Bitcoin Forum

A few days ago, the value of all the bitcoins in the world blew past $1 billion for the first time ever. That’s an impressive achievement, for a purely virtual currency backed by no central bank or other authority. It’s also temporary: we’re in the middle of a bitcoin bubble right now, and it’s only a matter of time before the bubble bursts.

There are a couple of reasons why the bubble is sure to burst. The first is just that it’s a bubble, and any chart which looks like the one at the top of this post is bound to end in tears at some point. But there’s a deeper reason, too — which is that bitcoins are an uncomfortable combination of commodity and currency. The commodity value of bitcoins is rooted in their currency value, but the more of a commodity they become, the less useful they are as a currency.

Still, it’s worth taking a look behind the bitcoin bubble, because there are fascinating implications for anybody who cares about payments, or currencies, or trust.

First, though, let’s go back to the night of Sunday June 12, 2011. That was the date of the first big bitcoin heist: a theft of such simplicity and audacity that it might well be considered the perfect crime. A man — we know him only as “All In Vain” — went to bed that night with his Windows computer turned on and connected to the internet. On that computer was a wallet containing 25,000 electronic coins. When he woke up on Monday morning, the wallet was still there. But the money was gone.

Those 25,000 coins were, at the time, worth some $500,000; today, they are worth about $3.5 million. If All in Vain had noticed the theft within a couple of minutes of it happening, it’s conceivable that he could have got his money back. But he was asleep — and ten minutes after the theft occurred, it was utterly permanent and irrevocable. The only way All in Vain could get his money back would be if the thief were to simply transfer it back into his wallet.

No one will ever find the person who stole All in Vain’s coins. That’s because the coins were designed, by another pseudonymous internet denizen known only as Satoshi Nakamoto, to be the perfectly anonymous payment mechanism for a digital world. That’s one of the things about bitcoins: once you send them, they’re sent. Similarly, if someone sends you bitcoins, you know for sure that you own them. You don’t need to know or trust the sender — all you need to know is that the coins have arrived in your virtual wallet, ready for saving or spending.

Bitcoins were designed to be – and, in many ways, are – the perfect digital currency: they’re frictionless, anonymous, and cryptographically astonishingly secure. For anybody who’s ever suffered the incompetence of a bank, or bristled at the fees involved in just spending money, either domestically or abroad – that is to say, for all of us – the promise of bitcoin is the holy grail of payments. Especially since, to all intents and purposes, bitcoins are invisible to law enforcement and the taxman.

Those strengths are also weaknesses. No one wants to risk losing millions of dollars worth of currency overnight, just because they were outsmarted by some computer hacker.

Still, for the time being, bitcoin is in many ways the best and cleanest payments mechanism the world has ever seen. So if we’re ever going to create something better, we’re going to have to learn from what bitcoin does right – as well as what it does wrong.

The source code for bitcoin is free and public, which means that just about every hacker and cryptographer in the world has had a crack at it. And they’ve all come to the same conclusion: it really works. There are question marks over just how anonymous it is and just how scalable it is, but when bitcoins first arrived in early 2009 – right at the height of a massive global crisis of capitalism – they had immediate and magnetic appeal to the anarcho-utopian crowd of techno-libertarians who drive an enormous amount of innovation online.

Such people, including Satoshi Nakamoto, are far from unique in their mistrust of all existing financial institutions. What sets Nakamoto apart is that he turned that mistrust into a philosophy, the most important driving force behind the bitcoin project. When he introduced bitcoin to the world in February 2009, Nakamoto boasted that his new currency was “completely decentralized, with no trusted parties”. And he explained in some detail what he saw as the problem in need of a solution:

The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts.

Nakamoto’s no paranoiac crazy: what he’s saying here is not all that different from what Warren Buffett wrote in his 2012 letter to shareholders.

