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All You Need to Know About Bitcoin's Rise, from $0.01 to $11,000
- lurcio 9y agoBloomberg? lol Blockchain may be different. Deviousness is not: https://medium.com/@bitfinexed/spoiler-alert-the-institution-buying-tethers-is-bitfinex-themselves-f56af29ce60c https://medium.com/@bitfinexed/spoiler-alert-the-institution...
- jstanley 9y agoWow, another obnoxious self-playing video in the corner. No thanks.
- erikb 9y agoMany people discuss how much one could buy from the bitcoins today that where used for the first pizza purchase. Few people consider though, that today's value of a bitcoin might not exist without that order.
- zitterbewegung 9y agoTruly an example of where exchange creates wealth.
- jstanley 9y agoYep. The most astonishing thing to me about the price of Bitcoin isn't that it went from $1000 to $11000 this year, it's that it ever made it above $0 in the first place!
- StavrosK 9y agoI am really sad that Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency that ever managed to touch "mainstream" (it's on Steam, it has Stripe support, etc) and we fucked it up so hard that you need a $4 fee just to pay for one thing with it. I was really hoping it would catch on as a medium of exchange, because there's value in being able to pay for things quickly, cheaply and without giving people a bunch of info, but nope. Digital tulips.
- baby 9y agoHeard revolut is going to accept it as well.
- endijs 9y agoRevolut will not accept. But you will be able to exchange USD, EUR and other currencies to Bitcoin (and vice versa). But you will not be able to transfer Bitcoin to Revolut or transfer Bitcoin out of Revolut. At least not at the first iteration of crypto currency support.
- tomrod 9y agoWow, that's a huge transaction cost!
- nadam 9y agoOther cryptocurrencies, which are meant for payment (like Dash) will eventually make it into the mainstream. It's a matter of 1 or 2 years in my opinion. Bitcoin is digital gold, that is also a valid use case IMHO, and a good first step for cryptocurrencies. (Real gold has a 7 trillion market cap.) (Warning: this will be downvoted because of mentioning Dash. Edit after multiple downvotes: Naive people think that they will be able to stop the (by far) best payment focused cryptocurrency by silencing others. The growth of Dash shows its dominance is inevitable.)
- StavrosK 9y agoI hope so, I did send ETH yesterday with minimal fees and instant confirmation, but no stores accept ETH as payment.
- dreamdu5t 9y agoBitcoin is what’s wrong with our society: An obsession with money over health, community, housing, food, etc. Bitcoin epitomizes our embrace of the new capitalist dystopia.
- Top19 9y agoI’ve also seen this connected with the rise of individualism that’s been going on since the early 80’s. Allegedly though, according to the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr, societies tend to move in 40 year periods of either community or individualism. Assuming individualism started in 1980, this would have it end in 2020. These two books sum it up well: The Cycles of American History https://www.amazon.com/dp/0395957931/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_hYSiAbHA3RN8Q https://www.amazon.com/dp/0395957931/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_hYSi... The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy https://www.amazon.com/dp/0393313719/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_CXSiAbCKES8Z9 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0393313719/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_CXSi...
- sdwisely 9y agodo you mean society is what's wrong with Bitcoin?
- eqmvii 9y agoSomething I rarely see discussed is the gender breakdown of bitcoin ownership. I'd be surprised if it wasn't something like 90%+ men mining, trading, and owning bitcoin. If bitcoin really takes over the world, it's going to look like a bunch of dudes printed themselves a fortune and then convinced the rest of the world to buy it from them.
- firstplacelast 9y agoIf you're that concerned you should vote to increase taxe the wealthy. Hell, vote to tax wealth itself. Then you won't need to worry about things like this as much.
- MadSudaca 9y ago> it's going to look like a bunch of dudes printed themselves a fortune and then convinced the rest of the world to buy it from them. Just like fiat money.
- paulgb 9y agoYou can dislike how much fiat the government prints (I do too!), but at least when the government prints money the profit goes towards things that benefit the public (bridges, defense, schools, etc.), some corruption notwithstanding.
- MadSudaca 9y agoI don’t necessarily dislike fiat, I’m just saying that probably the same gender demographics applied to the invention and dissemination of paper money. One example that comes to mind is the Mississippi Bubble. When I read about it most people involved at the beginning were men, but eventually everyone wanted a piece of the action.
- influx 9y agoWhat do you see as the barriers for women to participate in bitcoin?
- NiklasMort 9y ago"Bitcoin’s current estimated annual electricity consumption stands at 29.05 Terawatt hours" I just leave that here...
- bitxbitxbitcoin 9y agoDo you know what the estimated annual electricity consumption of VISA as a corporation is? What about the Treasury portion of the US government, let alone all the other parts. I'll just leave that there :).
- emodendroket 9y agoIs the number of transactions anywhere near comparable?
