As much as I love seeing the price point rise, I'm afraid of a bubble. There's no need for the price to rise so quickly. In fact, there should be little focus on the price point.
The focus should be on the actual economy. In order for this to not be a bubble, there needs to be an economy to back this up, as in, more people and businesses should be trading in bitcoin, and the price rises accordingly. If big media attention brings loads of speculators to bitcoin without plans to actually use bitcoin as a medium of exchange, then a bubble is quite likely.
Downplay the price, and focus on the economy.
Edit: if people come because of the price to use bitcoin as a medium of exchange, then that's good. It's a swarm of speculators that I'm worried about. But I have a feeling people are more likely to use a currency as a medium of exchange if they hear about merchants using it, rather than price hikes.
What is a bubble? If price doubled every day/week/month/year/decade, is it a bubble? A "bubble" is the term that only works in hindsight, and is therefore pretty much useless for discussing the current state of affairs. If you look at price change over total trade volume, not over time, you'll notice that recent price increase is very different then the June 2011 madness:  |
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why does everyone rushes to buy ASIC? Not everyone is rushing. In fact, the majority od bitcoiners are not buying ASICs. |
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4-6 weeks
This is the only reliable answer, based on past experience. BFL ASICs are always only 4-6 weeks away. |
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Awesome graph, this rally looks much more stable than the one in 2011! Could you please make the same graph with BTC volume instead of USD volume? I'm wondering how that will make the graph look. Thanks!
It would probably look even more like the simple price-vs-time  The reason I chose USD volume is because it (still) is a more "real" measure of the value in people's minds - USD volume shows how much value people are willing to risk or invest, because people still think in terms of USD. |
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Alright, got my head on straight (hopefully). Cumulative volume doesn't really highlight well, what it is you are trying to show. The main thing that pops out is that price is the same now as back then. What I would be much more interested to see is a plot of cumulative net volume. I suspect it would be similar to on-balance volume, and I'm curious to see how similar. Plotting the On-Balance Volume transforms some of that "stretched out" x-axis into vertical change (projected onto the linear date axis), making what you are trying to show much more clear (ie, that the OBV is much higher now than it was back in June '11). But I am curious to see how the cumulative net volume would plot (not sure if there is an indicator equal to cumulative net volume). Here it goes, with the price for comparison:  |
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Privacy?
There's some impact: Google knows which websites the user has signed in to. You have to provide a name to register a Google account, but there's no requirements on "real-ness" if you don't opt-in to Google+, so if someone wants to do a Satoshi they can. Unfortunately phone verification is required to sign up via Tor, as part of the bulk signup/abuse controls.
Depending on the nature of your website, you'll have to decide how important this is vs the extra security systems you get access to.
Thanks, Mike. Could you explain if Google learns about the actual account of the user, or only about the fact that the user is logging into the specified Website? In other words, would Google directly learn or deduce that I am "niko" if I logged onto this forum using Google ID? |
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My coins are associated with a brand new, never-sent-from address. To "forge" bitcoins would mean to get an unauthorized (by me) transaction from that address. First, the hacker would need to break hash function so badly as to be able to quickly reverse my address into the public key. Then, the hacker would need to break the digital signature algo so badly as to be able to reverse public into private key. All this is essentially impossible to happen without years of warning signs of weakened security of the two algorithms.
One thing to worry about is forging (replacing) public addresses with fake ones. Just think about all the donations and trades happening where person sending coins cannot easily be sure the website or email was not tampered with, and that he is sending coins to the correct address. This is not Bitcoin problem, this is the Web/email security problem. There are solutions, but for some reason general public generally doesn't care.
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Nobody within 100 miles, and nobody interested in more than about 1/5 the USD values I want to deal with. Hopefully time will change that. There are lots of reasons to expect the positive change you described, and one of these reasons is "Bitcoin being bought out" by people with vision, experience, and the ability to innovate further. |
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Ooops, a little celebration-drunk. The cumulative quantity is on the x-axis (always-increasing), makes total sense. Nice charts!
cheers! |
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Thanks for the charts. But my first thought is that your labeling of the axex as "cumulative trade volume" don't make no sense. A "cumulative volume" plot would be monotonic, always-increasing. Cumulative net-volume might decrease. So I'm not sure exactly what you're plotting here.
