But now we see that gold lost a third of its last winter highs (silver even more than that). How on earth can you consider those shiny metals as real value really? A few years ago silver got nearly as high as $50 per ounce (it was a perfect bubble right then) and this year it fell to below $18 per ounce... How come, pork?
I dont look at price to determine underlying value. Do you buy bullion (or coins for that matter) or stick to some derivatives? I remember you also said that you have some stock in miners, right? Do you buy them without respect to price too? I buy bullion and coins. Again, I said that I dont look at price to DETERMINE value. However I do look at price once I have determined the value, to see if it is higher or lower than my determined value. I did buy a considerable amount of miners. However I also hold physical metal as that is a vital part of any precious metal portfolio. So you are actually a goldbug? This explains a lot... What would you do if your government decided one day to confiscate to buy from you all those shiny pieces of metal at some fixed price?
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Yes Bitcoin was a great (pyramid like) scheme, that one could have profited from as a speculator. However I only buy when I see REAL VALUE and I only SAVE in real money. Now I dont see any of this in bitcoin (as I said I think the price will collapse as I dont think bitcoin will become money).
But now we see that gold lost a third of its last winter highs (silver even more than that). How on earth can you consider those shiny metals as real value really? A few years ago silver got nearly as high as $50 per ounce (it was a perfect bubble right then) and this year it fell to below $18 per ounce... How come, pork? I dont look at price to determine underlying value. Do you buy bullion (or coins for that matter) or stick to some derivatives? I remember you also said that you have some stock in miners, right? Do you buy them without respect to price too?
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You could earn real money, porc. Will gold ever give you such an opportunity to get rich? If you knew in advance that bitcoin price would skyrocket (bubble or no bubble), would you then take this chance or rather continue to sling mud at bitcoin here?
Yes Bitcoin was a great (pyramid like) scheme, that one could have profited from as a speculator. However I only buy when I see REAL VALUE and I only SAVE in real money. Now I dont see any of this in bitcoin (as I said I think the price will collapse as I dont think bitcoin will become money). But now we see that gold lost a third of its last winter highs (silver even more than that). How on earth can you consider those shiny metals as having real value really? A few years ago silver got nearly as high as $50 per ounce. It was a perfect bubble right then that you preach against now. And this year it fell even below $18 per ounce... How come, porc?
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These "low transaction costs" were a joke from the beginning, as nobody wants to hold onto bitcoins (tokens masquerading as money).
The spread (buying and selling bitcoins for dollars) and high volatility result in high! transaction costs guys.
I explained this in the OP already. And dont assume that the volatility will stop: Artificial agreements to trade useless tokens that nobody wants, for goods are always volatile (I have adressed this already). Its in the nature of this artificial agreement. Also, most of the people buying bitcoins are speculators, buying because they think they will get rich.
volatility depends on market participation. With 400 billions market cap we'll have a foreign currency like volatility. For sure. You wont reach this market cap (at least not for a sustained period of time, I could only imagine a blow off bubble top). Worthless tokens will never become money, as they dont fullfill the requirments of money. I have adressed this already: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=361037.msg3926046#msg3926046You could earn real money, porc. Will gold ever give you such an opportunity to get rich? If you knew in advance that bitcoin price would skyrocket (bubble or no bubble), would you then take this chance or rather continue to sling mud at bitcoin here?
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Suppose that one guy have 31 million dollars, he bought all the 21 million coins at $1, and sold 10 coins to others. Then, he still have $10 million at hand. Then he refuse to sell any coins below a market price of $1 million and are willing to buy any coin at a price of $1 million. Then bitcoin's market price will be $1 million
He can set a bid and ask price, but he can't force anyone to trade at those prices. Suppose nobody will buy at $1 million. There will be no trades so you don't know what the market price is. Also, if he was able to buy up all the coins for $1 each, then obviously nobody values them any higher than that. In this case, the owners of the 10 coins will happily sell them all to the rich guy for $1 million each. They have $10 million and the rich guy who started with $31 million is left with 21 million coins that he can't sell. That is just an extreme example, the principle is that you hold large amount of coins but using certain amount of fiat money to support the exchange rate of small amount of coins on the market, thus make your holding more valuable. Banks are doing this kind of operation frequently, they hold large amount of fiat money but never release them, otherwise there will be very strong hyperinflation and destroy the value of fiat money It doesn't make much sense unless you are going to use them on something else besides trading (which is simply impossible right now in any significant amount). Otherwise you inflict uninvited costs on yourself. Central banks are doing this because they have to defend their exports (as an example). They don't do it just for the sake of keeping exchange rate at certain level...
