9 ms·

Bitcoins reached $300

121 points by kolinko 13y ago

Here are the charts: http://bitcoinity.org/markets A screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/kW1CJz2.jpg And a link to the front page of WSJ's financial section today: http://m.imgur.com/4bcGGZG

jackgolding 13y ago
Looking at the chart it doesn't seem as volatile as mainstream media leads us to believe.
- imd23 13y ago
  Some days are really volatile.
- necubi 13y ago
  It increases 50% in a week, and you don't consider that volatile?
  - JanezStupar 13y ago
    You know, its the oscillations == volatility philosophy. Of course only should only look at daily graphs no older than two days. http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg1460zigDailyztgSzm1g10zm2g25 http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg1460zigDailyztgSz...
    - ramchip 13y ago
      I don't think philosophy has much to do here. Volatility is a financial term with a precise, mathematical definition.
- jaibot 13y ago
  The fuck? USD changes less than 2% a year. Within the last _six months_ BTC has been valued at anywhere from $65 to $321 USD (http://bitcoinity.org/markets http://bitcoinity.org/markets). It would be incredibly difficult to oversell how volatile BTC is - it's really, really, really, really fucking volatile.
- this_user 13y ago
  Your average currency pair moves less than 1% on almost all days. Moves above 1% are rare and days with moves of several percent are extremely rare and occur a couple of times a year at most. BTC, on the other hand, may be worth anything from 250 to 60 USD a day. That is the reason why BTC as a currency is of little use. You cannot do serious business with something like this unless you immediately hedge all of your exposure. In a larger organisation that would be impossible and, on the other hand, only means that someone else is holding the bag for the next crash. BTC is driven by little to no fundamental data. Its exchange rate is subject to pure mass psychology which is why it repeatedly goes through boom and bust cycles. This is not going to stop unless something like a real BTC economy of non-trivial size develops. But I think it very unlikely for this to happen for the aforementioned reason of volatility and the fact that BTC is by design deflationary. BTC's deflationary properties would choke off any such economic system that is based on this crypto currency. All in all, I am of the opionion that BTC is an interesting experiment and a case study in speculative behaviour. The difference compared to former manias (see [1] for historic examples) is that in BTC the process plays itself out at an extremely accelarated pace. Maybe this is even what the creator(s) intended. Maybe they created a purely electronic ecosystem of speculative behaviour to be able to study and better understand the phenomenon of financial bubbles. This would certainly explain the 'Satoshi' entity's non-interference. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusions_and_the_Madness_of_Crowds http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusions...
  - jackgolding 13y ago
    This is the kind of response I wanted to invoke - that you for your insight! I guess the closest 'real' currency examples would be something like http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=ZWD&to=USD&view=10Y http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=ZWD&to=USD&view=10Y
shubhamjain 13y ago
When Silkroad went down I expected bitcoin to take quite a slump but what has happened is contrary. I am not implying that anonymous transaction s for illegal use are the only thing bitcoins are good for but its my guess that it forms a major part of the group that actually use bitcoins for buying stuff. I am not sure why would anyone would get troubled in buying bitcoins for purchasing rather than punching a CC number. What is pushing its value, I am not sure but I am really spectical that it has to do with bitcoin's popularity.
- Wingman4l7 13y ago
  Bitcoin did take a hit, but it recovered fairly quickly.
  - fragsworth 13y ago
    I think the simple explanation is that Silk Road's takedown increased Bitcoin's media coverage, which is leading to new buyers, which offsets whatever sell-off there might have been.
- lingben 13y ago
  silkroad 2.0 launched just recently
- pera 13y ago
  SilkRoad was important, but most important was its community (dkn255hz262ypmii.onion) that it's still online. You see, the most important things for the anonymous market are the WoT and the PGP pubkeys, and that's not illegal (at least until now). Additionally Black Market Reloaded was already very popular when SR was seized. I believe that what is pushing Bitcoins value is that many people call it "the credit card of the 21st century" and they are buying bitcoins as shares of the next Visa. EDIT: as wildgift said, there is no insurance in Bitcoin yet, but I'm sure that if Bitcoin starts being really popular we are going to start seeing online wallets with insurance provided by big corporations. CCs (as a technology) don't include insurance either...
  - 13y ago
mtgx 13y ago
Bitcoins should lose 3 zeros, like many countries do to their currencies. So 1 new Bitcoin = 0.001 old Bitcoins = $0.3 I think I'd like that more than just starting naming them something else all of the sudden, and call them Satoshis or whatever, and then when the Bitcoin reaches $10,000 we'll probably have to use new names yet again. Cutting the zeros could be a little confusing at first, but I think less confusing than starting talking about Satoshis, or mCoins or whatever, all of the sudden.
