5 ms·

Bitcoin HITS $400

42 points by imd23 13y ago

taspeotis 13y ago
Bitcoin layperson here. What's the deal with the volatility?
- imd23 13y ago
  While it is really volatile, it is always going up and up. At least that seems to be the trend. This is a revolution. This is total free market. The rules are new and might not be near similar to any other trading.
  - Tarang 13y ago
    Yeah but its not all that good. People can use bitcoins for more than speculation. They go up and then no one wants to sell. If you check out certain areas on localbitcoins you'll find the sellers have disappeared. It's not good for liquidity. Imagine if it was doing a spike down and there were no buyers? Markets are two way streets.
  - grey-area 13y ago
    It's different this time?
    - jafaku 13y ago
      I don't know why people keep asking this question, other than to try to sound smart or experienced without much effort. Yes, it's pretty damn different this time. Else tell me: when was the last time you saw a decentralized distributed crypto-currency be born and take over the world?
      - grey-area 13y ago
        Markets, particularly unregulated or opaque ones, are often subject to volatility, exponential network effects, irrational exuberance, etc, and the most common excuse for that is 'this time it's different', which is your argument and that of the OP. Often, the explanation is just that crowds follow each other and/or those with a stake attempt manipulation. As a store of value, gaining value exponentially is a sign of danger, because it is clearly unsustainable, even in the short term. While it gains though it seems a one way bet and lots of people will take it, as they did during the south sea bubble, the railway bubble, the dotcom bubble, housing bubbles, tulips etc. Each time it was different, and we'd achieved a new paradigm where old rules no longer applied (and in some sense in each case this was true, but people got carried away). As a currency, volatility over hours, days and months is deadly - who wants to transact in a currency when you can't tell what the value of what you hold will be tomorrow or later today? As a currency, gaining value rapidly all the time is also difficult - who wants to transact in such a currency instead of just holding on to it and spending other currencies or bartering? It becomes more an investment than a currency (see gold when paper money is available). Still it's an interesting currency and I certainly wouldn't discount it (though it has not taken over the world just yet!) - just wary of irrational explanations for its huge rise in value over the last few months.
        jafaku 13y ago
        It's not a sign of danger in this case though, it's a sign of exponential adoption, which is exactly what's happening and is perfectly understandable for such a technological feat like Bitcoin. The same happened with many startups like Facebook: A lot of volatility in the beginning, exponential growth, IPO, stabilization. > As a currency, gaining value rapidly all the time is also difficult - who wants to transact in such a currency instead of just holding on to it and spending other currencies or bartering? That's another argument that keeps popping up and doesn't make sense, it's basically a myth. Economists and opinionologists dread this imaginary situation where people will starve before spending their deflationary coins. Hint: The world did just fine for thousands of years using gold. And no one starved to death with Bitcoin either yet. If you have other currencies to spend or stuff to sell, you could have used them to buy more Bitcoin, and use Bitcoin to buy whatever you need at whatever price it is at the moment, so not spending Bitcoin and spending other things instead doesn't make any sense either.
- M4v3R 13y ago
  It's just law of the market. Bitcoin has limited supply (only 21M will ever be "mined" and even less in circulation due to lost wallets) and ever growing demand. Most recently Chinese got interested in Bitcoin, so the demand grew even more, while the supply stayed the same. So simply put when there are less people that want to sell than people that want to buy [3], the prices rises. Also, as other person here suggested, Bitcoin mining difficulty has risen dramatically in past few months [2] thanks to new specialized hardware (ASICs) finally arriving to its buyers. This, while does not affect the price directly, shows that there is much faith put in the system by miners, which in turn encourages people to buy even more. It's also worth noting that the $400 price is only on MtGox, which is not considered as market leader anymore. What's more, the withdrawals from MtGox are counted in weeks or even months , so it's not a viable trading platform. If you want a reliable Bitcoin price, head over to BitcoinAverage [1] which does what the name implies - averages (and takes volume into consideration) the price over all major exchanges. They even have a button to exclude MtGox price from the calculations, as MtGox is always 10-20% higher than the rest. As of writing this post, the average price including MtGox is $380. [1] https://bitcoinaverage.com/ https://bitcoinaverage.com/ [2] http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-lin.png http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-lin.png (network hashrate now approaching 5 Terahash per second) [3] http://blockchained.com/depth_mtgox_15d.png http://blockchained.com/depth_mtgox_15d.png (on bottom chart: orange line is sum of all offers from people wanting to sell, green one is for people wanting to buy)
