Bitcoin Forum

Well, it was a while coming and I think it's a while to go.

Putting my bets on $2 lows and $2.80 to $3.00 later this evening.

there have been a lot of sells today, there is a thread in the economics section about it

It's just people cutting their losses on their bitcoin investments, most likely.  These are more the rule than the exception lately.

In the coming years it will be said that bitcoin came and went in 2011.  There is simply no realistic chance of bitcoin recovering at this point.  I'm not just talking about the price.  I'm talking about people being interested in it.  It's a fascinating project, but most people don't want put money into it when there's a very good chance a large percentage of the value they invest will evaporate.  Sure, if they're active traders they can do ok, but most people don't have the desire or time to sit around and manage their bitcoin investment or a bot.  I'll say it again.  Bitcoin is done.  We have well funded speculators and Bruce Wagner to thank for it.

Bruce Wagner is done.  Bitcoin is inflating at a rate approximate to some South American countries but not Zimbabwe, and, well, all those countries still exist.

Now we may welcome a new, more productive era of speculators and software engineers to fuel the adoption of digital currencies (bitcoin or not) and promote their usage.  If altchain currencies are any indication, people are still interested and perfectly willing to make or lose money on this.

#2
I'd also like the price go lower before I buy.

Predicting Bitcoin is vanishing is like predicting the internet would be gone because subscriptions to AOL went down in April of '97

The big mistake here is looking only at the speculative value of Bitcoin. Independent of speculation, Bitcoin has a value inherent in its technology that will only increase over time. The only thing that will make the value of Bitcoin vanish will be a competing technology that does was Bitcoin does, but does it better.

Anything less than that is at worst a speculative blip, and at best a really good time to buy.

Or the third option:  BTC goes down so low, that a new,better chain is launched, and BTC never rises again.

Bitcoin isn't what has value - it's the blockchain concept that has value.  Which of course Bitcoin is tied to.  But right now people who invest in BTC aren't investing IN BTC, they're investing in the decentralized blockchain concept.  BTC is a blockchain with X variables at Y levels.  It's yet to be seen (and isn't looking well from where I'm sitting) if those variables in place make for a good, reliable currency.

Or at least that's how I see it.

I'm beginning to understand that bitcoin's being successful is true in the same way lots of religious claims are true in that there are no practical conditions under which it cannot be successful.  Bitcoin price goes up, successful.  Price goes down, successful, good time to buy.  Nodes go up, successful.  Nodes go down, successful.  Hash rate up, successful.  Hash rate down, successful.  This is, apparently, the most resilient project to failure that's ever been created.

buy? BUY? BUUUUUUUUUUUYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!

It may be a good thing, anything that does not kill you makes you strong.  The selling will wipe out the bears allowing those with more holding powers to stay on.

Bitcoin is the original and it has brand recognition. A different block chain is a cheap knock off. Even if you change the rules.

Oh, it has brand recognition alright.

you are wrong about that. there are only 21 million coins. everyone wants to have at least one, regardless of the value.

when i first heard about bitcoin, about 6 months ago, my friend told me "but i heard it alreads collapsed in worth cause of some hack or something. maybe we should buy some cause they are very cheap now?!" ..so this is rather subjetiv than objectiv.

and that was months ago! ..in fact you are thinking the big attention for bitcoins is already over, when in fact it did not even really start. it is still "underground". why?! cause everyone heard the word bitcoin, but the fewest can explain what it really is.

take 90% of the media articles about bitcoin: they spend on average feeled 70% of the article explaining what bitcoin is, cause nobody yet really knows, exept some 20.000 on this forum and the mining-geeks.

but_never_take_your_subcultures_stream_for_the_mainstream ! (and the stream here is: "glimpse of doom", "destruction" "the end is near"; while the mainstream-ppl just have heared about bitcoin and don't know anything about it's worth. it simply does not matter to them if they are yet worth 3$ and were worth 30$ before! take into account this informationasymetry!!

true - there will be no "bitcoin 2.0 - NOW FOR REAL" or something. it defitelly will be BITCOIN, nothing else.

Tell that to Myspace.

Right, because the "mainstrem-ppl" won't bother looking at price history, or the sentiment on the forums.

