Bitcoin or Gold? What would you pick?
Gold, absolutely A shrewd decision taking into account that gold's current price is near its cost of production, so it just can't fall much lower for a long period of time (but just long enough to take longs, no pun intended)...  There is no such thing as a single price point "cost of production" for gold, because the true underlying costs represent a monotonically-increasing function based on the underlying difficulty of obtaining the gold. Market price drives cost of production in the sense of what kind of supply preferences are going to actually be realized in the market, and not the other way around. |
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I was reading a few old threads (2012 ish i think) where price was 10-30. People said 1k would happen in 2016. No one mentioned 100 (which came shortly after). 1k happened 2013. Many people say 1-8k 2015. Not sure, lets see what happens 2015-2016. We don't even know what surprises are in store for last half 2014 even! |
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Your best bet is to not convert it to fiat at all if you can avoid it. I know some need to recover cost from purchasing miners etc., but if you hold you can avoid taxes and enjoy the bull run.
Not converting to fiat does not make you immune from taxes. That would be considered tax evasion, and if they catch you there will be penalties and possible jail time depending on how severe. You pay capital gains tax on actual gains. I don't have any gains as i have never sold any and received a cash payment. That's exactly right. Only the appreciation on Bitcoin holdings is taxed as capital gains. Mining or getting paid in Bitcoin is income. Just read the IRS guidance, the opinions I'm seeing in this thread are so ignorant it's bordering on comedy. |
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Your best bet is to not convert it to fiat at all if you can avoid it. I know some need to recover cost from purchasing miners etc., but if you hold you can avoid taxes and enjoy the bull run.
Not converting to fiat does not make you immune from taxes. That would be considered tax evasion, and if they catch you there will be penalties and possible jail time depending on how severe. |
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This is what I've come to understand about the guidance so far. If I buy a crate of tomatoes today and the price drops and I sell them for a loss tomorrow, can I write off the loss if I only buy and sell tomatoes as a hobby, not my primary business?
It can only be deducted against regular income to a limit that I think is either $2000 or $3000, otherwise you have to have other capital gains to deduct them against, or deduct them from income if they exceed the limit over the course of multiple years. If I sell them at a profit, do I have to report the income?
Yes but as capital gains. They're only counted as income if you acquire them in the first place by mining or being paid them, in which case you declare income on the fair market value on the day you acquire them, and that establishes your basis. I am not in the business of buying and selling bitcoin, do I have to report gains and losses to the IRS every time I spend them for goods and services?
Yes, according to the guidance. Acquiring goods and services counts as realizing a gain. Your gain is fair market value of goods and services minus cost basis. It's safe to do this in a FIFO manner, and you have to apply your method consistently. There are other methods of tracking cost basis, but don't even try to do something like that without consulting a CPA. Now here's the kicker...if the IRS says I must report the realized gain every time I spend them, then can I write off the loss hat Hasfast will never send me my miner?
This you might need a CPA to answer. I think the guidance would consider that a loss of basis price to zero for the bitcoins spent, but not 100% sure. |
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Log trendline is the null hypothesis on this joint. Past performance blah blah blah is regurgitated generic pedantic crap. For the first time in human history we have an asset that follows self-reinforcing network effect growth, where the fundamentals themselves mathematically scream logistic function, yet somehow a logarithmic growth curve until saturation is supposed to be controversial? That's preposterous.
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WAT DOES IT MEAN
The waves of profit-taking that constituted the bearish trend is over. Sellers willing to sell at prices seen during the rundown are exhausted. |
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Do you guys still believe this Willy word press bullshit had any significance? Pls.
I think Willy was very significant in showing how stupid and gullible people are in blindly accepting whatever conforms to their confirmation bias. |
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It takes a really special kind of oblivious to write fluff pieces targeted to a clueless demographic, and post them to a Bitcoin message board!
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If the bitcoin (BTC!) becomes the world reserve currency, then banks will long have adopted it. They will have scared people because of security issues when holding BTC by themselves and they will have made people deposit and transact via the banks, which in turn allows the banks to work with IOUs instead of actual BTC.
This will result in the ability to massively inflate said IOUs by just issuing more of them as debt which will have to be repaid (plus a little extra). For this to not get out of hand an institution will be appointed bitcoin reserve bank and it will be able to control the creation of said IOUs on a pace they like.
As a result, the rich will get richer and the poor will suffer.
The value of a bitcoin by then? A lot less than now because it has been massively inflated with trillions of bitcoin IOUs everyone is forced to accept as settlement of debt.
