I am pretty confident we are the new wealthy elite, gentlemen.

[FreeMoney]

While I share the belief that bitcoin or something very like it will play a major role in the future, I think the road there is going to be a lot rougher.

I imagine we will see a huge boom then a bust, after that those who stick around will build the meaning full economy that will allow bitcoin or its successor to dominate.

I don't care about the busts. I am riding this pig wherever it takes me. If it tanks, I'll have a helluva story to tell. I'm sick of half measures. I'm swinging for the fences and If I strike out, so be it.  I won't be some mediocre drone living a life of quiet desperation. I believe in bitcoin and I'm going for broke, knowing the risks.  

I'm with you. Want to camp together if this shit burns?

[1713411585]

1713411585

[MoonShadow]

I'll keep one dream secret, you Australian f**kers will take it. ^_^

If you can buy the World Cup with Bitcoin, would it still be a game worth watching?

[MoonShadow]

While I share the belief that bitcoin or something very like it will play a major role in the future, I think the road there is going to be a lot rougher.

I imagine we will see a huge boom then a bust, after that those who stick around will build the meaning full economy that will allow bitcoin or its successor to dominate.

I don't care about the busts. I am riding this pig wherever it takes me. If it tanks, I'll have a helluva story to tell. I'm sick of half measures. I'm swinging for the fences and If I strike out, so be it.  I won't be some mediocre drone living a life of quiet desperation. I believe in bitcoin and I'm going for broke, knowing the risks.  

I'm with you. Want to camp together if this shit burns?

I'm game, but I'm not going to get in the barrel!

[Paperweight]

This time's it's different.

[unk]

but creighto, at least you'll have your guns, ammo, and silver to disinfect your milk.

just recall that 'if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is'.

those of us who aren't teenagers have seen this kind of thing dozens of times before, each time with claims that the speculation is based on something fundamentally new. i make no predictions about the price of bitcoins, as today's price results solely from what game theorists call a beauty-contest game, but 'confidence' in the most optimistic of results isn't warranted.

perspective isn't hard to acquire here, but it's always elusive. you can find quotations almost exactly the same as the original post in this discussion littered through history. would it help anyone if i found some?

borrowing in support of speculation is, additionally, almost always irrational because of the diminishing marginal utility of wealth. if bitcoins end up worth $1,000, it won't really matter whether you have 3000 or 5000 of them. (as someone with money, that's all too real a truth. like most people who've made money, i continue to seek it out of what, if i were honest, i'd have to admit was a quirky habit, rather than a need or a belief that i can do something better with it than others.) on the other hand, the interest on the $36000 debt you'd incur to buy an additional 2000 bitcoins today, which debt would grow to $240,000 in 20 years at 10% interest, could make the difference between solvency and bankruptcy for you.

going 'whole hog', to borrow an american phrase, is almost never a good investment strategy. diversification is almost always better, particularly when bankruptcy is a real risk. (incidentally, what does an honest libertarian do when facing legal bankruptcy, which is of course basically a protection against legitimate debt offered by a welfare state? does he or she decline the legal protection because it results from 'force'?)

[kinghajj]

Diversification is key. I plan on selling about half of my bitcoins when the price goes way up (~$1000), and then invest most of the proceeds somewhere.. stocks, bonds, I'm not sure yet. But I'll keep the other half of the bitcoins just in case the price keeps on going up.

[skysurfer808]

Spending money you don't have is like imagining what you could have had.

Either way, I'm in and want to see how it goes.  It's going to be an interesting ride.

Now for those who bought and held from early on, you will have the power to face the world on your own terms. 

I wish all of us the best, but we must face this with open eyes.

Skysurfer808

[Astrohacker]

Atlas, thanks for posting my article. It was a pleasant surprise to open this thread and see someone compliment my work.

calling for people to take out loans to buy up an appreciating asset in the same article as talking about financial responsibility, efficiency, and freedom is highly ignorant.

