4 ms·

I'd say it is here to stay: http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg360ztgTzm1g10zm2g25 http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg360ztgTzm1g10zm2g...

by Fuzzwah 13y ago

TylerE 13y ago
That looks very similar to this one: http://www.ecotao.com/holism/add/enron/Enron_whole.jpg http://www.ecotao.com/holism/add/enron/Enron_whole.jpg If you look at it up to about end-of-year 2000.
- meowface 13y ago
  The difference though is that Enron insiders were engaging in immoral and illegal activities. Bitcoin on the other hand is provably not a scam; it is an existing and backed commodity. Market manipulation as an insider is impossible, as there are no insiders; manipulation is only possible by attacking infrastructure or accumulating enough BTC. Future bubbles and crashes are likely, but I predict it's going to continue to bounce back pretty much forever. Only if many major governments began to criminalize it, or if some new somehow "better" cryptocurrency came out, would it be in risk of complete deflation.
  - TylerE 13y ago
    Really? What happens when the founders who mined hundreds of thousands of coins in the early days cash out?
    - etherael 13y ago
      Because the people who were prescient enough to figure out that there was immense unrealised demand for such a system are surely anxious to offload their now increasingly valuable stake in that system, right? I sure am, back when I was mining and buying at around the 1$ mark I thought to myself; self, you know this is all just games and popcorn, but there'll always be a bigger sucker out there and some day they'll come along and buy all this stuff you're now building, so suck it up and tolerate the jet engine whine of the fans, you'll be rich in the long run. Not really, though.
    - Phlarp 13y ago
      Go look at the top 250 addresses, a _majority_ of them have never been spent from. There isn't any conclusive proof that the #1 address (111,111 BTC) belongs to DPR, but it is clearly linked to SR in one way or another. I'd be willing to bet a solid amount of my own holdings that those coins are effectively "dead" (private key lost) along with a good portion of the rest of the addresses that haven't been touched since 2011, or have flat out never been spent from. Everyone is touting the 12 million number for total coins in circulation right now and 21 million as the maximum amount. In practice both of those numbers are going to be significantly lower.
      - gwern 13y ago
        > There isn't any conclusive proof that the #1 address (111,111 BTC) belongs to DPR, but it is clearly linked to SR in one way or another. It's been linked to Ross/altoid's Bitcointalk posts, and has a sum consistent with the first year of SR commissions. That's all as conclusive evidence as anyone needs for it.
        Phlarp 13y ago
        So what happens when you remove 1% of the currency from the market in a single day?
        reginaldjcooper 13y ago
        "I apologize, Goldfinger. It's an inspired deal!"
        gwern 13y ago
        It hasn't been removed yet. The DPR story has just started - the password-crackers could turn in success any day, or Ross could decide that he'd like to cut a decade off his near life sentence. All we can say is that it's currently not on the market, which is exactly what we could say before the SR bust.
    - mrb 13y ago
      Your fears are unfounded. 2 million coins were sold in the last 30 days: http://bitcoinity.org/markets/list?currency=ALL&span=30d http://bitcoinity.org/markets/list?currency=ALL&span=30d and yet the price rose from $130 to $200... So a few extra "hundreds of thousands" of coins being sold would not have been able to significantly decrease the exchange rate.
  - notahacker 13y ago
    It's not backed[1], and it's not a commodity. It's a collection of bytes that has value because a small minority of them are being accepted in exchange for real products, and at present a much larger number of speculators are willing to bet on more people wanting them in future. And as you've pointed out yourself, there are two very obvious and likely future scenarios in which it would become very difficult to buy anything with BTC. [1]The "mining" is a clever hack against crashes in that it makes speculators reluctant to divest their BTC holdings for less than they've spent acquiring the BTC. But if you can't reliably convert the BTC back to GPU time (assuming you actually wanted it) it's still intrinsically worthless.

