7 ms·

BTC $141 USD

28 points by niggler 14y ago

pazimzadeh 14y ago
The latest price is always here: http://bitcoinity.org/markets http://bitcoinity.org/markets. I'm not sure that a new submission is required every day.
- rplnt 14y ago
  I'm sure they are not required and they are annoying even. Especially when the submission adds absolutely nothing. And as a bonus links to a page that is not valid few minutes after posting.
Nursie 14y ago
But it's still not a bubble, no sir, the bitcoin economy has just really kicked in to the tune of 40% growth in the last 24 hours...
freakyterrorist 14y ago
Surely this madness has to end soon? Also seriously regretting not buying it when it was "expensive" at <$5 :(
- nkozyra 14y ago
  Some of us bought ours around $.85 and sold when there was no way it could go any higher around $30.
  - niggler 14y ago
    "Some of us bought ours around $.85 and sold when there was no way it could go any higher around $30." Picking tops and bottoms is a fool's game.
  - 3pt14159 14y ago
    Heh some of us only sold 80% of the lovely bit coins. Muhahah.
bluedevil2k 14y ago
cough sell now cough
- rheide 14y ago
  Yet people aren't. Apparently there's still enough belief to warrant this kind of growth. (..getting ready to eat my own words, real soon..)
Matsta 14y ago
My 2¢ is that it's gonna crash like it did a couple years back. Then would be the best time to buy, since it will probably do this crazy business once again.
- paulhodge 14y ago
  Of course, it's not going to crash very far if enough people are thinking this.
crazytony 14y ago
Not being fluent in the ins and outs of bitcoin: what is driving this? Is it pure speculation? Are more people trying to get in on the BTC wagon (riding the Cyprus wave)?
- IgorPartola 14y ago
  Nobody really knows. The common thought is that as more merchants start accepting BTC, it becomes more viable as a stand-alone currency and therefore more valuable. Facts seem to contradict this theory as 40% overnight growth cannot represent a 40% growth in the BTC economy. Thus either we undervalued BTC all along, or it is against bubble.
- gnu8 14y ago
  Yes.
- Nursie 14y ago
  Speculation. There doesn't seem to be any evidence that (in the world of BTC) the Cyprus situation has triggered anything other than rampant speculation by non-cypriot libertarians who already distrust central banks and now have a boogeyman to point at.
- Egregore 14y ago
  What was driving the price of gold for the past decade?
bryanlarsen 14y ago
Standard bubble advice applies here. 1) the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. (Keynes) 2) a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Bank your profits. It turns exponential gains into linear gains, throwing away a huge amount of potential profits. But a small amount of real profit is worth more than a huge amount of potential profit.
- jerguismi 14y ago
  "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Bank your profits. " Are you implying that banks are safer way to store wealth then Bitcoin? #Cyprys ;)
  - beedogs 14y ago
    They sure are. Just not in Cyprus.
  - niggler 14y ago
    What happened in Cyprus will not happen in the US. It's far easier to just print a ton of money than it is to confiscate or force a bank collapse (and Cyprus didn't have that option because they don't have control over EUR) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-t17wziSnA&t=26s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-t17wziSnA&t=26s
    - VLM 14y ago
      In the short term you're probably right. In the very long term all fiat currencies collapse, so yeah it will happen here, eventually. You have to have an engineers perspective. All manmade bridges collapse. That doesn't mean they're not useful, or its going to fall over tomorrow. But delusions of immortality are not realistic.
    - npongratz 14y ago
      Sure, the means are different, but the end result of printing tons of money is loss of value, same as outright theft. Only difference is scale: theft from depositors vs. theft from all those holding the inflated currency.
Yuioup 14y ago
I still don't understand how a nonexistent coin could be worth anything. No really. How does solving an algorithm translate into value?
- niggler 14y ago
  Value, be it in gold or silver or USD or EUR or bitcoin or cars or art, is a perceived phenomenon. Something has value because others are willing to trade it for goods and services (or for other forms of value). Gold and silver are trusted stores of value because they have been used in that capacity for centuries (and for a very long time, USD were silver certificates so there was real metal backing the paper) The underlying value of BTC, IMO, is the anonymity feature (the ability to conduct commerce without a clear centralized record identifying you by name). Once that is compromised, it's not clear what value BTC will have.
  - ragmondo 14y ago
    Anonymity is not really the selling feature of bitcoin - in fact it really only offers pseudo-anonymity. The fact that no-one else can just "print" bitcoins, and that you can transfer funds at internet speed to anybody else anywhere in the world and that (after a short time), the transaction cannot be reversed are the main utilities.
    - jaimebuelta 14y ago
      Yes, I think it is possible, in the long run, to figure out who's behind a wallet, assuming that the Bitcoin use is frequent and convenient (meaning no-super-high-inconvenient-counter-measures are used, but a regular use of currency) In that case, my concern is that I think it will be possible to determine ALL the transactions of that wallet. Making it even less anonymous than regular currencies. I could be missing something, but if confirmed, that could be a problem for using Bitcoin as a regular currency
      - Nursie 14y ago
        There are various laundering schemes, and there's nothing stopping you using new wallets constantly. But yes, in effect, every transaction is traceable and public, AFAICT.
polshaw 14y ago
I cannot ----ing believe it. I thought there would be a bump when it hit $100, but not this much. It's just insane, I was calling it a bubble since $30, and it's doubled again and again.. I wonder how low the crash will go? I'm guessing it won't be below $30.
- Nursie 14y ago
  Depends how many people get badly burned by this I would have thought. It could pretty easily drop to almost nothing if confidence is completely bust, as the 'fundamentals' supporting the price of BTC are far from obvious.
