Bitcoin has had a ton of positive publicity recently and nobody ever complains when positive publicity is based on hyperbole rather than fact.
Bitcoin is absolutely being traded like a commodity at the moment. It's naive to believe that the majority of people speculating on Bitcoin prices right now intend to hold them long term or use them to purchase things. Many of them will dump their coins when there's little volatility.
Yes, there's a lot of lazy journalism. This applies to both the good and the bad. Time after time inaccurate articles start off on arstechnica or wired and nobody does any fact-checking before they start appearing everywhere else. That's equally true of mainstream news stories.
For every person who wants Bitcoin to "go mainstream", there's another Bitcoin user who thinks that could kill Bitcoin and that the emphasis should be on it being a disruptive technology.
There's no cohesive "Bitcoin agenda". Nor does there need to be. People want and expect different things from Bitcoin and they use it for different reasons and in different ways. It's not surprising, then, that media reporting regarding Bitcoin is all over the place and rarely balanced.
It's pretty much up to each of the groups with an agenda (whether it's the "mainstreamers" or the crypto-anarchists), to take responsibility for getting the kinds of stories they'd like to see about Bitcoin published - bearing in mind that each group will likely be displeased by a report regarded as "positive" by the other.
Bitcoin unfortunately still connotes "drugs", "gambling", or other illegal things, even though these have now become very small portions of the Bitcoin economy. They are the vast majority of the bitcoin economy. Show me a business processing more revenue in BTC than SatoshiDice/Sealswithclubs/silk road. BFL and Avalon don't really count. The major advantages of bitcoin lend themselves perfectly to these activities and is its best chance of growing as a currency and not just a commodity. Silk Road does approximately 30000 BTC per month in sales. SatoshiDICE has 150000 BTC per month in gambles. BTC-E deals with as many BTC per month as SatoshiDICE. It's the 4th largest exchange, accounting for 4% of Bitcoin to fiat trading. Bit-pay processes $5.2 million USD monthly. That's about 80000 BTC at the March weighted average. BTCGuild mines 36% of all mined bitcoins. In the past month, that was over 50000 BTC. No, Bitcoin is not "mostly used for gambling and drugs". |
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Bitcoin has had a ton of positive publicity recently and nobody ever complains when positive publicity is based on hyperbole rather than fact.
Bitcoin is absolutely being traded like a commodity at the moment. It's naive to believe that the majority of people speculating on Bitcoin prices right now intend to hold them long term or use them to purchase things. Many of them will dump their coins when there's little volatility.
Yes, there's a lot of lazy journalism. This applies to both the good and the bad. Time after time inaccurate articles start off on arstechnica or wired and nobody does any fact-checking before they start appearing everywhere else. That's equally true of mainstream news stories.
For every person who wants Bitcoin to "go mainstream", there's another Bitcoin user who thinks that could kill Bitcoin and that the emphasis should be on it being a disruptive technology.
There's no cohesive "Bitcoin agenda". Nor does there need to be. People want and expect different things from Bitcoin and they use it for different reasons and in different ways. It's not surprising, then, that media reporting regarding Bitcoin is all over the place and rarely balanced.
It's pretty much up to each of the groups with an agenda (whether it's the "mainstreamers" or the crypto-anarchists), to take responsibility for getting the kinds of stories they'd like to see about Bitcoin published - bearing in mind that each group will likely be displeased by a report regarded as "positive" by the other.
Bitcoin unfortunately still connotes "drugs", "gambling", or other illegal things, even though these have now become very small portions of the Bitcoin economy. Silkroad would like to tell you otherwise... If you consider less than 2% significant, why not. Silk Road processes $22 million annually. The rest of the economy is over $2000 million annually (includes trading, transaction volume, etc.). |
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Bitcoin has had a ton of positive publicity recently and nobody ever complains when positive publicity is based on hyperbole rather than fact.
Bitcoin is absolutely being traded like a commodity at the moment. It's naive to believe that the majority of people speculating on Bitcoin prices right now intend to hold them long term or use them to purchase things. Many of them will dump their coins when there's little volatility.
