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Bitcoin Businesses The Almighty Buck

Bitcoin Smashes Past $7,000 For the First Time (cnbc.com) 144

Posted by msmash from the new-milestone dept.
A reader shares a report: Bitcoin hit another all-time high Thursday morning, surpassing $7,000 for the first time. The cryptocurrency has had a bullish streak throughout the week following the CME's announcement that it will introduce bitcoin futures contracts. According to data from CoinDesk, the virtual currency reached an all-time high of $7,242.69 at about 7:08 a.m. ET. The jump in price saw the virtual coin rise by more than 7 percent on the day. A surge in the digital coin's value saw the total market value of all cryptocurrencies top $189 billion for the first time Thursday. The market cap of bitcoin alone is currently more than $121 billion, according to data from industry website Coinmarketcap.
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Bitcoin Smashes Past $7,000 For the First Time More

Bitcoin Smashes Past $7,000 For the First Time

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  • Cue in Bitcoin deniers (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    They're convinced there's $121 billion worth of illegal transactions happening with Bitcoin because that's all it's good for even though every single transaction is right there in the blockchain.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Khyber ( 864651 )

      "They're convinced there's $121 billion worth of illegal transactions happening with Bitcoin"

      If you'd read some law in countries other than your own, say China, you'd see that this kind of financial activity (which has been what's driving Bitcoin's prices up for a good while, wealthy Chinese moving/hiding their money out of the country in HUGE quantities) is actually illegal.

      But hey, you keep your narrow education and world viewpoint. Those of us with broader global mindsets and experience and education wil

    • PROTIP 1: Your delusions of worth mean nothing to me. Bitcoins pose no value whatsoever, because there is no work behind them. The are only considered “worth” something, because there are morons, so stupid, that they will pay $7000 to get one. Any why do they do this? Because they heard there are morons, so stupid, that they will pay $7000 to get one. You realize the fallacy of this, right? The circular logic. Like building the 7000th floor of a skyscraper, not on 6999 floors below, but onto it

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sabri ( 584428 )

        PROTIP 2: Just because there's no law against it, doesn't mean it's not a crime.

        Wrong.

        Any basic principle in every criminal code is that no person shall be punished for an act or omission that is not prohibited by law.

    • I'm sure there are also lots of speculators who think that tulip bulbs are actually worth $7000.

  • Faites vos jeux! Faites vos jeux, s'il vous plait!

  • 1 Bitcoin equals 9171.40 Canadian dollars
    1 Bitcoin equals 9272.12 Australian dollars

    It's also fun to see how much one Bitcoin is worth in other crypto-currencies:
    85 Monero
    135 Litecoins
    1799 Vertcoin
    6250000 Dogecoins

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Check on Venezuelan Bolivars...

      There are a bunch of people mining bitcoin to stay alive in Venezuela. They use subsidized electricity costs, spread their operations between a bunch of individual homes to keep from being caught and then trade their Coin for stuff they cannot buy using Bolivars, anywhere.

      Oh the joys of socialism, where the leader is recommending the trapping and eating of rabbits to keep from starving, in a country with rich Oil reserves.

  • Soo... when is the correction coming? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by leonbev ( 111395 ) on Thursday November 02, 2017 @09:25AM (#55475961) Journal

    Anyone who's ever studied basic Economics knows that Bitcoin is in a price bubble right now. They real question is... when is that bubble going to pop?

    I sure as hell wouldn't want to be the one buying Bitcoin today, though.

    • Re:Soo... when is the correction coming? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by neonv ( 803374 ) on Thursday November 02, 2017 @09:36AM (#55476003)

      I agree. The price seems to be going up because people are speculating that it will continue to go up and more, causing the price to further rise. Few people are buying it as a tool for exchanging goods and services. As a result, there's not much backing the current value other than rarity, which probably isn't enough. It will drop drastically in value eventually once the speculating stops.

      • As a result, there's not much backing the current value other than rarity

        Rarity is good enough for a bunch of different assets, like precious metals or gemstones.

        But in addition to being rare, bitcoin is also secure, easy to transact, and easy to divide/recombine.