  - leokun 13y ago
    > only 21M will ever be "mined" and even less in circulation due to lost wallets But you can break bitcoins down into smaller increments than just 1. That must be significant in some way.
    - hcal 13y ago
      It is as significant as dollars breaking down into pennies. It allows for finer control in deals where the currency is the unit of account.
      - deanclatworthy 13y ago
- iSnow 13y ago
  Basically is is a very narrow market (~3.5b cap) and completely unregulated. So there is any amount of market manipulation. Furthermore, bitcoin holds the prospect of being deflationary - and this leads to a deflationary spiral right now.
- TomGullen 13y ago
  It's got a pretty small 'market cap' (not strictly the correct word regarding Bitcoin from what I understand but this is moot for your question) All Bitcoins are worth in the region of $4.5bn: http://blockchain.info/charts/market-cap http://blockchain.info/charts/market-cap Twitter is currently worth in the region of $23bn: http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/q?s=TWTR http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/q?s=TWTR (As a side point, this either makes Twitter look ridiculously over priced or Bitcoin ridiculously under priced...) Smaller valued assets are generally more sensitive to exterior influences. Bitcoin really is venturing into the unknown as well which means the news around Bitcoin can in itself be more volatile (you can have some very bullish news followed by some very bearish news on the same day). A lot of speculators in Bitcoin are amateurs as well (me included!). This lends itself to higher volatility as well as the owners of Bitcoin are more susceptible to act emotionally and induce a panic sell or greed driven buying frenzies. It's a nervous market that isn't worth a huge amount yet. Once more is known about it and once it reaches higher valuations it will bring more stability.
imd23 13y ago
More screenshots https://cloudup.com/icq8MzUMUGU https://cloudup.com/icq8MzUMUGU
saalweachter 13y ago
This is not a surprise. The bitcoin mining difficulty has ~doubled since October, when the price was ~$200. The price is currently pegged to the minimum profitable price for mining.
- sundaymorning 13y ago
  I don't see a mechanism for mining difficulty to affect bitcoin price.
  - dutchbrit 13y ago
    Governments can print money whenever they want. It's harder to saturate Bitcoins. Demand is rising more than the amount that it can be mined at. Pretty simple.
    - w0utert 13y ago
      That's not completely correct. Governments don't print money, central banks do. Governments still have have to sell bonds to actually have money to spend. The amount of money in circulation affects the interest on these bonds, but it's not as simple as saying governments can just print money without consequences (maybe it should be, but that's a different discussion).
      - jobigoud 13y ago
        > Governments don't print money, central banks do. I think most money is created by private banks, not central banks.
        w0utert 13y ago
        No, credit is created by private banks, but the money supply is controlled by central banks, for example like the FED does right now by scooping up assets (quantitative easing, ie: increasing the money supply). This is popularly called 'printing money' but obviously that just an allegory: nothing is actually 'printed', and the amount of currency (notes and coins) in circulation is completely unrelated to the money supply.
QuasiAlon 13y ago
I've read a handful of reports here in the past week about several site that got hacked and millions of dollars in bitcoins stolen. For the life of me I can't understand why someone would pay so much for something that can be taken away from him/her. Perhaps someone here can explain and enlighten me. Please.
- M4v3R 13y ago
  Those reports that you've read are basically the same as you would read that some small, obscure bank with anonymous owners was robbed and people lost their money. That doesn't tell you anything about the currency that was stored in this bank, but it tells you something about people that decided to put currency into it. Bitcoin as a protocol and technology proved itself to be rock-solid. People are already using it all around the worlds for many different purposes, from storing their wealth to buying subs in Subway. On the other hand, there are some Bitcoin services that are can be used to store your Bitcoin that are not exactly very secure or trustworthy. Most people advise against storing your Bitcoins in such services, as it has risks of either service operator or hackers to take your coins from their servers. Still, some people decide against these advices and still use these online wallets. You can't blame Bitcoin itself for that. There are more secure ways to store your Bitcoins, from printing your private keys on as a paper wallet and store it in a safe place where no one can reach it, to storing it on your computer, protected with a long, unique pass phase, to storing it in a web wallet like blockchain.info which doesn't store your coins directly, but encrypts the private key with your password before storing it on their servers.
  - bashcoder 13y ago
