Bitcoin Price Touches $1,000 Again as Overstock Sales Hit $130,000 | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin Price Touches $1,000 Again as Overstock Sales Hit $130,000

coindesk.com

91 pointsdcawrey100 comments

This is just ridiculous. If Overstock is the biggest retailer in the world accepting Bitcoin, and on their opening day they only manage $130,000 in sales (130 BTC), what does that tell you about the volume of Bitcoin actually being used in trade and commerce rather than speculation?

There are 12.5 Million BTC in circulation. I don't doubt that Bitcoin will become a revolutionary system of payments and money storage down the track, but the price of coins is outrageously inflated at the moment.

It tells you bitcoin is at the adoption stage. People are just finding out about it.

Plus Overstock isn't exactly a hot retailer. If Amazon does this, it will be HUGE.

Even bigger would be for Paypal to add BTC as a payment method . Stores wouldn't have to "accept BTC", Paypal would do the dirty work and send on the amount in fiat to the store.

What would be better (from a branding point of view), Paypal to use PPC as "Paypal Coin". The masses wouldn't have a clue that it was actually named something else.

Thats effectively whats going on here though–Coinbase is handling the bitcoin and sending USD to Overstock. So on the retailer side of things the only difference is Coinbase doesn't have the cache that PayPal does(or the baggage). They are backed by some solid VC though–so a worry about them disappearing is probably unwarranted.

Perhaps you mean "cachet" instead of "cache"

> I don't doubt that Bitcoin will become a revolutionary system of payments and money storage down the track, but the price of coins is outrageously inflated at the moment.

Prices rise immediately in anticipation of positive future events.

Really?

If that was the case the bust of DPR and the downfall of SR should drive the price of BTC down, to it's knees - since it was the only market where BTC was treated like a curency. This fact shows that either BTC is not as rational as one might think or that big players (or a small team of players) are trying to keep the price as high as possible (by not selling in bulk).

Note that if A. Shamir's paper is correct, and we don't have proof of the opposite, than 98% of BTC is owned by 2% of portfolios. IF that's the case, then it's no wonder it's over-inflated.

The sad thing is some people believe, that somehow this is more liberal while might complete driven, by a small team of unknown/anonymous players.

NOTE: I'm not stating that this scenario is real, but to me seems not far fetched at all.

I don't see why the closing of silk road should have resulted in a drop of the price if "prices rise immediately in anticipation of positive future events." The closing of silk road lead people to anticipate that bitcoin would come to be associted with mostly legitimate purposes instead of nefarious ones in the future. So the price rose. (That was only part of it though; the senate hearings had a greater effect.)

Because people != common sense. The closing of silk road put it in the news as a currency for bad things.

It was already widely known as a currency for bad things. The closing basically eliminated that argument.

> I don't see why the closing of silk road should have resulted in a drop of the price if "prices rise immediately in anticipation of positive future events."

That's elementary: Since SR was the only place where owning BitCoin was actually useful since you couldn't buy using dollars and was a big market (in turn-over), it's seizure by the FBI should driven BTC price down because the largest btc-related goods trader closed, so all those people buying illegal products, would stop searching/buying for bitcoins. Simple as that.

So losing 40% to 50% of it's value should be expected/rational, IIRC lost from 10 to 20% for a couple of hours. The senate thing you're referring happened later on and it's still NOT clear how will end.

Then you go making an assertion... Like if anyone really cares if you buy drugs, guns or chocolate with your currency. The world doesn't work like that, no one bought/used BTC because suddenly became ethical to own one since the good BFI caught the bad Silk Road guys. If that was the case, the USD wouldn't be so widely used.

I mean, we clearly saw that the price rose. You provided an explanation for why it should have fallen. It didn't, so you are wrong. Therefore I think the world "does work like that", in some contexts.

I offered an explanation of the context in which the prices did not rose, but you clearly you don't believe that's the case.

Out of curiosity, you think that Adi Shamir is wrong?

Why would I want to spend Bitcoins that are increasing in value? I'll spend them on the way down, not up.

1. They are not guaranteed to increase in value

2. Spending bitcoin helps the ecosystem, thereby increasing the value of your other coins in the long run.

3. Having things now is often more desirable than slightly more later.

(You can't eat bitcoin. If bitcoin is all you have to spend, you will spend it on food, because food now is worth more than more valuable bitcoin later. If you also have dollars, then you'd just spend the dollars. If you have dollars and bitcoin, you can spend the bitcoin to help support the system, and replenish it immediately with your dollars.)

