7 ms·

Bitcoin $645? Yeah, That’s Totally Reasonable

28 points by vyrotek 13y ago

johnrob 13y ago
Bitcoin is a currency. Shouldn't we be more interested in the number purchases made with it instead of the current exchange value?
- phaed 13y ago
  Not yet.
- craigyk 13y ago
  Yup, despite what it's advocates say, it sure isn't behaving like a currency. Major requirement of currency: very-low volatility.
  - applecore 13y ago
    There are a number of currencies that experienced ridiculous levels of hyperinflation over the years. When is a currency a currency? Until it isn't?
    - Jtsummers 13y ago
      Many currencies lack stability (meaning some low % inflation/deflation(?)). I think it would be reasonable to contend that almost anything could be a currency or used as one, but stability makes for more effective currencies. While the value of BTC vs USD (or other established currencies) continues to explode, it makes it more difficult to use as a currency proper (rather than as a commodity/investment). If you have 10 BTC, it'd be difficult to spend 0.05 BTC (over 30 USD now) on a good (not a necessity) when it seems like in a week you could spend 0.03 BTC for the same thing.
      - craigyk 13y ago
        yes, I left out the 'effective' adjective. Or I should have put currency in sarcastic quotes.
- exit 13y ago
  is it a currency? is it a commodity? it may be something new which doesn't fit into existing categories.
- ISL 13y ago
  It's a thing. At the moment, some people are willing to trade ~600 cheeseburgers for one of them.
- a3voices 13y ago
  It's more like gold than a typical currency, due to its scarcity (20 million Bitcoins will be mined ever).
- VLM 13y ago
  Transfers. The overall transfer market utilizes 100 BTC (made up) and the overall transfer market at any given instant is worth $65000 (made up) therefore the average price on the transfer market is $650, although that doesn't mean anything to anyone in the transfer market. If the price collapsed to $10 tomorrow, then the international transfer market would still be worth $65000 at any given instant (duh, unless world trade collapses), it would just require 6500 BTC instead of 100 BTC. If the market can't provide 6500 BTC at $10 (I don't think it can..) then the market clearing price will rise until the transfer market obtains its average $65000. The buy and hold and the pump and dump crowds get all confused about what it means. The current exchange value on the open market has to remain constant-ish for months because of middlemen. So I ordered a Debian branded swiss army knife and the whole transaction must have taken months, I'd be pretty pissed if the exchange rate from $ to swiss francs or whatever it was varied much. On the other hand as a replacement for Western Union to send cash to Mexico or whatever, I guess the value needs to remain constant for what, like 10 minutes?
massarog 13y ago
Looks like half the sites are down/have issues. Can't even login to my coinbase account without getting errors.
- aestra 13y ago
  They aren't sending me out SMS verification codes.
ISL 13y ago
Logarithmic plots! A better way to look at a quantity which has changed so much is to use a logarithm. http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#tgSzm1g10zm2g25zvzl http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#tgSzm1g10zm2g25zvzl
Everlag 13y ago
I think it is telling that in the time from when this was posted to this reply, bitcoin is up to 668.5. This is a bubble, anyone who thinks otherwise doesn't understand that people make an effectively stupid amount of money by using bitcoin as a pump and dump scheme. If you think this bubble is helping bitcoin as a currency, then you are terrifically incorrect. For all the good that bitcoin is capable of, how the hell do you base a payment system around something that has no price stability?
- a3voices 13y ago
  Actually Bitcoin is following strong exponential growth from its inception. It's no more a bubble than Facebook is.
- ISL 13y ago
  Agreed. I'd like to purchase a cheese sandwich at my local BTC-accepting food truck, but I'm going to skip it this week precisely because I might be able to buy twice as many (or half as many) sandwiches next week. Things are so volatile this week, that even nearly-instantaneous transactions USD-->BTC-->BTC-->USD (whose utility isn't affected by the price of 1 BTC) aren't guaranteed to happen as expected. Better to wait a week for things to chill out. They will.
- wellboy 13y ago
  You need to understand what a bubble is and what isn't. It's a bubble when bets are made on things that have nothing backing up their immense valuation. Now, you need some smartness to understand that the value in currencies is not in it´s physical value ($100 are worth maybe $0.02 in physical value), but how many people use it. Millions of people now use bitcoin, thousands of businesses have started accepting bitcoin over the past 6 months. In a year these numbers will be 50-fold. Things that people use a lot, are not bubbles. Also, this doesn't take into consideration the potential, which is a major factor determining a valuation. And that is that Bitcoin or something similar has the potential to replace all banks and all currencies entirely. EDIT: Changed "don't have an underlying value" to have nothing backing up their immense valuation". And sorry I was a bit angry, but I've read it now a hundred times on hackernews over the past 2 years, we're in a bubble here, we're in a bubble there. It is not a bubble, when millions and millions of people are using it. The 2000 bubble was a bubble because there were 300M internet users at the time. Now we have 2B, that's the difference.