    > Those reports that you've read are basically the same as you would read that some small, obscure bank with anonymous owners was robbed and people lost their money. Except there's no such thing, so there are no such reports.
    - QuasiAlon 13y ago
      news reports...
onion2k 13y ago
The first mention of bitcoin on HN was 4 and a half years ago. You could have bought them at about $0.05 back then. I wish I'd been paying more attention.
- _wmd 13y ago
  Hindsight is a wonderful thing :) It's worth reminding yourself why you ignored it then, and (perhaps like some), continue ignoring it today.. I may be a reluctant Bitcoin user sometime in the future, but attempting to profit from its price movements is an inherently risky business, especially given the legal and tax grey area it entails in many parts of the world. If I'd held on to the BTC I bought in 2011 it'd be worth £20k right now, but I'm still glad I didn't, for all these reasons
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
  - manmal 13y ago
    Why? Assuming you are in the UK, couldn't you just pay VAT on it and be done with it?
- mike_esspe 13y ago
  Do you realize, that you still can buy it and get a 3-digits increase? :) Or lose. In that regard situation is the same as 4 years ago.
  - menato 13y ago
    Not exactly :) If we suppose that entire economy (which is nearly 70,000,000$M) is expressed in bitcoins (there will be 20M of it), then each bitcoin would cost 3.5$M. Started from order of 4e-2, it is now traded around 4e2, so it have done half-way (in logarithmic scale) to 4e6 -- its potential limit value.
lelf 13y ago
Hello, is it HN? What's problem with just "http://bitcoinity.org/markets/mtgox/USD" http://bitcoinity.org/markets/mtgox/USD"? Or even better http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg2zig15-minztgOzm1g10zm2g25zv http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg2zig15-minztgOzm1...
- olalonde 13y ago
  Or even better, we stop quoting the MtGox price since it is artificially inflated due to delays with cash withdrawals. This is the graph I personally use: http://bitcoinwisdom.com/markets/bitstamp/btcusd http://bitcoinwisdom.com/markets/bitstamp/btcusd
  - waterlesscloud 13y ago
    The idea that Gox is artificially high is outdated, not that it made sense anyway. In any case, why not quote the highest volume exchange, BTCChina? It's usually Gox price or slightly higher.
tostitos1979 13y ago
Tulips, anyone?
skrause 13y ago
As someone not invested in Bitcoin I'm just curiously waiting for the day when someone discovers a serious cryptographical weakness which makes all Bitcoins suddenly worthless. Has there been any advance in finding flaws in Bitcoin already?
- easy_rider 13y ago
  Nice one, as someone who almost invested 2k of his savings when it went from $2 to $20, I'm also very interested in a projected failure of the entire system. No envy in play here at all. /edit Hint: You could always start accepting bitcoin payments. the long term trend seems to be up. There is still money to be made from speculating on this without selling your house for BTC.
- jafaku 13y ago
  > As someone not invested in Bitcoin I'm just curiously waiting for the day when someone discovers a serious cryptographical weakness which makes all Bitcoins suddenly worthless. Typical hater... > Has there been any advance in finding flaws in Bitcoin already? No. So far we just have people who only understand Cryptography, or only understand Game Theory, or only understand Economics, or even none of those, creating inflammatory blog posts on why Bitcoin is doomed and should die any minute. But the reality is... Bitcoin users not affected!
Luc 13y ago
Anyone have recommendations for books about financial bubbles? I have a few bitcoin and I believe it is a legitimate currency, but I'm feeling uneasy with the 'this time it's different' reasoning which is supposed to justify its current runup. Amazon reviews aren't being particularly helpful; there isn't a book that stands out in my searches so far. I'll probably order 'Manias, Panics and Crashes' by Kindleberger & Aliber ( http://www.amazon.com/Manias-Panics-Crashes-History-Financial-ebook/dp/B007OSIOWM/ http://www.amazon.com/Manias-Panics-Crashes-History-Financia... ) EDIT: Thank you all for your excellent suggestions!
- jafaku 13y ago
  http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2013/04/bitcoin-is-money-bitcoin-is-bubble.html http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2013/04/bitcoin... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHUPPYzzZrI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHUPPYzzZrI
  - Luc 13y ago
    Thanks. I didn't watch the video yet, but I've read the article before. What I'm wondering is whether the bubble is stable, or inflating above the eventual equilibrium (and more importantly, deflating by the time I want to convert to another currency). I have a feeling the current lawlessness has a lot to do with the value attached to bitcoin, and that probably won't last.
    - jafaku 13y ago
      It's not really a bubble (other than in the sense given to it in the article) and it's definitely not above the eventual equilibrium. The video explains it very well.
      - Luc 13y ago
        I'll watch the video, but I'd rather make up my own mind and look at source material, scholarly research and history as much as possible.
- 13y ago
pyalot2 13y ago
I like bitcoin, I do, but, please stop posting prices.

