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Bitcoin surges to all-time high above $1,700
- vocatus_gate 9y agoStill remember when it was $7 per bitcoin and sort of a joke. Hard to believe it's worth over $1700 now.
- elliottcarlson 9y agoI was mining when it was $4 per bitcoin... sold most at $32.
- JTon 9y agoMost of us would have. I mean, 4->32 is great a return. A lot stories about people who didn't sell were those who had lost and then found their wallets. Pure luck.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Cyph0n 9y agoI learned about Bitcoin at exactly the same time. I told my father about it and asked him if I could invest $100. I didn't press him on it though, but I'm sure I would have sold way before $1000+.
- Grangar 9y agoI bought in at sub-dollar prices. I could've bought a house if I didn't sell almost everything in the April 2013 bubble lol. Still paid nicely for a lavish time in college though.
- icefo 9y agoDamn, some early adopters are certainly sitting on a ton of gold now
- DaiPlusPlus 9y agoI believe it's just going to keep going higher: more and more (legitimate, blue-chip) institutions see the value in Bitcoin for moving currency around due to its near-zero transaction fees, rapid clearing, and the impossibility of chargebacks - and given there's a cap of 21m BTC it means deflation is going to keep going on, if not accelerating further. I do expect to see BTC reach $10k or $20k within 5 years, even if it crashes this year. I don't know if BTC will reach $100k or even $1m - it depends on how the rest of the financial industry treats it - or if there's a mass ditching of BTC for ETH or possibly even a bank-controlled blockchain. BTC has one hurdle coming up: the darknets - the original populizers of BTC - are switching to Monero due to its increased privacy protections.
- vizzah 9y ago"near-zero transaction fees"? I wish.. it currently costs ~$1 to have your transaction executed within 10-30 minutes (next block).
- codexon 9y ago"rapid clearing" as well. Takes a while to wait for the recommended number of confirms.
- Taek 9y agoNot compared to wire transfers or credit card clearing, which can take 3 and 30 days, respectively.
- matt_wulfeck 9y agoYeah honestly, why do people keep saying this? Real life bitcoin transactions are much more expensive to users than credit card or ACH transfers. I can move money for free between my bank accounts and the money is settled in three days. I can pay friends for free with venmo and it settles likewise. Bitcoin needs to become significantly faster and cheaper, since there's nothing holding back the competition from getting more efficient from self-imposed limits.
- mikeash 9y agoIt's amazing to think of the RoI you could have gotten for a few hours of computer time if you were mining early. Of course, for every Bitcoin, there's a million stupid schemes that don't work out, and it's hard to tell them apart.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- dibujante 9y agoI mined 50BTC back in college. My harddrive died and I discarded it, thinking nothing of the ~$0.03 I was throwing away.
- doubleunplussed 9y agoI wonder if in the future "bitcoin miners" might be a more literal name, for those digging through landfill looking for hard drives like the one you threw away.
- mikeash 9y agoIt's already been done at least once: https://www.cnet.com/news/uk-man-tries-to-retrieve-7-5-million-in-bitcoins-from-dump/ https://www.cnet.com/news/uk-man-tries-to-retrieve-7-5-milli...
- austenallred 9y agoI bought a bunch when it was around $9; probably $1,000 worth, just for fun. Then I spent most of it on stupid stuff like pizza, and had about $5 left. A couple years later that $5 had grown to become worth $200, so I again spent it on a couple stupid things. I would be mad, but it was in my MtGox account anyway.
- thefalcon 9y agoThat's what I do with all my BTC: MTGO cards, Steam games. My initial "investment" was ~$10 worth of Stellar when that was given away for free, and I currently have ~$30 spread between BTC and a couple alt-coins from that initial free $10. So it's all just play money to me.
- ic4l 9y agoMy friend told me to buy $1000 worth of it when it was around 60 cents a coin. I thought he sounded crazy. $1000 => $2.8M :'(
- superasn 9y agoI posted about this on an old forum when Bitcoins were super cheap. The mods didn't like it and deleted my thread saying that the whole Bitcoin thing sounded a bit scammy :D
- macintux 9y ago...and it still does.
- billions 9y agoHistorically, as soon as bitcoin makes national press, it drops. Amateur investors jump on without the stomach for the hiccups, leading to the subsequent virtual "bank run"
- conistonwater 9y agoA bank run is a pretty specific thing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_run https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_run), you shouldn't use that term for any general situation where lots of people decide to sell something at the same time, or where a price of something drops precipitously.
