A stock market crash right now wouldn't affect too much bitcoin. There's still not enough infrastructure/awareness to allow stock traders to quickly move to cryptos.
However, if it happens in a year or so, the scenario might be completely different and cause a major buy in into btc.
Yes, there needs to be an easy way to sell stocks and buy bitcoin (or a proxy thereof) on the same platform. If/when a bitcoin ETF becomes tradable, it will then be possible for average investors to buy into bitcoin easily. The ETF will also likely increase public awareness of bitcoin, causing more people to adopt bitcoin. |
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hurry, the first 100 people get their money...  ... and maybe they will print as much as everyone wants but its worthless paper in the end. man....its sad but this will happen all over the world in the next years and not many people know this.  This is coming to a bank near everyone someday. At first there will be delays and hopefully they will be able to get printed cash to fill the demand for deposits of their customers. Get ready everyone. Wouldn't happen to country with high reserve requirement and sound lending practice. If credit is too tight in the form of banks needing to keep too much in reserve and too strict lending standards then they would be unprofitable and would eventually fail as they could not make enough from the loans that they make. |
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I wish MasterCard would print a QR code on my bill and I could just pay in btc.
That's a good damn idea! It would be more likely that they would make their customers pay online if they wanted to pay with bitcoin as the exchange rate can vary widely over the 45 day period that people have to pay their credit card bills. It should also be noted that Mastercard does not actually lend people money, the issuing banks do. As a result people do not pay mastercard directly |
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Would it take governments deciding to hold bitcoin in their reserves for bitcoin's market cap to reach these heights or not? Or is private capital sufficient to get bitcoin to the 100 billion, 500 billion or 2 trillion dollar market caps mentioned?
When some country buys another currency for reserves, yes that strengthens the foreign currency. The only reason to have reserves, is to manipulate (also called stabilize) a local fiat currency. If the fiat currency in question were allowed to float, reserves would not be necessary. If a country has a trade surplus and nothing to spend the excess currency that is pouring into the country then it will have foreign currency reserves. That is not enough, the foreign money has to somehow get into the pockets of the government. Most governments charge some kind of tariff when goods are imported, these can be paid for with foreign currency. Governments also often have some kind of ownership stake in various industries. |
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Some people will not sell the coins even if they were 100K USD presently. Whoever wanted to buy all the coins would have to have government sized wallet  This is not true. The higher the price of bitcoin, the more likely people will be to sell their coins. The OP has a few issues with the sceanario. The miners will continue to mine new coins via block subsidies, this will make it impossible to have all of the bitcoin for several hundred years. Another issue is that once someone acquires the majority of bitcon the value of bitcoin would drop dramatically. Bitcon derrives it value from the fact that people will/do use it as a payment method/currency. |
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I'd like to numbers and citations to support the claim that illegal transactions compose a large percentage of Bitcoin transactions.
Criminality is going there. I don't have specific statistics, but bitcoin is known to be a way to conduct nefarious activity. There is also a large number of crypto ransom hacks where an attacker encrypts a user's files files and demands a certain level of bitcoin or the key to decrypt the files will be permanently destroyed. |
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-snip-
I don't think governments are the only one who could make barriers to entry. Sometimes something as simple as controlling the supply of a commodity is enough to create an insurmountable barrier to entry.
A market with no regulation is more likely to cease to be a free market in the long run than one that is regulated properly with the intention of keeping it free.
The biggest barrier to any market is the initial investment necessary to start a business. The more investment required prior to starting a business the harder it will be for newcomers to enter the market. |
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If there was a hidden reserve and the reserve was not met then the coins would not have been sold. The only way that the coins were sold if there was a hidden reserve would be if the winning bidder had bit an amount higher then the reserve.
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Only 1 million shares. Small float = easy manipulation
Pump and dump time
Having access to wall street money, who really know how high bitcoin will go. Yeah they'll pump it then dump it. Leaving all retail bagholders in tears. Seen it all the time in pennystocks ETF's do not work like that -if more than one million shares are purchased the ETF issues new ones, and buys the bitcoin to hold against them. So if 3 million shares get bought they will issue another 2 million, the fund then buys extra bitcoin with the proceeds of the new share issuance so as be balanced. That way the value of the ETF share stays in line with the value of bitcoin and is not influenced by the supply and demand of the ETF share itself. When shares are sold back to the ETF they retire them and sell bitcoin so as to stay balanced So if the ETF gets huge swings in inflows and outflows then it will have a huge impact on bitcoin - unless insitutional market makers get involved in the real bitcoin market so as to smooth flows and volatility. There are one million shares initially because the ETF will only own 200,000 bitcoin, and each share is worth 0.2BTC. If more than one million shares get bought the ETF will have to buy bitcoin at market. If less then they may well have to sell bitcoin. EDIT: Lets not forget though that to be fully funded at inception or close to inception, ie all one million shares bought, this ETF needs to sell the equivalent 200,000 coins to interested parties , thats USD 130,000,000 at current prices, - and we just had a little panic about 30,000 coins going at auction. But if more than 200,000 shares are sold (say, 300,000 on the first day), there are only 3600 coins per day to be had. How will they buy them all? And for how much? You can see that if they get to 1,000,000 shares, it will be almost impossible to fill the need, meaning the price of bitcoin will need to skyrocket to massive numbers in order to convince HODLers to sell. Shares in ETFs can be "created" by investors giving the trustee the same assets in the index/securities that the ETF is suppose to track. So for example someone could create 5 shares of the bitcoin ETF by giving the trustee 1 BTC |
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There's almost 29M usd swaps now on bitfinex, and to me it looks like the upward momentum has stopped. If the price ranges from 640-660 for a while with no upward movement the probability of a long squeeze is going to increase dangerously.
