Bitcoin breaks $3K to reach new all-time high
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
the price to dollar is mostly controlled by the exchanges supply and demand, which are mostly opaque.
if I were to bet: price collusion to dump it before every miner jumps into the new chain exclusively.
you might be right on the reason. only the exchange knows. the trick is that the dollar to btc is a known value for them only.
Why does this matter? If you're concerned about double spend, just wait for more confirmations and treat it as a slower to resolve chain. In any case, double spend problems could only happen if miners _did_ switch, so then you wouldn't need to be worried about miners not switching.
Also Segregated Witness will lock in on Aug. 8 with a very high probability, and activate at the end of August.
This is a good heuristic in general. Everyone has an agenda and it is very hard to find an unbiased source of anything, especially for contemporary news. It is often better to find sources where the bias is clear, as opposed to hidden. Then find the strongest contradictory argument and compare the two.
UPDATE: Parent asked for a summary, not a technical deep dive. Here it is from "/r/btc" (pro fork) POV: https://i.imgur.com/uJ9XE06.png and from "/r/bitcoin" (against fork) POV: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6r05nm/megathread_... Follow the mentioned links if you are interested to get into more details.
Really? How do you quantify this? Most people who are pro big blocks felt it went well (r/btc) and it'll take a while to make it profitable for miners to mine it. Many people who are against big blocks thought it'd immediately dive to $1, which is 1/200 of where it is currently at. It also seems like many pro-Blockstream people would dump Bitcoin Cash regardless, just because they don't believe in the rationale for it (r/bitcoin threads about how to sell Bitcoin Cash w/o analysis).
You could argue about market liquidity etc, but 4B market cap is hardly a failure. This doesn't mean it is a success. It is more accurate to call it undecided for the time being. To call it a failure is definitely premature and uncharitable, though.
The daily volume tells you that Bitcoin Cash is traded (or maybe dumped?) quite a bit. It's volume is about that of LTC currently which really is not too shaby.
Don't forget that Bitcoin Cash was an as friendly fork as possible. I don't think anybody realistically expected that it would overtake Bitcoin right away. I'm not even sure if the initiators expect it to overtake Bitcoin at all. In a slightly conspiracy theoristic view, it might just have been a rehearsal for if the 2X part of Segwit2X doesn't happen and a hostile takeover might be tried.
Cryptocurrencies don't easily die and so far, Bitcoin Cash is doing okay. Calling it a failure at this point is premature.
Please don't play up this narrative unnecessarily. It's an easy narrative, but it's also wrong and misses important things about governance and identity. It makes it sound like the Segregated Witness proposal, which won supermajority support on the development list, does not increase block size (which it does, just in a backwards compatible way).
It has been known for quite some time that apart from a bug in the software, that could destroy value in an instant, the biggest challenge will be managing an open source project in the face of competing interests. It's the first time the IETF governance model meets fintech, and if Bitcoin continues to grow it will make the patent drama round rtcweb look like child's play.
> pro-Blockstream people
This is also simplifying beyond what's reasonable. Bitcoin is an open source project. There is a mailing list. You can join it.
It's not always roses and civilized technical discussion, but every argument can be heard out and there are enough people lurking the sidelines to act as a guard against abuses of power.
The Blockstream narrative plays down the contributions of Lau, Lopp, Lombrozo and dozens of others which do a lot of the development and release management of the software.
Also, as you point out big block isn't really the defining characteristic of the Bitcoin Cash fork since in principle Bitcoin is having a block size increase in the near future too. The bigger difference is ripping out the SegWit fix for transaction malleability, with the stated intention of making Lightning Network off-chain payments which require malleability to be fixed not work. In an interesting attack of irony, the ViaBTC exchange (one of its main proponents) just has to stop withdrawals because transaction malleability was breaking them: https://twitter.com/ViaBTC/status/893744282087047168
Sure, and as ironic as it may be that BCH deposits was malleability attacked earlier today, I still don't think it is a good idea to focus on the technical features of these forks. Who is behind the fork is more interesting than what is in the fork.
This is not a conflict among developers, with a few notable exceptions. This is a governance conflict. That is why the conflict is not very visible in the developer community, but rather outside in social media.
The open source project is a multi stakeholder model which can be very foreign to people who consider themselves influential. In many ways it looks more like academia than a corporation. Everyone would like the developers on their payroll, but no one wants to pay for it. Pretty much like academia, I suppose.
One source: this interview with a dev of the main Bitcoin Cash client: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/future-bitcoin-cash-int...
