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Bitcoin Blows Past $9,000
- flyingfences 9y agoGoku would be proud.
- forgotmysn 9y agotook me a second
- lunaru 9y agoBy the end, power levels were at absurd numbers (I think in the billions?) Crypto bulls' collective wet dreams.
- jchrome 9y agoCan't wait until it gets to Frieza's level
- huffpopo 9y agoI live in a retirement town where many of the retirees have put their entire life savings and more into USI Tech. As far as I can tell USI Tech has properties of a classic pyramid scheme. I wonder how much this and other similar schemes are driving the price of bitcoin. I also wonder what will happen when entire towns get wiped out without recourse.
- riffraff 9y agoI feel bad for them, but putting one's own entire life savings in _any_ risky investment seems like a bad idea.
- huffpopo 9y agoI feel bad for them as well. They are very trusting of their friends and USI Tech has a MLM mechanism to it. At the moment they are pretty obnoxious about it and are feeling bad for me.
- sgt101 9y agoCan they get out? I mean this run must have made them money; isn't now the time to jump?
- shthed 9y agoHave to wait up to 7 months to be able to get your money back out of USI Tech (they sell contracts that pay 1% per day for 140 business days) but the pyramid scheme will probably crash before then.
- sgt101 9y agoIs there a cash analysis of that anywhere? I guess the question is what happens if BTC drops n% for n days...
- spilk 9y agoI see a lot of similarities in the kind of people that get pulled into Amway/Herbalife/etc and Bitcoin people.
- hndamien 9y agoYou would be mistaken, but I can see how you may conclude that. See Dash/ Bitconnect for a more apt comparison.
- wrinkl3 9y agoIn my experience there's stark difference between those who got into the cryptocurrency culture at large, and those who just trust some specific platform/service to make them rich riding the Bitcoin wave. The latter group certainly tends to have MLM mentality and the services they use usually have all markings of a scam.
- AJ007 9y agoWhat area of the country is this? Google Trends put Hawaii at the top for the US, Guam for global.
- loudandskittish 9y agoSometimes I kick myself for not buying any BTC for the novelty factor...you know, back when the primary use was buying illicit substances online. Then I realize, I would've sold it off when it hit $250 per BTC and I'd probably hate myself more.
- Robelius 9y agoI remember buying a couple dozen BTC for $0.10, and thinking I was amazing when I sold all of the coins for a total of $20. Still don’t regret it though because I know the next few years of my early 20s would have been spent tracking BTC like a bloodhound rather than spending that time on things I enjoy. Then again I’m probably telling myself that so I don’t feel bad for missing out on 100s of thousands of dollars.
- QAPereo 9y agoSo... is there a “Bitcoin” now, that we’ll wish we’d taken seriously in ten years? What do you think it might be?
- deweller 9y agoIts Bitcoin. $9000 may look ridiculously low in 10 years.
- QAPereo 9y agoI can’t see how... the bubble’s skin is already pretty taut IMO
- r3bl 9y agoApproaching the final limit -> so many Bitcoins lost -> so many Bitcoins confiscated -> the amount of Bitcoins goes down -> the demand increases -> price for one Bitcoin goes through the roof. At least that's how I see it. Don't know jack shit about cryptocurrencies, but this seems like basic economy.
- ganeshkrishnan 9y agoBitcoins aren't backed by anything or to anything. Whether it's worth 1 dollar or a million dollar makes no difference, it's our perception that gives it value. Plus they are limited unlike Fiat currency
- jeremyt 9y agoThe backing of fiat is illusory. I always posit this question, to which I have never received a satisfactory answer: What, exactly, would the US do if the world suddenly decided that the dollar was worth nothing? Massive buybacks of dollars by the Fed would be seen as an ineffective and desperate move. Besides that, what other recourse do they have?
- paulcole 9y ago>What, exactly, would the US do if the world suddenly decided that the dollar was worth nothing? Why would the rest of the world decide this? It’d hurt them more than it’d hurt the US or else they’d have done it already.
- jeremyt 9y agoThis is not logical. Just because something hasn't happened doesn't mean it can't happen.
