11 ms·

Bitcoin heading towards $200, new bubble forming

• kken 13y ago
  What is the reason? Can't find any news.
  • devx 13y ago
    China announcing they want a new world currency that doesn't depend on US, and Baidu adopting Bitcoin, I assume.
    • JackSmithThe3rd 13y ago
      China would be looking at SDRs (= special drawing rights issued by the IMF) for a world currency, though
  • Choronzon 13y ago
    Its inherently deflationary anyway (which is a terrible idea for a currency).
    • LinaLauneBaer 13y ago
      I know too little about currencies but to me it looks like that our "real currencies" are inherently deflationary as well... At least this is how it is supposed to work - right? I mean what if governments weren't printing new money all the time? Then there would also be a limited amount of money available in a big pool... Wouldn't it depend on the growth rate of country to determine weather or not a currency is deflationary? - Number of people is growing, same amount of money for the people, no new money is printed => deflationary? vs. - Number of people is shrinking, same amount of money for the people, no new money is printed => inflationary?
      • Semaphor 13y ago
        But it can be regulated by the government. And if they behave responsibly that's a big feature BC doesn't have.
      • Choronzon 13y ago
        Printing money is basically intrinsic to our "real currencies" so if you remove that you have something quantitively different,effectively a new type of currency. Technically currency is a medium of exchange and can be linked to anything,industrial production,gold,number of cows,someones else's currency etc ,so whether it is inflationary or deflationary depends on its social framework and design. Now what is a deflationary currency inherently bad?Say I am Mr Big with my 2 million bitcoins, I can invest in your new business with a variable prospect of success or I can sit on my arse and watch the value of my money go up due to deflation,which am I more likely to do? How do you deal with exiting debits in a deflationary spiral? In deflationary systems money does not circulate and that is the death knell of commerce. But bitcoin is circulating! Well yes,but its value is due to it being traded for speculation and extralegal activities (a lot of which Im actually sympathetic to) ,not as an actual replacement currency.
        • Tichy 13y ago
          But why does a fixed supply make it deflationary? What happens when all BTC have been mined, will the price still go up all the time? I guess it could go up if the Dollar goes down at the same time. The actual price is staying the same, but the Dollar is worth less, so it takes more to buy X. Not sure why that would be bad. Also I suspect banks will create virtual bitcoin, as they do with money (lending BTC that they borrowed). Perhaps that will affect the price as well.
          • maxerickson 13y ago
            Well, if you assume economic growth, a fixed number of counting tokens will have to represent larger values over time. The real trick is to read 'deflationary' as 'will create deflationary pressure', not as 'will inevitably cause deflation at every moment in time'.
            • Tichy 13y ago
              You mean, assuming there was only one Bitcoin: if a VW Beetle costs 1 BTC this year, and next year a Porsche is published (growing the economy by replacing cars with better cars), the Porsche would also have to cost 1 BTC because there isn't more than 1 BTC? That seems incorrect. While impractical, there might be other solutions, for example the Porsche could cost 1 BTC+ 1 Carrot, or maybe it could cost 2 BTC anyway. The buyer just wouldn't be able to pay in one go.
      • jsmcgd 13y ago
        True, but there are things that governments can do to influence how infationary/deflationary their currency is. Bitcoin by design cannot be influenced in this way. Once the production of new bitcoins end (which is guaranteed by its algorithm), then it is highly likely there will be deflation, possibly a deflationary spiral.
    • devx 13y ago
      I wonder if someone could build a new digital currency that starts let's say at 1 trillion units, and is expanded by 2 percent per year (that 2 percent being split so a slight increase happens every day, so it doesn't happen all at once, but after a year, the increase rounds up to 2 percent). The problem would be seeding it and distributing it early on. But it could still be mined much like Bitcoin, with the difference being that the total amount will never be limited. Also, it should be easier to mine them, since the (non-finite) total (1 trillion) would be a lot larger than the 21 limit for Bitcoins. Someone should also do the math for this new currency's adoption rate, so all of the 1 trillion units (adjusted with the 2 percent inflation rate) get distributed in 3-5 decades. Basically we don't want a few thousand people to get that whole trillion within 10 years. I'd also prefer if anonymity would be built it (look to Zerocoin for that). Perhaps it shouldn't be anonymous by default, but you should be able to "switch it on"). It should also be as easy to use and as secure as possible (the clients), so normal people can use it safely on all of their devices.
