An investment in bitcoin could be likened to an investment in a tech startup with various seed rounds. High probability of failure, but success means massive a ROI. Bitcoin may be in it's series C, with many more seed rounds to follow.

$0 - 1: Bootstrapping. Bitcoin had little promise of mass adoption, very theoretical use cases, and was used by a small handful of people.
$1 - 10: Series A. Bitcoin finds a great use case in dark markets and potential use cases in other markets. First VC money doled out to build Bitcoin companies. Still very theoretical and small user base. Regulatory status unclear.
$10 - 100: Series B. Overstock and some other large companies accept bitcoin payments. Much more VC money pumped into the developing ecosystem. Regulatory stance becoming more clear in many developed nations. User base expanding consistently. More use cases becoming clear.
$100 - 1000: Series C. More than 100,000 merchants accepting bitcoin payments. Investments into the ecosystem from some very prominent institutions. Real regulatory framework being built. User base still expanding accordingly. More potential use cases being discovered.

Each series comes with less risk of failure, but also less chance of reward, much the same way a venture investment works.

Some people around this forum post drastically differently from day to day depending on whether they are short or long. You can go ahead and press the ignore button. The valuable members speak reason and logic regardless of their position, and they tend to understand that trying to trick a few gullible people on a forum isn't going to effect the price.

Back to the topic, this crash is similar in its duration. There is just too much good news recently for it to last much longer. Wall street has officially entered. More to come.

Watch some industry leaders and experts talk about mining. Knowledge is power! Trolling is useless.

http://blockchainstuff.eu/video-of-the-recent-mining-discussion-panel-tnabc-bitmain-valeryvavilov-vcorem-matthewroszak-lukedashjr-courtesy-of-bitcoinist/

Transactions broadcast instantly, so 0 minutes for a transaction. However many blocks you need to feel comfortable that the sender won't perform a double spend is up to you. 6 blocks is arbitrary, and quite unnecessary for any payment under $10k. I would say 1 confirmation should suffice for anything under $1k. And this is for direct P2P transfers, that don't involve a third party.

Comparing it to a bank wire introduces a third party. If you introduce a third party to bitcoin, impulse instant tranfers, recently introduced by Jeff Garzik and Bitpay, make payments instantly secure.

Actually, hash rate in January 2014 averaged about 10MM Gh/s. It is currently about 300MM Gh/s for an increase of about 30X in one year. Check out the link I posted directly above your comment.

But yeah, according to every newbie and short positioned troll, Bitcoin is dead and stuff. Cut your looses.

I watched the mining panel speak this past weekend at the North American Bitcoin Conference. As a highly competitive field, miners have an incentive to discourages others from entering, so they will tell you that their operations are not profitable, or keep quiet on the subject. However, the panel was rather resounding in the fact that mining is still profitable for their companies.

For some perspective, view this chart: https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate?showDataPoints=false&timespan=&show_header=true&daysAverageString=7&scale=0&address=

Then compare it to price for the same one year time frame. If mining was not profitable, this would not be happening.



Nonsense. What do you think you know that the NYSE, USAA, BBVA, Vikram Pandit, Tom Glocer, and NTT DoCoMo don't? I'm assuming you saw the announcement today of their $75MM series C with Coinbase.

A lot of us have been through this cycle a few times now. The ones who make it with BTC are the ones who understand volatility in an incredibly uncertain marketplace. The first experience of a drawn out crash is hard. If you think BTC is the same technology that you understood a year ago, then you should try to not worry so much. Look at the history. Compare past fundamentals to past price action and do the same for more recent events. The exercise should create a more positive and realistic long term outlook. This experiment is going to take a little bit of time to unfold, so try not to panic. An emotional investor is nearly guaranteed to lose. Create a strategy to separate your emotions from your trading. You'll feel much better.

This is probably the worst place to ask for investment advice. A large minority of the people in this sub are able to give unbiased, knowledgable advice about investing in Bitcoin. Most people here are emotional, uneducated, inexperienced investors.