Yes, there's a lot of lazy journalism. This applies to both the good and the bad. Time after time inaccurate articles start off on arstechnica or wired and nobody does any fact-checking before they start appearing everywhere else. That's equally true of mainstream news stories.
For every person who wants Bitcoin to "go mainstream", there's another Bitcoin user who thinks that could kill Bitcoin and that the emphasis should be on it being a disruptive technology.
There's no cohesive "Bitcoin agenda". Nor does there need to be. People want and expect different things from Bitcoin and they use it for different reasons and in different ways. It's not surprising, then, that media reporting regarding Bitcoin is all over the place and rarely balanced.
It's pretty much up to each of the groups with an agenda (whether it's the "mainstreamers" or the crypto-anarchists), to take responsibility for getting the kinds of stories they'd like to see about Bitcoin published - bearing in mind that each group will likely be displeased by a report regarded as "positive" by the other.
Bitcoin unfortunately still connotes "drugs", "gambling", or other illegal things, even though these have now become very small portions of the Bitcoin economy. |
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I was wondering about the economics of mining the other day, and I'm not probably the first one to be puzzled by this...
If a piece of specialized mining equipment (ASIC, FPGA, whatever) is cost efficient (i.e. the value of the bitcoins it generates is more than it costs to manufacture and operate), it doesn't make any sense to sell it.
If a piece of mining equipment is not cost efficient (i.e. it takes more electricity to operate than the bitcoins it generates are worth), it doesn't make any sense to buy it.
So if someone buys hardware to mine bitcoins, the manufacturer is either screwing them, or being charitable. Which one of these is true, or am I missing something obvious?
There is also a "gambling paradox" and an "insurance paradox". Are gamblers being "charitable"? Are insurance brokers "screwing" their customers over? Avalon is being charitable. What BFL is doing, I do not know. |
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All I wanna know is what I can make from say a decent GPU card (300 Mh/s)...  Almost nothing. Difficulty is currently projected to increase at approximately 25% every 2 weeks. At current difficulty, your rig will earn you 20 mXBT per day. If you leave it running forever, it will earn you at most 2 BTC, probably less than 1 BTC. forever, meaning ∞? Forever, meaning until either Moore's law stops applying or Bitcoin takes a nosedive. This will be far after your GPU stops working, so it's close enough to ∞. |
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All I wanna know is what I can make from say a decent GPU card (300 Mh/s)... Almost nothing. Difficulty is currently projected to increase at approximately 25% every 2 weeks. At current difficulty, your rig will earn you 20 mXBT per day. If you leave it running forever, it will earn you at most 2 BTC, probably less than 1 BTC. |
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How can you say that when we don't even know what exactly happened yet. Sure it can be due to the vulnerability's discussed earlier but as said before, that is only speculating.
Because it doesn't matter whether it was the vulnerability which was discussed last week which was exploited. The moment it becomes public that your service has a vulnerability, there's a massive target on your back and people will not only try to exploit that particular vulnerability, they will actively look for others (and they'll look for similar vulnerabilities in other services). The fact that it's going to take them more than 90 days to start returning user funds (and likely more if you have over 50 BTC with them) indicates that they had no adequate disaster plan in place. How you're going to verify claims in the event of a security breach should be something you already plan for before a breach occurs and it sure as hell shouldn't involve providing information which is already known to be easily compromised. People don't demand enough of Bitcoin services. Half the time they know little - if anything - about the people behind them and especially about the resources they have available. They don't bother asking service providers about their disaster plans (which is insane because very few Bitcoin services have the financial resources to simply absorb losses which occur due to security failures). They leave amounts they can't afford to lose with services which could literally be out of business an hour from now. No doubt some of the people who'll be impacted by this have previously lost funds to other exchange/wallet service failures (and will likely do so again in the future). None of this means that services themselves should get a free pass when disaster strikes or that people should be ever so grateful for any steps they take to try to make users whole. Hear hear. So many people here are against regulation. Until people become accustomed enough to regulate companies themselves, more regulation is good for Bitcoin. |
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I just moved all my coins to new addresses. All of a sudden, I'm not a "founder". Thank goodness, now the "founders" own fewer coins.
