Silk Road forums
Discussion => Silk Road discussion => Topic started by: wackmanblu on March 21, 2013, 11:16 pm
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Has anyone noticed the HUGE valuation of the bitcoin in the last day or so? It went form approx $45 to over $80 USD - almost a 100% value increase - literally overnight.
This is happening just as the new generation of ASIC's are being shipped (ASIC's make bitcoins by 'mining' them). Something seems fishy. A select few people are making hundreds of thousands of $$ (possibly millions) overnight as the new ASIC's are capable of mining between 300 and 400 BTC's per unit a month! that's like $30k.
I shoulda been an ASIC investor!
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Heres a prediction, a good prediction, alot of people share the same views.
Sell your bitcoin before european bank bailout gets written in stone. Thank me later. And for the vendors like myself, hedge your account.
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Heres a prediction, a good prediction, alot of people share the same views.
Sell your bitcoin before european bank bailout gets written in stone. Thank me later. And for the vendors like myself, hedge your account.
Well ok, can you expound upon that thought so we can understand why? I fail to see how a bank bailout or anything else really will effect BTC long-term at all. In fact, I'd rather have my money in BTC than in some other currency. The USD is shit and is only going to devalue from here. Is there a BTC -> gold option? I'd like to hear more about this please.
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It's strange that so many people are buying up Coins this week. You'd think a mass sell off would drop the price , as ink is a lot people have been selling off their coins this week. But people are still buying! It's like a pyramid scheme, as more new investors come in and buy bit coins the value goes up for very one who already invested earlier. It seems the more news articles about bit coins or Silk Road the more higher bit coin gets. A few more news shows and it will reach three figures!
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So is this massive increase in value due to people investing in Bitcoin? I had been gone from the road for about 2 months and when I left the value was at 13USD per bitcoin! It has now gone up to 80!? This sounds outrageous... I'm a little confused and somewhat skeptical. Is it safe to spend bitcoin? Should I just leave my account and let the bitcoin stack up?
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Bitcoin Fever: The World's Largest Online Currency
21 Mar 2013
Sara Eisen takes a look at Bitcoin, what it is and how it's used. She speaks on Bloomberg Television's'' Market Makers.'' ...
clearnet link
http://www.bloomberg.com/video/a-look-at-the-world-s-largest-online-currency-cPMjkXT0QB~SWJbQWWaB2g.html
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Fleeing the Euro for Bitcoins
Worried your government is going to take your savings? There's an app for that.
Actually, there's an entire currency: Bitcoin, an online-only currency based on a decentralized network. It's unregulated, hard to track and increasingly common. Since Sunday, downloads of three Bitcoin-related apps have surged on Spanish charts, Bloomberg Businessweek reports.
The interest in Bitcoin coincided with news that the Cyprus government planned to tax savings accounts as part of the country's bailout program. The value of the online currency increased more than 20 percent in the past two days to $64, according to the latest price information.
The downside is it's a currency that has experienced price fluctuations, occasional hacking and account thefts, and is a favorite for black-market transactions, including almost 2 million a month in illegal online drug purchases at the Silk Road marketplace. That some Europeans are investing savings in Bitcoin isn't exactly a sign of confidence in European banking.
According to a European Central Bank report published in October, increased demand for Bitcoin "could have a negative impact on the reputation of central banks," especially if the public perceives Bitcoin's rise is due to "a central bank not doing its job properly."
Bitcoin removes financial institutions completely from transactions, allowing users to conduct two-party exchanges over the Internet without a middleman. People can exchange local currencies into Bitcoins on online exchange sites and store them in e-wallets. Payment-processing services such as BitPay allow merchants to accept the currency as payments. The virtual money can buy a range of goods and services, including video strippers, gun parts, pizza and WordPress upgrades.
Without regulation or integration into existing banking structures, Bitcoin doesn't yet appeal to investors looking to park large amounts of money. But as the currency grows more mainstream, with banking confidence eroding, Bitcoin is something to watch.
clearnet link
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-03-20/fleeing-the-euro-for-bitcoins-.html
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Subbed
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Thanks for the paste, Dcompany... interesting.
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A lot of people are moving there savings out of euros into bitcoin because of whats happening with cyprus. Now is a good time to buy and watch them raise in value. Will (IMO) the $ will probably break the 3 figure mark within a few weeks.
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subbed.
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I really wanna buy something, but I also don't want to be broke when btc might double again.
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I still don't know what to think.
I mine BtC on the side with a PC video card just to pay for order postage on SR. I usually made about USD $1.65/day, that just went up to $3.28/day. Not bad just for leaving a machine running. I may be able to make enough for an entire order plus postage if this keeps up.
... still I can't shake an eerie feeling that there's some kind of market manipulation going on somewhere ... I guess we'll know in a day or two based on if the value crashes or remains stable.
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if it does crash, it will only raise again quickly as people but up all the cheap btc. Especially with all the media attention bitcoin is getting at the moment. Everyone wants some!
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BTW - what does "subbed" mean?
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Not bad just for leaving a machine running. I may be able to make enough for an entire order plus postage if this keeps up.