- dagurp 13y ago
  What about 8 bitcoins = 1 bytecoin
  - dxm 13y ago
    And 1 nibblecoin == 4 bitcoins.
- dagurp 13y ago
  What about 8 bitcoins = 1 bytecoin
- user24 13y ago
  people have suggested mBTC or "millibits". I think it's not something that can be mandated. A new terminology will naturally arise if the need is genuine.
  - netcan 13y ago
    I don't think it'll be needed until/unless bitcoin stablises enough that people start quoting prices in bitcoin. Right now, advertising a computer at 3 bitcoins is not practical. The value of those bitcoins change to fast.
    - user24 13y ago
      > Right now, advertising a computer at 3 bitcoins is not practical. Only if you're seeing the "real" value as the USD. No-one says "$100 is meaningless because its conversion to Thai Baht varies so wildly". The only thing that will kill bitcoin is stability without utility.
phaed 13y ago
To the moon! ┗(°0°)┛
- achalkley 13y ago
  Amen.
  - phaed 13y ago
    $320 now.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
ck2 13y ago
Somewhere buried on my hard drive I have a fraction of a bitcoin that people were giving out for free when bitcoin first came out to encourage adoption. I really need to find it, it's actually worth money now... ps. that pizza is now worth $3 Million
- Tegran 13y ago
  All you need to do is travel back to 2010 and visit this page: http://web.archive.org/web/20100703032414/http://freebitcoins.appspot.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20100703032414/http://freebitcoin... 5 free bitcoins for solving a captcha? Yes please!
- valevk 13y ago
  What about Ebay announcing that they might accept Bitcoins?
  - nikcub 13y ago
    I've been buying up in the last week (previously I was in at 5, 10, 12$ and sold at the last peak at $240) because I think PayPal will jump in soonish.
- theklub 13y ago
  Yeah, I did the same exact thing. I have a few "lost" bitcoins from the early days.
vinchuco 13y ago
where do you personally buy/sell BTC ?
- pera 13y ago
  I prefer localbitcoin and bitcoin-otc, but I do have an verified account in MtGox.
  - laichzeit0 13y ago
    I wouldn't trust Gox as far as I could throw a piano right now. I've been waiting more than 24 hours for a BTC withdrawal. It's not even showing up on blockchain.info yet. Search the forums there are a lot of people this is happening to. Some with more than 3 days. I'd be EXTREMELY cautious and suspicious about Mt.Gox right now. Make very sure you can get your BTC/USD out of Gox before you trust it.
    - nathanm412 13y ago
      3 days? People haven't been able to withdraw BTC to USD in months as far as I was aware. http://www.reddit.com/r/mtgox http://www.reddit.com/r/mtgox
      - laichzeit0 13y ago
        Not BTC to USD. Just plain BTC to my wallet. This is happening to a lot of people. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=324918.60 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=324918.60
    - pera 13y ago
      24 hours? but did you pay a fee? sometimes if you don't pay a fee it takes long time until some block includes your transaction, and specially when the difficulty of the network is high (like now).
- valevk 13y ago
  bitcoin.de if you are in Germany.
dwaltrip 13y ago
Damn. Sometimes I can't believe it. I have been following bitcoin quite closely for over 18 months now. The ecosystem is growing in ways only a few bold people have predicted. Fundamentally, it is about belief and trust. The protocol has largely proven itself. People are starting to believe in bitcoin. This is why the price is going up. For those who say "It isn't being used as a currency!" here is my response: Bitcoin excels as a secure protocol for tracking account balances in a decentralized, seemingly untamperable fashion, as well as transferring value very quickly to anywhere in the world at the sole, uncensorable discretion of the owner. It is both a payment protocol and a distributed ledger. A lot of people want these unique feautures, even if they can't buy groceries with it yet. Those types of merchants will always be the last to adopt. Bitcoin also has the pontential to be used in diverse ways as "progammable money". It has a built-in API, and features like timelock, mutli-entity transaction signing (built-in escrow), and others that I don't fully understand. An AI bot could utilize bitcoin (might have trouble with a bank account!). Also, see gold and its $8 trillion of largely made-up valuation (not stemming from industrial/ornamental demand). You don't see gold owners buying things with a few shavings ;) Bitcoin is far superior to gold in almost every way (it isn't quite as shiny tho). If society can make up several trillion dollars of monetary valuation for gold, then I definitely can picture bitcoin snagging a pretty decent slice (right now it is only 1/3,000 the size gold). People recognize this potential, and thus choose to invest. The first mover advantange is massive. Network effects are very important - it will take quite the innovation to unseat bitcoin, and it has to be something that can't be simply copied/integrated into the existing protocol. The whole thing is sort of a self-fullfilling positive feedback loop. I'm a cautiously strong proponent, and find it absolutely fascinating to watch. These kind of events don't unfold that often. TL;DR - magic internet money! Sorry for the multiple edits. I wrote this on my phone.
