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Bitcoin

It is just bitcoin, guys. :)
 
Surrealistik said:
Volatile and dangerous as **** to get into IMO, but I trade it with a small % of my capital via derivatives.

I don't recommend holding more than a very small portion of your assets in BC, and only as a gamble play, in that you should be prepared to lose that money, and be okay with drawdowns of 50%+ if you're going to buy and hold.

Personally, I don't see it as being a true/legitimate currency or unit of trade so much as a playground for speculators, criminals and terrorists who use it for money laundering and transacting black market goods. I suppose one of the upsides is that it can be used to conceal/export wealth in the event of truly tyrannical governments like China, but a committed government can thwart such maneuvers by coming down on the exchanges.
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These are some good points....

+ I don't want to get into conspiracy theories but if the U.S government ever sold arms to terrorists or another country, it would be a lot easier to uses a cryptocurrency than go through the bank.

+ Many of these countries like Venezuela may be better off using cryptocurrency as their main form of currency.

+ Eventually, any country that keeps printing paper money will pay for it

+ Cryptocurrency is going through a bubble. I believe there are over 900 different types of cryptocurrencies and the majority of them are scams. That being said when the internet started, many people were scared to make purchases online and were skeptical the world wide web was going to take off. The internet did take off however it did have a dotcom bubble. I see that with cyrptocurrency but once you open the box, you can't put it back in. I hear that bitcoin to could rise to 1 million by 2020???

I'm not saying to put all your money into this, but I think you would be silly not to invest 1-5% of your income. Perhaps I see at as a better alternative to gold.
 
Bucky said:
These are some good points....

+ I don't want to get into conspiracy theories but if the U.S government ever sold arms to terrorists or another country, it would be a lot easier to uses a cryptocurrency than go through the bank.

+ Many of these countries like Venezuela may be better off using cryptocurrency as their main form of currency.

+ Eventually, any country that keeps printing paper money will pay for it

+ Cryptocurrency is going through a bubble. I believe there are over 900 different types of cryptocurrencies and the majority of them are scams. That being said when the internet started, many people were scared to make purchases online and were skeptical the world wide web was going to take off. The internet did take off however it did have a dotcom bubble. I see that with cyrptocurrency but once you open the box, you can't put it back in. I hear that bitcoin to could rise to 1 million by 2020???

I'm not saying to put all your money into this, but I think you would be silly not to invest 1-5% of your income. Perhaps I see at as a better alternative to gold.
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buy these tulip bulbs, instead
much better return in their day
you ever play musical chairs? know what it is like to be the guy without a chair? if not, you will should you take your own advice and "invest" in bitcoins/equivalents
 
justabubba said:
buy these tulip bulbs, instead
much better return in their day
you ever play musical chairs? know what it is like to be the guy without a chair? if not, you will should you take your own advice and "invest" in bitcoins/equivalents
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Are you comparing tulip bulbs to currency?

That is a terrible analogy.

Answer this, what make a U.S dollar or any other currency worth more than a bitcoin?
 
The fact is if you put money in a bank, and it defaults, you have no guarantee that you will get that money back.

Bitcoin surprisingly is much safer.

Don't be shocked if a country like Venezuela or Mexico starts using a crypto as their main currency.
 
Bitcoin is indeed in tulip mania territory at the moment if we're to value and assess it by the approximate # of active users as the value of BTC derives from the size and activity of its network; anything can be in bubble/overbought territory and BTC certainly appears to be.

As of late May, the number of wallets containing $1+ stood at about 11 million; the number of duplicate wallets per user might be as high as 10, giving us a range of 1.1-11 million users.

Price of BTC at the time was ~$1800 USD.

Assuming an average of the 1.1-11 million user range at say 5,555,000 active, actual users, we have a price of 1800 USD correlating to a userbase of 5.555 million.

If price growth scales linearly with the user base (and historically it has grown significantly more slowly), there would have had to have been an approximate 9 fold increase in the number of users within 7 months which is absolutely impossible.