It's not ignorant, it's leveraging. Also, I never talked about "responsibility" or "freedom".

While I share the belief that bitcoin or something very like it will play a major role in the future, I think the road there is going to be a lot rougher.

I imagine we will see a huge boom then a bust, after that those who stick around will build the meaning full economy that will allow bitcoin or its successor to dominate.

I don't care about the busts. I am riding this pig wherever it takes me. If it tanks, I'll have a helluva story to tell. I'm sick of half measures. I'm swinging for the fences and If I strike out, so be it.  I won't be some mediocre drone living a life of quiet desperation. I believe in bitcoin and I'm going for broke, knowing the risks.  

Hell yeah.

but creighto, at least you'll have your guns, ammo, and silver to disinfect your milk.

just recall that 'if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is'.

those of us who aren't teenagers have seen this kind of thing dozens of times before, each time with claims that the speculation is based on something fundamentally new. i make no predictions about the price of bitcoins, as today's price results solely from what game theorists call a beauty-contest game, but 'confidence' in the most optimistic of results isn't warranted.

perspective isn't hard to acquire here, but it's always elusive. you can find quotations almost exactly the same as the original post in this discussion littered through history. would it help anyone if i found some?

borrowing in support of speculation is, additionally, almost always irrational because of the diminishing marginal utility of wealth. if bitcoins end up worth $1,000, it won't really matter whether you have 3000 or 5000 of them. (as someone with money, that's all too real a truth. like most people who've made money, i continue to seek it out of what, if i were honest, i'd have to admit was a quirky habit, rather than a need or a belief that i can do something better with it than others.) on the other hand, the interest on the $36000 debt you'd incur to buy an additional 2000 bitcoins today, which debt would grow to $240,000 in 20 years at 10% interest, could make the difference between solvency and bankruptcy for you.

going 'whole hog', to borrow an american phrase, is almost never a good investment strategy. diversification is almost always better, particularly when bankruptcy is a real risk. (incidentally, what does an honest libertarian do when facing legal bankruptcy, which is of course basically a protection against legitimate debt offered by a welfare state? does he or she decline the legal protection because it results from 'force'?)

Given no other information, except that something sounds too good to be true, then yeah, it's probably too good to be true. But I (and you) have way more information than just what bitcoin sounds like on the surface. I just spent a solid three weeks studying the technology, the community, and whatever economics I could digest in that period of time. And my conclusions have done nothing but sharpen on the incredible outcome: bitcoin is likely to actually be adopted as a currency by a huge fraction of the world.

I get your point about being reasonable. Any time we arrive at such an incredible conclusion we ought to consider the possibility that we have made a mistake. I have considered that possibility and I am not at present aware of any mistakes I may have made.

Your point about there not being a difference between 5000 and 3000 is simply wrong. It's different by a factor of 5/3. How many billionaires would turn down the opportunity to have 5/3 more money? None.

[Dude65535]

Your point about there not being a difference between 5000 and 3000 is simply wrong. It's different a factor of 5/3. How many billionaires would turn down the opportunity to have 5/3 more money? None.

Well yes they didn't get to be billionaires by turning down money but the more relevant question is how different would their lives be with 5/3 more money.

[Astrohacker]

Your point about there not being a difference between 5000 and 3000 is simply wrong. It's different a factor of 5/3. How many billionaires would turn down the opportunity to have 5/3 more money? None.

Well yes they didn't get to be billionaires by turning down money but the more relevant question is how different would their lives be with 5/3 more money.

Depends on what they do with the money. If they sit on it, nothing. If they try to maximize their ability to improve the world with it, then they can make 5/3 as much of a difference.

[caston]

Well I didn't buy to many bitcoins because i'd just started a new job and had to pay down some debt. The only way I could put money into MtGox at the time was via paypal and their official trader. I didn't buy more because I was sceptical that I could actually get the money out of MtGox. I bought 80 or so coins from coinpal I was putting in small amounts at a time like maybe $25 AUD into mtgox through the paypal exchanger. I finally went to put about $200 in and that was around the time of the DDoS attacks and my money came back to me because Paypal decided to ban bitcoin. I also mined about 5 coins myself but so them because I thought it was a correction. Had low buy orders in again and was expecting further corrections but the price went out of orbit.

