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Bitcoin broke $700 ($750 at this moment)
- triptychs 13y agoI'm interested in it's psychologically limited factors related to price "per" bitcoin... or, in other terms, bitcoin's "exchange rate". Owning 1 bitcoin, no matter what it's worth, psychologically makes you feel poor. It's an arbitrary habit and, really, meaningless but to the average person they can't stand trading $1000 for 1-2 bitcoins. When people look in their bank accounts, they want to see thousands... millions! Not 1 or 2. Right? I think people would more likely buy 10,000 of something they perceive as a currency instead of 1.0000 -- even if through a change of "terms" they were worth the exact same in USD. Am I selling the general public short in this assumption? (Probably not pertinent note: I sold today and no longer hold any BTC.)
- BenderV 13y agoWhenever I look at the evolution of Bitcoin's price, I feel oblige to think about the internet bubble... But I was too young to care about that then. Could someone explain to me the similarities and differences between those two events ? How Bitcoin could avoid the "too-early" bubble ?
- dragontamer 13y agoBitcoin is designed to be deflationary in nature. Many people here will see BTC's dramatic rise in price as a feature, not a bug. I personally am more concerned about the difficulties of BTC -> USD conversion... with exchanges going down and others getting hacked. Speculators obviously love BTC's volatility. But surely, this is not a sign of a healthy "currency".
- rsynnott 13y agoBitcoin is indeed designed to be inherently deflationary, but the volatility is far too great to be explained by that; it's likely in a speculative bubble.
- Hermel 13y agoHere is what drove the Internet bubble: during the whole nineties, the stock market went upwards. People thought we had entered a New Economy without recessions. There were plenty of good reasons to believe this. For example, due to the end of the cold war, we could allocate resources to much more productive areas and gain a lot through globalization and increased international trade. This effect was also known as the peace dividend. Furthermore, the Internet promised to bring enormous productivity increases. The sentiment was that everything will be done online sooner or later and that whoever is first to occupy a particular niche in the Internet would dominate that market globally and forever. For example, the first to create an online shop for pets would have such an advantage that if executed well, competitors would never be able to catch up anymore. By buying a share of pets.com, you did not want to buy a share of a company without profits, you wanted to buy a share of the future before it was too late. People thought they would be buying the equivalent of a few square feet of future Manhatten. Domain names changed hands for crazy prices. It was very hard to resist the general sentiment as it was repeated over and over, for years. One of the few that resisted was Warren Buffet - and the media pitied him for not understanding the New Economy due to his advanced age.
- phaed 13y agoTo the core!
- jmduke 13y agoBitcoin's price at the first of November was $197. That's around a 250% increase over the course of two and a half weeks. General question: if you expect the price of Bitcoin to continue this rate of growth, does the rational consumer have any reason to spend? I don't follow BTC too closely, but it feels as though there's an innate conflict between its role as a speculative investment and its role as a currency.
- dragontamer 13y agoOne area of speculation is whether or not the rise of CryptoLocker virus has inflated BTC prices. With victims that number "in the tens of millions", many people are being FORCED to use BTC, whether they want to speculate or not. http://www.coindesk.com/tens-millions-uk-may-targeted-cryptolocker-bitcoin-ransomware-gang/ http://www.coindesk.com/tens-millions-uk-may-targeted-crypto...
- 3pt14159 13y agoGood question! Yes you have a reason to spend. While it is true that bad money drives out good, in this case we are not comparing equivalent monies. The reason is that in order to buy drugs safely online you MUST spend bitcoin. So even if you are just converting temporarily to make the transaction happen, we don't get the liquidity freezes that most hard currencies had during scrip floods. For example, Joe wants drugs, he takes $1000 to Frank for a bitcoin. Joe sends the bitcoin to Charlie's address for some cocaine. Charlie sells the bitcoin for $1000 in order to buy some cocaine from his importer. Its status as sole-use currency for certain transactions provides liquidity to the market.
- Brakenshire 13y agoThat hardly seems like a full currency, just a short-term transfer medium, with a very dubious role as a long-term store of value.