I think there's long/medium term potential, but it's too dangerous for me to commit more money to BTC atm; I'm waiting for either a pullback in the price or a growth in the user base such that the price is justified by its real network size, whichever comes first.
 
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Surrealistik said:
Bitcoin is indeed in tulip mania territory at the moment if we're to value and assess it by the approximate # of active users as the value of BTC derives from the size and activity of its network; anything can be in bubble/overbought territory and BTC certainly appears to be.

As of late May, the number of wallets containing $1+ stood at about 11 million; the number of duplicate wallets per user might be as high as 10, giving us a range of 1.1-11 million users.

Price of BTC at the time was ~$1800 USD.

Assuming an average of the 1.1-11 million user range at say 5,555,000 active, actual users, we have a price of 1800 USD correlating to a userbase of 5.555 million.

If price growth scales linearly with the user base (and historically it has grown significantly more slowly), there would have had to have been an approximate 9 fold increase in the number of users within 7 months which is absolutely impossible.

I think there's long/medium term potential, but it's too dangerous for me to commit more money to BTC atm; I'm waiting for either a pullback in the price or a growth in the user base such that the price is justified by its real network size, whichever comes first.
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Perhaps you are correct however if the "experts"are wrong, boy you just missed out.

I see at least 10-20 catylst events moving the price of bitcoin further. Perhaps 30k by the new year.
 
Bucky said:
Perhaps you are correct however if the "experts"are wrong, boy you just missed out.

I see at least 10-20 catylst events moving the price of bitcoin further. Perhaps 30k by the new year.
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Actually, what's going on this week pretty much proves my point.

Bitcoin cannot function as a currency because of the speculation and volatility. Let's say you purchased a $1000 computer with Bitcoin two weeks ago. Due to the wild rise in BTC-USD exchange rates, congratulations! You've now paid $2000 for that computer, because if you had just held onto that Bitcoin, it would have doubled in value.

Bitcoin is appreciating too rapidly for anyone to use it to buy sodas and socks. As a result, Bitcoin owners are hoarding their virtual coins, and vendors are increasingly dropping it. (Steam, for example, announced today is no longer accepting BTC.) Its primary function has probably already shifted from "virtual currency" to "speculative virtual asset."

Meanwhile, exchanges are having lots of technical issues, a situation which can be costly for their customers. Prices are out of sync from one exchange to another, again something you really don't want in a currency, and further fuels speculators and makes the value unstable. Not to mention that exchanges and individuals are now a huge target for hackers.

There is no way to know when the Bitcoin bubble will burst. It has no fundamentals, which means it will keep going up as long as suckers are willing to buy it. It could be minutes, days, weeks, months, who knows? We can know, though, that anyone who borrowed to buy Bitcoin will be screwed, as will anyone who poured their life savings into Bitcoin because "this time, it's different!"

We should note that in a few years, most of these issues facing cryptocurrencies will probably be worked out, or at least they'll be more stable than they are now. I'm fairly confident that they can be a useful tool, once things settle down. That doesn't change the fact that Bitcoin is in a bubble, has lost its primary purpose as a currency, and is significantly riskier right now than playing the slots in a casino.
 
Little late to be investing in Bitcoin. It could very well go up even more but it could also crash down to 1k. Nobody really knows for sure what Bitcoin is doing or what it will do as this is all uncharted territory. One thing we do know is that bubbles eventually pop and this sure as hell looks like a monster bubble.
 
Visbek said:
Actually, what's going on this week pretty much proves my point.

Bitcoin cannot function as a currency because of the speculation and volatility. Let's say you purchased a $1000 computer with Bitcoin two weeks ago. Due to the wild rise in BTC-USD exchange rates, congratulations! You've now paid $2000 for that computer, because if you had just held onto that Bitcoin, it would have doubled in value.

Bitcoin is appreciating too rapidly for anyone to use it to buy sodas and socks. As a result, Bitcoin owners are hoarding their virtual coins, and vendors are increasingly dropping it. (Steam, for example, announced today is no longer accepting BTC.) Its primary function has probably already shifted from "virtual currency" to "speculative virtual asset."

