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Bitcoin Businesses The Almighty Buck

Bitcoin Surges 10% To All-Time High Above $2,700, Has Now Doubled in May (cnbc.com) 139

Posted by msmash from the price-frenzy dept.
An anonymous reader writes: In another intraday jump of more than $200, bitcoin surged to a record Thursday on strong Asian demand overnight. Bitcoin jumped more than 10 percent to an all-time high of $2,752.07, more than twice its April 30 price of $1,347.96 according to CoinDesk. The digital currency last traded near $2,726. At Thursday's record, Bitcoin has now gained more than 45 percent since last Thursday and more than 180 percent for the year so far. "There is no question that we are in the middle of a price frenzy," said Brian Kelly of BKCM, in a note to clients Thursday. "There will be a correction and it could be severe, but it's unclear if that correction will start from current prices of $2700 or from some place much higher."
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Bitcoin Surges 10% To All-Time High Above $2,700, Has Now Doubled in May More

Bitcoin Surges 10% To All-Time High Above $2,700, Has Now Doubled in May

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  • Unclear (Score:4, Funny)

    by 110010001000 ( 697113 ) on Thursday May 25, 2017 @10:01AM (#54483881) Homepage Journal
    "but it's unclear if that correction will start from current prices of $2700 or from some place much higher."

    I wish I had a job like this. There will be a correction, but it might happen today, or 10,000 years from now.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by zifn4b ( 1040588 )

      "but it's unclear if that correction will start from current prices of $2700 or from some place much higher." I wish I had a job like this. There will be a correction, but it might happen today, or 10,000 years from now.

      Yeah, you know, some day the world might end or it might not. If it does end it could be sooner or later, it's hard to tell. Whatever the case may be we should all be prepared for it if that day ever comes. Now that's what I call news.

      • I also wish I had a job like "today will be sunny, tomorrow will be rainy". And if the exact opposite happens, it doesn't matter. You keep your 6 digit job anyway.
  • Can someone actually sell (or exchange depending on whether you believe it to be currency or not) a couple of million in bitcoins without the price crashing?

    • You could probably manage it if you do it slow enough that it doesn't cause a panic sell, and/or do it through a number of shell accounts so it doesn't look too suspicious.

      Once you've unloaded a few hundred BTC, try to dump the rest and cause a market crash, then buy back what you sold originally for a fraction of the price and wait for the next bubble.
      =Smidge=

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        You could probably manage it if you do it slow enough that it doesn't cause a panic sell, and/or do it through a number of shell accounts so it doesn't look too suspicious.

        If you had bought $100 worth of Bitcoin in May of 2010 when the price was 0.003 cents, it would be worth more than $70 Million today. However, this also illustrates the two biggest problems with Bitcoin.

        First, if you bought that $100 worth of Bitcoin back in 2010 it's unlikely that you would even still have it today. It probably would have been stolen by now. Is there even a Bitcoin exchange that's been in business for any significant amount of time and hasn't suddenly run off with everyone's money, or,

        • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Idiot. Go to a major exchange. Watch the real time trades appear. Add up how long it takes for the sold volume to hit 500 bitcoins. The answer is minutes. What does the price do? Absolutely fuck all. You could cash out $1 million in minutes.

        • First, if you bought that $100 worth of Bitcoin back in 2010 it's unlikely that you would even still have it today. It probably would have been stolen by now. Is there even a Bitcoin exchange that's been in business for any significant amount of time and hasn't suddenly run off with everyone's money, or, got "hacked" and "lost" all their Bitcoin?

          If you left that $100 worth of Bitcoins on an exchange all that time, you're an idiot. If it was kept inside a wallet controlled by your own computer, you'd still h

        • First, if you bought that $100 worth of Bitcoin back in 2010 it's unlikely that you would even still have it today. It probably would have been stolen by now.

          I suspect that there's a much simpler explanation: most of the people who bought in at $100 or mined a couple of BTC way back when, probably sold them when they hit $200 or $500 or whatever. Most of the stories about the guys who struck it rich are about people who mined a few or bought some on a lark early on, forgot they even had them, then thankfully remembered their wallet password when the hype struck and BTC was all over the news.

    • No. Not yet. BTC volume is low compared to the equity trading. BTC volume is generally in the range of 50K - 200K BTC / day. And spiking much higher the last few few days.

      At $1000 per BTC that's a volume of 50-200 million dollars per day. Low in one respect. But it is respectable.

      You can clearly see that it will be a billion/dollar a day market pretty soon.

      BTC at $2,500 and trading volume of 400K would make it a billion dollar market.

    • It's a traded currency. So I suspect it is governed by the same laws of supply and demand. If someone starts dumping it en masse, I'm sure the price will go down. Unless there is a feeding frenzy of course.

      It reminds me of tech stocks in late 2000 early 2001 that oscillated like crazy. I know quite a lot of people who won big and became millionaires. And quite a lot of people who gambled millions on a hunch and lost them.

      • Technically, it isn't a currency, anymore than Disney bucks are a currency. One day, it might become a currency. Think Ubiquity.

        • On the most basic level, currency is that which circulates. Bitcoin circulates, Disney gift certificates do not.

          Without knowing which definition of currency you've chosen, it is hard to assess your claim of technicality. Or, for that matter, how closely your definition matches the ordinary meaning of the word.

          • By your definition of "currency", stocks would be considered currency. So would a lot of other instruments, trading cards, collectibles, durable goods.

            And I actually qualified why I answered the way I did. Ubiquity.

            • Bitcoin is very fungible and liquid, and while still volatile(many fiat currencies are volatile too), isn't at all like a stock where you don't see people trading stock shares to buy goods and services.

            • You capitalized it, which led me to believe you were talking about some product that I was unfamiliar with. If you just mean "everywhere", I should point out that "everywhere" is never everywhere everywhere, but is always everywhere in some scope .