- PeterisP 13y agoIf X works great as the short-term transfer medium, then it keeps/raises in value, and becomes good also as a long-term store of value. If X starts to fail as the transfer medium, then the value collapses as well. No matter if X is dollars, gold coins, bitcoin, cowrie shells or whatever - in practice the transactional usage is so much larger than 'store of value' that it dominates value/pricing.
- poopsintub 13y agoI don't pretend to know anything about how bitcoin works but it seems to be very volatile. The stock market is bad enough, but this fluctuates wildly just on speculation and seemingly nothing more.
- rhizome 13y agoHey, just yesterday it was the same price as a share of Apple stock, which is very stable! Now it's even higher, so, maybe think about converting those Standard Oil shares.
- hnha 13y agoWhat really grinds my gears is that you have to assume that everyone who talks positively about it, just does so to make his bitcoins "worth" more. For that reason alone I hope that it will fail. Speculation and hype should not be rewarded.
- blake8086 13y agoI guess by the same token, everyone who doesn't have any has to criticize it to justify their decision not to buy.
- rsynnott 13y agoNah; some of us are just amused.
- hnha 13y agowell, I have 1.something bitcoins which I once mined because it seemed like an interesting idea for "pseudonymous" online.payments. What it primarily has become utterly disgusts me. I always felt (yeah, it was uneducated) that bitcoin would be something opposed to our financial system with all its unsocial speculation, lies and deceit.
- polarix 13y agoOh, but in this case, they really really should be rewarded. The point is that military might has floated fiat for millenia. Pulling that down will require a lot of mindshare, and it's going to be damn hard without a lot of hype and projection. Luckily we have that power.
- antonius 13y agoEverytime I see a new bitcoin article discussing its' new price, I'm reminded why I should have never sold at $75. Sigh.
- davidw 13y agoFailing to predict the future is one of those human foibles that we all suffer from every now and then.
- scotth 13y agoWhat price should you have sold at?
- rjd 13y agoI look at it and think its a con. Coincidentally after a several massive thefts, the price suddenly raises? sounds like deliberate manipulation to dump stolen coins to me. Wouldn't mind betting some syndicate took a huge upfront loss to drive up price, and are now recapitalising that loss with said stolen coins.
- sliverstorm 13y agoCan be explained as "no news is bad news", e.g. high profile thefts got BTC a spike in publicity. Up until this month, nobody but geeks knew what BTC was. Now I'm hearing philosophy & art majors talking about it.
- vezzy-fnord 13y agoNot really. Bitcoin got its first mass mainstream exposure around February of this year when it broke its peak from mid-2011, IIRC. Definitely before this month, however.
- sliverstorm 13y agoThat's true, but if memory serves that was a metaphorical 10th-page oped. The coverage we're seeing now, starting around the thefts, is 1st or 2nd page.
- romanovcode 13y agoAlready down to $520.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- cryowaffle 13y agoCheck out prices at bitcoinity.org/markets, prices haven't gone down to $520, it's short term stabilized around $720 after the first round of congressional meeting.
- taigeair 13y agoI wouldn't mind buying some to speculate since I can only lose the amount I buy which won't be much. But it's not very easy to do it. What's everyone using?
- cryowaffle 13y agocoinbase.com is quite easy, just AHC like you do anywhere
- byoung2 13y agoI signed up with Coinbase (YC S12) today specifically to engage in gold rush type speculation. Much better odds than lottery tickets, and more convenient than driving to Vegas.
- phaed 13y agoWell did you pick the wost possible service for the job. Currently you can't buy coins at Coinbase til the 22nd.
- tensafefrogs 13y agoCoinbase (a YC backed company) is probably the easiest (and one of the more trustworthy) places to get set up and buy some. [disclosure: this is a referral link] https://coinbase.com/?r=5125b580c746f00bc6000018&utm_campaign=user-referral&src=referral-link https://coinbase.com/?r=5125b580c746f00bc6000018&utm_campaig...