- selectodude 9y agoI think it's about as likely as somebody dropping something and it falling up. Keep testing the existence of gravity, it could change on you.
- jeremyt 9y agoI'm not sure that you realize that the current monetary system is only about half a century old. Fiat currency, backed by nothing except the government, has only existed since the 1970s.
- jpatokal 9y agoGizmodo already updated their title to say "past $12000", but that was a short-lived spike. (For now?)
- Mtinie 9y agoThat must have been a typo. I can’t seem to find any market where a flash spike appeared.
- pedalpete 9y agoYou're either in Australia or Canada, Gizmodo is posting for local pricing
- cstrat 9y agoIt is in AUD$
- mancerayder 9y agoAt least it's not posted in Tether. I should say, I'm almost surprised it's not.
- rjgray 9y agoI don't know where you're based, but for me (NZ), I get redirected to gizmodo.com.au. I see $12k as well, but I'm guessing that's in AUD? Looking at BTC price graphs it seems the most recent peak was at about $9500USD
- habosa 9y agoI've been playing with Bitcoin since 2010, the first price I remember was $0.10 a coin. I even did some CPU mining (!). I have never seriously invested in BTC but I've been paying attention. It's amazing to watch the price go up as utility has gone down. In 2012 or so Bitcoin was legitimately useful. Coinbase was around so it was easy to buy. You could move it for reasonable fees / transaction times and it gave you access to Darknet Markets which offered services you couldn't get anywhere else. We also believed it to be private because law enforcement had not yet developed any block chain analysis software. Bitcoin was the only credible coin, everything else was a joke or lacked critical mass. Now none of that is true. If you're interested in privacy you don't touch BTC with a 10 foot pole. If you want an actually usable currency with speed and low fees you use ETH or any other. And if you're a financial institution you're looking at Ripple. Oh and let's not forget all the BTC forks and exchange hacks. Yet the price just climbs and climbs, and many people are getting quite rich. I can't say I'm not jealous, but I still won't invest because the fundamentals are all wrong. Someone will be left holding the bag.
- Proven 9y agoOther coins are less hacked (or, only BTC is stolen) because it makes most sense to steal it. While it’s true that it’s less private and useful than it was, there are developments that will make it better and some are in testing now (such as LN). It is a bubble, but it’s anyone’s guess when this madness will stop. There’s relatively few BTC out there. Like many others I regret I didn’t hold onto BTC I once had...
- antoniuschan99 9y agoWhat do you think of Ripple? It seems like it has the potential to be the legit crypto because it’s backed by banks.
- deweller 9y agoNot backed by banks is Bitcoin's primary value proposition. Ripple will find a use and may do quite well. But it requires more trust in a few centralized parties. It won't replace Bitcoin's primary use case as the highest security value store and world-wide settlement layer.
- sunseb 9y agoIs Bitcoin a bubble or not? No one knows for sure, but it reminds me a lot of the 2000 dot-com bubble, when Internet companies were overvalued like crazy. We had basically the same selling line: it's a new economy, a new paradigm, an exponential growth, you better join if you do not want to be left out, it will rocket to the moon, and so. I fear it will end up badly for a lot of people in Bitcoin. Make sure you exit before you end up with nothing.
- mrisoli 9y agoYou can look at it the other way, the dot-com bubble happened under huge speculation that we'd "live on the internet" and the huge potential of e-commerce/marketing but the tools available were still not finely-tuned and the internet speeds were also lagging behind. But now that we have widespread adoption of smartphones and high-speed internet(still lagging behind in some countries), plus a plethora of tools to build apps and track, analyze and influence user behavior, tech companies are some of the wealthiest and most influential enterprises on the planet, two of them even survived the 2000 bubble(GOOG and AMZN), IMO, far beyond the imagined potential of dot-com predictions. So I partly agree with you, I think there are some extreme expectations on BTC and a major crash seems possible, but who knows, maybe technology will enable BTC or some other cryptocurrencies to thrive the same way the internet recovered from the dotcom bubble burst.
