Bitcoin Forum

This is when I bought my last dozen or so Bitcoins, at about $4. Who here is in the same league? Who has yet to lose a dime even with this steep decline?

To date I've INVESTED $2000 into bitcoin, netting a profit of just shy of $600. I'm supremely confident that the $1400 loss will be covered over time.

Are you sure you know what this word means?

I bought $100 AUD worth at just above $3 US.  That gave my kids 10 Bitcoin each.  Those 30 odd coins will be hoarded (Until the kids reach 21 years old)

I have since been dollar cost averaging $100 AUD each month when ever I feel like it.

I must admit the third tranche I paid $11 each (on the way to $30 high) and when it jumped above $22 I had to sell that lot.  There are not too many investments that give 100% so quickly.  Highest paid so far is $16.34

My personal goal is to acquire/save/hoard 500 bitcoin and spend 100 bitcoin for real use by the end of the year.
I am getting there and have spent 38 Bitcoin in real transactions.

The more I use Bitcoin, the more I like it.

6 months ago I was buying bitcoin with paypal (coinpal) and I think it was under a dollar, I also spent most of those bitcoin, wish I had held, but its fun to play with.  Most recently I bought at ~14 when I thought it would go back up, sold ~13 bought at 8, and bought some more at 4.  waiting till it hits $1 to buy some more.  Also I've acquired bitcoin a small amount of bitcoin from methods other than exchange for USD.

Quite sure. It takes money to make money!

But taking money and throwing it into a bottomless pit doesn't mean spending money on an investment. You seriously have no basic grasp of economics if you think something that has lost 50% of it's value in only a few days and has been on a steady decline for months is still viable? You can't just look at a year chart and say HEY IT'S ABOVE WHERE IT WAS.

I invested 25k around that price (in mining hardware , to make sure i have something left if BTC evaporates)..If I sell my equipment today (30% worth off) today i made 2.5k ..

BTW Immanuel why dont u answer msgs?

I don't buy coins, although I do get paid in them for some work. About a third of what I have right now I got back during the $0.80 days in March (and another 8.50 BTC which I got during the $0.80 days and spent on a shirt at $3.50), and the rest at various places up and down the big bubble (although I did escape part of the downfall by exchanging back and forth). So it's a mixed bag for me.

...But it is higher than where it was? And after people cash out the price will stabilize. Once that happens business's like mine (openspacemovement.org) will feel confident enough to start accepting bitcoins as a form of currency. Once that happens the value will become incalculable!

It will never stabilize, and you summarize why pretty well with this post. The Bitcoin price will continue to rally and then crash forever. When people think it will go down they will sell, hoping to get cheaper coins later, which pushed the price down. Then, when it has fallen so far that enough people think it can't fall much further it stop falling. That will put people in the "value will become incalculable" modus again, and we'll have a new rally which will last until the price has become so high that more money are being pulled out of the market than added.

You could see this from any stock, any currency, anything really. If it was that easy nobody would be working.

No, you can't. Stocks have an underlying value, and the stock price will not deviate very much from what the company is expected to earn. Currencies can get some of this, but because the market participants knows that governments can change their economic policies to stabilize the value, it will seldom get really bad. The best comparison is probably gold, which behaves pretty much as I described. There are enough participants in that market to make the cycles much longer than for bitcoins, though.

are you atlas?
I thought atlas is already dead.

But what your saying doesn't take into account bitcoins eventual adoption as a true currency, business's accepting it across the board, or the finite number of them which once are completely mined will eliminate much of the mining pools and other BS that are bringing this commodity down.

No my name is Jason and I run openspacemovement.org. Please don't insult me by comparing me to that quack.

That's a really silly statement. If Bitcoin remained "forever volatile" you would see hedging mechanisms and insurance which tempered the peaks and troughs. Basically, if you can predict a pattern of movement, you can profit from it, and thus reduce the movement. You can see this with the "btc always falls in price over the weekend" that was occurring in regular intervals earlier this summer. If it can be predicted, people buy and sell in anticipation of profiting from such foresight and ultimately diminish the move they were predicting.

Bitcoin will be volatile for a very long time, but ultimately it will (like all goods and services) tend toward efficiency and stability.

Gold has been around for thousands of years, and a lot of the reason why countries stopped using it as a currency was that it was too volatile. There is no reason to believe that bitcoins will be different. I realize that you have to believe what you do because the alternative is to admit that bitcoins (and gold) can never work well as a currency, so I'll stop arguing now.