- chii 13y ago
  i wish bitcoin's equating with gold is going to last - but i believe that because bitcoin's uncontrollability (from the banker's point of view), it will be stamped out as soon as it threatens fiat currencies as the dominant means of transfer.
  - 13y ago
seleucia 13y ago
This reminds me increasing at gold last year.
sojorn 13y ago
Is there any serious research paper on BTC (and not an enthusiast blog post)?
- oscilloscope 13y ago
  Yes, it was originally proposed in a paper. http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
atmosx 13y ago
Awesome. I wish (as always) I hadn't sold mine earlier. But if I didn't I would probably sold them now and wait to see what happens. Thing is, this fluctuations are not connected with any sort of events that make sense or justify the price sky-rocketing which makes me think that the whole thing is driven, manually. When the whale leaves the sea, BTC will turn into peanuts. Till then...
- pja 13y ago
  It's something of a paradox isn't it: If nobody had ever sold their bitcoins in return for something else, then there would be no market for bitcoins at all and bitcoins would be irrelevant.
jaibot 13y ago
In this thread - people confusing up arrows with "good". (Rapid deflation is not a great thing for a currency in general)
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- jcfrei 13y ago
  But it might be for a world reserve currency - and replace gold to a large extent.
- Semaphor 13y ago
  I'm wondering, is it as bad for a currency that still rather rarely get's used exclusively? I don't have a lot of economic knowledge (only what I learned in high school, though one of my majors was economics & politics; Germany, school until 13th grade) but it just seems to me that not all the normal rules would apply in the case of bitcoin.
grey-area 13y ago
If I had money in bitcoin I'd find this movement terrifying. It is not correlated with broader economic movements or the inflation rate of USD, and has all the classic hallmarks of a bubble, including true believers telling everyone it is different this time, increasingly wild oscillations, and exponential growth. I find bitcoin really interesting, love the idea of a cryptocurrency, and also find the idea of a deflationary currency interesting. I've no argument with that side of it. Obviously there are issues with things like exchanges which seem to be almost entirely run by amateurs who think that a VPS or leased server is secure enough for financial transactions, but those problems could go away in time, they are not inherent to the currency, though they're another reason to be cautious at present. However there are a few issues with the use of the currency which can't easily be fixed. What I find more troubling is the commitment to anonymity and lack of accountability from the creators - it is designed to allow anonymous transactions, and the users seem to be resistant to regulation. Those two things mean people can engage in bitcoin theft, fraud, laundering, cornering the market, setting up bogus or insecure exchanges/banks, with impunity and anonymity. Without proper regulation, insurance, compensation, which means identification of users and verification of transactions and everything that goes with that, I can't see bitcoin spreading beyond enthusiasts. I wouldn't use it for anything important because of the lack of regulation and controls, but do think it represents something of the future of currencies, after our latest experiment in hyper-inflationary fiat runs its course (see Fiat Money Inflation in France for a previous experiment). It'll be interesting to see if other cryptocurrencies are born which take a different direction and attempt to build in accountability and responsibility to secure transactions and allow them to be policed effectively by tying them to real world identity. Anyone know of any?
- crassus 13y ago
  According to the bubble theory of money, all money is a bubble. The bubbliness is what defines money - it is that which is irrationally overvalued. See[1] Bitcoin is money, Bitcoin is a bubble [1] http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2013/04/bitcoin-is-money-bitcoin-is-bubble.html http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2013/04/bitcoin...
- gnerd 13y ago
  When dealing with an entirely new concept, isn't everyone an amateur?
Kiro 13y ago
Brace for impact.
marginview 13y ago
it fails as a store of value and therefore is not money which is obvious given its volatility. Bitcoin is best described as a computer programme which sells itself on features written to provide assets to those with the mindset desiring such assets - libertarians, those anti fiat currencies, Austrian economists (more recently now gold is letting them down) etc... Such mindset are sure to only increase given the Wall St ownership of the Federal reserve so Bitcoin will continue to sell until its technology is made obsolte. If that takes years then bitcoin $100,000 soon enough but if tomorrow then hello bitcoin $0
- VexXtreme 13y ago
  What would make BTC obsolete?
adrianwaj 13y ago
