Bitcoin Forum

1 million people always buying, never selling always HODLing.

With a limited supply the price can only go one way over a period of time...

Always hodl.

I really believe only a few people understand how valuable something with a truly limited supply is... Nothing has ever existed like that before.. ever.

not quite, most metals that our earth consists of are really limited and unreproducible with our current scientific knowledge. of course, they are abundant in space, unlike bitcoin, but for practical reasons they have always been considered truly limited.

also, any work of art exists exactly in one copy - truly limited - that is why they appreciate like crazy.

I am assuming you swapped the two L's in SELL.

:D

Not quite true. Being limited in supply doesnt make something valuable. There must also be demand in the markets. It is a possible scenario that some day another cryptocurrency will replace bitcoin and people dont want to buy bitcoins anymore. Then bitcoin has no value whatsoever.

i would assume if this were likely, one of the billion alt coins would have already done it. i think the fundamental question here is bitcoin going to be a myspace/facebook thing or more like a letter mail/email thing.

Yes Bitcoin will be Myspace and something else will be Facebook...

Unlikely, bitcoin has too many millions invested in it. Both from direct investments as from various forms of infrastructure

People switched from MySpace and many other social networks to facebook simply because nothing was at stake. It did not cost them many to delete their myspace account and open a facebook account.

 But when they need to transfer wealth from bitcoin to another form of even more risky currency. Or even across multiple Altcoins. It's something else entirely.  Not to mention the much more conservative merchants and investors. We are just starting to get bitcoin accepted by merchants and investors. An altcoin will be years behind on bitcoin and any altcoin has to offer serious benefits to all parties involved (merchants, investors, savers, spenders, etc.) for it to gain even the tiniest amount of traction against bitcoin.

It's just not very likely to happen. Ever.

The first thing a merchant will say when you approach him about pump-and-dump coin #20374 is: "we allready accept bitcoin. Why would we want to accept scamcoin #20374?"

And there you are, trying to explain why your coin is better. But it really isn't because they're all the same, a ripoff premined Ponzi to try and make people who think they missed the boat on bitcoin believe they can make more money on scamcoins. The only ones making money are the creators and early-in early-out guys.

Even if one of the Altcoins comes up with something truly innovative it would be 100000 times easier for bitcoin to just update the protocol than it is for the altcoin to gain even 10 000 users

Better sell all your bitcoin and start posting in the alt coin board then.

I reckon there will be myspace/facebook event with bitcoin, but not for a few years yet. When it does switch the early bitcoin adopters will switch first and the global financial system will keep chugging away with bitcoin for a few more years before they realise things have moved on. Fun times ahead!

I would buy some gold with my bitcoins but I am not willing to take the risk of getting some tungsten with a layer of gold on the outside.

I would cash out into government money but why would I want to hold a currency that is on the hook for over $70 trillion in debt.

So...even if I did not want to hold, there is nothing else worthy of holding in its place.

speaking of that debt. Let's say they pay off their debt by printing 70 trillion dollars. With the current value of bitcoin, what would be the price of one bitcoin then?

There was approximately $1.28 trillion in circulation as of May 14, 2014, of which $1.23 trillion was in Federal Reserve notes.

So to answer my own question, if they printed all the debt and paid it off, the value of a dollar would decrease only ~70 times.

With the current value of bitcoin, one bitcoin would then costs $44660.

Why wouldn't they pay off all their national debt by just printing it? It actually seems pretty clever idea.

Money printing...?  Hitler tried that..  Just google it and you'll see why it won't work has never worked and will never work.  (by the by you are.. it's called QE)

Great post zimmah, sounds exactly what I've been trying to explain to people who keep spouting that "An alt coin will undoubtedly come along and render Bitcoin obsolete."  But you're wasting your breath, some folks just refuse to believe that Bitcoin has to do so little to remain dominant: an easy to use form of value transfer with a HUGE head start in mind share and network effect worldwide.  The dollar in one's pocket is also at its basis an easy to use form of money (although very archaic), and has to do little but transfer value from one to another to be useful.  And that's the foundation of bitcoin too.  This is all the 95% majority of users will really care about.

I remember when RedHat Enterprise Linux first came out over 10 years ago, as a better, free version of Unix for the business enterprise.  After that in the first couple of years, scores of "flavors" of enterprise Linux (SuSe, Debian, etc.) cropped up overnight, all competing to dethrone RedHat and prove that they were a "better" version with better "enterprise" features.  But at the end of the day, RedHat Linux was first to market, did for corporations what it needed to do, and had a better business support model.  When corporations were approached by RedHat competitors, they would reply "Why should we switch to a different distro of Linux? RHEL already does everything we need it to do.  And it is the mostly widely supported distro by all of the enterprise application vendors."  Now today, RHEL is the corporate standard to run enterprise level applications, and all the other enterprise Linux distros like CentOS, Oracle Linux, etc. are just clones of RHEL.

Not a perfect analogy, but you get the idea.

Assuming Bitcoin will be $5000, you still will HODL ?

Geekiest analogy of all time ;)

No, then all will HODR!  8)

It depends, if we are near the peak of a bubble I'll sell, if we have just dropped 3/4 of the price after the peak I'll hodl and buy more.

Why sell it ?
Spend it !

This sums up altcoins quite well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eU2INYe4gk

Yep.  They're all Rube Goldberg machines.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rube_Goldberg_machine