I would describe #3 more generally by saying that holding BTC creates an opportunity cost, unique to each person's circumstances.

Some more reasons:

4. Lower transaction cost (especially for international transactions)

5. If you want to help out the merchant, he may get a lower transaction cost out of it too (if the alternative is credit card, for instance).

Edit: Oh, and let's not forget the spend-and-replenish BTC strategy to keep your BTC holdings fixed.

>> Spending bitcoin helps the ecosystem, thereby increasing the value of your other coins in the long run.

One person spending Bitcoin has a negligible impact on helping the ecosystem, so the incentive for doing this is pretty small. You would likely gain a bigger benefit holding on to your BTC and letting other people help the ecosystem.

Why would I ever save dollars when they're always decreasing in value?

You would almost never want to save dollars, in the sense of putting them under your mattress and forgetting about them.

What you would want to do is invest your dollars, either in assets or in a savings/checking account, to get some return above the rate of inflation.

This is partly why the Fed is trying to raise inflation: a low, steady level of inflation encourages people to spend and invest in the economy, rather than simply sitting on dollars.

You don't. When your bank proudly advertises 0.9% CD rates, it's time to start taking chances.

Last night, I bought food from a truck in Austin that discounts Bitcoin purchases by 15%. I have both dollars and Bitcoin, but there are many scenarios in which I'd rather spend Bitcoin.

Since Bitcoin has a fixed currency pool, with population growth and increasing supply of goods/services, we might see the cost of goods/services priced in Bitcoins fall. In such a deflationary environment, the rational incentive is to delay purchases for the future, which is bad for the aggregate economy. When people stuff money under the mattress, it reduces the velocity of money (decreasing trade, decreasing wealth). This is why the Fed sets an inflation target in the low single digits.

It's the first day.

Your implied assumption that Overstock is the only thing influencing the price isn't right.

It's not as small as you think. This is what Overstock's CEO had to say about it on Twitter: "#Bitcoin's first full day on @overstock.com was a huge success: 840 orders, $130,000 in sales. Almost all new customers. #stunned". https://twitter.com/OverstockCEO/statuses/421754592427139072

130 BTC is 0.001% (130/12.5M) of all Bitcoin spent in one day at Overstock. Does Overstock typically receive 0.001% of all the USD money supply in one day (~30M$)? My math is probably a bit off but my point is that before calling 130 BTC ridiculous, you have to put it in perspective with regards to other currencies.

Alternatively, Overstock marketing department could spend $130k of BTC on itself (keeping most of the value due to self-dealing) and make the transaction costs back in PR advertising value.

From a comment below, they do about $3 million in a day.

But there has never been a day where excited dollar enthusiasts spent easy money on Overstock to help the dollar look better.

Yes, I'm insinuating that at least some of that volume is bitcoin millionaires having a laugh.

That "Almost all new customers" bit seems to emphasize your point. A lot of these people probably hadn't considered Overstock before they heard they were accepting BTC.

There are also a lot of holders who want to convert their BTC in to something else without paying taxes. (some of whom will be billed, or jailed, for many years in to the future as tax authorities reverse the transactions paths.)

We don't have to guess, we can calculate this precisely.

The M1 supply of all USD is $2.1 Trillion [1]. Overstock has $1.1 Billion in revenue per year [2]. So they pull in .05% of US currency per year, or 0.00014% per day.

The bitcoin money supply is $12.5 Billion [3]. Overstock pulled in $130,000 in a day, which is .001% of the bitcoin money supply.

So they got 7 times the proportion of bitcoin than they get of USD.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overstock.com [3] https://blockchain.info/charts/market-cap

Wait 1 week. Then check the numbers of BTC sales again :-)

I believe that $1.1 billion revenue figure includes international orders whereas the 130 BTC figure was for US orders only (they haven't enabled Bitcoin payments for international orders yet). In other words, that proportion should be a bit higher.

On the value of bitcoins:

There was another discussion on hacker news, where I commented on the fact that bitcoins should have a higher value due to lost coins: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6859991

In that thread, @nl provides the most interesting look at bitcoins from the perspective of bitcoins as a part of GDP: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6860024

Anywho, the value is largely speculative, but most indications seem to point to a long term growth.