Meanwhile, exchanges are having lots of technical issues, a situation which can be costly for their customers. Prices are out of sync from one exchange to another, again something you really don't want in a currency, and further fuels speculators and makes the value unstable. Not to mention that exchanges and individuals are now a huge target for hackers.

There is no way to know when the Bitcoin bubble will burst. It has no fundamentals, which means it will keep going up as long as suckers are willing to buy it. It could be minutes, days, weeks, months, who knows? We can know, though, that anyone who borrowed to buy Bitcoin will be screwed, as will anyone who poured their life savings into Bitcoin because "this time, it's different!"

We should note that in a few years, most of these issues facing cryptocurrencies will probably be worked out, or at least they'll be more stable than they are now. I'm fairly confident that they can be a useful tool, once things settle down. That doesn't change the fact that Bitcoin is in a bubble, has lost its primary purpose as a currency, and is significantly riskier right now than playing the slots in a casino.
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Spot on. Bit Coin is in the Tulip Bulb phase right now.

I think for a crypto currency to truly be successful long term as a currency, it would have to be physically backed by some sort of fixed asset or better yet a basket of fixed assets. In this way the intrinsic value can have a much higher probability of NOT going to zero and helps to stabilized the value of the currency as the value would essentially parallel the underlying assets. Using a basket of commodities would further stabilize the value of the currency.
 
Everyone has a theory. Bitcoin exchanges and other vendors are committing to transactions using fractions of bitcoins. An interesting development.

I bought bitcoins in '97 for the grandkids to use when playing video games. They didn't. I had bought a $1k's worth not knowing they had dropped to 17¢ each. I forgot about them, but registered them with an exchange. A miner woke me up offering $2k per coin and I sold out at auction realizing about $2,500 per coin. A glorious series of mistakes. I should have held on but didn't know what I was doing. No complaints over spilled milk, I still made out very well. Right now, no one has a crystal ball, and no one knows the future. I thought about getting back in, but I'm not that greedy.
 
Surrealistik said:
Bitcoin is indeed in tulip mania territory at the moment if we're to value and assess it by the approximate # of active users as the value of BTC derives from the size and activity of its network; anything can be in bubble/overbought territory and BTC certainly appears to be.

As of late May, the number of wallets containing $1+ stood at about 11 million; the number of duplicate wallets per user might be as high as 10, giving us a range of 1.1-11 million users.

Price of BTC at the time was ~$1800 USD.

Assuming an average of the 1.1-11 million user range at say 5,555,000 active, actual users, we have a price of 1800 USD correlating to a userbase of 5.555 million.

If price growth scales linearly with the user base (and historically it has grown significantly more slowly), there would have had to have been an approximate 9 fold increase in the number of users within 7 months which is absolutely impossible.

I think there's long/medium term potential, but it's too dangerous for me to commit more money to BTC atm; I'm waiting for either a pullback in the price or a growth in the user base such that the price is justified by its real network size, whichever comes first.
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In fact, there has been such a run up this would be a good time to get the hell out of it.
 
Bucky said:
Notice, the people trashing bitcoin, like Mark Cuban and the CEO of Chase lose money when bitcoin increases in value.
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please offer us a cite showing that they each sustained a financial loss as a direct result of bitcoin valuation increases
 
justabubba said:
please offer us a cite showing that they each sustained a financial loss as a direct result of bitcoin valuation increases
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Jamie Dimon is the ceo of chase bank. Are you asking a serious question?
 
Bucky said:
Notice, the people trashing bitcoin, like Mark Cuban and the CEO of Chase lose money when bitcoin increases in value.
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Friday, Dimon said "Who cares about bitcoin?"

Apparently J.P. Morgan Chase which stated on Friday that it "is examining how to assist its clients to trade in bitcoins and bitcoin futures." Dang!