The x-axes represent sum of trade volumes to date. Instead of adding one day each day, I add the trade volume each day. Instead of saying "price has gone from A to B in ten days" I say "price has gone from A to B in $120,560 worth of trades". You will notice that the grand total of MtGox trades since April 2011 is worth about $300,000,000. I say that instead of saying "since April 2011, there have been 700 days". Makes sense? |
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It is often commented, quite reasonably, how present price increase is very different from the 2011 bubble because present rally is supported by much higher trade volume (among other things). So, I thought I'd have a look, and plotted historical BTC price versus cummulative trade volume on MtGox. The idea is that price fluctuations involving higher trade volumes are "stretched out" (compared to representation in linear time), indicating more powerful trends. Steep regions then represent relatively large price fluctuations over small trade volumes - and are presumably less significant. I want to know if this makes any sense to anyone else. Thanks. MtGox data curtesy of almighty bitcoincharts.com In linear price scale, comparison of time- and volume-based charts:  The same comparison as above, but in log scale (much more appropriate, as price spans more than an order of magnitude):   === My speculative take: clearly, the current rally (until today) is much less of a rally then the June 2011 madness - it's more like a slow, unstoppable steamroller in the flower garden. |
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Bitcoins are easy, fast, and cheap to move around the world, dollars and euros are not. This thread is really asking about moving dollars between people, and has nothing to do with Bitcoin.
wow, the thread is actually about an easy way of cashing out bitcoins in dollars to 3rd parties....come on read No, this thread is about selling bitcoins for US dollars, then sending those dollars to someone else. Or sending bitcoins to someone else, then that someone selling those bitcoins for dollars. There is no such thing as "cashing out to 3rd parties", and there are good reasons why any sane merchant or customer would not attempt to get involved in such practice. Each trade involves implicit and explicit contractual obligations and rights. "Cashing out to 3rd parties" only invites trouble. |
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So, the name of the game is to always stay on the bleeding edge of the available tech...in the hopes that you are implementing and bringing that tech to bare so you can collect an increased percentage of profits before all the other guys catch up. Then it's rinse and repeat with the next innovation?
Sorry if this is an ultra-noob understanding of all this I'm just fascinated by the whole process.
That sounds reasonable. There has been lots of discussion lately of mining economics in the context of transaction fees and various proposed changes (or lack of changes) to the maximum block size. Might wanna look into that - lots of guesswork, speculation, and wishful thinking about an immensely complex issue (coding, game theory, human nature, economics, networking, moore's law...). |
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Since monetary inflation of bitcoins is still significant (compared to the USD, for example), I thought it'd be useful to look at the inflation-corrected exchange rates. Ideally, I should have included the USD inflation, but I am too tired, and it wouldn't change things much anyway. I sourced the data from bitcoincharts.com, and corrected each daily VWAP for the number of coins generated up to that date, relative to the number of coins generated up to a fixed, arbitrarily chosen, reference date. Number of coins (monetary base) is projected, not actual, but the two are close enough. There are two reference dates used in these graphs: April 1 2011 (before the first bubble, and when Gox trade volume just started becoming significant), and January 1 2012 (after the first bubble, during the slow recovery).  The same data in log scale, in case you appreciate it as much as I do:  Bitcoin economy (be it based in speculation, savings, trading, gambling, playing - whatever) has obviously been growing stubbornly. If it were not for monetary inflation since January 2012, one bitcoin would be trading today at about USD 42. It would be interesting to expand this simple analysis by taking into account old coins that never moved after being generated - lots of these back in 2010 - actual monetary inflation has been even higher if we assume these 2010 frozen coins were actually lost due to low perceived value. |
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i thought it debunked the myth that people who buy drugs with bitcoins, fill out surveys. Well maybe... but I don't see why, this survey is anonymous Because they've got better things to do? |
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So, what would be the next step with this? Translate all (mobile) client software to africaans and the like? How about a bounty for this? This may be some very, very well invested few bitcoins here..
Ente
Let's not let this idea get buried. It is an obvious expansion market for bitcoin. I don't speak any african languages but I would like to offer my time to the project in any way I can help. Get in touch with weex. Examples: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=133616.0https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=145100.0 |
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add "paypal" to the query and it looks quite different  Yes, Sukrim pointed it out already. I wouldn't say it looks different - the numbers are what they are, regardless what comparisons we make. I picked several well known systems with comparable search volumes, so we can get a feel for the level of global awareness. Sure, PayPal is much bigger than any of these. We should include it all on log scale. Unfortunately, Google Trends only lets me pick up to five terms at a time, and normalizes and scales data so 5+ comparisons are complicated. |
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im shocked at dwolla, does no one outside of btc use it?
I'm pretty sure I've googled bitcoin way more times than anyone would google dwolla no matter how much they love it, there is just so much more to learn and read about bitcoin than dwolla. Good point, this skews the results. |
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This is presently true, but only because Bitcoin is still a new, obscure, and therefore unregulated system. As it gets more widely adopted, there will be more attempts to regulate and monitor transactions. Much like a business today is typically required to collect and report information about certain fiat transactions, in the future same AML requirements may apply to businesses within the "bitcoin system".
This will absolutely never happen. The system allowing such bs would be by definition a fork of Bitcoin, and a pretty irrelevant/hopeless one at that. No fork needed, I was writing about factors external to Bitcoin and its protocol. As for irrelevance - today's credit cards are far worse, and may be irrelevant in your view, but hundreds of millions of them are in use. |
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In the future I think mining will be done by organizations that have a lot of transactions to process, and the incentive to mine will be the commerce those transactions enable. Whether they do it themselves, or in pools, or outsource it to dedicated mining companies is impossible to predict.
Could you elaborate on this? A few examples, maybe. |
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