Bitcoin Tumbles Most in Two Weeks Amid South Korea Hack (bloomberg.com) 87
Bitcoin extended losses for a third day, tumbling as much as 6 percent Sunday as South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Coinrail said there was a "cyber intrusion" in its system. From a report: The largest cryptocurrency declined 4.6 percent to $7,277 as of 10 a.m. time, the biggest drop since May 23, according to data compiled by Bloomberg from Bitstamp pricing. That widens Bitcoin's losses for the year to 49 percent. Peer cryptocurrencies Ethereum and Ripple fell 5 percent and 6.6 percent, respectively.
No, few people are, thus dropping half its value (Score:5, Insightful)
Nope, few people are buying Bitcoin anymore. That's why the value has dropped in half in the last six months.
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Bitcoin doesn't work as a currency because it's not an effective substitute for the US Dollar and it never will be. Frankly, Bitcoin sucks for any legal transaction because the fees are too high and the processing times are too slow and just try to dump your whole stash of Bitcoins and see where the price goes. When Warren Buffet of Berkshire Hathaway, arguably the greatest living investor, and Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase say that Bitcoin is scam, the average person should listen. Even George Soros, the m
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rankly, Bitcoin sucks for any legal transaction because the fees are too high and the processing times are too slow
The fees are lower than bank fees, and the transaction clearing time averages less than an hour, so it is faster than a Check or Overnight wire --- It's not like current banks support clearing transactions instantly. Even your credit card transactions are just pre-"Authorized", and the settlement process takes days before the merchant actually gets paid.
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It is that day when bitcoin's price will dramatically fall to more commonsense levels.
Actually... that will probably be the day when Bitcoin's price would have dramatically increased to more commonsense levels, such as $0.0001 US per Satoshi.
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In before (Score:1)
neck beards compare bitcoins to tulips.
Re:In before (Score:5, Insightful)
Forget claiming they are like tulips, cryptocurrencies are worse than tulips. You can plant a tulip and it can reproduce with no additional effort. Cryptocurrencies and their network have to be maintained with other resources. Not only that but 51% attacks actually happen [slashdot.org] so your cryptocurrency may just vanish one day.
Re: In before (Score:1)
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Nope, Ripple is only susceptible to something MUCH stupider.
The whole bitcoin craze was quite pointless IMHO, but at least they thought they were solving some problem...namely eliminating the need to trust in a government fiat currency and banking system and it's inherent downsides (inflation, stability, vulnerability to government confiscation, bank failure which is only partially mitigated by FDIC for people with large balances, etc).
But now with Ripple, the whole design is founded on having trust in a "b
Fraud (Score:2)
Looking at news over the last several years I think it is less likely that you'd lose your coins in some hacking event, and more likely though some sort of more fraud scheme. Either in some coin that is more less fake, or even in established coins where the brokerage/trading houses just embezzle it and vanish.
A lot is made out of blockchain ledgers supplanting the need about placing your trust in corporate banks or nations, but they don't exactly have a monopoly on fraudulent activity.
I think the time has c
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You better calm down before that mighty fedora topples from your head. You totally failed at reading comprehension. My whole point is they aren't alike but neck beards like yourself always bring up the tulip market when bitcoins are mentioned. You seem to be projecting a lot of inadequacies from your own life onto mine. Funny you mention normal intelligence when you can't even understand my comment.
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"My whole point is they aren't alike but neck beards like yourself always bring up the tulip market when bitcoins are mentioned."
Meanwhile, those of us with actual stock market experience AND those that possess knowledge of history know that they are very, very much alike.
People like you who don't see the similarities are the reason for its proliferation.
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Can tulips be exchanged for goods and services?
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I'm waiting on stores that take tulips as payments. Why are you so angry anyhow? I'm going to comment more now that I know it pisses you off so much.
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Give a woman a really pretty tulip, you might get laid. Perhaps if you left your desk and went outside, you'd know this.
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You don't make money by in crypto by dumping in money and waiting. You might as well pay the lottery. You make money by setting up buy and sell points. No different than day trading stocks.
