Why? How does this make sense?
- There are the people who get it. They get the technology and the implications of this. They've been wanting something like this (not specifically this and not a clear idea maybe) for a long, long time and sort of know what to do with it.. The idea has had time to mature and they were mentally ready. They may have problems deciding on which flavor or "crypto currency company" to bet, but they're 100% backing the concept.
- There are the astrologers/traders who have no grasp of the concept but have no trouble explaining it in expert interviews on CNBC/Bloomberg/CNN Money. Traders are expert at trading: selfie sticks or the greatest "money thing" since Fibonacci's injection of Hindu-Arabic numerals into Roman banking, it's the same different thing. More crudely: if there were a market for excrement, they'd sell the shit out of it. [there actually is]
- Then there's the rest of us. A sucker is born every day. We see all these tulip bulbs and want in on the action.. Oh my, I remember when it was less than $250, if only I had bought then. What? I remember when it was like $40, imagine if I had bought then.. I didn't buy at $300 because it seemed excessive and no profit was to be made, but now, I see it's $4000! So if it went from 300 to 4000, surely it can go up [this reasoning here].. And bam...
So I think these are some of the populations driving the surge.
The very limited number of exchanges essentially have an oligopoly, and as price climbs slowly the fall in price and 'runs on the banks' can happen extremely rapidly as the exchanges have no obligation to buy your coins for anything other then 'market rate' which assumes there's a buyer.
Oh, and market demand is largely driven by bots and speculators - not the actual functionality of the BTC network.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/29/bitcoin-b...
What value is it?
Why is it good that bitcoin is so inefficient?
What are the alternatives and is it possible to improve any of the failures of bitcoin?
Are you speaking with a bias because you have invested in bitcoin and you want to cash out some day?
The Bitcoin network stores numbers in a distributed database. Why is that valuable?
Take a look at http://coinmarketcap.com/
What makes BTC rare or valuable?
>Why is it good that bitcoin is so inefficient?
It helps increase the confidence in bitcoin. We value the energy used to create bitcoins so that helps us recognize the value of the coins. It's no different than rare stones being valuable because of the work expended to find them.
at the time of Malmo's piece, he calculated that a single
bitcoin transaction requires as much electricity as the
daily consumption of 1.6 American households, and that
number has increased since then. "Adopting Bitcoin as a
major currency anytime in the next few decades," he wrote,
"would just exacerbate anthropogenic climate change by
needlessly increasing electricity consumption until it's
too late."
Kidney stones are rare and require lots of work expended to find them. Don't confuse those precursors with establishing value.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/aek3za/bitcoin-co...
At the moment it has very limited use as a practical currency - I can't buy my groceries with Bitcoin, I can't put fuel in my car with Bitcoin, I can't pay my rent or bills with it, and I can't use it at my local pub or any pub for that matter.
Bubbles don't have to make sense.
Somehow there are a lot of flagged news on HN lately.
What's wrong? I don't think the direction is good
How is that number calculated?
The actual market rate is only determined by active users who send a buy order though an exchange. If there's no demand, the price instantly tanks to 0 in a few seconds - the exchanges guarantee nothing.
What's the demand behind BTC? Speculators?
What happens when the speculators cash out because something better comes along?
Same as the stock market.
> What happens when the speculators cash out because something better comes along?
It'll crash super hard but I still think this is fine metric.
It's the notion of what is stable here that's novel and interesting