Bitcoin - World's 30th largest Currency

This time will be different, in that it will rise 200% after the dip. :)
 
Well, Confucius, or was it Socrates or Plato, once said:

"$60K of fiat money in hand is worth $1M of bitcoins in the bush".
 
Anything with that much volatility is not an investment but gambling...

I am not going to gamble with these prices.... but good on you that you have made money...
 
If one is sure that the price always goes back up, he welcomes volatility for a chance to buy more at a lower price.
 
Mr._Graybeard said:
Also this:
ripple-11.jpg


As Redd Foxx used to say, "Mix it with champagne, and you have 'champipple.'"
Click to expand...

My son bought 900 shares of Ripple at $.24. When he called to tell me about it and said the name I thought of liquor.
 
Texas Proud said:
Anything with that much volatility is not an investment but gambling...

I am not going to gamble with these prices.... but good on you that you have made money...
Click to expand...

I do not think of it as an investment (at these prices) either and I would not own "crypto's" outright. I am trying to get a handle on them for when some of them become more mainstream. I have questions and concerns regarding "crypto exchanges safety"and prefer to deal with Nasdaq,NYSE, CME,CBOE.

My lone foray into this was buying a futures contract on the CME and selling 10 shares of GBTC (The bitcoin trust). The price of Bitcoin makes no difference to me. My interest lies in the premium to NAV on the Bitcoin trust which has been upward of 100%. Generally speaking if the price of Bitcoin would go down, theoretically the premium on NAV of GBTC should follow. On high volatility days like yesterday, I do not believe that was the case.

I used to be a futures trader for a mega multinational (30 years ago) and have not traded futures for 30 years now. I anticipate the NYSE will come out with a long/short ETF in 2018 and possibly a myriad of other derivatives, so I view this as strictly brushing off the cobwebs from my brain, which does not react as fast as it used too. BTW Bitcoin is up 40% from yesterdays lows!
 
One of the big problems that I have with crypto currency is that there is no limiting supply... sure, there is a max number of Bitcoin, but we already know of a number of other 'currencies' (I do not know how people can call them currency but that is another discussion)....

And there is no barrier to entry... IOW, we could have millions/billions of different bit currencies out there... and the only value they have is what can I sell them to somebody else for...

I can see where people are going to be buying some other bit with their current bits and hoping the new bits go up faster... and the person who they bought it from is hoping THEIR bits go up faster..

And this does not factor in that there is going to be continuous losses of these bits over time... and if you lose your bits you have nothing...
 
Texas Proud said:
One of the big problems that I have with crypto currency is that there is no limiting supply... sure, there is a max number of Bitcoin, but we already know of a number of other 'currencies' (I do not know how people can call them currency but that is another discussion)....

And there is no barrier to entry... IOW, we could have millions/billions of different bit currencies out there... and the only value they have is what can I sell them to somebody else for...

I can see where people are going to be buying some other bit with their current bits and hoping the new bits go up faster... and the person who they bought it from is hoping THEIR bits go up faster...
Click to expand...

Yes, bits are fungible.

Gold and diamonds are not as useful as their prices suggest, but mining them takes a lot of work. The difficulty in "mining" bitcoins is artificially mandated. Hence, it took no time for people to create alternate blockchains, and we have 1,200 of them already.

Imagine beanie babies whose authenticity can be guaranteed by cryptography. In other words, suppose there were a way to make sure that there were only 21 million beanie babies made, and there were absolutely no more that could be made.

Would those 21 million beanie babies become $16,000 each? And then, people would come out with "baggie babies", or "ricy babies", or "lumpy babies", etc... Would all these babies, along with the original beanies, take over the entire world's wealth?
 
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Here’s a fun little forecast from Wikipedia:

A World Economic Forum report from September 2015 predicted that by 2025 ten percent of global GDP would be stored on blockchains technology.

2016 world GDP is 126 trillion
 
Was there any forecast on beanie babies or tulips? We’re those assets traded globally? Did they have their own dedicated exchanges? I fail to see any similarities
 
NW-Bound said:
The difficulty in "mining" bitcoins is artificially mandated. Hence, it took no time for people to create alternate blockchains, and we have 1,200 of them already.
Click to expand...

I also have to wonder whether that "mining" mandate could be overcome through technological means. Fracking revolutionized the energy industry; I'd be surprised if some software engineer somewhere wasn't working right now to crack the bitcoin code. The payoff could be stupendous; of course, the impact on the market would be catastrophic.
 
