Bitcoin Forum

Long time lurker and hodler, first time poster.

I just bought a small amount of btc to purchase a product without dipping into my larger storage. By the time the btc got from the exchange to the market wallet, my btc were no longer valuable enough to purchase the product I desired.

Can someone remind me why btc is master currency?

Just remember this.

The feeling your feeling right now is exactly what those with buying-power are preying on.
This is part of the game.  Hold on, brother.

I remember when 30$ was mindblowing; I've been through highs and lows. I'm not talking about holding vs selling. I'm talking about trying to use btc for its intended purpose and failing.

Not many long-term thinkers here, just people who thought they would get an easy ride to riches. That day will come, but no one said it would be easy.

Remember you only ever Lose value if you Sell ;) If you never Sell the price on the exchange is completely irrelevant and you never lost anything to begin with just a percieved worth at that moment in time is all it is..... Hold on for better days price only matters when you sell or buy and if you stand to lose just SAY NO there's plenty of other days ahead don't let it get to you and PANIC sell and make someone else richer.....

Long-term is long term
Keep the faith, don't be deterred by momentary turbulence

You are ignoring the OPs point. They wanted to use bitcoin to buy something, and it depreciated stupidly between times needed to place order at certain value, exchange, then transfer coin.

He's not looking to speculate, he wants to use it as currency as it is intended.

Use a buffer account.

I keep a few bitcoins in a Blockchain.info account just for spending. When I want to buy something using btc, I spend however many I need at that moment & immediately order replacements from Coinbase. So I don't have to worry about price fluctuations.

Being an early adopter means that we have to deal with a lot of problems. But just imagine if/when Bitcoin becomes big. There will be whole economic ecosystems based solely on bitcoins. We won't need to convert between fiat & btc. The value will go up & being early adopters, our knowledge will put us far ahead in the economic game.

It takes patience to build a garden can watch the ground and toil at it all day but it takes time for the seeds to grow into something larger
At least that's my analogy

Do NOT sell!!

If you are into BTC , then panicking with everyday news should not bother you . When BTC gets good press , all the people jump on the train and when something goes bad , same people start bitching. May be fiat is better for you.

Why you invested in bicoin if you lose your faith so easily?Price oscillate so much because some idiots named Chinese throw on the market bad news about bitcoin,scared people sell their bitcoins and guess who jumps and buy bitcoins...........Chinese!

The same thing could have happened if you had all your money in dollars and wanted to buy something in euros. Why didn't you just send the coins straight from the exchange to the vendor  ???

Don't listen to everyone going sell your bitcoin you can't handle the price change, it gets old fast.  This is the internet, where else can you vent your feelings about btc, at the bar (tell someone what bitcoin is at a bar they may kick you out for thinking your excessively drunk.)

I'm a major pessimist, but after seeing 377 the other day, and it rebound to 4's in the morning, I am feeling a little better. 
I'm starting to doubt the major crash now on the 16th, as it seems like a presumed crash has already happened.  I'm not saying moon prices, but hopefully a build up back to mid five - six withing a week or so after the 16th, would give us some confidence.

Wtf do I know though .  Maybe i'm just in denial land because i'm tired of seeing btc value go down, and I'm now one of those btc to the moon jack offs. 

You are right volatility is a real problem for its use as a transaction method. It sucks to lose value over short holding periods, and if the price is sky-rocketing, no one will spend it.

It's futile to deny that volatility is currently a threat to BTC. It's one of our biggest threats. The solutions to remedy this are in the works. As the economy grows, stability increases. Upcoming derivatives markets, WS funds, and financial tools can help balance price moves, and enhance merchant BTC services could remove BTC price risk from transacting parties.

Thanks to the three people in this thread who actually understood what I was talking about lol.


This is a good workaround, but the fact that you are required to develop such methods is pretty ludicrous if you think about it. It also necessitates having a pre-existing pool of btc from which to draw funds.

