7 ms·

Bitcoin, I've Been Here Before

81 points by krambs 9y ago

0x445442 9y ago
Or... AMZN, I've Been Here Before. 5.97 in August 2001
- justboxing 9y ago
  > Or... AMZN, I've Been Here Before Me too. Ahh the good old days. We'd be coding and day trading back and forth all day. Take turns watching for the Boss to come towards our area, so we could all hide the trading window and get back to coding. My co-worker dev lost 3K on PETS.COM's stock in 1 day. I'd gotten in on 100 shares of AMZN Apr 2000 at $57-ish, ate a loss of about 30$ / share in Oct 2000, sold at $28-ish. All I have left now is war stories ...ending very badly lol. The rush of trading on volatility makes it 'not a complete loss' tho.
- pyrrhotech 9y ago
  yea and AMZN was 110 in December 1999, an equivalent drop for BTC would be to roughly $1000. I've been a crypto bull for a long time, but I sold everything 2 weeks ago. I sold a little early, but better to add that addition to my house than lose 95%
- justherefortart 9y ago
  I told a few wealthy people I know to put 10% of their investments on Apple in 2003. When I talk to them now, I said why'd you ask for a stock tip if you weren't willing to follow through? Sadly, I put my money into my own startup. Got about 15-20x return on my investment. You live and learn :-)
stale2002 9y ago
50$ in fees per transaction, I never thought I'd see this day. For the last 3 years, there has been a bitcoin civil war about how to scale bitcoin, as people have warned that the problems we are seeing now would happen. And unfortunately for bitcoin, the side that wanted high transaction fees, and wanted to prevent all scaling won the war. And now we are seeing those problems come home to roost, as segwit (which was marketed as an immediate fix) adoption has been minimal, and the mythical lightning network and layer 2 or 3 solutions that the core development team promises will that will solve everything is perpetually 2 years away from completion. Things are going exactly as people had predicted. Those of us who are fed up with these problems have moved on to other coins, such as Ethereum and Bitcoin Cash.
- HenryBemis 9y ago
  I don't know munch about investing (I do), but 50$ on a 50k transaction that makes a 5k profit, is peanuts and never stopped anyone from investing. Investing is not a sport/hobby for teenagers that rely on the daily allowance.
  - smokeyj 9y ago
    But you can also pay $50 on a $5 transaction. LN existing on testnet has no bearing on the real world. Who wants to tie up $50 to open a channel and $50 to close it? Small blockers are kidding themselves.
    - HenryBemis 9y ago
      But why would someone pay $50 for a $5 transaction? A criminal perhaps to stay under the radar. A sensible person would go for the cash option and pay $5 for $5. If on the other hand someone was to launder money ;) then still the fee is tooo large to launder petty cash (pay 55 dirty to get 5 clean). An efficient money laundering rate is anything north of 50% (100 dirty --> 50-70 clean).
      - stale2002 9y ago
        Money laundering is not the glorious vision that Satoshi sold to me or the world. I really don't care about that use case. If THAT is all that bitcoin is good for, then I hope it dies. I got into bitcoin because I believed in a peer to peer electronic cash system.
      - Fnoord 9y ago
        > An efficient money laundering rate is anything north of 50% (100 dirty --> 50-70 clean). That's supported by what I read in "Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground" by Kevin Poulsen. Book's about Max Butler alias Iceman who ended up as in the higher echelon as vital gear of a carding gang. They'd have people who'd shop and resell the items instantly, as if new. The shoppers also need to get paid, obviously. Blockchain's entirely public, so Bitcoin is terrible for money laundering. Not any better than USD. Monero is apparently anonymous though. Though I take the term anonymous with a huge grain of salt since its always a relative term, not an absolute binary flag.
HenryBemis 9y ago
Bitcoin as an investment option is pure gamble, unless someone has a better idea e.g. has put its value side-by-side to Gold, Silver, Oil, Adamantium ;) and has noticed a pattern. Perhaps there is pattern, and it is related to the "petyas" of this world (new malware that is massively cashin in/out).
jerkstate 9y ago
To all of those wondering if this article compares Bitcoin to the .com bubble or Tulip bulbs, it's the .com bubble this time. Saved you a click.
- krambs 9y ago