Mr._Graybeard said:
I also have to wonder whether that "mining" mandate could be overcome through technological means. Fracking revolutionized the energy industry; I'd be surprised if some software engineer somewhere wasn't working right now to crack the bitcoin code. The payoff could be stupendous; of course, the impact on the market would be catastrophic.
Click to expand...
If a programmer finds a super way to encode and add a new block to the blockchain faster than anybody else, he would earn all the rewards, meaning all the coins that are allowed for each block generation. Even then, he is still limited to the 21 million coins that are allowed to exist.

That is not the same as if someone finds a way to break the authentication code. This means he can be an imposter of anybody and steal all his coins. However, if someone manages to do that, he can also break a lot of computer security systems used in banking and commerce.
 
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97guns said:
Here’s a fun little forecast from Wikipedia:

A World Economic Forum report from September 2015 predicted that by 2025 ten percent of global GDP would be stored on blockchains technology.

2016 world GDP is 126 trillion
Click to expand...

Blockchain concept is useful and people are thinking of applications for it. It does not mean that Bitcoin or any of its current knockoffs will become more and more valuable.

Back in the late 1990s, it was widely anticipated that the Internet would become more and more important. It did not mean that AOL, one of the largest ISPs then would become a dominant factor. AOL did appear formidable for a while and managed to take over Time Warner, which was arguably worth more than AOL. People, including Time Warner management and shareholders did not realize that the Internet was important, but one did not have to get to the Internet via AOL.

Suppose AOL said it would limit the number of subscribers to 21 million. One better hurried up to get a subscription, because when it ran out there would be no more. This kind of artificial limit would not work because who said you had to go through AOL to get to the Internet?

Bitcoin is the first implementation of blockchains. It is not the only blockchain that can exist.

See Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cryptocurrencies

The number of cryptocurrencies available over the internet as of 27 November 2017 is over 1324 and growing. A new cryptocurrency can be created at any time...​
 
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NW-Bound said:
Blockchain concept is useful and people are thinking of applications for it. It does not mean that Bitcoin or any of its current knockoffs will become more and more valuable.

Back in the late 1990s, it was widely anticipated that the Internet would become more and more important. It did not mean that AOL, one of the largest ISPs then would become a dominant factor. AOL did appear formidable for a while and managed to take over Time Warner, which was arguably worth more than AOL. People, including Time Warner management and shareholders did not realize that the Internet was important, but one did not have to get to the Internet via AOL.

Suppose AOL said it would limit the number of subscribers to 21 million. One better hurried up to get a subscription, because when it ran out there would be no more. This kind of artificial limit would not work because who said you had to go through AOL to get to the Internet?

Bitcoin is the first implementation of blockchains. It is not the only blockchain that can exist.

See Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cryptocurrencies
The number of cryptocurrencies available over the internet as of 27 November 2017 is over 1324 and growing. A new cryptocurrency can be created at any time...​
Click to expand...
+1 Great commentary, thanks.
 
Just curious: bitcoin miners are compensated with new bitcoins, right?

How will miners be compensated when the 21m bitcoin limit has been hit?

Who or what will maintain the blockchain?
 
According to Wikipedia article on bitcoin:

Paying a transaction fee is optional. Miners can choose which transactions to process and prioritize those that pay higher fees. Fees are based on the storage size of the transaction generated, which in turn is dependent on the number of inputs used to create the transaction. Furthermore, priority is given to older unspent inputs.​
If you are cheap and willing to pay just a penny for someone to encode your transaction, it may never get recorded on the blockchain.
 
Was talking to my brother this evening and he paid for dinner... said it was a good year... I asked... do you have bitcoin? He said 'did you watch Big Bang?'.... said he was like that... had a couple of coins way back when but forgot them on his companies laptop which they took back when he left...

Not sure, but he said 2 other coins actually have a higher % gain this year than bitcoin... so if you bought into it you picked wrong (if he is right that is)...
 
A recent Jason Zweig Bitcoin article.

Summary - Don't do it.

"Investors often blur the vital distinction between what is obvious and what is inevitable. It’s obvious that blockchain and digital currency have a bright future, but that doesn’t mean that it’s inevitable that any particular cryptocurrency will dominate."
 
Except faith is increased if the controller of the currency can throw you in the clink if you don't fork over some of what they printed and your employer paid to you.
 
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