Man buys $27 of bitcoin, finds they're now worth $886k
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
But somehow this guy made the same amount without putting really any effort or taking any risks. It's like inheritance when you are suddenly rich and collected all these years efforts.
What I'm trying to convey is that living without any assets is pretty darn hard in today life. As many (the majority) of people are inheriting wealth from their grand-parents and countries, they find life much easier.
I guess this also made life more expensive. Since they have the assets, this group can raise the prices (virtually) infinitely. They can exchange assets between each other, but people who are new to the game will be screwed.
I think the same thing is happening to Bitcoins. It's becoming too expensive that we'll see the 0.01% and the remaining of the 100%. It'll be probably as worse or much worse than real life.
He sunk $27 into an investment that (from his knowledge at the time) had a high chance of ending up completely worthless, and a low chance of exploding in value (if bitcoin took off).
That isn't "without taking any risk". On the contrary, it was a very high-risk investment. In this case, it paid off. (It was a low value investment, but that doesn't change the relative risk: making lots of (un- or anti-correlated) low-value, high-risk investments, instead of one big one, is a way to reduce your total risk).
If he was making an investment, he'd have probably followed and tracked it. That was not the case. He just found out about it.
Otherwise, my comment wasn't about that particular detail.
That wouldn't qualify as an expensive restaurant in any Western country, let alone Norway (one of the most expensive countries in the world). $27 in Norway would get you about three Big Macs. A nice restaurant would be well north of $100 ($250+ if we agree on what nice is).
To be fair, you'd make this much in ~6 years as an engineer at Google. The problem with accumulation is that most people also will spend nearly as much over that time period and not have $800k in the bank.
Granted - the speed of the price increase of Bitcoin is very impressive - other examples from history:
- Man buys $27 of Gold Coins, finds they're now worth $886K
- Man buys $27 of Tulips, finds they're now worth $886K
- Man buys $27 of Railroad shares, finds they're now worth $887K
- Man buys $27 of (insert .com boom company) Shares, finds they're now worth $886K
- Man buy $27 of Beanie Babies, finds they're now worth $886K
And as long as its price is fluctuating like this, you've got to be kind of crazy to be using it as anything but a novel currency.
Buyers have every reason to be hesitant to buy things using Bitcoins because of the possibility that the pizza's worth of BTC they could spend today might be worth enough to buy a house in another couple years. If you had a lottery ticket that you had good reason to believe might be a winner, would you trade it for a pizza? I sure wouldn't.
On the other side of things, sellers have rational reasons to not accept BTC out of fear that the company's bank account might rapidly diminish in value.
The (non-speculative) Bitcoin community is this fascinating caricature of currency situation in old Soviet bloc countries. Practically speaking, dollars are more valuable because of their greater stability. But people go on using the other currency anyway because of politics.
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/11/mf_bitcoin/
(From the 20/20 hindsight department.)
I guess just move the decimal point 4 places since it was 10k coins and that means the pizza is now worth over $2 Million
Article claims it was "the first real-world bitcoin transaction". Without those first few transactions from enthusiasts, bitcoin may well not have taking off. And those 10,000 wouldn't have been Laszlo's only bitcoins. So from that POV, maybe it was a pretty wise investment :)
Bitcoin does not beat regular coins when it comes to that yet.
After all, money does not "move", it is always stored in someone's pockets and switches owners instantly. It's just everyone has different time preferences and stores different amounts of cash for different amount of time.
I hope Google doesn't kill Calendar before 2018.
Scalability is an issue. In the future we will probably have to rely on thin clients making bitcoin less attractive.
Governments won't peacefully accept bitcoin. Why would we let people make under the table payments, enabling tax evasion and laundering? They've ignored it so far but as it becomes more popular we could see action taken against it. You may object that bitcoin is decentralized and on the internet and therefore invincible. But if exchanges were shut down that would be devastating.
A better cryptocurrency could take its place.
2. Governments will die off without ability to have "budget deficits" via money printing. No one would vote for politicians because they wouldn't be able to build stuff "for free" by borrowing money from your unborn children.
3. Owners of Bitcoin have all incentives to adjust the protocol to fix all bugs and implement all useful features to not lose their wealth. Not a problem for Bitcoin and not a problem for anyone else either. Even if Bitcoin is replaced by Bitcoin2, it won't change things for the fate of the governments.
In the leftist case, the outsiders are the rich and the insiders are "99%", they use deficit spending to remain in power. In the rightist case, the outsiders are wealthy foreigners and the insiders are their own citizens, they use expansion and conquest to remain in power.
Fiat currency enables leftist policies, hard money encourages rightist.
I suspect not. Whatever the long term shape of the price curve is, I think that in the moderate term its probably something like a logistic curve, and this year saw most of the steep portion of the logistic curve and is already bending into the high-end slow-growth portion of the curve.
shirotsku 29 October 2013 2:31pm
"Go back in time to the 80s. Buy shares in Apple. Sell shares in 2009. Buy BitCoins. Sell BitCoins in 2013. Profit."
JenniDark "Directions unclear. Bought Blackberry shares. Now what?"
Shortly after the price skyrocketed... safe to say the biggest donation I've made to date. Oh well, can only hope it is helping them out!
https://blockchain.info/address/1FfmbHfnpaZjKFvyi1okTjJJusN4...
144k Bitcoins, transferred in 324 ("FBI" on a phone) BTC increments. Presumably, they got it via either a plea deal or by finding it on one of his devices.
Most definitely not. It's more like an immigrant ghetto, together with Grønland.
Anyone know how to retrieve it?