        • Rhodium once experienced a bubble like this. It corrected all the way down.
          I do believe in bitcoin as an asset. But the current price explosion looks unsustainable and backed by nothing other than fear of missing out.

        • Gold is valuable beyond being rare. Not only is it pretty to look at (blockchains not so much), but it is used in a lot of electronics and industrial applications where its amazing corrosion resistant properties have no equal.

          Gemstones like diamonds similarly have both fashion and industrial applications.

          As for secure, it is only as secure as your wallet and many exchanges have been hacked or turned out to be outright frauds. I'd rather a thief have to physically enter my house to rob me, or to store my m

          • Industrial use of gold only uses up 10% of the amount that's mined. The other 90% has been stockpiled for many years, so we have a huge surplus. Yet, the price is still very high.

            There are many cheap materials that are just as pretty to look at, including gold plated jewelry, but people still prefer the solid kind. Not because it's pretty, but because it's valuable. The idea that you can always sell your gold ring in times of need is very powerful.

            As for secure, it is only as secure as your wallet

            Which can be as secure as you want it. You can keep your pr

      • I also think this is a pure speculation-based bubble, especially because there is so much vested interest in keeping the price high (all those computing farms are a significant hardware investment)

        Does anyone know if someone has tried to analyze the bitcoin blockchain in order to calculate a rough estimate how much bitcoin are actually used for non-purely speculative transactions?
        Would this be possible?

    • People said it was in a bubble when bitcoin was $1000 and then they said it again when it was $2000. They said it would be foolish to buy bitcoin for $1000 or $2000

      I don't know about you but id kill to buy bitcoins for $1000 or even $2000 now...

      How do you know $7000 is anywhere near the top?

      • People said it was in a bubble when bitcoin was $1000 and then they said it again when it was $2000. They said it would be foolish to buy bitcoin for $1000 or $2000

        I don't know about you but id kill to buy bitcoins for $1000 or even $2000 now...

        How do you know $7000 is anywhere near the top?

        If I owned Bitcoin I'd set mine to auto-sell once it hits $9,750. Psychologically, when it hits $10k, some people are going to panic and it will hit a correction. How high bitcoin can go is anyone's guess, but just like $1,000 was a big psychological barrier and we had a correction after hitting it, $10,000 is going to be an even bigger deal. Once the correction hits the basement, might be worth buying again, to see how high it will go next time.

        • Well me personally I am not interested in trading constantly like that.

          I bought some back when they were $100 each and my plan was to hold onto them for like 30 years and just see what they end up like. They could end up worth nothing which in that case I didn't lose much at all. Or they could be worth a ton, like 50,000 per coin or something, especially once all the coins are mined and there is no supply of new coins.

          • Well me personally I am not interested in trading constantly like that

            I know several people who tried trading. They ended up selling most of their coins for a few hundred $$, making a decent profit, and are still waiting for the price to drop so they can buy back.

            • Yep, that's what I assumed I would fall into myself so my decision was just hold the coins in cold storage and check on them again in several years.

          • I personally would set a "price goal" to run along with your time goal. Whichever comes first type strategy. That way if it sky rockets to an amount of value you feel meets your value goal quickly, you don't risk it dropping and never returning to that price point.

      • Yeah, that's a question. I remember when bitcoin was around the $1000 range, and people were saying it was too high. But if I'd bought then, I'd have 7X that. If 7K is the high, I'd be a nidiot to buy at that price. But if it goes to 15K, I'd be kicking myself for not buying.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Jeremi ( 14640 )

        How do you know $7000 is anywhere near the top?

        I absolutely don't.

        On the other hand, I don't know it's not near the top, either.

        And since at this point the Bitcoin's valuation seems to be driven entirely by investors' bandwagon psychology, which I don't claim to understand, that makes Bitcoins way to risky for me to invest in, even if I could potentially make a lot of money by timing the market -- I could equally well lose a lot of money, and I have no way to predict which outcome I would get.

    • Bitcoin is a little different as it has several things going for it.