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I think it's just a lull. I mean look what happened after every "bubble" recently. It will go back down but as long as it established a "higher low" then BTC will be fine. It's good if it can build a base somewhere around here, you don't want it going back to like $300 otherwise people will panic.
It means that it's trending upwards. Also, if bitcoin goes to something around $300, I think it will be too late to panic after it had reached $1200+ before...
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Considered by bankers because they make money on it. Not good enough.
I don't think this discredits the article itself somehow (in fact, rather bankers for that matter). Don't shoot the messenger Also, some small inflation (2-3 percent per year, maybe lower than that) is considered to be positive for economy (in fact, a currency should be depreciating for it to work properly). If economy and population would be growing, Bitcoin would be appreciating (gaining more purchasing power) too, meaning there is less bitcoins per good per capita. That point is correct as well... Oh right, about that. The western population is in fact shrinking so don't worry about that. Okay then. What about economy? If bitcoin will not go to the economy, the economy must come to bitcoin, right?
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Considered by bankers because they make money on it. Not good enough.
I don't think this discredits the article itself somehow (in fact, rather bankers for that matter). Don't shoot the messenger Also, some small inflation (2-3 percent per year, maybe lower than that) is considered to be positive for economy (in fact, a currency should be depreciating for it to work properly). If economy and population would be growing, Bitcoin would be appreciating (gaining more purchasing power) too, meaning there is less bitcoins per good per capita. That point is correct as well...
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Mother nature has taken care of that. That's why we have silver, gold , platinum and diamonds. And you can't really tell that gold is better than silver. You have to compare a quantity or the properties and gold isn't winning every time.
Yes, silver is a better conductor than gold. Actually, it is the best conductor out there (at normal conditions). But this doesn't affect their prices/price ratio to a significant degree. That is what important here, so not all properties are worth considering in the first place... Tell me how you compare the price of gold and that of diamonds please , with the price of bitcoin if you would like to expand it:) What I was pointing out was that you can't say gold is better than silver. Also you can't say we can't invent a compound better than gold. I didn't quite understand your question, but well, if we take some metric, then yes, we can actually say that gold is better than silver (or otherwise, depending on metric). Diamonds are not a precious metal, so their price cannot be compared directly with the price of gold, if that was your point...
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Mother nature has taken care of that. That's why we have silver, gold , platinum and diamonds. And you can't really tell that gold is better than silver. You have to compare a quantity or the properties and gold isn't winning every time.
Yes, silver is a better conductor than gold. Actually, it is the best conductor out there (at normal conditions). But this doesn't affect their prices/price ratio to a significant degree. That is what important here, so not all properties are worth considering in the first place... This misses the point. Economic metrics are relevant here. Physical properties of precious metals are irrelevant other than the fact that you can physically hold them. They aren't virtual. Posession doesn't need to be verified by a protocol on a blockchain. That was exactly my point. We should consider only those metrics that are relevant here, i.e. economic ones. Did I say anything on the contrary really? I know I didn't. Back to the topic, though. I think one of the most robust metrics would be volume of goods and services that can be bought or rendered with bitcoin. How could we get that number? That remains to be seen, but probably we could make use of blockchain transactions by taking all volume being transacted and excluding all exchanges related from them (their wallets should be known)...
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Mother nature has taken care of that. That's why we have silver, gold , platinum and diamonds. And you can't really tell that gold is better than silver. You have to compare a quantity or the properties and gold isn't winning every time.
Yes, silver is a better conductor than gold. Actually, it is the best conductor out there (at normal conditions). But this doesn't affect their prices/price ratio to a significant degree. That is what important here, so not all properties are worth considering in the first place...
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Then there was the part about needing a bitcoin bank that could print or destroy bitcoins as needed. And the plug for bernie at the end. The word ponzi was used which automatically discredits him and his article. Lots of other stuff.
The actual wording about Ponzi doesn't claim that bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme as such, as you probably meant it to look or sound by saying that the word automatically discredits the author and his article. Actually, the article says it would be for central bankers to decide whether they wanted bitcoin to be a Ponzi scheme or an actual medium of exchange. Simple logic tells that the author doesn't think bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme by itself...
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It is a vicious circle. Bitcoin volatility makes businesses avoid it and this contributes to its volatility, i.e. more speculation over real world usage for buying/selling goods and services that would stabilize its price...