Bitcoin HITS $400

42 points by imd23 13y ago

taspeotis 13y ago

Bitcoin layperson here. What's the deal with the volatility?

imd23 13y ago
While it is really volatile, it is always going up and up. At least that seems to be the trend. This is a revolution. This is total free market. The rules are new and might not be near similar to any other trading.
- Tarang 13y ago
  Yeah but its not all that good. People can use bitcoins for more than speculation. They go up and then no one wants to sell. If you check out certain areas on localbitcoins you'll find the sellers have disappeared. It's not good for liquidity. Imagine if it was doing a spike down and there were no buyers? Markets are two way streets.
- grey-area 13y ago
  It's different this time?
  - jafaku 13y ago
    I don't know why people keep asking this question, other than to try to sound smart or experienced without much effort. Yes, it's pretty damn different this time. Else tell me: when was the last time you saw a decentralized distributed crypto-currency be born and take over the world?
    - grey-area 13y ago
      Markets, particularly unregulated or opaque ones, are often subject to volatility, exponential network effects, irrational exuberance, etc, and the most common excuse for that is 'this time it's different', which is your argument and that of the OP. Often, the explanation is just that crowds follow each other and/or those with a stake attempt manipulation. As a store of value, gaining value exponentially is a sign of danger, because it is clearly unsustainable, even in the short term. While it gains though it seems a one way bet and lots of people will take it, as they did during the south sea bubble, the railway bubble, the dotcom bubble, housing bubbles, tulips etc. Each time it was different, and we'd achieved a new paradigm where old rules no longer applied (and in some sense in each case this was true, but people got carried away). As a currency, volatility over hours, days and months is deadly - who wants to transact in a currency when you can't tell what the value of what you hold will be tomorrow or later today? As a currency, gaining value rapidly all the time is also difficult - who wants to transact in such a currency instead of just holding on to it and spending other currencies or bartering? It becomes more an investment than a currency (see gold when paper money is available). Still it's an interesting currency and I certainly wouldn't discount it (though it has not taken over the world just yet!) - just wary of irrational explanations for its huge rise in value over the last few months.
      - jafaku 13y ago
        It's not a sign of danger in this case though, it's a sign of exponential adoption, which is exactly what's happening and is perfectly understandable for such a technological feat like Bitcoin. The same happened with many startups like Facebook: A lot of volatility in the beginning, exponential growth, IPO, stabilization. > As a currency, gaining value rapidly all the time is also difficult - who wants to transact in such a currency instead of just holding on to it and spending other currencies or bartering? That's another argument that keeps popping up and doesn't make sense, it's basically a myth. Economists and opinionologists dread this imaginary situation where people will starve before spending their deflationary coins. Hint: The world did just fine for thousands of years using gold. And no one starved to death with Bitcoin either yet. If you have other currencies to spend or stuff to sell, you could have used them to buy more Bitcoin, and use Bitcoin to buy whatever you need at whatever price it is at the moment, so not spending Bitcoin and spending other things instead doesn't make any sense either.
