Regulation aside, who wouldnt accept bitcoin? (at least up to this price level). bitcoin is seemingly property at the moment, as long as the bitcoin wasnt the proceeds of criminality, it should be good to transact with, and thus pay folks for services with. now, you may have to do some explaining to the board if you accept bitcoin from a guy you represent that was say, instrumental in the hacking of GOX. you payment may well be evidence. but if the crime is unrelated to bitcoin, why the hell not?


there is a reason why steam just stopped accepting btc, and it has nothing to do with the reason they stated in public, imo.

Given the current price of BTC, can you remember the most ridiculous\expensive thing you have purchased? Within the last four years I can remember paying a .2  on gyft for a chili's gift card and converting multiple BTC at a time (like 3-4) to pay rent. That seems insane now!

Looking back, that like 3.5k to eat American casual dining food for two, and 45k a month rent on a 400 square foot corporate apartment in a really hole in the wall city.

Thoughts?

the price is so high because pure fomo. plain and simple.

this boils down to two types of people that purchase bitcoin; those that reposiition value inside of the system, or use value created in the system, and those that use value from outside to purchase bitcoin. if you are of the former, you know that this price level seems like a temporary thing. we are more likely to ride bitcoin up, then get off and go into other alts for increased profit. we have seen a major bull market before, and some of us have not forgotten.

the later is most of the folks that just got in. to not already have value in place at this point means you are new, this also means you are more likely to suffer major hurt as you will not recognize when to escape. be careful. these gain percentages can easily be loss percentages.

Sweet Jesus YES! this is asked so much it actually comes up on google when you search the term generally (and there has been a wealth of professional copy written on this topic).

so a differential explanation of this, since it has been beaten to death.

look at the current political climate. markets are doing great, due to American politics, across all spheres. specie, fiats, stocks, assets AND crypto. isnt that a bit off? why, in this particular time of turmoil, no matter where you live on the globe, is the price of speculative markets so up?

and when/where have we seen this before?

do a research task for me. observe the price level of the dow jones industrial average right before we go into a crash. you may notice we are close are in an ath. this is not a coincidence, people that can pump before they take profit. taking profit with a large enough position suppresses the price, most whales know this.

so again, why have we risen so high? is it perhaps to give us ample space to fall, when we do? it must come down. this is the law of the world.

Trump.


Alot of us dont follow traditional fiat markets, so we dont understand how the current political situation has played a role in the price. a lot of this advance is due to the extra capital traditional wallstreet has given the fact that the tax code might be changed. old school stock markets have soared, and those taking profit has send a few bucks towards btc. thus the price. if you were watching gdax while Trump was making his Israel press release, you may have noticed the markets went perfectly sideways the whole time he was talking. as soon as his speech ended, we spiked seriously, check it out, Im not lying and you can see this yourself.

why would this be greedy?

this was never a promised thing, the success of bitcoin. this is the peril of early adoption, a risk I was willing to accept in a more economically turbulent time. so why should I have to liquidate a position just because I took more risk, and got more profit as a result?

now, for the new cats that got in above 10k, i feel for you and understand. you arent greedy, you are misinformed. someone told you that this ride was a one way street, you lack the experience to know this is far from the case, empirically.

but greed, no. more severe FOMO. people have seen our progress (although I dont agree with it) and want a part of it. thus the price.

if this is truly your friend, cut them some slack. no one expected all this growth in such a short time. and to call in that marker at its peek valuation is kind of rude, if this is your bro (im assuming you know his situation, there is a reason why he hasnt paid you back yet. this is one of the few types of debt that may grow over time, and a new thing to the financial sphere. at the best, charge him the usd price from the time when he borrowed the coins. at the worst, get SOME of the profit you would have had if you had kept your coins, but understand while he may owe you money, he has a legitimate reason to be salty about this. his loan went up over 100% .

how would you feel about your mortgage if you had to pay half as much again, suddenly?

I hate to say this on a bitcoin loving form, but learn crypto, not bitcoin. bitcoin is dope and all, but is only one faucet of this entire sphere. you would be a fool to ignore the promising alts in the top 20, as well as the erc20 projects that are so ubiquitous across this space. it is good that you have recognized missing the bus; it takes a mature investor to realize that the ship has sailed on bitcoin, and investment at this point. Too much risk; you would do better with an ERC that has potential.

bitcoin was the origin. while it may remain, alts are the future. thus is the nature of progress.