- billions 9y agoFeel free to contribute a more accurate term
- matt4077 9y ago"illusion of patterns in randomness"
- jeremyt 9y agoPanic sell
- acover 9y agoPrice drop. Supply glut. Demand shortage. Investor flight. Fire sale.
- paulgb 9y agoBubble collapse
- rejschaap 9y agoFlash crash? Especially if it involves a lot of limit orders triggering, which is quite likely in the case of bitcoin.
- 1001101 9y ago
- massaman_yams 9y agoIt's not just bitcoin. ETH and LTC have both spiked in price recently as well - ~2x for ETH, and ~3x for LTC, vs. prices 30 days ago.
- Mendenhall 9y agoHeck I think even dogecoin went +2x.
- Cybourgeoisie 9y agoAt least 5x in the past 1.5 months, actually - from ~$.00025 to ~$.00145 (now $.00125). I watched it climb in disbelief. Most of the top 20 or 30 alt-coins saw at least 2x market cap increases in the past 2 months, some had 10x or greater increases.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- DaiPlusPlus 9y agoLTC spiked because Coinbase added them to their trading service - I'm surprised that making something simple and easy to use would bolster activity like that. Is it safe to say "Coinbase is the iPod of Bitcoin"? That's what it feels like.
- c0nducktr 9y agoOnly if iPods constantly broke and when you bought songs on iTunes they weren't delivered on time. I'd advise anyone thinking of purchasing Bitcoin through Coinbase to take a look at /r/coinbase. Their support is pretty much non-existent. Edit: Not only is support non-existent, people are having problems accessing their funds, getting charged different amounts than what they agree to when buying... It's feeling like MtGOX all over again.
- Obi_Juan_Kenobi 9y ago
- Mendenhall 9y agoSome of these exchanges have come a long way and the volatility makes it great to trade cryptos. I still view it as the wild west, so scammers everywhere, but where there is chaos there is profit!
- ggambetta 9y agoI'm still waiting for my MtGox coins to be returned :_(
- radarsat1 9y agoSame!
- tannerwj 9y agoit could actually happen (https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/6a24et/if_price_keeps_rising_mtgox_may_become_solvent/ https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/6a24et/if_p...)
- radarsat1 9y agoSomething about this doesn't make sense. Either he pays in BTC or JPY. If he pays in JPY, then he has to sell the BTC, which if he does that on market, will tank the price. If he pays in BTC and the courts recognize it, then BTC must be officially recognized as a currency, no? Not sure. In any case, if the courts recognize that he can pay back in BTC, and he has enough BTC to do so, then I don't see why it's contingent on the BTC price. He could do it today.
- ic4l 9y agoExcited about this... I had $5,000 in cash that was supposed to be wired to me. They kept saying its in the process of being sent... Then one day I go on HN, and it says that MTGox is insolvent. Haha.
- moneytalks 9y agoWhere does the $52 billion market valuation come from? All BTC ever created or those traded recently? Any evidence of the # of coins lost forever? I know I had one or two from the early days that got forgotten and lost with a hard drive wipe. Also, do BTC disappearing from circulation affect the currency differently than a fiat currency?
- anonova 9y ago> Where does the $52 billion market valuation come from? That seems to be a mistake in the article. $52 billion market cap is of all currently tracked cryptocurrencies, not just bitcoin.[1] Bitcoin is ~$28.7 billion right now.[2] [1]: https://coinmarketcap.com/charts/ https://coinmarketcap.com/charts/ [2]: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/ https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/
- slg 9y agoAnother problem with that number is there is no way to tell if a coin is being hoarded or if it lost forever. If that hoarded number is high, it presents a risk that a hoarder could offload their coins and crash the market. If that hoarded number is low, it means the actual size of the market is much less than people claim.
- kbody 9y agoAlso, beware that the marketcap figures are not quite true [1]. They calculate based on the total supply rather than the circulated supply and on some (scam)cases like the recent Gnosis ICO it results in crazy amounts. [1]: https://blog.sia.tech/want-to-deflate-the-token-bubble-fix-the-market-cap-indicator-d50f7f1e1ec4#f4f4 https://blog.sia.tech/want-to-deflate-the-token-bubble-fix-t...