  Username checks out.
bbrx 9y ago
Pardon my very limited knowledge about those things, but one thing I wonder and find fascinating about bitcoin is this : I understand that a very limited number of people, probably the initial developers, hold a very hight percentage of available bitcoin. (disregard the rest in case i'm even completely mistaken in that assumption...) Those people have an asset with an incredibly high face value. Of course, the market is probably far too shallow for them to cash out even a small part of this face value. The question is this : for those people, assuming or not that they can coordinate, what is the optimal strategy? I'm thinking something like draw regularly, in order to build a war chest to "defend" the cryptocurrency against too violent crashes, such sustaining the confidence of the public. In a way controlling and fine tuning the influx of external money coming in from fools wanting in on the pyramid effect. Is it realistic to think such strategy could be feasible, and if so, for how much time those people could/would want to sustain it?
- michaelchisari 9y ago
  On the flip side of that, how do you build an economy around a currency that front loads such massive wealth inequality out of the gate?
  - bbrx 9y ago
    The moral angle is indeed the mindblowing part, but I wanted to sollicit the acute minds of hackernews to shine a light on the practical aspect of it.
  - cat199 9y ago
    we have an answer for that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system
- 0wing 9y ago
  Because there's no inherent value and it's just traders making up theories, I would conclude there's this set of game theory: 1. Buy bitcoins or release media PR to pump price 2. Buy future shorts 3. Sell a large enough order to trigger margin calls and stop losses 4. Profit twice from your BTC sale, and short sale 5. If you believe the price will return, buy back in cheaper than you sold due to other panic sellers
olalonde 9y ago
If this article interested you, you might like https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoinobituaries/ https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoinobituaries/. And here's more or less the same article from 2013 when price was $84: https://whistlinginthewind.org/2013/04/12/the-bitcoin-bubble-has-burst/ https://whistlinginthewind.org/2013/04/12/the-bitcoin-bubble... "So what now for bitcoin? It will crash and disappear like Pets.com, Leheman Brothers and Anglo Irish Bank, existing only in the memories of economists." "There have been some slight recoveries which have given hope to bitcoinites. They cling to the hope that this is only a correction and that bitcoin will bounce back stronger than ever. They fail to realise that all crashes include a slight recovery followed by another crash." I'm not saying the author is necessarily wrong, just highlighting the fact that no one knows what the hell they're talking about or what's going to happen.
- saalweachter 9y ago
  I will say, as a Bitcoin "hater", Bitcoin is far more resilient than many things it might be compared to. With Pets.com or Leheman Brothers, there was a corporate structure that could stop existing. It could go bankrupt, the C-executives could be arrested, something could happen beyond which it'd be fair to say it was over. With Bitcoin, you could have all of the exchanges go defunct, you could have 99% of the miners close up shop, and as long as a few people kept the blockchain going, a few years later it could be back, the same as before.
  - nkrisc 9y ago
    Or just continue on being useful to a small fraction of people. It doesn't have to be this massive market.
    - therein 9y ago
      In case of a massive and rapid reduction in the number of miners and therefore the network hashrate, it would take Bitcoin network difficulty too long to adjust to be useful in short term.
  - xapata 9y ago
ripberge 9y ago
Still long on bitcoin, but also wouldn't be surprised if it lost 70% of its value in short term. He does bring up some great points regarding transaction throughput and the team productivity. It seems like lightning network is the tool to get a lot of cheap, fast transactions done via bitcoin and turn it into a really useful viable currency. However, that has taken a long time just to get to test mode. Much of the fate of bitcoin is tied to that github repository and pull requests. There has never been another open source software project with this much money riding on it. Can this team continue to deliver value? There are other concerns like deflationary spirals, volatility, etc., but my bet on bitcoin is largely a bet on the dev team and whether or not useful pull requests get created & merged and what that velocity is.