Investments that are denominated in a given currency include money-market funds, bonds, mortgages, bank deposits, and other instruments. Most of these currency-based investments are thought of as "safe." In truth they are among the most dangerous of assets.
Over the past century these instruments have destroyed the purchasing power of investors in many countries, even as these holders continued to receive timely payments of interest and principal. This ugly result, moreover, will forever recur. Governments determine the ultimate value of money, and systemic forces will sometimes cause them to gravitate to policies that produce inflation. From time to time such policies spin out of control.
Even in the U.S., where the wish for a stable currency is strong, the dollar has fallen a staggering 86% in value since 1965, when I took over management of Berkshire. It takes no less than $7 today to buy what $1 did at that time.

If you hold dollars, you’re trusting the US government not to destroy your wealth. Bitcoin, by contrast, is based on mistrust — it’s specifically designed so that it’s every man for himself. All in Vain was blamed by many in the bitcoin community for his stupidity: what was he thinking, keeping his wallet on a Windows computer attached to the open internet?

But even with bitcoin, people nearly always end up trusting someone – and the entity they’re trusting often turns out to be unreliable. MyBitcoin, turned out to be a fraud; Mt Gox was hacked. The latest hot new bitcoin company is Coinlab, but given how much money can be made by hacking into these companies, and given that law enforcement authorities are unlikely to make any attempt to go after the perpetrators, there will always be a pretty substantial risk that clients will lose their money.

The level of mistrust built into bitcoin is both feature and bug – most of us actually like being able to outsource our wealth-hoarding to some large trusted institution, rather than burying $1,000 under a black volcanic rock in a dry stone wall next to an old oak tree, or wrapping $90,000 in hundred-dollar bills in aluminum foil and hiding it in the freezer. Looking after your own coins is dangerous, and requires a pretty substantial level of tech-savviness. But trusting someone else to look after your coins requires the very trust that bitcoin was designed to circumvent.

Bitcoin’s built-in mistrust of institutions doesn’t just set it apart from fiat currency, it also sets it apart from other virtual currencies, such as Facebook credits in the US, QQ coins in China, or Linden dollars in Second Life. All those currencies are closely controlled and guarded by the companies that invented them – and have very little value outside that particular ecosystem. (That said, credits in World of Warcraft are valuable enough that Chinese prison guards reportedly force convicts to perform monotonous tasks within the game for 12-hour stretches at a time, building up credits which can then be sold for many times the guards’ official salary.)

Some of these virtual currencies are roughly the same order of magnitude as Bitcoin in size, although it’s hard to make apples-to-apples comparisons. Revenues from Facebook credits are running at a rate of about $1 billion a year, for instance, and the market in QQ coins was so big in 2007 that the Chinese central bank, fearing that it was losing control of the money supply, cracked down on their use, calling on companies to stop trading in them. In this latest bubble, bitcoin transaction volume has managed to exceed $30 million in one day, and most days are seeing volumes of more than $5 million. That works out to about $2 billion in volume per year, so long as the bubble doesn’t burst.

But the biggest difference between bitcoin and other virtual currencies is that bitcoins are the only one which have speculative value. What’s more, because they’re not tied to a corporate parent, bitcoins appeal to the web’s anarcho-libertarians in the way that no other virtual currency can. Bitcoins hold exactly the same gleaming promise for techno-utopians as gold does for Glenn Beck. They’re a scarce resource, and there’s no government or corporation which can control that resource.

Bitcoins, like gold, are beholden to no government; they can’t be printed by any central bank, and they certainly won’t be subject to hyperinflation, since the global supply of bitcoins will never exceed 21 million. Like gold, bitcoins are mined; but unlike gold, no one can stumble over some large seam and make a fortune. Mining for bitcoins involves an enormous amount of computer power, and very little luck, and the global rate at which new bitcoins will be mined is both predetermined and slowing down. There were about 3 million coins outstanding at the beginning of 2010, there are about 11 million coins outstanding today, and we’ll get to 14 million in early 2014. Come 2021 or so, assuming bitcoins are still used then, the rate of growth of bitcoins will be so low that to a first approximation the money supply will be constant. This carries with it its own problems, as we’ll see. But there’s no risk that some central bank will print millions of new bitcoins, thereby diluting or inflating away the value of existing ones.

