Bitcoin crosses $10B market cap again | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin crosses $10B market cap again

coinmarketcap.com

126 pointsivank57 comments

As someone actively working in this space for the past 3 years, I have a few observations on Bitcoin's price movements:

* The only parameter that in any way is correlating to Bitcoin's price is it's transaction count over time. In fact, if you take out Bitcoin's extreme price spikes they almost completely match up. number of transactions should go through the roof one the Lightning Network is functional.

* The only real world application of Bitcoin that I have seen so far has been 1) Black markets; 2) International money transfer (it's faster to do Bank-Exchange-Bitcoin-Exchange-Bank in most cases than direct bank to bank transfers. That should tell you something about the current state of banking.

* Using market caps for a commodity is ridiculous. The only meaningful parameters to track is nr of transactions, depth of order books globally, nr of exchanges in countries.

Side note: I don't hold any crypto currencies anymore. I don't invest in things which I can't have direction over.

The reason for slower bank-to-bank over international borders is probably more related to managing liability than it is to inefficiency.

Long settlement times are a feature, not a bug. It reduces externality costs (drugs and terror) and reduces insurance costs. (reverseability)

Plus the bank gets to charge interest while they hold it, a week at my bank and a week at the receiving bank, for multiple transactions is a nice little earner.

Wow, what bank takes a week to do an international wire? For me it always seems to arrive the next business day.

> only real world application is black markets; money transfer

Currently bitcoin is in between a commodity & a currency. Given that the R3 bank network will be more of a transfering network and btc having difficulty with scaling, I see bitcoin as a currency. It bas lots of potential uses, here are more than the ones you touched on currently:

* Pricing and purchasing conduit to all major crypto currencies.

* Crypto speculation/investment vehicle.

There are more applications than the 4 we listed but I somewhat agree with transaction vol being the metric. For all other alts and btc actual trade volume is more important than market cap. like fiat, it is based on trust and ascribed value. just because there are provable transactions and known amounts, volume & transactions are an insication of value (or perceived value) and this likelihood people begin accepting them

R3 offers no efficiencies over incumbent transfer systems. SWIFT/ACH/etc are far more efficient than R3. R3 seems to be figuring that out, and is rapidly pivoting from their original goals (including blockchain)

> R3 offers no effeciencies

It isn't built yet, but ACH is pretty bad, so I can't imagine R3; regardless of what tech they go with, being worse. It started in 74 so its 4 decades old. I'm not saying you are wrong but I would like a bit more color. I am not excited about R3, bug given the backers (all major banks & payment inst) I assumed it was moving forward & poised to take ach in the next 3-5 years

Chinese second-class investors are doing another pump-and-dump scheme now using the #HalvingHype.

Bitcoin has gained no consumer adoption, most new development is happening with Ethereum, and Bitcoin got replaced in headlines with Blockchain.

I see this final pump-and-dump as a desperation move. Imagine this applied to stocks as "Let's pump AMZN, because if we don't, it will go out of business."

This time, the pump is done by miners predominantly and the volumes are small as people moved to more profitable investments long ago

> Bitcoin has gained no consumer adoption

https://coin.dance/volume/localbitcoins

How do you explain away the increased adoption in nearly every country listed there?

And Bitcoin ATMs are growing at a steady clip:

https://coinatmradar.com/charts/

These are two metrics of real growth that goes against what you're describing.

All local ATMs I know closed down...

So if that's the case, how long do you think it'll last? At least till the halving event?

When this hype wears off, it will sharply fall. If miners don't find a way to mine efficiently, the whole thing will die.

Explain to me why Ethereum isn't just hype.

N.B. This here is HN, not Reddit.

It's like asking - is the next major version of something just a hype.

Okay, Bitcoin was good, it introduced the concept of the blockchain and solved a long-standing issue in a very energy inefficient way.

To run all this computing power just so that Chinese thieves and speculators can sneak out stolen money or increase it as they either lack means to invest elsewhere or it'd be just too sophisticated for them to do, is a ridiculous concept that cannot be sustained for too long!

P.S. By promoting Bitcoin, you support Climate Change, illicit businesses, and stinky speculation.

Just by breathing you can also say I support Climate Change, illicit businesses and stinky speculation.

Where are ethereums killer apps? Something so groundbreaking that it takes the world by storm. The browser, or bittorrent for example. Or is it just another chain in the centipede of cryptocurrency "innovation"?

Elusive Dapps, and the Casper PoS system.

I want to see what happens after 28 days: http://www.thehalvening.com/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3o89yz/the_halveni...

A lot of this has to do with unease within the Chinese economy. Gold is also being bought around the same clip, and long term bonds have yields that are plummeting despite a possible rate hike.

It's kind of a pity that three years have passed since it arguably went mainstream (among the tech literate at least) and the most prevalent use case is still by and large speculation. Making money is cool and all but the technology had a lot more promise than this.