feelin_googley 9y ago
As I recall, back in the day, SoundForge was the lightest and fastest audio editor for Windows. (On the Mac there were of course many choices for simple editing, going all the way back to SoundEdit16.) It was a little sad to SoundForge sold to Sony. The author should be proud of that software. There was nothing else comparable for Windows back then, to my knowledge. Interesting that he became involved with something as different as Bitcoin.
- frik 9y ago
  SoundForge and Vegas used to be great software tools in the 1990s and early 2000s. Unfortunately you had to sell them. Thanks anyway for your story. Recently Sony sold them to Magix from Germany. Unfortunately the software is lagging behind, basically stayed for decades in low maintenance mode, and Magix software is known to be a cobbled together buggy mess. Their other own video software Video Deluxe is still 32bit buggy unstable piece that relies on decade old dlls and can't be installed on up to date Windows 7/8/10 without deactivating security functions, changing registry settings by hand and renaming the Windows cert folder. Nowadays the open source Audacity is a great alternative to SoundForge, and Premiere/etc are better alternatives to Vegas/VideoDeluxe.
nadam 9y ago
These "bitcoin = tulip maina = .com bubble" articles get a bit boring after a while especially if one is relatively deeply involved with the space. This has been discussed at very great depths thousands of times already. What shows how superficial these articles are is that almost all of these articles (and most of the mainstream media articles) single out BTC, (which is less than 50% of total crypto market capitalization) without going into specifics of the given coin (like discussion of cons and pros of on-chain scalability solution vs. second layer scalability solutions, POW, POS, small/big block sizes etc...) I think it would be a bit more interesting to speak about the price of a continously rebalanced, market-cap weighted index of the top 10 coins or something for mainstream purposes. This would prevent these articles focusing too much on the current state of BTC (which they cannot really focus on anyway without going much deeper), zoom out a bit more, and put the focus more on the possibilities in the whole evolving cryptocurrency space, which would be more interesting for a mainstream audience (they just don't know, because everybody tells them bitcoin, bitcoin, bitcoin).
- ardit33 9y ago
  Nobody is using bitcoin for any daily transactions.... at this point is just bits... so, it fails as a cash. The the second argument is made, it is a "storage" medium, like gold/silver, etc... At least you could argue that gold/platinium/silver have some intrinsic industrial value, but bitcoin?
  - nadam 9y ago
    The vision of the BTC community is that on-chain scalability for payment has no chance anyway (1MByte is capable of 5 orders of magniutde less tx/sec than VISA), so using second layer methods (like lighting network) to do payment is absolutely inevitable anyway. So they keep blocksize small enough that a regular guy with a regular PC can realistically sync-up the network and become a full node, because they think this is needed to be truly decentralized and secure. This possible lighting network future, and also that BTC is the most battle tested, and most forked coin, and has by far the biggest network effect are all included in its price. My portfolio contains other coins from the top ten so I hedge it with other solutions for scaling, but BTC's share in my portfolio is close to its share in the crypto market cap (a bit less, admittedly).
moneytide1 9y ago
Bitcoin will be more relevant soon because there is exponentially more gold/silver/platinum/uranium in the solar system than on Sol-3. It would be silly to ship in paper every 2 years so people could trade "cash" while working at the methane harvesters and excavators. Just keep that price constant and we can finally move forward.
- pbhjpbhj 9y ago
  I haven't carried paper currency as a matter of course for something like 12 years. Most transaction since the Summer in our small UK business have been "contactless" (debit/credit card), though we still took 2 cheques IIRC. Bitcoin isn't the only alternative to cash.
  - moneytide1 9y ago
