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The demand is rising because more and more people are aware of it. And even so, many people are still stand aside and watching, because it is still very risky to put large amount of wealth in bitcoin without being lost or stolen
Unless you can make sure you have all your money in your control, you will never put serious money in this thing. Unfortunately, even a very professional site like bitstamp get hacked, the chance for an average Joe to lose his coins are high
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Banks will fail, and they will be forced to liquidate their foreclosure assets at most unfavorable price, which gives other people a chance to buy cheap houses, $10k houses will be the norm (which also means those debt laiden house owners will all default and buy cheap houses instead)
However, since most of people's money are in a bank, they will lose most of their money when bank failed, so they don't have money to buy cheap houses! Those who have money under his mattress will make a fortune. Then people will learn that never put their money at banks, and survived banks will become just a payment processor at best
In a word, those who don't trust banks will win big and those who trust banks (which is majority) will lose big. So they had to save the banks because many people have become too dependent on banks
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I went on one of those mortgage calculator sites and plugged in our current $18 trillion debt.
With a generous rate of 2%, if we stop borrowing more and start paying a mere $800 billion per year toward the debt we'll have it paid of in 2045.
With annual income tax revenue of $1.3 trillion, that leaves us $500 billion for everything else (including our national defense which we currently spend $526 billion on).
Maybe we can save money on earmarks which cost around $1 billion per year (don't laugh, that was John McCain's entire economic strategy).
I'm afraid that those 1.3 trillion tax revenue only comes when you continuously increase the debt and print more money. If the debt is repaid, the money in economy will be destroyed, means less money to pay the tax, when the day that all the debt is paid off, there will be no money in economy, thus no income tax revenue  |
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Oil has been fallen sharply too, but no scam here. Since the end of QE3, almost every commodity's price is on a free fall against USD, simply because there is no more fresh USD every day to buy these things (QE3 was printing 2.8 billion USD per day)
To make it worse, bitcoin miners still pump out 3600 coins per day. To absorb those 3600 coins, either miners hoard most of them (Which is less and less possible due to the mining has been taken over by large farms which have to sell coins to cover their cost), or the usage increases (people buy bitcoin as long term saving, to transfer value oversea, or to purchase goods/services). When price cut by half, for same usage you need double amount of coins, the demand for coins will double, the price drop will eventually stop when the price is enough low
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Maybe they wanted to take out a large hedge fund who has tons of short positions by surprise Central banks don't endanger their huge holdings and their country's economy for petty revenge like that. No, there must have been a better reason. I just can't figure out what. Don't underestimated the scale of those hedge funds. Many years ago, Soros took out the wealth of many small country by just shorting their currency. Using leverage, those hedge funds can command a capital much larger than a country's central bank's currency reserve. He only met resistance in HongKong, which is backed by the whole USD reserve of China I can imagine, many such funds were shorting CHF during the past year since SNB was busy buying all the Euro they can to prevent the CHF from rising, SNB made those funds' short position a risk free ride If it was some thing much bigger that made SNB's sudden move, it should already happened, but so far nothing |
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If the house price crash, normal working people will lose their job, because the total consumption of the whole society will shrink dramatically when many people are underwater and have to pay much more to bank to have their house. Then many companies' sale will plummet and a mass scale of firing workers will follow
And this is a good thing (TM). It would be good, long term, because these jobs were create by malinvestments (capital wrongly allocated to not really profitable business). If too much homes were built, the sane thing to do is stop building new homes where no one is requested or needed. The people and the capital freed by the bust will be reallocated, given time, to more productive use. Hopefully, a use able to give back a profit without external manipulations. This could happen when people still had room to recover from the IT bubble 15 years ago. But instead of doing that, FED pumped up housing bubble to recover from the collapse of the IT bubble, and followed by an even giant debt bubble to recover from housing bubble's collapse, now they are running out of bubbles and when it stalled, everything happened in the past 15 years will be undone, means almost everything is malinvestment since 2000, no one can afford such a loss |
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There will always be p2p exchanges
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This weeks dramatic volatility in stock market and a soaring bond/gold price indicated that this storm is getting close
It is clear that without stimulus the economy will fall back to recession right away, and with stimulus, the effect of each stimulus is getting weaker and weaker, since humans are all adaptive
Maybe this is the official end of Keynesian economics
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I guess they really didn't care about losses to traders.  Everything is connected.  If they hadn't caused such an earthquake on the currency market, the CHF wouldn't have jumped so much compared to the EUR, which means that SNB's euro holdings would have lost less and the Swiss exporters would have been hurt less. I still have no idea why they did it that way. These things never happen by accident. They knew very well what was going to happen, yet they chose to do it nevertheless. There was a reason behind it, a reason why it looked like a good idea to them. I just can't figure out what it was. Maybe they wanted to take out a large hedge fund who has tons of short positions by surprise Small country's central bank often become the victim of foreign currency speculators since they are always obliged to buy or sell to keep the rate stable. If there is a difference in official exchange rate and market exchange rate, there will always be arbitraging firms making a lot of profit and the central bank will be the one who pay the bill |
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A view that the swiss franc will collapse: http://www.safehaven.com/article/36515/the-swiss-franc-will-collapse"The Bottom Line The problem of falling rates is crushing everyone, but raising the rate cannot fix the problem. It should not be surprising that, after decades of capital destruction -- caused by falling rates -- the ruins of a once-great accumulation of wealth cannot be repaired by raising the interest rate." I don't totally agree with this article, but he brought up a good question: Would it be possible to raise the rate again after so many years of near zero or even negative interest? |
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4 pools owning around 51% of the hashing power.