Ah yes. Bitcoins weekly "death".
 ::)

Nope....hoarding bitcoins will never work. All that confidence game does is lower lows and lower highs.
No one should do the work for the hoarders...even at 1 cent.

Lets see what the next group of bag holders has to say...this group was amusing, and people like Immanuel Go never did see that they were the ones duped.

There are plenty of people who trade galangals or soybeans and don't even know what they look like.  Your understanding of something has little to do with the public demand for it.

I'm not suggesting anyone needs to understand everything about how bitcoin works.  I am suggesting that "mainstream-ppl" won't take dollars and convert them to bitcoins without looking at something as simple as the price history of bitcoin.  And given that history, I'm saying that most ordinary people will not put money into the system because most ordinary people want to at least retain the purchasing power they put into the system without using a bot or constantly managing their bitcoin holdings by selling/buying all the time.

There is nothing unique to Bitcoin at this stage. It is nothing more than bartering your favorite half-nude Mario Lopez portrait for pound of beef jerky.

Peter, I hope you don't have holdings in BTC.

TIL: Secure, fast, low-cost, unregulated international transactions == bartering your favorite half-nude Mario Lopez portrait for pound of beef jerky.

Sorry, I should probably clarify. There's nothing of value at the stage where one person is mining, one person is sending, and one person is receiving BTC. At that point, my half-nude Mario Lopez portrait (yes, it's mine!) is just as secure, fast, low-cost, and unregulated.

It's a dumb argument to claim that as long as something can be traded by two people, it's a fantastic libertarian ideal currency.

LOL

No, don't.  Try proofreading next time, then try to say it right without endless do-overs.

Leave your straw men at home next time, too.

at this point i would like reaffirm the above.

The Debt Collector: Bring out yer dead.
[a man puts a bitcoin on the cart]
Large Man with Bitcoin: Here's one.
The Debt Collector: That'll be $2.
The Bitcoin That Claims It Isn't: I'm not dead.
The Debt Collector: What?
Large Man with Bitcoin : Nothing. There's your $2.
The Bitcoin That Claims It Isn't: I'm not dead.
The Debt Collector: 'Ere, he says he's not dead.
Large Man with Bitcoin: Yes he is.
The Bitcoin That Claims It Isn't: I'm not.
The Debt Collector: He isn't.
Large Man with Bitcoin: Well, he will be soon, he's very ill.
The Bitcoin That Claims It Isn't: I'm getting better.
Large Man with Bitcoin: No you're not, you'll be stone dead in a moment.
The Debt Collector: Well, I can't take him like that. It's against regulations.
The Bitcoin That Claims It Isn't: I don't want to go on the cart.
Large Man with Bitcoin: Oh, don't be such a baby.
The Debt Collector: I can't take him.
The Bitcoin That Claims It Isn't: I feel fine.  Look at me! Already up to $2.60 and starting another bull market!
Large Man with Bitcoin: Oh, do me a favor.
The Debt Collector: I can't.
Large Man with Bitcoin: Well, can you hang around for a couple of minutes? He won't be long.
The Debt Collector: I promised I'd be at the Satoshis'. They've lost nine today.
Large Man with Bitcoin: Well, when's your next round?
The Debt Collector: The Weekend.
The Bitcoin That Claims It Isn't: I think I'll rise in value!
Large Man with Bitcoin: You're not fooling anyone, you know. Isn't there anything you could do?
The Bitcoin That Claims It Isn't: I feel happy. I am valuable!
[the Debt Collector glances up and down the street furtively, then silences the Bitcoin with his a whack of his cluestick]
Large Man with Bitcoin: Ah, thank you very much.
The Debt Collector: Not at all. See you on Weekend.
Large Man with Bitcoin: Right.

The Bitcoin That Claims It Isn't: Who's that then?
The Debt Collector: I dunno, must be a king.
The Bitcoin That Claims It Isn't: Why?
The Debt Collector: He hasn't got shit all over him.

I wasn't wrong. I just know you, in particular, can't read right. I said it just fine, but I knew you would probably misinterpret the demonstrative as well as tell me that the "uniqueness" of the last remaining bitcoin transaction holds more value than any single barter with any two items.

I know you really, really want to be right. I'm sorry, old_engineer.