M4v3R 13y ago
It's just law of the market. Bitcoin has limited supply (only 21M will ever be "mined" and even less in circulation due to lost wallets) and ever growing demand. Most recently Chinese got interested in Bitcoin, so the demand grew even more, while the supply stayed the same. So simply put when there are less people that want to sell than people that want to buy [3], the prices rises. Also, as other person here suggested, Bitcoin mining difficulty has risen dramatically in past few months [2] thanks to new specialized hardware (ASICs) finally arriving to its buyers. This, while does not affect the price directly, shows that there is much faith put in the system by miners, which in turn encourages people to buy even more. It's also worth noting that the $400 price is only on MtGox, which is not considered as market leader anymore. What's more, the withdrawals from MtGox are counted in weeks or even months , so it's not a viable trading platform. If you want a reliable Bitcoin price, head over to BitcoinAverage [1] which does what the name implies - averages (and takes volume into consideration) the price over all major exchanges. They even have a button to exclude MtGox price from the calculations, as MtGox is always 10-20% higher than the rest. As of writing this post, the average price including MtGox is $380. [1] https://bitcoinaverage.com/ https://bitcoinaverage.com/ [2] http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-lin.png http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-lin.png (network hashrate now approaching 5 Terahash per second) [3] http://blockchained.com/depth_mtgox_15d.png http://blockchained.com/depth_mtgox_15d.png (on bottom chart: orange line is sum of all offers from people wanting to sell, green one is for people wanting to buy)
- leokun 13y ago
  > only 21M will ever be "mined" and even less in circulation due to lost wallets But you can break bitcoins down into smaller increments than just 1. That must be significant in some way.
  - hcal 13y ago
    It is as significant as dollars breaking down into pennies. It allows for finer control in deals where the currency is the unit of account.
    - deanclatworthy 13y ago
iSnow 13y ago
Basically is is a very narrow market (~3.5b cap) and completely unregulated. So there is any amount of market manipulation. Furthermore, bitcoin holds the prospect of being deflationary - and this leads to a deflationary spiral right now.
TomGullen 13y ago
It's got a pretty small 'market cap' (not strictly the correct word regarding Bitcoin from what I understand but this is moot for your question) All Bitcoins are worth in the region of $4.5bn: http://blockchain.info/charts/market-cap http://blockchain.info/charts/market-cap Twitter is currently worth in the region of $23bn: http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/q?s=TWTR http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/q?s=TWTR (As a side point, this either makes Twitter look ridiculously over priced or Bitcoin ridiculously under priced...) Smaller valued assets are generally more sensitive to exterior influences. Bitcoin really is venturing into the unknown as well which means the news around Bitcoin can in itself be more volatile (you can have some very bullish news followed by some very bearish news on the same day). A lot of speculators in Bitcoin are amateurs as well (me included!). This lends itself to higher volatility as well as the owners of Bitcoin are more susceptible to act emotionally and induce a panic sell or greed driven buying frenzies. It's a nervous market that isn't worth a huge amount yet. Once more is known about it and once it reaches higher valuations it will bring more stability.