    Then the currency will be debit/credit with your bank which has Assets on Sol-3 and the consistent activity there guarantees a steady value on the value of USD, GBP, EUR, etc. If things do come to pass and a significant carbon mass is shifted off Sol-3 (human population), then currencies will fluctuate since that is what drives steady value. This value will fluctuate as bitcoin is now doing "if" the abundance of rare-earths is transmitted back to the Origin planet. I'll say it again: "if".
- 659087 9y ago
  "Soon" is a pretty hilarious term to use here, assuming you're talking about mass scale resource mining in space. We must have very different definitions of that term.
  - moneytide1 9y ago
    Soon is relative. Most people have their bitcoin charts set on 1h. LOL
- cat199 9y ago
  Totally. My perceptics rundown indicates that the real thetans are moving things forward to clear the planet with heavy upstat bitcoin momentum. Mining coin helps me to audit my preclears and be a more on-source being. Either that or I've been reading too much sci fi. Not sure which. Xenu knows!! :D :D
pimmen 9y ago
My main problem with Bitcoin is that it’s a deflationary currency, that’s really why I hope it doesn’t have a future. I have paid this months bills and rent, I have budgeted some money for groceries and fun, I have put 10% of my pay check in my pension fund. Something is very wrong if you feel conflicted when you’ve invested money or spent money to get by because you missed out on your money being worth more.
EastLondonCoder 9y ago
I think Satoshi marketed bitcoin as a currency, but the intention was something that more resembles gold than currency. Bitcoin as a currency does not make sense from a macroeconomic point of view. Whats the incentive of spending something of a fixed resource? Maybe I'm old fashioned but I prefer monetary policy to be decided by a small cabal of professionals.
- apropsapros 9y ago
  "resource" ? proof that it is a resource? If it cannot be used in practical context as a currency then what is this resource?
- jpadkins 9y ago
  It's not the small cabal of professionals that irks me. It's the method of increasing the money supply to generate inflation that bothers me. Central bank fiat systems use credit to increase money supply, so banks and people who consume large amounts credit (large capital projects) get the hot money first. Inflation does not apply evenly to everyone in the economy at once. As new money works its way into the economy, price levels rise. It's a rigged system for those close to the central bank.
  - EastLondonCoder 9y ago
    So currently most money gets created when a back offers a loan, how and much is decided by the central bank. The thinking behind the current system is that easier access to credit will increase productive investments and grow the economy, hopefully to offset the inflation incurred by the increase in the money supply. I agree its a quite blunt instrument, things like mortgages for houses doesn't really tend to grow the economy. But its a hard problem, personally I would like to see some tinkering with helicopter drops
CryoLogic 9y ago
Bought at $230, sold at $19450. That's enough roller coaster for me. I'm out for good. Here are my issues with Bitcoin: 1. Transaction times are insane, 30-45 minutes at peak hours. Bitcoin blockchain can only handle ~10TPS. 2. Fees, upwards of $30 / transaction a few weeks ago. This makes it not practical for any real purchasing or as a currency. Both of those issues are solved by IOTA and the tangle, so that's where my money is going. I want to invest in a currency that has real world usability. Bitcoin doesn't have that at current scale.
- etr-strike 9y ago
  Way to pimp your altcoin at the end there. IOTA isn’t even in the same league as bitcoin. It’s not decentralized and it’s not trustless. Just use SQL at that point...
  - CryoLogic 9y ago
    Those points are not accurate. IOTA uses the coordinator as a security measure right now (against 34% attacks) and will be removed once the coin is distributed enough to diminish probability of attacks. So saying it is not decentralized isn't honest. Without the coordinator it is decentralized. Point two is also refuted once the coordinator is gone.
    - goldpineapple 9y ago
      Opinions on Streamr v Iota?
    - etr-strike 9y ago
      I see you took the long way around to agreeing with me at the end there. Have fun with your coordinator. Cheers!
moab9 9y ago
Blasphemy!!! <jk>
goldpineapple 9y ago
Opinions on streamer bs iota?
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