- kmfrk 14y ago
  If it drops to $15, I'm going to try to get a physical Casascius coin just for the hell of it: https://www.casascius.com/ https://www.casascius.com/
- illuminate 14y ago
  Whenever the crash happens, we'll have so many threads generated telling us to "get in now!" and the speculation will begin anew.
russellallen 14y ago
A currency which changes in value by around 40% in a 24 hour period is completely useless for the transactions I mostly deal with. We worry about a few percent change over weeks and insist on hedges. Imagine saying to someone - I'll put 1000 BTC into your venture when you reach the next milestone in two months. What's that going to be? USD 100,000? USD 50,000? USD 1.50?
- niggler 14y ago
  "A currency which changes in value by around 40% in a 24 hour period is completely useless for the transactions I mostly deal with" 1. IIRC Silk road uses some average price rather than the spot price 2. Does anyone provide BTC hedging? Seems like a pretty useful and profitable service.
  - ragmondo 14y ago
    To enable hedging, someone would have to take a forward position in USD/BTC .. and at the moment, the market is in contango ( see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contango http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contango ) which means that the sentiment is that the price will continue to increase for the near term ... ie you'd have to be very brave indeed in order to put a limit on the expected BTC price.
    - niggler 14y ago
      "you'd have to be very brave indeed in order to put a limit on the expected BTC price." Or quote a fairly aggressive price (so that the hedger pays a significant premium for the service) Also, how are you getting futures/forward prices on USDBTC?
mkr-hn 14y ago
That's a lot of tulips.
AndrewDucker 14y ago
How are people still actually using it to _buy_ things? My problem with this rate of change is that it makes it harder to use it as a means of buying things. If I see an item for sale for 2.5BTC then it can take me an hour to translate my GBP into BTC. Then I carry out the exchange, and then they have to transfer it back to their currency (if they want to spend it on most things). If the value has gone up 15% in that time then what price should they be charging me? Should a shopfront be updating its prices on an hourly basis? I'm all for BTC being valuable, but it needs to have _some_ stability to be used as a method of value exchange.
- swinglock 14y ago
  I bought a domain at Namecheap. That sent me over to BitPay which I gave the current USD price in BitCoins and an hour later Namecheap had accepted the payment.
  - Devilboy 14y ago
    And two days later you regretted not hoarding the bitcoin instead.
    - swinglock 14y ago
      I don't, the price was good and the amount was tiny. Sure it would have been better today but I needed it yesterday. That wasn't the point though, the point is yes, you can buy stuff and it's simple. Apart from the hour it takes to confirm the transaction (this is done by the BitCoin network, nothing any user or particular party needs to do) it was much less of a hassle than paying with a credit card... at least if you already have the BitCoins.
- Devilboy 14y ago
  Almost nobody is buying anything with bitcoin. At least 99% of the bitcoin price is due to speculation.
meerita 14y ago
It makes impossible for a developer to charge BT on any service. Tell me how you do it without being overpriced the next day.
- EarthLaunch 14y ago
  Calculate the exchange rate automatically? This is not 1900.
  - meerita 14y ago
    Really? I wasn't my point. I was talking about make use of the bitcoin value as a statement. Of course I can charge in Yens and convert it on the fly to dollars or pounds, but that wasn't the point. It's really to make Btc popular on a website when every refresh can bring you a new value. It's horrible for business. Btc right now is only useful for trade than for other low end business operations as paying one month of hosting or buying a toy.
- Devilboy 14y ago
  Price your goods in USD and do the conversion at payment time. Didn't think of that idea did you?
  - eterm 14y ago
    But then you're not really charging BTC, you're charging USD but allowing BTC as a payment mechanism of USD.
    - Devilboy 14y ago
      So?
    - VLM 14y ago
      This is a feature not a bug. Also its much more valuable for the endpoints to be dissimilar payment regimes because financial transfers have obscene fees at this time. You double the currency exchange cost while eliminating all transfer fees. Transfer fees to go from my employers NYC bank checking account to my local credit union checking account are pretty low. On the other hand hopping borders and using multiple payment processors adds up pretty quick and the rates are extremely high for small transactions.
daveungerer 14y ago
I'm surprised that someone hasn't started another Bitcoin yet. Is it harder than just changing some initial seed? Because the artificial scarcity of digital currency is what's allowing for these high prices. Then all you need is intermediary parties that will exchange your V2 Bitcoins for V1 Bitcoins (which will currently have the highest acceptance for buying things). Over time, V2, V3 etc. may even become accepted directly by merchants, if they become big enough. UPDATE: Thanks for the info on additional ones. This is getting really interesting. So my initial scarcity hypothesis was wrong, which means it's just pure herd mentality. Hopefully over time the availability of multiple currencies will lead to some sort of equilibrium though.
- rarestblog 14y ago
  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=134179.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=134179.0
- rheide 14y ago
  Litecoin. Namecoin. Ixcoin. Ppcoin. Terracoin. Devcoin.
- nonpme 14y ago
  Actually, there's a lot of other virtual curriences, see for examples: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=134179.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=134179.0 Yesterday 2nd popular one, Litecoin (LTC) more than doubled its value.
nsns 14y ago
It's like in Germany in the 30's.
- glennos 14y ago
  I was thinking that as well, but it's actually the opposite. Germany experienced hyperinflation, where the value of the Mark decreased rapidly. This is the currency increasing in value, so "hyperdeflation" I guess.
kmfrk 14y ago
I guess the y-axis should be logarithmic at his point.