So I still have about 10g in fiat money debt and zero bitcoins. I do however have about 1300 namecoins and I might try and  get some more of those and of course might buy some more bitcoins if there is another crash. I have to figure out how to get my money in and out of the market though as I live in Australia.

[DATA COMMANDER]

Your point about there not being a difference between 5000 and 3000 is simply wrong. It's different a factor of 5/3. How many billionaires would turn down the opportunity to have 5/3 more money? None.

Suppose you approached a person with a net worth of one billion dollars and made the following proposal: I will use a fair random number generator to pick an integer between 1 and n. If the integer I pick is n, you will give me your fortune and, furthermore, will owe me $100,000. If I pick any other integer, I will give you one billion dollars.

For what minimum value of n do you think that it would be reasonable to accept this offer?

[Astrohacker]

Your point about there not being a difference between 5000 and 3000 is simply wrong. It's different a factor of 5/3. How many billionaires would turn down the opportunity to have 5/3 more money? None.

Suppose you approached a person with a net worth of one billion dollars and made the following proposal: I will use a fair random number generator to pick an integer between 1 and n. If the integer I pick is n, you will give me your fortune and, furthermore, will owe me $100,000. If I pick any other integer, I will give you one billion dollars.

For what minimum value of n do you think that it would be reasonable to accept this offer?

I don't know, but I get your point. If you're going to take out a loan to place a bet, you better be very sure you're going to win.

[unk]

Your point about there not being a difference between 5000 and 3000 is simply wrong. It's different a factor of 5/3. How many billionaires would turn down the opportunity to have 5/3 more money? None.

the opportunity to get it isn't costless. most people would be irrational to take a substantial risk of bankruptcy for a chance to have $5 billion instead of $3 billion, given, among other things, the diminishing marginal utility of wealth.

And my conclusions have done nothing but sharpen on the incredible outcome: bitcoin is likely to actually be adopted as a currency by a huge fraction of the world.

for one thing, three weeks isn't enough time to make lifelong investment decisions. if you feel rushed, that itself is probably the result of counterproductive speculative pressures. recall that 'get in before it's too late' is an almost certain hallmark of a scam or at least hypothetical speculation. in non-speculative investments, there's a presumption that the price impounds at least some rational calculus by the market, so that waiting a month ought not to make a big difference.

as to the particulars, your interesting article runs into a few potential problems that you might want to consider being more cautious about.

first, exponential growth is almost always unsustainable and, in practice, is almost never sustained. relatedly, past performance of any commodity does not predict future performance. to assume that it's as easy (and rapid) to grow from 1000 to 10000 users as it is to grow from 100,000 to 1,000,000 would have been an incorrect assumption for almost any technology, and it's not justified here.

second, you downplay various attack vectors. it's very hard to predict, but many have offered at least credible analyses that suggest (for example) that governments could readily shut down bitcoin. there are also potential internal problems, like scalability and the evolution of the fee structure. at the very least, there are more unknowns than knowns here.

third, i don't see a justification for your claim that there can be only one decentralised online currency. you tie this claim only to the notion of the security of the block chain based on hashing power, but

(1) alternative currencies could rely on alternative proof of work,

(2) alternative currencies could rely on alternatives to the need for proof of work, and this becomes sharply easier as soon as you relax the design criterion of 'total decentralisation' toward 'decentralised for all practical purposes', and

(3) 'most secure' is never important in the real world; what's important is whether a technology is secure enough for the purposes for which it's being used, in view of its threat models.

