Why is bitcoin not tulip mania?

[Triton]

Why is bitcoin not tulip mania? or even why do u think it is?

[laowai80]

It's not tulip mania, because it's bitcoin mania 

Seriously though, bitcoin is much closer to the concept of money than tulips are. In what aspects? Please do your home work and come back to ask if something's not clear.

[jballs]

Why is bitcoin not tulip mania? or even why do u think it is?

In a word, utility. In an elaborate but succinct illustration... http://youtu.be/BzcEiszx09g

Where is the bubble, and what are the tulips?

[beetcoin]

you should do a search on tulips here.. it's been talked about ad nauseum, especially on the economics subforum. calling it a tulip mania is like calling it a pyramid scheme or ponzi scheme. it's wrong. you may think BTC will burst like a bubble, and that would be a legitimate opinion.. but they are not tulips, or a pyramid/ponzi scheme.

[Bobbydiggital]

its funny how many people are refering to tulipmania when talking about bitcoins, bitcoins are revolutionary, its necessary and will help people to be a little more free, i dont think tulip have anything to do with this. If im wrong it would be a good story to talk about once i will be very old.

[Lethn]

In order to explain that we'd have to spend hours and several pages explaining it to you and simplifying it down so ordinary people get understand it and I think I can safely say for most people here you just can't be bothered because your humouring somebody who doesn't want to learn about Bitcoin in the first place, but here's a short summary of what I've learned so far that you can research on your own which has consistently managed to affect price for me.

. Difficulty - how difficult it is to mine coins always affects the rarity of them and therefore their value

. Hashpower on the network - This directly ties into difficulty so if you see a huge amount of hashpower then that means something big is going to happen to the price

. Money supply - I'm not talking about price inflation, these are two completely different things, my theory is that coins aren't actually worth that much but paper money is so hyperinflated that the price are being pushed up to crazy highs because there isn't any price fixing going on, the reason the rest of the economy hasn't caught on yet is because central banks are yet again trying to make all their numbers look good for the general populace, gold and silver is regularly manipulated as an example but it's extremely difficult to manipulate Bitcoin without people knowing

. Nearly anonymous transactions - Do I honestly have to explain this again and again? You don't think the ability to make transactions on the internet and trade with people with your identity not being spied on by everybody out there isn't valuable? That alone in this era of surveillance is probably why Bitcoin spiked to $1000 nevermind the prices we're all looking at now

. No restrictions to trading with different countries -  Fuck the politicians, now if you want to help out people in a struggling country that has been paypal blockaded you can or you can send money to a friend without having to pay ridiculous fees

. Open source - I would never have taken an interest in Bitcoin if it wasn't open source, if you really do think this is a scam or a bubble, you've got some research to do on what open source is and it shows just how ignorant people are when the code is all out there and can be easily looked at and improved, people are already spamming their own ideas on the alternate currencies board and I think it's fantastic

[Bitlend]

 "how difficult it is to mine coins always affects the rarity of them and therefore their value"

Not all rare things have value.

Just sayin.

[jballs]

In order to explain that we'd have to spend hours and several pages explaining it to you and simplifying it down so ordinary people get understand it and I think I can safely say for most people here you just can't be bothered...

That's why I made the video. 46 minutes about covers it (actually my first one was 90 minutes but my rendering crashed...probably for the best). The world is tulips.

[Elwar]

I have never heard this analogy with tulip mania before. Please indulge us all.

[bryant.coleman]

In case of tulip mania, the price crashed as more and more tulip bulbs were made available. However, since the supply of Bitcoins are limited, there is no chance of that happening with the BTC.

[ar88]

Why is bitcoin not tulip mania? or even why do u think it is?

because I can't send a tulip half way across the world in 60minutes..  

[franky1]

tulip mania started because tulips were new to a country and demand was high. the downful was that there is no fixed supply of tulips, and once everyone has them they can all grow their own and make supply outweight demand.

bitcoin however has a fixed supply. and as more people get bitcoins there are less left to get in the world. sure there are minutes/hours when the daily 3600 generated coins along with hoarders selling old coins out-supplies the amount of people buying that day. but that lasts for maybe 2 hours..

generally bitcoin supply (through mining) is always going to be outside of the hands of 'everyday joe' thus people will continue buying coins or opening businesses to get coins forever increasing the price

there are many mathematical formula's to suggesst bitcoin is still very early in its growth.

take for instance this scenario
imagine 1.5million people only ever put a single $10k into bitcoin. with todays slightly over 12m coins in existance that equates to a
market cap of $15,600,000,000 with a individual coin value of $1300.

thats just 1.5 million people, thats just an average of a persons tax free allowance for one year.

and with each day there are only 3600 new coins available which if you continue on the bases that each investor on average invests $10k into bitcoin ever in their life. then the newly mined coins would only allow for 468 new people to join the bitcoin ecosystem without the price fluctuating.

yes there are sellers that leave the bitcoin ecosystem, but the supply of bitcoins only allows for 468 population growth at a $10k per head spend. or 4680 population growth per day at a $1k spend. (you can play with the numbers as you deem fit)

now to put this into reality. i am only talking about 1.5million people so far in bitcoin and only allowing for under 500 each day to join in just t keep bitcoin at $1300

there are 7 billion people in the world and some of them want to invest ALOT more then just a one time only $10k investment.

bitcoin is still at the start of global growth. and there will not be a saturation point because there is no endless supply. bitcoin will never be a tulip mania

[Elwar]

How do you vote with tulips?

Or implement contracts?

[Ekaros]

Read the wikipedia article about tulip mania, not too long and clears up a lot.

Bitcoin is mania. Just it's own kind of mania.

[Elwar]

My car is like red tulips.

My car is red.

[beetcoin]

my peen is like tulips, as it has two lips on it