81 points by krambs 9y ago

0x445442 9y ago

Or... AMZN, I've Been Here Before. 5.97 in August 2001

justboxing 9y ago
> Or... AMZN, I've Been Here Before Me too. Ahh the good old days. We'd be coding and day trading back and forth all day. Take turns watching for the Boss to come towards our area, so we could all hide the trading window and get back to coding. My co-worker dev lost 3K on PETS.COM's stock in 1 day. I'd gotten in on 100 shares of AMZN Apr 2000 at $57-ish, ate a loss of about 30$ / share in Oct 2000, sold at $28-ish. All I have left now is war stories ...ending very badly lol. The rush of trading on volatility makes it 'not a complete loss' tho.
pyrrhotech 9y ago
yea and AMZN was 110 in December 1999, an equivalent drop for BTC would be to roughly $1000. I've been a crypto bull for a long time, but I sold everything 2 weeks ago. I sold a little early, but better to add that addition to my house than lose 95%
justherefortart 9y ago
I told a few wealthy people I know to put 10% of their investments on Apple in 2003. When I talk to them now, I said why'd you ask for a stock tip if you weren't willing to follow through? Sadly, I put my money into my own startup. Got about 15-20x return on my investment. You live and learn :-)

stale2002 9y ago

50$ in fees per transaction, I never thought I'd see this day. For the last 3 years, there has been a bitcoin civil war about how to scale bitcoin, as people have warned that the problems we are seeing now would happen. And unfortunately for bitcoin, the side that wanted high transaction fees, and wanted to prevent all scaling won the war. And now we are seeing those problems come home to roost, as segwit (which was marketed as an immediate fix) adoption has been minimal, and the mythical lightning network and layer 2 or 3 solutions that the core development team promises will that will solve everything is perpetually 2 years away from completion. Things are going exactly as people had predicted. Those of us who are fed up with these problems have moved on to other coins, such as Ethereum and Bitcoin Cash.

HenryBemis 9y ago
I don't know munch about investing (I do), but 50$ on a 50k transaction that makes a 5k profit, is peanuts and never stopped anyone from investing. Investing is not a sport/hobby for teenagers that rely on the daily allowance.
- smokeyj 9y ago
  But you can also pay $50 on a $5 transaction. LN existing on testnet has no bearing on the real world. Who wants to tie up $50 to open a channel and $50 to close it? Small blockers are kidding themselves.
  - HenryBemis 9y ago
    But why would someone pay $50 for a $5 transaction? A criminal perhaps to stay under the radar. A sensible person would go for the cash option and pay $5 for $5. If on the other hand someone was to launder money ;) then still the fee is tooo large to launder petty cash (pay 55 dirty to get 5 clean). An efficient money laundering rate is anything north of 50% (100 dirty --> 50-70 clean).
    - stale2002 9y ago
      Money laundering is not the glorious vision that Satoshi sold to me or the world. I really don't care about that use case. If THAT is all that bitcoin is good for, then I hope it dies. I got into bitcoin because I believed in a peer to peer electronic cash system.
    - Fnoord 9y ago
      > An efficient money laundering rate is anything north of 50% (100 dirty --> 50-70 clean). That's supported by what I read in "Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground" by Kevin Poulsen. Book's about Max Butler alias Iceman who ended up as in the higher echelon as vital gear of a carding gang. They'd have people who'd shop and resell the items instantly, as if new. The shoppers also need to get paid, obviously. Blockchain's entirely public, so Bitcoin is terrible for money laundering. Not any better than USD. Monero is apparently anonymous though. Though I take the term anonymous with a huge grain of salt since its always a relative term, not an absolute binary flag.

