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The Almighty Buck Bitcoin

Bitcoin Breaks $1,000 Level, Highest in More Than 3 Years (cnbc.com) 146

The price of digital currency bitcoin has hit the $1,000 mark for the first time in three years. From a report on CNBC: The cryptocurrency was trading at $1,021 at the time of publication, according to CoinDesk data, at level not seen since November 2013, with its market capitalization exceeding $16 billion. Bitcoin has been on a steady march higher for the past few months, driven by a number of factors such as the devaluation of the yuan, geopolitical uncertainty and an increase in professional investors taking an interest in the asset class. "We are seeing the aftermath of zero interest rates run amok. So bitcoin is a healthy reminder that we don't have to hold on to dollars or renminbi, which is subject to capital controls and loss of purchasing power. Rather it's a new asset class," Bobby Lee, chief executive of BTC China, one of the world's largest bitcoin exchanges, told CNBC by phone.
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Bitcoin Breaks $1,000 Level, Highest in More Than 3 Years

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  • by Anonymous Coward

    i remember when you could use a bitcoin fountain and get 1btc at each pull of the virtual lever.

    • by swm ( 171547 )

      i remember when you could use a bitcoin fountain and get 1btc at each pull of the virtual lever.

      It was a bit-nickle.
      But they were free to anyone who wanted.
      I think my son picked up a few for himself.
      I never did...

      • I got a bit nickel shortly after they dropped the drop size. Still have it, worth about $50 now . . . one of my better investments.

  • Speculators (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 02, 2017 @09:10AM (#53592015)

    So long as speculators can make money holding onto bitcoin while the value shifts, it will not be a viable means of exchange. Currencies need a stable value for people to want to use them as a currency.

    • Re:Speculators (Score:5, Insightful)

      by supremebob ( 574732 ) <themejunky AT geocities DOT com> on Monday January 02, 2017 @09:46AM (#53592123) Journal

      If you look at the Bitcoin price charts, you see that it tends to crash in value quickly after rising for some time.

      To me, it looks like now would be a time to dump the currency before it tanks again.

      Of course, the person who wrote this article is probably a speculator themselves. They are probably hoping that they can increase their gains a bit more before unloading their holdings.

      Sadly, these price swings are one of the reasons why Bitcoin doesn't really work well as an actual currency. Well, that and the fact that payment confirmations now take forever to complete unless you bribe the miners with a big transaction fee.

      • by Yvan256 ( 722131 )

        If you look at the long-term chart, it does crash a bit after rising too fast, but it crashes down above the previous value and then continues to climb. It's similar to charts of the adoption rate of new technologies.

        • I'm looking at that big spike back at the tail end of 2013, where it the value went down by half.

          I could see that happening again in 2017. Nobody knows how the Trump cabinet is going to react to cryptocurrency, but I can't imagine it being good considering that the bankers seem to be in charge of the government again. If they start cracking down on crypto, the price could drop like a rock.

    • Bitcoin is slowly becoming more stable:

      "Its biggest daily moves in 2016 were around 10 percent, still very volatile compared with fiat currencies, but markedly lower than the trading of 2013, which saw daily price swings of as much as 40 percent."

      http://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-markets-bitcoin-idUSKBN14M0IF [reuters.com]

  • Shocking (Score:5, Informative)

    by Luthair ( 847766 ) on Monday January 02, 2017 @09:29AM (#53592071)
    Someone involved in bitcoin thinks its relevant and people are doing big things with it. Next thing you know companies will be sending out press releases saying they're releasing great products.
    • Re:Shocking (Score:4, Informative)

      by Baron_Yam ( 643147 ) on Monday January 02, 2017 @09:32AM (#53592079)

      No, the VC idiots have finally learned that Bitcoin is a way of stealing their money. The smart VC money never went there, except a few 'drop in the bucket, just in case' experiments.

      Slashdot really ought to just ban these stupid 'stories'; we don't post about Beanie Baby market fluctuations, and there's nothing technically interesting left with Bitcoin to discuss. It's just the latest attempt by scammers and cultists to pump their obsession.