Is that considering the power used to make it though? I've thought about doing it just for fun, it seems you pretty much aren't going to make any significant money unless you're running a huge rig. Or supposedly got an ASIC.
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Not bad just for leaving a machine running. I may be able to make enough for an entire order plus postage if this keeps up.
Is that considering the power used to make it though? I've thought about doing it just for fun, it seems you pretty much aren't going to make any significant money unless you're running a huge rig. Or supposedly got an ASIC.
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the trend is for southern EU(Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Spain,France) states increasing taxes and northern richer EU states lending them thereby increasing their deficit in near future...so it seems like there will be higher taxes in all of EU
hence bitcoin/ LR offers no-tax anonymous alternative to hide from governments (they are good for nothing)
this along with recent halving in btc production rates and more demand kicking btc rates up IMO
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BTW - what does "subbed" mean?
Subscribed to thread ;)
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Fuck..
Lol...I had 2.90 bit coins I got rid of for 46$ or something a few days ago.....sigh.
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Surely the value will take another huge jump leading in to the 420 sale?
I can't see why the value would drop at all in the foreseeable future .
Especially if more and more people trade goods for it, legal or otherwise.
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lol i would of made almost as much money if i just invested in bitcoins back when i started rather then flipping drugs...... o well atleast i get to meet cool people :) and grow as a person of course
I'm just thinking of some vendors out there who had say 10grand in bits back in in early fall now they have like 70grand X)
I feel like bitcoin is gonna be the great equalizer
"You wont change anything until you change the way money works" is a favorite quote of mine and i think it will hold true
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i have another theory on why the price is going up. nobody is going to like it tho. Some government is slowly buying each and every coin up and keeping it. if theres no coin, theres no money flow, no coin flow, nobody is buying shit from SR or doing anything illegal anymore. once they stop producing coin thats it no more coin. just a theory.
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I see others are jumping on the wagon of my prediction, if banks open up and they negotiate low interest rates with the government your going to wish you sold your coins, i do so as i receive them...budget is due to drop any time.
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I see others are jumping on the wagon of my prediction, if banks open up and they negotiate low interest rates with the government your going to wish you sold your coins, i do so as i receive them...budget is due to drop any time.
you are going to wish you kept them when they crack triple digits in two weeks.
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^Please explain further. (sellitall99)
As for governments buying up coins, I highly doubt it. I don't think they really care about SR that much.
Generally, as long as they are seen to be doing something things flow as usual. So much government related activity is funded
by drug sales...
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I have placed orders for a number of ASIC machines and am expecting delivery in the coming weeks.
@88G/h per machine i am hoping to make back my investment in a couple of months
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Subbed, cant wait to see where all this goes!!! I just purchased some btc at 47 yesterday, and today on 65 something..
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Wow, $70. Holy dogshit batman! I wonder if this will crash or stabilize at some high point?
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It's over $80 USD this morning.
I have placed orders for a number of ASIC machines and am expecting delivery in the coming weeks.
@88G/h per machine i am hoping to make back my investment in a couple of months
At 88G/h you'll make approx $22k in one month! - that should keep you in dope and pay off your ASIC in a week or 2.
Not bad just for leaving a machine running. I may be able to make enough for an entire order plus postage if this keeps up.
Is that considering the power used to make it though? I've thought about doing it just for fun, it seems you pretty much aren't going to make any significant money unless you're running a huge rig. Or supposedly got an ASIC.
I'm fortunate in that electricity is a fixed monthly cost for me, so whether I use it or not, same same.
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"At 88G/h you'll make approx $22k in one month! - that should keep you in dope and pay off your ASIC in a week or 2."
How do you figure this? and how much does an ASIC set up cost?
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"At 88G/h you'll make approx $22k in one month! - that should keep you in dope and pay off your ASIC in a week or 2."
How do you figure this? and how much does an ASIC set up cost?
ASICs are specifically developed for mining BitCoins. They are hard to come by, you have to pre-order them at approx $1200 USD per machine (that will give approx 66G/h mining cycles) and delivery can take up to 9 moths. If you use an online bitcoin mining calculater:
CLEARNET - http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator
... then you can see approx how much you'll mine although a lot is based on various factors such as current difficulty mining (it will only go up according to moors law. meaning less results for the same computing power) and if other miners beat you to the blockchain of any specific bitcoin. Also, who knows what the value of the BtC will be 9 months from now. These are complex issues to explain in a single "sound bite" of a thread. It really comes down to those who are lucky enough to have the latest, greatest ASICs right now. If we all had them and they were easy to get then the value of the BtC would be drastically lower,
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butterfly labs ;)
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WOW....i was doing it all wrong, spent 700+ BTC on drugs was not he way to make money....i should have just saved the BTC's!!!!! That's almost 49k!!!!!.....granted it was over the entire course of my SR life span(11months), but DAMN!!!!! fucking this shit is crazy, do you people really think we'll see 100+ ??? cuz that's still incentive to buy now....