imd23 13y ago

More screenshots https://cloudup.com/icq8MzUMUGU https://cloudup.com/icq8MzUMUGU

saalweachter 13y ago

This is not a surprise. The bitcoin mining difficulty has ~doubled since October, when the price was ~$200. The price is currently pegged to the minimum profitable price for mining.

sundaymorning 13y ago
I don't see a mechanism for mining difficulty to affect bitcoin price.
- dutchbrit 13y ago
  Governments can print money whenever they want. It's harder to saturate Bitcoins. Demand is rising more than the amount that it can be mined at. Pretty simple.
  - w0utert 13y ago
    That's not completely correct. Governments don't print money, central banks do. Governments still have have to sell bonds to actually have money to spend. The amount of money in circulation affects the interest on these bonds, but it's not as simple as saying governments can just print money without consequences (maybe it should be, but that's a different discussion).
    - jobigoud 13y ago
      > Governments don't print money, central banks do. I think most money is created by private banks, not central banks.
      - w0utert 13y ago
        No, credit is created by private banks, but the money supply is controlled by central banks, for example like the FED does right now by scooping up assets (quantitative easing, ie: increasing the money supply). This is popularly called 'printing money' but obviously that just an allegory: nothing is actually 'printed', and the amount of currency (notes and coins) in circulation is completely unrelated to the money supply.

QuasiAlon 13y ago

I've read a handful of reports here in the past week about several site that got hacked and millions of dollars in bitcoins stolen. For the life of me I can't understand why someone would pay so much for something that can be taken away from him/her. Perhaps someone here can explain and enlighten me. Please.

M4v3R 13y ago
Those reports that you've read are basically the same as you would read that some small, obscure bank with anonymous owners was robbed and people lost their money. That doesn't tell you anything about the currency that was stored in this bank, but it tells you something about people that decided to put currency into it. Bitcoin as a protocol and technology proved itself to be rock-solid. People are already using it all around the worlds for many different purposes, from storing their wealth to buying subs in Subway. On the other hand, there are some Bitcoin services that are can be used to store your Bitcoin that are not exactly very secure or trustworthy. Most people advise against storing your Bitcoins in such services, as it has risks of either service operator or hackers to take your coins from their servers. Still, some people decide against these advices and still use these online wallets. You can't blame Bitcoin itself for that. There are more secure ways to store your Bitcoins, from printing your private keys on as a paper wallet and store it in a safe place where no one can reach it, to storing it on your computer, protected with a long, unique pass phase, to storing it in a web wallet like blockchain.info which doesn't store your coins directly, but encrypts the private key with your password before storing it on their servers.
- bashcoder 13y ago
  > Those reports that you've read are basically the same as you would read that some small, obscure bank with anonymous owners was robbed and people lost their money. Except there's no such thing, so there are no such reports.
  - QuasiAlon 13y ago
    news reports...

onion2k 13y ago

The first mention of bitcoin on HN was 4 and a half years ago. You could have bought them at about $0.05 back then. I wish I'd been paying more attention.

_wmd 13y ago
Hindsight is a wonderful thing :) It's worth reminding yourself why you ignored it then, and (perhaps like some), continue ignoring it today.. I may be a reluctant Bitcoin user sometime in the future, but attempting to profit from its price movements is an inherently risky business, especially given the legal and tax grey area it entails in many parts of the world. If I'd held on to the BTC I bought in 2011 it'd be worth £20k right now, but I'm still glad I didn't, for all these reasons
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- manmal 13y ago
  Why? Assuming you are in the UK, couldn't you just pay VAT on it and be done with it?
mike_esspe 13y ago
Do you realize, that you still can buy it and get a 3-digits increase? :) Or lose. In that regard situation is the same as 4 years ago.
- menato 13y ago
  Not exactly :) If we suppose that entire economy (which is nearly 70,000,000$M) is expressed in bitcoins (there will be 20M of it), then each bitcoin would cost 3.5$M. Started from order of 4e-2, it is now traded around 4e2, so it have done half-way (in logarithmic scale) to 4e6 -- its potential limit value.

