Bitcoin Forum

I figured that this would happen when they announced the commissions on trades would be 0% for those who had an mtGox account before the hack.

People are buying in small price swings and selling at small price swings. They can make a few dollars and pay no commission. So the swings have become smaller and smaller and smaller until now it has just been wavering by less than ten cents.

I predict that the 26th, when commissions go back up to full price, the price will start to rise again as people hold longer and the traders set up larger swings for trading.

That's an interesting point; however, I don't think that's all there is to it. The interest in Bitcoin has capped at the moment. Check out Google trends, you'll notice that the number of searches has dropped drastically. Maybe the price stagnation is also a symptom of this. If the interest in Bitcoin keeps dropping I expect the price to erode further.

Still, you have a point, we'll see what happens in a couple of weeks.

http://bitcoinweekly.com/articles/the-calm-after-the-storm

You might wanna read that article. It gave a variety of reasons as to why price stabilized.

The Euro and USD currencies are on the brink of collapse if their issuers don't stop defaulting on their loans.
There will be much bigger worries by then, but I'd put any significant cash reserves into gold, platinum, silver and bitcoin at the moment.

In the current economic climate I wont be surprised to wake up one morning and see the US dollar value plummet dozens of % in a day

Bitcoin and other scarce commodities will skyrocket in value if that happens, people will attempt getting ahold of anything which isn't fiat currency or unlimited paper money

Bitcoin has stagnated because the decimal point wasn't moved.  We need to move it 2-3 places.  Normal people might be willing to throw $10-20 into bitcoin.  For that they get.... 1 coin?  If they could get 100 or 1000 it would seem like a better deal.  The psychological barrier is far, far, more important than most people on these forums realize.  Believe it or not, most people in the world aren't mathematically adept libertarian engineers.  We need to go after the humanities people, the liberals, the people who don't understand fractions or decimals.  We need to move to a "points" model, like xbox points or credit card rewards points.

Absolutely NOT.  This is intended to be a serious medium of exchange, not some sort of "point" system designed to obfuscate value. 

As a counter example I present Berkshire-Hathaway.  That stock has never had a split, never paid a dividend, was never gussied up to look pretty for the "common Joe."  Result?  $115,000 per share, and returns well above market.

People absolutely understand fractions.  And if they don't, well.  Too bad.

I thought the reason that shares often had to be split was not because of any "people don't understand fractions" nonsense, but rather because it's not possible to sell a fraction of share?

How would I, a nobody, invest in this Berkshire-Hathaway company?  I can't get the money to buy even one share.  If they split the stock by 100,000; I could, and so could a lot more people.

As to shifting the decimal place.  It's not a problem, it requires nothing other than a UI change.  I really don't see what the problem would be.  Boot up vim and  ":bufdo %s/100000000/100000/g" then ":bufdo %s/BTC/mBTC/g" and job done.

For most of a century people were paid in pennies.

A penny for your thoughts, pinch a penny, the $5 per day job at Ford considered high wages...

The exact same way you, as a solo miner, would aquire a bitcoin with a difficulty in the tens of millions.  By joining a pool.  You buy into a mutual fund, and the fund buys the shares.  Along with shares in other companies for good measure.


1,$s/1000/1/g is not the solution, it's a technical implementation.  Exchanges could also implement this with no changes to the client.  It would also be bad in the sense of "we're changing our currency to NEW bitcoins" sort of bad, even though it's a simple rename and decimal point shift.

Buying shares in the share pool is splitting the stock.  Why not just split it?


I wasn't literally suggesting those commands (I shouldn't have written them); and if you note I was careful to change the units.  I was trying to say that when we say "print x/100000000" it is pretty easy to make that "print x/100000" 1 BTC would remain 1 BTC  there would be no "new bitcoins".  We simply switch to showing millicoins instead of coins.  It's a user interface issue; nothing more.

You're right that exchanges could do the same, but ... who cares?

As I said, it's not a problem worth worrying about, other than perhaps providing people a nice interface to specify in the units they prefer, it will take care of itself when the greengrocer changes his "0.005 BTC per Apple" sign to "5 mBTC per Apple", which he is free to do at his option; and requires no help from the bitcoin system.

