If you think banks are a bad idea, I'd recommend some Econ 101 as to why you are just wrong about that. They allow for a safe place to store value and then lend out money to people who want to purchase beyond their annual income by easily within their long term budget. If banks were actually a bad idea, they would have died centuries ago.RJ Dalton said:
Bitcoin Loses Half its Value After Chinese Crackdown
- Thread starter StewShearerOld
- Start date
Bitcoin's value is only what it can be traded for against currencies used by those capitalistic institutions, the moment it can't be traded with them for real money it's value is zero.mindfaQ said:
So far only China is preventing financial institutions from buying/selling/holding Bitcoin, but expect America and Europe to join them sooner or later since Bitcoin (and the concept of crypto currency in general) is becoming a byword for money laundering services all over the world. Some revolution that'll be.
I agree, it isn't going anywhere. However, there are other Communist countries that wouldn't look kindly on such a capitalist venture. To top that off, you are going to have a metric ton of people selling off coin at the first sign of trouble right now due to the recent drop. Bitcoin is very young (as far as currencies go), and as such is very prone to wild variations in value (thus my previous comment about not wanting to advise people to buy it, though I'm definitely not against it).albino boo said:
Keep telling yourself that.PcaKes said:
All time Opening
12/5/2013 1230.005
Last 5 days Opening
12/13/2013 - 899
12/14/2013 - 943
12/15/2013 - 900
12/16/2013 - 916
12/17/2013 - 760
Today's Average
560
I'm sure it'll go up in at least two more parabolic spikes before the 95% death spiral happens, but those are a few months away minimum. You'll be evangelizing the masses like those who called 3D TV a dead end before the industry did. You'll even blame the government for the massive loss when it does it.
For those who understand the economics behind it China has Zero cause in the latest drop. It would have happened if they had done nothing, but we all like to blame the last thing that happened regardless of how much it actually attributed to the drop.
Keep clutching that Ayn Rand voodoo doll. It'll be all that's left.
It's not backed by a state. It's too unregulated, too "strange" for people with serious money to get involved. The potential for bitcoins is huge, but the mysterious nature of it makes it too risky for the financial scene to ever jump on board.
I like the idea of Bitcoins, and I forsee something like it becoming quite big in the future. But I don't see much of a future for Bitcoins themselves. If I were a holder of bitcoins, I'd sell them quick. It's what everyone else is going to be doing, whether you think it's the right reaction or not. And once everyone sells theirs, the value plummets. So yeah, even if you love bitcoins, you need to consider what other people are going to do and react accordingly. If I were you, I'd dump em for whatever you can get now.
I like the idea of Bitcoins, and I forsee something like it becoming quite big in the future. But I don't see much of a future for Bitcoins themselves. If I were a holder of bitcoins, I'd sell them quick. It's what everyone else is going to be doing, whether you think it's the right reaction or not. And once everyone sells theirs, the value plummets. So yeah, even if you love bitcoins, you need to consider what other people are going to do and react accordingly. If I were you, I'd dump em for whatever you can get now.
people like to speculate, period. no matter whether its vacuum or real lfie goods, people speculate. And looks like the bubble is bursting, congratulations to those who have managed to sell out when it hit 1000, the rest, well, you can only blame yourself now.fix-the-spade said:
I would like to point out though that studies have found that bitcoinds are hardly more illegal-attractive than other illegal moeny trasnfer mechanisms (such as WOW gold) is. It hasnt become the drug dealer currency as people were afraid of. I mean, to become a drug kingin you have to be at least relatively smart or youd end up dead. and as such you know not to do it in bitcoins.
Industial marijuana is nothing new and has been done in plenty of places. the good thing about it is that you cant get high on it so stoners pretending to be industrialists simply would be pointless.
Your using a logarythmic scale to trick people.Jeff Bergeron said:
heres how it actually looks:
http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#igDailyztgSzm1g10zm2g25
If you cant see a bubble there then i dont know what to say.
One thing to note is that private banks and central banks are not the same thing. central banks would be the "govenment" of banking sector as much as Congress is government of your dayjob. They are the high ups who can tell other banks what to do. Sadly in case of US (which is not true in other nations) the central bank is privately owned, which makes this relationship, to pub bluntly, fucked up.Serrenitei said:
Cryptocurrency CAN work if its done prorly, yet people ahve proven with Bitcoin that they wont allow that to happen. Sure everyone would have loved to buy bitcoins when it was 1 dollard each and sell for 1000 now as much as they would ahve loved to invest in Microsoft in 1982. But such is the nature of investment, hindsight alaways make us look like fools.
coming back to central banks, my countries central bank currently has 1,4 times more in reserves (gold alone covers 90%) than the currency currently circulating, so its pretty darn well backed up. This is of course not true for all countries, especially in US where the actual pysical backing is much less than the currency circulating. however there is at least SOME backing, and there is NONE in bitcoins.
world governments have caused mroe financial scandals than banks will in a thousand years if the pace keeps the same. Banks as we know them now is actually a fairly NEW institution in comparison. Does that mean we should just remove government and go into anarcy? No. Because even after all its faults, they have done mroe good than bad. Same is true with banking. Im nto saying we should not regulate them, no, im just saying that going of "banking is hitler" isnt going to help any.RJ Dalton said:
Current Fiat currency has SOME value - it has backing. the backing may nto be enough to cover the value we give to all currency in circulation, however some backing is better than none.
