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Winklevoss twin says Bitcoin valuation will top $40k
- cstrat 13y agoIn other news, the majority shareholder in <insert company here> says their share price will sky rocket by 300% in the next six months... you should buy shares immediately. Since the twins are so heavily invested, there is no way they would ever support any evidence contrary to the title of this post...
- damian2000 13y agoI think they own about 1% - a fair bit less than Satoshi Nakamoto, but yeah agreed on your point ... totally useless story.
- cstrat 13y ago"Winklevoss twin says value of Bitcoin will remain stable and find its place as a useful form of currency in the current global marketplace" ... said no Winklevii ever..
- tagawa 13y agoThey're also trying to launch a fund - Winklevoss Bitcoin Trust [1] - so they're (potentially) more invested in Bitcoin than what they directly own. [1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-23140904 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-23140904
- jacques_chester 13y agoThis behaviour is known as "talking one's book".
- semmem1 13y agoThis should really be made illegal. Some poor soul is going to think they are serious and actually put money into it. The Winklevoss are barely a step above Madoff here.
- gmays 13y agoNever trust a doppelgänger.
- downer89 13y agoWhy won't the Winklevoss twins just die?
- klochner 13y agoTo put things in perspective: taking the (presumably) wildly optimistic forecast of the Wilklevii, the total future bitcoin appreciation will be approximately equal to the year-to-date performance. So in an optimistic scenario, the bulk of any appreciation is behind us, and the fortunes made to-date won't be made by the current batch of speculators.
- sillysaurus2 13y agoI don't understand. If Bitcoin appreciates to $40k like the Winklebosses are saying, then I stand to 40x my money. How does that equal the year to date performance, or mean that the bulk of the appreciation is behind us? (I think appreciation to $40k is delusional, but that's what they're claiming.)
- exit 13y agoaccording to this wikipedia article, the price in december 2012 was $13: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Bitcoin#Prices_and_value_history http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Bitcoin#Prices_and_v... the average today is $827, 827 / 13 = 63.6153846154
- sillysaurus2 13y agouser "laszlo" did first transaction – bought 2 pizzas for 10,000 BTC.[67][68] User "SmokeTooMuch" auctioned 10,000 BTC for $50 (cumulatively), but no buyer was found.[69][70] EDIT: I know, it was just a funny event.
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- cstrat 13y agoI am pretty confident that stuff like this does more harm to the bitcoin community than good. It further encourages anyone remotely involved to sit on their coins and not use them. The only way something like bitcoin can flourish is if the majority of users are spending them (trading them)... if 90% of people buy bitcoin in the hope they will go to $40K then they are supporting all the things that the naysayers are claiming (ponzi scheme and what not).
- natrius 13y agoThis isn't true. If it becomes easier to spend bitcoins than dollars, why wouldn't you just spend bitcoins and convert your earnings to bitcoins as they come in? The problem with Bitcoin isn't so much the price volatility. It's that spending them is difficult. That is changing rapidly. If a merchant offers a bitcoin discount that reflects the lower costs of doing business with Bitcoin, why wouldn't consumers spend them?
- cstrat 13y agoi agree with you in principle, however i still think there is a flawed economy behind all this. as long as i have $$$ and can spend them, why would I used BTC if the value of BTC is going up X% each month... I am better off using fiat. at a purely commercial level, it makes sense to buy bitcoins for capital gains, and use $$$ for life.
- ekianjo 13y agoI don't agree. Optimistic view on bitcoin -> Media Attention -> User Attention -> Bitcoin value goes up -> User Pool Increase -> Merchants' attention increase -> more merchant support, resulting in more utility for bitcoin and more confidence in the viability of the currency. Of course, I'm simplifying stuff on purpose here, but more people talking about Bitcoin in a positive light is good for Bitcoin. Apart from the valuation they throw in here, them investing in Bitcoin will breed further options on the market.
- cstrat 13y agoit is true that more attention is good, however it is getting attention for the wrong reasons. It isn't getting attention because people are using bitcoin as a currency, rather an investment hoping for the capital gains. I have seen countless threads on forums where people are saying they accept bitcoin and are surprised that no one has used BTC yet. I'm confident at using bitcoins, but it makes more sense to just pay for something with cash if I have it... obviously if there were some incentive to use BTC (discount or whatnot) I might reconsider.
- enko 13y ago> Winklevoss twin hopes Bitcoin valuation will top $40k FTFY
- logn 13y agoBank of America's analysis of price made a lot of sense to me, and to the best extent possible, they justified their valuation ($1300 max). This is just mindless speculation like CNBC saying BUY BUY.
- ekianjo 13y agoJustified the 1300 value how ? They have no real method to get to that number.