(as a rough analogy, the rijndael cypher was adopted as the advanced encryption standard, aes, even though almost everyone believed it to be less secure than serpent and twofish. but it was faster and good enough for all conceivable practical purposes, given the standard's timeframe, threat model, and use cases.)

i'm not sure why i keep engaging these discussions, only to be misinterpreted as a bitcoin detractor. i'm actually trying to help people make better investment decisions, and though you don't have any particular reason to believe me, i have quite a lot of experience in this area. as a matter of full disclosure, at today's rates about 3% of my wealth is currently in a large pile of bitcoins that i mined cheaply early on, though that was not a conscious investment decision and amounts to little more than a lottery win.

[Jaime Frontero]

I am riding this pig wherever it takes me.

yup.

but i ain't spending anything in my dreams.  i'm a patient man - and i'll think about that later.

[marcus_of_augustus]

I think Hal Finney said it best with 1 in 100 million longshot on bitcoin making it big. For some computer time or exchange conversion fees I'll take those odds.

Things this revolutionary do not come along very often, like only every 300 years to a millenia in the past have we had changes in philosophical and technical aspects of the medium of exchange.

IF it comes in, it is going to be big, there is no doubt about that, it is a huge swing for the fence. But then when you can see for yourself the product of the brainpower that has gone into it is worth some confidence. The current problems surrounding the inefficient allocation and distribution of monetary information has been identified and a technical solution has been found that seems to work so far.

The bottom line is, money is about power. Recent history has demonstrated terrible abuses by those entrusted with much of those powers. Maybe through no fault of their own but just the centralised nature of the system they inherited and their own individual weaknesses and greedy responses to the situations they found themselves in. Hopefully the new wealthy elite will act more responsibly ... (hops in the boat off to "The Island" ... outta here.   )

[unk]

I think Hal Finney said it best with 1 in 100 million longshot on bitcoin making it big. For some computer time or exchange conversion fees I'll take those odds.

...

The bottom line is, money is about power. Recent history has demonstrated terrible abuses by those entrusted with much of those powers. Maybe through no fault of their own but just the centralised nature of the system they inherited and their own individual weaknesses and greedy responses to the situations they found themselves in. Hopefully the new wealthy elite will act more responsibly ...

wow, i agree completely. i wouldn't have given good odds a week ago that moa and i would agree quite this much on anything, so perhaps you should take any predictions i make about the future with a grain of salt.  :-)

(to be serious for a moment, though, my point is that i'm not actually making any predictions. i'm just advising caution against the more reckless of speculative approaches to investment. that it's worth 'some computer time' is exactly right. and of course most people could afford to lose $50 in the exchanges, though keep in mind that there's no shortage of possible ways to invest $50, and it might not be best to be guided only by the availability heuristic.)

[FreeMoney]

Seriously 1 in 100 million chance of what? We've already got a 1 in 1 chance at 100000% increase in value.

[marcus_of_augustus]

Yeah, that 1 in 100 million quote was when they were worthless 0.001 or so I think ... so from there we have already appreciates 10,000 times so those odds are much better already, obviously the pay-off is not as large but neither is the risk  ... cost averaging, (buy all the way up )

What's 10^8 divided by 10^3 .. 10^5 .... still a 1 in 100,000 long shot so plenty of room for more success or failure.

[Bit_Happy]

While I share the belief that bitcoin or something very like it will play a major role in the future, I think the road there is going to be a lot rougher.

I imagine we will see a huge boom then a bust, after that those who stick around will build the meaning full economy that will allow bitcoin or its successor to dominate.

I don't care about the busts. I am riding this pig wherever it takes me. If it tanks, I'll have a helluva story to tell. I'm sick of half measures. I'm swinging for the fences and If I strike out, so be it.  I won't be some mediocre drone living a life of quiet desperation. I believe in bitcoin and I'm going for broke, knowing the risks.  

I'm with you. Want to camp together if this shit burns?

Topic:
I am pretty confident we are the new wealthy elite, gentlemen.
Quote:
I'm with you. Want to camp together if this shit burns?
^^^
Camping together is the wealthy elite back-up plan?