What happens when the mining difficulty exceeds the cost of electricity to run the ASIC miners?

In theory, people will turn off miners and difficulty will reduce.

Also, it puts the breaks on volume, which in theory should increase demand & become scarce commodity.

It makes sense to buy from Overstock if you are in US, otherwise the shipping prices are ridiculously high. I assume that the majority of orders came from US, but Bitcoin is used all over the world.

Why do you think the price is inflated? The whole market cap is only $11B.

> the price of coins is outrageously inflated at the moment.

I would love to listen to you justify this statement, or rather, explain how any store of value without intrinsic value can be over/undervalued.

In attempting to do this, you will find that there are gaps in your understanding of how currencies work.

Or perhaps not that many Bitcoin holders need an area rug right now?

Most of my wealth is in USD, and yet in my entire life I've never bought anything from Overstock. I suspect there are millions of USD holders that can say the same. I don't think that says anything bad about the USD.

Yeah, a currency that has no transactional cost from a third party thus offering a 2-4% discount to either buyer, seller or split by both, that maintains one value globally, and isn't controlled buy a particular nations government, probably is of no interest to the retailers of the world and likely just inflated bits that will never become an actual system of payments down the road. If you believe that, I have a plethora of REAL investments to sale you.

> I don't doubt that Bitcoin will become a revolutionary system of payments and money storage down the track

The tone I get from your comment makes me wonder if you really understood what GP meant. You could be both right, as in BTC being very useful to a lot of people, but still overinflated.

I hear you, but the author of the comment heavily edited his post. That's not what it initially said. Either way, we all have our views. With something like BTC the future is unknown and thus just fun to discuss. It's great to engage with you and everyone else here. Theres's obviously a pool of great minds in the HN community.

You fail to realize that Overstock represents a tiny fraction of all the commerce done in bitcoins.

Bitpay alone is seeing an exponential growth of Bitcoin transactions: they appear to be doing about $20-30 million/month at their current rate: http://blog.bitpay.com/2013/12/bitpay-drives-explosive-growt... and http://blog.bitpay.com/2013/12/bitpay-exceeds-100000000-in-b...

That's still astronomically low compared to non-bullshit money. The US economy goes through its M1 money supply 7 times per quarter, or over twice per month [0]. If Bitcoin had that ratio, it would now be running $30 billion of meaningful transactions per month, not $30 million.

[0] http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/M1V

[Ctrl-F keyword: "velocity of money"]

Bitcoin actually isn't doing too bad, according to blockchain.info.

They estimated a transaction volume of 82,659.87740705 BTC for the previous 24 hour period. Multiply that by 365 and divide by 12.5 million, and you get 2.4x. 2.4x is less than half 7x, but it really ain't bad.

Of course, if you take the same stats, and divide the money which went to miners -- 4,811.59892633 BTC -- by the transaction volume, you get an effective transaction fee of 5.8% for that same period...

EDIT: Whoops, mixed up quarters and years. BTC goes through its money supply 0.6x per quarter. I'm not sure if that's good -- "only" an order a magnitude off from USD -- or bad -- a "full" order of magnitude off from USD.

Yes, but what fraction of that is "economic" stuff that goes into a GDP? With cryptocurrency you have clearly non-economic transactions that get registered in the global blockchain, like someone reorganizing their wallet internally, or a group shuffling bitcoins in circles as a money laundering method. Bitcoin transaction volume could be orders of magnitude higher than the Bitcoin "GDP'; it's not a measurement of it.

"They estimated a transaction volume of 82,659.87740705 BTC for the previous 24 hour period. Multiply that by 365 and divide by 12.5 million, and you get 2.4x. 2.4x is less than half 7x, but it really ain't bad."

I think that's off by a factor of four: the Fed uses financial quarters (3 months) as the time interval.

You don't understand Bitcoin. $30 million/month is just the Bitpay figure.

In reality, there are many more payment processors other than Bitpay, and many economic transactions happen outside of payment processor networks. It is hard to estimate money velocity in Bitcoin: http://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction-volume-u... shows approximately $3 billion/month ($100 million/day) but this is an upper bound, because some of these transactions are just people moving coins around their wallets. The real figure is probably $100+ million/month to give an order of magnitude. And $100 million/month is not bad at all considering that it started from zero merely five years ago!

"The real figure is probably $100+ million/month to give an order of magnitude."