I wouldn't say it's a bubble just yet, because it's too close to the last ramping which was a response to the Cyprus confiscations. This is just a response to what many would perceive as the beginnings of capital controls in the USA... it's probably the tail end of that. Another "Bitcoin Bubble" to me would be around $500 in the next few days... thus entailing some burst or large correction. http://www.foxbusiness.com/government/2013/10/17/jpmorgan-chase-denies-new-capital-controls-on-accounts/ http://www.foxbusiness.com/government/2013/10/17/jpmorgan-ch... A better word would be "recapitulation."
- oleganza 13y ago
  Last rally started at $14 and crashed into $100. This time we started at $140 around Silk Road shutdown. If this history repeats itself, the bubble may crash into whopping $1000.
  - adrianwaj 13y ago
    The main argument I heard against bitcoin from a Russian tycoon during the Cyprus shenanigans for bitcoin being a good store of value was that there was no quick way to liquidate large sums of bitcoin if you wanted to (I presume into some fiat currency for spending.) An interesting point: it wasn't really about the currency losing value it was about liquidity. But the counter-thought is that it's better having a store of value that one can't spend than not having anything at all! At least time is on your side with bitcoin in terms of liquidity, it's not with fiat if you look at capital controls on the increase. Capital controls are an issue especially if you want to move between countries. Anyone with $100mil+ and not in bed with government should move into bitcoin and get a good anonymizer .. the rest of us just get a free ride. Assume some goverment will then come after (if not those bitcoins) then you. And so the end game of bitcoins is when goverment ends up with most of them (or at least wanting them.)
    - oleganza 13y ago
      Many people bet on Bitcoin becoming world money. Then you don't need to "liquidate" it at all. At the same time, market evolves: the more people invest tomorrow, the more btc you will be able to liquidate. When Bitcoin becomes a world currency, then capital controls wouldn't matter.
heliodor 13y ago
It seems to me the real price is lower as depicted by Coinbase or CampBX which have a stable and reliable system, unlike MtGox at the moment. I think the ~6% higher price on MtGox is a reflection of people's lack of trust in MtGox being able to provide withdrawals in a reliable and timely fashion.
csomar 13y ago
Hate BitCoin or like it. Let's agree, nobody can explain this; and nobody can predict BitCoin value or usage. Some top HN members criticized BitCoin heavily. I, for one, invested $0 in BitCoin. But we can be sure about something: Bitcoin is weird, new and innovative. It's something completely new and has no rules. The game is open. How the market will react will not depend on your limited (or wide) experience. Bitcoin can go all the way down to $0 and the rest is history. It can go up and widely used that it changes history. I'll be just watching though.
- oleganza 13y ago
  1. Bitcoin can be explained if you take time and study it. It has no new or strange constructs in it. Hash functions and digital signatures were around for decades. You may also like this glossary: https://github.com/oleganza/CoreBitcoin/blob/master/GLOSSARY.md https://github.com/oleganza/CoreBitcoin/blob/master/GLOSSARY... 2. Bitcoin has rules and those rules are strictly followed and very strictly specified in actual software.
  - maxerickson 13y ago
    The block size blockchain fork was resolved on an ad hoc basis. There was nothing in the software to deal with it. Miners lost rewards over it (or at least, wasted cycles).
    - oleganza 13y ago
      Software has bugs. They need to be fixed and some people may lose money. This story only proves that incentives are correctly working in favour of everyone: miners voluntarily chose to lose rewards and stay compatible with the older network to not shake confidence in it. The point is not to have a perfect system (which is impossible), but to have proper motivations for everyone to play along instead of cheating and stealing.
      - maxerickson 13y ago
        Well, now we are running away from "strictly followed" and "very strictly specified". I guess I would be happy if you always posted a disclaimer with such claims, something like "But of course all software has bugs and who knows how severely a given bug in the bitcoin software will impact the network".
harshpotatoes 13y ago
So, I don't understand. Why does bitcoin have such high deflation? Is this just because there has been a constant stream of people switching their traditional currencies for bitcoins at a rate faster than bitcoins can be mined? Presumably at some point bitcoin will stop being deflationary if it ever wants to be useful as a currency. When does that happen? Why do people buy bitcoins if it isn't really useful as a currency yet? I mean, there are supposedly 3.5 billion USD worth of bitcoins in existence, but if I want to buy any sort of physical product or pay for utilities, I have to use a traditional currency. Currently it appears that bitcoins are most popularly used for less than legal purposes (payment for drugs, payment for services to avoid taxes, payment for blackhat services). Does this mean that by buying into bitcoin, I'm essentially providing USD to these black market activities which might not have had USD to begin with? Many questions I don't understand...

