Bitcoin Nears $6,000 For the First Time (bloomberg.com) 120
Bitcoin closed in on another milestone Friday, as the digital currency approached $6,000 for the first time to put its gain in 2017 to above 500 percent. From a report: The push higher comes just three days after bitcoin suffered its biggest one-day drop in a month on rising concern that regulators are increasingly targeting digital currencies. It's added almost $500 in value in the past two days alone.
In hindsight (Score:2)
In hindsight, maybe I should have held on to those bitcoins from 2012...
Re:In hindsight (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, I was too smart for all of this.
We downloaded it right after it first appeared on the net to play with it. Shared computing was just becoming a thing, with folding at home. So we installed in on a couple of machines to see what it was. After playing around with it for a couple of weeks, I had 1 bitcoin and my lead developer had three. I thought it was interesting, but essentially pointless and deleted it. My buddy kept playing around and eventually amassed 7 whole bitcoins.
They were valued at about 50 cents, theoretically, when we started. They spiked to $7 in a really short time, then back down to a buck. When they went back up over two bucks, my buddy sold out. He's no fool. We both knew a bubble scam when we saw it.
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Wait he sold his bitcoins for $14??
Those 7 would be worth $42,000! Who is the fool?
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Wait he sold his bitcoins for $14??
Those 7 would be worth $42,000! Who is the fool?
Yeah, that's the joke. And you a good joke only gets funnier when you explain it...
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Could be worse. Early on, I had my VPS solo-mining when it was idle...and I managed to find a block, but didn't notice it until a couple years or so later. When I discovered I had 50 BTC on hand, the value had already gone up to $13 each. I spent most of it on a Radeon HD 7750 (to get into GPU mining) and a couple of Butterfly Labs ASIC miners (something like 5-7 GH/s each). If I had just held onto those 50 CPU-mined BTC, they'd be worth about $300k right now.
I now have a rig with four GeForce 1070s pro
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Well, I'm not American, so there's that.
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LOL.... sigh.... ahem.... happy friday
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I'm kicking myself for not making bi-weekly buys of say $250 over the past few years. I got in when BTC was trading around $250, so even $750 seemed like a high valuation back then and I didn't put more money in.
That being said, I'm pretty happy with my return. My holdings are now valued at more than six figures and I invested less than $10,000 initially. It's kicked the crap out of my other retirement holdings.
Time to buy?? (Score:5, Interesting)
Normally I laugh at people foolish to buy at a high and sell low when it tanks, but I am thinking it will only go up for the following reasons:
1. We are at an economic height now and growth we have not seen since the mid to late 1990s.
2. Russia and other countries are launching their own bitcoins
3. Goldman Sachs and others like this because they can do business without being taxed or have the government snoop. You can easily do commerce in bitcoins and not pay taxes
So what makes 1 unique and retarded? Well, like gold bitcoin has an inverse relationship to the stock market. WIth over-inflated prices we know a crash is coming and recession will strike. That is the norm these days. When it does gold SPIKES. When Wall Street sees their stocks losing 1/2 it's value in just 3 months they need a safe haven to put their money. Gold and bitcoin are such.
Even better bitcoins may skyrocket in value in such an event in a stock market collapse making thsoe who didn't get in at $6,000 a coin sorry. I am going to save this comment so I can either laugh at myself for benig moronic if I am wrong later on or will do this as a HA told ya so!
I am seriously thinking of putting some money down but am nervous I am buying at a high.
What do you all think>?
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According to CNBC [cnbc.com] it's going to keep growing past $10,000 per BTC.
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According to CNBC [cnbc.com] it's going to keep growing past $10,000 per BTC.
They lost all credibility with the .com rise and crash.
I am not following the experts. What I am following is lots of money is out there. People do not want it to loose value. When Stocks go down in value they put it in other places. Housing was the boom during the .com crash. Bitcoins are soooo easy to invest with less hassle during a crash. Gold too.
But overall bitcoin and gold are TERRIBLE investments as there is no ROI. But now my opinion is they are serving a purpose as the stock valuations are well ou
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But overall bitcoin and gold are TERRIBLE investments as there is no ROI.
If I cash out now, I will realize a 300% ROI if I don't have to worry about any sort of taxes, so I'm not really sure what you're talking about.
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But overall bitcoin and gold are TERRIBLE investments as there is no ROI.
If I cash out now, I will realize a 300% ROI if I don't have to worry about any sort of taxes, so I'm not really sure what you're talking about.
What I meant is it does now earn value. ROI was not the appropriate term. I think earnings would be better as when you buy a stock you get a share of the money earned. When you invest in a home you get rent, etc.