So we are completely in agreement on the numbers. I used $30 million as my anchor point: the same power of 10. Either way it's 2.5-3 orders of magnitude from $30 billion (B), which is what you'd predict if money was moving around as fluidly as the rest of the economy.

Emphasis: you're fiddling with a factor of 3, within an uncertainty of a factor of 10 and a shortfall of a factor of 1,000.

I feel sorry for those buying bitcoins at prices $900+, seriously! China has two more weeks until the shut down - so far Huobi and a couple of other exchanges still allow bank transfers into the exchanges and the Chinese are making their last profits. When Yuan stops flowing into the exchanges (or becomes much harder), the only Yuans you can get to buy is when you sell. I'm sure people will figure out to buy via friends from outside the country, but you can't really do the current level of speculation not having quick transfers in and out. Keep in mind most of the trade volume is in China! Mt.Gox has ridiculously low volume, yet, both Bitstamp and BTC-e follow it although they have much more volume now. Remember on the 14th the Taobao restriction also kicks in. Also, hearings won't be very positive this time as it looks. Anyway, November was a great month, but not every month in November! Also, the initial excitement about Overstock will quickly subside. It just can't get any better than this.

Thanks for downvoting without giving a reason why!

How does the ban on 3rd party payment processors affect direct bank transfers?

As it's obvious that they are using the letter of the ban to go around the spirit of the ban.

Don't feel sorry for those people, exchanges exist for a reason. If people feel like they do not want to hold on their cryptocurrencies anymore, they can still sell them. Moreover, as long as there are enough people willing to buy those coins at a higher price, it can only keep rising.

I'm not a bitcoin booster or super believer or whatever the term is (even though I have some), but even if we are to follow your arguments, and assume that Chinese traders got the price that high, we can say that with a market cap as low as $10B, China hadn't likely injected as much money as Wall Street would if they entered the market. My point is that even if the price crashes because of some bad news in China, it still has a chance to rise again when Wall Street comes (if we are to believe that those companies still want to enter).

It really looks like speculation is what keeps the btc/usd pair rising, but with such good news coming, I can't think of a lot of reasons why people would stop speculating. Keep in mind that there is no short supply of people who want to get rich with little work.

You cannot deny that the current high price is due to the extremely high demand in China. Get China out of the picture, add a bit more due to Zynga and Overstock, the price should be less than $300.

I'm not denying it, just pointing that some other factors could have the same effect.

> It just can't get any better than this.

People were saying this in 2010 when it reached dollar parity, in 2011 when it was $20 a pop and they keep saying it now. It really means nothing.

Also, you're getting downvoted because you're making these hard and fast predictions without substantiating them with anything but pure speculation. If you really believe BTC is about to drop then why don't you put your money where your mouth is and short it? There's a fortune to be made if your predictions turn out to be correct.

A lot of people mix profiting and preaching. If you believe in Bitcoin, you don't necessarily have to support its high price. In fact, the high price and the volatility limit mass adoption, the exponential growth makes many people recognize it as a bubble and they don't want to participate. Many just want to get rich from Bitcoin easily and secretly multiply the number of bitcoins they own times the Winklevii level of $40K or higher and go to bed with a smile. Instead of creating real value, many rush to make money from the raise by not doing much, putting their last penny into bitcoins. As companies like BitPay and Coinbase eventually drag the price down, I read many Bitcoin diehards suggesting to immediately replenish your coins right after purchase, i.e. spend your bitcoins and then pay 1% + $0.15 at Coinbase. I won't mention that the rate will be different at that moment, too! :) Loyalism to the level of idiotism! If you believe Bitcoin price will keep going up, pay with your credit card, and then pay your credit card balance 30 days later when it will cost you less Bitcoins! Or don't pay it at all - the APR will be nothing compared to the logarithmic growth, right? :)

I believe it will keep going up but I am not 100% certain (anyone who says they are is an idiot or clueless) so I am invested only with an amount I am comfortable with. It's not an all or nothing kind of situation; you can be be exposed to an asset in proportion with the risk you associate with the said asset. It's called risk weighting and it's considered basic investing knowledge.

At this point I am not comfortable investing more in BTC but I would also be very reluctant to bet against it. I currently believe that the chance that BTC will reach the levels the Winklevii are talking about is minuscule, otherwise I would've already dumped all my savings into it.