But there are still 50 bitcoins created every ten minutes (roughly) that means 6000 bitcoins a day, 42000 bitcoins a week, ... you get the idea. Thats a big increase in the money supply and there are a number of miners that sell what they produce, so there has to be people buying, otherwise with the new supply of bitcoins the price would plummet.

Yes, too bad for us.  We (those of us who have bitcoins) could be millionaires if it weren't for people like you wanting to keep the bitcoin economy exclusive.



You are incorrect.  Switching to mBTC is inferior to actually moving the decimal point.  Regular people do not understand SI prefixes.  People memorize the relationship between meters and kilometers.  You are kidding yourself if you think that normal people have the skills or desire to understand the concept of mBTC.  We need to actually move the decimal place.

+1

Well, they figured out bytes, kilobytes, megabytes and gigabytes and terabytes all right...

People will figure it out.

Oh yes, because people will NEVER understand the change from $0.05 per apple to 5 cents per apple.

Fractions? What fractions? We're not dealing with numbers like 1/2, 1/16, 1/5, 1/7, or whatever. Just decimals.

It's not much harder for me to understand 1.00100 than it is to understand 1,001.00

I think the real problem is people like you that think Bitcoin is some kind of get-rich-quick scheme rather than being a currency. It prevents outsiders from seeing the potential and focusing solely on "ZOMG PONZI SCHEME!" I'm glad the price is currently stabilized because that's what we need, not volatility.


Since we're being pedantic, decimals are fractions. They were originally called "decimal fractions".

There's no evidence to show otherwise. Bitcoins are either (1) hoarded or (2) sold on the exchanges. Nothing else is happening, man. Accept this!

True that and really BTC has a huge ROI compared to any other investments right now.

Be careful. You make assumptions about the value of Bitcoin that hinge on its long term viability, something that your speculation works against.

Depends on when you invested.  If you did so at $17, let alone $30, your ROI is pretty bad right now.

Oh really?  Walk down street and ask 10 people how many kilobytes are in a gigabyte.  No more than one person will get the answer correct.


Once bitcoin is very well established people will have no trouble with having 2-3 different units in the mix.  We do not live in that time.  As it is right now bitcents are also a reasonable unit to use, because of the similarity with the dollar.


You are in the top 10% of mathematical ability, most people would have trouble with that.  That said the next group of people that we need to reach (hip urban people) would have not too much trouble with 1.0001 compared to 1001.  However understanding 1.001 vs 0.001001 is too hard for them.


You do not know me.  I am not a speculator.  Right now we have a nice core of technically-adept people to build software and nice core of liberty-minded people to evangelize the currency.  However the problem with these people is that we don't spend a lot of money on junk.  We need consumers.  We need people who actually make purchases with bitcoin.  We need people who will buy stuff because they want stuff, not for the novelty of using bitcoin or because they want to make the world a better place.

Its been having HUGE ROI and continues to do so unless the price goes down to $0 tomorrow.

Or into negative numbers.

I wasn't referring to the actual numbers, and if I was, a wonky 8-bit system would not be my prime example. I am talking about orders of magnitude. Of those ten people, more than one could order them from smallest to largest...I hope. Maybe I am overestimated the common man, but if my parents get it and only use the computer to play bookworm, i think the average joe has some concept of it. Consider cell phones and data plans...these things have become relevant to the everyday user, not just the people who care about gadgets.

Keep in mind that that technology has been around on a consumer level for twenty years, max. I remember my first 240mb HD that would never ever run out of space. I am sure there are people on this forum who remember their 640kb HD with the same thoughts upon its installation. That's pretty good progress...from a non-existent term to an everyday term...

It will take time for the jargon to take hold, but that's better than bending to the whims of ignorance. For every major overhaul to the bitcoin system, their is going to be a backlash and loss of confidence to match or overshadow it. A step forward doesn't mean it isn't over a cliff...no one knows the future.

A penny for your thoughts still sounds better than 0.00071429 Bitcoins for your thoughts, or 71,429 Satoshis for your thoughts!