HenryBemis 9y ago

Bitcoin as an investment option is pure gamble, unless someone has a better idea e.g. has put its value side-by-side to Gold, Silver, Oil, Adamantium ;) and has noticed a pattern. Perhaps there is pattern, and it is related to the "petyas" of this world (new malware that is massively cashin in/out).

jerkstate 9y ago

To all of those wondering if this article compares Bitcoin to the .com bubble or Tulip bulbs, it's the .com bubble this time. Saved you a click.

krambs 9y ago
Username checks out.

bbrx 9y ago

Pardon my very limited knowledge about those things, but one thing I wonder and find fascinating about bitcoin is this : I understand that a very limited number of people, probably the initial developers, hold a very hight percentage of available bitcoin. (disregard the rest in case i'm even completely mistaken in that assumption...) Those people have an asset with an incredibly high face value. Of course, the market is probably far too shallow for them to cash out even a small part of this face value. The question is this : for those people, assuming or not that they can coordinate, what is the optimal strategy? I'm thinking something like draw regularly, in order to build a war chest to "defend" the cryptocurrency against too violent crashes, such sustaining the confidence of the public. In a way controlling and fine tuning the influx of external money coming in from fools wanting in on the pyramid effect. Is it realistic to think such strategy could be feasible, and if so, for how much time those people could/would want to sustain it?

michaelchisari 9y ago
On the flip side of that, how do you build an economy around a currency that front loads such massive wealth inequality out of the gate?
- bbrx 9y ago
  The moral angle is indeed the mindblowing part, but I wanted to sollicit the acute minds of hackernews to shine a light on the practical aspect of it.
- cat199 9y ago
  we have an answer for that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system
0wing 9y ago
Because there's no inherent value and it's just traders making up theories, I would conclude there's this set of game theory: 1. Buy bitcoins or release media PR to pump price 2. Buy future shorts 3. Sell a large enough order to trigger margin calls and stop losses 4. Profit twice from your BTC sale, and short sale 5. If you believe the price will return, buy back in cheaper than you sold due to other panic sellers

olalonde 9y ago

If this article interested you, you might like https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoinobituaries/ https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoinobituaries/. And here's more or less the same article from 2013 when price was $84: https://whistlinginthewind.org/2013/04/12/the-bitcoin-bubble-has-burst/ https://whistlinginthewind.org/2013/04/12/the-bitcoin-bubble... "So what now for bitcoin? It will crash and disappear like Pets.com, Leheman Brothers and Anglo Irish Bank, existing only in the memories of economists." "There have been some slight recoveries which have given hope to bitcoinites. They cling to the hope that this is only a correction and that bitcoin will bounce back stronger than ever. They fail to realise that all crashes include a slight recovery followed by another crash." I'm not saying the author is necessarily wrong, just highlighting the fact that no one knows what the hell they're talking about or what's going to happen.

saalweachter 9y ago
I will say, as a Bitcoin "hater", Bitcoin is far more resilient than many things it might be compared to. With Pets.com or Leheman Brothers, there was a corporate structure that could stop existing. It could go bankrupt, the C-executives could be arrested, something could happen beyond which it'd be fair to say it was over. With Bitcoin, you could have all of the exchanges go defunct, you could have 99% of the miners close up shop, and as long as a few people kept the blockchain going, a few years later it could be back, the same as before.
- nkrisc 9y ago
  Or just continue on being useful to a small fraction of people. It doesn't have to be this massive market.
  - therein 9y ago
    In case of a massive and rapid reduction in the number of miners and therefore the network hashrate, it would take Bitcoin network difficulty too long to adjust to be useful in short term.
- xapata 9y ago

ripberge 9y ago

Still long on bitcoin, but also wouldn't be surprised if it lost 70% of its value in short term. He does bring up some great points regarding transaction throughput and the team productivity. It seems like lightning network is the tool to get a lot of cheap, fast transactions done via bitcoin and turn it into a really useful viable currency. However, that has taken a long time just to get to test mode. Much of the fate of bitcoin is tied to that github repository and pull requests. There has never been another open source software project with this much money riding on it. Can this team continue to deliver value? There are other concerns like deflationary spirals, volatility, etc., but my bet on bitcoin is largely a bet on the dev team and whether or not useful pull requests get created & merged and what that velocity is.

