesses and stinky speculation. Where are ethereums killer apps? Something so groundbreaking that it takes the world by storm. The browser, or bittorrent for example. Or is it just another chain in the centipede of cryptocurrency "innovation"?
- hatsunearu 10y agoElusive Dapps, and the Casper PoS system.
- gchokov 10y agoScam at its best.
- fhood 10y agoYeah, look at dogecoin, still fighting, much determination. Never give up dogecoin.