121 points by kolinko 13y ago

Here are the charts: http://bitcoinity.org/markets A screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/kW1CJz2.jpg And a link to the front page of WSJ's financial section today: http://m.imgur.com/4bcGGZG

jackgolding 13y ago

Looking at the chart it doesn't seem as volatile as mainstream media leads us to believe.

imd23 13y ago
Some days are really volatile.
necubi 13y ago
It increases 50% in a week, and you don't consider that volatile?
- JanezStupar 13y ago
  You know, its the oscillations == volatility philosophy. Of course only should only look at daily graphs no older than two days. http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg1460zigDailyztgSzm1g10zm2g25 http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg1460zigDailyztgSz...
  - ramchip 13y ago
    I don't think philosophy has much to do here. Volatility is a financial term with a precise, mathematical definition.
jaibot 13y ago
The fuck? USD changes less than 2% a year. Within the last _six months_ BTC has been valued at anywhere from $65 to $321 USD (http://bitcoinity.org/markets http://bitcoinity.org/markets). It would be incredibly difficult to oversell how volatile BTC is - it's really, really, really, really fucking volatile.
this_user 13y ago
Your average currency pair moves less than 1% on almost all days. Moves above 1% are rare and days with moves of several percent are extremely rare and occur a couple of times a year at most. BTC, on the other hand, may be worth anything from 250 to 60 USD a day. That is the reason why BTC as a currency is of little use. You cannot do serious business with something like this unless you immediately hedge all of your exposure. In a larger organisation that would be impossible and, on the other hand, only means that someone else is holding the bag for the next crash. BTC is driven by little to no fundamental data. Its exchange rate is subject to pure mass psychology which is why it repeatedly goes through boom and bust cycles. This is not going to stop unless something like a real BTC economy of non-trivial size develops. But I think it very unlikely for this to happen for the aforementioned reason of volatility and the fact that BTC is by design deflationary. BTC's deflationary properties would choke off any such economic system that is based on this crypto currency. All in all, I am of the opionion that BTC is an interesting experiment and a case study in speculative behaviour. The difference compared to former manias (see [1] for historic examples) is that in BTC the process plays itself out at an extremely accelarated pace. Maybe this is even what the creator(s) intended. Maybe they created a purely electronic ecosystem of speculative behaviour to be able to study and better understand the phenomenon of financial bubbles. This would certainly explain the 'Satoshi' entity's non-interference. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusions_and_the_Madness_of_Crowds http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusions...
- jackgolding 13y ago
  This is the kind of response I wanted to invoke - that you for your insight! I guess the closest 'real' currency examples would be something like http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=ZWD&to=USD&view=10Y http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=ZWD&to=USD&view=10Y

shubhamjain 13y ago

When Silkroad went down I expected bitcoin to take quite a slump but what has happened is contrary. I am not implying that anonymous transaction s for illegal use are the only thing bitcoins are good for but its my guess that it forms a major part of the group that actually use bitcoins for buying stuff. I am not sure why would anyone would get troubled in buying bitcoins for purchasing rather than punching a CC number. What is pushing its value, I am not sure but I am really spectical that it has to do with bitcoin's popularity.

Wingman4l7 13y ago
Bitcoin did take a hit, but it recovered fairly quickly.
- fragsworth 13y ago
  I think the simple explanation is that Silk Road's takedown increased Bitcoin's media coverage, which is leading to new buyers, which offsets whatever sell-off there might have been.
lingben 13y ago
silkroad 2.0 launched just recently
pera 13y ago
SilkRoad was important, but most important was its community (dkn255hz262ypmii.onion) that it's still online. You see, the most important things for the anonymous market are the WoT and the PGP pubkeys, and that's not illegal (at least until now). Additionally Black Market Reloaded was already very popular when SR was seized. I believe that what is pushing Bitcoins value is that many people call it "the credit card of the 21st century" and they are buying bitcoins as shares of the next Visa. EDIT: as wildgift said, there is no insurance in Bitcoin yet, but I'm sure that if Bitcoin starts being really popular we are going to start seeing online wallets with insurance provided by big corporations. CCs (as a technology) don't include insurance either...
- 13y ago

mtgx 13y ago

Bitcoins should lose 3 zeros, like many countries do to their currencies. So 1 new Bitcoin = 0.001 old Bitcoins = $0.3 I think I'd like that more than just starting naming them something else all of the sudden, and call them Satoshis or whatever, and then when the Bitcoin reaches $10,000 we'll probably have to use new names yet again. Cutting the zeros could be a little confusing at first, but I think less confusing than starting talking about Satoshis, or mCoins or whatever, all of the sudden.