28 points by niggler 14y ago

The latest price is always here: http://bitcoinity.org/markets http://bitcoinity.org/markets. I'm not sure that a new submission is required every day.

rplnt 14y ago
I'm sure they are not required and they are annoying even. Especially when the submission adds absolutely nothing. And as a bonus links to a page that is not valid few minutes after posting.

Nursie 14y ago

But it's still not a bubble, no sir, the bitcoin economy has just really kicked in to the tune of 40% growth in the last 24 hours...

freakyterrorist 14y ago

Surely this madness has to end soon? Also seriously regretting not buying it when it was "expensive" at <$5 :(

nkozyra 14y ago
Some of us bought ours around $.85 and sold when there was no way it could go any higher around $30.
- niggler 14y ago
  "Some of us bought ours around $.85 and sold when there was no way it could go any higher around $30." Picking tops and bottoms is a fool's game.
- 3pt14159 14y ago
  Heh some of us only sold 80% of the lovely bit coins. Muhahah.

bluedevil2k 14y ago

cough sell now cough

rheide 14y ago
Yet people aren't. Apparently there's still enough belief to warrant this kind of growth. (..getting ready to eat my own words, real soon..)

Matsta 14y ago

My 2¢ is that it's gonna crash like it did a couple years back. Then would be the best time to buy, since it will probably do this crazy business once again.

paulhodge 14y ago
Of course, it's not going to crash very far if enough people are thinking this.

crazytony 14y ago

Not being fluent in the ins and outs of bitcoin: what is driving this? Is it pure speculation? Are more people trying to get in on the BTC wagon (riding the Cyprus wave)?