but is it really?  these are two separate topics here. yes, we are indeed in a bubble, but it is non material as we arent out of it yet an the majority of participants dont perceive it.  but that is secondary to the general unsuitability of bitcoin as a everyday medium of exchange. high fees, slow transactions and general user unfriendliness all contribute to the issues with bitcoin, and why we havent hit the mainstream yet. we need to advance the protocol in a big way. we say we want adoption, but do you really want network performance even worse than the current state?

but people wont listen. it seems absolutely idiotic to buy in as a newbie at these price levels, given the risk of epic downtrend is a real thing. but, FOMO is also a real thing, and we are seeing a lot of that that the moment. new guys are coming in without knowing how volatile these markets can be, as well as how unpredictable they are. all it takes is another China rumor, or a misinterpreted SEC guidance, and this yar long bull trend cant reverse for how know how long


what goes up, must come down. sound advice folks. reciprocity is a real concept.

Peeps now view and use Bitcoin as a store of value, and its an investor's dream since its volatility has caused its price to rise sharply.

But as a payment system, Bitcoin is straight bawls, and there are core issues which are stopping its growth in this direction. Bitcoin's scalability is being hampered because it is too slow and expensive relative to more conventional payment processing systems.

this quote about sums up why this wil never work, until we actually scale instead of forking needlessly:


So yeah 

this makes sense, and is a required "base regulation" in order to be able to enforce more complex legislation. consider, while this seems vague, this essentially says "if we can prove you have acted in bad faith, you have broken the law". this takes the legs out from under even a complex, studied legal defense. arguing the fine points becomes moot when a prosecutor can simply say "you didnt disclose this, so you were hiding it. and thats illegal. so you are a criminal, and now we have overwhelming legal authority to investigate other faucets of your affairs, in order to look for additional criminality".

this is pretty much the strategy being used to impeach the president. the violation of generally stated laws, in a manner that may define case law as it occurs .

yes, but not in the manner we are thinking. when folks get arrested for running unlicensed exchanges and for operating as unregistered money services businesses, they often have to pay taxes retroactively, as most criminal that generate value during the commission of the crime. this can be directly compensated to the government, usually in the form of a fine or penalty attached to a judgement, or this can also manifest as property forfeiture. value is value, and having ones shit stolen by the government looks pretty much the same on paper as paying them a bunch of money

a big red line item.

This number is undoubtedly less; many of these wallets may be owned by the same person, and are being quarantined from each other for matters of security. Bitcoin is centralized for this reason, despite its centralized nature. the concept of centralization applies to all faucets of a thing. yes, the trustless design and use of consensus make bitcoin operationally decentralized, but other factors, like this or the mining situation, are points of centralization that are just as damaging.

a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. so any point of centralization is a point of failure, or an attack vector.

Unlike the majority of folks of this thread, I cannot agree that this would be a sound investment for the majority of elderly folks (at least in America). Why? RIsk, and the current state of the price. In a general sense, the older you get, the more risk adverse one should become in their investing strategy, as there is increasingly less income potential to replace the money should one make a bad investment. on the other hand, at these price levels no one can really call what is going to happen in the next few months. the price is so high it takes a significant investment to see meaningful gains. would you want your grandma to buy 10k worth of btc, to have it drop 30% over the next few months? that 3K loss could have been a month or so of living expenses, and time was lost as well.

bitcoin is for the younger investor, more welcoming of risk.

Its not an issue if bitcoin could disrupt an in place fiat economy like this (it could), but more of would the respective government ALLOW bitcoin to subvert it like this (it wouldnt). Although it is damned near impossible to effect bitcoin on a protocol level, without major expense, it is far easier to simply ban bitcoin for the citizens of that locale. With a few words, and a half hearted effort at enforcement that singles out a few actors for maximum punishment, a government could really take the incentive out of owning bitcoins. Would you keep a wallet if it meant 10-20 years in prison?


Most would not. And this is why we want to stay on the good side of the regulators.

If one observes proper security the risk of getting hacked individually becomes pretty low. The protocol itself isnt really that suceptable to being hacked, the protocol was designed with a lack of actor trust in mind. compound this with the fact that btc has been around for years now, growing increasingly valuable yet there has never been a major 'hack'. If this live stress test isnt an indication of the robustness of bitcoin security, then meh.

you need a quantum computer to hack bitcoin properly. so no, and not for some time.

LOL, we haven't had "almost instant transactions" since this thing started. Much faster confirmation times with this, but never as quick as certain other major alts that typically confirm in 30 seconds or less

This is people chasing the price, moving coins around to liquidate and ultimately, congesting the network. It's temporary, but is fueled when we give in to these high fees and raise them to use a coin. Don't do this! Would you pay extra to use a grid locked toll road? Or would you just take a different route?

really folks, you cant have enough of these 

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