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Bitcoin breaks $3K to reach new all-time high
- jeremynixon 9y agoLegendary. Huge thanks to all of the engineers behind segwit.
- erentz 9y agoBut segwit isn't active yet is it? Is it likely to go ahead?
- dongcarl 9y agoI usually check the status here: https://www.xbt.eu https://www.xbt.eu Since 100% of the blocks mined during this period has been SegWit, I would say it's very likely that it gets activated!
- runeks 9y agoIt’s not a matter of probability. Miners decide what to do, and right now a majority of them will ignore non-SegWit blocks. Doesn’t mean they can’t change their minds, though.
- kobeya 9y agoBecause of BIP91, any miners who fail to signal segwit will have their blocks orphaned. It's pretty much a done deal at this point.
- wfunction 9y agoCan someone explain how old Bitcoin works post-fork? Can you sell the same old Bitcoin twice now? Is this already priced in somehow and still going up?
- JoshTriplett 9y agoBitcoin works the same as it always did. However, anyone who had N Bitcoin on a particular time on August 1 also has N "Bitcoin Cash" using the same private keys, and can go spend that separately on the forked blockchain, without in any way affecting their existing Bitcoin. Both have their own price and market, and they don't interconvert beyond that one-time thing except by selling/buying/trading between them.
- mirimir 9y agoRight, but you can get yourself a BCH wallet, and import the keys from your existing BTC wallet. Then convert BCH to BTC, if you like. Using shapeshift.io perhaps, which requires no account.
- icebraining 9y agoJust to make it clear to others, "convert" here means sell BCH in exchange for BTC. It's not some sort of mathematical operation.
- kingmanaz 9y agoI'm having trouble wrapping my head around this. Once you use your private key to complete a transaction on the BCH blockchain, won't that reveal the private key publicly and allow others to spend the corresponding unspent bitcoin on the BTC blockchain? Sorry if I'm overlooking something obvious, but it was my understanding that once someone used their private key it should never be used again...
- mirimir 9y agoNot at all. You never reveal private keys when transacting. You will reveal addresses, however. The only BTC addresses that have BCH value are those that existed at the fork. So before using them in the BCH blockchain, it would be prudent to first spend them in the BTC blockchain. Doing this is a double spend in some sense, but they happen in different blockchains, so they don't affect each other.
- perpetualcrayon 9y agoNot saying the alternative (fiat) is a substantially better alternative, but this is what happens when markets aren't regulated. My prediction: There are going to be a lot of naive poor folks who are going to become poorer, maybe even dirt poor, and some very savvy wealthy people who are going to be even more wealthy when this is all said and done.
- icelancer 9y agoA better prediction: There's going to be a bunch of random movement that causes random fluctuations in holdings of various people.
- fapjacks 9y agoYes, but there are also large players clearly manipulating the markets on the various exchanges, unhindered by regulations. It is definitely more than just random movement.
- dmichulke 9y agoImo they can only sell and buy, is that manipulation?
- icelancer 9y agoAlso publish blog articles and tweets and such about it. That is manipulation. There's also option-style trading on some platforms, plenty of people have been short BTC and gotten squeezed recently, however.
- fapjacks 9y agoIf these people did the same things (quote stuffing and layering in general, spoofing, etc) on the regular stock exchange, the SEC would have them arrested. It is illegal to do the things on the regular stock exchange that some of these people are doing on the cryptocurrency exchanges. As someone that's been involved in Ethereum and Bitcoin (bot) trading on various exchanges for at least a couple of years now, I am tracking several groups or individuals ("players") that do this kind of thing all day, every day. I personally don't have a problem with it, but don't think for a second that this would be legal on the regular stock exchange.
- lightedman 9y agoIt had to reach an all-time high, otherwise there's no way there's going to possibly be any money to back Bitcoin Cash, since I'm pretty sure the people that forked it have no real assets to back up this currency otherwise.
- kgwgk 9y agoI'm not sure if this is a joke, but certainly I hope so.
- lightedman 9y agoWhere'd the sudden money come from to back Bitcoin cash? Who put in the initial currency valuation? Did you watch the quick and near-parity change in price between Coin and Cash, only for Cash to suddenly double and then drop right back toparity with BC, then the jump to over 3,000 on Coin to nearly-mirror the needed missing reserve to back Cash? It's pretty simple - follow the money. The pattern is BEYOND evident.
- paulpauper 9y agoBeen long bitcoin since 2013. I felt like I was late but it has been awesome .glad I ignored the headlines about bubbles . the news is useless. for every bubble they call correctly, the get 10-20 of them wrong. Bitcoin is like General Electric..its not going anywhere. Against all odds it succeeded and surpassed everyone's expectations.