IgorPartola 14y ago
Nobody really knows. The common thought is that as more merchants start accepting BTC, it becomes more viable as a stand-alone currency and therefore more valuable. Facts seem to contradict this theory as 40% overnight growth cannot represent a 40% growth in the BTC economy. Thus either we undervalued BTC all along, or it is against bubble.
gnu8 14y ago
Yes.
Nursie 14y ago
Speculation. There doesn't seem to be any evidence that (in the world of BTC) the Cyprus situation has triggered anything other than rampant speculation by non-cypriot libertarians who already distrust central banks and now have a boogeyman to point at.
Egregore 14y ago
What was driving the price of gold for the past decade?

bryanlarsen 14y ago

Standard bubble advice applies here. 1) the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. (Keynes) 2) a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Bank your profits. It turns exponential gains into linear gains, throwing away a huge amount of potential profits. But a small amount of real profit is worth more than a huge amount of potential profit.

jerguismi 14y ago
"a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Bank your profits. " Are you implying that banks are safer way to store wealth then Bitcoin? #Cyprys ;)
- beedogs 14y ago
  They sure are. Just not in Cyprus.
- niggler 14y ago
  What happened in Cyprus will not happen in the US. It's far easier to just print a ton of money than it is to confiscate or force a bank collapse (and Cyprus didn't have that option because they don't have control over EUR) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-t17wziSnA&t=26s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-t17wziSnA&t=26s
  - VLM 14y ago
    In the short term you're probably right. In the very long term all fiat currencies collapse, so yeah it will happen here, eventually. You have to have an engineers perspective. All manmade bridges collapse. That doesn't mean they're not useful, or its going to fall over tomorrow. But delusions of immortality are not realistic.
  - npongratz 14y ago
    Sure, the means are different, but the end result of printing tons of money is loss of value, same as outright theft. Only difference is scale: theft from depositors vs. theft from all those holding the inflated currency.

Yuioup 14y ago

I still don't understand how a nonexistent coin could be worth anything. No really. How does solving an algorithm translate into value?

niggler 14y ago
Value, be it in gold or silver or USD or EUR or bitcoin or cars or art, is a perceived phenomenon. Something has value because others are willing to trade it for goods and services (or for other forms of value). Gold and silver are trusted stores of value because they have been used in that capacity for centuries (and for a very long time, USD were silver certificates so there was real metal backing the paper) The underlying value of BTC, IMO, is the anonymity feature (the ability to conduct commerce without a clear centralized record identifying you by name). Once that is compromised, it's not clear what value BTC will have.
- ragmondo 14y ago
  Anonymity is not really the selling feature of bitcoin - in fact it really only offers pseudo-anonymity. The fact that no-one else can just "print" bitcoins, and that you can transfer funds at internet speed to anybody else anywhere in the world and that (after a short time), the transaction cannot be reversed are the main utilities.
  - jaimebuelta 14y ago
    Yes, I think it is possible, in the long run, to figure out who's behind a wallet, assuming that the Bitcoin use is frequent and convenient (meaning no-super-high-inconvenient-counter-measures are used, but a regular use of currency) In that case, my concern is that I think it will be possible to determine ALL the transactions of that wallet. Making it even less anonymous than regular currencies. I could be missing something, but if confirmed, that could be a problem for using Bitcoin as a regular currency
    - Nursie 14y ago
      There are various laundering schemes, and there's nothing stopping you using new wallets constantly. But yes, in effect, every transaction is traceable and public, AFAICT.

polshaw 14y ago

I cannot ----ing believe it. I thought there would be a bump when it hit $100, but not this much. It's just insane, I was calling it a bubble since $30, and it's doubled again and again.. I wonder how low the crash will go? I'm guessing it won't be below $30.

Nursie 14y ago
Depends how many people get badly burned by this I would have thought. It could pretty easily drop to almost nothing if confidence is completely bust, as the 'fundamentals' supporting the price of BTC are far from obvious.
kmfrk 14y ago
If it drops to $15, I'm going to try to get a physical Casascius coin just for the hell of it: https://www.casascius.com/ https://www.casascius.com/
illuminate 14y ago
Whenever the crash happens, we'll have so many threads generated telling us to "get in now!" and the speculation will begin anew.

russellallen 14y ago

A currency which changes in value by around 40% in a 24 hour period is completely useless for the transactions I mostly deal with. We worry about a few percent change over weeks and insist on hedges. Imagine saying to someone - I'll put 1000 BTC into your venture when you reach the next milestone in two months. What's that going to be? USD 100,000? USD 50,000? USD 1.50?

niggler 14y ago
"A currency which changes in value by around 40% in a 24 hour period is completely useless for the transactions I mostly deal with" 1. IIRC Silk road uses some average price rather than the spot price 2. Does anyone provide BTC hedging? Seems like a pretty useful and profitable service.
- ragmondo 14y ago
  To enable hedging, someone would have to take a forward position in USD/BTC .. and at the moment, the market is in contango ( see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contango http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contango ) which means that the sentiment is that the price will continue to increase for the near term ... ie you'd have to be very brave indeed in order to put a limit on the expected BTC price.
  - niggler 14y ago
    "you'd have to be very brave indeed in order to put a limit on the expected BTC price." Or quote a fairly aggressive price (so that the hedger pays a significant premium for the service) Also, how are you getting futures/forward prices on USDBTC?

mkr-hn 14y ago

That's a lot of tulips.