You seem to be implying in this and other threads that Bitcoin will turn into something which is used by a different class of users, and in different ways, than is commonly assumed.  I'm fascinated because fairly early in my studies I theorized about this (and it bothered me.)

I sort of gave up on the line of thought because it seemed like a good part of the strength of Bitcoin would be lost if it were not in fairly widespread use among numerous people with a good understanding of things and with conflicting interests.  Any one faction gaining significant advantage would destroy the whole thing.  I assumed that if Bitcoin were deemed to be of high value to wealthy individuals or intelligence agencies or whatever, it's use would need to be fostered amongst the general population.  One of me 'evil self-interested' thoughts was to hope for this and ride such a wave, but it seemed like such a long shot that it fell off my list of plausible end-games.  I see no real evidence of it other than possibly some surprisingly positive mainstream press.  The market is so small now that anyone with any power would have to be trying pretty hard not to destroy the system or demoralize the participants.

I believe that this has been more or less my sense from early in my exposure to Bitcoin (which was delayed until post-peak due to some other financial adventures), but it's hard to remember exactly.  I do believe that Bitcoin could function servicably in this role, for a time at least, but likely only if a void opens up due to some financial calamity.

A more recent epiphany (for me) is that currency generally is not a logical store of value.  It's value lies in how it moves things around, and that value is what I would like to see be more equitably distributed.  (It's also during this motion that it is most easy for third-party actors to reach out and grab a chunk, and Bitcoin is unusually good at avoiding this misfortune.)


(Forgive me if you've seen my elaboration on this before, or if I otherwise bore you, but...) I have had a vision about what I call 'block chain zero' serving as something of a backing store for a multitude of similar currencies each with it's own inflationary properties, transaction fees, etc.

Holders of 'block chain zero' value could choose which 'sub-currency' to support based on their reward (or politics or whatever) and similarly, users of the sub-currencies could choose which ones to use base on the benefit which it provides them relative to other sub-currencies.  Exchanges could value all of the currencies with probably more accuracy than any other form of rating organ.

In this way I believe that the holders of currency and the users of it would both have a pretty powerful hand and thus a fairly equitable solution would fall out.  In fact, it would not surprise me if the holders got a pretty raw deal as they would need to compete with their most altruistic of their peers.  That would be fine with me :)

My concerns are along the lines of whether coalitions would form and destabilize things, or whether natural oscillations in such a system would render it unworkable.  My current sense is actually that my concerns here, and other issues I've not dreamed up, would be terminal for an end-game such as I've described.

This "familiarity" is really important. It's about trust in its store of value being stable compared to the goods people buy with it.


It doesn't "act" like a good proxy because it's not a good proxy. I can't rely on it as an exchange medium because it doesn't allow me purchase goods with any kind of regularity (it can't purchase anything I truly value, like my tax obligation, my groceries, and my rent). The one time I suggested an exchange of goods with Bitcoin, the seller told me that he would not, in fact, actually accept bitcoin because its value is changing too rapidly. For the undereducated: "I can't accept bitcoin because what you pay me with tomorrow has the potential to be worth way less than I am willing to accept for these goods today." This is the problem.


I recognize that government backed currencies are very much manufactured in the sense that their value is based on policy, powerful individual decision-making, taxation-backed, etc. And centralized fiat currency definitely has the potential to be manipulated in a way that ruins life. See Zimbabwe inflation. But the fact is, USD has not done this. It's very well understood in the US elite Fed crowd that a reliable store of value (read: stable in terms of the goods it can buy), plus wide adoption (salaries and taxes paid in USD) matters enormously. Trust, based on stable currency-to-good exchange  is paramount.

I like the idea of an unmanipulatable currency. This really is Bitcoin's strong point. But you need much, much more than this. You need stability in terms of goods, you need predictable access (regulation and assurance that you get what you pay for), and you need reduced barriers to entry to make any exchange medium useful. Bitcoin has none of this compared to USD, and there's nothing inherent in Bitcoin to ursurp a well-established system that just works, on a day-to-day level.

This isn't some grand conspiracy. Bitcoin sucks as a way to pay for things. And for this reason, it will either remain a speculative toy, or die out like many, many attempted stores of value.

Basic point: the most reliable, safe, and easily accessible currency will win out in exchange. Anything else is a pure commodity rife with speculative prices.