- philfreo 13y ago
- lmg643 13y agonot to add fuel to the fire: but if bitcoin is really un-hackable (can't guess individual keys held offline by private owners), untraceable, and all that goodness ... ... and there are only 21 million of them in the world ... ... then the value of each bitcoin could be $100,000 or more, assuming it can attract 1/4 of the interest that gold currently enjoys worldwide. of course, as the value creeps up, it's use as a currency will diminish, and it becomes more of a store of value. eg, without bitcoin dimes and quarters, you'd have a hard time buying smaller items. but it is lighter than a pound of gold for sure. the possibilities are interesting.
- carlosdp 13y agoThere are smaller denominations. You can have .00000001 bitcoins, for example (it's 8 decimal places = 1 satoshi right?)
- joezydeco 13y agoYes. More decimal places can also be added later on. If we really get to the point where 1BTC = USD100,000, I could see the decimal point shifting and rebase (e.g. 1BTC now = 100,000 new BTC)
- lcampbell 13y agoI hear a lot of people talking about the need to shift decimal points, but never really understood -- what's the benefit of this over just using SI prefixes? To me, it's clear how 1mBTC relates to 1BTC and 1µBTC. I think people underestimate consumers. Before Decimal Day (1971), 1 British pound was worth 20 shillings, and 1 shilling was 12 pence[1]. As confusing as it seems to me, apparently that worked for awhile. Likewise, I think consumers could deal with SI prefixes in a decimal system (rather than needing to redefine how much 1 BTC is). -- [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_Day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_Day
- joezydeco 13y agoThere is no benefit, it's just a technical possibility. The other possibility is that the eventual client app on your smartphone just works in femtoBTC and handles the UI however people choose {BTC, satoshis, femtoBTC, USD, CNY, whatever}.
- adrianwaj 13y agoChina: Bitcoins welcome here.
- icpmacdo 13y agoMan I really wish I had a handful of bitcoins right now.But I think that it is going to be rough for people either way if the price goes up you will have a bunch of depressed people not buying in and if it goes down a bunch of people are going to be REALLY depressed for obvious reasons
- dragontamer 13y agoInteresting. Clarkmoody is using "Mt. Gox", which is a well known exchange where it is damn near impossible to get your USD out of. Notice that other BTC exchanges (btc-e is more cannonical right now...) have prices closer to $550. Keep in mind WHICH exchange these prices are coming from. Unlike more established currencies, there is very little arbitration going on between exchanges, and prices swing DRAMATICALLY between say... Mt. Gox and BTC-e.
- fudge 13y agoBTC-e is above $610, BTCChina at $830. [edit current prices]
- acallaghan 13y ago"One likes to believe in the freedom of Bitcoin. But glittering prices and endless rate rises shatter the illusion of integrity."
- Tycho 13y agoWill cross $1000 within 2 weeks.
- matthuggins 13y agoBut how many more weeks before it comes crashing down?
- rjd 13y agoProbably as soon as all the stolen coins in circulation have been cashed in and suddenly there is no market manipulation to keep it up.
- phaed 13y agoI give it days, if not hours.
- lafar6502 13y agoI bet the only goods that are currently bought for bitcoin are US dollars.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- songzme 13y agoThe most common question I get every day when the topic of bitcoin comes up: "This is skyrocketing. Is it a good time to buy?" The truth is, there is no right or wrong answer. Bitcoins could very well go to 6000/coin and we'll still be asking that same question. Bitcoins could also just as likely go down to $1/coin and everybody would be talking about how they could've sold at $650/coin. The beauty here is that BitCoins is not managed by anyone, its completely p2p, and its 100% opensourced. Nobody controls it, nobody has insider info, nobody knows what is going to happen. I would personally throw in a few thousand just see what it becomes. If nothing comes of it, think of it as a very expensive speeding ticket.
- kzrdude 13y agoThis is the third time bitcoin price has spiked this wildly, you just need a log plot to see it: http://blockchain.info/charts/market-price?showDataPoints=false&show_header=true&daysAverageString=1×pan=all&scale=1&address= http://blockchain.info/charts/market-price?showDataPoints=fa... going by history, it would be wiser to buy in the dip after the spike.
- Brakenshire 13y agoSeems like pure speculation; finance stripped of any contact with the real economy.
