Bitcoin Forum

Today, 17th October 2011 Bitcoin went to a $2.20 per unit low. Lowest point so far. Lower than the average price needed to produce a coin. On the way down, almost all of the speculators sold. I know lots of people lost money and I'm sorry for them. Some made profit, but nothing to blame.  Now there is a real change, and people will start to use bitcoin as a currency and buy things otherwise not available easily or anonymously.

Rally? Dunno, don't care. I do care about shopping for Christmas with some coins.

EDIT: Oh, and try to differentiate us from bitcoin. Bitcoin is still a success, has a great price and now major flaws were discovered. It was just speculators (in all their forms: traders, miners, hoarder) got screwd. Including I. Never sold a coin until $6. And generated some with CPU...

Why would they, if they only see it going down? Why risk buying the currency to buy something else, if what they buy is expected to lose value in a day?

You are right, but value cannot simply drop forever. If it goes to 0.5 many people will buy. And it's up to $1 again. If it goes to $1.5, fewer than "many" will buy, but still the price can stabilize or rise to 1.7. Anyway, we need stability after this decline.

Excatly...Bitcoins traded for under 2.2 for the majority of the time.

And what's the "average" cost to produce a coin?

Yes, it can. Volume can drop to the point that MtGox decides the cost of running the exchange outweighs the money they make, and they close up shop. I promise you nobody will be around to dance with your BTC without MtGox.

WHAT? oh please! N00b!

You mean, like, speculators and hoarders?

LOWEST POINT SO FAR SINCE 32. I'm not a moron that thinks bitcoin traded first for $10.

Could be. But if they saw this decline, won't do big moves. Big moves will do people that want to move funds. Easily, securely and maybe anonymously.

yes you are. sorry mate!

It's not "just a bit more difficult," it's magnitudes more difficult. And enormously more risky, considering you need to trust people with complete anonymity.

Don't expect the past diehards to keep things rolling. I've watched many of them bolt.

You and everyone else need to stop pretending like BTC was anything other than one more internet meme.

How can you tell? I mean, how could people tell that email, HTTP, and online retail like Amazon weren't just internet memes? (All claims put forth at the time) What makes the bitcoin protocol different?

Just a reminder that the price of bitcoin is irrelevant if you are using them instead of hoarding them.

mtgox started when bitcoin was worth 0.07 do you really think that they would quit a 2, 1 or 0.25?

they still have a bigger volume, then when they started.
they will not quit, as long they have a big usd volume.

The complete failure of its adoption more than 6 months after front-page articles have been written about it. Bitcoin, in its execution, is not of the same utility that the Internet was. The last 6 months have made this clear. I don't doubt that cryptocurrency will become widespread, but I highly doubt Bitcoin will be the iteration that gets it there. This was a nice proof-of-concept, and useful in showing the hurdles that the next iteration will need to overcome, but nothing more.

Exactly !!

But theres nothing of note to use them on besides drugs, and a smattering of overpriced goods.

These must be speculators who had their money at the exchanges, because had they held funds in their own wallets the BitcoinDays Destroyed metric would increase.  Instead it has been showing further accumulation over the past month.

When those coins that haven't moved since June start to move, then you can make your claim that there is selling.   But for now there seem to be a lot of iron stomachs out there.
 - http://banana.mine.nu/daysdest.html
 - http://abe.john-edwin-tobey.org/chain/Bitcoin?count=2016
 - http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bitcoin_Days_Destroyed

Everybody hoads them, except for merchants who sell them as soon as they get them. And even they just sell it to another person who will hoard them.  If you buy 5 BTC for your wallet with the intention of using them to buy something tomorrow, you are hoarding them, and would likely avoid doing this out of fear they will drop 10% overnight.

Fixed that for you.

On the contrary: the cheaper they are, and more happy should hoarders be, since they get more bangs for their bucks.

Even if I already lost my shirt on BTC, I think I would buy some more when I will see some relatively stable bottom, or when they will be sold for peanuts.

why the hell would people sell peanuts?  they are crazy, they taste great! i would not buy anything for peanuts!

Thank you, I was about to tirade. It's obvious that if your store of value deflates (or inflates) wildly, it matters enormously. The mentality that it doesn't is an indication of the true ignorance many hold surrounding bitcoins, currency, and value in general. I pray for your families if you can't grasp the basics of this. God help your retirements.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=12156.0


I just love this post, Are you elite now, lol.

I just mean if you keep some USD at your exchange and you want to buy something with BTC.  Just buy your coins and then send them. It is not elegant and you may loose a tiny bit. But you may also realize a discount if the price goes up a bit. 

Oh, that's so funny!

I think it's clear that Bitcoin has a few niche uses, though broad acceptance seems unlikely because non-reversibility is so unforgiving.  It reminds me of Unix, which will let you execute rm -rf from the root directory.  Not too many people want that power, and the responsibility that comes with it.  No matter how simple you make bitcoin, the premise of non-reversibility will always be there, and I don't see too many people using the command line these days.

I salute all of you that are still reading the forums, whether you're holding bitcoins or not.  Anyone sticking around during the trough of disillusionment has internal strength of character, and doesn't stick their head in the sand when something goes wrong.  I'm looking forward to being on this ride for several years, and the best thing is, no one knows where it's going!