      • brazzy 13y ago
        The problem is that for a real currency you ideally want inflation to match the growth of the economy. Fixed inflation rates (including 0) are decidedly non-optimal.
        • vbuterin 13y ago
          There are arguments in favor of the fixed supply model. The usual economic one is this: When you earn and stockpile currency units, what you are doing is producing more than you consume, so in real terms you are allowing others to temporarily consume more than they produce. This essentially means that you are investing the difference into society as a whole. Thus, it makes sense that if the economy grows by 2x, your currency units should grow 2x in value, as that's the way any other investment works.
      • vbuterin 13y ago
        Freicoin takes the inflationary cryptocurrency idea: http://freico.in/ http://freico.in/ PPcoin is also slightly inflationary, although it offers you an interest rate higher than the inflation rate if you participate in the validation process (basically like mining except you "mine" with your ppcoins rather than with your cpu cycles): http://ppcoin.org http://ppcoin.org Personally, I don't mind the inflation/deflation argument too much; one thing I would like to see, however, is a coin with a semi-centralized distribution model - an organization bound by contract to give X units to every person in the world. Ripple could have been it, but they went with keeping the coins to themselves instead.
    • peteretep 13y ago
      It's a terrible idea for a sovereign currency for a country, sure. For a store of value ... seems pretty good to me?
    • notdrunkatall 13y ago
      Only if that currency is the basis for your economic system, and you wish to continuously stimulate artificial demand in your economic system through continuous currency debasement. It has been theorized that though such continuous stimulus may lead to greater growth on paper, that growth is more likely to be malignant than it would be were the economy allowed to grow at a more natural rate. Furthermore, continuous inflation is also at least partially responsible for the business cycle. The price of money is the interest rate at which it can be borrowed, and constant inflation is what keeps interest rates low. When money's cheap, people tend to borrow more of it and are less careful about what they do with that money. Hence, due diligence declines, and economic bubbles become more likely.
      • sesqu 13y ago
        I guess it comes down to whether you believe people are overly conservative with their money. Inflationary currency incentivizes investment, which is useful in a world with scarcity. But if you believe enough people spend too much on luxuries, deflationary currency wins out.
        • notdrunkatall 13y ago
          What it comes down to is whether you think the increased growth from perpetually easy credit is worth the malinvestment and economic bubbles that come with it.
    • enoch_r 13y ago
      It's extremely implausible for everyone to know that the value of ${commodity} will rise steadily, with no risk, for the foreseeable future. Why? Think of the second-order effects of what you're saying--I expect the value of ${commodity} to rise indefinitely, so what do I do? Buy ${commodity}. Or, I own a bunch of ${commodity} and expect the price to rise indefinitely--what do I do if someone offers to buy my ${commodity}? Either sell for a higher price, or don't sell at all. Both of these have the effect of bringing the future price increase into the present. If everyone expects a 10% increase in the next year, the price today will increase by roughly (10% - the risk-free interest rate). Now, is the picture different for currencies? Yes. Economists call short-term prices "sticky," and sticky prices are why demand-side recessions are possible. If I'm earning $40,000 a year today, and my boss decreases my pay to $39,000 a year, I don't say "well, there was deflation this year, so I actually got a raise!" On the other hand, if I'm earning $40,000 a year, and my boss doesn't increase my pay at all, I don't say "there was inflation this year, so I just got a pay cut!" In the short term, sticky prices make things (like labor) cost more or less than they would in a frictionless market. That stickiness is why countries with deflationary currencies have problems. Now then--bitcoin may be a currency of sorts, but are bitcoin prices sticky? No. Companies selling products for bitcoins overwhelmingly price their goods in dollars. At whatever time the transaction is conducted, the buyer converts that price into bitcoin and transfers bitcoin to the seller, who sells the bitcoin for dollars. A buyer will never say "yesterday your price was 1BTC, and today it's 1.2BTC--why have you increased your prices?" A seller will never say "yesterday you offered to pay me 1BTC, and today you're only offering 0.8BTC--no sale!" Both sides of the transaction are dealing in dollars, only using bitcoin as a medium to exchange those dollars. In other words, bitcoin is a medium of exchange but not a unit of account. Is bitcoin likely to become sticky in the future? Well, if a large proportion of people were paid solely in bitcoin, and could live comfortable lives spending bitcoin instead of dollars, it's possible that we could have a cultural shift to thinking "I'm paid 333BTC a year" instead of "I'm paid $60,000 a year." And at that point, bitcoin's deflationary nature would be an issue. How likely are we to reach that point? Not very, not least because it's a self-limiting cycle--if the sticky-price/deflation combo is an issue in the bitcoin economy and not in the dollar economy, people have very little incentive to switch their accounting to bitcoin. But that's an entirely separate issue from whether bitcoin is or will remain a useful medium of exchange.