What? Living in a country with a broken financial and banking system I'm relying on Bitcoin for storing and transferring value. Check out Bitcoin search trend for South Africa, North African countries, Pakistan, and Venezuela.

Other reasons to use bitcoin: Drugs, Money Laundering, CryptoLocker, Capital flights, etc...

Up until this month - most of the speculation has been dead. That's why coinbase is pivoting. The majority of bitcoin is being used by people who need it in order to run their businesses.

Pivoting? Adding Ethereum as another asset on their exchange is not pivoting.

i tend to think the two sides of the bitcoin: currency and tech; are at odds

when one is useless the other is valuable

there is value to bitcoin because mining is expensive

expensive nonce detection renders the blockchain inefficient

if we had superficial nonce detection the currency would be useless but the tech would become practical

This is inevitable as everyone saw what happened at the litecoin halving last summer (if you don't pay attention to such things, it was a massive spike then dump).

So I take it you bought loads of bitcoin a few weeks ago?

I wish.. I just spent 5 years of minimum wage grad school so my pockets are not that deep.

There is question as to whether this is even real, or just Willybotted up. This article is from March, but it hasn't stopped: http://www.bitcoinfuturesguide.com/bitcoin-blog/reminder-chi...

What happens if you try to cash in at these prices? There's no actual demand, so the price flash-crashes: http://qntra.net/2016/06/mere-265-bitcoin-sell-causes-flashc...

OKcoin is not the only exchange... Yes, you can't trust many of the Chinese exchanges. But there are 10s of thousands of bitcoins being traded daily on many different (non-Chinese) exchanges that don't fake their volume.

Coinbase, Bitstamp, and Kraken, three of the more reputable USD exchanges, have had a combined volume of over 30k BTC alone in the past 24 hours. http://bitcoinity.org/markets/list?currency=USD&span=24h.

it wouldn't be a flash crash if there was no demand. it would be a crash. the flash crash happened because there was insufficient liquidity on one exchange - as soon as the market sought to fill the gaps, it went right back up.

I wonder if Chinese price manipulation has anything to do with the upcoming Australian Bitcoin auction in late June.

there is no such thing as price manipulation.

Only volume manipulation.

Okay then: Chinese Bitcoin activity

Yeah, look at dogecoin, still fighting, much determination. Never give up dogecoin.

Scam at its best.

$10B down, a few trillion to go.

Should be a matter of weeks.

New wave of cryptocurrency scam started in May. How long it will last this time?

As long as there is criminal activity, there will be cryptocurrencies.

...and fiat currencies

Also bigger than Twitter.

Bitcoin has maybe 3 million users (maybe). Twitter has 300 million. I'm investing in both, and I wonder how much Bitcoin would be worth at 300 million users. The network effects are going to be fun to watch

Lol HN really doesn't like Bitcoin. Sour grapes I guess

No, I think HN realizes Bitcoin price isn't correlated to number of users. After all, the number of "users" hasn't grown that much over the past 30 days, even though the price is up 50%.

Hacker News has been the most Bitcoin friendly of the communities I visit on a regular basis. It probably has the highest ratio of Bitcoin enthusiasts you'll find in a mainstream community outside of drug fora and the Bitcoin community itself.

If this story can't find an audience here, it's not going to do better elsewhere.

Surpassing Western Union's market cap.

I've seen this comparison a lot but I have no idea what the significance is. Why does this matter?

I've no idea. Is utterly meaningless. A more meaningful comparison would be "what $ value has been transferred using each network over the last 12 months"

Probably because WU is a money transmission network, so somewhat comparable to what Bitcoin does.

But doesn't market cap mean two entirely different things for a company and a currency?

Yes.

A more meaningful comparison would be the market cap of various bitcoin exchanges; the flaws with that comparison are pretty much the same as the flaws with comparing bitcoin to WU in general.

Bitcoin transaction volume in USD for the last 24 hours was $ 224 million. Not sure how much WU turnover in transaction value a day...

The best data I could find on this is in their 2015 annual report, which says they've had $81.6 billion in consumer-to-consumer transfers[0], which made up 79.21% of their revenue[1], so I guess we can estimate an annual turnover of $103 billion, which comes out to $282 million per day over the year of 2015.

[0]: http://s1.q4cdn.com/568883301/files/doc_financials/2015Annua... - page 66

[1]: http://s1.q4cdn.com/568883301/files/doc_financials/2015Annua... - pages 59 & 64

Most of their revenue = Most of their volume is questionable. Do you have any sense for whether revenue and vole are roughly correlated here?

Nope, I'd assume that B2B has lower fees/margins, so the actual daily volume should be higher than my calculation said above. Still, it should be enough to establish that WU is still a fair bit ahead of BTC.

Doesn't that by necessity include all the change as well? So it's a misleading number if you want to take it for "this is how much people are paying each other with bitcoin"

Keep in mind though that anyone with reason, could easily fake a lot of volume: 2 address, starting amount, swap back and forth until you eat up the whole thing with fees.

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