- omarchowdhury 9y agoGeneral Electric produces electricity, Bitcoin wastes it.
- azm1 9y agoIt provides me value so its not a waste.
- runeks 9y agoEnergy spent with a purpose is not waste. This is the case if you spend energy to build a car, and also when spending energy to calculate a proof that prevents altering historic information. In the former case, consumers pay car manufacturers to spend energy to produce cars, in the latter case bitcoin buyers pay miners to spend energy to secure the blockchain. In both cases, if the end-user of the (virtual) good ceases their activity — consumers buying cars/people buying bitcoins — the good in question will automatically stop being produced (miners don’t burn off energy to produce bitcoins if they can’t sell them for a profit). In this way, Bitcoin works just as any other consumer good: the (bitcoin) buyers finance the activities of the producers (Bitcoin miners) in order to produce a useful tool (electronic cash).
- vinceguidry 9y agoFiat currency takes time and materials and energy to produce too, is that wasted?
- grey-area 9y agoHow can you tell this isn't a speculative bubble? It has all the hallmarks of one - exuberance without strong fundamentals is a classic sign.
- mmaunder 9y agoThat was quite a stair step up around 8pm PDT. Anyone know what happened? http://imgur.com/a/W6m6n http://imgur.com/a/W6m6n
- gcb0 9y agono. the price to dollar is mostly controlled by the exchanges supply and demand, which are mostly opaque. if I were to bet: price collusion to dump it before every miner jumps into the new chain exclusively.
- DaiPlusPlus 9y agoBut where's the evidence of miners switching? The block-mining-reward for BCH is very low - and from what it looks consumers looking to use BitCoin for retail transactions will have a hard time with BCH because very few, if any, retailers support BCH compared to BTC.
- gcb0 9y agoagain. I don't know. you don't known. the real btc/bth to dollar offer and supply is not transparent. miner can move either way in any second. I don't follow all of the public groups. and there are mostly private big miners now anyway. you might be right on the reason. only the exchange knows. the trick is that the dollar to btc is a known value for them only.
- rlpb 9y ago> But where's the evidence of miners switching? Why does this matter? If you're concerned about double spend, just wait for more confirmations and treat it as a slower to resolve chain. In any case, double spend problems could only happen if miners _did_ switch, so then you wouldn't need to be worried about miners not switching.
- mirimir 9y agoTwo possibilities come to mind. One, perhaps potential buyers were nervous about the BCH fork. And after BTC price didn't crash, they jumped in. Two, perhaps some large BTC holders are buying more BTC with their windfall BCH. I mean, what else would they do with it?
- gaetanrickter 9y agoA rising tide lifts all boats and I can imagine this breakout boosting the entire cryptocurrency market. Just wait until we enter a bear market, we'll start seeing just about every cryptocurrency spike in value.
- matude 9y agoBull market, you mean?
- qwtel 9y agoi think the idea is that if theres a bear market in the real economy, more people will flee into the virtual one
- ben_w 9y agoAll boats, except for the ones with holes in them. And some of those boats don't look like they can handle stormy weather…
- runeks 9y agoPerhaps if you measure in USD. Measured in BTC, Bitcoin Cash has been nothing but falling for the past couple of days: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin-cash/#BTC https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin-cash/#BTC
- pmorici 9y agoBitcoin Cash is only a few days old. It is going to take some time for the market to find it's true price. That will take more and more exchanges supporting it so that markets function more smoothly. In the meant time it would be expected that there are wild price fluctuations and differences in price globally.
- paulpauper 9y agohas not helped etherium and many others
- mrkgnao 9y agoThis link posted a couple days back may be of interest: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14891968 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14891968
- discombobulate 9y agoProgrammable money makes coders powerful. For some reason, a large fraction of HN hates crypto. They seem to like getting fucked up the ass by everyone. Groveling to VCs for funding. Looked down on my MBA-types. Coders/hackers should be embracing what's happening. Finally, merit > dick sucking.
- tasuki 9y agoWhat merit?
- discombobulate 9y agoInvestment. Tokens sales are going to fund projects without gatekeepers. Personal brand is going to become more important. You're on an investment website -- for startups.
- ksrm 9y agoThis sort of language doesn't make for a good HN comment.
- dang 9y agoWould you please stop posting uncivil and/or unsubstantive comments to HN? We've warned you before, and continuing to do this will get your account banned. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14934569 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14934569 and marked it off-topic.
