The real price of bitcoin, less than an iphone app

[NotLambchop]

...
The valuation of whatsapp comes from it's massive user base. ...

The valuation of Bitcoin is certainly not the code but the user base.  I can compile a clone coin, identical in every respect to Bitcoin, that would be 100% worthless.  Not sure if I'm following the logic here.

[yelloyello]

The 2014 Winter Olypics in Sochi costs 2 and a half app.
The Iraq War costs 40 app.
The health care costs of alcohol in the US are 10 apps a year.
I don't get your point. Why do you compare costs of things with a coin?
You can name thousends of things that costs money.

For Whatsapp is payed $19 billion dollars, people use it as we speak, but maybe in a period people like to use Telegram or Wechat instead. Point is, one day, the product is gone while people still text.

So what is your point? BTC is like money, you can re-use it forever.
For your info, BTC is not a product. It provide a way to trade products.

So it is silly to compare a coin with a product.

[jonald_fyookball]

...
The valuation of whatsapp comes from it's massive user base. ...

The valuation of Bitcoin is certainly not the code but the user base.  I can compile a clone coin, identical in every respect to Bitcoin, that would be 100% worthless.  Not sure if I'm following the logic here.

I think we just said the same thing.  value is in user base not code base.

[slowlyslowly]

agree with most of the posters that this is not a useful comparison.

1. whatsapp or things like it are an entity (and in this case has users you can get to ie advertise to so "monetise".)
so you can establish a value someone will pay for the entity,

2. you cannot do that with bitcoin. the producers of the bitcoins have already been paid so each bitcoin sits as its own entity. It has a use but that use is the lowering of transaction costs to someone by buying and then sending the bitcoin. If there exists in the countries the sender and reciver are in items like visa etc (bitcoin competitors) then the value of lesser transactions costs is very small (say 1% of the $ value of the transaction).

3. what i see as wrong about many posters is thinking the price (value?) of a bitcoin will rise massively as bitcoin use increases to the millions. Just while no one can say the current price (at $630 is high or low) there is no way to know what the price of 1 bitcoin is when it is widely adopted. That will be determined initially by the amount of speculation that goes on and once that is over the landing prie of the bitcoin. It could be as little as $100. there is no reason for it to be $1 million

[jonald_fyookball]

agree with most of the posters that this is not a useful comparison.

1. whatsapp or things like it are an entity (and in this case has users you can get to ie advertise to so "monetise".)
so you can establish a value someone will pay for the entity,

2. you cannot do that with bitcoin. the producers of the bitcoins have already been paid so each bitcoin sits as its own entity. It has a use but that use is the lowering of transaction costs to someone by buying and then sending the bitcoin. If there exists in the countries the sender and reciver are in items like visa etc (bitcoin competitors) then the value of lesser transactions costs is very small (say 1% of the $ value of the transaction).

3. what i see as wrong about many posters is thinking the price (value?) of a bitcoin will rise massively as bitcoin use increases to the millions. Just while no one can say the current price (at $630 is high or low) there is no way to know what the price of 1 bitcoin is when it is widely adopted. That will be determined initially by the amount of speculation that goes on and once that is over the landing prie of the bitcoin. It could be as little as $100. there is no reason for it to be $1 million

We can look at market cap compared to other major currencies.  If market cap is 1T that represents 100x increase w same number of coins.

[m3g4tr0n]

Price of whatsapp higher than the GDP of the 85 poorest countries. 

[freedomno1]

First, I like bitcoin, I invested in it, but in reality it is not nearly as big as some people talk it up to be.  

Fact.  Market share of bitcoin- not even 8 billion USD.
Fact.  Facebook bought Whatsapp for more than 19 billion USD.  

That means that bitcoin as a service has a value of less than half of Whatsapp, a simple text messaging app for sending free texts and pics from smartphone to smartphone.  

Yes, maybe Facebook overpaid for Whatsapp, but still...... for all the hours of development and years of coding and work done on the bitcoin code, a simple iphone/android app for sending texts is worth more.

Just something to think about.    

By that logic Bitcoin is worse less then the value of a website.  That website might be Facebook but it is still less then the value of a website.

Everyone knows Whatsapp was hugely overpriced and every shareholder of Facebook lost some real dollars the moment that overpriced purchase was made.

That was easily one of the worst purchases of the year in my opinion not for its utility but because I don't see it covering costs

“Fifty years ago, no 55-person company was bought for $19 billion. And that’s a good thing,” Gates said on “This Week” Sunday.

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2014/03/bill-gates-on-whatsapp-acquisition-zuckerberg-bold-and-aggressive/

I guess I'll wait though

While speaking of Facebook’s Zuckerberg, Gates said, “It’s an example of how he’s an out-of-the-box thinker, he’s aggressive, I hope it works out for him– not everybody would’ve done it.  I’ll say that for sure.”

[fendlestick]

Facebook didn't pay so much for an app. Facebook paid so much for the users that are using it. The users and their data is the product.

This ^