This quite real and significant divergence of worldviews is one of the biggest challenges that civilization faces, and, I believe, is also the primary thing holding back wider deployment of innovative technologies, rather than technical or financial limitations.
This is not to say that people shouldn't have different views. But identities are tied up together with communities and the general belief system that goes with them. It's just human nature and no technology is immune to it.
Anyway, there was a difficulty adjustment in the last hours, so things should improve.
My prediction: There are going to be a lot of naive poor folks who are going to become poorer, maybe even dirt poor, and some very savvy wealthy people who are going to be even more wealthy when this is all said and done.
No they wouldn't. I worked as an equities trader for years. Saying something is illegal is meaningless if people do it anyway and the enforcement body has little to no power to stop it. Spoofing is rampant in the equities market regardless of its legality. Watching GDAX for the last week, there is definitively less spoofing in the ETH/USD market than in the equities markets as a whole.
The number is not 21 million. It's currently 21*10^8 via fractional transactions and expandable (meaning practically and theoretically infinite).
If everyone started talking about cents instead of dollars that wouldn't mean there's 100x as much money... 1 cent would still be worth 1/100 of a dollar.
Likewise, if you started dividing down to 1/1000 of a dollar it wouldn't be inflation. Each 1/1000 of a dollar would still be worth 1/1000 of a dollar.
Edit: and if you suddenly replaced every dollar with 1000 newdollars, those newdollars are also worth 1/1000 of what they were before.
It's currently 21*10^8 via fractional transactions
Second, there is no question that Bitcoin is deflationary in the long term. The fact that it can be split in smaller units doesn't change that at all.
I think the first stable government that promises this to the world (probably at first via country to country agreements) is going to see their value spike (in relative terms). Not exactly sure where this would ultimately leave Bitcoin...
So true. Where I am now the best option for sending / receiving money to the US is either a 50$ wire transfer, or Western Union gouging you to death. Even Paypal is not available here, and the ATM fees add up. It definitely hurts the people of poorer countries immensely to have a middleman in between all international payments. I imagine the typical case is people sending money back home to family members.
Governments don't charge money to change currency. That is done by private companies which charge a fee for it, in the same way blockchain exchanges charge a fee to trade between blockchain currencies.
I agree the currency exchange fees are higher than they should be, but... if you think that's a big need it isn't too hard to start a company to compete and lower the fees. That's what XE.com did for example.
I'm confused what you think a government should do?
The fact is plenty of companies have setup as currency exchanges.
Theory is nice but practice is even nicer.
Some banks give you some tools to protect against this case like generating debit card numbers with an exact balance on it. But Bitcoin generalizes over the case.
Your comment is the sort of all-or-nothing mentality that I don't understand. I look at banking institutions vs cryptocurrencies as different options just like credit cards vs cash: I want to be able to choose, and I don't want to be limited to one single solution.
It's kinda of like the decision between an iPad vs a techie's laptop. I think the most common cases (e.g. my parents' needs) are best served by an iPad or a banking institution, but it's dangerous when someone begins telling me that I don't need such a powerful laptop.
All too often I see cryptocurrencies dismissed with the condescending implication that nobody is capable of evaluating the trade-offs.
Savings accounts are more suited for money you will need at any moment.
I have some money in other investments but I just think banks are a rip off.
Another advantage is government-insurance of savings.
Bitcoin's code is open source and the balances of all addresses are public, so anyone could create a fork (a new separate currency based on it, optionally starting with the same balances).
Merchants find they need to accept any popular currency their users demand. Being forked from the Bitcoin chain is beside the point.
Bitcoin Cash isn't the first new or even nearly the most popular altcoin. Ethereum has actually overtaken Bitcoin in some indicators at times, though not in number of accepting merchants. Nothing has gotten close to Bitcoin in terms of how many places accept it.
Sometimes those points give you the rights to some other associated company points without spending the original points.
Also worth noting is that sometimes these points are effectively unspendable because of availability of rewards etc. Just like how Bitcoin Cash is "worth" $700 (or whatever), but you can't actually exchange it for anything at that price.
Now you have two balances - two diverging branches with shared history. You can't spend either twice, that is, create two commits with the same parent that don't diverge again.
'New' and 'old' here are somewhat arbitrary/controversial ways of thinking of the fork. Proponents of Bitcoin cash might argue having no limit was closer to Satoshi's original intention - the block limit was originally added in as a temporary measure. Lots of politics going on around that.