  • peteretep 13y ago
    I wonder if it's a lot more respectable now SilkRoad is gone?
    • yk 13y ago
      Or the many headlines about SR acted as sort of advertising.
      • notdrunkatall 13y ago
        Some of both, I suspect.
      • swswsw 13y ago
        negative news could be good PR sometimes.
    • pantalaimon 13y ago
      Well, maybe because it only took such a small hit when SR went down and quickly recovered, whereas everyone expected it to greatly lose in value. It basically has proven it can exist without SR. Also, there are two big new markets and countless smaller ones already.
  • audeyisaacs 13y ago
    Cryptolocker started using it as a payment method... (I'm not sure what the real reason is).
  • zby 13y ago
    China is leading this rally - so look there for answers. Baidu accepting bitcoins is a good example of what is going on there - this would not happen if the party did not want it - so many people think that maybe the Chinese government would like to give it a try, experiment, maybe not as the final move - but to test the grounds of alternative international currency.
    • guiomie 13y ago
      What leads you to believe so ?
  • haakon 13y ago
    There are probably many reasons; this post on bitcointalk lists most of them: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=313806.msg3367122#msg3367122 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=313806.msg3367122#ms... (I know this forum is pretty bad in general, but I like that specific post.)
• peteretep 13y ago
  Why does this imply a bubble?
  • bayesianhorse 13y ago
    Because nowadays any exponential growth is called a "bubble in forming". And because all stochastic exponential process eventually crash, or "underperform", it sounds really smart to "predict" a crash months or years in advance. Especially when using non-logarithmic axes, the predictions and the crash look really impressive. You don't, however, often see these prophets of doom profiting from their predictions, because the exact timing of crashes isn't that easy at all.
    • Choronzon 13y ago
      Its actually generally a lot easier to profit buying a bubble than shorting it.There are a lot more points of increase than points of collapse. Paulson made a fortune shorting the housing market,plenty of people predicted the collapse but Paulson picked the peak correctly. The interesting thing is given his shocking trading performance since then he appears to have been lucky rather than smart. Didier Sornette has some interesting theories(and dubious models) about bubbles,well worth a read.
      • matwood 13y ago
        Exactly. On shorting a bubble:the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
  • netrikare 13y ago
    Well, price has risen not because of businesses across the world adopting the currency but because of only Baidu saying they will accept Bitcoin. That does not justify 50% rise at all.
    • peteretep 13y ago
      How do you know that that's why it's risen? Why does that not justify a 50% rise? Why does that imply the price will suddenly crash? Is this idle chat, or have you attempted to significantly short bitcoin somehow to take advantage of the financial gain from your certainty?
• joelthelion 13y ago
  I'm still hesitant to sell my (smaller) stash. The probability that bitcoin will explode is fairly low, but trading a small but real possibility of becoming a millionaire against a few thousand dollars is a difficult decision :)
  • peteretep 13y ago
    So take a decision now about when you'll sell, write it down, and stick to it. Mine has a 5 year timeline, or a specific value (a few orders of magnitude more than today) at which I'll sell.