- Obi_Juan_Kenobi 9y agoThat figure isn't right, it's about 29 billion. As for lost coins, we can only guess. Much of this depends on whether you think the coins mined very early on by Satoshi are lost forever, or could come back into play. There's very roughly 1 million 'Satoshi Coins'. I'd estimate about another 500,000 that are lost on discarded hard-drives and whatnot. 1-2 million coins seems reasonable. The only ones we know for sure are ones sent to 'Bitcoin Eater' addresses. Example: https://blockchain.info/address/1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSendf59kuE https://blockchain.info/address/1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSend... IIRC there are perhaps a few hundred lost in that way.
- tonydiv 9y agoI think I can claim that I wrote the 1st academic paper on Bitcoin in early 2011. Anyone else trying to claim that title? :) Unfortunately I was broke in school so bought and sold only a few coins. Asked my lawyer dad for money, he laughed, just as all my Wharton finance friends did. https://www.scribd.com/document/86764784/Diepenbrock-BitcoinReport2011 https://www.scribd.com/document/86764784/Diepenbrock-Bitcoin...
- flashmob 9y agoInteresting to note that at the same time bitcoin's dominance in the cryptocurrency market is down to 55.5%, hugging historic lows. http://coinmarketcap.com/charts/#dominance-percentage http://coinmarketcap.com/charts/#dominance-percentage
- rgejman 9y agoMy understanding is that people use bitcoin to buy other cryptocurrencies because they can more easily exchange their conventional currencies for bitcoin. As a result, bitcoin demand is maintained at elevated levels.
- 1001101 9y agoWe'll see what happens to the demand if the Winkelvoss ETF gets approved. It's under review right now, should hear on or before May 15. [1] There's an Etherium ETF under review as well. If institutional and retail flows start causing crypto purchases through ETF creation unit mechanics, it's going to blow sky high. There are similar efforts going on in other countries. Crypto as an asset class is going to be a theme. Japan also legalized Bitcoin as a payment method [2], so there's been lots of buying there. I'm sitting on some BTC (not nearly as much as I used to though, :'( ). [1] http://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/26/bitcoin-price-sec-winklevoss-etf-review.html http://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/26/bitcoin-price-sec-winklevoss-... [2] http://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/12/bitcoin-price-rises-japan-russia-regulation.html http://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/12/bitcoin-price-rises-japan-rus...
- modeless 9y agoETF approval is a real long shot. The SEC already rejected it, with reasoning that makes it unlikely to be reversed anytime soon.
- kristofferR 9y agoThe pro-regulation Obama led SEC rejected it, the Trump anti-regulation one may not.
- headcanon 9y agoIt's killing me too because I'm waiting on the next correction to come before buying any more, but I thought that was going to happen earlier and I'm kicking myself for not buying some a week ago. The future looks bright for cryptocurrencies, but I don't want to buy some at 1700 and feel like a fool when it crashes back down to 1100
- xienze 9y agoSo just wait. It's going to crash again, it always does.
- Taek 9y agoThe question is whether it will crash from 2000 to 800, or from 6000 to 2500.
- mcv 9y agoAnd we can't know, because it has no intrinsic value and nobody even understands why it's so high right now. It might drop from 6000 to 2500, it might drop from 1800 to 300. Its value only comes from the trust people put in it, and from nothing else. If that trust evaporates, so does the value.
- dwaltrip 9y agoBuy low, sell high! Piece of cake!
- if_by_whisky 9y agobuy a little bit automatically every week. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_cost_averaging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_cost_averaging
- stupidhn 9y agoIf you think it's going to crash, why not sell it all and buy later? Or do your powers work only one way?
- kyledrake 9y agoThe bull run going on with Bitcoin right now is very concerning to me. There's been no recent improvements to the utility of Bitcoin, instead there's been scaling issues and an ugly, contentious civil war over how to solve it. It's utility if anything has dropped considerably, as mining fees have become far higher than traditional methods and more unpredictable, leaving smaller transactions to sometimes take 16+ hours to confirm, even with the default fees set by the wallet. Historically, a lot of this activity tends to be from unregulated exchanges in Asia, many of whom could be engaging in some form of price manipulation (it wouldn't be the first time - google for Willy Bot). My Bitcoin friends in town have started to joke that the reason it's going up is just the word "China", because it tends to be a repeated explanation of why the price is increasing, suggesting to me that nobody really knows what's going on or even where the demand is coming from. I'm not anti-bitcoin, but I'd vastly prefer to see a slow, stable increase in price based on the currency improving in utility, not these giant blasts of speculation that, IMHO, only work to discredit Bitcoin as a serious instrument for financial systems. An extreme example of how bad this is getting right now that I seriously hope is just a joke: https://np.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6a3lvd/today_i_took_out_a_325239_equity_loan_on_my_house/ https://np.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6a3lvd/today_i_took...