As the reverberations from the financial crisis continue to echo, people betting on a decline of trust in government have been stocking up on gold and bitcoins. (Or rather, gold or bitcoins: although they can be equally zealous and vehement about their respective asset classes, there’s surprisingly little overlap between goldbugs, on the one hand, and the bitcoin community, on the other.) These are the perfect assets for rugged individualists, who trust their guns or their ultra-secure passwords more than they do their country. And in times of global turmoil, as we’re seeing today, such assets can perform very well.

The immediate impetus for the current spike in bitcoin prices, of course, is the events in Cyprus. There, the government, under extreme pressure from the European Union, first proposed taking all bank accounts – even the insured ones – by at least 6.75%. That didn’t work, but now uninsured account holders at Cyprus’s two largest banks stand to lose most of their money. It’s a stark reminder of the dangers associated with depositing money in a bank.

Bitcoin has become suddenly popular in Cyprus for obvious reasons: no government can confiscate your bitcoins, or prevent you from transporting them out of the country. (On the other hand, if your bank account is frozen, it’s hard to find the money needed to buy coins.)

More generally, bitcoins could be emerging as a very useful currency in police states, or anywhere that monetary policy could fail catastrophically. At the end of 2011, for instance, there was a significant uptick of bitcoin activity in Belarus and Ukraine, two countries at severe risk of hyperinflation. If you want to protect your wealth from the policies of your national government, or from the inflationary policies of a heterodox central bank, then bitcoins can be a very good way of doing so in a largely undetectable manner.

Of course, acquiring bitcoins in such countries can be non-trivial: there’s not a lot of liquidity on the major internet exchanges from people looking to sell bitcoins and buy the Ukrainian hryvnia. And even if there were, your local Ukrainian bank might frown on sending lots of hryvnia to Mt Gox. But it’s conceivable that people in Ukraine and Cyprus, especially information workers, might start working for bitcoins, spending them on goods and services, and introducing them into the local economy that way. At which point one can envisage the coins getting the same kind of status, at least among the information elite, that dollars had in the Soviet era.

Bitcoins, then, are like cash — but they take the idea a step further than has ever been possible. If you give me a $100 bill, the transaction is anonymous and untraceable, but we both need to be in the same place at the same time. And it helps if we both live in a country where the US dollar is an accepted unit of currency.

With bitcoins, transfers can take place across continents and timezones with no problems, no timelags, and only minuscule transaction fees. No banks are involved; no central bank controls the money supply; no taxes ever need to be paid. Once you’ve obtained a stash of bitcoins, they’re yours to do with as you like.

And there’s lots that you can do with bitcoins. You can convert them into any of a dozen currencies, on various online exchanges. (Although at that point you’re going to start needing a bank account.) You can gamble with them in online casinos. Or you can just go out and spend them. The list of things which have been bought with bitcoins is very long, and is by no means confined to laptop computers and computer-programming services. Hotels take them, a sock manufacturer in Massachusetts is famous for accepting bitcoins, and the more enthusiastic members of the bitcoin community regularly do things like split checks at a restaurant – even one which doesn’t take bitcoin itself – by transferring coins to the person paying in dollars.

And then, more notoriously, there’s Silk Road – a site which is not only a hub of bitcoin activity, but also played an important role in the first bitcoin bubble, the vertiginous rise in market value of bitcoins in 2011 which made the rest of the world sit up and pay attention to what was going on.

Silk Road — and bitcoins — hit the public consciousness on June 1, 2011, a couple of weeks before the All in Vain heist. That’s when Gawker’s Adrian Chen published an article headlined “The Underground Website Where You Can Buy Any Drug Imaginable”. His post was viewed more than 1.5 million times, and caused a sensation, with Senators Joe Manchin, of West Virginia, and Chuck Schumer, of New York, writing an outraged (and entirely ineffective) letter to the Attorney General and the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, demanding Silk Road be taken down.