If this doesn't prove that the methodology is flawed, I don't know what does.
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Is there a quick way to transfer CNY to USD? In theory I could sell my BTC on BTCChina, transfer the CNY to USD then to gox. Probably not in the time BTC will go above 150 USD.
There is no need to do that. Others will for you. All you have to do is wait for a correction to the market USD price and buy back your XBT. |
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Now.
127 to 122 in minutes. Imagine what will happen in a few hours.
Of course, this "flash crash" is nothing unusual when compared to other "flash crashes" of late. The price will most likely recover again.
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$1,330,000,000.00 $121.14 Kyrgyzstan
$1,335,000,000.00 $121.60 Macedonia
$1,416,000,000.00 $128.97 Chad
On our way. I'm checking the price as I type to make sure this is not out of date.
We have not yet reached Chad. |
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Chad... Unfortunately it's also one of the world's failed states.  |
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So, 1.1 x 10^15 is not enough units to work with? if that was USD, that would by $1 Quadrillion.
Anyhow, the correct answer was that the Bitcoin market is too small for institutional traders to be bothered with it.
Too few is correct in this case, as it would require more bitcoins (not more decimal points) to bring the market to an acceptable size. Let them trade in microbitcoins then. There are 11 trillion microbitcoins, after all. (Bitcoin is just an arbitrary unit. Satoshi could have made the Bitcoin equal to 100 satoshis and set the upper limit to 21 trillion Bitcoins, and the effect would be the same.) Let me reword the statement. More bitcoins are needed to bring the value of the market to an acceptable size. Trading in microbitcoins does not solve this problem. The article is correct in saying that there are currently "too few" bitcoins. It neglects to mention that there will always be "too few" at current prices, but regardless there is no error in the text. |
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This article is full of fail. First: There are only 11 million bitcoins in existence, and there can never be more than 21 million, so it’s not a very liquid market. If a way ever emerges to break bitcoins up into even smaller fractions, that might solve the problem, according to traders we spoke to. Then, an attempt at a correction: Update: Article has been amended to reflect that bitcoins can already be traded in small fractions, indeed to 0.00000001 BTC (eight decimal places). Nonetheless, even with the ability to break bitcoins into small pieces, there are too few bitcoins in existence for institutional traders to be willing to trade them. So, 1.1 x 10^15 is not enough units to work with? if that was USD, that would by $1 Quadrillion. Anyhow, the correct answer was that the Bitcoin market is too small for institutional traders to be bothered with it. Too few is correct in this case, as it would require more bitcoins (not more decimal points) to bring the market to an acceptable size. |
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This might be a silly (read: newbish) question, but what's stopping someone from buying a few Bitcoins from BTC-E at 87.849 USD per BTC, and then selling them at MtGox for 118.2 USD per BTC to make a profit?
Nothing. And you got the prices totally wrong. It's about 87 EURO / 1 BTC on BTC-E. If there were such a huge difference, people would have exploited it already. Are you sure? I'm currently seeing BTC/USD = 87.849.  This image is from March 30. The current price is $119/ BTC. |
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Updated to reflect recent price & GDP increases.
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Where's the <14 option?
(I don't fit into that category [though sometimes I wish I did], but there are certainly people on these forums at that age.)
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If we account for all 21 million coins the market cap is 2,4 billion $ so we are actually already at
$2,476,000,000.00 Honduras
Yeah, and if we account for all ∞ US dollars the US market cap is greater than the rest of the world combined. |
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Could it be possible to send coins to an unused address, so that someone gets a surprise when they generate a new address? hmm...
No. It would take longer than the life of the universe to accidentally generate an address with coins already in it. This is also assuming that RIPEMD is reversible. |
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