In the former case, consumers pay car manufacturers to spend energy to produce cars, in the latter case bitcoin buyers pay miners to spend energy to secure the blockchain. In both cases, if the end-user of the (virtual) good ceases their activity — consumers buying cars/people buying bitcoins — the good in question will automatically stop being produced (miners don’t burn off energy to produce bitcoins if they can’t sell them for a profit).
In this way, Bitcoin works just as any other consumer good: the (bitcoin) buyers finance the activities of the producers (Bitcoin miners) in order to produce a useful tool (electronic cash).
I've used Bitcoin to buy medication from India. When ppl say shit like this, I get confused. Literally sit there & use it whilst ppl say it can't work. Really odd.
It works. I've used it. It works. I'm not sure exactly what it takes to get through. A functioning system doesn't seem to suffice.
A global payment system which is faster than a wire transfer. An uncorrelated hedge for assets. P2P payment. Things like that?
For comparison, the "fundamental" value of USD is a trust in the US Government to maintain its value. Comparing that to the fundamental value of Bitcoin would be a fun discussion to have, but the fact remains that the US has done it for 225 years and Bitcoin has done it for less than 9 years.
Actually, by that reasoning, I guess the fundamental value of Bitcoin is the distributed self-interest and capability of Bitcoin holders to maintain Bitcoin's value, which is obviously a powerful force.
Can you make money speculating in Bitcoin? Obviously. But it is not fundamentally backed by something that people have long-term trust in -- it is only worth what you can trade it for at that moment.
People always underestimate the power of network effects. People have been predicting the demise of facebook for the last decade. Surely something better will come along at eat its lunch, right? Wrong. Network effects are and always will be king.
The USD was backed by gold until Nixon, you can only count the last 40 something years against Bitcoin's 9.
Mind blown, right? :)
The value of a Bitcoin itself is only indirectly linked to this -- it is very possible that another cryptocurrency will prove more useful (cf. ETH), and people will switch to using that other currency for their cryptocurrency needs.
Yes, Bitcoin is great and enables new things. Bitcoin "investment" / speculation is another thing entirely.
I've been asking for positive examples for years, and I still see no signs that Bitcoin is poised for more than niche adoption. Sure, if you want to do something modestly illegal, like buying gray market prescription drugs, Bitcoin may fill a niche. But it hasn't caught on for legal transactions, and its traceability makes it bad for seriously illegal activities. And even if you're only doing something modestly illegal, you have to be pretty technical and pretty dedicated to make it work. For most people it's way easier to give cash to their friendly local drug dealer.
So yes, it doesn't have strong fundamentals. The underlying commodity, long integers, is freely available. Despite years of "Bitcoin will be widespread soon" puffery, the use value is very weak compared with alternatives. At least you could plant tulip bulbs.
P2P payment is a big one. I think kids may use it, since they can't get PayPal et al(?). Thought of that yesterday. That's a generation growing up with crypto.
Investing in startups around the world is new (via token sales).
Investing in uncorrelated assets is valuable. Eat gold.
Browser micropayments could get big (Brave browser). Ppl may even get paid for attention in the future.
Iota for the internet of thing (haven't looked into that much).
Hedge against fiat inflation.
Internet ported to decentralised infra if Trump etc start pulling 1984 bs.
Self-driving cars paying toll road via crypto (just made that up).
Solar panels off-setting their cost via crypto-mining. Then ppl have crypto to spend.
Decentralised file systems.
Decentralised storage.
That's a few whilst I whale on my legs.
& A few other anti-inflammatory medications. & Other bits & bobs.
I've given a list of other use cases.
I've bought modafinil before. That's legal, also. I try & be open about things. Helps against cunts who try & attack me.
Edit: bought the Moda with a CC, I think. Not from a pharmacy.
And that's my big problem with Bitcoin advocates. I ask, "How is Bitcoin creating value today?" And 98% of the answers I get are, "Tomorrow will be amazing!!1!" I have received that consistently for eight years.
Strong fundamentals don't include "might be amazing one day". I too enjoy science fiction, but...
Edit: you seem to not know they are real, because you haven't looked into it. Because you don't think it's real. Maybe someone else told you when you asked, but you didn't listen?
Edit2: Howard Marks -- the investor -- recently said bitcoin wasn't real. So you're not alone in thinking x-real-thing isn't real!
I'm probably going to be holding some of the assets for a decade. Something like that. Unless the whole thing tanks.
Good investment opportunities don't come around vary often. By the next one I should have made the money back (& more).