MarkPNeyer 13y ago
i'm not sure whether this current bitcoin price run is a bubble or just the currency becoming more valuable as it gains more attention and recognition from world governments. my guess is that a downward correction is coming soon. either way, though, i'm certain that in the long run, the currency is worth much more than the $600 it trades at now. the model i'm using is BTC as a new form of gold. the current value of all the gold in the world, by my primitive calculation, is around 4 trillion. if all the bitcoins in circulation eventually reach a quarter of that value - which i think is totally realistic, most likely an underestimate, that puts the price per bitcoin at over $100k, a number that already seemed reasonable to me. my guess is it'll be there in less than 10 years. anybody want over / under?
- jjsz 13y ago
  Me neither but I gambled .XX BTC into it before it exploded in reddit than mainstream online articles.
a3voices 13y ago
It's not a bubble. It's very fast growth. http://i.imgur.com/qgT9vxx.png http://i.imgur.com/qgT9vxx.png
vijayboyapati 13y ago
This is what the real-time monetization of a good looks like. In the early stages you have massive price increases until there is enough liquidity and volatility declines. Bitcoin looks like a bubble, but money is inherently a bubble phenomena: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2013/04/bitcoin-is-money-bitcoin-is-bubble.html http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2013/04/bitcoin...
- exit 13y ago
  the author of the article you link to set up a donation address and received 1.159 btc on the same day, currently worth 678.52 usd.
  - vijayboyapati 13y ago
    He actually received a total of a little more than 19 bitcoins. He's a very popular and respected blogger among libertarian circles. One of the most well read (of history and economics) authors I've come across.
JanezStupar 13y ago
How does one short bitcoin? Any proxies?
- tlrobinson 13y ago
  I don't care how bearish you are on Bitcoin, you'd have to be crazy to short it.
  - JanezStupar 13y ago
    Indeed. However I think that buying or holding bitcoin is just as crazy. This is strictly a mental experiment. There is no way I am putting any kind of money into this market on any side.
- Moral_ 13y ago
  Shorting bitcoin doesn't really make any sense. You can't loan someone bitcoins and if you could, how would you get them back? So no.
  - CamperBob2 13y ago
    You can't loan someone bitcoins Someone should probably start working on that.
    - simlevesque 13y ago
      You can do it using Ripple with trust lines.
  - VLM 13y ago
    "You can't loan someone bitcoins and if you could, how would you get them back?" Why do you say that? MPEx has been doing that for 3 years. As for how you get "them" back that is pretty obvious. How long would a margin call take with a digital currency, like 2 ms or something?
  - tlrobinson 13y ago
    Of course you can loan Bitcoin, why wouldn't you be able to?
baddox 13y ago
Unsurprisingly, the author makes no attempt to show why any BTC to USD exchange rate should be considered reasonable or unreasonable.
corysama 13y ago
Viewed on a log scale, it's clear that $650 is too high. But, it's not quite as outlandish as the linear plot implies. http://i.imgur.com/GOYWUMo.png http://i.imgur.com/GOYWUMo.png According to that armchair-financier line fitting, the trend is for the price to still be below $300. What's more interesting is the long term trend of 10X price increase every 12.5 months for the past 3+ years running. Disclaimer: past performance is not an indicator of anything.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- ISL 13y ago
  It's clear that such a slope is unsustainable in the long term. If bitcoin continues its growth, with a $5B market cap now, and a ~$100T world GDP, it's clear that there's, at most, another four orders of magnitude to go. And, given that perhaps a few thousand collectors are each willing to pay a few dollars to own most of the world's BTC, there's perhaps six orders of magnitude of room for the price to fall.
  - a3voices 13y ago
    I agree it's unsustainable forever, but I see it as analogous to Facebook when its market cap. was only $6 billion or so.
  - corysama 13y ago
    Agreed. Even if it doesn't die, it's going to S-curve at some point. The range between $1000-$10,000 is going to be interesting times. At that point, a lot of the early hobbyists are going to be holding minor life-changing amounts of potential money ($10Ks-$100Ks). Even with the forecast of continued exponential growth, it's will be the smart move for a lot of people to "take some off the table" and cash out a significant portion of whatever they've been hoarding.