That's true, but I think we'll see a slow and steady growth in 2014 the more and more merchants that start accepting it. I think it'll only take one big company to announce that they're going to implement it and the value will skyrocket. It's still early days for BTC yet. Wait, aren't we talking about stabilizing bitcoin value in the first place? And it seems that I've already seen just the same wording in someone else's posts. Copy-pasting?
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The only thing backing any currency system is faith. Gold is just a shinny rock, fiat is just fancy paper. Bitcoin has more faith behind it than ever, and perhaps the opposite could be said of fiat.
What you refer to as faith is called subjective value in economics, lol
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"Быки", "Медведи" на бирже слышал... "Олени" - нет... Действительно, новое слово в биржевой науке... Жаль что не понятно, олени - это куда? Вниз? Вверх? )))
Олени - это на выход...
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Yeah, I understand that the article is written for newbs in economics, but could you instead of blaming and cursing that guy try to actually refute the points? The author didn't indeed say anything new about bitcoin, but he didn't in fact say anything wrong about it either. Bitcoin deflationary nature is not a point of debate between its opponents as well as its supporters, so wtf?
He said lots of things wrong: This self-perpetuating cycle of doom is what sunk the global economy in the 1930s, and what, to a lesser extent, has sunk Japan since the 1990s. And it's what has been sinking us since 2008, though this time central banks have at least kept prices from falling, just barely.
Now, it doesn't make much sense, but there's actually a currency designed to create these kind of economic calamities. Bitcoin is designed to create these "economic calamities"? wtf. It's designed to try stop the banks creating these economic calamities. He was referring to the deflationary nature of bitcoin. And yes, with a deflationary currency you are more prone to get into trouble, as the late 19th century crises, war in Europe and Great Depression have shown. This doesn't mean that you couldn't ruin the economy with an inflating/depreciating fiat (as with anything), but at least in the latter case you effectively get rid of some well-known issues associated with deflationary money...
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The real problem is the adoption of the Bitcoin. Many people jump to mine it with ASICs but only few start business based on Bitcoin and other coins. This make the Bitcoin price vulnerable to speculations.
It is a vicious circle. Bitcoin volatility makes businesses avoid it and this contributes to its volatility, i.e. more speculation over real world usage for buying/selling goods and services that would stabilize its price...
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Yeah, I understand that the article is written for newbs in economics, but could you instead of blaming and cursing that guy try to actually refute the points? The author didn't indeed say anything new about bitcoin, but he didn't in fact say anything wrong about it either. Bitcoin deflationary nature is not a point of debate between its opponents as well as its supporters, so wtf?
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But you still don't take into account the average production costs through the whole life of both gold and bitcoin (since they are not consumed in the way food is). Why should we count in only today's costs in the first place, as what you actually propose to do?
Your logic is self-contradictory (by the way, the labor theory of value has been thoroughly disproven since its very inception)...
I understand your point. the average cost is much lower due to hoarding of early production. However, since the scarcity, the average cost is indeed higher and higher, not only today cost. What I dont get is why labor theory of value is not apply to gold or bitcoin. Because exchange value (commonly referred to as price) is ultimately determined by the balance of supply and demand, and the cost of production is only a factor among many others contributing to the establishment of this balance. There is a thread somewhere in this forum that statistically proves that price of bitcoin is not dependent on the mining cost/difficulty...
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JK you of all people are not allowed to repeat such idiocy, YOU KNOW THE CODE, Cryptography has ZERO do do we keeping BTC scarce, their is only a simple IF statement in a line of code that either accepts or rejects a block as valid based on the mining quantity that is standing between a finite supply of BTC and unlimited debasement. The mining pools and exchanges have not chosen to edit that line of code on their software, but that choice is all to is guaranteeing BTC rarity, you can argue about how hard/unlikely/self-defeating it would be for them to do that, but it is NOT a cryptographically secured part of the Protocol.
Though I agree on the point that cryptography has nothing to do with keeping bitcoin scarce, but are matters with fiat currency much different from that? Isn't what sets apart a limited supply of fiat from unlimited debasement of that fiat even more arbitrary than that? In fiat, there is no if statement. But this by no means makes it less arbitrary, right? Nothing that could ultimately prevent a fiat currency turning into a Zimbabwean dollar (unlike gold backed money)... Oh, wait, Zimbabwean dollar is just a fiat currency themselves!
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