What does "moving the decimal place" mean if not using millibitcoins (mBTC) or microbitcoins (uBTC)?  You're not seriously suggesting that 1 bitcoin become 100 new bitcoin, which would be entirely absurd?

After careful deliberation I agree that the ONLY thing keeping bitcoin exclusive and all of us on this forum from becoming gajillionares is a 100 or 1000:1 bitcoin split.  And people like me in our ivory towers.</sarcasm>

Even in the US people have become sensitized to "kilo", "mega" and "giga" (and soon, "tera" and "peta") as prefixes which denote increasing size.  They may have to whip out a calculator to convert, but they all know giga > mega > kilo.  They are capable of grasping the concept of "milli" and "micro" and "nano" as prefixes denoting smaller sizes.

Outside the US (and last I checked the rest of the world is quite a bit bigger than countries still using Imperial units) people have no problems with the concept of "deci" (1/10th), "centi" (1/100th) and "milli" (1/1000ths) because they're exposed to the concept of decimeters, centimeters and millimeters (and *liters, etc) all their lives.  If someone wishes to express their penis length in millimeters they can do so instead of saying something like "my wang is but 0.12 meters long".

The US population could well be dumber on average, but isn't so cretinous as to have decimal points being the only thing stopping you from buying a helicopter with your bitcoins.

Of course I am suggesting that 1 bitcoin become 100 (or 1000) bitcoin.  Mexico actually moved the decimal point on their currency.

Americans never could figure out the metric system... :D

Considering the quality of some of the posts on this forum, I'm glad we can use better units, since a lot of the thoughts here are worth a Satoshi.

Mexico is a country, with fiat currency, that was inflated through the roof.

Additionally, you wouldn't actually be doing anything, except changing the way the data is displayed.

Stable prices are good for merchants, it means they don't need to keep readjusting their prices.

I think the stable price is going to be a lot higher than the price right now though.

I think if Bitcoin becomes prevalent then the price will fluctuate about as much as gold currently does.

Have you been to the Market section of the forum?  People are buying and selling goods and services left and right!  I personally was not one of the early adopters with 10s of thousands of bitcoins but I've already bought a computer, an iPad app, and a keepsake coin using bitcoins.  Additionally, I have tipped and donated to some people using bitcoins.  I consider myself to be a fairly frugal person so I'm sure there are others who are spending even more than I am. 

I am glad for the stable price as I think it will encourage more merchants to accept bitcoins.

That argument goes both ways... "A milli for your thoughts" sounds better than "1.315293 pennies for your thoughts".

My Dad tries to use that argument against the metric system saying "It's a lot easier to say 3-foot waves, rather than 0.91 metre waves". And I say "Yes but if they were exactly 1 metre, it's easier to say 1-metre waves than 3-foot-3-inch-and-4-tenths-of-an-inch waves".

hello_good_sir's arguments about appealing to non-technical people are quite valid. This has been said a ton before, of course, but the bitcoin community needs:

1) A dead-simple reference client with built-in means to back up and secure the wallet. These functions need to be presented in ways that ordinary people will understand. Some real effort needs to be spent on user-interface design.
2) The crypto details need to be obscured from people. Full addresses rarely need to be completely visible. "all those numbers and letters" just confuse and turn people off.
3) The confirmation status and number, block stuff, connections, etc, all need to be obscured in default bitcoin transacting interfaces. Again, this is just going to confuse people and make things seem way too complicated and error-prone.

buy the b-class shares, then at ~53€ at the moment.

we just need to get bitcoin in the news again....someone go do something bad...but not too bad...just bad enough to get on tv again  hehe

Finance some terrorism anyone?

I think what we need is quite the opposite of this...

I think the guys dealing rock on skidrow should be accepting my bitcoin. That'll turn some heads...besides, half the bums there are rocking smartphones. It's shocking.

Well I'm buying.

How about if someone orders somthing from Silk Road and then instead of getting it to themselves, have it shipped to the White House... :D

Buy Barry some weed? That would be hilarious.

+1 I've performed over 200 transactions and less than half were related to currency trades.