      • by JcMorin ( 930466 )
        Beanie Baby could be created as much as the company wanted. Bitcoin are limited in quantity... for something purely digital this is a great invention... like it or not! The value of bitcoin derived from that fact... if you could multiply it, it would have no value.
        • by Luthair ( 847766 )
          You realize if they hadn't made beanie babies have artificial scarcity they would have had no value?
  • While bitcoin is changing the landscape, I still think it suffers from the same problem that 'normal' currency has, in that the richest 1% control nearly all the currency, only this time that 1 percent are the techies/geeks.

    Only time will tell if they'll also fall prey to human nature (ie. greed, and hoard it all to themselves). Here's hoping that won't happen.

    • You realize that "the 1%" don't have Scrooge McDuck vaults dotting the landscape, right? They do not have "Money" they have assets. Stocks, bonds, businesses, land, gold, and now Bitcoin. The US Dollar is not considered an asset.
      • Wrong, there are indeed real Scrooge McDuck vaults in widespread use. Well, they don't have all the money in a pit with a big diving board over it, because you would kill yourself by diving into it and the money would be inconvenient to retrieve, but from a financial standpoint the concept is exactly the same:

        http://www.financialsamurai.co... [financialsamurai.com]

        http://www.cnbc.com/2014/09/22... [cnbc.com]

      • Sure. If a rich person keeps lots of dollars around, for some reason, those dollars will be in a bank and therefore most will be usable in the economy. The BTC 1% are that way because they got BTC when they were cheap (in money or computrons) and sat on them. One big problem with a deflationary currency is that the holder can stuff the currency into a safe place where it will be unused and gain wealth, meaning that currency is driven out of circulation. These 1%ers generally have a decent income in dol

    • You do realize that the makeup of the "1%" has a high turnover [fee.org], right?
  • by Anonymous Coward

    If someone is not interested in drugs or guns is there any benefit to bitcoin?

    Just curious.

    • Why be into privacy? Why be concerned about NSA spying? Why be concerned if google knows everything you search for?

      I mean, unless you're interested in drugs or guns, why should you possibly care about privacy? /sarc
    • by grumling ( 94709 )

      Bitcoin mining is helping people in Venezuela avoid the problems of hyperinflation, thanks to state subsided (although likely illegally used) electricity:

      https://www.theguardian.com/te... [theguardian.com]

    • If someone is not interested in drugs or guns is there any benefit to bitcoin?

      Just curious.

      All cryptocoins are basically a stock trading simulation game being played with real money. Any other use cases are pretty much secondary.

    • I have bought things with bitcoin, but never guns. All my guns have been paid for in cash. So I do not see the connection...
  • Pump and dump (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 02, 2017 @09:52AM (#53592147)

    Slashdot is helping with the pump, who is out there dumping?

    • You mean someone has been dumping it for 3 years? Recent days we have seen insane price increase if you look over 3 years, it's a pretty consistent price increase. Sad you probably never read how bitcoin works and understand to true power of p2p transactions. If that would have been possible... would you have invest in the p2p communication called the Internet? Or the p2p file sharing torrent? Bitcoin is the next logical step against censorship.
  • Another way of writing the story is this:
    People who bought bit coin in 2013 had lost money for the last three years, and at long last are now even.
    Look for the same if you buy bitcoin now, you can help make the 2013 losers whole by participating in the next round of pump and dump ... From the losers side.

    • Another way of writing the story is this:
      People who bought bit coin in 2013 had lost money for the last three years, and at long last are now even.
      Look for the same if you buy bitcoin now, you can help make the 2013 losers whole by participating in the next round of pump and dump ... From the losers side.

      Not even even, they are still behind inflation.

  • Hilarious (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dunbal ( 464142 ) * on Monday January 02, 2017 @09:56AM (#53592155)

    Seeing bitcoin and "professional investor" in the same sentence, as well as seeing real world economic situations used as an excuse for the latest bitcoin bubble.