"Further decentralization"? lol
Before it was 2 pools owning 60% |
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Great to have OP on board  |
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It is a real convenience for criminals, since the transaction is anonymous and difficult to trace. The fact that there is no real good way to trace it might trigger many regulatory concerns, so that regulators might either strictly classify it as a digital asset trade-able on regulated exchanges, or ban it and drive it underground
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Considering that, according to CEX-IO CEO Jeff Smith, "...$320 (per BTC) would be the price point at which most miners will get out of the red..."), and since we are presently at 26% BELOW that mark, one has to reasonable ask: What is the future of BTC AND, Is there one at all?
Due to the recent dip in price (to mid $160's), mainly, many companies have gone belly up... including CEX.IO. Batterfly Labs, HashFast, Cointerra... More will no doubt follow if there's not a sustained rebound. The rebound supposedly motivated by the $75 million dollars cash infusion by venture capitalists to Coinbase, along with their proclaimed regulation in 24 US states, was very sharp (to $310) but extremely brief, so price is back down perhaps on way to test those recent lows or even go lower. So, considering this sustained reality, what is the future of BTC and Is there any at all? Everyone concurs that the blockchain tech will be here to stay... but who would sustain it if miners have to look for a different, less costly hobby? No miners, no blockchain, right?
Meanwhile the other alt coins suffer a debacle in price often of higher proportions than BTC, so, obviously, markets are telling us that the whole shebang is held strictly by BTC.
Opinions?
The price of almost every commodity has been in a free fall since FED ended QE last year, bitcoin is no exception, just confirming that there is a USD liquidity problem on going. And to make it worse, FED is going to raise the interest rate, which will further reduce the money supply However, if you have USD reserve, it is usually a good time to buy when everyone else are running out of fiat |
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So what? A lot more people are buying their own homes too. Debt per person isn't really the greatest indicator.
IMO, the greatest indicator is income. Income does not increase as fast as debt. Now a large part of their income comes from the fact that the house will increase in price later, which is only possible to maintain by more borrowing and more money printing. It can still last for a while, but once you have been on this track for too long and you suddenly find out it is a dead end, maybe there is no way to go back by then |
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I feel totally different Now it is the time to cheer that you can get cheap coins without investing in much more sophisticated mining rigs. With same fiat money you can buy much more coins now than several months ago, what to regret? If you have faith in its long term success, any drop in exchange rate is a good opportunity to buy, the more it drops the more you can buy |
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The real danger behind this is that a large part of the fiat money are backed by these debts
When the debt defaults, so goes the value of those fiat money, then the confidence about currency becomes weak, there will be inflation, and FED can only raise interest rate as a counter measure. However, that will trigger another round of assets selling, which further weaken the value of the assets that backing those currency, causing more panic inflation. Then there is no point of return
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The "rising value of gold" myth generated from a prerequisite that people regard USD as a unit of value, which is an illusion. In fact, it is USD who has lost its value sharply since the removal of gold standard (if you consider one ounce of gold as a standard unit of value)
Some people might argue that the price of anything else has not changed too much against USD, but that is because: The value of all of these other thing's also dropped together with USD
Value is decided by supply and demand, when supply increase a lot and demand keeps more or less the same, the value sinks. The added USD supply increased lots of production, and decrease the product's value at mean time, so that their final price measured in USD keep the same
But you can't increase gold production with simply adding more USD, the supply of gold is limited and the extraction is very energy consuming just like bitcoin mining, so the gold value kept the same, as a good indicator to show how much more USD they have issued
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Then OPEC must be carrying this illegal activity for several decades. And FED is the banking alliance to control and fix the price of the dollar for more than 100 years There are a lot of people that do think OPEC is illegal, and the US Congress has rumbled every once in awhile about declaring it so. The Fed example is silly, that is not companies in an open market colluding to fix prices. All the DRAM manufacturers could say "OPEC! The FED!" until they're blue in the face. It didn't stop them from getting hit with hundreds of millions in fines for price fixing. Money is just like any other commodities openly traded on market, so the same rule applies. In fact, any bitcoin miner is a distributed central banker, of course they don't have to hold FOMC meeting to manipulate the money supply and interest rate to raise or lower dollar's value, since all the rules has been written in code in protocol And a law can not be applied across country boarder, the actions against Samsung is more likely to be caused by some government officials to protect their domestic merchants |
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