I would do a lot more transactions with btc if it weren't for the volatility. Living with 3 roommates, we often owe each other small amounts of money (buying beers for each other when one is out etc.). Btc, with its divisibility, would be the perfect solution to not owning the correct arrangement of coins to pay one another back. At this stage though, the benefits of btc are completely outweighed by its volatility. Great for speculation, terrible for use.

The central problem is that merchants still use USD as reference currency. The problem will disappear once Bitcoin is the reference currency. To accomplish the entire economic supply chain (from primary raw materials to products and services) has to use Bitcoin. Any initiative to accomplish that, even it is just within one economic sector (for example food sector) would be a huge leap forward.

  Bitcoin as the master currency- is this an allusion to the master race?

   I don't know if bitcoin is the end of innovation in finance and payments, but as to why it is a vast improvement over the current system, I can accede to your request.

1- Payment platform: Bitcoin improves vastly in efficiency for both tiny amount, like 10 cents, which would be impossible with current infrastructure, and huge amounts, in the millions, which would take days with the banking system due to clearances and other bureaucratic complications. This, over the entire internet planet wide, and very quickly. This enables whole new forms of commerce to emerge.

2- Store of value: Bitcoin removes the need to trust institutions with no moral integrity with your life savings. It enables you to keep your savings highly portable and liquid, while offering the same security against inflation as precious metals.

3- Enabling anonymous transactions: Bitcoin can still be used successfully to purchase goods that you may not want on public record due to unjust laws, much in the same way cash does, but on a planetary scale.

4- Upside potential: Due the factors above and the steadily increasing user base, bitcoin has the potential to increase dramatically in value, whereas fiat, like dollars, are certain to continually decline in buying power. This is the same factor many see as a detriment- this is actually because they limit their exposure. As long as you keep most of your wealth in steadily declining fiat, the fluctuations appear scary. If I wanted to buy a bicycle for 400 dollars so I buy 1 btc, and the exchange rate drops to 350, with the merchants pegging the rate to dollars, I can no longer afford it. But if I buy 25 btc with my whole savings of $10,000, just buy the bicycle at the lower exchange rate anyway, this will balance out when I buy a $10,000 dollar car for 2.5 BTC a year from now. So volatility is simultaneously a good and a bad thing. It's kind of like living by an airport- after a while you just learn to live with the noise and enjoy the cheap rent.

     It's also true that this volatility will smooth out as more people use bitcoin more and more- and by that time you'll probably wish you had bought a lot more BTC when you could afford it. Weathering the volatility is part of the difficulty of being an early adopter- and it's because of the willingness of early adopters to do so that they will be rewarded for participating in this grand experiment with rising exchange prices. Why is this likely to be so? As listed above, bitcoin eats into at least five major markets- payments (Visa, Mastercard, Paypal), remissions (Western Union, Moneygram), deposits and bank transfers (major banks), precious metals (gold, silver, platinum, as a hedge against inflation), black market transactions.

   The amount of money flowing in these areas is probably in the trillions. If bitcoin captures just 1% of this business, it will be valued at least 5 to 50 times the current price. It is likely to do so because of increasing internet latency, increasing smartphone availability, and the majority of interface infrastructure being built for bitcoin, rather than any altcoin- none of which have offered improvements on bitcoin significant enough to warrant shifting energy away from bitcoin.

   Does this answer your question, or should I go on?

40-45% reduction in value in 5 weeks isn't 'everyday news'.

It kind of is. Look at the long-term graph (http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/bitstampUSD#tgSza1gWMAzm1g20za2gWMAzm2g1920zl (http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/bitstampUSD#tgSza1gWMAzm1g20za2gWMAzm2g1920zl)) - BTC typically falls by 50-75% after every all time high (and in a matter of days, not weeks). This has been occurring every 8-9 months. BTC's volatility is well known.

Yes and the past is not the future. Previous rebounds and dips have precisely nothing to do with determining the future.

The 40-45% reduction was in the past, surely? Regardless, if you look at a graph and see what's being tracked has been very volatile you would - presumably - conclude that there's a high probability that it will continue to be volatile.