conductr 13y ago
That article fails to mention what is going on in China right now which, whatever it is, is driving the price
- conductr 13y ago
  Saw this gem on the front page, it goes in more detail about China and BTC http://www.coindesk.com/china-leading-global-rise-bitcoin/ http://www.coindesk.com/china-leading-global-rise-bitcoin/
mrb 13y ago
If you compare Tulip Mania to the world's first decentralized, censorship-resistant, inflation-resistant, digital currency, then you don't understand Bitcoin. At all. Combine this with absolutely zero efforts to estimate the worth of the Bitcoin system, how Bitcoin is used today, etc. That's the difference between being published at Techcrunch and more prestigious publications like http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/31/technology/bitcoin-pursues-the-mainstream.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/31/technology/bitcoin-pursues... or http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/11/08/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-bitcoin-bubble/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/11/08...
- maxerickson 13y ago
  If in, say, 5 years, you turn out to be hilariously wrong, will you eat your bitcoins?
  - moocowduckquack 13y ago
    I expect bitcoin to crash and burn at some point. But that is because I think bitcoin has flaws that make it likely to be replaced by future crypto-currencies, or possibly something weirder. Until those currencies exist and gain traction however, bitcoin is going to get bigger. A lot bigger. I don't think this is even that stupid a time to buy, I strongly suspect that there is at least another 10x growth still there, a $10,000 bitcoin price within 3 years would not shock me at all.
  - mrb 13y ago
    Let me clarify my position: the utility of decentralized digital currencies on society is so enormous that it is inevitable that they will succeed. Decentralized digital financial transactions are an invention as big as the Internet. Is it Bitcoin that will succeed, or some other cryptocurrency? I don't know, but it has a good shot at it because it has the first-mover advantage and benefits from network effect.
    - rafcavallaro 13y ago
      By the same utility argument there should be no nuclear weapons, an all out push for zero emissions energy, and world peace, but don't hold your breath. There are existing, very powerful stakeholders such as the governments and militaries of numerous world powers who would far prefer that financial transactions not be anonymous. Tech folk sometimes forget that their bodies live in meat space, not cyberspace, and whoever controls the guys with weapons (i.e., controls police and armies) controls meat space.
VMG 13y ago
other things that are completely unreasonable and yet seem to exist: the internet
tlrobinson 13y ago
So how exactly does one come up with a "reasonable" price for Bitcoin? Why is $100 any more "reasonable" than $645?
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- VikingCoder 13y ago
  So how exactly does one come up with a "reasonable" price for anything? Why is $10 for a chicken any more "reasonable" than $10,000? Things have value because we (collectively) believe they do. Currency is a numbering system. In practical terms, what matters is how easy are the numbers to use, and what's the relative value of one thing versus another. And if you think we can rationally decide how many chickens a hip placement is worth, you're still nuts.
  - junto 13y ago
    Surely price is comparative? If you only earn $10 a week then $10 for a chicken is expensive, but if you earn $1000 a week then that chicken is pretty cheap.
    - VikingCoder 13y ago
      Why does one guy earn $10 a week, and the other guy earns $1000 a week? No, seriously. Nothing is stable in an economy. Everything is dynamic. Everything is relative. Everything is a shared delusion. Luckily, most people buy into it, most of the time. When that fails, you get massive inflation.
IanChiles 13y ago
Now I'm just a little bit disappointed I didn't buy any when I first heard of them... But this feels like the same bubble Bitcoin has had twice before - it spikes then plummets, but it plummets to a point higher than the last drop
cft 13y ago
Coinbase: Note! We've exceeded our normal buy limits for today. If you would still like to purchase you will receive the market price of bitcoin on Friday Nov 22, 2013 at 11:01AM PST after your funds have arrived. The price is rapidly dropping, lost nearly 10% now from today's peak.
- ISL 13y ago
  Good for Coinbase. It's in their interests to remain solvent, and to encourage moderation. I really liked having my desire to buy tempered by their ~week-timescale delays in the past. (That said, if you really want to buy, keep trying, Coinbase's buy limit opens and shuts sometimes.)
robius 13y ago
This is just the beginning of the tides turning. This huge jump is just a few thousand Chinese investors coming online. More will come. Next think about when another country gets its own exchange, say India. Expect more large jumps before things settle down.