- loceng 9y agoIt's due gambling. The first blockchain currency that corrects the unreasonable value gained simply because of demand (via redistribution?), will be the blockchain that wins the whole market.
- goodside 9y agoOne way to read this is that every year that goes by without the discovery of a major, world-ending flaw in the Bitcoin protocol should increase your confidence that there won't be one soon, so you should expect growth even if all else is equal. It's not just time either, as the "bounty" on such a discovery is proportional to the market cap of Bitcoin.
- codexon 9y agoAll crypto will eventually be broken. SHA-1 seemed bulletproof a few years ago, and now people are trying to phase it out. If it becomes worth it to break bitcoin, these vulnerabilities will be used, discovered faster, and likely won't be published before someone uses it to profit off Bitcoin and crashing the price. Bitcoin is priced this high because uneducated people expect it to replace paypal and credit cards but it will never be able to because 1 transaction take 30+ minutes and that is by design. The faster they make transactions take, the higher chance of forgery. Other crypto-currencies that attempt to have faster transactions are simply trading safety for speed.
- fivestar 9y agoI can't tell you that Bitcoin is a scam, but I can tell you that if I were going to devise a Ponzi for the 21st century, Bitcoin is what it would look and feel like.
- kentt 9y agoCan someone explain to me why Bitcoin is compared to a Ponzi scam so often. I understand what a Ponzi scam is and have a decent understand of Bitcoin. I'm curious if people just mean it's scam and a Ponzi scam is fresh in their memory.
- madamelic 9y agoIt is an asset and not a currency. People holding it want the price of it to go as high as possible. There is no incentive to have a stable currency when people are still wanting to buy into the hype and liquidity is still there to dump it. I don't think it is a true Ponzi scheme but I definitely think people mistreat it.
- placeybordeaux 9y agoIt's not a stock because it pays no dividends. It's an asset.
- seanalltogether 9y ago40% of stocks don't pay dividends.
- brut 9y agoHere's one way to see it: if you need to use Bitcoin to pseudonymously transfer large amounts of money anywhere in the world relatively easily, then you should worry not about the price it's currently trading at. If you want to transfer 1 million $'s, then you buy the appropriate amount of BTC and cash out when the transaction is done. A lot of people who are "invested" in Bitcoin are there to make money selling it for a higher price than they bought it for.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- grizzles 9y agoAnyone know a creative way I could go short bitcoin over a long time period? eg. >5yrs
- stupidhn 9y agoWrite your own call options. The challenge will be finding a counterparty. But look at The Big Short; they're out there.
- grizzles 9y agoOn what market? I don't think there are any on CBOE. I'd be skeptical of a market run by a bitcoin company even if it raised VC because: 1) The failure rate of VC in general, and especially in fintech bets. 2) It's probably "pre-revenue" eg. not profitable company 3) It will probably be a low volume market & therefore have few counterparties.
- NicoJuicy 9y agoI wouldn't short bitcoin actually. The big capital is coming in. Not all for bitcoin, but bitcoin is still the "safe" haven
- johnwheeler 9y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
- clarkmoody 9y agoPreviously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2561043 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2561043 (May 2011, price $7.50)
- placeybordeaux 9y agoHow long exactly did tulip mania last? How many crashes did the tulip price recover from during this period? Did the tulips have a well known price before speculation started?
- t0mbstone 9y agoCurrency isn't SUPPOSED to be this volatile. Currency is NOT supposed to be an investment mechanism in and of itself. If I buy a loaf of bread for $1 now, I should be able to buy a loaf of bread for $1, 10 years from now. Currency inflation is BAD, and so is currency deflation. Stability is GOOD. The fact that bitcoin's value keeps skyrocketing proves that it is a speculative currency which is too volatile for use. The only way I would trust bitcoin for anything would be for short-term holding to transfer value from point a to b, and then convert it back into a stable currency. The only way I would invest in Bitcoin is if I was totally okay with potentially losing every penny I invested. It could literally drop to zero tomorrow if something happened to it (like a major country making it illegal, for example).
- hartator 9y agoWhy stability is better than volatility? It doesn't seem that obvious to me. Every time price stability is forced onto something, it just destroyed its market.
- dxhdr 9y ago> Why stability is better than volatility? It's self-evident that a stable currency is preferable to volatile, though I'm interested in reading an argument to the contrary. volatile: liability to change rapidly and unpredictably, especially for the worse. stable: not likely to change or fail; firmly established.