Quite a lot of money they are holding. What stop them from running away or claimed hack like tradefotress did? They make money off of trading fees and earn a portion of the interest on Swaps. Over the long term they stand to make more money off of these fees would outweigh the amount they could get away with if they were to steal the coins from their customers. |
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Nah, kinda doubt that.
I think for once, traders and holders are united in their hatred of the idiocy that is posting this chart over and over again.
The labels on the chart are not even accurate. The MSM was reporting on bitcon for much of 2013 |
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It is very important to note that bitcoin being invested in by VC has very much changed the dynamic of the trading market. As less percentage of investors are speculating on the price the price of bitcoin should become more stable and the frequency of "bubbles" and crashes should decrease.
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As the price of bitcoin rises the holders of a lot of bitcoin will have an incentive to sell their bitcoin which will cause bitcoin to be more widely held.
It should also be noted that these numbers are distorted by Satochi's estimated 1 million bitcoin. If you were to back out these coins then bitcoin would show as being more distributed.
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Total bitcoins avaliable: 12,976,600
If 5000 each, market cap would be around 100 billion
Current market cap is around 8.5 billion
How grow up bitcoin price to 5k: put 91.5 billions of fresh money there. Seems harder than walk to millions to billions
91.5 billion of pure expenditure would push the price far into the tens of thousands. There's an awful lot of those 13 million or so coins that are lost or impossible to buy. There were 29 million millionaires in the world in 2012 (probably more now). Each of them cannot get even a single bitcoin. It is typical for millionaire home offices to allocate at least 5% to alternative investments. If, instead of 5%, bitcoin will become just 1% of millionaires investment, the price at the equilibrium would have to be $40000 to achieve this allocation (1%). This does not even take into consideration the other 99.4% of the humanity. Every one allocating their investments in the same way can lead to economic devastation as prices would crash when there is a small economic decline causing people to sell a modest amount of their investments. |
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I assume he paid above market. Trying to purchase this amount at 'market' price would cause an upswing so big you'd end up paying even more. Plus of course, he had the opportunity to purchase from a known and trusted party, which should be worth a premium.
The same is true for the government who was selling the coins. Draper could have purchased the coins at any time, but the USMS had a deadline to get the coins off their books. Draper had the known and trusted party advantage as well as he had to provide identifying information and had to "send first" |
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I would argue that this is a very big step in the right direction to get bitcoin to start trading as an ETF. I would say that ETF trading would likely push up the price over the long term.
It should also be noted that second market recently announced an open ended mutual fund that will invest in bitcoin
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It looks like the note was attached to the transaction under it.
Okay. Damn, that would have been some excitement if the note was for the 150K. The note was attached to one of the begging spam TX that was sent to the DPR address EDIT: I don't think this is actually a DPR address, just one with ~ the same number of coins. |
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A lot of these are more ways that ASICs could be used rather then how the concept of the blockchain could solve these problems.
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I'm just wondering if there is a possibility the appeals process could result in the remaining coins being held in limbo for years.
That is sort of the best case scenario for Ulbricht, sadly. It is generally difficult for the prosecution to appeal a not guilty verdict against a defendant. It is somewhat more common for the prosecution to appeal a specific ruling that was made in the defenses favor that could potentially result in a retrial. IMO I would find it more likely that he is initially found guilty then he appeals various rulings in his case and potentially walks a free man. It should be very interesting to see just how much evidence is actually against him and how the evidence was found. Once the verdict in his criminal trial is finalized (appeals have been exhausted) the civil case regarding his personal coins should be pretty straightforward. |
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I'm also actually surprised at how much business some of these companies are doing, but then again I'm always surprised people actually want to spend their coins  . I hope this encourages expedia to start accepting them for hotel bookings and also encourages other businesses to take the plunge. All these places now accepting BTC use some typa 3rd party yeah ?
I can't remember the name of the popular one thats been around a while, bitpay maybe ??
Yep, bitpay http://coinbrief.net/expedia-accepting-bitcoin/It isn't so much that people are spending their existing coins it is that people are buying bitcoin for the purpose of spending it. |
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