The entire crypto-economy is worth something like 70B. Way smaller than Facebook/Goog/aapl. If you want a sure thing, crypto ain't it! I do think it's a good bet, though (asymmetric).
I've used Bitcoin again instead of a wire. Wires don't go on the weekend.
To review, gray-area suggested Bitcoin could be a speculative bubble because there's strong exuberance and weak fundamentals. You objected to that phrase, claiming that "it works". I said that "works" is too low a standard for strong fundamentals; for that you need significant use driven by a user value proposition stronger than the alternatives.
You claimed, as best I can tell, that significant use is occurring. I am asking you for data demonstrating that. I have been asking Bitcoin advocates for that for years and never received any. You haven't given me any either. Do you have it?
1 is yes. 2, I believe it will be. We haven't seen 2 much yet b/c time hasn't occured.
A) wires are better, as far as I can tell. For speed.
B) traditional VCs are investing in token sales, today.
C) crypto hedge funds are open today.
I never claimed there was significant use. I would argue it's a functioning system & there are strong value props (better than alts).
You know there isn't significant use. You want to wait? Wait. I'm fast follower. I like to benefit from new technology. Startups/hackers. That sort of thing. I think other ppl can benefit if they have a look. 99/100 hype is bs. Sometimes though.
It's good to be sceptical. I was.
The same thing happened when people claimed to be 99.999% sure Trump would never be president, but of course they never actually bet any money on it.
One could argue the grandparent doesn't argue their point either, but they definitely seem to put their money where their mouth is. All these people who are so against crypto and like to sit at the sidelines moaning about a bubble, why don't you either short it or bet against it? A la http://blog.samaltman.com/bubble-talk
It's very hard to predict this market in the long and the short term. As far as I can tell speculation is the only driving factor in bitcoin. Not something I want to bet on or against it's too random for me.
There is an inherent asymmetry between going long and short. If you're going long, your losses are capped at what you put in, and your gains are unlimited. The opposite is true if you are going short: your losses are unlimited, but your gains are limited.
It is definitely more work though and maybe not something most people are willing to do unless they have strong reasons to believe they are right and can profit from it.
(Another way is also to do proxy bets/investments, i.e. go long on things that are inversely correlated with X, but this is less practical in the case of cryptocurrencies for various reasons.)
Also for every bitcoin millionaire there's countless people like me who didn't buy and sell at the right time. You see it go up 10%, you have no idea what's going to happen tomorrow, so you say "oh, this is a fine roi." Trusting the market has ruined many more fortunes than it's made and greed is rarely a bearer of good luck.
And finally, trading is like coming up with passwords. You may think you're clever but in reality, your innovative strategy was likely programmed as an algorithm 30 years ago and your perceived edge is likely imaginary. TA bots, arbitrage systems, pump-and-dump commenting botnets, and sentiment analysis of big-data for leading indicators have been used by traders heavily since, well, the beginning - remember where bitcoin came from; everyone who had a coin in 2009, before you ever heard of btc, was likely also savvy enough to leverage all of these.
Also, Do Not Keep Too Much In Exchanges. If history has taught us anything, it's private wallets on private computers that are turned off most of the time is the safest place to store them. If I was a criminal with a 0-day exploit, the very first thing my code would do on a victim's computer is look for wallet.dat.
So have fun, trust nobody, don't panic, and it's probably best not to invest too deep.
Exactly. Bitcoin needs only to survive to gain long-term credibility in the public's mind. I've been long since 2011. Here's what I wrote back then:
"If Bitcoin passes the harsh tests of crisis again and again, it will slowly gain credibility in the public’s mind, both as medium of exchange and store of value. Over a period of many years or even decades, as the world gradually learns via trial-and-error how to use Bitcoin, becomes familiar with its properties, and ultimately comes to trust it, nothing can prevent it from gaining as much credibility as, say, gold.
The world’s existing legal and regulatory regimes may not welcome Bitcoin at first – few governments are likely to take kindly to the emergence of a decentralized, anonymous, global currency beyond their control. Sooner or later, however, governments will adapt to the changing circumstances, as they always do. I would expect governmental acceptance of Bitcoin to occur initially in less developed countries, as many of them are already used to having their fortunes tied to a global currency beyond their control: the US dollar.
If I am right, in the long run, as man-made crises of all kinds erupt all over the planet from time to time, global adoption of Bitcoin should gradually expand from niche markets to the broader population. Ultimately, global adoption for Bitcoin should be enormous."[0]
[0] https://cs702.wordpress.com/2011/05/29/on-the-potential-adop...