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WOW....i was doing it all wrong, spent 700+ BTC on drugs was not he way to make money....i should have just saved the BTC's!!!!! That's almost 49k!!!!!.....granted it was over the entire course of my SR life span(11months), but DAMN!!!!! fucking this shit is crazy, do you people really think we'll see 100+ ??? cuz that's still incentive to buy now....
Im kicking myself for not saving all those btc when they were just $5! If everybody keeps holding onto their coins, then wouldnt the value drop? Right now i think everybody is buying coins so the value will rise but if they just hold on to them, they will either drop or plateu hard.
I dunno ,Im enjoying my account now though lol
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Im kicking myself for not saving all those btc when they were just $5! If everybody keeps holding onto their coins, then wouldnt the value drop? Right now i think everybody is buying coins so the value will rise but if they just hold on to them, they will either drop or plateu hard.
I dunno ,Im enjoying my account now though lol
Welcome back @ camomug :)
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Yeah, I have no idea if I should buy and hold onto stuff for awhile or what. I'm worried that if I do that it'll crash but if i hold off it'll keep climbing.
The crashes in the past occurred due to either hacking or large holders selling off large quantities, correct?
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Yeah, I have no idea if I should buy and hold onto stuff for awhile or what. I'm worried that if I do that it'll crash but if i hold off it'll keep climbing.
The crashes in the past occurred due to either hacking or large holders selling off large quantities, correct?
yes
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Does anyone think there will eventually be an easier way of procuring BTC? Right now the 'easiest' way involves running to a bank with hands full of cash and trusting someone like Bitinstant to send you BTC when they're constantly down. Or if you're realllly patient you can use someone like Dwolla and then you don't have to leave your house to buy BTC but the process takes like a week.
Until it's easier to procure BTC I think eventually it will stop growing in value and just plateau. Most people aren't technologically savvy enough to learn how to even get your hands on them.
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Let me start this off by saying I don't know much about the space program, or the bitcoin..
Anywho, to me, this seems to be an artificially high price for bitcoins. They were at $40 just a week or so ago, and now they are knocking on $80? I do not believe that these are natural forces influencing the market.
Now, this could continue for a few more days or weeks or month.
What we have here my friends is a bubble, and there is no telling when it will pop.
Like the Dutch Tulip bubble of the 18th century, or the more recent housing market. The value keeps going up up up, and people think it will always be so, but it isn't. You can spend your money on $80 coins if you want to, and they will probably make it to $100, but I am going to try to sit this one out.
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So you admit to knowing little about bitcoin, yet you're confident this is a bubble that's leading to a crash?
Logic.
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So you admit to knowing little about bitcoin, yet you're confident this is a bubble that's leading to a crash?
Logic.
One does not need to comprehend how the studs of a house work to play the housing market. Same thing. The smart move is to wait. That's what I'm going to be doing. I'd suggest to everyone else to do the same.
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You're also forgetting how any opinions on where BTC is headed are irrelevant, given how it's all just speculation. Saying that it's best to wait for a crash/much lower market price is as worthless as saying that one coin will reach $1,000 by the end of the year. No one knows, so attempting to pass off your guesses as fact is pointless.
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From mtgox, it seems like its starting to go down slightly. But from previous patterns, the rate usually straightens up for a bit and then just shoots right up again
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You're also forgetting how any opinions on where BTC is headed are irrelevant, given how it's all just speculation. Saying that it's best to wait for a crash/much lower market price is as worthless as saying that one coin will reach $1,000 by the end of the year. No one knows, so attempting to pass off your guesses as fact is pointless.
You are correct in that regard.
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From mtgox, it seems like its starting to go down slightly. But from previous patterns, the rate usually straightens up for a bit and then just shoots right up again
looks like someone big sold droping the rate but its back up now
btc market aint' rational like other markets in a sense as a crackheads need dope at any cost
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The run up is scary fast... That to me is indicative of way more buying power than selling power... where does a bit coin come from? Can "someone" just "print" more? What happens when the big buyers keep buying them all that there are so few left the price doesn't matter since you just can't get them? If a large government (like the US) wanted to "kill" bitcoins, could they not just "buy them all"? It sure would be cheaper than the so called war on drugs.... Lots of questions, not many answers, I happen to hate conspiracy theories but something here is not adding up.
Oh and yeah, I sure wish I still had the 3k bitcoins I have spent over the past year.
Peace
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Let me start this off by saying I don't know much about the space program, or the bitcoin..
Anywho, to me, this seems to be an artificially high price for bitcoins. They were at $40 just a week or so ago, and now they are knocking on $80? I do not believe that these are natural forces influencing the market.
Now, this could continue for a few more days or weeks or month.
What we have here my friends is a bubble, and there is no telling when it will pop.
Like the Dutch Tulip bubble of the 18th century, or the more recent housing market. The value keeps going up up up, and people think it will always be so, but it isn't. You can spend your money on $80 coins if you want to, and they will probably make it to $100, but I am going to try to sit this one out.
I would have to agree. I think something is not quite on the level. This reeks of market manipulation - nothing appreciates 100% overnight without some kind of obvious indication as to why. I'll hold my coins for now, but if if goes to $100 USD then I'm selling, if it drops to $60 USD than I'm buying - weed on SR that is. Ha! Suck it Stock Exchange!