feelin_googley 9y ago

As I recall, back in the day, SoundForge was the lightest and fastest audio editor for Windows. (On the Mac there were of course many choices for simple editing, going all the way back to SoundEdit16.) It was a little sad to SoundForge sold to Sony. The author should be proud of that software. There was nothing else comparable for Windows back then, to my knowledge. Interesting that he became involved with something as different as Bitcoin.

frik 9y ago
SoundForge and Vegas used to be great software tools in the 1990s and early 2000s. Unfortunately you had to sell them. Thanks anyway for your story. Recently Sony sold them to Magix from Germany. Unfortunately the software is lagging behind, basically stayed for decades in low maintenance mode, and Magix software is known to be a cobbled together buggy mess. Their other own video software Video Deluxe is still 32bit buggy unstable piece that relies on decade old dlls and can't be installed on up to date Windows 7/8/10 without deactivating security functions, changing registry settings by hand and renaming the Windows cert folder. Nowadays the open source Audacity is a great alternative to SoundForge, and Premiere/etc are better alternatives to Vegas/VideoDeluxe.

nadam 9y ago

These "bitcoin = tulip maina = .com bubble" articles get a bit boring after a while especially if one is relatively deeply involved with the space. This has been discussed at very great depths thousands of times already. What shows how superficial these articles are is that almost all of these articles (and most of the mainstream media articles) single out BTC, (which is less than 50% of total crypto market capitalization) without going into specifics of the given coin (like discussion of cons and pros of on-chain scalability solution vs. second layer scalability solutions, POW, POS, small/big block sizes etc...) I think it would be a bit more interesting to speak about the price of a continously rebalanced, market-cap weighted index of the top 10 coins or something for mainstream purposes. This would prevent these articles focusing too much on the current state of BTC (which they cannot really focus on anyway without going much deeper), zoom out a bit more, and put the focus more on the possibilities in the whole evolving cryptocurrency space, which would be more interesting for a mainstream audience (they just don't know, because everybody tells them bitcoin, bitcoin, bitcoin).

ardit33 9y ago
Nobody is using bitcoin for any daily transactions.... at this point is just bits... so, it fails as a cash. The the second argument is made, it is a "storage" medium, like gold/silver, etc... At least you could argue that gold/platinium/silver have some intrinsic industrial value, but bitcoin?
- nadam 9y ago
  The vision of the BTC community is that on-chain scalability for payment has no chance anyway (1MByte is capable of 5 orders of magniutde less tx/sec than VISA), so using second layer methods (like lighting network) to do payment is absolutely inevitable anyway. So they keep blocksize small enough that a regular guy with a regular PC can realistically sync-up the network and become a full node, because they think this is needed to be truly decentralized and secure. This possible lighting network future, and also that BTC is the most battle tested, and most forked coin, and has by far the biggest network effect are all included in its price. My portfolio contains other coins from the top ten so I hedge it with other solutions for scaling, but BTC's share in my portfolio is close to its share in the crypto market cap (a bit less, admittedly).

moneytide1 9y ago

Bitcoin will be more relevant soon because there is exponentially more gold/silver/platinum/uranium in the solar system than on Sol-3. It would be silly to ship in paper every 2 years so people could trade "cash" while working at the methane harvesters and excavators. Just keep that price constant and we can finally move forward.