> BTC will be popular and grow because it's popular and winning right now
This sound circular-ish to me. How about a different interpretation?
- BTC is overhyped to the point of completely non-technical people in distant countries buying BTC "to get rich quick" (this narrative is pushed hard by both media and BTC fans).
- so there is a constant influx of USD into the BTC ecosystem from those folks. Note that it happens regardless of any technical or economical analysis and drives BTC price up
- however, that influx is clearly limited (by the number of naive people) and predicated on constant growth [1]. The only real purpose of BTC for those "investors" is to get rich quick, they will never buy coffee with it. As soon as USD:BTC flattens out (and it inevitably will), they will try to cash out, crashing the markets in the process. It didn't happen yet just because there were so many people to be convinced (or fooled), but it's going to happen.
[1] side note: in this sense it's literally similar to ISIS, which amuses me a bit
How do you not realize how biased you are? That comparison is ridiculous.
The fact that you have to concede the point you're making so immediately is evidence you are being irrational.
>Because it serve multiple functions: hedge against inflation, safety, commerce,
Money laundering, tax evasion, drug sales...
You can hardly call it safe either. Most of the exchanges have been full of shady and fraudulent activity. I have no doubt the exchanges are probably filing orders and doing other sketchy things to drive the price up.
10 bitcoins when they first came out, would have the same the volume as 10 bitcoins today.
For some reason, a large fraction of HN hates crypto. They seem to like getting fucked up the ass by everyone. Groveling to VCs for funding. Looked down on my MBA-types.
Coders/hackers should be embracing what's happening. Finally, merit > dick sucking.
You're on an investment website -- for startups.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14934569 and marked it off-topic.
It's pretty simple - follow the money. The pattern is BEYOND evident.
Have we ever seen such appreciation in an investment /speculation?
Oh, it will crash, as soon as a 'better' cryptocurrency comes in. It has value for as long as people buy it.
More likely you would implement a strategy to sell off a little bit every day. It would take some time to liquidate it all at the best possible price. This isn't any different than the problem faced by any wealthy person with a large position in a publicly traded company would face. You can't market sell 300 million of anything in an instant and not more the price. Bitcoin also has private markets where high touch trading desks match large sellers with large buyer so it is conceivable you could use something like that as well to get a good price and exit your position relatively quickly.
That said if you you are the person who had the vision and stomach to hold that position all that time it's unlikely you would find yourself wanting to sell it all in an instant just because the price crosses 3k. You almost certainly believe 5 figure Bitcoin is possible if not likely and a 6 figure Bitcoin price isn't out of the question. I could seem a person in that position selling a bit to make life comfortable but not panic exiting their position entirely.
But honestly when it was six cents no one was really stocking up on it other than Satoshi.
What happened on 1 August and with the prices immediately after suggests how the conflict over the blocksize has been widely misreported.
Bitcoin was not ripping itself into two in a civil war, but innovating new forms of governance and token distribution for new projects.
We now have a technically proven, and from the looks of it, established new method of token distribution that is arguably far superior to crowd sales and ICOs.
If you don't like the BCH or Bitcoin implementation, there are already hundreds of other cryptocurrytencies, but you can also fork your own from the biggest, original (and arguably most widely distributed).
BCH now has a "market cap" of about $3.7 billion dollars, probably a world record for a startup (open source project) that was literally released to the world a few days ago.
If you own bitcoins before the fork, you should now own equal amounts on both sides of the coin, and (hopefully) soon will be able to buy or sell either token, depending on your preference.
Bitcoin itself has a $52 billion dollar market cap right now post fork not only because it survived the challenge and may soon implement Segwit, but because it will be one of the best chains from which to fork new projects.
There is no need to take sides from this perspective. Just sell the token you don't like and use the gain to buy more that you do like. OTOH, it's perfectly fine to like and hold both just like it was once okay to use more than one web site.
[post edited: BCash to the more neutral BCH ]
For running a bitdoinwednesday you seem to be misinformed about what bitcoin is.
Chill out, please. I don't want to see it fail at all.
Read my original remark more closely. This is good for the whole industry. We are holding both.
You made me giggle. Market cap is a measure already debatable for Bitcoin, but for a currency for which most of the holders aren't yet able to sell, it's completely meaningless. As a matter of fact I made already 150% return by shorting it. I plan to make even more as people are slowly able to unload their BCH.
And congratulations on the trading. Please buy more Bitcoin with the profit. It's all good for the industry. just wait and see.
Regarding BTC, I'm trading various cryptocurrencies depending on the opportunities I see ;)