Bitcoins were – and still are – the only currency accepted on Silk Road, and overnight they became a speculative bet on the online future of illegal trading. The price of bitcoins, which had never before traded in the double digits, soared in just one week to as much as $33 apiece.

The value of bitcoins, it turns out, is highly sensitive to media coverage: a year earlier, in July 2010, the influential technology site Slashdot posted a short item about bitcoin which sent the price soaring tenfold — from less than a cent to about 7 cents per bitcoin — also in a few days. And a single post on Time.com in April was enough to double the price of Bitcoins in a week, from 80 cents to $1.60. Even the article you’re reading now is appearing now because of the current bubble, and will, at the margin, help to continue to inflate it.

For speculators, the math is incredibly compelling. If you spent $100 on bitcoins the day after the Slashdot article came out, those coins would have been worth $72,500 when the Gawker article came out just under a year later. And they would have been worth $250,000 a week after that. Today, they would be worth more than $1 million. There aren’t many perfectly legal investments which offer that kind of return.

All of which helps explain the current bitcoin bubble as well. Each time the value of a bitcoin hits a new high or a new milestone, there’s more press coverage of the phenomenon, drawing new people in, and sending the value of bitcoins even higher. Indeed, if you chart the value of bitcoins against the number of times that they’re being talked about on Twitter, you’ll see a very strong correlation. And because of the Cyprus connection, mainstream publications have a handy real-world news hook, now, with which to explain the bitcoin phenomenon.

It's all numbers. There's always alt coin

Bitcoin is difficult to classify given that it differs considerably from traditional financial instruments. Is it a commodity? Is it a currency?

Instead of trying to fit Bitcoin nicely into traditional financial models consider for a moment that it is something different entirely, its own entity, a cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrencies are typically finite in number, distributed in regulation, though you could still argue they are regulated by a more fluid democratic system of miners.

With cryptocurrencies the main point you need to consider is the size of network that supports them. As the network grows the cyptocurrency becomes more useful to both those inside and outside of it, increasing its value.

Bitcoin may be overvalued at the moment, but it may also be very undervalued. In previous runups of the Bitcoin price, crashes were precipitated by faulty exchanges that couldn't handle the volume of trading put on them (mainly just MtGox). Today there are several major exchanges and if one goes down the others pick up the slack, making Bitcoin's exchange price, and thus its price in general, more resilient. While Bitcoin could come crashing down at some point it is highly likely that it will land well above its previous high(s) effectively creating a net gain for its long term backers.

I don't like to speculate as to price, but I will speculate to the long term viability of bitcoin, which I think is strong. I'd expect to see bitcoin succeed in becoming an integral part of how goods and services are traded online.

that's a lot you wrote, but yeah.. we past the $1 billion market capitalization rate a long time ago. we recently passed $10 billion.

There is no regulation to monitor and control flow of bitcoins.

If you are scared about it, just stand still.

If you want to dive into it and pick some white and black pearls, it is upto you only.

Keep in mind, that altcoins considerably add significance to your discussion.

It will end higher than before the bubble, I would bet to that

TL;DR

 ;D

Can you show me where you got the information that we passed 10 billion? Half of the possible Bitcoins have been mined recently which is about 10 million. 10 million x 1000 per Bitcoin is only 1 billion. Therefore, we are nowhere near 10 billion. 

We could be in paradigm shift... and all that would just be old way of thinking... We'll see in the coming years

Actually it's over 12 million bitcoins mined, l2google.

check your math.. 12 million x 1,000 is 12 billion... BTC is over $1,100 right now so we should be at $13ish billion market cap.

I have my doubts that its just a bubble, features on Yahoo finance, increased popularity, etc. have all helped to stabilize bitcoin at a new high.

WayTooGosu, are you just making "constructive" posts for PrimeDice earnings? You simply copied and pasted an article.