      1. It is very very liquid. Which outside of accounting means you can buy or sell and convert to cash INSTANTLY!
      2. Not regulated by the government
      3. Anybody with a computer and buy or sell without a middle man
      4. You can do transactions tax free!
      5. It is cheaper and easier to transfer to different country currencies
      6. We have a hot bull market with stocks right now. In a bull market where do you think Wall Street will put there money in?

      My g

      • Correction I meant in 6. In a bear market where do you think Wall Street will put there money? In a bear lots of money will need somewhere to go? ... Not bull ( stupid Android autocorrect)

      • 1. It is very very liquid. Which outside of accounting means you can buy or sell and convert to cash INSTANTLY!

        3. Anybody with a computer and buy or sell without a middle man

        Aren't those dependent on the exchanges? IIRC, MtGox quit allowing its victims, er I mean customers, to sell their bitcoins, and they were SOL when it imploded.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Jeremi ( 14640 )

        Bitcoin == San Francisco real estate prices. If you bought in 1970 you are rich as low prices WILL NEVER return. Yes fluctuations will happen. But all the 6 things stated above will make it a reality unlike gold. I just wish I got in earlier.

        That's a pretty good analogy, perhaps even better than you realized.

        Bitcoin is like San Francisco real estate prices, in a scenario where many investors have not yet realized that there are other viable cities out there to invest in besides San Francisco.

        Currently a lot of people are pouring money into Bitcoin because it's the one virtual-currency "brand name" they are most familiar with, but what happens once it becomes widespread knowledge that other virtual currencies (Ethereum, Monero, etc etc etc) are

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Bitcoin is liquid like diarrhea.

  • Completely volatile (Score:5, Insightful)

    by aepervius ( 535155 ) on Thursday November 02, 2017 @09:25AM (#55475969)
    If you look at the history of price in BTC/USD, the bitcoins are (relatively...) stable until end 2016/start 2017, then it went completely volatile with rising in spike, and having dropds which were higher than the full price it was end of 2016 (e.g. drop higher than 1000$). Yet the number of Tx per month did not rise in parallel to values. So what you have here is an extremly volatile speculative commodity and that's it. Anybody would be insane to use it as a currency.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Zocalo ( 252965 )
      I think we've actually got two quite distinct groups of BTC users at this point (with some members of both groups); those that are using it as a currency, split between those who maintain a float of BTC in a wallet and those that just buy BTC on demand for a specific purchase, and those that are using it as a high-risk speculative investment. Depending on the size of the wallet and the timing of the (probably inevitable) price correction, the former group shouldn't be two badly burnt by it, especially if t

    • Anybody would be insane to use it as a currency

      Nobody's using gold bullion bars as currency either, but I hear people are people good money for them.

      • Gold has value, but the value doesn't wildly fluctuate from month-to-month. The problem with Bitcoin isn't the value itself, its the change in value that's inexplicable. BitCoin, as transfer mechanism, would have the same utility regardless of the price on an individual BitCoin.

        • Gold has value, but the value doesn't wildly fluctuate from month-to-month

          For a fair comparison, you should look at the price of gold in the first 9 years of its existence, not the price after it had a chance to settle down after 6000 years of mining and trading.

          BitCoin, as transfer mechanism, would have the same utility regardless of the price on an individual BitCoin.

          No, because there's only 16 million coins in existence, the utility is related to price.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      One of the more plausible theories for why the price became so volatile is that the current pop in BTC price coincides exactly with the Chinese government restricting the flow of yuan out of China.

      I've heard that something like 85 to 90% of all the bitcoins in existence are currently being used for illegally smuggling capital out of China.

      So therefore, that means that whatever is left is the current free float on the market, which is an astoundingly small amount. Hence why the price has become so volatile.

  • Worth 7B USD at the moment. Can I have some?

  • The jig is simple. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    BTC is going to $10k and it's that simple. Then it will crash to $1 where you can buy it back and ride it to $100k and repeat.

    • BTC is going to $10k and it's that simple. Then it will crash to $1 where you can buy it back and ride it to $100k and repeat.

      I agree it will hit $10k and then drop- but it won't go all the way back down to $1. Maybe $7k or $8k and then start rebounding again. BTC is too widely used in illegal transactions to completely collapse. It's more like gold than tulip bulbs. As in, it is both a currency with a certain worth, AND an investment medium rather than just a pure useless investment medium.