Do you really think this is the big hangup? I think you're implying a bit more. It's the non-reversibility in conjunction with wild west non-regulation and internet anonymity. Cash is just as non-reversible, but we have regulation (in the US) to protect transactions regardless of the medium used.

Edit: actually, I think I'm just splitting hairs. It's the combination of what I'm saying above that makes BTC so non-reversible, yeah?

Interesting choice of words. What price do you mean? I guess you are doing the conversion back to a fiat currency. Interesting. Old habits never die. So, go buy some drugs already, then you won't be worrying about the fiat value of a Btc.

And wobber, if you are referring to the lowest Bitcoin 'price' ever it was and still possibly could be ZERO. Not that I think it will be, but that's just maths.

Actually, I was referring to bitcoin itself, not the exchanges, nor the usage of an anonymity network like Tor in conjunction with running bitcoin.

While there is precedence for a global "undo" when a bug was found and 2 billion coins minted, there's no one that has the power to undo any specific transaction.  It's like running a bank without a backup of the main ledger, and no possibility of ever having a backup.  While you'll never lose a copy of the blockchain, there's no backup in the sense that an old copy can't be restored if you find an erroneous transaction, whether it be a mistake, theft, or whatnot.  Non-reversibility is both a feature and a bug, and for most transactions, this "bug" isn't worth the risk.  Sure, you can build other things on top of bitcoin that provide this feature, but then you're no longer talking about bitcoin.

Most people want reversibility in their transactions, whether it be credit card chargebacks, returning spoilt milk, or nabbing the pickpocket and getting your money back.  Perhaps more instructive is to examine one user group that loves non-reversibility and other features of bitcoin: the black market. 

Though the possible anonymity (technically pseudonymity) aspect tends to be highlighted, non-reversibility is also a prerequisite when buying prohibited items (ie Silk Road).  Someone could require ransom in bitcoins, and then they know that the bills won't be marked, everyone can see if ransom has been paid, and no risky meeting place has to be arranged. Bitcoins are also perfect for unregulated money transfers between countries, and since there's sometimes no legal way to reverse a transaction between countries. Bitcoins for country-to-country money transfer is basically like a Hawala network, which is the primary money remittance system used in many parts of the world (and is, of course, illegal in the USA):
http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/terrorist-illicit-finance/Documents/FinCEN-Hawala-rpt.pdf

There's a reason that Nigerian spammer/scammers are in Nigeria: there's no way to undo a transaction, or prosecute the scammer.

From most people's point of view, bitcoins "features" don't represent progress, though they are clearly useful in limited cases.  Then again, is the world better off with nuclear weapons and nuclear power?  Perhaps not.  I even think that the advent of agriculture was not necessarily good for humans, forcing us out of a hunter-gatherer lifestyle and into a sedentary farming lifestyle that we aren't well suited for.  But bitcoin is here to stay: it's up to us to figure out what the hell to do with this new and disruptive technology, and hopefully we'll find productive uses over the coming years.

Minus the bit about the coming years, this is interesting. Thanks.

What, you planning on dying?  Or predicting the end times ala Harold Camping? :)

Bitcoin isn't going anywhere, and everyone that says bitcoin will exist so long as there is a miner, a sender, and a receiver, is actually overstating the case: the ideas behind bitcoin will exist even without one of them.  In this era of ubiquitous cell phones, there's still an active ham radio community that spends thousands buying new equipment from companies that specialize in selling ham gear, rather than $20 cell phones.

As far as interesting reading, you might also like "Shelling Out' by Nick Szabo, which is about why humans like to collect seemingly worthless things, and why it is an adaptive trait:  http://szabo.best.vwh.net/shell.html

I was actually also speaking explicitly about Bitcoin beyond the exchanges. In fact, I was referring to Bitcoin the way all of you do: as a useful currency.  If you haven't noticed, I'm consistently trying to dig at this pervasive, irrational need for bitcointalk members to make up every excuse in the book to support "bitcoin will live forever"-type thinking. Nothing guarantees your conception of tradeable hashes on any useful scale will conitue.

Case in point: Small shells still exist, as do Roman coins, but you can't pay your taxes with them (NO, IT'S NOT A PREREQUISITE, JUST AN INDICATOR).

One miner (painter), one sender (me), and one receiver (you) may be all I need to exchange my sexy Mario Lopez portrait for a pound of your tasty meat, but it sure as hell isn't a currency.

LOL

I almost forgot how insane June was. Man, that crash was SO necessary.

And you know what... the fraction of intelligent posts on this forum has really gone back up. It's cool how the majority of sane posts in that old thread were speedy chan-style image meme responses. The forum was in anti-idiot defensive mode.

But it isn't anymore. Sure, still some insanity around, but it's still decreasing. The fog is lifting. Give it another month or two, let the crash finish if it hasn't already, and we might see an entirely new situation. More infrastructure, a first step of allocating BTC to sane speculators done, and we have more users and publicity than before the bubble.

So, all in all, I think a great thing happened indeed; not just today, but in the whole bubble chaos, including hacks and trolls and media hype and fraudsters. The system hardens from every experience. Unless people run away because of the past, we're in the process of setting up a more usable foundation for a Bitcoin economy.