Well I dont think that you should be questioning the long term viability (master currency) of bitcoin by its short term volatility. I would simply suggest that when you pull from the exchange you transfer a bit extra to ensure that a dip in value does not delay your purchase. $50-$100 daily swings are nothing special currently. In a year from now well experience a lot more stability but for the time being...

It could equally have happened the other way. You could have purchased bitcoin for $400, and then it was worth $430 when you went to pay for your item and that gives you some extra change. Don't let one transaction ruin your faith.

price will go up at the end, I think gambling will save it. It has the most potential in gambling industry.

 this is true. online gambling is estimated at 417 billion industry. If bitcoin took over 1% of this, it is 4.17 billion increase in market cap. Global drug trade is estimated at 321 billion. 1% of this is 3.2 billion increase. global porn industry is estimated at 96 billion. 1% of this would be about 1 billion.


    If bitcoin took over 1% of these industries, which it really will probably take more than 1%, this would increase the market cap by as much as 8 to 9 billion taking bitcoin to a new all time high. The world would be a better place if people didn't spend so much time and money with these things, but still, I am just saying, it is really difficult to imagine a scenario where bitcoin is not firmly above 1 to 2 kin exchange value a year from now- unless the internet is somehow destroyed.

Think about why you got into BTC and forget about the price for a sec.  Is a short term loss as bad as not having access to the technology in the long run.  if the price shoots up are you gonna care a about this issue that much?

Its shoot up is already in progress.

Indeed it made a nice move upwards :)
(As an aside elephant avatar is tempting me)
Raise that trunk up to the moon XD

Elephants honking to the moon :D but there's also som bumping so we are around 510$ sadly hopefully it will stabilise at 550 till tommorow.

If you have some extra money exactly for bitcoins buy few of them and hold them without headache doesnt matter if they fall or rise. If you want to invest into bitcoin you'll lose or get alot more. Nothing more to predict here.

You should just stick with fiat.  Bitcoin isn't for the faint of heart and will continue to be volatile at these low valuations.

Volatility is a big problem with Bitcoin. Every now and then it gives an impression that the prices have stabilized. Then some bad news (or just some rumors) will come in and crash the prices.

True enough although the badest news has more or less arrived already so what is left is the stabilized low trough

The OP talks about wanting to spend his BTC.

The responses are referencing getting rich quick and remembering the past dips rebounding.

Hilarity.

They don't care, just say the same all the time, to the moon blah blah.
English is not my main language, but was pretty easy to understand what OP was saying. He wanted to buy something with BTC, in the process of getting bitcoins and doing the transaction the price changed.

 

Yes, no one can really say what the price of bitcoin is going to do. It would seem most practical to me for a 'believer' to have a buffer wallet with spend-ready coins, then aim to replace them through exchanges or something like local bitcoins (although this all depends on personal finance etc.).

It seems odd that the OP would not at least have perceived the risk of his bitcoin value decreasing through the time taken to undergo the transaction via exchanges, though? Even through local bitcoins it can take up to a few hours depending on the availability of the seller. You can't just lose faith over something that is common knowledge and experience?

I think people are forgetting how early it is still. Nearly 50% of the UK or something daft like that want to ban it because they don't understand it. So much uncertainty still.

Just my opinion, of course.

~kp

We wouldn't have this problem if venders would just keep the bitcoins and not exchange them to cash but I guess they have to pay there bills to.

Superior thinking demonstrated above. Thanks!


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i had the same problem using BTC as currency.  i'd send the sufficient funds to a particular wallet for deposit.  and within hours, i'd be fluctuated out of the purchase price.  i've just learned to put about 10% more into my wallet to accommodate for the fluctuations.

In the long run, with a deflationary currency, that wouldn't work either. Your (merchant) products would get ridiculously expensive.

While I take Coinbase as an example here, there aren’t many trustworthy and easy-to-use services to make Bitcoin transactions yet — and all services have flaws. People ask me all the time how they could buy bitcoins, and I don’t have a simple answer.

because it's the first virtual coin