    • pmarca 13y ago
      "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?" --JM Keynes :-)
    • yafujifide 13y ago
      If bitcoin replaces the dollar as the unit of account, currency of international trade, world reserve currency, and so on, it might be better simply to spend the bitcoins than to "sell" them.
      • jafaku 13y ago
        If that ever happens, our homes are gonna be visited by flying drones. But you don't need that to happen for Bitcoin to make you rich. It could very well just stay as a high value, scarce commodity. A few whales buying in can make it happen.
  • gizmo 13y ago
    Assuming you have $5000 worth of Bitcoin that's 25 bitcoins at the current $200 exchange rate. So bitcoin has to go to $40.000 for you to become a millionaire. Bitcoin at launch was $0.05. So value of bitcoin has doubled 12 times since launch, and the value of bitcoin has to double 8 more times for your to become a millionaire. So that's quasi-plausible. Not holding my breath, though :) [1] Source https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AmcTCtjBoRWUdHJuUE1mUkFxa3A0eHBDQkxZLVVFZmc#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AmcTCtjBoRWUdHJ...
• doctorfoo 13y ago
  I'm going to sell when I can retire on it. Which won't be for a couple orders of magnitude yet. Some of us are holding for the longest time... I apply this same logic to my startup attempts. If anyone offers me enough to retire, I'll sell with no doubts.
  • SuperChihuahua 13y ago
    Gray Swan investing!
  • jafaku 13y ago
    By that time you won't need to sell. Besides, are you seriously gonna risk your money like that? Switching back to a currency system that can be frozen/confiscated, inflated, etc.?
• nolok 13y ago
  I know you can sell your coin when the price is high; but can you trade quickly enough to profit from such temporary surges (buy low then sell high only a dozen hours later) ? What is the average request processing time if you want to buy, say, 10 BTC on mtgox ?
  • djcapelis 13y ago
    Orders don't take long. Most of the time (i.e. when the exchange is operating normally and isn't down) they pretty much just happen so long as you know, the orders can match with other orders. If you buy 10BTC at market rates and tell mtgox that you don't really care what you pay for it, then it'll just go ahead and do it. There's not much waiting involved other than the web interface refreshing, which isn't strictly necessary since you could trade by API too if you'd prefer that.
  • citricsquid 13y ago
    An exchange will allow you to trade instantly; the moment your sell/buy orders go through, the btc/usd is available in your account for usage, however getting USD into the exchanges can take some time and in the case of mtgox, getting USD out is almost impossible (it's why the price at mtgox is about 10% higher than elsewhere). Your location matters most, if you're in Europe you could get money into Bitstamp within a couple of hours if you pay for a fast transfer and once it's in you can trade instantly.
  • swswsw 13y ago
    buy & sell occurs at an exchange, which is instant as long as the exchange does it instantly. The exchange is keeping tracking of which account inside their exchange has what stuff. So it is just the exchange writing its records to database. This has nothing to do with how long a bitcoin transaction (sending bitcoin from address a to address b) takes. bitcoin transaction occur in bitcoin network. The buy & sell is just internal to an exchange (eg. mt. gox) and occur outside of bitcoin network.
  • ISL 13y ago
    If you maintain some inventory at coinbase, you can effectively buy and sell instantly. If you trade rarely, then buys and sells are effectively instant too, you just don't see the results of your trade for 10 days. I believe that for verified/tier 2 customers, coinbase offers faster turnaround.
• neals 13y ago
  $200? Hardly. Maybe if you look at Mt.Gox, it might look like you could get $190 per bitcoin. Howerver, there is no way to actually get that money to your bank account, since Mt. Gox hasn't been doing any banktransfers for months. The price is high on Mt.Gox because people that have money on there can only get it out by buying Bitcoins and transfering those to other exchanges. This drives the Mt.Gox price up. If you look a the exchanges that are actually solvent, the price is more around $160.
  • waterlesscloud 13y ago
    People have been saying this for the last $100 or so of rise. And yet here we are.
    • neals 13y ago
      Yes indeed, people have been saying they can't get their money out of Gox for quite a while. Thanks for backing me up on that, I guess?