    It's very easy to look "professional" when the bubble is inflating. Let's see how professional they look when it pops again, as it will - because Bitcoin is SPECULATION not investment. I'm pretty sure that tulip salesmen were highly respected financial professionals in the 1630's, a few months before they turned gardener again.

    Now don't get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with a bit of speculation and money can be made. However it is a universe of risk away from the term "investment" and the buyer must beware.

    • Refer you to https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoin... [99bitcoins.com]
      • by Dunbal ( 464142 ) *
        I'll refer you to all those people who bought Bitcoin at $1000 per a few years ago and who only NOW have access to their money again.
        • After 8.5 years the stories about imminent death of bitcoin gets kind of old - that was the reason people started collecting bitcoin obituaries. Trading strategy: buy and hodl and have a long term investment horizon. Lots of opportunity to average down as low as $200 during the intervening period. Point is if people see a value to permissionless, unseizable global digital gold. From the $16 billion market cap it seems that they do. Feel free not to buy any.
        • Unless you shorted bitcoin. Anyone who did that made a fortune.
    • It is normal for investors to hold a percentage of higher risk assets, and to hold financial instruments for purposes other than long term growth, such as hedging contracts to protect against currency fluctuations. In BTC's case, holding it offers certain characteristics that are hard to get in other asset classes. To someone managing a fund or portfolio, these characteristics have little to do with the technology itself, and everything to how the bitcoin price responds to international events. In recent
  • If you just want a way to digitally pay for things with limited (but far from perfect) anonymity, bitcoin is a fine mechanism if you can stomach the wild fluctuations in valuations relative to governmental currencies. But if you actually want something independent of government currency, you don't want to jump overboard into an exchange based on artificial scarcity backed by nothing but the good will of mathematicians; you want durable commodities. Bitcoin is simply a zero-value hash which a subset of peopl

    • Good will of mathematicians? Err math :) 2+2 = 4 regardless of the mood of mathematicians or their views on your spending choices. Try your claim with metals: Gold is simply a near zero-value metal ingot which a subset of people have agreed has value. Nothing less, nothing more.
  • Saying that bitcoin is not subject to capital controls and loss of purchasing power is something that the guy running Silk Road would strongly disagree with. He was one of several people who have lost their bitcoin's purchasing power following government controls - in this case seizure. Here's another in Australia [bbc.com].

    It's like anything else - if yu can own it, someone else can take it away from you. "New asset class" my arse.

    • by Jeremi ( 14640 )

      That's an oversimplification to binary -- of course neither Bitcoin nor anything else is a magical solution to the fact that your government (or any other sufficiently powerful entity) could point a gun at your head (either literally or metaphorically) and force you to comply with whatever demands/rules they've come up with.

      The question is, how practical is it for a government to do that on a regular/systemic basis? With a formal banking system, it's quite possible, since there are only a small number of b

      • Even p2p traffic requires the net. It's not like cash, which you can just carry around with you and spend as you choose without any infrastructure. I know which I want to have on me during a power failure, or when my battery is dead, or I'm in a dead spot ... or even when I want to bargain for a discount for cash payment. Cash is still king.
  • $1000 today... 5 cents tomorrow... $300 next week. Doesn't really matter what Bitcoin is worth today, it flops around like a wet fish, still not really viable as a useful currency, better as a medium in which geeks take money from other geeks.

  • by Khyber ( 864651 ) <techkitsune@gmail.com> on Monday January 02, 2017 @12:51PM (#53592849) Homepage Journal

    "So bitcoin is a healthy reminder that we don't have to hold on to dollars or renminbi, which is subject to capital controls and loss of purchasing power."

    As if bitcoin isn't subject to a loss of purchasing power? As if that wasn't why the prices fluctuate so wildly?

    Holy shit, the people getting into bitcoin are getting scammed harder than I thought if they're buying this economically-unsound statement.

Every nonzero finite dimensional inner product space has an orthonormal basis. It makes sense, when you don't think about it.

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