- charlesdm 9y agoThe entire market cap of crypto is around $250bn at the moment. The .com bubble went up to $6.7 trillion before correcting back down to 1.7tn. In todays dollars that's close to $8tn. One can only hope this will be "the next" .com bubble -- there will be money to be made. Given the amount of liquidity that was pumped into the market by the fed, it will be interesting to see what stops this train. The more and more you look around, money isn't worth anything anymore. Like that recent Leonardo Da Vinci painting that was sold for $450m. Assets and companies selling for a 10-12x multiple, excessive property prices in prime locations, etc. Asset prices have been driven up significantly across the board.
- yyyyip 9y ago
- delsarto 9y agoI love Bitcoin (and the broader ecosystem). The promise of great riches if you can survive long enough in a lawless new world, navigating the schemes, scams and intrigue and the government besides. It must be a glimpse of what got people to pack up and and head west for the gold rush. The mysterious author, watching mtgox grow, collapse and subsequent revelations, "we found Satoshi" debacle, the DAO heist and reaction, altcoins, block size schism, ICO's, segwit activation, segwit2x deactivation and bugs, Teather's "theft", this rally ... Chinese mining pools, Russian hackers, the dark web, struggles for control; it's like living in a Neal Stephenson novel. Worth the price of admission just for the entertainment value.
- dstroot 9y agoThis.
- revmoo 9y agoThis isn't reddit
- prawn 9y agoAnd that's why I've recommended to people that they buy even just a little bit to be part of the craziness. Even just $100 that they can afford to lose. Maybe it's tulips, maybe it's not. But it's incredibly interesting to watch unfold regardless.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- geff82 9y agoYou, man, said it right!! I am just invested with about a thousand Euros in the crypto world, and I mainly did it for one reason: I don‘t want to be last in the game and get some hands on experience. But mainly, I just want to be able to tell my grandchildren one day about that crypto craze that occured in about 2017. Its crazy, irrational, completely new and that is why I love it for that moment in my life.
- asdfasdfas112 9y agoLove the comments in this thread. Do a search for Bitcoin (or FB/Amazon/etc.) over the past 10 years. Same comments calling for "bubble" "fundamentals don't make sense" "crash is coming" "but dotcom 2000...". Most of these commenters have not done any research and just sit on their hands typing based on their "feelings" or regurgitate others that align with their feelings. Take note. Most people are like this. Most people are wrong most of the time.
- tudorw 9y agoMy store of wealth, denominated in GBP, is no more 'real' than bitcoin, however, the issuer is a large entity, with deep and diverse global assets and the military means to protect those assets. The GBP I hold is a promise that the issuer will go to almost any means necessary to maintain the value of my wealth in respect to its fungibility. While there is a raft of risk associated with my wealth, it may diminish in respect of its inter currency value, it may suffer hyperinflation, as a part of my 'deal' with the issuer, they additionally provide a framework for a bank to operate, the bank has insurance, this means that a proportion of my wealth would be preserved even if the institution with which I entrusted my wealth turned out to be a bad actor. Furthermore my currency is protected from entropy, the accounting system used to store the value of my wealth is secure, by design, and by insurance by the issuer. In 'good times', I am rewarded for making my wealth available as capital for other users, or interest as it is known. Bitcoin is exciting, as a follow of everything from e-gold to beenz and an original CPU miner, not to mention possibly the only person to actually profit from the first generation ASIC you have to believe me when I say I am not here to detract from Bitcoin, I'm here to say it's not a currency, it's not an asset, it's really something novel, the value is indeterminable.
- alanfalcon 9y agoSeems to me the market has found a value, and while it changes from day to day and even hour to hour, it’s still pretty determined.
- nwah1 9y agoThe market found a value for beanie babies too. You are mixing up what classical economists called exchange value and utility.
- hndamien 9y agoThe exchange value in this case directly impacts the utility. If you are moving large amounts of wealth and the price is high, then the transfer bandwidth is also high. If the price is low then the transfer bandwidth is low. Ability to transfer wealth geographically with no counter party is the utility.