  • csomar 13y ago
    My experience was that buying Bitcoins from other exchanges is usually much more expensive than Mt.Gox. I'm not sure about selling, though.
    • neals 13y ago
      I've been trying to get a fair amount of both $ and € out of Gox for 3 months now. Nothing is going through.
• tjaerv 13y ago
  Editorialized title much?
• spindritf 13y ago
  Could we ban the words "bubble" and "disrupt" from submission titles?
  • wtvanhest 13y ago
    Disrupt is fine. Its basically a quick way of saying a company is in a specific industry. disrupt industry x. Bubble, lets lose that. People are so bad a predicting bubbles it is laughable.
    • DennisP 13y ago
      That's what disrupt means now. It used to mean a company is changing the way an industry does business. But then everybody started claiming they would do that, no matter how trivial the change, so now it means "there's a new company in this industry and it has a hip website."
      • wtvanhest 13y ago
        Yeap, it definitely has changed definitions. I would never use the term, but it definitely has changed definitions.
• pmarca 13y ago
  Oh no, something is showing the slightest glimmer of working, it must immediately be a bubble!
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
• pearjuice 13y ago
  - Bitcoin? Sounds interesting but I am not going to waste CPU cycles on it. This will never be of any real value! - Bitcoin seems to be steadily growing. Well, as soon as they realize it is worth nothing, it will return back to non-existency. - Yeah, this is definitely a fad. It is growing too fast. No way I am going to mine. - So, mining at home is redundant now. Well, don't picture me buying into it! It can collapse any second. - Haha, it collapsed. Good grief. No way I am buying all the leftovers. This will never recover. - Recovering? This will be temporarily. Bitcoin has no future. - A new peak? Well too late to step in, now. Just wait for the new burst. - Yet another peak!? This is the last one. Buying now would be stupid. - Bitcoin heading towards $(peak of some arbitrary rounded number), new bubble forming Every time.
  • M4v3R 13y ago
    Very relevant - Market emotions cycle: http://cuffelinks.com.au/wp-content/uploads/AO-cycles.png http://cuffelinks.com.au/wp-content/uploads/AO-cycles.png
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
    • snitko 13y ago
      Bitcoin is not a ponzi scheme. It's a technology with actual useful properties. The code is out there to see. If you don't understand why these properties are useful to so many people, I welcome you to the third world countries where you can't start selling your product to the rest of the world (even if it's a great one), because PayPal doesn't work with your country and cc processors won't let you accept cards from other countries (fraud risk). It's not just that. It's also that you don't have to report to anyone and go through all the tedious paperwork to incorporate BEFORE you actually made a cent on your product. When you compare the ease with which you can start selling your product with Bitcoin, it's just amazing. Government regulations stifle innovation and entrepreneurship, Bitcoin let's you break free.
      • jbooth 13y ago
• MarcusBrutus 13y ago
  How many legitimate real world services and products currently accept Bitcoins? I understand it is only the Chinese search engine. I also take it for granted that any major Euro/US-based organization (be it Google or Domino's Pizza) that starts accepting Bitcoins will instantly face very serious political repercussions. Given these facts it is astonishing that Bitcoin seems to be heading from strength to strength.
  • Tichy 13y ago
    I am too lazy to create a lmgtfy link for you, sorry. Google yourself. Lots of places accept Bitcoin. Although I am not sure how many people actually use it for shopping.
  • elux 13y ago
    >How many legitimate real world services and products currently accept Bitcoins? I understand it is only the Chinese search engine. The hundreds (thousands now?) of (mostly) small businesses accepting bitcoin for goods and services include gift card vendors. [1] You can spend your bitcoins on gift cards (a form of virtual currency in itself) which you can use at some of the world's largest retailers, for example Amazon[2] or Walmart [3]. It's a two-step process, but you can use your bitcoins at Amazon or Walmart, today. [1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade#Gift.2FDebit_Cards https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade#Gift.2FDebit_Cards [2] http://www.gyft.com/shop-for-gift-cards/ http://www.gyft.com/shop-for-gift-cards/ [3] http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1om2jm/egifter_now_sells_walmart_gift_cards_buy/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1om2jm/egifter_now_...