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The run up is scary fast... That to me is indicative of way more buying power than selling power... where does a bit coin come from? Can "someone" just "print" more? What happens when the big buyers keep buying them all that there are so few left the price doesn't matter since you just can't get them? If a large government (like the US) wanted to "kill" bitcoins, could they not just "buy them all"? It sure would be cheaper than the so called war on drugs.... Lots of questions, not many answers, I happen to hate conspiracy theories but something here is not adding up.
Oh and yeah, I sure wish I still had the 3k bitcoins I have spent over the past year.
Peace
Actually you can just print more - I'm doing so right now by mining them on my PC. My video card is doing a shitload of computations per second that actually verifies Bitcoin (BtC) transactions. It's calling verifying the blockchain and all it does is ensure that there are no counterfeit BtC in circulation. By doing so I 'earn' new BtCs - only so many are released at any given time by mining and verifying the existing blockchain. This will go on until the year 2140 when all BtCs are per-determined to be mined out. Bitcoins are a complex commodity (and yes I'm calling them a commodity) insofar as they only exist because we ascribe value to them - they aren't backed by gold or any country's GDP, they have value only because we've all agreed that they do.
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how many boxes ya have mining?
if ya dont mind me askin :)
Peace,
ChemCat
8)
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I only have one PC mining and it's my video card doing the work. I'm getting about 400 Mhps which translates into about $4.00 a day given current BtC valuations. Anyone could do this, but my video card cost me about $350 a couple months ago. I use it for more than mining (I play a game or two) but when not gaming I mine.
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I have access to about 20 old windows xp boxes (would be cpu mining) and free electricity, does anyone know if this would be worth it to set up mining on these? or what kind of returns i could expect.
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I'm a little surprised more folks haven't checked out Btcs when they started using them!
Here is a very good article explaining ALL about them, how they came to be and how they are 'mined' Warning! ClearNet ..... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin
IMO Satoshi and the Btc developers had considered most, if not all the factors affecting Btcs growth! The "difficulty" in mining Btcs goes 'up' every 2016 'blocks' to compensate for several factors, from the price of electricity, to the effects of Moore's Law!
Warning; ClearNet https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty ........... http://bitcoinminer.com/post/3751270526/hashing-difficulty-76194
"Earlier today the difficulty threshold for generating bitcoins went from 55590 to 76194. The difficulty readjusts every 2,016 blocks and today this happened when block 112,896 we reached.
The hashing strength of the entire Bitcoin network is now at roughly 545 GHash/second using the new difficulty measurement. Early calculations for the next adjustment indicate a leveling off however with nearly two weeks left before that happens there’s no way to be certain it won’t jump again. It is quite possible though that we are done seeing 40% or higher increases of the difficulty.
Supply of the GPU hardware used widely for mining will likely loosen now that ATI has released their high end graphics card the Radeon HD 6990. Miners using hardware less powerful than the HD 69xx, HD 5970, or HD 5870 are responding to the jump in difficulty by switching to mining pools. There are currently five public mining pools in operation.
The cost of electricity for the graphic from above was calculated for a typical miner running equipment at home under residential utility rates in the U.S. Elsewhere in the world, electric rates vary significantly. If the network hashing strength continues to increase yet the market exchange rate doesn’t follow, then mining will soon turn unprofitable in certains parts of the world. As a currency that knows no borders, that disparity could result in a significant loss of opportunity for some.
When a bitcoin had just hit price parity with the dollar following the Security Now netcast and the subsequent press coverage in Slashdot and elsewhere, the cost of electricity to mine a bitcoin was just under $0.08. Five weeks later, thanks to the increase in bitcoin hashing difficulty, the cost of electricity to mine a bitcoin is now just under $0.20."
" What network hash rate results in a given difficulty?
The difficulty is adjusted every 2016 blocks based on the time it took to find the previous 2016 blocks. At the desired rate of one block each 10 minutes, 2016 blocks would take exactly two weeks to find.(actually it's 15 days! IDK how they got the math wrong!)
If the previous 2016 blocks took more than two weeks to find, the difficulty is reduced. If they took less than two weeks, the difficulty is increased. The change in difficulty is in proportion to the amount of time over or under two weeks the previous 2016 blocks took to find.
To find a block, the hash must be less than the target. The hash is effectively a random number between 0 and 2**256-1."
A TRULY fascinating currency .... GO the Mighty Bitcoins!
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Clearnet Link
http://www.riderfans.com/forum/showthread.php?114647-Alberta-Man-Selling-House-In-Bitcoin
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I have access to about 20 old windows xp boxes (would be cpu mining) and free electricity, does anyone know if this would be worth it to set up mining on these? or what kind of returns i could expect.
Unfortunately PC CPU cycles contribute very little to the mining rate. All 20 PCs you have, with even the latest intel processors would still take quite a while (months) to mine even half a BtC.
You really have to use a video card, and it should be an AMD - not an Nvidea - only because of the way each card processes information.