I have a dislike for people who keep preaching either about BTC completely failing or overtaking the entire world economy. Both belong to the same camp of irrational thinking and simply hoping their preferred outcome happens. There is a certain probability distribution associated with the future price and the chance that the price will be at the either end of the curve (0 or max) is tiny. This is why I always tell people who make black and white "predictions" about price to simply invest according to their beliefs and certainty levels. It usually reveals real quick what they really believe (more often than not, they're full of shit).

I have to agree that both extremes don't do a favor to their side. The most important rule is not to invest money you can't afford to lose. I think 10-20% of your play capital can be invested in Bitcoin, but many put every single penny into it - maybe they don't have another chance to make money, who knows. Bitcoin sounds so simple as an investment! Unlike stocks, you don't need any special skills - you just hoard and cash out after a few years when you suddenly wake up a millionaire. By skills in stocks I mean that to match Bitcoin ROI you need to make a sequence of successful trades and stock picks.

I think this really helps justify Bitcoin as a viable currency to the public. Seeing relatively large sales being done with Bitcoin at a well-known retailer is a big confidence booster.

Seeing relatively large sales

For comparison, overstock sold 1.1B in 2012.. which is 2.6M in 21 hours vs 124K in 21 hours

What about holiday sales being majority of yearly revenue?

Not really the case for Overstock.. Q4 2012 was 342M, Q1 2013 was 311M... their sales have been flat for 2012, 2011, and 2010.. so it's likely Q1 2014 is similar to last year

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=ostk

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=OSTK&annual

So what you're saying is that on the first day of availability, Bitcoin made up 5% of their sales by volume. I'd consider that a pretty big success.

Check back in a few days. It's almost certainly going to go down, not up.

Has anyone been following what BTC price Overstock is allowing?

Because I seriously doubt you get market top or even average price in BTC for something.

Coinbase aggregates a few different markets to determine the price in real-time.

I don't see how it's anywhere near a viable currency for general use. The wildly fluctuating exchange rate, the fact that it's run on a public ledger (and the privacy loss implications of this), the relative difficulty of use compared to cash or debit/credit cards, and its uncertain legal status are all still problems in that regard.

The press must know by now Mtgox is an inflated price, but they still continue to reference it as the price of bitcoin.

Agreed, no one should be quoting Mtgox price these days.

Perhaps it's moderately inflated, but it is still the most well-known exchange among the populace; therefore, they're going to go with it. It's sort of like real currencies. Yes, on the spot market they're worth X, but when you're on the street trying to exchange it, it'll be worth X * 0.9.

Exactly. Good luck getting 100% of the spot price of Gold.

In a perfect world the newspapers would use the combined weighted price for the last few weeks shared by all of the exchanges, but we're dealing with reporters here.

It's inflated because USD withdrawals are severely delayed, often taking months to clear. There are people waiting since June 2013 for withdrawals.

Domestic JPY withdrawals seem to happen smoothly so some people use that route to get fiat out.

It used to be where 80 percent of the transactions happened. Now it's more like 25 percent, and Bitstamp seems to have surpassed it recently, at least for BTC/USD:

http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/

Not only is it inflated, but it has more volatility. I no longer own any bitcoins, but if I were going to invest or purchase from an exchange, it would not by MtGox because of all the HFT that happens there.

High frequency trading minimizes volatility. And MtGox is notorious for not taking weeks to pay out. So I'm not entirely sure what you're on about.

>>And MtGox is notorious for not taking weeks to pay out.

There must be a typo there. The word "not" should be removed. MtGox is a mess. It doesn't matter if MtGox values bitcoin at $999,999 each. You'll never see a dime. I'm curious to know who is using that exchange and how well it's working for them. Maybe they're daytraders who don't actually feel like getting fiat yet. I know I've been trading coins<--->fiat on btc-e.com but haven't actually requested the USD of my profits yet. When that time comes, I plan to buy bitcoin ---> coinbase.com ---> bank account. And in this way I pay the rate coinbase.com will give me.

If you try to go MtGox--->BankAccount, failure. So the fiat/BTC rate on MtGox is meaningless unless you're lucky enough that it actually worked for you.

selectodude, Can you explain how HFT minimizes volatility? I was always under the impression HFT made the swing wider as when the price drops, naive algorithms sell anticipating a wider drop.

Why not? Anyone with a free account can sell at this this price.

You can sell but you can never get the USD from that sale.

This is called spreading FUD. All it takes is 3 weeks.