- nikolay 9y agoYeah, but look at the trading volumes - at least an order of magnitude lower than 2 years ago!
- sygma 9y ago24h volume 2 years ago was around 22 million USD [0] Trading volume in the last 24 hours is 1.6 billion [0] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/#charts https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/#charts
- nimchimpsky 9y agothats not the same thing
- kobeya 9y ago...it's exactly the same thing.
- nimchimpsky 9y agoit really isn't. Volume is the amount traded, independent of price. 10 bitcoins when they first came out, would have the same the volume as 10 bitcoins today.
- foepys 9y agoOP meant the Bitcoin trade volume, not the US-Dollar volume. The BTC trading volume is extremely low currently. [0] 0: https://data.bitcoinity.org/markets/volume/2y?r=week&t=a https://data.bitcoinity.org/markets/volume/2y?r=week&t=a
- kobeya 9y agoHe said "the trading volumes." Could have been either, but BTC trading volume is even more meaningless than USD trading volume. An inflation-adjusted aggregate volume is probably the best metric, which is closer to the USD trade volume than BTC.
- vedoza 9y agonow bitcoin price $3,173 https://www.exchangeratesdata.com/convert/BTC/USD/ https://www.exchangeratesdata.com/convert/BTC/USD/
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- generalseven 9y agoI'm a board member and founder of https://www.bitcoinwednesday.com/ https://www.bitcoinwednesday.com/ What happened on 1 August and with the prices immediately after suggests how the conflict over the blocksize has been widely misreported. Bitcoin was not ripping itself into two in a civil war, but innovating new forms of governance and token distribution for new projects. We now have a technically proven, and from the looks of it, established new method of token distribution that is arguably far superior to crowd sales and ICOs. If you don't like the BCH or Bitcoin implementation, there are already hundreds of other cryptocurrytencies, but you can also fork your own from the biggest, original (and arguably most widely distributed). BCH now has a "market cap" of about $3.7 billion dollars, probably a world record for a startup (open source project) that was literally released to the world a few days ago. If you own bitcoins before the fork, you should now own equal amounts on both sides of the coin, and (hopefully) soon will be able to buy or sell either token, depending on your preference. Bitcoin itself has a $52 billion dollar market cap right now post fork not only because it survived the challenge and may soon implement Segwit, but because it will be one of the best chains from which to fork new projects. There is no need to take sides from this perspective. Just sell the token you don't like and use the gain to buy more that you do like. OTOH, it's perfectly fine to like and hold both just like it was once okay to use more than one web site. [post edited: BCash to the more neutral BCH ]
- consz 9y agoAre you saying that this "established new method of token distribution" is to make a copy of the current state of the main BTC chain?
- antocv 9y agoBCash is a fork ZCash. For running a bitdoinwednesday you seem to be misinformed about what bitcoin is.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- generalseven 9y ago
- tryingagainbro 9y agoSo it's 2009-2010 and someone has $6000 laying around. Hears about Bitcoin and buys 100,000 shares at 6 cents each. Wakes up in 2017 and miraculously all is there, in the old computer. $6000 to $300,000,000 in 7 years. Have we ever seen such appreciation in an investment /speculation? Oh, it will crash, as soon as a 'better' cryptocurrency comes in. It has value for as long as people buy it.
- 0x0 9y agoI'm curious - if you actually had $300m worth of bitcoin and started selling it, would you be able to actually sell everything off for that price before the price started dropping like crazy? Would whatever exchange you're using even be able to wire $300m USD to your bank account after the sale just like that?
- tryingagainbro 9y agoPresumably you would do a private sale or sell little by little.
- pmorici 9y agoIt all depends on how fast you sell it. If you market sold it on a single exchange sure you could flash crash the price to close to zero for a moment that wouldn't be in your interest though. More likely you would implement a strategy to sell off a little bit every day. It would take some time to liquidate it all at the best possible price. This isn't any different than the problem faced by any wealthy person with a large position in a publicly traded company would face. You can't market sell 300 million of anything in an instant and not more the price. Bitcoin also has private markets where high touch trading desks match large sellers with large buyer so it is conceivable you could use something like that as well to get a good price and exit your position relatively quickly. That said if you you are the person who had the vision and stomach to hold that position all that time it's unlikely you would find yourself wanting to sell it all in an instant just because the price crosses 3k. You almost certainly believe 5 figure Bitcoin is possible if not likely and a 6 figure Bitcoin price isn't out of the question. I could seem a person in that position selling a bit to make life comfortable but not panic exiting their position entirely.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jjlane 9y agobuying all that afghani heroin 10 years ago really fucked me out of being a millionaire