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.
lulz (Score:1)
i remember when you could use a bitcoin fountain and get 1btc at each pull of the virtual lever.
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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...
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I got a bit nickel shortly after they dropped the drop size. Still have it, worth about $50 now . . . one of my better investments.
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What kind of contract are you suggesting? You pay someone who holds BTC cash for a contract where they lock up some of their BTC and that BTC will be awarded to you (Or bought back from you for cash) if the BTC increases in value with respect to USD, and if the value of USD stays the same or increases in value with respect to BTC, then the Cash you spent on that contract becomes worthless?
You could probably do it simpler with Call options on an ETF holding BTC
Re:Any way to hedge USD using smart contracts? (Score:4, Informative)
Bitcoin as a currency has built-in deflation, so you can't peg it to anything.
There are real reasons why all the serious, real fiat currencies are managed for low inflation. Having guaranteed deflation makes bitcoin useless long-term, and it even makes it hard to understand price changes.
The supply is constrained. A bitcoin will always have more purchasing power in the future. So it can only ever succeed temporarily in "pyramid scheme" fashion. Success would mean demand, but demand cannot be sustained in those circumstances.
The only reason it is in use is because drug dealers don't realize that it is more traceable than dollars. Ignorance is not a good basis for an economy. See also: information theory (economics)
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Why do you think demand cannot be sustained ? Bitcoin is a payment system. If you want to use it you need to purchase some bitcoin. The amount of bitcoin is largely irrelevant. You purchase for a certain value. If the value keeps going up you just get less bitcoin for the same value. But you can still use it for transactions for that value. Bitcoins are basically infinitely divisable. The current minimum amount of 1 satoshi can easily be subdivided.
When you think of bitcoin only as an investment vehicle it'
Re: Any way to hedge USD using smart contracts? (Score:1)
For example, Bitcoin offers a way to transfer funds in and out of war zones and political hot spots. Our existing monetary system breaks down in these cases, as trust breaks down, government stop operating, and the local fiat currency becomes wor
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Speculators (Score:5, Informative)
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)
But rest assured, the scale itself changes day to day, sometimes even as much as stocks change day to day.
Rubbish. Currencies tend to be stable over time. It's when they're NOT stable (witness the Russian Rouble, the Euro, and the British Pound last year) that the shit tends to hit the fan. Which proves GP's point - people like STABILITY in their currencies. Instability is a sign of failure not success.
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Currencies, like other commodities, tend to be more stable when they are more widely traded. Bitcoin is exchanged sparsely, so a single big transaction can affect the price. As it is more widely adopted, it will be more stable.
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Currencies, like other commodities, tend to be more stable when they are more widely traded. Bitcoin is exchanged sparsely, so a single big transaction can affect the price. As it is more widely adopted, it will be more stable.
Two days is a little short to start calling it a trend...
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Nothing is perfectly stable. We do not even know how to define "perfectly stable" in a manner that economists would agree on.
Most major currencies exhibit less instability over the course of two decades than Bitcoin does over any year. So if we agree that stability is desirable enough to even discuss, then that is a major black mark against Bitcoin.
Re:Speculators (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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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.
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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]
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Volatility can hurt the exchange function. If you are just using it to transfer funds between two different currencies, having the value drop 10% in the space of time it takes for the transactions to clear is less than ideal.
Cheap enough is also questionable. If you want your transaction to not take days to clear, you are paying a higher fee than Visa or Mastercard charge.
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If you want your transaction to not take days to clear, you are paying a higher fee than Visa or Mastercard charge.
Deposited a check lately?
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Yes I have, the funds are normally in my account within an hour. It did take two days when I recently sold my house. But I don't get charged a fee for cashing them.
And Bitcoin is trying to be like handing someone digital cash. Do you remember the last time you sold something on Craig's list and got paid a $20 bill, but you had to wait three days before you could spend it?
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With this description in mind, BTC seems to be more like gold than dollars.
Like gold, it seems to have an intrinsic value, in the eye of the beholder. And gold is assumed to be a finite resource, which we discover and deliver with variable effort and cost. BTC seems to have an increasingly higher cost to discover and deliver new BTC, though technology (as happens sometimes with gold) may make this relatively easier from time to time, possibly affecting perceived value.
Unlike gold, which has a broad, virtual
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LOL you're making a pretty huge vocabulary mistake when you confuse the definition of a fiat currency ("in the eye of the beholder" eg, value is in the perception/agreement that there is value) and intrinsic value.
About $250/oz of the value of gold is based purely on the industrial value as a construction material! There is real long-term intrinsic value that serves as a guaranteed floor and allows gold to trade at a much higher level in a similar way to a fiat currency.
Bitcoin has zero intrinsic value. Zer
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About $250/oz of the value of gold is based purely on the industrial value as a construction material! There is real long-term intrinsic value that serves as a guaranteed floor and allows gold to trade at a much higher level in a similar way to a fiat currency.
What's "intrinsic" about that? Is there some particular reason to think that people will always and forever value gold at $250/oz or higher, no matter what?
Keep in mind that aluminum was once valued more highly than gold, now it's cheap enough that many people don't even both to recycle it but rather just throw it in the landfill.
Seems to me that gold is valued as an industrial material only as long as no cheaper/more-useful substitute can be found, at which point its value would drop accordingly. Outside
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Will BTC go back to the $600s perhaps. Two hundred. I don't think so.
Re:Not surprised... there isn't anything capping i (Score:4, Interesting)
Because of the moronic increasingly constrained supply over time, the price will continue to trend up even as people abandon it and demand trends down.
A normal fiat currency the price would crash until you need 10 billion Zimbabwe dollars to buy a sandwich. With bitcoin, you can't even print more; people will have to abandon it. It won't get easier/cheaper to get, either, because of the speculation premium.
