Bitcoin Forum

Yeah, it costs 7 times more but now it can't be used as currency with all these +/-100 USD swings. Early adopters happy but the rest of the world can't use it even as store of value, because when it crosses 1000 USD mark the early adopters will cash out again. Of coz u can hold it until it reaches 2000 USD mark, but will it?

Bitcoin is not only a store of value. Please google it more next time.

What is it then?

Right now it is its perceived potential.

It's price is sentiment - if you believe in it, you are a buyer / holder, if not - the opposite.

I googled for a while and found http://gavinthink.blogspot.com/2012/07/is-store-of-value-enough.html. He mentions only "store of value" and "means of exchange", both aspects were covered in the OP.

What the difference when it comes to buying/selling stuff when BTC will grow? Instead of paying 1 BTC you will pay 0.001 BTC etc. I dont see any problem with it as long as you can "translate(?)" the BTC to USD/EUR etc.

Exactly! Bitcoin was supposed to be used as a currency, not as a toy for speculators.

Yeah , bitcoin was supposed to do  lots of things.
There are people here that said bitcoin will reduce poverty in Africa (how ? , beats me).

Well , guess what , it doesn't do most the things it was supposed to do , but in the future it might.

the price is volitile because the amount of people in the system doesnt match new comers and a few other factors. the more people that adopt bitcoin for daily use the more stable the price will become. at the moment it is like the first week of the month is peoples payday where they sell of for fiat, then the rest of the month s hoarding. this has been the pattern for months now.

once there are enough people to buy when others want to sell and vice versa, to keep the price at a basic level people will start moving into bitcoin in their droves.. bitcoin is still in the early stages.

It does one thing : it allows verifiable transfer of a fungible, finite thing : bitcoin. That, in itslef (and some other properties), is huge, and explains the interest for bitcoin and its future.
Bitcoin might reduce poverty in Africa, yes, because it might lead, directly or indirectly, to the end of debt money. Understand it or not, but that would be a HUGE change in our current world, and would indeed help reduce poverty, to put it simply.

Of course , that would explain why some countries were poor even before fiat money
And why Greece has gone bankrupt 7 times during the gold standard.

Hasn't failed me yet. I bought into bitcoin to use it as a currency, but before I got the chance to spend it it quickly doubled in worth. Now it's worth seven times as much and climbing. I would’ve been pretty annoyed now had I spent it all. When/if the currency seems to stabilise at a point in the future, then I'll probably spend it, but for now I think I'll save it as an Investment and see what highs or lows bitcoin can ride. Plenty of people are still buying and selling with it at the moment, but personally I think it'd be unwise to spend it now, but people can do what they want with it; money doesn't have to be spent as soon as you get it. I'm excited to see what happens.

So sad you sold in 2011. You should have kept some.

Yeah... Wait, I sold at 200+ half a year ago! And keep getting them as payment for my coding service. Don't worry about me plz.

Average 3rd world person in poverty, has no bank account. They have no real means of even amassing wealth safely. Tack on to this, that services like Paypal and others all needed some "Exchange" end to be value, none of which was cash, prohibits them from participating.

Now, some guy can post services , get a small micro wallet, and very good chance he can exchange it one way or another. With 0 fear of some corp just jacking his funds over some KYC issues etc. The real potential is for the world of people excluded from normal banking and savings. IT will just take time and adoption.

Almost 5 years left. Can u assess when we'll see the progress?

Let us not forget that the Bitcoin developer abandoned his project years ago and vanished.

Fortunately there are other currencies with active developers rising to the challenge. Don't worry, if Bitcoin becomes a sheer object of speculation others will find a way. Bookmark this page: http://coinmarketcap.com/

Of course my friend..
We have no water , no electricity , food only from the UN help funds , but we can store our "wealth" in a wallet.
Problems solved , we're going to Italy to buy Ferraris.

You say this as if Bitcoin was no longer being developed.  There is now a whole team working on bitcoin, just because Satoshi is not working on it (or is he? no one knows) means nothing.  What is your point?  Oh probably that everyone should buy Goldcoins.

I'd prefer not to have developers at all. Most of new features were about centralization and regulation.

True, a lot of people have limited access to computers, internet, banking, especially in poor regions, but they have (or could afford) mobile phones with wallets, or any other small pieces of tech, which are easy to carry, and work for days without electricity. By having a BTC wallet instead of cash you can feel safer cause it's encrypted and more secure than a credit card, no central authority watching over your money, you just have a coin in your pocket and the whole system can go F*** themselves.

Nowadays people are insecure, just look at this whole prepper thing, nobody heard about it since the cold war. In the US you can at least buy a gun and shoot it from your porch, imagine how people in the EU feel - no real rights, no weapons and more countries in debt or bankrupt.

Sure. That would be fine but my point is most people don't understand that Bitcoin is not the only digital currency.

But this is changing and very very rapidly. Bitcoin is like the web crawler of the early 90's, we still don't know who will be Google. Yesterday for the first time, Max Keiser talked about Litecoin on his show. It's happening right in front of our eyes.

Digital currencies are taking over the World and it's not going to be a bitcoin-only ride.

Useless psuedo bullshit, bitcoin was created to get the sheep to accept digital currency, it will be replaced by government backed digital currency and botcoin will just die thereafter when they deem ready to murder it.

Ohh you see all these Bitcoin scams can't trust some black market currency, but you can trust ECB and FED backed digital currency.

Bitcoin knew about its mass scaling problems and did jack shit in the last 5 years to address them, either really stupid or done on purpose.

I agree that Bitcoin has scalability issue, but the rest of ur post isn't backed by anything.

