Bitcoin Forum

Dear Investors:

Anyone who bothered to educate themselves on Bitcoin, would know that it faces years of opposition from governments and federal banking systems. That's the *entire* reason it was created.  It's going to get banned, outlawed, and fought every step of the way, because it is designed to take power away from governments and banks.

Weak hands and "get-rich-quick" investors saturate the buying and selling market right now. They frenzy buy, then panic sell. *They* are the reason the price is volatile. Not Bitcoin. Informed companies and investors continue to pour hundreds of millions into start ups and infrastructure because they know what's coming. While "day traders" and the ill-informed exhibit bipolar manic/panic behavior on the trading exchanges. These people have absolutely nothing to do with the technology and infrastructure related to Bitcoin.

This isn't a "stock" that's going down in value because "the company is tanking".  The crashes are just as much speculation as the rises were.  Bitcoin itself remains unchanged. Actually, its growing. The price could drop to $1.00 tomorrow and it wouldn't phase me. If it phases you, I recommend you get out while you still can.

-BittBurger-

Hear hear! Except for the last part, that can't happen.

Agreed all except where you wrote "Bitcoin" replace that with "cryptocurrencies ecosystem including altcoins". Bitcoin is not sufficient to defeat the corrupt governments (which is all of them in my opinion). It lacks several critical things. That will have to come from an altcoin that does not yet exist.

I wouldn't go so far, bitcoin was created to give people more freedom with their assets not to oppose gov.
But also gov’s can be corrupts and make “mistakes” bitcoin gives you the ability to make your own mistakes


First rule of bitcoin!!!

Each of these boom waves generates a lot of headlines, and a lot of people who don't really understand bitcoin and are just fickle momentum chasers. But these phases also leave behind a new layer of bitcoin believers, advocates, and infrastructure builders. It's happened with every wave. The ecosystem gets stronger. The weak-hands (weak minds?) can do what they please.

What Bitcoin does, equates to taking economic power away from the Government.  By definition.  That will be viewed as "opposition".  And rightly so.  We can argue Satoshi's motives if you want, but neither of us knows.  His comment on the first Bitcoin transaction however is telling. Do you know what he wrote? If you think Bitcoin doesn't forcibly remove economic control from Govts and Central Banking Systems, then I don't believe you understand Bitcoin. I am not Libertarian.  Nor am I anti-government.  In fact I also love Obama, and hate the Tea Party. (The very people who are most prone to adopt Bitcoin / Gold / and be anti-government).  But I am realistic about what Bitcoin is.  And what it does.  I see a lot of new posters (fewer than 30 posts) who are pro regulation.  And afraid that Bitcoin will get labeled as "distruptive".  Bitcoin is disruptive.  Assuming its elements are not changed by the Dev teams, governments will need to change to accommodate it.  Not the other way around. 

The functionality of bitcoin is not 40% less from its peak.  The functionality is almost the same or better than it ever was.  Only the price is down.  The only people who care about the price are those speculators caught on the wrong side of the swing.  Nearly everyone in the bitcoin community who is working to build something nice - does not depend upon the high prices.  They work to make bitcoin better whether the price is $1 or $1000. 

Only the speculators are hurt by this.  Nearly all of us are busy building something good - and don't care about price in the least.  This isn't the first crash - and it isn't going to be the last.

Brilliant rephrasing of the first post.  Well put!

-BittBurger-

makes sense- except if the price goes down to 1.. something really bad possibly fatal just happened.

BittBurger, DGulari, I completely agree with you except for the $1 part, not going to happen!
The network and the block chain, "Bitcoin", is unaffected and it's growing as we speak, it doesn't depend on FIAT so it's immune to crashes.


this ^^^

Nobody is predicting $1 - we just say that whatever the price, everyone except the speculators just keeps on working the same. 

Where can you find that out?

Obviously it does phase you to some extent, otherwise you wouldn't have bothered creating this post. psichological for ya!

In the Genesis Block there's a headline from a 2008 bank bailout. Very telling.

Thinking clearly inside the foundation

Please give me a way to SuperLike this post.

No, let's not try to rally the investors who are in fear and in panic mode. Let them sell low. More and cheaper coins for the rest of us. If you are panicking, you deserve to lose all your coins. Sell them now and get out. I want them cheap coins now.

Dear Investors:

Anyone who bothered to educate themselves on fiat, would know that it faces years of abuse from governments and federal banking systems. That's the *entire* reason it was created. It's going to get worth less every step of the way, because it is designed to take power away from the people.

This is almost an exact replica of the conversation I had with my father when I finally convinced him to buy 1000BTC at $8.
The $8 dollar was in September 2011 after the $32 peak.