This lol. and in the newbie forum where most people wont attack him.

stop bumping these threads fro 1983. I recently bought spain for 1.0125btc

$13 billion market cap this is true, but there is only about $0.13 billion you can actually get from exchanges if you convert all Bitcoins to USD, so about 1%

I just joined this forum, but if this is the quality of posts that you get here, I'm really going to enjoy this.

That is not representative, don't worry  :P

You are mistaken, Bitcoin price reflect only current supply/offer state.

But bitcoin is mainly transaction processing system and can be used as payment system. There are already mining hardware sold for BTC only and BTC price doesnt change even when USD/BTC change a lot. It is just a start but in 10-30 years a lot of trade chains will be done in BTC only

It is very valid that we're treating bitcoin with the skepticism that it deserves, and the bubble at present may burst within coming months. What bitcoin is to us, a fluid easy to access and secure medium, is bogey science to many many others out there. However, the more people hear about it, the more they're willing to consider doing their research and realising the value of such a system - and that has been shown to exist without doubt. I find it very hard to believe that bitcoin will crash to nothingness, just because it has so much potential, and this should become very real in the next 5 years.

I thought it was a bubble at $300 and sold 13 BTC. Never mind, I was happy at that moment, and would be more bothered if the price had fallen and I hadn't sold, than the fact it's risen since.

But what I've mined since I'm holding on to for now  ::)

sold .5 at $250, thought it was going to bubble too.. that bubble did come, but only after it hit $900 and it only went to the high 400's. it's a speculative bubble, but it's also a sound investment. do with it what you wish.

i think next week we're going to hear an announcement from a retailer that will accept BTC, and the price is going to run up a bit, possibly to $1400?

I doubt it'll go that high, Virgin Galactic started accepting bitcoins few days ago and the price didn't jump to much.

LOL sorry to bump thread but this is worth it.  I too was one who had thought as Bitcoin as another one of those internet fads doomed to fade.  Then I started researching it.  Learned some that got me interested, started mining for a hobby to understand it and I must say the more I understand about this system the fewer flaws I can find in it.  Not many systems of this complexity hold up under scrutiny but I do personally believe this may be the start of something big.  A revolution that benefits the people in a way not since the overthrow of monarchs.

www.coinmarketcap.com
 ::) ::) ::) ::) ::) ::) ::) ::) ::) ::) ::) ::)

It will be interesting to see what happens (if?) when the Winklevoss twins release their ETF. That will allow a great deal of FIAT liquidity into the market through exposure to the greater financial world that theoretically should cause a decent bump upwards. It also will position BTC as a commodity- which is both good and bad in terms of meeting it's currency ambitions.

That is amazing, wow

What a hugh wall of text. Where is the TL;DR lol? :P

Just kidding, but yeah, some people don't even understand what "SHA" and "mining" are but put their money into Bitcoin.
With the media coverage, some of the general public just "invest into something cool", and such demand pushes up the price.

Does 1 BTC worth 1000 USD? I don't know.
Is the BTC price increasing too fast for the past year? Definitely, IMHO.

What do you mean fast? Look at previous BTC yearly price increase % and you will see nothing unusual...

I've known people who held onto stock in the hundreds only to watch it go down to pretty much nothing. Be happy with your profits.

I'm jealous that you can mine..........

BTC price in Dec 2012 is somewhat like 12-13 USD.
Which word would you use to describe a "10000% increase in a year"?
Steady? or Crazy?

theres a lot money put into bitcoin already so its not a bubble

OP = FUD ~+ tl;dr  :-)  BTC@12OO//^ hahaaaa

I don't get your argument.

Whenever there is an economic bubble, a lot of money is invested.

IMHO Bitcoins are totally unpredictable in there movement pattern,it all depend on the demand and as long as it's higher than selling the price will maintain/improve but you can't predict it for long term.

LOOOOL , based on your math...
Where did you copy the first post. Cause it's clear you fail at math.