28 points by vyrotek 13y ago

Bitcoin is a currency. Shouldn't we be more interested in the number purchases made with it instead of the current exchange value?

phaed 13y ago
Not yet.
craigyk 13y ago
Yup, despite what it's advocates say, it sure isn't behaving like a currency. Major requirement of currency: very-low volatility.
- applecore 13y ago
  There are a number of currencies that experienced ridiculous levels of hyperinflation over the years. When is a currency a currency? Until it isn't?
  - Jtsummers 13y ago
    Many currencies lack stability (meaning some low % inflation/deflation(?)). I think it would be reasonable to contend that almost anything could be a currency or used as one, but stability makes for more effective currencies. While the value of BTC vs USD (or other established currencies) continues to explode, it makes it more difficult to use as a currency proper (rather than as a commodity/investment). If you have 10 BTC, it'd be difficult to spend 0.05 BTC (over 30 USD now) on a good (not a necessity) when it seems like in a week you could spend 0.03 BTC for the same thing.
    - craigyk 13y ago
      yes, I left out the 'effective' adjective. Or I should have put currency in sarcastic quotes.
exit 13y ago
is it a currency? is it a commodity? it may be something new which doesn't fit into existing categories.
ISL 13y ago
It's a thing. At the moment, some people are willing to trade ~600 cheeseburgers for one of them.
a3voices 13y ago
It's more like gold than a typical currency, due to its scarcity (20 million Bitcoins will be mined ever).
VLM 13y ago
Transfers. The overall transfer market utilizes 100 BTC (made up) and the overall transfer market at any given instant is worth $65000 (made up) therefore the average price on the transfer market is $650, although that doesn't mean anything to anyone in the transfer market. If the price collapsed to $10 tomorrow, then the international transfer market would still be worth $65000 at any given instant (duh, unless world trade collapses), it would just require 6500 BTC instead of 100 BTC. If the market can't provide 6500 BTC at $10 (I don't think it can..) then the market clearing price will rise until the transfer market obtains its average $65000. The buy and hold and the pump and dump crowds get all confused about what it means. The current exchange value on the open market has to remain constant-ish for months because of middlemen. So I ordered a Debian branded swiss army knife and the whole transaction must have taken months, I'd be pretty pissed if the exchange rate from $ to swiss francs or whatever it was varied much. On the other hand as a replacement for Western Union to send cash to Mexico or whatever, I guess the value needs to remain constant for what, like 10 minutes?

massarog 13y ago

Looks like half the sites are down/have issues. Can't even login to my coinbase account without getting errors.

aestra 13y ago
They aren't sending me out SMS verification codes.

ISL 13y ago

Logarithmic plots! A better way to look at a quantity which has changed so much is to use a logarithm. http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#tgSzm1g10zm2g25zvzl http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#tgSzm1g10zm2g25zvzl

Everlag 13y ago

I think it is telling that in the time from when this was posted to this reply, bitcoin is up to 668.5. This is a bubble, anyone who thinks otherwise doesn't understand that people make an effectively stupid amount of money by using bitcoin as a pump and dump scheme. If you think this bubble is helping bitcoin as a currency, then you are terrifically incorrect. For all the good that bitcoin is capable of, how the hell do you base a payment system around something that has no price stability?

a3voices 13y ago
Actually Bitcoin is following strong exponential growth from its inception. It's no more a bubble than Facebook is.
ISL 13y ago
Agreed. I'd like to purchase a cheese sandwich at my local BTC-accepting food truck, but I'm going to skip it this week precisely because I might be able to buy twice as many (or half as many) sandwiches next week. Things are so volatile this week, that even nearly-instantaneous transactions USD-->BTC-->BTC-->USD (whose utility isn't affected by the price of 1 BTC) aren't guaranteed to happen as expected. Better to wait a week for things to chill out. They will.
wellboy 13y ago
You need to understand what a bubble is and what isn't. It's a bubble when bets are made on things that have nothing backing up their immense valuation. Now, you need some smartness to understand that the value in currencies is not in it´s physical value ($100 are worth maybe $0.02 in physical value), but how many people use it. Millions of people now use bitcoin, thousands of businesses have started accepting bitcoin over the past 6 months. In a year these numbers will be 50-fold. Things that people use a lot, are not bubbles. Also, this doesn't take into consideration the potential, which is a major factor determining a valuation. And that is that Bitcoin or something similar has the potential to replace all banks and all currencies entirely. EDIT: Changed "don't have an underlying value" to have nothing backing up their immense valuation". And sorry I was a bit angry, but I've read it now a hundred times on hackernews over the past 2 years, we're in a bubble here, we're in a bubble there. It is not a bubble, when millions and millions of people are using it. The 2000 bubble was a bubble because there were 300M internet users at the time. Now we have 2B, that's the difference.