  • dwaltrip 13y ago
    Bitcoin growth will be led by investors and speculators. Day to day transactional use will be a consistently lagging indicator that helps buttress the rising exchange rate floor. Until the whole thing falls apart (or not). Time will tell :)
• r0muald 13y ago
  by 2015 google will be accepting bitcoin
• lma21 13y ago
  i see they're updating their market data with socket.io. but the graph bit is nicely made. Anyone knows how they're doing it with canvas?
• Sagat 13y ago
  I wonder who Satoshi is and how much he's worth now. Not many people can put on their CV that they created a new currency.
  • oleganza 13y ago
    Satoshi does not need CV :)
  • gwern 13y ago
    The upper bound on how many coins he's mined is roughly 1 million (the best estimates I'm aware of come from https://bitslog.wordpress.com https://bitslog.wordpress.com ). So you can just interpret the current exchange rate of X as X million. On http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/currency/USD.html http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/currency/USD.html I see Bitstamp at $169 right now (MtGox, as pointed out here, is not a useful benchmark anymore), so that's $169m in bitcoins. (modulo all the usual reasons it's less than $169m: the estimate should be an upper bound and so the real amount lower, he may have lost his bitcoins, you can't cash out that much without crashing the price, he'd have to pay taxes on such an enormous amount, etc etc)
  • hannibal5 13y ago
    Wrq ZpPnyro with high probability. Look at what he has done, where he lives and how he writes.
    • Sagat 13y ago
      Who is that? There are no google results.
      • Geee 13y ago
        ebg13 ftw
        • Sagat 13y ago
          Why waste people's time like that?
• notdrunkatall 13y ago
  I've said it before and I'm sure I'll say it again: the biggest risk to bitcoin is a government (specifically the US government) deciding that they don't like it. Barring that, its growth will likely continue.
  • snitko 13y ago
    You don't need to be a prophet to guess that. Of course they don't like it. To me, it's not even a question. The question is, what are they gonna do about it and for how long will they manage to delay Bitcoin adoption.
    • notdrunkatall 13y ago
      My thinking is along the same lines. They're tacitly accepting it now, not because they accept it, but because they think it might collapse on its own. When they realize that it's not going to go away, I'm almost certain that the government will step in somehow and try to put the kibosh on bitcoin. How long that will be is anyone's guess.
• hannibal5 13y ago
  For a more clearer picture, look at this graph: http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg1460zig12-hourztgWzm1g10zm2g25zvzl http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg1460zig12-hourztg... Bitcoin is deflationary and has enough actual use to support small trading volume even without speculators. It's perfect vessel for speculators and bubbles, but the long trend is pretty obvious. I suspect that it will grow until it has reached all of it's potential users and potential speculators. It has actual use as currency for bad stuff, money laundering and avoiding currency restrictions like in China for example, so I think the exchange rate will grow for some time. I suspect that grey economy might support money supply worth of 200-300 billion at least. Government interventions might cut it into much smaller number though. Virtual currency has little value if you can't interact with the rest of the economy. It's not path to cyberanarcist-utopia, but it's not clearly useless either. I think it might find it's niche or be replaced with something similar.
• c0ldfusi0nz 13y ago
  "New bubble forming" - LOL. Yes, there will be volatility, but the long term trend is UP.
• etherael 13y ago
  not a bubble, just reversion to the mean exponential trend that has been consistent since genesis.
• mediocregopher 13y ago
  It's better to not use MtGox as a baseline price anymore, it's at about $20 higher then any other exchange due to the fact that you can't actually get your money out of it ATM. Check the btc-e graph for a better view: http://bitcoinwisdom.com/markets/btce/btcusd http://bitcoinwisdom.com/markets/btce/btcusd (They both show the same trend, I'm just being pedantic)
  • dwaltrip 13y ago
    One cool thing that has happened over that several months is that Mt Gox has drifted down to a market share of around 30% of the total trade volume (generally speaking; ocasionally this trend weakens on days with huge swings, but less often than before). It is good to see more healthy exchange competition.