Hey guys,

I'm new posting around here but have been using and collecting bitcoin since it was around $9 per coin, I wish I had held on to them now as I would be laughing rather than trying desperately to get back in now, I still think that bitcoin has a long way to go and the price will be a lot higher than $1000/1BTC in the long run.

I think as more people are adopting the currency including the Chinese, there will be a lot more uses for it over the next year where we will see what is going to happen for this currency.

Dont forget the Indians. India is just waking up. BTC has a long way up to go.

You guys sleep a bit too much.

wait for the buble to explode, sell next bubble. Wait after the bubble, sell in the bubble. Oh yeah i am going to be rich babies

tldr ur a bubble

I stopped at the argument that bitcoins are easily stolen. Only from stupid people, I have posted this so many times in not gonna bother anymore but there is a way to keep your bitcoins 100% completly safe.

Is mtgox a reliable to base bitcoins value nowadays? Iv heard that It isn't.
Could sombody please clerify this for me :)

MtGox has USD liquidity problems after US DoJ froze US MtGox Bank accounts...

But can US use mtgox and cash out with Yen and do conversion themselves?

And here is when i stopped reading your lovely wall of text.
I mean saying "bitcoin is a bubble because it's a bubble" doesn't sound promising for the rest of your text...

That's 5 mils.
At current price they have to sell only 5000BTC to cover it.
And they don't have liquidity problems , they have incompetent problems.

How you can cash out Yen when you have USD ballance on mtgox.
You would need to sell Bitcoin for Yen first.

They would need 5000 BTC from fees first.
And they have high expenses (custommer support, trade platform software)

I think the first reply or two is obligated to give a tl;dr recap of WTF he's going on and on about. I stopped reading when he said it broke a billion. No, it actually broke 10 billion..

I stopped at "A few days ago, the value of all the bitcoins in the world blew past $1 billion for the first time ever" (yes, that is the very first sentence of OP), because it is a factually false statement (https://blockchain.info/charts/market-cap), unless (about) 240 days is accepted as "a few days".

Look at the trade amount the last months , apply the trading fee , and it will go way past 5 millions.

https://medium.com/money-banking/2b5ef79482cb
article originally published in April.

If it looks like a duck, smells like a duck, sounds like a duck, acts like a duck, then we can assume, that by all means, it is a duck.

The reason the current prices in bitcoin can be called a bubble is due to the following facts:

The chart looks like a bubble. All charts that looked like this in the past have ended up looking like this one:
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-qZ1HEWG3GHE/TVvKCodj1HI/AAAAAAAAFPo/h4LGbgEYElI/s1600/20.+%2527%2527TIME+-+TULIPOMANIA%2527%2527%252C+olio+su+tela+%2528100x150%2529+2011+.jpg

The current valuation of bitcoin was born solely out of speculative demand, as opposed to legitimate use as a currency.

A huge percentage of aforementioned speculative demand stems from increased media attention over the last few months.

The computing infrastructure that underlies bitcoin transactions is heavily undermined by the speculative price spike. The enermous amounts of money spent on developing and manufacturing hashing ASICs, and installing vast datacenters for mining are a school example of mal-investments in the Hayekian sense. Bitcoin has already sown the seeds of its future destruction, or at least decimation.

Its a bubble because it can explode easily, but if bitcoin holders start using it to buy things and not just as an investment, it will be more solid

Anyway, anyone interested in pursuing their luck in bitcoin should read the following. It's one of the most educative, and at the same time the most entertaining writings I've ever read.

The Great Hargeisa Goat Bubble
http://www.juliangough.com/the-great-hargeisa-goat-bubble/ (http://www.juliangough.com/the-great-hargeisa-goat-bubble/)

Why are so many people staring at a boiling pot and saying "look a bubble!! and there another one, surely this will be the final one!"

There were, are, and will be bubbles. This is not a stock that bubbles once and pops for good.

Oh no, tullip graph again...
What about microsoft bubble, it has to pop as well because their OS are worthless...

http://www.newstatesman.com/future-proof/2013/12/theres-%C2%A360m-bitcoin-heist-going-down-right-now-and-you-can-watch-real-time

Guess it's not 100% now is it

For you to realize how ridiculous you sound take a look of the price chart between 19/3/2013 and 10/4/2013.
Then look again at the all time price chart of bitcoin.

