Also worth noting is the fact that the Bitcoin Price Index has been massively resilient to all the bad "news" thats been pouring in this month. It has been consistently hovering around the 670-700 mark.
Basically, the price goes up quickly when new people are attracted to bitcoin and rush to buy. When the price dips however, because so much is bought for long term speculation, the price doesn't really dip much, as no one is incentivised to sell and hold out for when it gets better.
At some point the nerve of those holding out may crack, but if you read silly saurus2's post, its quite clear that many will hold out indefinitely on the belief or hope it will one day recover. So in this manner the bubble can deflate slowly. (If you call 10% in a day slow).
There are no settlement dates or ways to easily move money out (especially now) so a crash is prevented.
If a crash happens it'll probably happen before people realise it, but suddenly there just won't be anyone wanting to buy coins anymore.
But even that might not happen as people already invested into bitcoin use how wealthy they feel to buy bitcoins from each other. That can cycle for a long time before people realise there isn't new money in bitcoin.
If you had bought coins at 800-1000, why would you sell now? No one likes to cement a loss.
Those with the most reason to sell right now are the early adopters, but it's not actually clear how many of those coins are actually reachable.
But then if people panic and see how hard it is to get back into fiat from BTC won't they just go into relatively stable altcoins instead? For example DOGE is skyrocketing as we speak and it's USD price was totally unaffected by BTC's recent plummet. http://coinmarketcap.com/
EDIT: "If" -> "Is".
What, you thought other coins had their own code? Nope, they are all just a copy/paste of Bitcoin's code.
Specifically Dogecoin was "coded" (copy/pasted) in a Friday night, according to it's founder. So I don't know what you were expecting.
It will be interesting to see how each developer set and community handle this problem (and the future problems).
Disclaimer: I don’t own BTC or DOGE (or LTC or any other virtual currency).
Typically a copycoin will only have the same fixes as Bitcoin depending on when they decided to copy it. But then they will invariably lag behind.
"The OpenUDC softwares are designed to manage a free money system as described by the TRM (Théorie Relative de la Monnaie), that means a money system where no human has privileges in front of money creation either in time or in space."
The concept is therefore quite different from BTC which clearly gives some people a huge privilege in front of money creation in time
Conversely, unlike stocks, you don't need a broker, so there's nobody who would take on that dealer role.
Nobody has setup a "buy bitcoin on margin" service yet, and the first person to do so will lose a fortune to nonpayment of margin calls.
There also are brokers providing indirect Bitcoin shorting with 1:10 leverage in the form of CFD's (contracts for difference). Of course they could opt to always or sometimes not actually trade the coins - to their clients it makes no difference, as no actual coins can be moved in/out of the accounts.
Some possible ways that it might be interpreted to be more flexible are scripting, n-of-m transactions, and so on.
Reversibility shows up when you do transactions in a bank or other third party that can reverse the transaction on its own accord. There's no theoretical reason why this can't happen with bitcoin instead - you give your BTC to a hypothetical, highly regulated bank or broker or whatever, and then the transaction is exactly as reversible as any electronic transaction using dollars. The confusion sets in when you compare Bitcoin transactions with electronic transactions using fiat currency, when they're closer in many ways to physical cash transactions in nature.
I very much agree with you. This is also the right way to think about BTC exchanges -- an unregulated website that you ship cash to.
There are some subtleties around the specific nonphysical transaction mechanism of BTC that differentiate it from a cash transaction, which are sort of difficult to quantify currently because the technical and legal aspects have not been fully explored... as a hard example, imagine a BTC wallet coupled with a memorizable private key (or an effective substitute). This is essentially a cash store that cannot be confiscated, and which can be communicated verbally, i.e. within a protected (attorney-client) setting. There are some interesting implications there.
Great way of taking the risk created with the volatility of Bitcoin and multiplying up the risk massively so you can lose money even faster...
Was hoping to have a large amount in bitcoin so i can buy online services relatively anonymously.
Since then I more then recovered my loss even at the price it has now.
Maybe Bitcoin would be different if you could put money in but not take it out. But it's actually the reverse now -- it's harder to get Bitcoin out. So wouldn't that tend to increase the selling pressure?