I did not say that the volatility can be predicted, just that it will always be there.

Are you the same openspacemovement.org that took donations to fund, amongst other things, Copenhagen Suborbitals? I hope not considering how that ended. Jason Marsh or something? You said your name was Jason so...

Great here comes the goonrush to ruin just one more thing. You guys just don't know when to quit.

Holy shit, the people you meet. You pay CSO or any other group any of that money at all yet or did you spend it all on your website? Honest question, I haven't kept up with the story.

Wait up... You aren't a goon? I thought you were.

I was banned.

Really, what for? You can't be all bad if they banned you. Then again if those fruit loops ban you you might be really bad, heh.

???

Gold is the opposite of volatile.  Countries have stopped using gold because they can't just dilute everyone's gold holdings by printing more gold whenever they want.

A minor misunderstanding about some donations received.

That's so obviously wrong it's ridiculous, and only shows how much you need to bend reality to make it fit with your world view.

Are you saying that they actually can print more gold?

No, he's saying that value can be dictated through flexible and intangible means or that it possibly doesn't exist at all; that the system of money is just a means you can manipulate to an end; a mere utility with little meaning besides tradition -- hence implying that humans are irrational.

...or maybe I'm looking too far into one man's vague opinion.

Well, I haven't invested money directly, but I'm working my ass off in Bitcoin related projects. And I enjoy every second of it.

I've first heard about Bitcoin around April with the SilkRoad bonanza and Gawker article, I've sense earned 18.23Ƀ from my Safebit Bitcoin project. As long as I can provide for my family I'm going to continue working on Bitcoin, I really think that it's going to be worth my while...

Are you saying that they actually can print more silver?

The value of something is not locked just because it's hard to make more of it. If it was the proportional value of gold vs silver would always be the same.

Where the hell did silver come from?  I thought we were talking about gold.

If you can't hold more than one thought at a time I understand why you think this is difficult.

Well, I guess it was my fault for expecting a somewhat serious level of discussion.  If you want to be childish, I guess I'll just call you a poopy head and leave it at that.

For everyone else reading this thread, or if you someone that can explain things to you, maybe a younger brother, or a pet rock or something, I'll just mention one more thing.  In a fully floating system like we have now, it is impossible to measure the volatility of any one thing without measuring the volatility of every other thing at the same time.  If you look at just one pairing, say gold vs. dollars, or gold vs. silver, the best you can do is make a remark about the relative volatility of the pair.

That is, if you say that gold is volatile because the dollar value of an ounce varies a lot, the reverse claim is equally true.  Thus, the dollar is volatile, because the gold value of one dollar varies a lot.  It also means that statements at a remove are doubly worthless, so talking about silver vs. gold doesn't tell you anything at all about gold, or about silver, and it tells you even less than nothing about gold vs. dollars.

And that tells you what, exactly?  Think carefully.  Does it tell you something about gold?  Or does it tell you something about fiat currencies as a group?  Both?  Neither?

I did of course know you would say that, which is why I used silver. Your only recourse to fix the cognitive dissonance was to pretend it was off topic.

The currencies are much more stable compared to pretty much everything you can buy than gold. You can of course pretend it's the gold that's stable and everything else that's varying in value, but then stability becomes meaningless.

When you reach this line your brain has probably already gone through the "NOOO!" fase and fixed the cognitive dissonance for you again. It's quite fascinating.

Post of the week right here folks.  

https://i.imgur.com/EGUmY.gif

Awesome.  I'm not just wrong, I have cognitive dissonance!  Holy shit, I should try that technique!  It seems much easier than actually supporting a position with like data and logic and stuff.

Here (http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=339449) is a post showing a couple of examples from some diverse categories of goods, compared from 1984 to 2004.  Combine that with some historic gold data (http://www.nma.org/pdf/gold/his_gold_prices.pdf).  Virtually everything doubled in cost when measured in dollars, but only increased by 50% when priced in gold.

I know that one comparison from 1984 to 2004 isn't the whole picture.  Then again, you haven't presented any data at all.  So far all you've done is toss around some pointless insults and assert your position a couple of times.

I will concede one thing though.  I didn't notice any other prices change yesterday when gold dropped by $60/oz.  So, if you are willing to consider a short enough time frame, and ignore the money illusion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_illusion), then the dollar can certainly appear to be quite stable.