- logn 13y agoYou can read it here: http://cryptome.org/2013/12/boa-bitcoin.pdf http://cryptome.org/2013/12/boa-bitcoin.pdf They look at comparables such as gold, silver, PayPal market cap, etc and then deduced where BTC would fit in.
- ekianjo 13y agoYou can draw comparisons, but in the end Bitcoin is like nothing else you mentioned here. Even if you compared it to Gold, it has several advantages over it. It's like an electronic Gold currency that can be transferred faster and cheaper than Paypal. You cannot deduce the value of Bitcoin in this way, because its value exceeds the sum of its properties.
- vidarh 13y agoIf by "deduced" you mean "guessed" based on assumptions they have not really justified. IF you agree with them that Bitcoin will be used as a medium of exchange for about 10% of online transactions, and IF you agree that it will be used as a money transmission method and will compete as one of the top three money transmitters for volume and that this will add to the Bitcoin valuation according to the valuation of the top companies in this market, and IF you agree that since, "by the way, $5bn is not too far from the current value of total US silver eagles minted", $5bn is the maximum market cap of Bitcoins as a store of value, THEN their estimate may make sense. They dismissed any use for illicit transactions out of hand because they "don't have any informed view on this subject". They ignore B2B transactions after saying "we cannot rule out that Bitcoin can become a dominant medium of exchange for B2B transactions". Their total upside is calculated without even trying to make any assumptions about B2B usage. They've just hand-waved the storage of value bit with a comparison to silver eagles and the relative value of gold vs silver on the basis of long term reputation and volatility, making up a "roof" of 300bn, and then scaling that down to 1/60th based on the difference between gold and silver. Part of this they justify with the volatility, without considering whether or not volatility will flatten out if Bitcoin starts hitting a valuation roof. Partly they ignore the other possible upsides for storage, such as ability to more easily hide funds (e.g. they themselves pointed out a large swing up in Bitcoin value after the threat of the Cypriot "haircut"; they've also not considered the extensive use of e.g. strips of plated gold as a medium of short to medium term storage in high risk areas). I don't have any better assessment, but this one reads like an attempt to justify pre-existing opinion rather than an attempt to be thorough.
- repsilat 13y agoIsn't the price (softly) bounded above by the mining cost? I guess there's a demand/supply time-lag. No, wait, I think I get it: 1. Lots of demand. Price spikes. 2. Supply increases, 3. Mining difficulty ratchets up. Because mining difficulty is a function of mined bitcoins (and not a function of time) this price estimate isn't a refutation of Moore's law. It basically means that the demand for bitcoin, quantified I-don't-know-how, is going to double quite a bit faster than dollar-normalised processing power. (Can anyone tell me whether increases in mining difficulty happen smoothly or sharply? I wonder whether the current market is smart enough to price a cliff in the rate.)
- shit_parade 13y agohttp://bitcoin.sipa.be/ http://bitcoin.sipa.be/ http://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty http://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty
- repsilat 13y agoVery interesting. Now to try to corellate it with price swings...
- NateDad 13y agoIt's tricky, because mining is also affected by hardware efficiency. So, if some new hotness arrives on the scene, difficulty can jump dramatically, with no corresponding price increase. Also, since we're in the age where only asics can effectively mine, and they are output by small shops that have limited capacity, the hardware supply is more of a limiter to mining than demand. Generally, more interest in mining simply drives up the price of mining equipment, rather than immediately driving up mining rates. Of course, over time, more demand leads to more companies wanting to build asics, so more of them do. However, that's a very slow response, since making mining equipment that works well is non-trivial. It's interesting, for sure, but I think it probably affects ebay a lot more directly than difficulty ;)
- maxerickson 13y agoThe difficulty changes every 2 weeks. So it happens sharply. Also, the price will feed into mining activity, but mining activity won't especially feed into the price. It will some, but the giant size of the network means that mining power won't increase so much that it will substantially impact the ongoing supply (so the new coins should mostly be factored into the current market). Mining difficulty is a function of both mined coins and time, the adjustment tries to make the time between new blocks 10 minutes.
- ars_technician 13y agoIn other news, pumpers in a pump and dump scheme continue to pump. I can't believe this is even on the front page. What's next? A note from Tim Cook bullish on Apple?
- neil1 13y agoHow is that news? It's in their self interest(being large bitcoin investors) to try to raise expectations and make the price go up.
- confluence 13y agoHmmm, this reminds me of Carl Ichan, but I can't quite put my finger on why that is? Could someone possibly clue me in. I'm at a total loss.
- n00b101 13y agoOn Wall Street, this kind of rhetoric is called "talking your book."
- EGreg 13y agoWhat does the other twin say?