Dad:  What's causing it to drop?
Me: Fear
Dad: So the code is still good?
Me: Yes.
Dad: Buy a 1000.
Me: It's still in a down trend.
Dad: I don't care.  I consider the money gone now.  Buy them.

Libertarians unite. ;)

I am realizing I am way more libertarian then I ever thought for sure.  I don't have a gun yet though. 

Anyways,  I am not to fazed by the drop.  In the back of my mind I figured it was probably likely.  I tend to be optomistic though and bullish so I think that there will come a day when we can avoid these ups and downs, but this week is tough with China and even Christmas thrown in.

Sigh, oh well. 

I feel bad for my friends that just finally decided to invest and are underwater.  I guess I can't feel too bad because I told them to buy at $200 right before the big price increase and they did not listen fast enough. 

That is just the way it goes.

I have a feeling this will repeat itself ever few months.  We just have to get used to it.  I can bring myself to daytrade though.  I just can't time it right.

I hope you are right. Because in the past we could point to alot of different meaningless reasons why bitcoin was up and down. Now we are talking about federal governments, and countries saying no to bitcoin. I think it might be a little more serious now. Just my 2c

awesome.

+1


I'm down a lot of money but after all the do diligence I've done learning about bitcoin I'm not worried. If it goes down to $1 thought I may start getting worried.. so let's not go there.

And also is it okay to think of this as a "get-rich-eventually" scheme? I don't expect to get rich quick but I do think there is a good chance this will survive and capture a good chunk of the world's economy.

No one in the history of Bitcoin has lost anything, regardless of when they bought, if they just held long enough.  The people that lose are the ones that buy high, panic and then sell lower.  Otherwise it is just a test of our patience. 

Past performance is not an indicator of future performance.

Smart man, your Dad. May I assume he didn't panic sell this week?

Did he buy more?

two words

Love IT  :)

The dad sold 100 BTC at every $100 interval and then started doing 50 BTC at every $100 interval IIRC.

whoa and i thought i was a true believer. apparently i have been out classed. if the price dropped to one dollar lets just say i would be... phased.

--JimboToronto
No panic selling.  He sold into the rallies.

--humanitee
That's correct.  He has just under 300BTC remaining.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=178336.msg3742314#msg3742314

Bitcoin has two main value propositions, it is a cheap fast international money transfer protocol and also it is a decentralised store of value.  Anyone who does not have vested interests in the current system is going to embrace the money transfer part.

The store of value is the controversial part, there lots of people that are semi religious about the decentralised store of value aspect, and unsurprisingly the people who benefit from the current system hate it.  There are two very loud mouthed extremes, but to be honest I don't think that there is much mass on either side.  Most people simply care about getting stuff in a convenient, fast and safe manner.  Whether the money is government controlled or not does not matter to most people(hell,  most don't even understand).  I think that if the is mass uptake of bitcoin it is not going to be because of the store of value benefits, I think it will be because of the freedom the transfer system offers.



I'm sorry, but if anything I owned dropped that much in value in a week it would phase them.  If not could I please have all your stuff?

that's a point I have raised before...there are many aspects of BTC which resemble a cult and its a shame because its this sort of behaviour which is probably one of BTC's major weaknesses.  While I agree with much of what the OP says with regard to having patience and fortitude, to stick with something new through thick and thin, there is also a touch of blind adherence that in a different scenario would be classed as fundamentalism.

wow, this is the best serious thread going right now

friends have been trying to console me today "so sorry about the bitcoin news"  I'm like, bitcoin is fine, same as it ever was

Yes, everybody I know is doing the same to me :)
"So sorry to hear"
"HAHA told you it was a scam"
"Boy, you must feel such a loser right now"

I didn't even try to defend anymore ;)
I didn't lose anything :)

they say to the guy who bought his bitcoins for 12 dollars a piece about a year ago ::) ::) ::)

Can I just ask, what if it doesn't get banned but it gets accepted as an asset on which you must pay tax on capital gains?

I fear you may be banking on it getting banned when it looks like it is not going to get banned. What then eh?

Tax offices, the Inland Revenue, etc. will treat Bitcoiners like everyone else. They will make use of the blockchain and the cooperation of Gox, Bitstamp, and all other companies and exchanges, present and future, that want to succeed (and therefore will have to comply) to track fiat going in and out of Bitcoin, and then track the gains of your stash in fiat terms and tax it like the gains made by any other human being living in their country.

This looks like the most likely scenario for the future to me. Please tell me where I am wrong or how this doesn't make any difference to the "freedom from governments" philosophy. I'm interested to learn more.

