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Bitcoin Price Chart

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It's amazing how well the historical bitcoin pricing curve[1] matches the Gartner hype cycle conceptual curve[2]. One of the criticisms of the Gartner curve is how unscientific it is but at least in this case the behavior matches pretty well.

[1] http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/bitstampUSD#tgSzm1g10zm2g25z...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hype-Cycle-General.png

a) You should use log scale[1] b) The same "hype cycle" has been repeated in 2011 (bottom $0,001, top $32, crash to $2) 2013 (bottom $10ish, top $266, crash to $55) and 2014 (bottom $70ish, peak $1200ish, crash to $350ish) - always reaching higher highs and bottoming out to higher lows.

Therefore, zoom out and you will see that Bitcoins has "interim bubbles", but the long time trend has nothing to do with Gartner's hype cycle.

[1] https://bitcoincharts.com/charts/bitstampUSD#tgSzm1g10zm2g25...

[2] https://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#tgSzm1g10zm2g25zvz...

There will always be smaller price fluctuations than the long-term trend. I'm not sure why you think a log scale is a better comparison either. Note I wasn't just comparing the shape of the curves, the actual descriptions of the hype cycle match the bitcoin story fairly well. Anyway it was just a curiosity, eyeballing price charts and thinking you see meaning is a time-tested method for being wrong...

Anecdotally, that exact graph has been posted on the bitcoin subreddits frequently since 2011, each time fitting the price chart rather well.

On that basis, it's not crazy to imagine that today's long term trend will become tomorrow's fluctuation once more.

If you use the log chart you can see the fractal nature of the price curve, which has multiple instances of the hype cycle.

Edit: I don't think fractal is the right word. But if you are using the log scale you can see the fluctuations of relative value and the hype cycles become much more clear. There have been several. Also, GP is saying that if you average out the spikes and dips you lose the "rise and fall of bitcoin" angle.

The big difference is the slope of the Gartner hype cycle curve flattens in the "plateau" phase at a much lower level than the peak of the hype.

Bitcoin's price is within 35% of the all-time high, and the slope is steepening instead of flattening.

What I find most interesting about the rise in the last months, is that it seems organic. No huge bubbles, no temporary rises in volume. Just growth. I'm not saying it's not speculative by any means, but it does have a healthier and more solid feel, which I personally welcome.

Might have something to do with the demonisation of the 500 and 1000 rupee bills? I don't have any evidence, but this seems another blow to the credibility of fiat money.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_500_and_1000_rupee_note...

I've seen a number of news pieces coming up in my Google feed saying that adoption in India has increased hugely as a result, such as [1], and it would make some sense given that many do have mobile phones. I'm not sure about a blow to the credibility of fiat money, but it may be a reaction to what could be viewed as a very difficult policy for a huge number of people to deal with, but then that's the kind of thing that helps adoption of alternatives.

[1]http://www.thehindu.com/business/Industry/%E2%80%98Bitcoin-a...

Note that Ethereum has collapsed from $21.50 to $7.88 or -63% following a series of hacks, forks and bugs.

$1 billion in market cap is gone from Ethereum, and a large part of that has probably moved into old, boring, reliable Bitcoin.

Note that the ETHBTC pair dropped from a high of 0.037 to 0.010, or -73%. Since the dollar has strengthened during this time due to Brexit and Trump, you would expect ETHUSD to be more severe.

The fact that ETHBTC has been hurt even more may indicate that there's more driving Bitcoin demand than just rotation out of Ethereum.

This is the kind of thinking that starts bubbles :)

Trump effect?

I thought long-term steady increases in BTC value would be because of long-term steady increases in volume, but volume looks like it's fallen off a cliff. What is going on here?

Low, constant 'buy' volume. Are people using Bitcoin to store their funds more and more?

Yes, everyone is "hodl"-ing because the people who came before them got 100x or more gains. They're all praying that the steadily decreasing inflation curve and steady demand naturally yields higher exchange rates.

Every time somebody buys/sells bitcoins she just makes exchanges and algo traders richer. Bitcoin is awesome as a store of value...for everything else, there's Mastercard.

Can't say for sure, but it could be because speculation has historically been a major driver of volume and low volatility is bad for speculators. So while there's certainly been a good deal of ups and downs recently, overall the market has been, for Bitcoin, relatively boring. Also, a lot of the hyperbullish types might be wary of going all in again, having been burned before.

How are transactions prices progressing and are congestion due to block size limits becoming a real problem?

If anyone here is heavily involved or invested in bitcoin, what's your opinion on blockchain scalability?

Especially with the current blocksize lock, is it viable to keep it at this point if institutional investors enter the market and transaction volume rapidly increases?