              Stocks don't really circulate anywhere that I know of. There may be country clubs where they are passed around, but I don't know of any. For the most part, they are transacted through limited access markets by specialist traders. In those markets, it may be p

          • World Of Warcraft gold could be also called currency using this definition (it circulates), but it is not a legal tender. You can't expect anyone to accept it as a payment for your gas, apples, or coffee. No one enforces it. In case of fiat currencies, it's the governments of the countries that emit their currencies. The same situation is with Bitcoin.
      • It's a traded good, not a traded currency. You could trade web domain names in the same way, but you couldn't expect everyone to accept them as payment for your shopping, even though you could probably find some shops that would do it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ThePyro ( 645161 )
      Yes. You can actually see the market depth (i.e. how many buy orders are queued up) on GDAX if you're logged in. Right now there are enough open buy orders that a $1,000,000 sale would drop the price by 8%.
      • and Gdax is a very illiquid exchange. On a more popular exchange selling a million would hardly effect the price.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Lehk228 ( 705449 )
        8% for a 1 million dollar sell transaction sounds bad to me. maybe I'm wrong but that seems very sensitive to manipulation
    • Nobody owns a couple of millions of bitcoin. The way those are distributed at the fixed rate per time, earlier adopter had more but they worthless, today they worth a lot but received also less. If someone right now has let's say 100,000 BTC (worth 200 million) he probably acquired them a couple years ago and probably believe in the currency... little chance he will sell them all at the same time. If it's case that would crash the price instantly because there is no such liquidity. The same concept can be a

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Considering the daily trading volume of bitcoin is now exceeding $2 billion? Yeah, you could sell 500 coins without anyone blinking.

    • A few million in Bitcoin isn't much these days and many exchanges would quickly fill those orders in a second. Bitcoin is very liquid with over 2.5 billion in trading volume during the last 24 hours
  • ... you sell NOW. Right now.

  • ... Mystico and Janet, and flats built by hynosis

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

    (of course, most of the world's current currencies are the same, but bitcoin and its ilk just exaggerate the effect)

  • When the economy crashes and the US becomes a post-apocalyptic wasteland, I'm gonna be sitting fat and happy on my bitcoins while the rest of you scrounge for caps and Nuka-cola.

    That's why I've been keeping my bitcoins in my mattress since 2009. To protect them from ransomware.

  • Please, from now on..... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Please to refer to Bitcoin as the following:

    Internet Drug Tokens
    PedoPesos
    Math-Based Beanie Babies
    Internet Fun Bux

    and always remember....
    Satoshi Nakamoto is an anagram for "So A Man Took A Shit"

  • BTC Market Cap out of sync with available USD (Score:5, Interesting)

    by laughingskeptic ( 1004414 ) on Thursday May 25, 2017 @11:10AM (#54484425)
    Your ability to get a dollar out of the BTC market today for a dollar put in yesterday depends heavily on the participation of others putting their dollars in today. If you examine the data behind the charts https://blockchain.info/charts... [blockchain.info] and https://blockchain.info/charts... [blockchain.info] it is very clear that speculative trading has repeatedly driven BTC values up followed by a market value collapse of BTC. People stop putting their money in and instead pull it out and the amount of time it takes to get their money out goes from minutes to days. If there is no speculation and all BTC coins are used for ephemeral transactions, then the total amount of hard currency backing BTC would be around the daily volume of BTC transactions in a day: $1 Billion dollars. However people are behaving as if all of the BTCs are worth $40 Billion dollars. The speculators are the "long-term" holders of BTC, however only a small fraction of their holdings can actually be converted to hard currency before the entire BTC system collapses ... in the 2% range. Everyone is depending on everyone else not to blink, historically not a good bet.

    • however only a small fraction of their holdings can actually be converted to hard currency before the entire BTC system collapses

      That's true of many things.

      • Yeah, it's a known thing with all currencies, bank accounts etc. Fractional reserve banking. If more than an average number of people withdraw their money from the bank at the same time, you have big problems.

    • Market cap is indeed a worthless and misleading number; more relevant is market liquidity and you can easily sell a few million of btc right now and not effect the price more than 1%.

    • Your ability to get a dollar out of the BTC market today for a dollar put in yesterday depends heavily on the participation of others putting their dollars in today.

      Sounds like you are characterizing BTC as something of a Ponzi scheme. Is that about right?

  • The current rise in bitcoin value is due to market manipulation... expect the manipulators to cash out VERY soon and send the value under $1000 almost overnight...

    • Bitcoin has gone through many bubbles in the past where they all correct after a 5-11x in explosive growth, thus many longterm investors will likely take profits in the 5-10k USD per btc range here.
  • By the end of the year, the price will higher than $10,000 per BTC. Also, BTC will shoot up every time there is some financial disturbance. Finally, in 10 years the value of BTC will be one million dollars per coin. Why such wild predictions, you might ask? Isn't it a redo of the Tulip mania? The answer is: no. 1. In Netherlands, there is an almost unlimited supply of tulip bulbs. 2. BTC can never be regulated (well, you can switch off the internet, or can ban by law) 3. You can actually exchange easily y

    • ... There are huge issues with scaling the Bitcoin network, there has been a long-time Civil War among the hard-core fanatics on this issue, and while there have been many advancements in the technology over the years, these years have seen nothing but stagnation in the deployment of those advancements.

      The price is going up not because Bitcoin is working well, but rather because most of these know-nothing speculators have no clue that there are serious technical problems—hell, they don't even understa

    • That assumes that people will pay a megabuck for a bitcoin in 2027. There's plenty of unregulated things in limited supply that aren't worth a million dollars, and I can (indirectly) use these to pay for things.

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