Gold well it doesn't do anything. It doesn't generate wealth. Basically you hope someone will pay more for yours what you bought it for. For 30 year investments it is a bad move as your money looses to inflation compared to a traditional investment instrument. But for a few years bitcoin can go up i
Re:Time to buy?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Currency isn't supposed to generate wealth. It supposed to store wealth and make transactions easier. If it is generating wealth then it isn't a good currency. Of course, you are talking about investment, not a currency. But my point is that as long as people are treating Bitcoin as an investment, it really isn't much good as a currency. And if it isn't good as a currency, what good is it for? You are only investing in it because you hope someone else will buy it from you for more. It has no intrinsic value. It's no good for currency since transaction times are too long and transaction costs are too high. Eventually, people will figure out that Bitcoin is worthless. The only value it generates is taken from the suckers at the bottom of the pyramid.
If you want to design a crypto-currency that actually functions as currency, you gotta design something that isn't used as an investment. Otherwise, speculators are going to ruin it.
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Yeah, the "investment" aspect of bitcoin at this point is the part that is related to a ponzi scheme. Essentially, nobody is in the market. So as more people come to the market for a fixed amount of bitcoin, the price will continue to rise. Until no more people are coming to the market. Then it will stop rising. And then the "investor" class will leave. And the value of bitcoin will fall.
When these points will be reached is another question. One I'd love to know the answer to, because it would be real
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Yeah, the "investment" aspect of bitcoin at this point is the part that is related to a ponzi scheme. Essentially, nobody is in the market. So as more people come to the market for a fixed amount of bitcoin, the price will continue to rise. Until no more people are coming to the market. Then it will stop rising. And then the "investor" class will leave. And the value of bitcoin will fall.
When these points will be reached is another question. One I'd love to know the answer to, because it would be really easy to get really rich knowing something like that.
I think it will stay.
When Goldman Sachs realized in 2006 that ther real estate market was no good and wanted to leave while they still could they had a problem? It is not liquid or fast/easy to move. Buying real estate is not liquid or easy either. So let's say you're a banker who is loosing money FAST in a crashing stock market.
You could go through your lawyers, auditors, red tape paper pushers, other investors, their lawyers, then get a customer then have the money moved for each transaction. Or you coul
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Wasn't part of the problem they did get out fast? They just cooked up the financial instruments to do so and sold them to as many suckers as they could find (like Deutsche Bank at the time).
Pe
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Every currency on Earth generates wealth if it's deposited in a bank. Or if there's a deflation.
Bitcoin stores wealth just fine and transactions using bitcoin are a lot easier and faster than using the traditional banking system.
P
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Transaction times are fine and costs [bitinfocharts.com] are nowhere near what you pay for e.g. SWIFT or Western Union transfers.
https://blockchain.info/charts... [blockchain.info]
So you think a 142 minute (Oct 20, 2017) confirmation time and $3 transaction fee (Oct 20, 2017) is fine? Maybe if you are buying a house or a pallet of drugs or something. And who uses Western Union other than Nigerian princes?
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Bank transfers often take up to a week to be confirmed. 142 minutes are the average. If you're smart enough you'll choose a fee which will make your transaction be confirmed in under an hour.
Western Union is used by the people of the world. Tell me, how'd you send money (more or less instantly) from the US to a random person in some odd country or vice versa? Bitcoin makes it trivial. Bitcoin allows you to remain fully anonymous. Bitcoin won't make you fill in forms or show your ID. There will be no IRS i
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...unless you don't care how quickly the transfer goes through, in which case you set a low fee. When I got my Trezor a while back and moved funds onto it, I set fees around 50-250 satoshis/byte, which I think worked out at the time to something like 5-25 cents for the transaction. So what if it took 36 hours to go through? I wasn't going to spend my stash on anything anytime soon, so I wasn't in a
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It has no intrinsic value
Neither do the paper bills you hold in your wallet. What makes Bitcoin really valuable is that you can transmit stored value outside of the traditional banking system.
You are also protected from having that value stolen by third parties. As an example, a court can pass a judgement and seize all of your bank accounts. Even with a valid judgement no one can take your Bitcoin without your private key.
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True, but you run the risk of losing your private key or having it stolen. I feel this is orders of magnitude more likely than a court seizing my accounts. But I can easily see how drug dealers could come to a different conclusion.
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If you want to design a crypto-currency that actually functions as currency, you gotta design something that isn't used as an investment. Otherwise, speculators are going to ruin it.