AndrewDucker 14y ago

How are people still actually using it to _buy_ things? My problem with this rate of change is that it makes it harder to use it as a means of buying things. If I see an item for sale for 2.5BTC then it can take me an hour to translate my GBP into BTC. Then I carry out the exchange, and then they have to transfer it back to their currency (if they want to spend it on most things). If the value has gone up 15% in that time then what price should they be charging me? Should a shopfront be updating its prices on an hourly basis? I'm all for BTC being valuable, but it needs to have _some_ stability to be used as a method of value exchange.

swinglock 14y ago
I bought a domain at Namecheap. That sent me over to BitPay which I gave the current USD price in BitCoins and an hour later Namecheap had accepted the payment.
- Devilboy 14y ago
  And two days later you regretted not hoarding the bitcoin instead.
  - swinglock 14y ago
    I don't, the price was good and the amount was tiny. Sure it would have been better today but I needed it yesterday. That wasn't the point though, the point is yes, you can buy stuff and it's simple. Apart from the hour it takes to confirm the transaction (this is done by the BitCoin network, nothing any user or particular party needs to do) it was much less of a hassle than paying with a credit card... at least if you already have the BitCoins.
Devilboy 14y ago
Almost nobody is buying anything with bitcoin. At least 99% of the bitcoin price is due to speculation.

meerita 14y ago

It makes impossible for a developer to charge BT on any service. Tell me how you do it without being overpriced the next day.

EarthLaunch 14y ago
Calculate the exchange rate automatically? This is not 1900.
- meerita 14y ago
  Really? I wasn't my point. I was talking about make use of the bitcoin value as a statement. Of course I can charge in Yens and convert it on the fly to dollars or pounds, but that wasn't the point. It's really to make Btc popular on a website when every refresh can bring you a new value. It's horrible for business. Btc right now is only useful for trade than for other low end business operations as paying one month of hosting or buying a toy.
Devilboy 14y ago
Price your goods in USD and do the conversion at payment time. Didn't think of that idea did you?
- eterm 14y ago
  But then you're not really charging BTC, you're charging USD but allowing BTC as a payment mechanism of USD.
  - Devilboy 14y ago
    So?
  - VLM 14y ago
    This is a feature not a bug. Also its much more valuable for the endpoints to be dissimilar payment regimes because financial transfers have obscene fees at this time. You double the currency exchange cost while eliminating all transfer fees. Transfer fees to go from my employers NYC bank checking account to my local credit union checking account are pretty low. On the other hand hopping borders and using multiple payment processors adds up pretty quick and the rates are extremely high for small transactions.

daveungerer 14y ago

I'm surprised that someone hasn't started another Bitcoin yet. Is it harder than just changing some initial seed? Because the artificial scarcity of digital currency is what's allowing for these high prices. Then all you need is intermediary parties that will exchange your V2 Bitcoins for V1 Bitcoins (which will currently have the highest acceptance for buying things). Over time, V2, V3 etc. may even become accepted directly by merchants, if they become big enough. UPDATE: Thanks for the info on additional ones. This is getting really interesting. So my initial scarcity hypothesis was wrong, which means it's just pure herd mentality. Hopefully over time the availability of multiple currencies will lead to some sort of equilibrium though.

rarestblog 14y ago
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=134179.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=134179.0
rheide 14y ago
Litecoin. Namecoin. Ixcoin. Ppcoin. Terracoin. Devcoin.
nonpme 14y ago
Actually, there's a lot of other virtual curriences, see for examples: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=134179.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=134179.0 Yesterday 2nd popular one, Litecoin (LTC) more than doubled its value.

nsns 14y ago

It's like in Germany in the 30's.

glennos 14y ago
I was thinking that as well, but it's actually the opposite. Germany experienced hyperinflation, where the value of the Mark decreased rapidly. This is the currency increasing in value, so "hyperdeflation" I guess.

kmfrk 14y ago

I guess the y-axis should be logarithmic at his point.