- lawn 9y agoYou could also compare it to how much Google consume. And you should realize the mining electricity usage is in no way related to scaling Bitcoin.
- NiklasMort 9y ago"Google’s many data centers around the world burn through 260 million watts" way less, besides Google's DC are rather modern and often are rather environmental friendly. Bitcoin on the other hand is mostly mined in China where the energy comes largely from fossil fuels
- NiklasMort 9y agoDo you have them? If I had to bet I'd say it is way less. If you don't then your argument is a bit of pointless, no offense.
- notahacker 9y agoIt's reported VISA's datacenter uses the same amount of energy as around 50,000 US households. Bitcoin energy use is about 2.9m US households. So say a fiftieth, for around 450x the daily transactions, and it could handle a lot more if demand existed without a commensurate increase in power consumption.
- backtoyoujim 9y ago> , a Nobel laureate in economics, said recently that bitcoin "ought to be outlawed” because it’s designed to evade regulation and "doesn’t serve any socially useful function." A world where if something is not required it is forbidden is not a world that I want any part of Nobel winner or otherwise.
- bitxbitxbitcoin 9y agoThe Nobel prize in Economics isn't a real Alfred Nobel prize as set aside in his 1985 will, either... So you're not the only one :).
- tonyedgecombe 9y agoEconomics isn't a real science either ...
- emodendroket 9y agoFor anyone who cares to follow up here's a good article about it: https://www.alternet.org/economy/there-no-nobel-prize-economics https://www.alternet.org/economy/there-no-nobel-prize-econom...
- emodendroket 9y agoIt seems to me like you're only taking into account half of the argument (the other half being that it's designed to evade regulation).
- wu-ikkyu 9y agoRegulation itself is not always "socially useful" for most people
- emodendroket 9y agoIf there is some sort of regulation that is harmful (do you have something specific in mind or is this just a generality?), it seems like the thing to do would be to reconsider that regulation, and not to simply allow a handful of savvy investors to skirt the regulation while the average person is still subject to it.
- yolobey 9y agoI got an international payment recently via bitcoin and the fee was under £2 on the sender side. If it had gone through my bank It would've costed me £7 to receive and way more on the other end to send. So I do get the criticism about high fees when paying for a coffee, but maybe that's not the ideal use case for bitcoin. It could've been cheaper with another cryptocurrency but it's a tolerable enough percentage at the moment compared to another widely used solution for international transfers.
- almost_usual 9y agoInteresting, are individuals factoring in the possible existence of quantum computers in the future? If Bitcoin does become a trillion dollar space I’d feel uncomfortable knowing there are technical limitations already in place. Also, what does the end of Bitcoin generation look like? If Bitcoin is truly deflationary why would anyone trade it? The interesting thing about inflation is it requires investment to ensure your money doesn’t lose value over time. Would Bitcoin be incentivizing a market where growth is extremely limited due to greed? Not taking any sides, trying to understand the long term reprucussions of a substantial Bitcoin market.
- jimmies 9y agoI haven't been understanding bitcoin for the longest time: It has been more than five years since I first heard about it. I tried to look it up, I can never quite get the overall picture, why it works the way it is. I finally understood the bitcoin mechanism and I can explain the original paper well just two days ago. I feel dumb reading this paper. Intellectually, I think it's a hallmark of many great inventions in the 20th and 21st century: public-key cryptography (to verify transactions), micro economics - game theory (to incentive people to mine), hashing (bounty), macro economics (to combat inflation), distributed computing synchronization (to trust the system while not trusting any single computer), statistics (to combat fake chains). Only when one has all the pieces of the puzzle together then the whole thing is possible to conceive. But I feel a sense of achievement when I finally figured the whole thing by myself. If you don't understand bitcoin, I think you should understand bitcoin as a hacker, even you don't need to use it or intend to store money in it. I only own a small fraction of a coin, I'm not a risk taker. I'm not going to be rich from bitcoins, I have no reason to shill it with memes. It's unlike anything you have encountered before, notably that the only reason why bitcoin is worth money, is because we are better off with it. I do believe the world is a better place when everyone agrees that bitcoin has values and can be traded, because that means many people can buy their own "insurance" should wars happen, which they do. Your money might turn into paper, you might get killed if you smuggle cows, gold, and diamond when you're running for life, but no one can know if you have bitcoins.
- DenisM 9y agoWhy wouldn’t those same people running for their lives store their money in a numbered bank account? If they need to hide from their own government they could use banks of one of the major players: US, EU, China, Russia. Whomever is the least friendly with your oppressor.
- jimmies 9y agoStore how? I was from a country that the money inflated 25% over a year, and the government made it extremely hard to send the money abroad. In the US, it's not possible to open a bank account without a SSN. How do you get an SSN if you don't work in the US?
- Kiro 9y agoWhy was this thread nuked from the front page? It was like #2 when I checked and now a few minutes later it's gone.