Bitcoin goes up $10 in just one hour | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin goes up $10 in just one hour

bitcoinity.org

33 pointsAmarandei52 comments

Open articleView on HN

Uses of money:

1) medium of exchange

2) store of value

3) unit of account

4) common ground for rumor and speculation!

On HN we try to upset the established order, so if you could just go ahead and rearrange your list, that would be greeaaaat

And it just went down $10 in a few minutes

http://aarondfrancis.clarify-it.com/d/mqvp3z

Mtgox is having a trade lag above 15 minutes. This is making the market/traders crazy.

Lag in dynamic systems often causes humans to reach for dramatic adjustments.

cf. The Beer Game or Dietrich Dörner's thermometer experiments.

For a bitcoin newbie, what are the credible platforms to buy and trade bitcoins?

For those that follow bitcoin news, I'm sure there is a plethora of "don't do this," "those guys did this," etc., but what do I do as someone who knows nothing about bitcoins and how to keep them safe?

And a bonus question: what are good Canadian-friendly trading platforms?

i've used cavirtex.com before

I have found Coinbase to be pretty convenient for buying and selling bitcoins.

For how to keep them secure once you have them, I recommend simply doing some research. Coinbase provides a basic wallet and if I remember correctly, they cold store most of their coins offline.

Blockchain.info is another good option for a basic wallet. It's simple with a good amount of features. Your wallet is also decrypted in-browser and not on their server so they don't store compromising information.

There are also concepts such as a paper wallet [1] and a brainwallet [2] for extreme security. A brainwallet is basically what it sounds like - a way of storing your wallet in your head.

[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Paper_wallet [2] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Brainwallet

Tried them. It says:

"Sorry, the maximum number of purchases on Coinbase has been reached for today. Please try again in 24 hours. We'll continue raising this limit over time."

These sort of security and reliability concerns are certain to hold bitcoin back. Granted they also represent the opportunity, as surely they will be resolved.

Well there's always MtGox, which I don't think has any limits, but you have to give them an absurd amount of identity verification to be able to place orders, which scared me away.

There are multiple services, Coinbase is just one of them. This particular instance of you not being able to place an order through them is not indicative of a wider tendency to not be able to place orders.

Coinbase has a 24-hour rolling limit for how many coins can be sold through them. This is reliably the case every day.

Also, not being able to buy coins doesn't seem to be a "security" issue.

This is a hugely misleading statement. Zoom out. Regarding the previous 2 hours one could say "Bitcoin collapses by $10 in just two hours". Zoom further out... Look at the last year... Looks like it might recently be a bit of a bubble.

People on IRC keep trying to tell me bitcoin is stable. I'll never understand what their reasoning is.

It's a half statement without a time scale attached to it. Stable over what period? A day? A month? 5 years?

It wasn't meant to be misleading. It was meant to be funny. There was another post here about how Bitcoins went down $10. By the time I saw the post it already went back up. So... yeah, I just posted it more as a response to that other post.

Isn't anyone worried about the Bitcoin bubble bursting? The price is going to get really high because of all the exposure it is receiving right now and people buying a bunch of it hoping that it will just keep going up and up and up.

Anyone say "Beanie Babies"?

More adoption means it can only go up.

Maybe too optimistic, but read http://falkvinge.net/2013/03/06/the-target-value-for-bitcoin...

edit: yeah, brainfart. I meant to say that "people buying a bunch of it" can only make it go up, not that it can't (or won't) go down again.

And people always need a place to live, but that didn't stop the housing bubble.

More adoption doesn't necessarily mean that. Of players who hold on to Bitcoin for longer than a few minutes, virtually all of them are speculators. If you accept Bitcoin as payment for services, your biggest technical challenge is converting them back into dollars/euros/whatever as quickly as possible. No one is accepting Bitcoin as payment and then holding on to them in order to buy something else or pay their workers.

As a long term (or medium-term anyway) store of value, Bitcoin is really quite useless for the time being.

> No one is accepting Bitcoin as payment and then holding on to them in order to buy something else or pay their workers.

Brewster Kahle at archive.org gives his employees the option to be paid in bitcoin received by the site.

> As a long term (or medium-term anyway) store of value, Bitcoin is really quite useless for the time being.

That's quite incorrect. Bitcoin has proven to be an excellent tool for buying low, waiting for a price rise, trading some of the bitcoin for gold, selling some of the gold and buying more bitcoin with the proceeds.