A lot of the things you said were true. Bitcoin is currently seeing a bubble in its pricing.

However, only part of the price increase is a bubble. A lot of it is actual infrastructure being developed and installed. The volatility of the price will eventually decrease when more companies start having a relatively larger share of input power within the network. Before, anytime Mt.Gox got hit, Bitcoin got hit. Now it's not the case so much, because companies like Coinbase have captured a bit more market share.

The more time that goes into Bitcoin, the more real outputs will come out of it.

It isn't all a bubble.

You're right, it's not a stock. It's a lot worse than a stock.
A stock means you own part of a company. Some market share, some production capacity in terms of employees, machinery, some cash reserve and assets.
With Bitcoin, you don't own anything except a cryptographically verifiable token. All its value stems from other people willing to accept it for money or goods.

If the infrastructure, the algorithm, or the economic trust suffers a serious enough blow, bitcoin will just evaporate.

I'm not saying it will necessarily happen, but it's a very real possibility.

I agree Bitcoin infrastructure needs to be developed, and the current price is just anticipation for where Bitcoin will be in near future (not years)

I bought few BTCs @ ~$170 during Oct and sold it in next week fearing bubble. Now I have bought again.

What about this one (http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/BASE)? Is the US Dollar a bubble too? ;D

https://i.imgur.com/LPUYXdH.png

Of course if for example the encyption algorithm used by bitcoin prove unsafe then the blow will be huge. Single digits blow probably. However that has nothing to do in the context of bitcoin being a bubble or not.

??

No, and (kind of) yes. :)

Well for one, that is not a price chart, it's the money supply. :) It's two very different things.

Also, that chart looks nothing like the tulipomania or the bitcoin chart, and means something entirely different. It's an indication of deliberate devaluation of the greenback, on mainly political ground. It's something people have engineered and executed according to a plan.

A valuation chart that exhibits the symptoms of a mania is, on the other hand, an aggregate effect of human psychology (greed) spiraling out of control.

And yes, the USD is being deliberately debased - though, that doesn't quite affect its fitness as a currency. It does affect its fitness as a store of value, but nobody ever thought that the greenback was a store of value (I hope).
Bitcoin on the other hand has no intrinsic value, nor the status of legal tender. It's based solely on trust, much of which currently stems from an oldschool media fad. And fads have a tendency to fade... ;)

we'll see 10,000.00 usd in a year

Of course it's a bubble currently, however the market pressure can push past it where the trend will just be advanced quickly. Also, your main point of security is someone getting hacked for 500k, when people don't secure large value items, they are often stolen. Doesn't have to be a hacker, it could be a piece of jewelry or artwork stolen by a burglar. Secure your large value investments properly. If people start using bitcoin as a common payment method, the banking software involved will be much more secure.

Next stop 10k!

It sure is. That was merely a wink regarding the shape of the graph.

I have to object on that one, except for the burst of the bubble in the end, but ONLY for the tulip, not Bitcoin :D


True, but that deliberate plan is still somewhat hazardous IMHO.


I object on that one too. Maybe $1000/BTC seems high because you don't see any interest in Bitcoin (as you have explained thoroughly, or I didn't get your point maybe). There are serious scenarios to consider that could lead Bitcoin to collapse entirely. But I am pretty convinced that, as much unrelated and incomparable you may say there are, there are also serious scenarios to consider that could lead the global financial system as we know it to collapse, at least to some extent, if not entirely.

I believe the UN currently estimates the online population to be about 2 billion. If only half of them want to have $1000 worth of Bitcoin tomorrow, that would mean a market cap of 1000 billion, i.e. about 83.300 USD / BTC, i.e. almost 100 times the current price. Put on that scale, $1000 / BTC seems more than sustainable in the short term and reasonable at this stage of adoption.