MarkPNeyer 13y ago

i'm not sure whether this current bitcoin price run is a bubble or just the currency becoming more valuable as it gains more attention and recognition from world governments. my guess is that a downward correction is coming soon. either way, though, i'm certain that in the long run, the currency is worth much more than the $600 it trades at now. the model i'm using is BTC as a new form of gold. the current value of all the gold in the world, by my primitive calculation, is around 4 trillion. if all the bitcoins in circulation eventually reach a quarter of that value - which i think is totally realistic, most likely an underestimate, that puts the price per bitcoin at over $100k, a number that already seemed reasonable to me. my guess is it'll be there in less than 10 years. anybody want over / under?

jjsz 13y ago
Me neither but I gambled .XX BTC into it before it exploded in reddit than mainstream online articles.

a3voices 13y ago

It's not a bubble. It's very fast growth. http://i.imgur.com/qgT9vxx.png http://i.imgur.com/qgT9vxx.png

vijayboyapati 13y ago

This is what the real-time monetization of a good looks like. In the early stages you have massive price increases until there is enough liquidity and volatility declines. Bitcoin looks like a bubble, but money is inherently a bubble phenomena: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2013/04/bitcoin-is-money-bitcoin-is-bubble.html http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2013/04/bitcoin...

exit 13y ago
the author of the article you link to set up a donation address and received 1.159 btc on the same day, currently worth 678.52 usd.
- vijayboyapati 13y ago
  He actually received a total of a little more than 19 bitcoins. He's a very popular and respected blogger among libertarian circles. One of the most well read (of history and economics) authors I've come across.

JanezStupar 13y ago

How does one short bitcoin? Any proxies?

tlrobinson 13y ago
I don't care how bearish you are on Bitcoin, you'd have to be crazy to short it.
- JanezStupar 13y ago
  Indeed. However I think that buying or holding bitcoin is just as crazy. This is strictly a mental experiment. There is no way I am putting any kind of money into this market on any side.
Moral_ 13y ago
Shorting bitcoin doesn't really make any sense. You can't loan someone bitcoins and if you could, how would you get them back? So no.
- CamperBob2 13y ago
  You can't loan someone bitcoins Someone should probably start working on that.
  - simlevesque 13y ago
    You can do it using Ripple with trust lines.
- VLM 13y ago
  "You can't loan someone bitcoins and if you could, how would you get them back?" Why do you say that? MPEx has been doing that for 3 years. As for how you get "them" back that is pretty obvious. How long would a margin call take with a digital currency, like 2 ms or something?
- tlrobinson 13y ago
  Of course you can loan Bitcoin, why wouldn't you be able to?

baddox 13y ago

Unsurprisingly, the author makes no attempt to show why any BTC to USD exchange rate should be considered reasonable or unreasonable.

corysama 13y ago

Viewed on a log scale, it's clear that $650 is too high. But, it's not quite as outlandish as the linear plot implies. http://i.imgur.com/GOYWUMo.png http://i.imgur.com/GOYWUMo.png According to that armchair-financier line fitting, the trend is for the price to still be below $300. What's more interesting is the long term trend of 10X price increase every 12.5 months for the past 3+ years running. Disclaimer: past performance is not an indicator of anything.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
ISL 13y ago
It's clear that such a slope is unsustainable in the long term. If bitcoin continues its growth, with a $5B market cap now, and a ~$100T world GDP, it's clear that there's, at most, another four orders of magnitude to go. And, given that perhaps a few thousand collectors are each willing to pay a few dollars to own most of the world's BTC, there's perhaps six orders of magnitude of room for the price to fall.
- a3voices 13y ago
  I agree it's unsustainable forever, but I see it as analogous to Facebook when its market cap. was only $6 billion or so.
- corysama 13y ago
  Agreed. Even if it doesn't die, it's going to S-curve at some point. The range between $1000-$10,000 is going to be interesting times. At that point, a lot of the early hobbyists are going to be holding minor life-changing amounts of potential money ($10Ks-$100Ks). Even with the forecast of continued exponential growth, it's will be the smart move for a lot of people to "take some off the table" and cash out a significant portion of whatever they've been hoarding.