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The run up is scary fast... That to me is indicative of way more buying power than selling power... where does a bit coin come from? Can "someone" just "print" more? What happens when the big buyers keep buying them all that there are so few left the price doesn't matter since you just can't get them? If a large government (like the US) wanted to "kill" bitcoins, could they not just "buy them all"? It sure would be cheaper than the so called war on drugs.... Lots of questions, not many answers, I happen to hate conspiracy theories but something here is not adding up.
Oh and yeah, I sure wish I still had the 3k bitcoins I have spent over the past year.
Peace
You can "print" or mine more however there is a 21 mil cap on the total amount of BTC that can ever be created, which is part of the genius of the coin. You can't make anymore after that point, unlike the Fed and other central banks that can print the shit out of their currency and devalue and inflate it to death and cause an economic crisis.
Also you cannot "kill" the BTC. If a government was intending to buy up all the coin it would be for investment purposes, not to destroy the coin. You cannot destroy the coin by buying up all the coins and then never using them/losing the encryption password there will always be someone out there with at least a few hundred or thousands coins meaning they would start to be traded in millibitcoins and the price of USD per coin would be in the 5 figures as everyone is trading now in millibits from the lack of volume (quick question what is the lowest amount that can be sent to another wallet? I know it is called the "satoshi" but how much is the satoshi beyond the decimal point?). However, people would still be able to mine and will be able to mine for a very long time and even if say the NSA puts all their hashing power into mining coin with an intent to own it all and then "destroy" the amount they still wouldn't be able to wrestle all of it from the miners out there with insane rigs and ASIC setups, it will take too long to get to the 21 mil cap anyway so BTC is very foolproof. The only real way to destroy it is some sort of natural market crash and everyone stops using the coin or finds it valueless (don't think that will happen, ever)
Finally one last note.... very important one actually. It is the 2 million BTC address, this apparently has always loomed over the price for a while as it is an early adopters address. Basically it is the 2 million freshly minted coins(never been traded/moved from the original mining address) There has been a lot of speculation on who has this amount of coin, whether they're still alive, whether they're waiting for the right price to dumping it to have massive market manipulation or is just going to exit the market(don't think they will) Does anyone know more about this? Has anyone here watched the blockchain close enough to see if those coins have been moved? I think I'll start another thread specifically for speculating on who has those coins, why the coins haven't moved? what happened to the owner? is he alive? what could you do to the market with 2mil and info on what's going on with that address.
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as far as we know publicly, the wallet disappeared if I am not mistaken and you are just going to get wild speculation in that department. Whoever knows certainly isn't in a rush to go public :D
Kudos to the member above copycats. that post helped me understand the BTC a little more....I was not aware that the monetary levels were actually known......if they are.........that is certainly helpful to know.
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as far as we know publicly, the wallet disappeared if I am not mistaken and you are just going to get wild speculation in that department. Whoever knows certainly isn't in a rush to go public :D
Kudos to the member above copycats. that post helped me understand the BTC a little more....I was not aware that the monetary levels were actually known......if they are.........that is certainly helpful to know.
Disappeared???? You mean no longer on the block index??? Or just inactive?
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ah, perhaps I am mistaken, I thought it was in reference to a very large wallet that was discovered on another BTC forum....perhaps i am mistaken..
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ah, perhaps I am mistaken, I thought it was in reference to a very large wallet that was discovered on another BTC forum....perhaps i am mistaken..
you are probably refering to pirateat40's wallet/ He ran essentially a bitcoin ponzi scheme. Some people also suspected him as being SRs money launderer.
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yea definitely not pirateat40's wallet, this an early adopter, with 2mil on BTC just sitting there for a few years now. But what do you guys know about pirateat40 funds from that ponzi scheme he pulled? Does he actually have in under one wallet? One address? If I was him i would've immediately started sending it off into a million different addresses and try to obfuscate where the stolen funds came from. Still someone savvy could track it but if you sent it off in a million different directions then it would be harder to track. is he just holding on to all that coin????
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Here is a little blurb bout him
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Pirateat40
He made off with a shitload of bitcoins and people are still pissed about it. There was basically an all out witchhnt for this guy. People claim to have gotten in touch with his family and found out where he lives...Sorry for the thread hijack, pretty interesting stuff
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oh i'm sure he's spendin some of it :)
Hiya Bart!!
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Interesting stuff here. So wish I had gotten in on ground floor. Might buy up some LTC just in case. If it doesn't gain any value it can still be used at some point for goods I would think.
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maybe it was pireat who sold a bunch of his coins in last few days causing temporary drop but as always there is decent amount of buying after that
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BtCs are back up again.
Anyone think they'll pass $100 USD mark?
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yes. yes they will.
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within 2-3 weeks they'll be up there, and will drop a little bit on the way. but its on a slow and steady climb.
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i just need a few more bucks and the $60 I had in there 11 days ago will be $110. Come on BTC's....
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it's funny none of u guys have mentioned the now increasingly and sure to grow online gambling.
no taxes no records and anonymous!
coins will hit 100 and soon! not even a prediction.......
ima so glad cashing out has been such a long and arduous journey!
i still have just over 50 - 4 dollar coins! BITCHES :P
jk the bitches part :)
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To all those babbling about market manipulation: how exactly is the market being manipulated? There are numerous exchanges, all operating like an isolated little wallstreet all their own, each with their own price for bitcoins. That price is set by the users making bids for bitcoins and selling them at certain prices.
