Bitcoin Forum

And? Bitcoin is magical and different. It's a growing snowball - not a bubble. It can't burst.

Mmm. Maybe it is time to sell some BTC for fiat after all... ;D

And today tulips are a multibillion dollar industry in Holland alone.

Edit - no one ever talks about 'what happend next'

.com bubble ----> google, facebook, twitter, ebay et al.

second. just haters dont listen.

Man, this comparison is really over used. This must the 50th time someone has tried to compare bitcoins with tulips in the last 2 months.

Eh, you obviously are an economist. And we all know that educated, experienced economists don't understand this new currency bitcoins. Because bitcoin is open source, p2p, fancy-smancy and mining - only we geeks can understand the value of it. (Just joking.  ;) )

Bitcoin is an amazing piece of technology - anyone can go dig up a tulip bulb this comparison is ridiculous

Bitcoin might be in a bubble, and that bubble might burst.

TC is having trouble keeping dollars in stock over at FC4B, so maybe the bitcoin bubble is collapsing right now, but the dollar and euro bubbles are collapsing faster.

Tulips are an amazing piece of natural bioengineering, and anyone can go mine a coin. I think this comparison is comparable.

The market cap for tulips is currently higher than the market cap for bitcoins. Add daffodils, and roses and we are entering stratospheric prices.
And that's discounting the lily and the orchid as a minor players in this market.

You are comparing natural resources with a currency. And during the tulips mania the tulips obviously weren't bought for their physical properties, which explains the crash, because people realized that the tulips as products weren't worth the ridiculous price.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania

So .gov said you only had to guarantee 10% of the bid, then sellers raised asks 10x. The entire thing is more like a myth.

Can you mine a coin by picking it up off the ground without any other hardware, knowledge, investment and skills?

Bitcoins are carefully crafted piece of tech - tulip bulbs are also a carefully crafted piece of tech by nature - but their use value is far lower than that of Bitcoin, clearly. A tulip bulb has been around for tens of thousands of years and will probably remain the same for another few millenia at least, Bitcoin is an emerging, carefully crafted technology which may have effects as profound as the internet itself. No comparison.

blah blah blah...

If the bulls are right, the bears will have to eat their words. If the bears are right, the bulls will eat their words, will most probably choke on thier tongues, and find themselves running out of skyscraper windows.

Obviously the only comparison between a 17th century dutch tulip bulb and a modern day Bitcoin, is that the prices of both were dramatically inflated by people investing in them purely seeking profit, having no intention of actually using the item for its practical intended purpose.

It is said that that one tulip bulb at the height of the mania could buy a house next to the royal palace. Whilst Bitcoin has seen astounding gains in the past few months, it is certainly a long way from that.

As has been pointed out, Bitcoin poses a threat to the status quo of the entire preexisting financial establishment. This fact alone, suggests to me that if one thing is guaranteed with Bitcoin, it is that it is not going to be left to have a smooth ride, and indeed, perhaps this is what we are seeing now. The price being artifically driven exorbitantly higher, in order that the price of Bitcoin one day can have such a an almighty crash, that it leaves a very sour taste in most peoples mouths and in the mean time, its valuation behaves with such volatility, that no serious business can afford to risk touching it with a 10 foot long shitty bargepole.

Jumping on Bitcoin, or already being on Bitcoin, is like being on a thrilling roller coaster ride that keeps spiralling higher and higher into the heavens, but that one day, is guaranteed to go flying off over a cliff edge. Those people who cannot recognise this (i.e. the majority on here), are those who are most likely to get seriously burned.

Enough with this comparison. I think I'll go plant some bitcoins and increase availability some (not)!!!  :D

At first I thought tulip bulbs were code for some strange currency.

Nope.  Literally the bulbs of tulips.

Seriously u guise.

Except there is no gavitational attraction between the price of BTC and the number zero. I hate clumbsy analogies so much because lead you to think you undestand something, when really you dont

I believe that number last time wasn't zero, but 2! A drop of around 95%. If history was to repeat itself, that would mean Bitcoin going down to ~$10 at current prices. Or if ti Bitcoins go to 500%, a 95% hit would take it to $25. How would you like those prices?

Ultimately, nobody really knows (or very very few people know) what the main or crucial driving forces in the Bitcoin market are and everyone is allowing thier emotions to bias their thinking. Whether a person is already up 1000%, and is growing increasingly risk averse, or whether they dived in at $150, and are anxious to get a slice of the exponential profits that the early adopters have gotten.