Mark Cuban's personal hedgefund, which represents only his personal interests having no other clients, Wescac Enterprises Ltd has been registered and trading at three bitcoin exchanges for three years. One in Japan, two in Hong Kong. Dang!

For the unfamiliar, Wescac was the computer father of Giles Goat Boy, a novel by John Barth. Our hero was raised as a goat until age 14. Later learns his father is one of the two computers ruling the world and about to bring the world into an apocalyptic nuclear war with Eastcac, the other computer. Based on the cold war, neo-nazi motorcyclists, pseduo-zionists, one the adoptive father of our hero, who is the only person who can enter Wescac (a computer in the old sense of being building sized) and shut it off from the inside, preventing the end of the world. Not too messianic. Both the goat boy's mother, a 1920's flapper style prostitute named Mary, and his very loose free love girlfriend Maggie, make appearances. Wescac's advice to his son, "never tell the world the truth about what you doing, make something up, preferably the opposite, as a deflection." Words Cuban seems to have taken to heart. Mark is obviously well read. :) Dang!

Will the goat boy save the world? Will he be introduced to adulthood by his free love hippie girlfriend before the novel ends? Read the novel and find out. His neo-zionist adopted father has already made him a member of the tribe with a bris, and he's been Bar Mitzvahed. A bit dated, but fun.

Barth is almost a legend as 20 century novelist, a favorite and inspiration to writers like Pynchon, Doctorow, Brautigan, Ellroy, Stephanson, and so on, with his novel The Sot Weed Factor (tobacco), written in the verbose style of James Fenimore Cooper is hilarious and a winner of more awards than any other novel of the century.

I am Dang! crazy tonight.
 
Bucky said:
Jamie Dimon is the ceo of chase bank. Are you asking a serious question?
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yes, i am asking a serious question

and i continue to await your serious answer
 
RAMOSS said:
In fact, there has been such a run up this would be a good time to get the hell out of it.
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In a sports analogy, we are just headed to the bottom of the first inning.

People need to realize, cryptocurrency is the next evolutionary stage in our currency. It is the equivalent of how the internet changed our lives.

When bitcoin hits 100k, people will really be kicking themselves.
 
justabubba said:
yes, i am asking a serious question

and i continue to await your serious answer
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Cryptocurrency threatens the legitimacy of the U.S dollar.

When the U.S keeps printing money, you don't there are any consequences?
 
Bucky said:
In a sports analogy, we are just headed to the bottom of the first inning.

People need to realize, cryptocurrency is the next evolutionary stage in our currency. It is the equivalent of how the internet changed our lives.

When bitcoin hits 100k, people will really be kicking themselves.
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Economics is not a sports analogy. There is an economic pattern of 'boom/bust' when it comes to speculative investiments, and the bit coin is definitely going through that right now.

If you disagree, by all means, put your entire savings into it.
 
RAMOSS said:
Economics is not a sports analogy. There is an economic pattern of 'boom/bust' when it comes to speculative investments, and the bitcoin is definitely going through that right now.

If you disagree, by all means, put your entire savings into it.
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The U.S dollar is a speculative investment. Do you think printing money and expanding the U.S debt will not have any consequences? Did you not forget that many banks and financial institutions were on the verge of defaulting 10 years ago?

The fact is many 3rd world countries would be better off using bitcoin than their current currency. Cryptocurrency is a much smarter, advanced, intelligent, and logical form of currency.
 
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Bucky said:
The U.S dollar is a speculative investment. Do you think printing money and expanding the U.S debt will not have any consequences? Did you not forget that many banks and financial institutions were on the verge of defaulting 10 years ago?

The fact is many 3rd world countries would be better off using bitcoin than their current currency. Cryptocurrency is a much smarter, advanced, intelligent, and logical form of currency.
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It being managed bu a governing body of people who you trust.

Who have no other ajenda than the maintenaince of it's value.

Who are not a bunch of con-artists who will be the first to flee when it reaches max value, except they will be able to print loads more of these virtual things to sell to the suckers out there, I mean smart investors in nothing......
 
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