This is very true, heard something that the poorest countries all have smart phones a data like a massive majority. The europeans me being one of them can go fuck themsleves, they deserve what they get with their pseudo bullshit progressiveness, ohh guns are bad good you dumb twats have fun getting fucked from other people with guns.

What do you expect from the nation who is going to Usher in anti christ

Its backed by many things go do some research. If you look at the current landscape governments all want a digital currency it means more control when they can track everything you spend your money on.

Sorry for your loss.

I'll advise not going full fiat unless in case of extreme need - full fiat tends to make people bitter and angry.

Excellent off topic rant about your penis being massively small, and your need to boost your ego.

Thx. But it's not a loss coz I used that money to create more money (in USD though). It's delusion that u should hold Bitcoins to get max profit. Money must work.

Yes. But I think many Keynesian-types have gotten their causality inverted when they look at successful economies and liquidity and cash flow. I strongly suspect that you cannot legislate a good economy by "forcing" cash flow, because the only way to make cash flow more than is natural, is to change the equilibrium by making it *more expensive* not to have it in motion, and the physicist in me reduces these concepts into a vague sort of economic perpetual-motion machine. Maybe they'll be able to switch up the game before it runs out of steam, but it certainly will eventually if left unattended...

One more thread about when 1 BTC == 1000000 USD (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=343398.0). Yeah, ppl care only how to make more dollars using bitcoins...

Bitcoin is just a couple of years old, give it some time!

Ok. But it's 5 years old, btw.

Time is quite some issue here.
Bitcoin has rise in price like there is no tomorrow but in number of people actually using it the increase is just laughable.
If something new and more user friendly comes on the market the future is grim for it as a currency.

So, when Bitcoin becomes more mainstream, one coin would cost 10 000$ and more. So tell me, how one bitcoin can hold its price stable at the current level?

It can't, and this makes it unusable as a currency.

Very short-sighted my friend.

The currency is in it's infancy.  After mass adoption the price will become more and more stable as more and more resources are sold in Bitcoin.

When China trades oil in Crypto currencies perhaps you'll consider updating your views.

Of course by then the investment opportunity will long be gone.

I bet Satoshi wouldn't agree with u. He wrote that price will go up non-stop, otherwise fees wouldn't cover mining expenses.

Bitcoin has no "price". It has an exchange rate with other currencies.

+1
Agree , a digital currency backed by the govt will work and will succeed better , however BTC may succeed as a digital currency when there is chaos maybe i don't know , but anyway its not about BTC specifically its about digital currency , BTC in itself is nothing is just another form of paper money man made currency in a digital form with a limit , that's it its nothing really , any group of people/country can make another form of BTC , that's why it will drop hard but not necessarily die ....

you might like to consider that when China trades oil in crypto currencies, it will be its own generated one, not one it has no control over.      they'll pre-mine a new currency and run their own block chain in a bank of dedicated super computers.

Breaking news! Sell bitcoin, sell bitcoin! Micro guy says bitcoin is abandoned!

WRONG!  China has to buy energy from other countries.  And those countries will only deal in a currency they trust.  That's going to be a decentralized crypto currency.  Right now that looks like Bitcoin.  (You heard it hear first.)

At a slow rate though, like inflation but in the opposite direction. Single-digit percentages annually in the long term. Before, with inflationary systems, you were presented the choice of (1) lose value at a rate of X%, around 3% in the US, to inflation, as a penalty for holding your money, or (2) invest your money by letting someone else hold it for you, like a bank at the least, who invests it, or invest it directly. (2) was the only option if you wanted a shot at increasing your assets' value. The people actively investing the money get the full return for value added to the economy in the form of productivity. Any intermediaries take a slice, and holding it yourself is like anti-investment.

It only makes sense that an asset at a fixed quantity, like Bitcoin, if used as a symbol of value for a large majority of the world's population, will increase in value. In essence, Bitcoin is worth the sum of:
V_prev Its previous value, plus
V_GDP A value equivalent to the GDP poured into it by the labor of its users (as people come to using BTC for wages and remain basically "inside" the economy), minus
V_ex Anything that leaves the currency (buying things by converting from BTC to some other currency), plus
V_spec Perceived value-ad, which is created by speculators (by buying BTC with some other currency).

As time progresses, (A) will always increase overall unless (C) outweighs it, which I can say is highly unlikely due to the psychology of the network effect; (B) will become the most influential, tying the value of the currency to our productivity as a species; (C) will become insignificant, as stated above, and (D) which, is necessary to bootstrap a decentralized and unbacked currency like Bitcoin, and which currently props up the currency, will become unnecessary.

This is why Bitcoin can be described as having a binary outcome. If V_spec outweighs V_ex for a period of time sufficient to cause V_GDP to be sufficient to offset V_ex on its own permanently, due to the network effect, then congratulations, you have bootstrapped a currency. The addition of the large backers in recent memory (Winklevoss twins, Richard Branson, etc.) virtually guaranteed that, and the remaining fear would be that a top economy would essentially outlaw it, but China embraced it, which forces the US to embrace it or not at their own peril -- and all signs point toward embrace. So, by all likelihood, we are past the biggest dangers to the currency achieving minimum orbital velocity.

In this way, simply holding BTC is an act of investment in the productivity of the human species, without requiring an intermediary. You can of course invest in specific subsets of the species (companies) that you're betting on beating the average, which will remain a smart move probably. But holding money isn't like giving it away as a penalty, anymore. So yes, it will become stable enough for use. Or, it won't be used at all, in the long term. There will be no middle ground, except for now, during the bootstrapping stage where V_spec is the greatest component of V_prev at any given time, thus subjecting it to instability. This is temporary. It is certain that if we are still talking about Bitcoin in a few years and not as a history lesson, it will have reached a point of stability congruous with usability.