That scenario you describe is not what "Bitcoin becomes the world's reserve currency" actually means. The system you describe is just the same system as now, just that banks would be able to hold Bitcoins as assets on their balance sheets. That's not at all the same thing as Bitcoin itself being a reserve currency. Reserve currency implies that parties are actually settling transactions in Bitcoin itself, and the design of Bitcoin is such that that kind of settlement is analogous to settling in a commodity money. |
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http://blockchain.info/stats has the numbers you want. The cost per transaction at present is about US$ 30 and the average transaction size in dollar terms is about US$ 1,300, so as a percentage, the cost per transaction is just over 2%. This is somewhat less than the cost of credit card transactions, for which merchants pay ~ 3% or more, depending on the card. Note that this is not the fee because it is not paid for by the people doing the transfer. Instead it is paid for by inflation (new bitcoins earned by the miners who process transactions), which means in effect that all holders of bitcoin are paying the cost of all transactions on the network in proportion to their bitcoin holdings. At present, the bitcoin rate of inflation is about 11% (ignore all the nonsense you read about bitcoin being a deflationary currency - it is nothing of the sort). So all things being equal, all holders of bitcoin will experience a devaluation of their holdings by 11% per year to pay for transactions made during that year. At present direct transaction fees are minimal (a fraction of a percent) but this will have to change over time as bitcoin inflation falls (it halves every four years) so that miners will increasingly come to rely on transaction fees. Nobody knows what level transaction fees will be in the future or how they will be charged (this is a huge topic of research), but ultimately somebody has to pay for the costs of the network. There's no such thing as a free lunch (except maybe POS, but that's another story ....) This is confusing and convoluted and does not address what the OP is asking about in any way whatsoever (with the minor exception of "at present direct transaction fees are minimal"). The weird monetary hypothesis being advanced here under the pretenses of talking about transaction fees has nothing to do with any of the economics directly surrounding merchant and customer adoption vs. credit cards. |
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Buying with bitcoin will mean avoiding tax vs cashing out bitcoin before purchase in UK im pretty sure?
I am not specifically knowledgeable about UK tax law, but I would pretty much guarantee you that it doesn't necessarily have to be a cash sale to qualify as a capital gain. You would most likely owe on the difference between the fair market value of the house on the day of purchase versus the basis price of your Bitcoins. |
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Could you post in point form (as you have done above) why you are skeptical on the long term success of bitcoin? I have seen you criticizing bitcoin but other than saying its success is limited, you do not seem to say why. It would be insightful to understand the reasons of failure from your point of view.
The "reason" is that there's people here that think otherwise that serve as an audience. I've never seen anything of any real substance other than pompous bluster. |
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Here's a tip for those people who keep dumping around 600. If you don't dump the price will go up and your coins will be worth more. Crazy rocket science, i know.
That's a prisoner's dilemma type situation though that could never happen in practice, because one bad actor dumps and takes advantage of the other people holding. |
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At the current price and difficulty, assuming $0.15/kWhr electricity cost, you would need to be eating up almost 8 watt/GH/s not to beat the cost of electricity. Almost every ASIC ever made is still profitable to run. Even BFL 65nm units still return about 100% versus the cost of electricity.
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There is no real reason to believe that Greer's theory necessarily represents an accurate picture of how technological civilization works. It hypothesizes modes of social organization that have never even existed, and has a very dubious view of "scarcity" as some kind of objectively fixed property of resources. The divisions into stages of progress are wildly arbitrary, as though discovering more efficient utilization of resources is not always happening to some degree or other. My personal impression of these kind of theories is that they're just repackaging the same tired Malthusian bullshit story into more and more sophisticated presentations.
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$115million is not even 5% out of 7billion, which is Bitcoin's market cap..
Market cap is a theoretical calculation to determine monetary base. Comparing that $115 million figure to market cap is irrelevant, comparing it to the float is what means something, and the float is probably well lower than $1 billion, if not lower than $500 million. |
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Not re-using an address is a best practice for security reasons, because the moment you produce a spend from an address, the public key gets broadcast to the network. An address has an extra layer of security attached to it because it's run through RIPEMD from the public key, so if SHA2 ever got compromised in some way, an unspent address would still be secure as long as RIPEMD wasn't.
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Darkcoin is the perfect script for a pump-and-dump, the proposition hits every single nitpicky thing that people could possibly believe is "wrong" with Bitcoin.
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