dagurp 13y ago
What about 8 bitcoins = 1 bytecoin
- dxm 13y ago
  And 1 nibblecoin == 4 bitcoins.
dagurp 13y ago
What about 8 bitcoins = 1 bytecoin
user24 13y ago
people have suggested mBTC or "millibits". I think it's not something that can be mandated. A new terminology will naturally arise if the need is genuine.
- netcan 13y ago
  I don't think it'll be needed until/unless bitcoin stablises enough that people start quoting prices in bitcoin. Right now, advertising a computer at 3 bitcoins is not practical. The value of those bitcoins change to fast.
  - user24 13y ago
    > Right now, advertising a computer at 3 bitcoins is not practical. Only if you're seeing the "real" value as the USD. No-one says "$100 is meaningless because its conversion to Thai Baht varies so wildly". The only thing that will kill bitcoin is stability without utility.

phaed 13y ago

To the moon! ┗(°0°)┛

achalkley 13y ago
Amen.
- phaed 13y ago
  $320 now.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

ck2 13y ago

Somewhere buried on my hard drive I have a fraction of a bitcoin that people were giving out for free when bitcoin first came out to encourage adoption. I really need to find it, it's actually worth money now... ps. that pizza is now worth $3 Million

Tegran 13y ago
All you need to do is travel back to 2010 and visit this page: http://web.archive.org/web/20100703032414/http://freebitcoins.appspot.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20100703032414/http://freebitcoin... 5 free bitcoins for solving a captcha? Yes please!
valevk 13y ago
What about Ebay announcing that they might accept Bitcoins?
- nikcub 13y ago
  I've been buying up in the last week (previously I was in at 5, 10, 12$ and sold at the last peak at $240) because I think PayPal will jump in soonish.
theklub 13y ago
Yeah, I did the same exact thing. I have a few "lost" bitcoins from the early days.

vinchuco 13y ago

where do you personally buy/sell BTC ?

pera 13y ago
I prefer localbitcoin and bitcoin-otc, but I do have an verified account in MtGox.
- laichzeit0 13y ago
  I wouldn't trust Gox as far as I could throw a piano right now. I've been waiting more than 24 hours for a BTC withdrawal. It's not even showing up on blockchain.info yet. Search the forums there are a lot of people this is happening to. Some with more than 3 days. I'd be EXTREMELY cautious and suspicious about Mt.Gox right now. Make very sure you can get your BTC/USD out of Gox before you trust it.
  - nathanm412 13y ago
    3 days? People haven't been able to withdraw BTC to USD in months as far as I was aware. http://www.reddit.com/r/mtgox http://www.reddit.com/r/mtgox
    - laichzeit0 13y ago
      Not BTC to USD. Just plain BTC to my wallet. This is happening to a lot of people. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=324918.60 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=324918.60
  - pera 13y ago
    24 hours? but did you pay a fee? sometimes if you don't pay a fee it takes long time until some block includes your transaction, and specially when the difficulty of the network is high (like now).
valevk 13y ago
bitcoin.de if you are in Germany.

dwaltrip 13y ago

Damn. Sometimes I can't believe it. I have been following bitcoin quite closely for over 18 months now. The ecosystem is growing in ways only a few bold people have predicted. Fundamentally, it is about belief and trust. The protocol has largely proven itself. People are starting to believe in bitcoin. This is why the price is going up. For those who say "It isn't being used as a currency!" here is my response: Bitcoin excels as a secure protocol for tracking account balances in a decentralized, seemingly untamperable fashion, as well as transferring value very quickly to anywhere in the world at the sole, uncensorable discretion of the owner. It is both a payment protocol and a distributed ledger. A lot of people want these unique feautures, even if they can't buy groceries with it yet. Those types of merchants will always be the last to adopt. Bitcoin also has the pontential to be used in diverse ways as "progammable money". It has a built-in API, and features like timelock, mutli-entity transaction signing (built-in escrow), and others that I don't fully understand. An AI bot could utilize bitcoin (might have trouble with a bank account!). Also, see gold and its $8 trillion of largely made-up valuation (not stemming from industrial/ornamental demand). You don't see gold owners buying things with a few shavings ;) Bitcoin is far superior to gold in almost every way (it isn't quite as shiny tho). If society can make up several trillion dollars of monetary valuation for gold, then I definitely can picture bitcoin snagging a pretty decent slice (right now it is only 1/3,000 the size gold). People recognize this potential, and thus choose to invest. The first mover advantange is massive. Network effects are very important - it will take quite the innovation to unseat bitcoin, and it has to be something that can't be simply copied/integrated into the existing protocol. The whole thing is sort of a self-fullfilling positive feedback loop. I'm a cautiously strong proponent, and find it absolutely fascinating to watch. These kind of events don't unfold that often. TL;DR - magic internet money! Sorry for the multiple edits. I wrote this on my phone.