- chii 9y agoLet me play the devil's advocate, and day that volatility is an enabler for gambling or betting, and people are known to want to bet.
- Avshalom 9y agoIf you buy in today and it drops to $1.7 tomorrow, do you spend or do you hope that it'll get back near $1700.00 soon? how much are you willing to do with out for how long? that's the question that volatility is constantly asking and it depresses the velocity of money, depressing whatever economy is based on it.
- pishpash 9y agoI'd like to understand where the trade flow is coming from, it may have something to say about other, legitimate markets. That's way more interesting and valuable.
- joepour 9y agoThe reason BitCoin has spiked is because it is the most supported crypto currency and the easiest to get hold of when setting up your wallet with a bank or exchange. There has been and influx of people trying to buy Etherium but first they need to buy BitCoin.
- faragon 9y agoTL;DR: "sky is the limit", "this is not a bubble but a new paradigm", "the price is going up because of China", "buy before it gets too late", etc.
- dangero 9y agoFor anyone who is interested in looking at some growth data take a look at this chart showing the worldwide value transfer of Bitcoins through localbitcoins denominated in USD: https://coin.dance/volume/localbitcoins https://coin.dance/volume/localbitcoins
- anon4this1 9y agoWent to a bitcoin conference recently and met a plumber who had quit his job to margin trade altcoins. I think a lot of his positions would have been wiped out in the beartrap 12 hours ago.
- jameslk 9y agoOf course the price of Bitcoin is going to keep rising due to the fixed amount of coins that can be mined and all the long forgotten stale accounts with coins just sitting in them. There will be a real issue with the velocity of coins exchanged decreasing over time as they're horded in this fashion.
- syngrog66 9y agoits clearly going up now because... its going up. its a cycle.
- dwaltrip 9y agoIt's amazing to me how many people on HN don't really get why Bitcoin is valuable. The simplest way of putting it: if one doesn't believe gold is going to imminently plunge in value, then there you go. That's why Bitcoin is valuable. It's digital gold. The analogy isn't perfect, but as far as analogies go, it is a very good one.
- mcv 9y agoIt's not digital gold, and it has plunged in value far more dramatically than gold ever has. That said, I don't grok the value of gold either. It doesn't have any intrinsic value, it's only valuable because people agree they need something that has value. Bitcoin is the same, except without the centuries of history of people irrationally relying on its value.
- dwaltrip 9y agoValue is socially constructed by people wanting things for complex, dynamic reasons -- it is entirely dependent on the context, which is never static. My understanding is that the concept of "intrinsic value" is flawed and leads people astray. Gold has strong money like properties [0], which is why it has remained valuable for so long (ornamental and industrial usage are a small fraction). Bitcoin has all of these properties as well (perhaps with minor caveats about fungibility), plus some of the very interesting benefits that come from being digital. Being digital brings a few negatives as well, but it seems the positives more than compensate. There are other considerations -- gold is found in the ground and has limited alternatives (platinum and silver, for example), while anyone can create their own cryptocurrency. It appears to me that the huge network effects, first mover advantage, and the principle of "well, it's good enough" are very important dynamics that counteract the near infinite possible competitors. [0] Recognizable, durable, fungible/uniform, and very hard to counterfeit. Two other big ones are portability and divisibility, which it's alright at.
- mcv 9y agoIntrinsic value is a real thing. Land has it. Labour has it. Companies and machinery do. Anything that can produce useful things. And of course the useful things themselves. The real reason for the value of currencies is not the gold backing up that currency, but the economy backing it up. And when that economy goes down, so does the currency. And that's the problem with bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies: they only have value when people accept them as payment for something valuable. Without that, they are worthless, as shown by both the history of bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies, and by the fact that anyone can make a cryptocurrency. Bitcoin works as long as there are enough people who have faith in it, and as long as there are a lot of people accepting it as payment. But when nobody accepts it because nobody trusts it, then bitcoin is worthless. Trust is the only thing it's based on. Of course being able to pay digitally is tremendously useful, but you don't need bitcoin for that.
- petre 9y agoIt's not just Bitcoin. I see most cryptocurrencies going up in recent months. Probably people and organizations pouring money from other assets into cryptocurrencies, as these are not taxed and not subject to state/central bank control.
- eternalvision 9y agoFor speculation on short term direction, current price of BTC which is above $1,750 is a SELL. This move is parabolic and looks to be complete. I'd put a stop loss for a short trade at $1,875.