No, thier is no gravitational force attracting Bitcoin to zero. What there might be is a lack of people willing to buy Bitcoins at any given price. Say this price is $500, and even the most risk taking/avaricious investors into Bitcoins, are getting itchy hands and are thinking that they really have maximised thier profits, and start selling. Then the price goes down, but with the already insanely exponential increases in Bitcoin, no serious money is willing to enter the market even at the marginally reduced price point resulting from the early sell offs, which leaves the Silk Road punters which presently represent about 0.01% of the Bitcoin market in terms of volume in USD as the core group of steady Bitcoin buyers. At this point supply far outstrips demand, and we have a glut of speculators who have either made 2000% profits and are looking to maximise their gains sensing that the game is up. We then have a landslide in the price of Bitcoin. With no clumsy analogies applied, this is typical of any commodity market that experiences mass exponential price inflation whilst the fundamentals that underpin that commodities value remain essentialy unchanged (i.e. experience only steady growth as opposed to exponential growth).

Of course, all the above only applies if the Bitcoin bubble were to be of the honest variety without any manipulative hands involved. Considering the weighty and indeed revolutionary implications that Bitcoin could have for the current global political and financial establishment, I think it is highly unlikely that the current monetary lords would be happy to leave Bitcoins to naturally grow. They can flatter the Bitcoin market to giddying height, before pumping it up the ass, and make decent gains in USD doing so, ensuring that Bitcoin can never be seen by the mainstream as a true alternative currency.

as you have a Cloud Atlas avatar, I can safely say that your opinion is not worth listening to

Can you divide a tulip up to 8 decimal places?  How long does a tulip bulb stay good (is it immutable?)  Are tulip bulbs finite?  Can you send tulips around the world in seconds for only a few cents?

It's not even like comparing apples to oranges...  It's like comparing apples to bacon  ;)

I'd love 'em. I could buy in again.

that

You sir are a dipshit:

Pets.com
Kozmo.com
Webvan
Flooz.com
eToys.com
Boo.com
GovWorks.com
MVP.com
Go.com
Kibu.com
Freeinternet.com 
GeoCities
WorldCom
Xcelera.com
inktomi

Total ~50.4Billion combind at their individual height.


You sir are stupid, go back to school read up on the subject you are attempting to speak out, then come back.

but what is the total valuation of google, facebook, twitter, ebay today? You want some pet food or pet toys online? Get it on Amazon.

the total value of internet advertising expenditures.

actually a better history lesson comes from the griots of the west coast of africa.
it goes back some 3800 years ago. at that time the currency was cowrie shells.
for many years there was a steady supply and there was no inflation or deflation.
over the course of hundreds of years you could get a fish for x amount of cowrie shells.
then for some inexplicable reason the cowrie population collapsed. suddenly it took
many more shells to get anything including fish and djembes. the value rose exponentially.
then after a few years after people had been hoarding shells never knowing when they would ever get more
there was a huge storm that washed up innumerable quantities of shells. the value of the shells plummeted.
those who had been hoarding instead of spending took a terrible beating. everyone had shells.
it took hundreds of shells to get one fish. those who had been speculating in shells were forced to fish
farm or make some kind of product that would fill a demand so they could get enough shells to trade
for things they needed.
eventually the economy stabilized when people were gainfully employed and the number of shells
came into equilibrium with the needs of commerce.

This^

LOL!

Not to mention dozens of other dotcom ventures that were nothing but hype and hot air, yet ended up highly 'valued'.

You guys aren't seriously comparing Bitcoin to Flooz?

You're right - the whole internet thing was a complete failure. I'm surprised you even found a way to post this on the internet.

LOL!

Hey guise, listen to this genius, internet totally exists just because of the dot.com bubble and all good that came from it.

The point is that the .com bubble was followed by the .com renaissance - arguably the most important 10 to 15 years in human history.

Arbitrary quote form wikipedia:

"A friend of mine has a great line. He says 'Nothing important has ever been built without irrational exuberance'. Meaning that you need some of this mania to cause investors to open up their pocketbooks and finance the building of the railroads or the automobile or aerospace industry or whatever. And in this case, much of the capital invested was lost, but also much of it was invested in a very high throughput backbone for the Internet, and lots of software that works, and databases and server structure. All that stuff has allowed what we have today, which has changed all our lives. …that's what all this speculative mania built.

This.

Bitcoin is probably going to tank at some point. This may even be "it." Or it might have been back in 2011. But it, or a successor, will come back, stronger than ever.

I'm very long-term. :)

The dotcom bubble was never going to kill the internet, it was just going to result in billions of notional capital going up in smoke resulting in economic devastation which in turn lead to the governments and central banks rigging the game to create a another credit bubble to 'save' the economy from the dotcom crash. This time the bubble was based upon real estate.