chii 13y ago
i wish bitcoin's equating with gold is going to last - but i believe that because bitcoin's uncontrollability (from the banker's point of view), it will be stamped out as soon as it threatens fiat currencies as the dominant means of transfer.
- 13y ago

seleucia 13y ago

This reminds me increasing at gold last year.

sojorn 13y ago

Is there any serious research paper on BTC (and not an enthusiast blog post)?

oscilloscope 13y ago
Yes, it was originally proposed in a paper. http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]

atmosx 13y ago

Awesome. I wish (as always) I hadn't sold mine earlier. But if I didn't I would probably sold them now and wait to see what happens. Thing is, this fluctuations are not connected with any sort of events that make sense or justify the price sky-rocketing which makes me think that the whole thing is driven, manually. When the whale leaves the sea, BTC will turn into peanuts. Till then...

pja 13y ago
It's something of a paradox isn't it: If nobody had ever sold their bitcoins in return for something else, then there would be no market for bitcoins at all and bitcoins would be irrelevant.

jaibot 13y ago

In this thread - people confusing up arrows with "good". (Rapid deflation is not a great thing for a currency in general)

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
jcfrei 13y ago
But it might be for a world reserve currency - and replace gold to a large extent.
Semaphor 13y ago
I'm wondering, is it as bad for a currency that still rather rarely get's used exclusively? I don't have a lot of economic knowledge (only what I learned in high school, though one of my majors was economics & politics; Germany, school until 13th grade) but it just seems to me that not all the normal rules would apply in the case of bitcoin.

grey-area 13y ago

If I had money in bitcoin I'd find this movement terrifying. It is not correlated with broader economic movements or the inflation rate of USD, and has all the classic hallmarks of a bubble, including true believers telling everyone it is different this time, increasingly wild oscillations, and exponential growth. I find bitcoin really interesting, love the idea of a cryptocurrency, and also find the idea of a deflationary currency interesting. I've no argument with that side of it. Obviously there are issues with things like exchanges which seem to be almost entirely run by amateurs who think that a VPS or leased server is secure enough for financial transactions, but those problems could go away in time, they are not inherent to the currency, though they're another reason to be cautious at present. However there are a few issues with the use of the currency which can't easily be fixed. What I find more troubling is the commitment to anonymity and lack of accountability from the creators - it is designed to allow anonymous transactions, and the users seem to be resistant to regulation. Those two things mean people can engage in bitcoin theft, fraud, laundering, cornering the market, setting up bogus or insecure exchanges/banks, with impunity and anonymity. Without proper regulation, insurance, compensation, which means identification of users and verification of transactions and everything that goes with that, I can't see bitcoin spreading beyond enthusiasts. I wouldn't use it for anything important because of the lack of regulation and controls, but do think it represents something of the future of currencies, after our latest experiment in hyper-inflationary fiat runs its course (see Fiat Money Inflation in France for a previous experiment). It'll be interesting to see if other cryptocurrencies are born which take a different direction and attempt to build in accountability and responsibility to secure transactions and allow them to be policed effectively by tying them to real world identity. Anyone know of any?

crassus 13y ago
According to the bubble theory of money, all money is a bubble. The bubbliness is what defines money - it is that which is irrationally overvalued. See[1] Bitcoin is money, Bitcoin is a bubble [1] http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2013/04/bitcoin-is-money-bitcoin-is-bubble.html http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2013/04/bitcoin...
gnerd 13y ago
When dealing with an entirely new concept, isn't everyone an amateur?

Kiro 13y ago

Brace for impact.

marginview 13y ago

it fails as a store of value and therefore is not money which is obvious given its volatility. Bitcoin is best described as a computer programme which sells itself on features written to provide assets to those with the mindset desiring such assets - libertarians, those anti fiat currencies, Austrian economists (more recently now gold is letting them down) etc... Such mindset are sure to only increase given the Wall St ownership of the Federal reserve so Bitcoin will continue to sell until its technology is made obsolte. If that takes years then bitcoin $100,000 soon enough but if tomorrow then hello bitcoin $0

VexXtreme 13y ago
What would make BTC obsolete?