But commodities were used as currencies before, and they worked. We use currency because its easier (you can easily divide it and ahve different denomination, you cant for example pay half a cow), but essentially it still works as commodity bartering anyway, so i dont see why commodity cant work as a currency.Scrumpmonkey said:
There are no communist countries in existence. There never were. There were an attempt once that didnt even reach socialism, let alone communism before devolving into totalitarianism.barbzilla said:
Yes, it does.KazeAizen said:
Value is simply a representation of how much a person is willing to give away something in exchange for it. Hence any commodity that a person wants has value. Value is based on wants and is subjective from person to person.
I really don't understand how people are so negative about bitcoins in this timeframe, nine months ago they were worth $20, now they are worth $622, of course it's not stable, but for the most part, many, many, many people have been made millionaires and very, very, very few people have lost anything, not to mention that if you average the whole history this year, it's only been gaining. Talk to me again in five years if the price drops to $0.32. The only people who have lost anything are people who bought at $1000 which is just silly.
Uh it's still worth $2,000,000 US008Zulu said:
It's still up 4,000% this year, find me an investment that's even close.Zachary Amaranth said:
So many people who don't understand Bitcoin spending time and money on Bitcoin.
It is a REFERENCE IMPLEMENTATION of a theoretical crypto currency - that people then decided worked well enough and would run with it.
Bitcoin relies on a blockchain file that is steadily increasing in size as people mine more blocks.
It's already several gigabytes.
- Which doesn't seem so bad when you consider storage is relatively cheap now.
-- However, this size increase is accelerating as more processing power is devoted to mining.
- It also generates network traffic to synchronize mining efforts
-- Which is also increasing as more people use Bitcoin
These increases will never level off, and will jump in rate drastically if a majority of people ever start relying on Bitcoin.
ALSO, Bitcoin is in the control of whoever is leading the mining efforts [http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/11/04/bitcoin-is-broken/]. This theoretically is the majority of active miners, due to how difficult it is for a small percentage of nodes to take the lead.
However, there is now specialized Bitcoin mining hardware [https://www.google.com/search?q=ASIC+bitcoin] that can mine at such a rate as to trivialize any non specialized hardware. This means that Bitcoin is now or will soon be *entirely* in the hands of the relatively few people with this specialized hardware.
Also also, all of this mining by people with more money and greed then brains has a significant environmental and resource impact. Mining runs computers as fast as possible ALL THE TIME, consuming both electricity and network bandwidth (which is electricity from other non mining computers).
This is already adding up to a noticeable footprint, and most people aren't even participating yet.
In short, supporting bitcoin on a non-academic level is not only throwing away your time and money, but is also actively degrading the environment at fairly aggressive rate.
There are people who made money. They were early adopters with a lot of mining hardware. They already cashed out or established their lead. Anyone entering the market now is only giving them money.
At best you can do margin trading to take advantage of other suckers in a highly volatile exchange.
(without actually returning to the mean at the end)
It is a REFERENCE IMPLEMENTATION of a theoretical crypto currency - that people then decided worked well enough and would run with it.
Bitcoin relies on a blockchain file that is steadily increasing in size as people mine more blocks.
It's already several gigabytes.
- Which doesn't seem so bad when you consider storage is relatively cheap now.
-- However, this size increase is accelerating as more processing power is devoted to mining.
- It also generates network traffic to synchronize mining efforts
-- Which is also increasing as more people use Bitcoin
These increases will never level off, and will jump in rate drastically if a majority of people ever start relying on Bitcoin.
ALSO, Bitcoin is in the control of whoever is leading the mining efforts [http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/11/04/bitcoin-is-broken/]. This theoretically is the majority of active miners, due to how difficult it is for a small percentage of nodes to take the lead.
However, there is now specialized Bitcoin mining hardware [https://www.google.com/search?q=ASIC+bitcoin] that can mine at such a rate as to trivialize any non specialized hardware. This means that Bitcoin is now or will soon be *entirely* in the hands of the relatively few people with this specialized hardware.
Also also, all of this mining by people with more money and greed then brains has a significant environmental and resource impact. Mining runs computers as fast as possible ALL THE TIME, consuming both electricity and network bandwidth (which is electricity from other non mining computers).
This is already adding up to a noticeable footprint, and most people aren't even participating yet.
In short, supporting bitcoin on a non-academic level is not only throwing away your time and money, but is also actively degrading the environment at fairly aggressive rate.
There are people who made money. They were early adopters with a lot of mining hardware. They already cashed out or established their lead. Anyone entering the market now is only giving them money.
At best you can do margin trading to take advantage of other suckers in a highly volatile exchange.
(without actually returning to the mean at the end)