I'd say it is here to stay: http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg360ztgTzm1g10zm2g25 http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg360ztgTzm1g10zm2g...

by Fuzzwah 13y ago

I'd say it is here to stay: http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg360ztgTzm1g10zm2g25 http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg360ztgTzm1g10zm2g...

TylerE 13y ago

That looks very similar to this one: http://www.ecotao.com/holism/add/enron/Enron_whole.jpg http://www.ecotao.com/holism/add/enron/Enron_whole.jpg If you look at it up to about end-of-year 2000.

meowface 13y ago
The difference though is that Enron insiders were engaging in immoral and illegal activities. Bitcoin on the other hand is provably not a scam; it is an existing and backed commodity. Market manipulation as an insider is impossible, as there are no insiders; manipulation is only possible by attacking infrastructure or accumulating enough BTC. Future bubbles and crashes are likely, but I predict it's going to continue to bounce back pretty much forever. Only if many major governments began to criminalize it, or if some new somehow "better" cryptocurrency came out, would it be in risk of complete deflation.
- TylerE 13y ago
  Really? What happens when the founders who mined hundreds of thousands of coins in the early days cash out?
  - etherael 13y ago
    Because the people who were prescient enough to figure out that there was immense unrealised demand for such a system are surely anxious to offload their now increasingly valuable stake in that system, right? I sure am, back when I was mining and buying at around the 1$ mark I thought to myself; self, you know this is all just games and popcorn, but there'll always be a bigger sucker out there and some day they'll come along and buy all this stuff you're now building, so suck it up and tolerate the jet engine whine of the fans, you'll be rich in the long run. Not really, though.
  - Phlarp 13y ago
    Go look at the top 250 addresses, a _majority_ of them have never been spent from. There isn't any conclusive proof that the #1 address (111,111 BTC) belongs to DPR, but it is clearly linked to SR in one way or another. I'd be willing to bet a solid amount of my own holdings that those coins are effectively "dead" (private key lost) along with a good portion of the rest of the addresses that haven't been touched since 2011, or have flat out never been spent from. Everyone is touting the 12 million number for total coins in circulation right now and 21 million as the maximum amount. In practice both of those numbers are going to be significantly lower.
    - gwern 13y ago
      > There isn't any conclusive proof that the #1 address (111,111 BTC) belongs to DPR, but it is clearly linked to SR in one way or another. It's been linked to Ross/altoid's Bitcointalk posts, and has a sum consistent with the first year of SR commissions. That's all as conclusive evidence as anyone needs for it.
      - Phlarp 13y ago
        So what happens when you remove 1% of the currency from the market in a single day?
        reginaldjcooper 13y ago
        "I apologize, Goldfinger. It's an inspired deal!"
        gwern 13y ago
        It hasn't been removed yet. The DPR story has just started - the password-crackers could turn in success any day, or Ross could decide that he'd like to cut a decade off his near life sentence. All we can say is that it's currently not on the market, which is exactly what we could say before the SR bust.
  - mrb 13y ago
    Your fears are unfounded. 2 million coins were sold in the last 30 days: http://bitcoinity.org/markets/list?currency=ALL&span=30d http://bitcoinity.org/markets/list?currency=ALL&span=30d and yet the price rose from $130 to $200... So a few extra "hundreds of thousands" of coins being sold would not have been able to significantly decrease the exchange rate.
- notahacker 13y ago
  It's not backed[1], and it's not a commodity. It's a collection of bytes that has value because a small minority of them are being accepted in exchange for real products, and at present a much larger number of speculators are willing to bet on more people wanting them in future. And as you've pointed out yourself, there are two very obvious and likely future scenarios in which it would become very difficult to buy anything with BTC. [1]The "mining" is a clever hack against crashes in that it makes speculators reluctant to divest their BTC holdings for less than they've spent acquiring the BTC. But if you can't reliably convert the BTC back to GPU time (assuming you actually wanted it) it's still intrinsically worthless.