I should probably be more directing this reply more at those who state that just because the dotcom bubble never killed the internet, it was an inconsequential blip in the system. But the point of this thread seemed to be to point out that Bitcoin is in the grip of a mania, and the majority of those invested or involved with Bitcoin, seem to be under the spell of the mania. When the tulip mania died, as many of the Bitcoin bullmarket zealots have pointed out, the Tulip industry never died out, but vast (projected) fortunes were lost and many investors were forced to rethink their entire paradigm. The fact that tulips have turned into a multi-million dollar global industry some 350 years down the line, I imagine would be quite irrelevant to any Dutch investor who sold his house next to the palace to get in on some hot tulip action.

This thread was started before Bitcoin went up £175, down to £70, and now sits at £80. This makes damn ugly viewing to all but the most idiotic (hey, just another great buying opportunity type) investor. I wouldn't in a million years put any money into Bitcoins right now if I needed to hold onto them for more than a few hours and probably the risk averse majority are thinking the same. So unless the master manipulators (whoever they may be) have other ideas, I would state that the bubble has popped for now and Bitcoin needs to find stability at much lower prices. This kind of makes this thread both relevant, and prescient, not to mention those who have attacked the OP look like the fools that they were always sooner rather than later, going to reveal themselves to be.

My term is longer 8)

And the "bitcoin bubble" could never kill cryptocurrency. Are we seeing some irrational exuberance? Yeah, probably. But 10, 20 years down the line, when shit has settled down some, the fortunes lost - and made - will be seen as they are: simply the cost of any new technology. There are always going to be those who see something like this and think, "Holy shit, this is the best thing since pancakes!" And it is, make no mistake about it.

But if you sell your house to go "all-in" on something this new, don't be too surprised when you need to ask to move back in with Mom. Get rich quick schemes never work out as planned.

I tend to agree with this.

However, I did see a thread where some guy was discussing whether to turn everything in his 401K (or wotever it is) into Bitcoins. Worse still, was the volume of nutters who were agreeing that this would be very best possible course of action he could take. Hopefully, he never actually done this.

I feel bad for my noob brother who has lost the lion share of £10K. When he first came to me with serious queries about how to buy Bitcoin (after 2 years of disinterest on the subject), Bitcoin was at $45. I recommended that it would be a very risky investment and that he should stay well clear. Then, as we all know, the price rose to around $150. This time, I strongly recommend that he didn't invest but since I had made him miss out on already massive profits, I had to concede that although I knew it was classic speculative bubble of the worst kind, I had no idea where it may stop. Since my advice already cost him 200% profits, this time he never heeded my advice. By the time he bought his Bitcoins (4 day delay for cash transfer at MtGox), he paid £120 each. In the following couple of days, the price rocketed to around £200, then down to £70, then back to £127. I strongly recommended that he get out as soon as a good opportunity arose, but as they say, 'bulls get rich, bears get rich, pigs get slaughtered'. Quite probably, had he bought in at $45, he would be in the same position today, much like my friend 'deathcode' from whom I (along with many others) suffered much patronising and condecension, on the grounds that we doubted his beliefs as to what the driving forces behind the exponential rise of Bitcoin were.......

.....still, he got his motorbike at least!

The comparison to the tulip mania is not valid. Tulips had no real value and was a craze driving prices. Bitcoin is so powerful an idea that it may change world finance. I am buying today.

Most of you are missing the point.  This is not a comparison of a BitCoin to a Tulip.  It's a comparison of the price action of BitCoins to the price action of Tulips in 17th Century Netherlands and the psychological implications.

You are missing the point. Around here we talk about the Bitcoin cryptocurrency, whose individual units are bitcoins.

Right.

See: http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/appeal-to-common-practice.html

If a person wants to appear credible in any field the language they use is very important because it communicates a great deal about them beyond the base syntactic meaning.

Doctors who have studied in medical school, and who spend a lot of time interacting with other doctors, use similar language patterns. They call things by the same name. We humans use that information to judge the credibility of the person talking to us. When we see someone using the wrong language for a particular we instantly know a lot about them at a subconscious level. The wrong language means the speaker doesn't interact much with other people in the field, which makes them an outsider and significantly reduces the probability that they know what they are talking about.

Proper terminology is necessary, but not sufficient, to establish credibility.

Just stop it with the Tuplip Mania crap, it is not even the same thing even slightly.

Tulips were not a brand new untried technology in the time that occurred and really was investor stupidity and mania. Tulips were not used as a currency. There was a certain mania here, but the price right now reflects who stayed. BTC has not crashed.

Im also keeping in mind that there are external forces at work on Bitcoin, the fluctuations are due to the rise in use and additional outside fiat being converted into BTC, plus new media hype simply a lot of desperate people out there looking to get ahead, and BTC is red hot. Some by long term investors, some by get rich quick people, as in any market. There has been no failure of the protocol or the community drive to see it succeed.

I look forward to the next rise to $500

@justusranvier. +1

When I see BitCoin instead of Bitcoin. I assume this person is informed about bitcoin via the media. Even though it is not incorrect to spell it that way.