It's a great tool if you're willing to learn how to use it.

>Brewster Kahle at archive.org gives his employees the option to be paid in bitcoin received by the site.

That's pretty cool actually, although personally I wouldn't do it. Hope to see more of that.

>Bitcoin has proven to be an excellent tool for buying low, waiting for a price rise, trading some of the bitcoin for gold, selling some of the gold and buying more bitcoin with the proceeds.

This speaks to Bitcoin's utility as an instrument for speculation, not for storing value. If it was a good store of value you would print out your private key and put it in a safety deposit box, confident that whenever you returned to retrieve it, it would represent approximately the same amount of wealth that it did when you left it.

This is most definitely not the case with Bitcoin at all.

> If it was a good store of value you would print out your private key and put it in a safety deposit box

I have quite a number of btc stored in cold wallets.

My point is that because of Bitcoin, I actually have fluid wealth to move around and store, be it with metals or cryptocurrency. I didn't have that freedom with US cash, an instrument whose value is rapidly decreasing and has been for a long time.

"It can only go up". Yes. Certainly. Nobody has ever said that about tulips, the South Sea company, real estate in Florida, truncated SHA256 hashes, or dot-com shares.

I think you might be too optimistic. "It can only go up" is pretty much the hallmark phrase thrown around right before something goes...down.

Unless you also share the cousin belief that things can become "too big to fail".

It's happened already. Everyone (who tries to store wealth in it) just gambles that they won't be the people who lose out.

Of course it's a bubble. But like all bubbles, some people will profit greatly if they know when to get out of it. It's a gamble.

Is freedom a bubble? There is tremendous value in freedom. Bitcoin provides this in abundance. Like P2P filesharing, no amount of legislation and regulation will wrest control of it back into the hands of the government and financial institutions - it will only continue to be embraced as public awareness grows.

It's not a bubble, it's a snowball - at least in the long run.

Whooo, easy. I'm not arguing with anyone. Yes, I could be wrong. But what will happen if an alternative to Bitcoin shows-up. Or 10. Won't that bring the price down? You have to admit, this "freedom" is kind of hard to control at the moment and it's moodier then a women. It crashed before and it can happen again. I'm not against or for it at the moment(maybe slightly the second), I'm just waiting to see what will happen.

Now worries - I didn't mean to sound argumentative and I agree with you that in the short run bubbles form. ^_^

Though, I would say freedom is not just _hard_ to control - it's impossible by definition. Freedom is not a short term thing, it's a long term outcome - it's the low energy state that's thermodynamically favored. Eventually the world will be a truly efficient, democratic, free society. But, it takes time and catalysis to get there.

Bitcoin is a catalyst for freedom. It or something like it will be adopted.

My gut tells me bitcoins are here to stay.

And there it goes - crashing down $10 in the last minute or so...

I happened to click the link exactly when it started falling. I wasn't sure if this was some kind of a joke. And the "&sarcasm=yes" doesn't help either

Volatility much! Watching it swing up and down between 36 and 41 is just crazy.

This reminds me of a volatile tech stock falling 15+% afterhours after a bad earnings report, only to bounce back 10+% or more the following morning.

No one mentioned about the URL. Ok, I'll mention it :)

Thanks, thought I was the only one :)

I posted this just because I found it very funny that the price went down and then up and people started already writing about it. Maybe I'm the only one seeing the humor in it.

It shed 25% of its worth just as quickly.

"This time it's different."

I'm pretty sure that's the point ...

What are the odds that the latest exposure will be followed by sabre rattling from politicians against bitcoin? And would that scare off enough people to drop the price?

Want to know what the price of Bitcoin is really about? Look at the 30-day chart.

Classic hype-curve hockeystick. Everyone should by now know what comes next.

Did you look at what's really driving the value of Bitcoin? Fine, the price will readjust, but you should forget most classic financial analysis tools atm. That said, I'm building a new little model justforfun to predict the price through some unusual growth drivers.

Where do I short?!

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/MPEx#Options

icbit.se

Lol @ $10 spread.

Sorry? The spread looks to me about 30 cents. Am I missing something?

Time to sell...

Pardon my Bitcoin ignorance, but you can sell, say $1 million worth of coins and not crash the price?

How thinly is this traded? 20%+ or - in hours can't be good

No, you would bring it down maybe $10-20.

And what would it bring it down to if it that drop caused a mild panic in the market?

Any idea what the total volume (in $) traded per day is?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com