- scotty79 13y agoI'd take that any day instead of speculative finance attched to food trade.
- Brakenshire 13y agoHah, well that's one way of looking at it. In theory, though, speculation does play an important role with food, futures establishing scarcity or abundance over a long enough time period so that new crops can be planted, or new land brought into cultivation, to balance things out. Albeit, not sure about in practice.
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- cs702 13y agoThe number of bitcoins is fixed, so price is a solely function of mass adoption. All else being equal, the more people who adopt Bitcoin, the higher its price.[1] -- [1] http://cs702.wordpress.com/2011/05/29/on-the-potential-adoption-and-price-appreciation-of-bitcoin-in-the-long-run/ http://cs702.wordpress.com/2011/05/29/on-the-potential-adopt... -- Edits: replaced "supply" with "number of bitcoins" and "demand" with "mass adoption," which more accurately convey my thoughts. (Thanks for pointing that out, amalcon!)
- wozniacki 13y agoThe Winkelvosses must be laughing all the way to the bank. Must have at least made one trip to cash out a portion, since they first started stashing the coin. [1] [1] http://www.bloomberg.com/video/winklevoss-twins-mine-11m-bitcoin-fortune-dh7Tpl8NTaOaiTgec3dT2g.html http://www.bloomberg.com/video/winklevoss-twins-mine-11m-bit...
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- VMG 13y agoThere is good reason to assume that the senate hearing on CSPAN-3 has something to do with it. Strong positive signals there. http://www.c-span.org/Live-Video/C-SPAN3/ http://www.c-span.org/Live-Video/C-SPAN3/
- the_watcher 13y agoI bought a bit of BTC in October because I am interested in it. I've now sold off enough to cover my initial investment plus a bit extra, and now get to watch BTC with house money.
- caycep 13y agohow easy is it to sell your BTC for USD?
- astrodust 13y agoAbout as easy as scoring a kilo of weed.
- jrs235 13y agoI've been seeing the bitcoin news hitting [more major] news outlets. Seeing an article like this http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/michael-santoli/bitcoin-price-bests-one-apple-share--but-is-it-worth-buying-185417569.html http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/michael-santoli/bitcoin-price... with a picture of physical coins worries me. Why? All the uninformed people that want to get in on this bitcoin action may be sold of physical coins by scammers like the coins in the pictures. I'm concerned for the technically illiterate.
- vezzy-fnord 13y agoI'm not feeling very jaded today, but I think you might be underestimating people's intelligence. If they want to get into Bitcoin, I think they'd read up on it being entirely virtual (minus the optional paper wallets) pretty quickly.
- jrs235 13y agoSadly, I worried about older folks. I bet you could get some metal "bit coins" like those in numerous pictures and go door to door selling them for several hundred dollars to some people. It'd be easy o come up with a story as to why you're selling them.
- schrodinger 13y agoHow is bitcoin income reported and taxed? Is it the same as holding a stock?
- mcherm 13y agoYou should ask a tax professional or your own tax lawyer for advice. But my own plan is to treat it as being equivalent to holding a foreign currency which, in the US is (more-or-less) taxed like capital gains that is always considered short-term regardless of how long you held it. I may be wrong.
- taigeair 13y agoDon't think it's regulated that much yet.
- wmf 13y agoIn the absence of specific regulation, everything is taxed by default.
- pbreit 13y agoAn obvious bubble but impossible to predict when it'll pop. It could easily go to $1k, $10k, $100k and beyond since supply is so limited and most of the coins are held tightly by folks who have already cashed out nicely.
- ewams 13y agoThat graph is darn sexy, and I am talking about the object itself not the data. The most practical and useful "interactive chart" I have ever seen. Props to Clark Moody. Does anyone know how to use that type of chart to display information from other data sources?
- AndrewDucker 13y agoDoes this mean that it's become more economic for miners? Are people breaking out their GPUs right now to make a few dollars?
- throwwit 13y agoI wonder how many ppl are repurposing PS4 or XB's to mine.
- brainburn 13y agoNoone in their right mind would do that
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- billadoid 13y agohttp://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really-works.html http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really... Look at "Submissions that get automatically penalized"