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Not news. (Score:4, Informative)
All widely traded cryptocurrencies have been trending downward since the crazy peak last December. There have been multiple larger events where values dropped precipitously without definable causes. Bitcoin and it's associated cryptocurrencies are a racket wherein people want to get rich by merely transferring money from others to themselves. There is no investment behind purchasing, it's all just taking.
Tell me when it really crashes and who's left holding the bag. Until then, shut up with this crap.
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All widely traded cryptocurrencies have been trending downward since the crazy peak last December. There have been multiple larger events where values dropped precipitously without definable causes. Bitcoin and it's associated cryptocurrencies are a racket wherein people want to get rich by merely transferring money from others to themselves. There is no investment behind purchasing, it's all just taking.
Tell me when it really crashes and who's left holding the bag. Until then, shut up with this crap.
Replace Bitcoin with "Precious Metals (Bullion)". Investments are risky. Don't invest if you don't know how to. Don't invest what you can't afford to lose. People don't get rich without taking educated risks.
Re:Not news. (Score:4, Informative)
Are you comparing rare elements dug out of the Earth with bitcoin? One has limited supply, the other is unlimited. When it gets too difficult to mine one coin, just go and invent a new one. When you've dug all the gold out of the Earth then that is that.
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This is like saying that once all the gold and silver dries up, we can just switch to bottlecaps. It doesn't work this way. Something is only valuable if people give it value. Sure you can start a new coin, but if people don't give it value then it's worthless.
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"Cryptocurrency has some value in the fact that it has an immutable"
That was proven bullshit very recently, too, when Vitalik reversed some transaction for some company that mistakenly dumped a bunch of ether. Immutability is BULLSHIT.
Meanwhile, you don't see that happening for anyone that was trying to figure out the convoluted system and lost ether by mistake. Nope. Fuck the small person.
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Vitalik reversed some transaction for some company that mistakenly dumped a bunch of ether. Immutability is BULLSHIT.
Your argument doesn't apply to Bitcoin itself.... effective Immutability is not Bullshit for Bitcoin itself.
ONLY for pretender cryptocurrencies like Ether which are ACTUALLY centralized, despite their claims to be decentralized --- Ether is still centrally controlled by Vitalik who hold a huge fraction of coins which were pre-mined and their loyal supporters, as you observed.
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Yes but precious metals have actual intrinsic value
NOTHING is intrinsically or inherently worth a certain amount of USD or other fiat currency.
The US government has and could again fix an arbitrary fiat price of their choosing for any precious metal,
because they in effect decide how much fiat will be worth ---- they can also make the fiat worth 0 by invalidating it
at any time and issuing new currency which they distribute in various proportions to people they like, their supporters, then the rest
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When it gets too difficult to mine one coin, just go and invent a new one
No... there is a limited supply of Bitcoins which are secured by the high hashing power of the Bitcoin miners, and you can't just go out and "invent a new one" and have it be comparable to Bitcoin, because your new coin will have a very low hashrate, and thus it will be easy to target with a 51% attack, should your "new invented coin" ever become valuable enough to even be worth it to try attacking.
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Replace Bitcoin with "Precious Metals (Bullion)".
Wrong. Most precious metals are actually useful, so they have real value. Gold and silver are great conductors which copper can be used for a magnitude of things. Even platinum is useful because it's biocompatible. Matter is a real thing but numbers are conceptual.
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None of what you describe are investments. You are talking about speculation.
You are correct. The point I was trying to make is that we speculate on many things. Gold, natural gas, oil, etc. No one gets up in arms over speculation on those things (well some do, but you get the point).
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Investing is speculating, or more appropriately hypothesizing since you're working with available evidence instead of just making a guess out of thin air.
Re:Not news. (Score:4, Informative)
The difference between precious metals and cryptocurrencies is that precious metals have some practical uses. Apart from their use in jewelry- which in many cases is ultimately a form of bullion- they have industrial uses. Admittedly, those uses alone would result in a lower price than the current one, but they do provide some kind of absolute price floor. In contrast, cryptocurrencies have no use except as a medium of exchange, and their price will fall to zero if people decide to stop using them that way.
And yes, you can say something similar about any fiat currency, too; there's no inherent value to dollars, euros, or yen. The practical difference there is that governments demand you use their currencies to pay taxes, which provides a real world use for them that isn't going away any time soon.