conductr 13y ago

That article fails to mention what is going on in China right now which, whatever it is, is driving the price

conductr 13y ago
Saw this gem on the front page, it goes in more detail about China and BTC http://www.coindesk.com/china-leading-global-rise-bitcoin/ http://www.coindesk.com/china-leading-global-rise-bitcoin/

mrb 13y ago

If you compare Tulip Mania to the world's first decentralized, censorship-resistant, inflation-resistant, digital currency, then you don't understand Bitcoin. At all. Combine this with absolutely zero efforts to estimate the worth of the Bitcoin system, how Bitcoin is used today, etc. That's the difference between being published at Techcrunch and more prestigious publications like http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/31/technology/bitcoin-pursues-the-mainstream.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/31/technology/bitcoin-pursues... or http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/11/08/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-bitcoin-bubble/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/11/08...

maxerickson 13y ago
If in, say, 5 years, you turn out to be hilariously wrong, will you eat your bitcoins?
- moocowduckquack 13y ago
  I expect bitcoin to crash and burn at some point. But that is because I think bitcoin has flaws that make it likely to be replaced by future crypto-currencies, or possibly something weirder. Until those currencies exist and gain traction however, bitcoin is going to get bigger. A lot bigger. I don't think this is even that stupid a time to buy, I strongly suspect that there is at least another 10x growth still there, a $10,000 bitcoin price within 3 years would not shock me at all.
- mrb 13y ago
  Let me clarify my position: the utility of decentralized digital currencies on society is so enormous that it is inevitable that they will succeed. Decentralized digital financial transactions are an invention as big as the Internet. Is it Bitcoin that will succeed, or some other cryptocurrency? I don't know, but it has a good shot at it because it has the first-mover advantage and benefits from network effect.
  - rafcavallaro 13y ago
    By the same utility argument there should be no nuclear weapons, an all out push for zero emissions energy, and world peace, but don't hold your breath. There are existing, very powerful stakeholders such as the governments and militaries of numerous world powers who would far prefer that financial transactions not be anonymous. Tech folk sometimes forget that their bodies live in meat space, not cyberspace, and whoever controls the guys with weapons (i.e., controls police and armies) controls meat space.

VMG 13y ago

other things that are completely unreasonable and yet seem to exist: the internet

tlrobinson 13y ago

So how exactly does one come up with a "reasonable" price for Bitcoin? Why is $100 any more "reasonable" than $645?

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
VikingCoder 13y ago
So how exactly does one come up with a "reasonable" price for anything? Why is $10 for a chicken any more "reasonable" than $10,000? Things have value because we (collectively) believe they do. Currency is a numbering system. In practical terms, what matters is how easy are the numbers to use, and what's the relative value of one thing versus another. And if you think we can rationally decide how many chickens a hip placement is worth, you're still nuts.
- junto 13y ago
  Surely price is comparative? If you only earn $10 a week then $10 for a chicken is expensive, but if you earn $1000 a week then that chicken is pretty cheap.
  - VikingCoder 13y ago
    Why does one guy earn $10 a week, and the other guy earns $1000 a week? No, seriously. Nothing is stable in an economy. Everything is dynamic. Everything is relative. Everything is a shared delusion. Luckily, most people buy into it, most of the time. When that fails, you get massive inflation.

IanChiles 13y ago

Now I'm just a little bit disappointed I didn't buy any when I first heard of them... But this feels like the same bubble Bitcoin has had twice before - it spikes then plummets, but it plummets to a point higher than the last drop

cft 13y ago

Coinbase: Note! We've exceeded our normal buy limits for today. If you would still like to purchase you will receive the market price of bitcoin on Friday Nov 22, 2013 at 11:01AM PST after your funds have arrived. The price is rapidly dropping, lost nearly 10% now from today's peak.

ISL 13y ago
Good for Coinbase. It's in their interests to remain solvent, and to encourage moderation. I really liked having my desire to buy tempered by their ~week-timescale delays in the past. (That said, if you really want to buy, keep trying, Coinbase's buy limit opens and shuts sometimes.)

robius 13y ago

This is just the beginning of the tides turning. This huge jump is just a few thousand Chinese investors coming online. More will come. Next think about when another country gets its own exchange, say India. Expect more large jumps before things settle down.