I would advise doing your own research including going to some other subs and asking questions about best practices for storing bitcoins, best exchanges for your purposes, sources for fundamental analysis to understand on a deep level what Bitcoin is, where it has been, and where it is today, and sources for technical analysis to peg against those fundamentals.

While you work on your research, which will take some time, I recommend investing a small amount of that $100k and playing with some coins. Fund some accounts with USD and with bitcoin and see the difference for yourself. This is what opened my eyes. Buy something with bitcoin. Try purse.io to order something from Amazon. Create a changetip wallet and tip somebody on twitter or reddit.

Once you immerse yourself with it, you can make your own decision instead of taking advice from anonymous strangers who likely have an agenda.

The issue with this theory is that Pantera capital / Fortress has a $10MM investment in Bitstamp. Pantera capital also holds a fund with over $100MM invested in BTC. It seems illogical to further damage the reputation of Bitcoin potentially causing their fund to lose more value than the $5MM that was lost to the hack. Also, you know, it's just bad business and Bitstamp happens to have investors that see the potential of remaining as one of the leading bitcoin exchanges. It's not like $5MM is something they won't recover from organically.

 

Thanks for the laugh.

Nobody knows, but it looks like a pretty solid triple bottom is forming.

+1

But in all fairness, this isn't the worst thread I've seen around here.

Bitstamp has a $10,000,000 investment from Pantera capital who has a fund invested in bitcoin worth north of $100,000,000. I imagine if Bitstamp's hot storage was hacked, they would reimburse customers, like any reputable, quality exchange would do / has done. And yes, after an uncertain beginning, I would certainly qualify Bitstamp as reputable and having the type of business plan and resources to cover such an incident and mitigate the potential damage.


+1

This topic is kind of ridiculous. Particularly the previous title before it was edited to not be completely false click bait.

Hey Pablo,

The time on my butterbot app keeps changing randomly. It was originally set to give values at 9:00 and 21:00. Then, two days later, it started giving values for 5:00 and 17:00. The next day, today, it is giving values for 11:00 and 23:00. I haven't changed any settings on the app, chrome, or my computer. Any ideas of how I can fix this?

Nah, he's cool with it. If you look at his comment history:

This Is Gentlemen by Daurgothothin Bitcoin
[–]qwsazxcde1 7 points 1 day ago
ugh, i may as well own up to it. Let the Gentlemen rally begin, Sir's.

And personally, I would be happy to see my typo become a thing. I mean, if you can't laugh at your own silly typo and have a good time, then life's gonna be pretty dreadful.

This is the second time I've seen that link claimed as being the first "This is gentlemen" post, but it's not. That was posted in response to the original typo, here:

http://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/2lxkqk/daily_discussion_tuesday_november_11_2014/cm0085i

2958 CNY was the high on Huobi last night... and, it would make sense to look to the Chinese exchanges to validate a prediction based on Chinese currency. Target hit.

A 500 BTC at today's price is more than a $150,000 investment in a very high risk asset that is like no other. There are very few people willing or capable of making this type of investment, and anybody with such holdings is either already very wealthy, or got in the BTC game very early.

I think anything over 50 BTC is a lot. That's over $15k at today's price. That amount also puts you at owning at a minimum .00024% of outstanding BTC. Today's market capitalization of Apple (AAPL) is $640,000,000,000. If Bitcoin achieves a similar market cap, which is quite reasonable, owning .00024% (50 BTC) would be worth $1,440,000 in today's USD. I would consider that "a lot."

I haven't been around for a few weeks. Did your troll ego switch from "Bitcoin is d00med!!!" to "maybe things will just be ok."

A crashing market will probably not influence Bitcoin much. Most investors in broad market funds like the DOW are risk averse, or at least have an investment strategy that allows for 1-5% max on risky investments. Their idea of risky includes precious metals. The majority aren't going to be panicking into Bitcoin, and those that do will likely allocate small percentages of their portfolio. An unstable financial system certainly has different implications for Bitcoin.

Anyway, back to topic, I think we'll see range bound trading for the next couple months before we continue on our logarithmic climb. So a bit of North and South for a while. I do think $275 was the bottom.