How can it possibly be manipulated? And in all of the exchanges at once? I just don't think it's remotely possible for this spike to be due to widespread manipulation, given that there's a limited number of bitcoins and a finite amount are generated on a moderately predictable schedule (1 block every 10 minutes, which means 25 new coins every 10 minutes on average -- the difficulty doesn't only go up, it goes down if necessary to maintain 1 block per 10 mins based on the previous 2 week's network hash rate).
Sure, a few USD here or there are manipulation. But not all of it. That's ludicrous. Again, word of mouth is exponential. Even Ashton Kutcher invested in them for fuck's sake. They're a hot item -- you're gonna be kicking yourself for not buying in now when they're $200 each in 6 months, if you ask me.
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what makes you think they will go that high?
not critique, just curious what your position is on it.
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what makes you think they will go that high?
not critique, just curious what your position is on it.
The European Union's economy is falling apart. Cyprus in particular is in serious trouble. They're considering a 10-25% tax on all bank deposits. From all citizens. Meaning their economy is in such a shambles that they're considering stealing their citizen's money in order to keep the government from dissolving.
Bitcoins cannot be taken like this. That information is spreading across the EU as we speak. It's a very attractive alternative to people who are being told they may have 25% of their total worth stolen by their government. It isn't income tax we're talking about here, it's more of an emergency "our country is collapsing, we're taking your money now," tax.
That's one of the reasons. The other is that plenty of people still haven't heard about Bitcoin, but they will at the rate it's going. And everybody's going to want at least one even as a novelty, I should think.
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what makes you think they will go that high?
not critique, just curious what your position is on it.
Everyone will have differing opinions but here is my bottom line: supply can only increase at a limited rate while demand is growing exponentially. How many people heard of BTC 6 months ago? How about now? The truth is that BTC are incredibly useful... not just for illegal activity but also for ease of transaction and *gasp* hiding income / activity from being taxed.
The very very large majority of people who would want to use BTC still haven't even heard of the currency. The same variety of reasons that we here are using them are the same reasons that other people will want to use them (once they know about them). In my honest opinion the only two serious threat I can think of are a.) someone hacking or cracking the algorithm and producing a ton of BTC for super cheap or b.) another digital currency that is better replacing it. Since there is a sort of "tipping point" for currencies (ie they are useless unless a decent number of people are using them) then perhaps the latter concern is moot for the medium to long-term.
Some people are even pointing to some of the economic crises going on and how governments are grabbing more and more of people's money. They would have serious challenges even attempting it with BTC.
These are just my opinions and I'm sure others here have ones that differ.
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what makes you think they will go that high?
not critique, just curious what your position is on it.
Everyone will have differing opinions but here is my bottom line: supply can only increase at a limited rate while demand is growing exponentially. How many people heard of BTC 6 months ago? How about now? The truth is that BTC are incredibly useful... not just for illegal activity but also for ease of transaction and *gasp* hiding income / activity from being taxed.
The very very large majority of people who would want to use BTC still haven't even heard of the currency. The same variety of reasons that we here are using them are the same reasons that other people will want to use them (once they know about them). In my honest opinion the only two serious threat I can think of are a.) someone hacking or cracking the algorithm and producing a ton of BTC for super cheap or b.) another digital currency that is better replacing it. Since there is a sort of "tipping point" for currencies (ie they are useless unless a decent number of people are using them) then perhaps the latter concern is moot for the medium to long-term.
Some people are even pointing to some of the economic crises going on and how governments are grabbing more and more of people's money. They would have serious challenges even attempting it with BTC.
These are just my opinions and I'm sure others here have ones that differ.
Definitely differing opinions, to be sure. The algorithm being cracked is extremely unlikely. A mathematical breakthrough could render them trivial to mine, sure, but I doubt it's going to happen within a decade let alone soon. As for governments not being able to take them, what a bitcoin wallet really is is a collection of public keys (the bitcoin addresses) and private keys (the unshown part that allows you to "own" a bitcoin address). It's very similar to PGP keys; Bitcoins are just public key cryptography applied to something totally different than message encryption. The government can't take your bitcoins any more than they can crack your high-bit-count PGP encrypted messages.
The funny part is that the private key is basically the same thing as a password. Except the private key doesn't protect anything except itself. There's nothing there. It's just a bitcoin address that the blockchain records say has received a certain amount of coins. Whoever has the private key is capable of generating bitcoin transactions using that address, and so they can send them to any other address. I just get a kick out of the fact that bitcoin wallets are just locks & keys to little boxes that hold -- absolutely nothing. Yet their price is going up practically by the minute :)
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I love it! A lot of libertarian websites that I frequent, the general conscious is stirring with talk of Bitcoins. More threads pop up, more questions being asked, more people seriously looking into a currency FOR the People BY the People.
I think, with the era of the Internet, that Revolutions will no longer be fought in the streets with violence and blood - but Economic Revolution will occur with People choosing to opt for different mediums of Trade. Breaking free of a debt-based societal norm that drives men and women into slavery.