I think freedom is also a part of the store of value function of bitcoin. Now, saving in money is discouraged and made impossible. They want to manage the economy to a larger output than what it will have by its natural pace. But this is not freedom, freedom is when each individual decides for himself how much to work, when to consume, when to save and when to invest. In addition, they will not be able to force the economy this way, the result is misallocation of resources and lower economic output. So they are uninformed and makes thing worse, not counting that they can also enrich themselves. Bitcoin can fix this by allowing people to save in money.

I'm not saying your wrong, I'm just saying that most people don't care (or understand) about what you have just written and so in reality it probably has very little to do with whether or not BitCoin will make it mainstream.

I'm ok with that.

NYT is a yellow piece-of-shit paper, read their other uneducated silly articles on bitcoin and you can stop quoting them :) let them speak with their ass alone.

An altcoin will solve this. Believe in the ecosystem. It is competitive.

Sorry, I need more than this.

  Well said, I'm with you all the way to $1, then back to the moon, and on to alpha centauri. The day I am waiting for is not the day that bitcoin hits $1 million, but the day that we stop thinking about bitcoin in dollars.

No. Watch the Senate hearing on Bitcoin. All the regulatory agencies were heard from.

FBI: Bitcoin doesn't look like a problem for us; we can trace it.
FinCen: Register with us and we don't have any problems.
Secret Service: We're seeing Bitcoin-related crime, and it looks like regular crime.
SEC: We'll go after anybody who tries the usual investment scams.  (Like Trendon Shavers).
DEA: The big drug dealers aren't using Bitcoin.

The  U.S. Government doesn't care about Bitcoin one way or the other. It's just another asset class. All the usual laws apply, from taxes to fraud.

Don't forget the Senator who announced that he would be making a phone call after the first recess, coincidentally right after fincen gave its green light.

It's just a faze he's going through ;-)

Poor choice of words then.  :)
Obviously there would be some shock and bewilderment.  Especially since Bitcoin is really going viral.
I am fully aware of the worldwide race right now to build infrastructure for Bitcoin and technologies that overlay the Bitcoin protocol.
So I would be confused as to why it had dropped so low.
But the reality is, the trading market, and all the super cool day traders buying and selling and jerking eachother off with their super cool trading terms like "dead cat bounce" have absolutely nothing to do with Bitcoin itself.
In fact it is they, and all the weak hands, who know little or nothing about Bitcoin who are giving Bitcoin a bad rep.
Simple minded people in the media think the trading exchanges are an indicator of Bitcoins worth or success, when in fact the trading exchanges are 1,000000% removed from what is actually going on in the industry.
In fact I sometimes wonder why trading was even part of the Bitcoin "thing" at all.  
It goes up in response to "happy news" and down in response to "sad news".
Meanwhile Bitcoin itself keeps chugging along, unchanged.  Going viral.  Getting built out.  Expanded upon.  Saturating markets.
There seems to be little correlation between the trading exchanges and Bitcoins true worth.

I mentioned earlier the parallels between BTC and religious/semi-religious groups and your position does seem more and more an article of faith rather than anything structured.

1. Do you think BTC is a currency or a store of wealth?  You infer you believe it will be a currency but you decry currency exchange, which is one of the first requirements it needs to survive.  Either currency or store of wealth, it needs to be traded against established currencies.  How can you wonder why this is part of BTC...it is essential.

2. You have stated many times that BTC is going to change the world.  That would be lovely but in the early nineties (when I was young and idealistic) so was the internet, the last great computer protocol.  It has changed the world: there has been some good but it has also brought increased materialism, pornification, new social problems and a huge drain on the world's energy supplies.  Not what we had in mind when we wanted to 'change the world'. 

I see very little behaviour on this board to suggest the people who are into BTC are going to do any good in the world....they will just be the new rich. 

3. What an earth do you think 'new money' (ie BTC) is going to do other than first attract the rich and the avaricious?

4. "BTC keeps chugging along unchanged"....I won't pretend to be a technical genius but its my understanding that the protocol has been and continues to evolve and be tweaked.  This is good because it is neither perfect nor immutable.  Seeing something as fixed and unwavering is not so healthy...its what we do with gods and saints to create a point of order within a chaotic world.

TL:DR  BTC isn't perfect, neither are people and BTC won't change the world, although people can.

When their masters say jump, they jump.

way back you could trade dollars for the gold it was backed by...  then it shifted to petro-dollars as most oil is sold in dollars or you get bombed to shit.

perhaps if there was some new energy revolution that would tie BTC to Kw you would get a more stable value... as you could then trade them for a 'barrel' of Kilowatts


there would be a whole lotta blood in the streets either way before any change like that ever happened