lelf 13y ago

Hello, is it HN? What's problem with just "http://bitcoinity.org/markets/mtgox/USD" http://bitcoinity.org/markets/mtgox/USD"? Or even better http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg2zig15-minztgOzm1g10zm2g25zv http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg2zig15-minztgOzm1...

olalonde 13y ago
Or even better, we stop quoting the MtGox price since it is artificially inflated due to delays with cash withdrawals. This is the graph I personally use: http://bitcoinwisdom.com/markets/bitstamp/btcusd http://bitcoinwisdom.com/markets/bitstamp/btcusd
- waterlesscloud 13y ago
  The idea that Gox is artificially high is outdated, not that it made sense anyway. In any case, why not quote the highest volume exchange, BTCChina? It's usually Gox price or slightly higher.

tostitos1979 13y ago

Tulips, anyone?

skrause 13y ago

As someone not invested in Bitcoin I'm just curiously waiting for the day when someone discovers a serious cryptographical weakness which makes all Bitcoins suddenly worthless. Has there been any advance in finding flaws in Bitcoin already?

easy_rider 13y ago
Nice one, as someone who almost invested 2k of his savings when it went from $2 to $20, I'm also very interested in a projected failure of the entire system. No envy in play here at all. /edit Hint: You could always start accepting bitcoin payments. the long term trend seems to be up. There is still money to be made from speculating on this without selling your house for BTC.
jafaku 13y ago
> As someone not invested in Bitcoin I'm just curiously waiting for the day when someone discovers a serious cryptographical weakness which makes all Bitcoins suddenly worthless. Typical hater... > Has there been any advance in finding flaws in Bitcoin already? No. So far we just have people who only understand Cryptography, or only understand Game Theory, or only understand Economics, or even none of those, creating inflammatory blog posts on why Bitcoin is doomed and should die any minute. But the reality is... Bitcoin users not affected!

Luc 13y ago

Anyone have recommendations for books about financial bubbles? I have a few bitcoin and I believe it is a legitimate currency, but I'm feeling uneasy with the 'this time it's different' reasoning which is supposed to justify its current runup. Amazon reviews aren't being particularly helpful; there isn't a book that stands out in my searches so far. I'll probably order 'Manias, Panics and Crashes' by Kindleberger & Aliber ( http://www.amazon.com/Manias-Panics-Crashes-History-Financial-ebook/dp/B007OSIOWM/ http://www.amazon.com/Manias-Panics-Crashes-History-Financia... ) EDIT: Thank you all for your excellent suggestions!

jafaku 13y ago
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2013/04/bitcoin-is-money-bitcoin-is-bubble.html http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2013/04/bitcoin... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHUPPYzzZrI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHUPPYzzZrI
- Luc 13y ago
  Thanks. I didn't watch the video yet, but I've read the article before. What I'm wondering is whether the bubble is stable, or inflating above the eventual equilibrium (and more importantly, deflating by the time I want to convert to another currency). I have a feeling the current lawlessness has a lot to do with the value attached to bitcoin, and that probably won't last.
  - jafaku 13y ago
    It's not really a bubble (other than in the sense given to it in the article) and it's definitely not above the eventual equilibrium. The video explains it very well.
    - Luc 13y ago
      I'll watch the video, but I'd rather make up my own mind and look at source material, scholarly research and history as much as possible.
13y ago

pyalot2 13y ago

I like bitcoin, I do, but, please stop posting prices.