pbhjpbhj 9y ago
I haven't carried paper currency as a matter of course for something like 12 years. Most transaction since the Summer in our small UK business have been "contactless" (debit/credit card), though we still took 2 cheques IIRC. Bitcoin isn't the only alternative to cash.
- moneytide1 9y ago
  Then the currency will be debit/credit with your bank which has Assets on Sol-3 and the consistent activity there guarantees a steady value on the value of USD, GBP, EUR, etc. If things do come to pass and a significant carbon mass is shifted off Sol-3 (human population), then currencies will fluctuate since that is what drives steady value. This value will fluctuate as bitcoin is now doing "if" the abundance of rare-earths is transmitted back to the Origin planet. I'll say it again: "if".
659087 9y ago
"Soon" is a pretty hilarious term to use here, assuming you're talking about mass scale resource mining in space. We must have very different definitions of that term.
- moneytide1 9y ago
  Soon is relative. Most people have their bitcoin charts set on 1h. LOL
cat199 9y ago
Totally. My perceptics rundown indicates that the real thetans are moving things forward to clear the planet with heavy upstat bitcoin momentum. Mining coin helps me to audit my preclears and be a more on-source being. Either that or I've been reading too much sci fi. Not sure which. Xenu knows!! :D :D

pimmen 9y ago

My main problem with Bitcoin is that it’s a deflationary currency, that’s really why I hope it doesn’t have a future. I have paid this months bills and rent, I have budgeted some money for groceries and fun, I have put 10% of my pay check in my pension fund. Something is very wrong if you feel conflicted when you’ve invested money or spent money to get by because you missed out on your money being worth more.

EastLondonCoder 9y ago

I think Satoshi marketed bitcoin as a currency, but the intention was something that more resembles gold than currency. Bitcoin as a currency does not make sense from a macroeconomic point of view. Whats the incentive of spending something of a fixed resource? Maybe I'm old fashioned but I prefer monetary policy to be decided by a small cabal of professionals.

apropsapros 9y ago
"resource" ? proof that it is a resource? If it cannot be used in practical context as a currency then what is this resource?
jpadkins 9y ago
It's not the small cabal of professionals that irks me. It's the method of increasing the money supply to generate inflation that bothers me. Central bank fiat systems use credit to increase money supply, so banks and people who consume large amounts credit (large capital projects) get the hot money first. Inflation does not apply evenly to everyone in the economy at once. As new money works its way into the economy, price levels rise. It's a rigged system for those close to the central bank.
- EastLondonCoder 9y ago
  So currently most money gets created when a back offers a loan, how and much is decided by the central bank. The thinking behind the current system is that easier access to credit will increase productive investments and grow the economy, hopefully to offset the inflation incurred by the increase in the money supply. I agree its a quite blunt instrument, things like mortgages for houses doesn't really tend to grow the economy. But its a hard problem, personally I would like to see some tinkering with helicopter drops

CryoLogic 9y ago

Bought at $230, sold at $19450. That's enough roller coaster for me. I'm out for good. Here are my issues with Bitcoin: 1. Transaction times are insane, 30-45 minutes at peak hours. Bitcoin blockchain can only handle ~10TPS. 2. Fees, upwards of $30 / transaction a few weeks ago. This makes it not practical for any real purchasing or as a currency. Both of those issues are solved by IOTA and the tangle, so that's where my money is going. I want to invest in a currency that has real world usability. Bitcoin doesn't have that at current scale.

etr-strike 9y ago
Way to pimp your altcoin at the end there. IOTA isn’t even in the same league as bitcoin. It’s not decentralized and it’s not trustless. Just use SQL at that point...
- CryoLogic 9y ago
  Those points are not accurate. IOTA uses the coordinator as a security measure right now (against 34% attacks) and will be removed once the coin is distributed enough to diminish probability of attacks. So saying it is not decentralized isn't honest. Without the coordinator it is decentralized. Point two is also refuted once the coordinator is gone.
  - goldpineapple 9y ago
    Opinions on Streamr v Iota?
  - etr-strike 9y ago
    I see you took the long way around to agreeing with me at the end there. Have fun with your coordinator. Cheers!

moab9 9y ago

Blasphemy!!! <jk>

goldpineapple 9y ago

Opinions on streamer bs iota?

deleted 9y ago

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