Every currency is used as investment, and every currency is speculated. The trick is not in the design but rather in creating a trading volume high enough that speculators can't affect the system simply by buying a small (relatively speaking to real currencies) amount of the currency.
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What I meant is it does now earn value. ROI was not the appropriate term. I think earnings would be better as when you buy a stock you get a share of the money earned. When you invest in a home you get rent, etc.
There's two ways to earn money off any investment, earnings and capital gain. Currency trading is all the latter.
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sounds like my friends who always tell me stories about big wins playing blackjack at a casino. they seem to forget all the times they lost money at the same game.
for now bitcoin has made people some money, assuming that they have taken opportunities to turn it into cash. at some point a clever person or persons will find a way to hack the blockchain and all confidence in bitcoin will disappear. it will be good to sell before that happens.
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Of, CNBC says so? Huh, maybe its time to sell.
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Nuclear Hellfire == no electricity.
No electricity. No internet.
No internet. No BTC.
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In Venezuela it's quite popular due to an unstable government and currency. If the US collapses (doubtful) you can always use bitcoin to trade and use any currency you like.
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Yes I realize that. I extrapolated to a SHTF (sh!t hits the fan) scenario; zombie apocalypse.
Still, if China and the US are knocked off the grid for a while (EMP) then finding a block will take a hell of lot longer than 10 minutes. Maybe 10 hours. Maybe longer.
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I'm taking a page from Star Trek and its gold pressed latinum. I'm having my Bitcoins converted to gold-wrapped chocolate. Still a Bitcoin in QR code form, gold value from the wrapper, food value from the chocolate.
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Well, I think the government is going to get their slice. That's how they roll. If they didn't already have the authority to tax transactions in bitcoin (they do), they would invent it quickly.
Plus, the bock chain makes bitcoin immensely traceable. Everyone knows every transaction that ever happens. So once you figure out who Goldman Sachs is in the bitcoin realm, you can tax all of it.
On the "other currencies" front.... this is where the $6,000 will be risky. Bitcoin is beginning to have real difficu
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gold fell in 2008, I don't think Bitcoin would behave the same as gold, but losing money is always easy...
Gold will go back up after the stock market crashes. I agree gold is a terrible investment as it earns no income for 30 year returns. However, Gold sea saws and in 1980 it was worth alot too when interest rates were INSANE.
Money always moves so basically buying bitcoin for me at least is a bet that the market will have a correction. All those extra trillions of dollars will need to go where it is safe. That will now be gold and bitcoin. Then I sell and buy stocks :-D
Re:Time to buy?? (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no rational basis to predict the future behaviour of bitcoin, so if you treat it as an investment, i.e. buy in and hope/assume it will increase in value, understand that you are gambling, not investing. I say that as someone who is doing exactly that right now. I had been on a policy of ending each trading session with only cash in my trading account, expecting btc to potentially crash after events in recent weeks, and while I did make some money trading, I would have made five times as much if I had just held bitcoin until today. So I decided to become a gambler for a while and went all in on btc a few days ago. I have a fixed target to cash out at though, and as I'm only trading for fun with a few grand, I can afford to take the risk.
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Err.... lulwut? That's complete rubbish.
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What do you all think>?
I don't believe the universe exists merely to screw me over personally, but based on what I've done with investments in the stock market, here's what I think. Bitcoin has long since passed being at the stage where I could gamble a little money on it and if it didn't go up, I could accept the loss. Now it involves a major financial commitment to me to get just one coin. If I made the kind of cash where I could just throw away $6000 and shrug it off if need be, I wouldn't be posting here. So I figure real
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major financial commitment to me to get just one coin
A bitcoin is divisible up to 8 decimal places. You don't have to buy them whole. Spend $10 or $100 or whatever other increment you want.
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Nope. The IRS doesn't care what you buy and sell, but if you make a profit that profit is taxable.
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If you can afford it, which means you're prepared to lose it, buy a few hundred dollars worth of Bitcoin and watch it over time. I did, and it's been fun to watch the values fluctuate like crazy.
That pattern seems classical (Score:3)
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It's easy to predict the past...
Anyone can look at the 6 month history of anything and point out 'yep, woulda bought there, sold there, bought again there, sold there...bought a TON there and sold it all....hmmm...there and there, and I'd be rich off a $10k investment...I woulda done it too if not for those meddling teenagers'
+1 for anyone who gets the reference
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+1 for anyone who gets the reference
+1 for Google, then!
Silver and Gold. (Score:3)
Don't burn and don't disappear when the power goes out.
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They also don't earn revenue like a traditional investment such as a Stock dividend or rent from a bought property.