Worth noting that BitStamp has double the volume of gox recently. And Stamp actually acts like a liquid company, getting people their money without fuss.

> The price of bitcoin reached $1,000 again today on Japan-based bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox

The headline is misleading. I would expect CoinDesk to use their own Bitcoin Price Index or at least a regular exchange like Bitstamp as a reference rather than an exchange from which no one can withdraw money in a reasonable time.

MtGox is a poor indicator for going rate of Bitcoin. Because it's so difficult to withdrawal USD from MtGox, their exchange rate is always higher than the going rate. Example, MtGox is currently $992/btc, where as both bitpay and bitstamp are $887/btc.

I wonder if anyone will ever write an article about Bitcoin that doesn't quote some crackpot who thinks the Federal Reserve is destroying our money.

Well, in this case the crackpot in question is the CEO of Overstock, so it's kind of relevant.

I think the real issue is that in a disproportionate number of the big cases of Bitcoin being used in actual transactions, one or the other of the participants is a crackpot who thinks the Federal Reserve is destroying our money, despite the dollar's impressive record of price stability.

How is adoption of bitcoin as a payment technology a bullish indicator for bitcoin as an investment? The prices on Overstock are still in dollars and bitcoin as a payment technology works equally well whether bitcoin is priced at $1,000,000 or $0.01.

If you believe that overstock will lead to increased demand for BTC (perhaps not due solely to overstock but a wave of merchants who follow suit) and that the demand outpaces BTC's inflation (i.e. the ~3600BTC mined into existence each day), then BTC's value will rise as a consequence.

The Overstock case doesn't increase net demand for bitcoins. This is how Overstock works. I have dollars and I want to buy something on Overstock. I buy some bitcoins with my dollars. I send bitcoins to Overstock and Overstock sends me the product. Overstock then sells the bitcoins to convert back to dollars.

So there is a buy and a sell for each transaction which creates no net demand for bitcoins. And if you consider the alternative where I already have bitcoins because I mined them, then I have bitcoins and I send them to Overstock who sells them for dollars. In that case you actually create downward pressure on the bitcoin price (against the dollar) since there is no buy on my part to net against Overstock's sale of bitcoins.

This is the initial setup, but as there is some cost involved when converting bitcoins to USD and back that is degressive with volume, if many people are buying through bitcoins, it would start making sense for Overstock to hold the bitcoins for a while and convert them in bulk, so this could eventually increase the demand for bitcoin after all, no?

(Of course, given the current volatility and volumes, it would make no sense for Overstock to do this yet.)

It's true that the Overstock transaction itself doesn't create new demand.

But it may bring new users who buy/hold BTC, if they see it as a useful store of value or just for convenience sake to make future purchases. Overstock's CEO said they may start holding it for longer if they can pay their vendors in BTC or have derivatives that allow them to hedge against decline in value.

Also, because the exchanges charge a fee to convert to/from fiat (e.g. 1% in coinbase's case), that creates some incentive to stay as BTC.

Coinbase allows retailers to specify how much Bitcoin to hold from purchases instead of converting to dollars. As more merchant expenses can be paid with Bitcoin, merchants will begin to hold larger amounts to avoid the 1% hit. As a result, they'll enjoy near zero transaction fees instead of 2-3%.

I sure hope Overstock's opsec people are securing their bitcoin wallets. Worst news to hear would be that someone took their bitcoins out of their wallets the next day.

Overstock isn't accepting BTC, they are accepting USD from Coinbase, who in turn accept BTC. Coinbase bears the security risk.

so swap the reference to the opsec of Overstock with coinbase's.

as soon as there's enough money, well funded organizations will start attacking, and robbing a bitcoin wallet is probably less risky than a bank...

I believe Coinbase holds the majority of their BTC in offline wallets distributed in multiple bank vault around the world.

They are probably one of the groups with the best BTC storage security (while maintaining usability). So yes, if they WERE to be robbed, then that would basically mean that no one is able to properly secure BTC.

There was a lot of volatility in a short span of time from the China announcement to Overstock adoption.

Yes, lots of trading bots at play, too!

BTW, I wondered, will actually having a higher transaction fee on the API transaction, in fact, reduce volatility? Let's say, at Bitstamp with volume, you can get down to 0.02% fee (no so hard with even a few bitcoins and a few trades). If API trading fee is always at 0.05% or higher, then bots will slow down a bit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com