I think bitcoincharts may be excluding volume from Chinese zero fee exchanges. On exchanges I track volume actually increased where it goes down on bitcoincharts [1] (which could be because of traders moving to these exchanges). In USD it stayed comparable [2]

1. http://data.bitcoinity.org/markets/volume/2y?c=e&r=week&t=ba...

2. http://data.bitcoinity.org/markets/volume/2y/USD?c=e&r=week&...

Can someone please explain why the price has been increasing? I haven't properly followed any news behind bitcoin lately...

Taking a wild guess I'd suppose increased political instability would be a driving factor some of them being:

* Britain, Brexit

* Italy, uncertainty around euro and leadership

* France, Presidential candidates are more aligned with Russian/Putin-values then earlier

* USA, Trump being elected to president as an outlier

These things will of course also drive political uncertainty in the rest of the world which will naturally put value of fiat currency in speculation, gold certificates are already sold at a much greater rate then available gold so bitcoin is a viable alternative.

Another explanation could be current lack of institutional investors in the bitcoin market, once BtC ETF's (stock traded funds) correlated to bitcoin value starts popping up there is a much higher likelyhood for institutions to enter the market. At this moment I only know of one, XBT in Sweden but the Winklevoss brothers are trying to open one up in the US.

My post may contain errors, if so please correct me.

As someone following Bitcoin I would mostly agree with this. While Bitcoin cannot be considered a proper (or in any way safe) alternative to Fiat I think it's growth highlights a dissatisfaction with central banking as more people become educated about it.

Anecdotal, I know, but I've seen a uptick in ransomware aimed at very large organizations.

Maybe a week ago, news had it that a Liechtenstein bank had their customer info stolen by someone who's now threatening to expose tax dodgers unless paid 10% of each accounts balance, in Bitcoin.

Related? Who knows. This kind of noise is in the news all the time.

Can someone explain why volume is so low? Has speculation decreased dramatically with Bitcoin?

I think a large amount of speculation has moved off block into exchanges where it's harder to track.

I would assume that people like to speculate with the currency. Since there is limited supply people expect the value to go up. As they buy it becomes a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy. (Also I assume the cost of mining is going up as well)

I thought also in countries like Venezuela and Argentina, where the local currencies are devaluating fast, they are using bitcoin as an easy way to get money exchanged.

For example : https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/bitcoin-miners-make-big-prof...

Bitcoin's price increase attributed to increasing Chinese demand for cryptocurrency according to interview with BTCC CEO Bobby Lee: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3z-VXbk9_o

Supply and demand.

As I already said in another comment: Might have something to do with the demonization of the 500 and 1000 rupee bills. Which seems like another serious blow to the credibility of fiat money.

What about ransomware? The variants I know usually have to be paid by Bitcoin.

I will sell all my Bitcoins when politicians stop inflating fiat currencies...until then I won't work so that they can inflate all my money away.

As someone a bit out of the loop, how is the whole block size debacle evolving?

It's not.

There's a lot of arguing and a main proponent of the "big blocks" camp has organised enough miners to current bitcoin scaling enhancements.

They demand bigger blocks before they allow further scaling enhancements.

Doesn't segwit help mitigate some of the congestion?

No, segwit fixes the transaction malleability problem, which is unrelated to scaling.

Not out the box,

To make use of Segwit wallet software must upgrade to support it, that is a lot of work for Wallets Devs that generally are not getting paid for their work.

It is arriving as a soft fork to get round cores instances that hard forks cannot happen (even tho other cryptos have done it. Eth/XMR). The soft fork is not backwards compatible and bits exchanged by segwit will only be protected by segwit enabled nodes but in fairness with a 95% activation threshold that will be 95% of the network.

We have a number of mining pools now stating that they will not run segwit without a hard fork for a block size increase, the est hashrate is 10-15% that will refuse to run it, this will either mean core need to change their 95% requirement OR simply say no block size increase and no segwit.

Personally and sadly if bitcoin cannot grow past its current limits, I do not believe it will keep its first mover position.

Just seems insane that something that was marked as a global payment network is limited in its size. It is like limiting BGP routing tables to a size and saying "only certain people can play", and if you want to play, just pay more.

> with a 95% activation threshold that will be 95% of the network

What happens to the other 5% of the network? Is it really a hard fork in disguise?

I'm not the person you replied to, but I can answer this.

Segwit is technically a soft fork, which means that it has some degree of backwards compatibility. Segwit will be redefining a previously-unused opcode in the bitcoin stack machine, which all old clients should treat as a NOP. So old clients will continue to operate normally with old transactions, but they will see segwit transactions as junk and be unable to validate them.

In the past this hasn't been much of a problem because soft forks have always implemented optional features. However this time it will be a problem, because the plan is to move all transactions over to Segwit. Any client that hasn't been upgraded once Segwit is activated will likely see no transactions at all, the same as if there had been a hard fork. So that's why they added a 95% activation threshold.