If you want a new fiat currency, fine. But it has to have long-term low inflation to succeed. If it has built-in deflation then speculation will dominate the market.
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Please stop this bullshit.
You obviously have no clue about bitcoins and your economics 101 is pretty flawed, too.
You get bit coins via bitcoin exchanges. You are mixing up mining, wich will hit a limited supply and will make finding new coins more and more expensive with transactions and payments.
There is no difference between gong to an ATM, withdrawing $10, going into a pub and drinking 2 or 3 beer versus "withdrawing" bitcoins worth $10 from an "bitcoin exchange" and buying some thing you want to buy via
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Stopped reading at "you obviously have no clue."
Everything I stated as a fact is a fact. Things not stated as a fact might be my opinion. You might simply be unaware of the facts, or don't care about my opinion, but then, why even respond? If I state a fact, and you offer a correction, I might read it. If you say I have "no clue," even though I actually did look into the subject and my comments were a mix of fact and educated opinion, then I know you're full of shit. I don't need to know whatever else you w
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Then you are not very smart ... as the opinions you form from your "even though I actually did look into the subject" make no sense and are wrong.
Your whoe posts indicates: you have no clue. ;D
And your follow up indicates: You're not even logically competent enough to disagree with me without making an ass of yourself because you are full with insults
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Wow, "you disagree with me, you must not be very smart."
I know you are but what am I?
You're right, I don't have anything but insults to respond to that with, because it is too fucking stupid to waste time with any other response. If you say shit like that to people, they are only going to respond for their own entertainment.
I'll leave it to you to figure out why your response is idiotic.
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How many Venezuelan bolívars do you own? If you were an investment adviser would you recommend investing in Venezuela?
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A currency goes up when people have confidence in it as a store of value and go down when they don't. Is it more complicated than that? Yes. But currencies do not go up when people lose confidence in it's stability.
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Br If you think this is a temporary phenomenon then this is a good time for you to short the US dollar. You'll make a killing.
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Euro nobody even knows if it will exist in 10 years. There is no Euro nation state, there is no long tradition of union, and they don't seem to be increasing trust and cooperation over time in a way that leads to that. They seem increasingly dysfunctional. The British pound, well, Britain isn't the power they used to be. If their currency became too important, they wouldn't be able to keep control of the politics. The bigger it got, the less stable it would be perceived as being, and the more dangerous poli
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
There isn't even a viable alternative to the US Dollar as a reserve.
Considering that Africa and (ex) Russia use Deutsche Mark as reserve currency, you must be living behind the moon.
The Unites States are a sinking ship since 30 years, no one is really investing it either $ nor the nation. Even your own bigger corporations flee the country and set up shop elsewhere. If you don't get your ass out of your butt you will sink into oblivion over the next 30 years. What exactly doe
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That's a pretty daft response, showing an intentional lack of understanding of the context.
No, having small 2nd and 3rd world countries using something else as a reserve does not establish that as an alternative reserve currency.
And honestly, that is a really pathetic argument to be making at all, much less basing insults on it that literally accuse me of other-worldly ignorance.
Adding anti-American blathering to it doesn't make it smaht, you know.
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There are no countries that are in any way meaningful that use US$ as "reserves".
US$ is bought and sold by majour national banks to influence the value of the $ or their own currency on global markets. That is all.
Do you really think when a majour crisis is approaching, like a big war, or even happening as the war is conducted, that any US$ would have any value for any one on the world?
Or do you mean, personal savings? Personal savings in many countries are either old DM or modern EU and only in countries t
Shocking (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Shocking (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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And still the 1% problem (Score:2)
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.
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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]
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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
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Confused? (Score:1)
If someone is not interested in drugs or guns is there any benefit to bitcoin?
Just curious.
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I mean, unless you're interested in drugs or guns, why should you possibly care about privacy?
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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]
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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.
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Pump and dump (Score:4, Insightful)
Slashdot is helping with the pump, who is out there dumping?
dumping... for 3 years? (Score:2)
Not good news (Score:2)
Another way of writing the story is this: ... From the losers side.
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
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Another way of writing the story is this: ... From the losers side.
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
Not even even, they are still behind inflation.
Hilarious (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re: Hilarious (Score:2)
Artificial scarcity is not a hedge (Score:2)
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
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More fake news based on lies (Score:3)
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.
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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
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More internet stupidity. The fact is that they were already under order to be seized. They would have been seized eventually no matter what - even if it meant offering someone a 10% finder's fee. There are plenty of people who can beg, borrow, or steal an electric drill or a hammer, and you'll be begging them to take every last bitcoin. And since it's not easily tracked, good luck getting it back, even if they catch the perps.
The same things that make bitcoin attractive to crooks make you, the owner, a ver
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Also, given that 5 Chinese organizations control the computing power to generate the majority of bitcoins, ...
If that was the case, you would not know
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I would say it is a /. myth :D
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I would say it is a /. myth :D
The New York Times disagrees with you [nytimes.com]. So does businessinsider [businessinsider.com]. And bloomberg [bloomberg.com]. The Chinese control bitcoin, even in Tibet [washingtonpost.com].
$1000 today... 5 cents tomorrow (Score:1)
$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.
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Historically over a long time though it has been very volatile.
Dumbest comment ever in summary (Score:4, Insightful)
"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.
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Even if BitCON hit $100,000 it'd still be worth less than even my most modest garnet mine.
I can trade my mine for a house, and the person getting the mine can immediately be fruitful and productive. Trade bitcoin for a house, we gotta wait for transaction, the network to keep up, and then, bitcoin isn't immediately useful.
Any removal of extra links in the chain is always the best option economically. But you probably failed economics and don't understand the bare basics of a trade and barter economy.