As great as it is and I think it can be, it saddens me that much of the world cannot and will not experience economic liberation through BTC - The start up and logistical cost is far too great for the impoverish to overcome.
Viva la Econolution
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^^^^
+1
:)
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It's going to be at $100 USD in no time at all. i hope people get freaked out and sell so the price drops and i can buy :D
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Subbing this awesome thread. Nothing to add for now though
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anyone know any good forums or resources for btc research
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reminds me of cocaine cowboys where they say Miami was build on drugs
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anyone know any good forums or resources for btc research
CLEARNET - https://bitcointalk.org/
Lots of good stuff about BtCs here. As you can image it's all "abuzz" right now.
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This is funny - the first ever BtC transaction was 10,000 BtCs for a $25 pizza in May 2010. Ha! that's approx. 750,000 USD pizza today! Hope it tasted good.
CLEARNET - http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/this-pizza-is-worth-750000
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Subb'd.
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Still. Kicking. Self.
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Bitcoin May Be the Global Economy's Last Safe Haven
One of the oddest bits of news to emerge from the economic collapse of Cyprus is a corresponding rise in the value of Bitcoin, the Internet’s favorite, media-friendly, anarchist crypto-currency. In Spain, Google (GOOG) searches for “Bitcoin” and downloads of Bitcoin apps soared. The value of a Bitcoin went up to $78. Someone put out a press release promising a Bitcoin ATM in Cyprus. Far away, in Canada, a man said he’d sell his house for BTC5,362.
Bitcoin was created in 2009 by a pseudonymous hacker who calls him or herself Satoshi Nakamoto (and who might be several people). It’s a form of virtual cash used to buy goods and services online. Even by Web standards, it’s a strange and supergeeky phenomenon. This is what happens when software and networks meet the concept of currency, when you take peer-to-peer networks and advanced cryptography and ask, “How can I make a new economy?”
There are 10,952,975 Bitcoins in circulation. (With a digital currency you can be specific.) Bitcoin isn’t about to replace hard currency—with a market cap of $864 million, all of it is worth less than what Facebook (FB) paid for Instagram—but it’s bigger than anyone expected. And many people will tell you that the emergence of a virtual global money supply beyond the reach and control of any government is very real and that it’s time we take it seriously. As long as the Internet remains turned on, Bitcoin will be there—to its adherents, it’s the Platonic currency.
A dollar bill has a serial number and travels from buyer to seller. A Bitcoin’s not so much a thing as an understanding, a balance in a decentralized general ledger, or “account log.” Bitcoins are created as the side effect of a great deal of meaningless computational work. That is, the computer could be working on protein-folding, or processing images, or doing something else with its time, but instead it’s being used to “mine” Bitcoins—searching for mathematical needles in a networked haystack. Once the needle is found, a “block” of Bitcoins is born. Bitcoins live in a bit of software known as your “wallet.”
How did they get there? Perhaps you minted them by mining, or bought them on an exchange, or received them as part of a barter transaction. Now those Bitcoins are burning a bithole in your bitpocket, and you want to buy something. How do you spend them? Clicking around your wallet app, you set up a payment and put in the Bitcoin address of the recipient—something memorable and fun, like 1Ns17iag9jJgTHD1VXjvLCEnZuQ3rJDE9L. A few minutes later, after the peer-to-peer network has authorized the transaction as legitimate, the recipient’s wallet, wherever it is, will show that you’ve paid up.
How is this different from PayPal (EBAY)? In theory anyone could run his own version of PayPal on a server and use that to transfer funds between parties. But he’d also need to handle world currencies, deal with security, and handle regulations. Similarly, physical banks promise protections above and beyond stuffing cash in a mattress or dropping it off in paper bags. Financial institutions commodify trust—it’s not their money, after all. It’s yours. Yet you trust them more than you trust yourself.
Bitcoin shrugs all this off. It’s not pegged to anything, and there are no regulations. It’s a supercomputer-size chore to counterfeit. The key thing to understand is that there’s no bank, no Federal Reserve, in the middle. It’s not unlike an exchange-traded fund (for example, FORX, from Pimco)—a mix of non-U.S. currencies—designed as a hedge against the dollar. Bitcoin is a hedge against the entire global currency system. And no exchange is needed, unless you want to convert your Bitcoin into an actual hard currency.
Bitcoin is no more arbitrary than derivatives or credit default swaps. Given that regular folks, if they’re nerdy and interested in Bitcoins, can use the currency for all manner of things, including illegal things, it’s arguably a far less arbitrary instrument.
Maybe Bitcoin’s devotees are right, and it’s the currency of the future. Or perhaps it’s a ridiculous joke—a speculative, hilarious enterprise taken to its most insane conclusion. Given that the founder is nowhere to be found, it feels like a hoax, a parody of the global economy. That the technology used to implement it has, so far, shown itself to be impeccable and completely functional, and that it’s actually being exchanged, just makes it a better joke. The truth is, it doesn’t much matter if it’s a joke or not. It works.