And USD 83.330 USD / BTC would not even be the "end of it", as BTC is deflationary and USD inflationary, it could theoretically rise forever.

I'm not saying there's no bubble, I'm saying the long-term evolution might not be the "final burst" that you obviously expect.


I would rather say that you deny intrinsic value to Bitcoin, because you don't believe in Bitcoin. It's totally understandable and there are many reasons to think like you do. On the other hand, many other people, like me, believe in Bitcoin, and therefore see intrinsic value in it.

What I mean is the following: Bitcoin has IMO no more or less intrinsic value than any other "paper" currency, in my understanding of intrinsic (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/intrinsic) (i.e. from the thing itself, be it the bank note, the ones and zeros in computers, etc.). Maybe you are confusing value (short) and intrinsic value?

It's only about the trust you give in the backer, be it the state or the Bitcoin system, or rather what those you will want to deal with will trust ;-)

Only time will tell :-)

Cheers

While I agree this looks like a bubble, I would think that by the time it pops it will have gained enough support to stay over $1k-$5k. Even if not, there's a huge potential for alt-coins now due to the huge media coverage. My bets are on namecoin+devcoin+papercoin getting to be at least 10-100x their current value, or even more. Still, I'm going to be fairly wary of the way higher prices until they settle some more.

Bitcoin and Litecoin are here to stay. And I believe Litecoin value will obviously rise when they get traded on major exchanges, like MtGox already has announced several times.

Namecoin will probably find uses, I don't know about DVC. Time will tell. There is room for more than one, but probably only a few.

Ya Bit and Lite are the Gold and Silver of digital I believe

it's not a bubble.

So do I :-)

That is the tl;dr :D

Well not quite

Well, when dealing with charts, you need to look at the peculiarities, the personality of the data series. The money supply chart has sudden jumps followed by plateaus where the supply levels off. Also, it's nearly monotonous rising.
This indicates a series of consecutive easings.

If it were a price chart, I'd say it was a commodity during a time of slowing production or growing demand. It looks like a very rational chart, very fundamental.

A mania however, tulips or dotcom stocks or bitcoin, look different. They have increasing peaks with valleys ("bear traps") inbetween, and each peak looks like a heavenly spire thrusting toward the sky in comparison with earlier ones. They are jagged, as they aren't ruled by fundamentals or logic, but by emotion - greed and fear.


If we assume that bitcoin WILL be widely adopted as a currency...
Actually, we'd have to sum the bitcoin "GDP", that is the size of the bitcoin-based real economy, and compare the money supply to that in order to get a proper valuation.
As the current size of the bitcoin-based real economy is rather small, and is in fact seriously suffering from price volatility (you can no longer determine prices in bitcoins - you need to determine them in USD, and use the hourly exchange rate), those numbers are pure science fiction at this point.


From Wikipedia: In finance, intrinsic value refers to the actual value of a company or stock determined through fundamental analysis without reference to its market value. It is also frequently called fundamental value. It is ordinarily calculated by summing the future income generated by the asset, and discounting it to the present value.

Bitcoin generates no income, and as such, does not have intrinsic value by definition. It has a market value, that is based on people who are willing to accept it in exchange for goods or fiat currency (as of today, more fiat currency than goods).

True, I do not believe in bitcoin. I am not an antagonist however, I see it as a possibility. There are things that seem worrying, especially the current media hype surrounding it, and the apparent connection between price and (social) media attention.

Also, currently it seems to be a fad to glorify deflationary systems. Studying the history of US finance might dispel at least some of the halo from that school of thought. Deflationary systems punish those who borrow and invest in real production capacity (like machinery or farmland), and reward those who hoard money and lend it out. It can be (and has extensively been) argued to be the most antisocial monetary system conceivable.

(Honestly, if Bitcoin mining speed was constant as opposed to decreasing, and the potential money supply over infinite time unlimited, I'd have better hopes for it as a currency. Of course it would be a far inferior get-rich-quick scheme. :D )