They still are not a good investment for 30 years for this reason.
However, they are great gambling tool or safe haven in the event of a stock market crash temporarily just like bitcoin.
FYI if you had no power who are you going to buy and sell from?
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When the power goes out the world as we know it will end. Bitcoin or not will mean zilch. The world will become total chaos and you can only pray that fiat money/gold/silver will still be worth anything at all.
Yeah with no power no one will be buying or selling. They probablyt will be trading and dollars still for awhile.
Having no power and a civilization collapse is very very improbable and unrealistic. I feel it is someone trying to justify why they lost so much money buying gold at a high because they hated Obama or something of that matter but I could be wrong.
With gold values no one will be trading in their wedding rings for a quart of milk. That is insanity so I say nay to this how argument.
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I maintain that if you know how to make booze, you can get anything else you need.
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When the power goes out the world as we know it will end. Bitcoin or not will mean zilch.
We had a power outage the other week, no-one died, and BTC still went up. Or are you talking a global permanent world wide power outage? Like the kind that happens all the time???
The world will become total chaos and you can only pray that fiat money/gold/silver will still be worth anything at all.
So out of all the millions of possible scenarios, that's one and you're backing that one only? Talk about speculative investing strategies....
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In a short term power or network outage, Bitcoin will be as available as current credit and debit cards. (Which is to say, not at all.) But gold or silver won't be useful for buying bread at the local supermarket, either -- they'll tell you to come back with dollars, or when the lights come back on.
In an actual, we're fucked global disaster like a Carrington event or a global war that permanently (or nearly so) knocks out major national infrastructure? Bitcoin and banks will definitely be gone. But peopl
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Don't burn and don't disappear when the power goes out.
They are also completely worthless when the power doesn't come back on after a week. At that point you'll be wishing you invested in canned beans instead.
Bitcoin's dominance (Score:3)
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I'm more curious as to why bitcoin's dominance [coinmarketcap.com] has been steadily increasing since July.
My take is that up to now BTC was just a nerd thing. Now it is breaking mainstream it is about to go stupid. I heard a guy at work say he's shifted his retirement fund to BTC (already made 50% this year). The demand market is shifting from a few million nerds, to hundreds of millions of semi nerds, until it hits the billions of regular folks. BTC is the de facto crypto currency so will be a magnet for users new to crypto. The supply/demand potential could see this thing hitting $1mil/coin (sounds stupid I k
I've always adored the nay-sayers here (Score:1)
It's a bubble!
It's a scam!
It'll never take off!
It doesn't have a ROI!
It's blah-blah-blah-blah-blah-blah-blather-blother-bloviate...
When it first came out, it cost you fifty cents worth of electricity on your monthly bill. And even when you had to start buying massively powered mining rigs, you were *still* getting coins, even if the ROI wasn't there at the time.
So word to the wise?
The next time something new pops up, that doesn't cost more than fifty cents on your monthly electric bill, don't waste your br
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quit trying to apply old-world ideas to predict a new-world invention!
So you think that "new-world inventions" are impervious to the laws of economics? SMH
You think the laws of economics apply to something that wasn't even conceived when said laws were dreamt up?
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You seem like an ideal candidate to buy Dogecoins.
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It can be a bubble and a scam.
If you flip flop and get out before it dies, there's no reason you can't make money off it.
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Over the years, how many new technologies have been hyped on slashdot? How many of those have actually taken off?
How many technology companies have been bashed on slashdot (eg Apple, Microsoft)? How many of those have continued to grow beyond all expectation?
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It's still a bubble and a scam. The fact that it's gone to $6k doesn't negate either of those.
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It's still a bubble and a scam. The fact that it's gone to $6k doesn't negate either of those.
It might be a bubble, but bubbles still make lots of people rich. It's no effort to call a bubble, the art is predicting the pop and getting out immediately prior.
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Pre-fork Surge (Score:1)
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Make that pre-forks surges. There's Bitcoin gold and also SegWit2x.
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> P.S.=> Enlighten me - what creates VALUE in bitcoins?
The value in Bitcoins is that they are predictable and virtually unchangeable, and governed by the mathematics in the protocol.
The only way to change the bitcoin protocol is to convince the majority of the market that such a change is necessary and beneficial. It is not possible to (for example) confiscate Bitcoin. It is not possible to change how many Bitcoin are created. Doing such things would require that at least most people involved in B
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Four-digit account that has been dormant for eight years suddenly comes back to life to troll for Trump? How's the weather in Moscow, comrade?
The email address tells the whole story.