I suppose I could also point out that when gold coins are used as currency, prices of everything in terms of those coins are extraordinarily stable.  Right up until someone decides to debase the coins.  See, for example, the fall of the Roman Empire (http://mises.org/daily/3663).

Wow. Thanks for doing such an excellent job at proving my point about cognitive dissonance. Do you really think you can convince me that gold is stable by asking me to ignore the most volatile years?

Wrong thread.

The whole idea of people "investing" in bitcoins is idiotic. Bitcoin is not an investment vehicle, or else, SHOULD not be. It is designed to be a currency, not a commodity. People buy lots of it, and hoard it to realize future profits. That makes it more expensive for others to obtain it, therefore creating an artificial bubble in USD / fiat currency value, and reducing it's value as an actual currency. This bubble inevitably bursts, reducing the USD value over time.

But it's value in USD is not what is important. It only remains relevant while a small number of people hold a majority of the coins. Until these people stop treating it as an investable commodity, buying tones of it and selling once the price rises, of course the price will fluctuate wildly. People who hoard bitcoin will inevitably lose money, so why do they still do it?

When people actually start using their bitcoin to pay for goods and services, and retailers or service providers begin to accept it as payment, its true value will become apparent. I.e. not the USD equivalent value at any particular time, rather, it's purchasing power.

This will not happen as long as idiots think their $2000 of bitcoin will be worth millions in the future. Sorry to tell you that this WILL NOT HAPPEN. It might be worth millions though, if Mr. Bernanke persists with his policies of "quantitative easing'.

The value of a bitcoin is not its conversion value to fiat currency, rather it is in it's purchasing power. It's purchasing power is very low at the moment, because it has been badly harmed by speculators (miners, investors, and general hoarders).

Shame on all of you speculators out there! You are ruining the bitcoin project...

I agree with everything you said but this:


Speculators aren't the problem.  Speculation is - or more to the point, the root problem is that BitCoin is deflationary, which creates massive speculation.

I think the falling value is great for BC since it will wash out many speculators, but I'm afraid we'll just run into another bubble once we bounce off the fundamental utility value.  It too will pop and we'll run all the way down again to the fundamental value.  More adoption will make the floor higher and the bubbles bigger (which is what speculators are betting on), but bubbles will drastically inhibit adoption.

Anyway, the fix isn't to blame speculators.  They're a natural consequence of having a market.  The fault is BitCoin's design.  The fix is to make BitCoin no longer (potentially) wildly deflationary.  I currently favor demurrage and dynamic inflation.  I don't think it'll ever happen in BitCoin, but another cryptocurrency will come along to replace it.  Then the speculators will go home on their own.

No the real problem with bitcoin is that there's dozens if not more assbags who's sole mission is to cause chaos with the bitcoin economy and bitcoin user base. This cunt-o-romma of trolling and foolishness is going to keep bitcoin from ever being taken seriously.

I agree that you're a problem.

The bubbles are inevitable and the price will be very unstable until we have a massively larger market. But I don't see this as a real problem as long as the size of the economy keeps increasing in the long run. That will ensure that the floor will be ever higher. So far this has been the case and will most likely continue to be the case for the foreseeable future. Even though there have been issues, the issues have been with 3rd parties and I expect services like that to be more reliable and robust as time goes on. People do learn from mistakes, most of the time.

If we could somehow ban the exchange of bitcoin into fiat currency (and vice-versa) this would probably take care of the problem. Then people would have to earn their bitcoin by providing services or goods in exchange for it. But then, there would have to first be a flourishing bitcoin economy for that to work. And since the growth of that economy is being hampered by speculation, it's a problem that doesn't seem to have an easy solution except to try and raise awareness that people should not hoard bitcoin to realize future fiat currency profits, but rather spend it on quality services or goods.

I'm scooping up as many cheap coins as I can.

I sure hope you won't burn your fingers if the price takes a nosedive, be careful and good luck!

Thanks :p

Bitcoin is currently inflationary. New coins are being constantly mined but few new people are signing up. End result: prices steadily droop.

It's an argument of semantics, but to be precise:

Bitcoin is deflationary, regardless of current events.  It is currently devaluing, partly due to mining inflation, but mostly due to market sentiment.

Mining is currently responsible for 36% yearly inflation (always decreasing).  Over the last 3 months we've seen roughly 1100% yearly price inflation.