- wils1245 9y agoI’d be interested to see a timeplot of the timing of ICO’s against the price/trading volume of bitcoin. My feeling is that there’s a lot of wash trading / market manipulation of bitcoin going on by the perpetrators of ICO schemes, to provide themselves with a way to funnel money out of crypto into dollars. The Bitfinex / tether fraud only works of bitcoin keeps going up.
- Kiro 9y agoI don't think you can compare Bitcoin to stocks, housing, tulips or any other commodity and draw bubble conclusions based on that. I think we're dealing with a whole new area of economic psychology that the world simply hasn't experienced this before. Not saying it won't crash though but I think the reasons will be different than traditional bubbles.
- aphextron 9y agoI tend to agree with this assessment of global markets in general. Things have accelerated to a point that no one has any idea what's going to happen anymore. Past experience is not only misleading, but meaningless now.
- wils1245 9y agoA quote from The Four Pillars of Investing: "Of the four key areas of investment knowledge — theory, history, psychology, and investment industry practices — the lack of historical knowledge is the one that causes the most damage. In finance, there is no controversy: the same speculative follies play out with almost clock-like regularity about once a generation." A whole lot of investors have come to believe that history is obsolete, and later regretted it.
- kgwgk 9y ago“The four most expensive words in the English language are 'This time it’s different.'”
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- mancerayder 9y agoI think one aspect of that newness is how much more intensely international and 24/7 the crypto game is. That makes it both more vast and more terrifying. I don't have numbers to back up my claim; I just know that the cryptos have immense capital invested/speculated into it from all corners of the world (but seemingly mostly the U.S. and Asia?), it runs on a 24/7 operation and the exchanges are pretty internationally dispersed. How does this compare to the NYSE, in terms of trading hours (09:30-16:00 ET), listed securities and overall accessibility? How much more capital can be pumped (and/or coins dumped) given time spans, lack of 'circuit breakers', and so forth? There's something about that aspect that I am sure is making this phenomenon potentially wilder than the Dot Com crash of 2001.
- davidw 9y agoSomeone should write a book like, say, "Bitcoin 36,000".
- vinchuco 9y agoI don't care what the price is, take a look at those price swings: https://i.imgur.com/pR15IgV.png https://i.imgur.com/pR15IgV.png Data: https://charts.bitcoin.com/chart/price https://charts.bitcoin.com/chart/price
- hndamien 9y agoPercentages are what matter here.
- milesf 9y agoWhat scares me is not the success or failure of BitCoin. What I find troubling is the spirit of BitCoin is paving the way for the exact opposite result. The idealism is to produce a system for faster, cheaper, and censorship-resistant way to transact. BitCoin is actually becoming unusable for that. It's slower than Etherium, the fees continue to climb when measured against the US Dollar, and the privacy issues are not being addressed. Sadly, no one will pay any attention to this while the price continues to climb. Only when the price crashes will folks come to their senses, just like when MintPal was hacked which destroyed VeriCoin and when The DAO collapsed with people voting to roll back and fork.
- mancerayder 9y agoWhat's the story with Bitfinex (or even Bittrex!) and the Tether situation? It sounds stigmatized and instilling terror as the medium of exchange, but it's all you really have when using a system like that internally (I have to use Tether as an intermediary to swap between coins). Is that just another component in this house of cards? If Bitcoin takes a dump, will people panic-sell other cryptos? If another big crypto explodes, will people panic-sell other cryptos? The problems and risks in this -- what feels to me, like -- a system, seem interconnected by human psychology if not ACTUAL structures like the exchanges.
- joshfraser 9y agoAll currencies are based on commonly shared beliefs. I accept $20 bills because I believe other people will accept $20 bills. The paper itself is worthless. Bitcoin is the same. It's worth $9,000 as long as enough people believe they can find other people who believe it's worth $9,000. Meanwhile, trust in governments and banking systems is crumbling. We've seen the hyper inflation in Venezuela. We've seen Saudi Arabia seize 800 billion dollars in assets. We've seen the banking bailouts in the US. As uncertainty rises, a system based on math begins to look like a far safer place to park your wealth. Belief in Bitcoin may be at an all time high, but it's still the early days. Only 21 million bitcoins will ever be created. Most of them have been mined already & there aren't enough left for every millionaire in the world to own even a single Bitcoin each.