AC-Coin (Score:2)
To mine an AC-Coin, you currently have to find the last four bits that correspond to the hash.
As you might imagine, finding four bits is easy (just guess 16 times). What do you think the current value of AC-Coin is? What will YOU pay for a 10,000 AC coin? I have some to sell you.
Making mining easy doesn't mean people do it.
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Problem with the floor value, is that Bitcoin (and derivatives) are susceptible to 51% mining attacks. If you have bitcoin, and can double the processing (or take over some of it) current to bitcoin, you can double or tripple spend their coins. So if mining drops significantly, Bitcoin cannot then be trusted for any high value transaction that has any anonymity to it, unless some regulatory and authority comes into bitcoin.
If bitcoin ever drops from being the top coin, it's value quickly goes to 0. If you
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In fact, if nobody is mining it, it becomes impossible to transact in it at all. The process of mining is what commits transactions to the blockchain.
The number of miners has to be sufficient that no individual or group has the ability to decide what transactions become part of the blockchain and which ones don't (a 51% attack).
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I was addressing:
Then with no one mining, losses (forgot wallet key, etc.) slowly push the price back up. It should not normally be possible for the bitcoin price to fall below the cost of electricity used to mine it, except very briefly.
In fact, no. With no one mining, bitcoin is dead. Nobody can buy, sell, or trade it because transactions can't happen.
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If mining cost nothing, then there would be mining as long as a few were still interested. Since it does cost, it will stop when the value people place on bitcoin isn't enough to justify mining. There will be some people trying to transact when the last miner hits the off button.
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This is the key, though. The criminal uses of cryptocurrency depend on there being enough legitimate uses to provide effective cover. If those legitimate uses dry up, the cover is blown. If only criminals use cryptocurrency, then using cryptocurrency is enough to get the police to investigate you.
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Gold and silver on the other hand have as much buying power today as they did 100, 1000, and 5000 years ago. The thing you don't seem to get is that precious metals are not an "investment" to make a profit. They are a store of value designed to
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Gold and Silver have maintained their real world buying power. It's money that has fluctuated since Nixon shock. And before that money allowed the US to criminalize ownership of gold so they could fo
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"There have been multiple larger events where values dropped precipitously without definable causes."
Anyone that actually watched the buy/sell/hold orders during those times knew exactly what was going on - pumping and dumping from China and South Korea.
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Tell me when it really crashes and who's left holding the bag.
"You are . . . Number 6 . . ."
This will be just like the sub-prime mortgages bust:
The folks who bought houses way beyond their means couldn't bail it out. They were flat broke.
The rich banks and bankers couldn't bail it out. They were "Too Big To Fail". That would have expanded the financial crisis.
So . . . I guess that left the taxpayers . . . who had nothing to do with the sub-prime loan shenanigans . . . to bail it out.
So . . . who will bail out the mess left by a Bitcoin Bubble Burst . . . ?
Th
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The US Government is either maliciously corrupt or COMPLETE FUCKING IDIOTS.
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/0... [nytimes.com]
Sweden bailed out their banks but ALSO gave them a set of ADAMANTIUM HANDCUFFS along with the bailout.
Finland DID NOT bail out their banks, and sure it SUCKED BADLY for a few years, but their financial system is BETTER AND STRONGER as a result.
Only USA threw billions of dollars into a blackhole and told the taxpayers "there is no other way".
In what
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Not a problem (Score:1)
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I just switched my Apple and Tesla stock into Dogecoin.
To the moon!!!1
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My country taxes 30% of a 4% assumed gain, so 1.2% per year, whatever the actual gain or even loss was that year.
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people are SO stupid (Score:2)
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You're ACTUALLY implying that THE MARKET (ie stock exechanges) is based on REAL value?
When THE SAME BULLSHIT REPORT that gets dragged out EVERY YEAR saying words to the effect of "Apple has JUMPED THE SHARK and we're all gonna die !!!!!!" immediately talks Apple stock by "about twenty percent".
AT LEAST ONCE EVERY YEAR.
(and Apple is only one of HUNDREDS of examples)
Seriously, have you NOT been paying attention? The Stock Market is all about PERCEIVED VALUE.