adrianwaj 13y ago

I wouldn't say it's a bubble just yet, because it's too close to the last ramping which was a response to the Cyprus confiscations. This is just a response to what many would perceive as the beginnings of capital controls in the USA... it's probably the tail end of that. Another "Bitcoin Bubble" to me would be around $500 in the next few days... thus entailing some burst or large correction. http://www.foxbusiness.com/government/2013/10/17/jpmorgan-chase-denies-new-capital-controls-on-accounts/ http://www.foxbusiness.com/government/2013/10/17/jpmorgan-ch... A better word would be "recapitulation."

oleganza 13y ago
Last rally started at $14 and crashed into $100. This time we started at $140 around Silk Road shutdown. If this history repeats itself, the bubble may crash into whopping $1000.
- adrianwaj 13y ago
  The main argument I heard against bitcoin from a Russian tycoon during the Cyprus shenanigans for bitcoin being a good store of value was that there was no quick way to liquidate large sums of bitcoin if you wanted to (I presume into some fiat currency for spending.) An interesting point: it wasn't really about the currency losing value it was about liquidity. But the counter-thought is that it's better having a store of value that one can't spend than not having anything at all! At least time is on your side with bitcoin in terms of liquidity, it's not with fiat if you look at capital controls on the increase. Capital controls are an issue especially if you want to move between countries. Anyone with $100mil+ and not in bed with government should move into bitcoin and get a good anonymizer .. the rest of us just get a free ride. Assume some goverment will then come after (if not those bitcoins) then you. And so the end game of bitcoins is when goverment ends up with most of them (or at least wanting them.)
  - oleganza 13y ago
    Many people bet on Bitcoin becoming world money. Then you don't need to "liquidate" it at all. At the same time, market evolves: the more people invest tomorrow, the more btc you will be able to liquidate. When Bitcoin becomes a world currency, then capital controls wouldn't matter.

heliodor 13y ago

It seems to me the real price is lower as depicted by Coinbase or CampBX which have a stable and reliable system, unlike MtGox at the moment. I think the ~6% higher price on MtGox is a reflection of people's lack of trust in MtGox being able to provide withdrawals in a reliable and timely fashion.

csomar 13y ago

Hate BitCoin or like it. Let's agree, nobody can explain this; and nobody can predict BitCoin value or usage. Some top HN members criticized BitCoin heavily. I, for one, invested $0 in BitCoin. But we can be sure about something: Bitcoin is weird, new and innovative. It's something completely new and has no rules. The game is open. How the market will react will not depend on your limited (or wide) experience. Bitcoin can go all the way down to $0 and the rest is history. It can go up and widely used that it changes history. I'll be just watching though.

oleganza 13y ago
1. Bitcoin can be explained if you take time and study it. It has no new or strange constructs in it. Hash functions and digital signatures were around for decades. You may also like this glossary: https://github.com/oleganza/CoreBitcoin/blob/master/GLOSSARY.md https://github.com/oleganza/CoreBitcoin/blob/master/GLOSSARY... 2. Bitcoin has rules and those rules are strictly followed and very strictly specified in actual software.
- maxerickson 13y ago
  The block size blockchain fork was resolved on an ad hoc basis. There was nothing in the software to deal with it. Miners lost rewards over it (or at least, wasted cycles).
  - oleganza 13y ago
    Software has bugs. They need to be fixed and some people may lose money. This story only proves that incentives are correctly working in favour of everyone: miners voluntarily chose to lose rewards and stay compatible with the older network to not shake confidence in it. The point is not to have a perfect system (which is impossible), but to have proper motivations for everyone to play along instead of cheating and stealing.
    - maxerickson 13y ago
      Well, now we are running away from "strictly followed" and "very strictly specified". I guess I would be happy if you always posted a disclaimer with such claims, something like "But of course all software has bugs and who knows how severely a given bug in the bitcoin software will impact the network".

harshpotatoes 13y ago

So, I don't understand. Why does bitcoin have such high deflation? Is this just because there has been a constant stream of people switching their traditional currencies for bitcoins at a rate faster than bitcoins can be mined? Presumably at some point bitcoin will stop being deflationary if it ever wants to be useful as a currency. When does that happen? Why do people buy bitcoins if it isn't really useful as a currency yet? I mean, there are supposedly 3.5 billion USD worth of bitcoins in existence, but if I want to buy any sort of physical product or pay for utilities, I have to use a traditional currency. Currently it appears that bitcoins are most popularly used for less than legal purposes (payment for drugs, payment for services to avoid taxes, payment for blackhat services). Does this mean that by buying into bitcoin, I'm essentially providing USD to these black market activities which might not have had USD to begin with? Many questions I don't understand...