- darawk 9y ago> I accept $20 bills because I believe other people will accept $20 bills. The paper itself is worthless. That is a common misconception. Government currency has intrinsic value because you are required to pay your taxes in it. If you live in the US, whatever currency you conduct your business in, be it Bitcoin or gold bullion, the USG wants to be paid in dollars. That creates an intrinsic demand for dollars. That intrinsic demand is what ensures that everyone accepts it as a common form of payment. Because everyone has this same common requirement to pay taxes in USD. People then choose to conduct all business in it simply because it's convenient to do so. The analog for Bitcoin is a little trickier, but I think an argument you might make is that it costs Bitcoin to move Bitcoin. And therefore there is intrinsic demand for Bitcoin, because the value-transfer capabilities it provides are inherently useful.
- jorblumesea 9y agoThe dollar, like any fiat currency, is also propped up by political and military power, as well as powerful central banks and gold assets. The paper itself is obviously worthless but what it represents is the currency of a unipolar superpower world backed up by $500 billion in military spending. Bitcoin has none of that. There's no bailout. There's no economic experts to come in and revise things. There's no political will to exert. Its decentralization is its greatest strength but also its greatest weakness. This is by design of course. But the argument that it's "just faith" propping up the dollar is fallacious. Apples and oranges.
- jorblumesea 9y agoBitcoin is really starting to resemble a pyramid scheme or penny stocks. No one can really cash out without people cashing in, otherwise the entire pyramid collapses. And the cult-like mentality of many Bitcoin holders does strike me as a multi-level marketing attitude. Just visit any forum or thread about bitcoin and there will always be that one person with some kind of tagline "it's not too late to get in!" which is a classic FOMO sales tactic. You know when the average person is getting into the market, we are in the late stages of the game. When suckers enter, smart money leaves. It's a very interesting technology which will continue to exist but it's really looks like an out of control bubble. In some ways it would be better for it to implode and get the snake oil salesman and sketchy white papers out of the ecosystem. It used to be a really cool proving ground for cutting edge technologies but now it's looking more like rampant greed, excess and arrogance.
- closeparen 9y agoYou have to remember that many of these people are not planning on “cashing out” but on crypto becoming the new cash.
- jorblumesea 9y agoIf that were true, why does everyone talk about it in fiat currency terms? Why would it matter what price BTC is, if the goal is to just use it? Who cares, then? I don't buy that argument. It seems to be mostly fueled by greed.
- nmj 9y agoWhat? It's a buyer seller market. By your terrible logic markets are pyramid schemes. This is upvoted?
- jorblumesea 9y agoThe bitcoin is a financial asset with no ballast that people buy because they believe it will appreciate. To liquidate your position and to make a profit you need constant inflow of new investors to keep the market going as BTC has no true value. There's no backing of any hard assets. The revenue stream is based on new investments rather than the underlying product itself. That's a very common pyramid scheme/multi level marketing scenario. This is very different from company stocks, as the stock unit itself is a guarantor of dividends and a small part ownership of the assets of a company. Its price is representative of the performance of the company, it is not the product itself. That company produces something (in theory), although to cash out you still need to find someone to buy it at a said price.
- nimos 9y agoWell that pays for my Christmas shopping. Made a couple thousand now off ~$10 I spent out of novelty. Hurts a bit seeing what I used to have I really don't see it personally. It seems pretty clear people are buying and holding en mass at this point and it just seems like pure FOMO. There is no underlying asset and I don't think its that useful for replacing cash. Not going to complain though. I'll go on, take my money and run.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- cdiddy2 9y agoI encourage everyone to watch this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHc81OL_hk4&feature=youtu.be&t=1h44m28s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHc81OL_hk4&feature=youtu.be... especially the Q&A after the talk. Its extremely thought provoking