      If citizen Joe panics and starts to sell, warlord Bob won't because it's not about investment to him.

      $10k is a very solid psychological ba

  • News for bag holders.....

  • The segwit2x fork is in a couple of weeks, and so everyone's trying to buy it up to get the free coins. The price will come back down afterwards, and I imagine most people that are trying to run this get-rich-quick scheme are going to lose out as the new coin won't be worth what they lose on selling the BTC they bought to get it for free.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by grnbrg ( 140964 )

      "Tulip mania" was all about speculation in futures prices, not about actual tulips, and has more in common with the sub-prime market crash in 2008 than with Bitcoin.

      • Interesting distinction considering how bitcoin is a virtual construct whose value is conveyed by a collection of numbers with no inherent value or full-credit backing by any nation or organization.
  • Bitcoin is supposed to be money and the basis of a payment system.......but people measure it in the fiat currency they want it to replace and the frenzy over its price and exchange means it can never be the basis of a stable payments system. Weird.

    • In order to replace just some of the uses of fiat currency, it needs to gain a lot more value. You can't take over the world with a measly $100B market cap.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by grnbrg ( 140964 )

      Gold and Euros also tend to be measured in terms of fiat currency. It's a pretty common way of talking about value.

      And the price will stabilize, eventually. If Bitcoin is successful, and becomes an easy means of electronic exchange of value, as well as a store of value, that price will be ridiculously high, compared to the current value. If it's not successful, that price will be near zero.

      Is the current price a bubble based on FOMO? Possible. Bitcoin has had 4 or 5 bubble events, but the post-bubble p

  • As Molly says, (Score:3)

    by PopeRatzo ( 965947 ) on Thursday November 02, 2017 @11:33AM (#55476955) Journal

    Fuck your block chain
    Fuck your crypto currency
    Fuck your imaginary techno utopia built out of my burning world

    https://motherboard.vice.com/e... [vice.com]

    "An index from cryptocurrency analyst Alex de Vries, aka Digiconomist, estimates that with prices the way they are now, it would be profitable for Bitcoin miners to burn through over 24 terawatt-hours of electricity annually as they compete to solve increasingly difficult cryptographic puzzles to "mine" more Bitcoins. That's about as much as Nigeria, a country of 186 million people, uses in a year.

    This averages out to a shocking 215 kilowatt-hours (KWh) of juice used by miners for each Bitcoin transaction (there are currently about 300,000 transactions per day). Since the average American household consumes 901 KWh per month, each Bitcoin transfer represents enough energy to run a comfortable house, and everything in it, for nearly a week. On a larger scale, De Vries' index shows that bitcoin miners worldwide could be using enough electricity to at any given time to power about 2.26 million American homes."

    • Given the numbers above, the average transaction cost is about $22 at $0.10/kWh. And it's only increasing with time. With costs like that, Bitcoin no longer makes sense for normal, everyday purchases. Why does Bitcoin have this amazing staying power? Why can't another cryptocurrency with cheaper transactions supplant it?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Troed ( 102527 )

        A blockchain only has value if it's immutable. Proof of work, the thing that consumes all that energy, is how the Bitcoin blockchain is made immutable.

        Many have tried, and none have succeeded, in a better method with the same security. A blockchain isn't immutable (solving the byzantine generals' problem) just because it is - but because of the computing power thrown at securing it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by xtal ( 49134 )

      How much energy is spent by nation states on military spending backing up fiat currencies? ...just sayin'

  • That's one way to see it. The other is seeing that Quantitative easing (QE) of Western Central Banks is about to end and all will crash in 2018
  • What goes up must come down.

  • Obviously no one around here cares about the reason bitcoin broke records and the massive developments changing its core software. Bitcoin is going to have its first major hardfork in a long time and become something much better.

    Bitcoin Segwit2x is a proposed change which is intended to improve the speed and cost of Bitcoin transactions. The Segwit opens up new possibilities like the Lightning Network, Tumblebit, Schnorr Signatures, Confidential Transactions, Cross-chain atomic swaps, and so on.

    I don't thi

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