Bitcoin Forum

First, I like bitcoin, I invested in it, but in reality it is not nearly as big as some people talk it up to be.  

Fact.  Market share of bitcoin- not even 8 billion USD.
Fact.  Facebook bought Whatsapp for more than 19 billion USD.  

That means that bitcoin as a service has a value of less than half of Whatsapp, a simple text messaging app for sending free texts and pics from smartphone to smartphone.  

Yes, maybe Facebook overpaid for Whatsapp, but still...... for all the hours of development and years of coding and work done on the bitcoin code, a simple iphone/android app for sending texts is worth more.

Just something to think about.    

Facebook and Whatsapp dont go against the governmental and banking oligarchy...
So bitcoin faces tougher oponents than FB or WA...

Thats why its currently so undervalued...
IMHO

cheers

I hear you.  I am all for power being moved back to the people.  That is one reason I put money in it.  That and I think it is also under valued. 

Yes, maybe this is nice topic to discuss but wait, bitcoin is much more valuable and huge then some text messaging app, so we just need to wait, this is revolution and cannot be done fast, it takes time. And market share can grow faster that we can think of.

I think the real story here is that 19 billion pricetag. My WTF meter is breaking in half.

Bill gates is only worth 4.1 whatsapps.

These apps have millions of users that use it daily. Bitcoin has at most probably only 50-100k genuine active users (whales who are splitting up wallets skew data imo). So, it's not comparable at all. Also, their network effect is faster as there is less skepticism towards these apps compared to bitcoin.

Valuation is accurate at the moment, until bitcoin becomes more user friendly and secure.

Facebook didn't pay so much for an app. Facebook paid so much for the users that are using it. The users and their data is the product.

The valuation of whatsapp comes from it's massive user base.  Same thing with twitter.  Got nothing to do with the technology.  Most decent programmers could code something like twitter in a day.

This just shows that we are all still early adopters. Not the earliest maybe, but still pretty much at the beginning of what may yet come.

Damn, put in that context makes it really seem ludicrous.  Wish I was worth a 1/10000 of a stupid app!

whatsapp is used by multiple millions of users. and i mean MULTIPLE

bitcoin is still growing. and when bitcoin userbase gets to whatsapp/facebook userbase. then you will see a difference in the market cap.

i think the OP is just panicing because he thinks bitcoin is something that will only last 2 months, he doesn't see the big picture of the next 100 years

^^ This.  FB paid $19b for 350million - 490million (depending on which source you read) user assets.  The app means nothing to them, I mean come on they already have facebook messenger right? FB must have the in-house development skills to clone WhatsApp in a week.  But for a business who's sole purpose is to profile people for advertising $$$, slurping all those extra contact lists and mobile phone books for "who knows who" is where the value was in that deal.  And given that Bitcoin, by design, protects user anonymity with no centralized userDB, the two things don't make a suitable comparison. They placed that value on WhatsApp in terms of something like $45 per user, not the app, code or service itself. IMHO.

If 400,000,000 people one day use Bitcoin, the value of all the bitcoins would exceed several trillion for sure.

This is once again apples to oranges.

Solution: integrate Bitcoins into whatsapp.  Problem solved!

Whatsapp is a business, it generates revenue. Looks much better in company accounts than bitcoins.

I'm failing to see the correlation between Bitcoin and Facebook overpaying to takeover another company.

It's also less than a hamburger, since McDonalds is valued at 494942929292 quabillion dollars.

I like this thread. It really shows how much room we still have to grow. We have not come remotely close to the peak.
This truly is the ground floor of something special with btc.

By that logic Bitcoin is worse less then the value of a website.  That website might be Facebook but it is still less then the value of a website.

Everyone knows Whatsapp was hugely overpriced and every shareholder of Facebook lost some real dollars the moment that overpriced purchase was made.

Whatsap also has 500,000,000 active users. Bitcoin is no where near that.

The valuation of Bitcoin is certainly not the code but the user base.  I can compile a clone coin, identical in every respect to Bitcoin, that would be 100% worthless.  Not sure if I'm following the logic here.

The 2014 Winter Olypics in Sochi costs 2 and a half app.
The Iraq War costs 40 app.
The health care costs of alcohol in the US are 10 apps a year.
I don't get your point. Why do you compare costs of things with a coin?
You can name thousends of things that costs money.

For Whatsapp is payed $19 billion dollars, people use it as we speak, but maybe in a period people like to use Telegram or Wechat instead. Point is, one day, the product is gone while people still text.

So what is your point? BTC is like money, you can re-use it forever.
For your info, BTC is not a product. It provide a way to trade products.

So it is silly to compare a coin with a product.

I think we just said the same thing.  value is in user base not code base.

agree with most of the posters that this is not a useful comparison.

1. whatsapp or things like it are an entity (and in this case has users you can get to ie advertise to so "monetise".)
so you can establish a value someone will pay for the entity,

2. you cannot do that with bitcoin. the producers of the bitcoins have already been paid so each bitcoin sits as its own entity. It has a use but that use is the lowering of transaction costs to someone by buying and then sending the bitcoin. If there exists in the countries the sender and reciver are in items like visa etc (bitcoin competitors) then the value of lesser transactions costs is very small (say 1% of the $ value of the transaction).

3. what i see as wrong about many posters is thinking the price (value?) of a bitcoin will rise massively as bitcoin use increases to the millions. Just while no one can say the current price (at $630 is high or low) there is no way to know what the price of 1 bitcoin is when it is widely adopted. That will be determined initially by the amount of speculation that goes on and once that is over the landing prie of the bitcoin. It could be as little as $100. there is no reason for it to be $1 million

We can look at market cap compared to other major currencies.  If market cap is 1T that represents 100x increase w same number of coins.

Price of whatsapp higher than the GDP of the 85 poorest countries.  :P

That was easily one of the worst purchases of the year in my opinion not for its utility but because I don't see it covering costs

“Fifty years ago, no 55-person company was bought for $19 billion. And that’s a good thing,” Gates said on “This Week” Sunday.

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2014/03/bill-gates-on-whatsapp-acquisition-zuckerberg-bold-and-aggressive/

I guess I'll wait though

While speaking of Facebook’s Zuckerberg, Gates said, “It’s an example of how he’s an out-of-the-box thinker, he’s aggressive, I hope it works out for him– not everybody would’ve done it.  I’ll say that for sure.”

This ^