The difference between arguing, discussion and debate is largely one of opinion.

So are true microtransactions currently infeasible due to transactions fees exceeding even CC-rates?

I believe that were of mayor concern last time I checked up.

https://bitcoinfees.21.co/ currently recommends around $0.17 per transaction.

That's a lot more then I though, is that even reasonable?

With today's digitalization even stock trading is commonly available at $0.1 in courtage fee, is it really feasible bitcoin to use double that if broad adoption is appreciated? Or is that not a prioritized goal?

What stance does the bitcoin foundation take or whichever is the highest authority talking on behalf of the community?

> What stance does the bitcoin foundation take or whichever is the highest authority talking on behalf of the community?

From what I undertand, it's not a goal for Bitcoin Core (lead dev team for the official client). They want to make Bitcoin a "settlement layer" that serves as a foundation for other things to be built on top of. Lightning network[1] would be the layer built on top that supports microtransactions.

There are others who believe that Bitcoin should be able to scale to support microtransactions and other features itself.

There's a very large controversy in the community over this.

[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Lightning_Network

The position of Bitcoin Core is that fees should be high and microtransactions should be infeasible, except on Blockstream's Lightning Network. The reason is that decentralization has costs and they believe fees need to be high to pay for it.

What is the Blockstream's Lightning Network and how does it correlate with bitcoin?

How will bitcoin attract customers from traditional payment options if fees are higher?

That's level 2 solution, implemented on top of Bitcoin (you need to create bitcoin transactions to start interacting with LN and consequent "good" transactions are almost free).

One thing - it is not actually implemented in full and therefore can not be used in vivo.

Lightning was not invented by Blockstream, nor is Blockstream the majority player in that space either. They're just paying two open source developers (Rusty Russell and Christian Decker) to work on it. The original creators of Lightning have their own company, and there are at least five other competing implementations. BitFury employs more lightning developers than Blockstream and LightningCo combined.

To be fair, the position of Core is more: "we don't know how to scale significantly without further threatening decentralization". The rest is a corollary of that.

Microtransactions were never feasible on 1st-layer bitcoin. 2nd-layer solutions like payment channels make them practical.

That's false. They're rejecting a hacked together half measure, not just any scaling enhancement.

I believe India may be contributing to the price increase due to the whole demonetisation thing going on here.

Just a reminder, no one on hackernews took Bitcoin as anything more than just an uninteresting scam, and this was as little as 3 years ago. It was a just a big joke.

It was invented in 2008 and it was appearing in conferences around 2011.

But by summer 2013 , there still had not been one article on the front page about bitcoin. I seem to remember comments on here mostly just deriding it if it was ever mentioned. (Please correct me if I am wrong).

I just feel this is important to share, not even HN knows what a hot technology is, even if it has been in the same room for years. It is interesting and sometimes I wonder what other emergent tech is on the scene which many know little about.

revolutionary things are rejected by the establishment at first

I mean if the HN crowd can't recognise an intriguing new emergent technology, who does? I am genuinely interested to know.

What if we get it, but don't think it's intriguing?

I'm not sure why you say that. There are plenty of bitcoin stories on HN going back far longer than 3 years.

Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2524631

Well I learned about bitcoin back in 2011 on the front page of HN.

There were so many bitcoin posts around the time bitcoin first hit $60 that they were getting actively flagged from sheer repetitiveness.

People definitely took it seriously. I suspect that per-capita Bitcoin holding among HN readers is far higher than the national or world average.

People get it and follow it. But there have been very few stories worth discussion here - for example this link is literally a price chart. Most news I've heard in the last few years centers around internal politicking.

These are actually pretty exciting times in cryptocurrency scene.

If you dont know about Monero, check it out. It is starting to catch momentum. It solved the fungibility problem that Bitcoin has, is build on solid base and

https://www.reddheads.com/en/is-monero-what-cryptocurrency-w...

I bought Bitcoins when I read this at HN by pg in March of 2013 (BTC was about $70):

    I am very intrigued by Bitcoin.  It has all the signs.
    Paradigm shift, hackers love it, yet it's derided as
    a toy.  Just like microcomputers.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5402424

Are there any good articles/resources that address the challenges of Bitcoin becoming anything more than a security vs a currency given it's similarity to being a restrictive Gold Standard like currency?

Recently I've seen some older talks by Yanis Varoufakis saying bitcoin can't work as a currency, and I'm curious if there's a response from the Bitcoin community?

https://yanisvaroufakis.eu/2013/04/22/bitcoin-and-the-danger...

We have enough good enough currencies, but the world was missing a good store of value. Gold is too hard to store/buy/sell reliably (and with small margin). It will be a better currency after it's accepted as a store of value by much more people.

Up-to-date price here: http://www.coindesk.com/price/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com