The Internet is a big fan of the worst-possible-thing. Many people thought Twitter was the worst possible way for people to communicate, little more than discourse abbreviated into tiny little chunks; Facebook was a horrible way to experience human relationships, commodifying them into a list of friends whom one pokes. The Arab Spring changed the story somewhat. (BuzzFeed is another example—let them eat cat pictures.) One recipe for Internet success seems to be this: Start at the bottom, at the most awful, ridiculous, essential idea, and own it. Promote it breathlessly, until you’re acquired or you take over the world. Bitcoin is playing out in a similar way. It asks its users to forget about central banking in the same way Steve Jobs asked iPhone (AAPL) users to forget about the mouse.
I have an intense memory from the early 1990s, when I was just out of college. I was seated alone in a diner. Suddenly a loud man behind me pronounced, “Internet time is like regular time but seven times faster.” I turned around to see a well-dressed adult, a serious person. I was mystified. How could he believe something so facile and arbitrary? On and on he went, expounding on the magical number seven.
Having been through one or two bubbles, I’ve learned that people can believe exactly what they want to believe. That’s one of the privileges of being a human with money to spend. When you compound utopian wishfulness with the anxiety of being left behind, you’ll have a bubble. Then again, we may be at the forefront of the coming Bitcoin revolution. There’s no way to be sure. I’ll admit to having run the Bitcoin mining software a few years ago for a week until I became convinced it was a poor use of limited computer resources. I had work to do. I expected Bitcoins to remain in the background with all of the other anarchist crypto-chatter that makes up an essential substratum of modern network thinking.
But Bitcoins didn’t go away. And I’m increasingly convinced there’s one thing that Bitcoins do that’s genuinely interesting. They decentralize trust. Trust is hard to earn; verifying transactions is a brutal problem, which is why PayPal locks down your account when there’s too much money flowing into it. Creating trust is traditionally the work of federal governments and branding agencies. Trust is also an easy thing to squander. Just close a beloved service, à la Google Reader. Or allow your banks to fail, causing an entire country to suddenly realize that the value of their deposits, the fundamental integrity of their financial selves, was arbitrary all along.
Along comes Bitcoin, a currency in which every transaction is stored by the entire network and every coin has its own story. There’s nothing to trust but math. Suddenly an idea that sounded terrible—a totally decentralized currency without a central authority, where semi-anonymous parties exchange meaningless tokens—becomes almost comforting, a source of power and authority.
That’s where Bitcoin thrives: where people would prefer to throw in their lot with anonymous strangers instead of the world economy. It’s gold-bug thinking reinvented for an age of fluid transparency and instantaneous transactions. And as such it’s an excellent indicator of anxiety. Where you see Bitcoins in action you find a weird and heady mix of speculative angst, a fear of being left behind, and people who appear to have lost faith in institutions, who feel most left behind. These are people who’ll trade in purely arbitrary tokens, willing to forgo the comfort of banking systems for the weight of mathematics and the Internet behind it.
Bitcoin isn’t tied to any commodity—besides trust. As a statement on the global economy, Bitcoin is hilarious. As a currency for the disenfranchised and distrustful, it’s as serious as can be.
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clearnetlink for this ^
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-03-28/bitcoin-may-be-the-global-economys-last-safe-haven#r=rss
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So BtCs reached a high of $95.7 USD on the Mt Gox Exchange today - only 4.3 short of crashing through the magic $100 mark - before falling slightly. The weighted average stands at $87.42 USD at closing today. Lets see what tomorrow brings ...
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Since Sunday, a trio of Bitcoin apps have soared up Spain’s download charts, coinciding with news that cash-strapped Cyprus was planning to raid domestic savings accounts to pay off a $13 billion bailout tab. Fearing contagion on the other end of the Mediterranean, some Spaniards are apparently looking for cover in an experimental digital currency.
“This is an entirely predictable and rational outcome for what’s happening in Cyprus,” says Nick Colas, chief market strategist at ConvergEx Group. “If you want to get a good sense of the stress European savers are feeling, just watch Bitcoin prices.”
The value of the virtual currency has soared nearly 15 percent in the last two days, according to the most-recent pricing data. “One hundred percent of that is due to Cyprus,” says Colas. “It means the Europeans are getting involved.”
That Spaniards would consider converting a portion of their dwindling savings into a peer-to-peer currency vulnerable to wild price fluctuations and the odd thieving Trojan speaks volumes about banking confidence in some parts of Europe. As German economist Peter Bofinger warned in an interview with Spiegel Online: “European citizens must now fear for their money.” The same apps download data, however, showed that Italians aren’t ready to abandon commercial banking, remarkable as many Italians still recall that black day in 1992 when they woke up to a levy on their savings accounts to prop up the nation’s teetering finances.
Meanwhile, for Russian millionaires who have also been burned by the Cypriot tax levy, Bitcoin is far from a safe haven shelter. “Bitcoin is good if you want to make a deposit of between $1,000 and $10,000. But the liquidity is just not there in the system for multimillion dollar transactions,” Colas points out.
clearnet link
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-03-20/jittery-spaniards-seek-safe-haven-in-bitcoins