And if you don't want to sell to a sketchy exchange, you can sell to SecondMarket[0] and get a wire transfer to your bank account the same day.
https://www.secondmarket.com/education/sell-bitcoin-secondma...
Not sure how true this is. Bitcoin has been going through a few major crashes in the past 3 years, yet the demand was still strong after it went down.
However this is incredibly unlikely, bitcoin went though a fork last year that caused some problems but was quickly rectified, this current maleability issue is also being worked on to get a resolution. These sort of network wide problems are problems with the fundamentals of bitcoin and should, by right, affect the price of bitcoin much more than say government regulations in China or India, that they dont is because most holders of bitcoin understand that these problems can be resolved with some dev time and BTC has some great and comitted devs working on it.
Namecoin (NMC) had a similar issue where it meant that web addresses linked to NMC were not secure, that caused a crahs but no where near going to zero and that is a coin with minimal developer support.
if you have 100 btc in an offline wallet, you will still have it tomorrow, despite whatever bugs/attacks hit the exchanges.
imagine if your bank was hacked, many people would literally be removed of their money.
With cryptocoins, you have the advantages of keeping dollars under your mattress while still bring able to spend them anywhere that accepts them.
I guess it would be possible.
The double spend attack works by convincing the other party that the transaction has completed (so they release whatever escrow is in place) and then replacing the blockchain.
(But a botnet infection could watch for wallets on a computer and cause the coins in the wallet to be spent)
When you have 51% of mining power, you can do a lot of nasty things(like stopping confirming transaction at all), but not spend someone else's bitcoins.
ASIC owners are paranoid about their earnings. They would notice they are getting less than they usually do the next day after the infection.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_signature
The purpose of the blockchain is to establish an ordered sequence of transactions.
This is a DDOS attack on the integrity on the distributed database, which is very bad, but not able to spend Bitcoin that isn't yours.
There is no problem with value changing tomorrow as this is a potential problem with any new payment methodologies. Adoption does not appear magically overnight. The US Dollar is velocity stable due to its wide spread use and being propped up by the equivalent of a bunch of duct tape and bailing wire.
The chances of everyone doing this and being comfortable with it is pretty low though. We need brain storage medium.
Not that I think this is the ne plus ultra of security, but since having a digital wallet doesn't obviate the existence of valuable physical documents (eg passports, title deeds) you might still want to use a safe to protect against fire, burglary, and so on.
One distinct benefit of a physical store is that removal or tampering are more obvious.
There was a guy on reddit who had all of his DOGE and BTC lifted right off his computer. He was using strong, auto-generated passwords stored in a password manager, so he was not even typing in passwords that a keylogger could intercept. Presumably the attacker had a backdoor into his system, watched him work, and just transferred out the funds when he wasn't at his desk. Poof - all gone, with more or less proper security measures in place and no clear sign of an intruder other than the missing money. Several other people reported similar events in that thread.
These are still major problems for mass adoption of crypto, completely setting aside the massive cases of fraudulent pools, online wallets, exchanges, etc., etc. There are many subtle problems that are difficult to diagnose and cure that come with a technological solution like bitcoin, that paper money simply does not have.
When he died, my grand-aunt, who always thought he was being silly, went out in the woods and retrieved all the jars.
The cash had rotted and deteriorated to the point that it was unspendable.
However, she was able to work with the US Treasury to sort through the remains and identify the bills and replace them with new currency.
There's not really a bitcoin lesson here, just some family lore that seemed relevant. :-)
These days spending old banknotes is problematic, even if they're in perfect condition.
Some people love gold, some people hate it, but everyone agrees it's the only thing that really has zero counterparty risk.
In both cases, there is one physical good which, when stolen, deprives you off the money. With cash, it's the physical notes. With Bitcoin, it's the private keys in the wallet (or private key to unlock the wallet's private keys). Making backups of the keys can protect against accidental data loss, but not against theft, as it increases attack surface (i.e. number of locations where the same money can be stolen from).
There is still an advantage here favoring Bitcoin, though: if the key is stolen and you know this, you still have a chance to preserve the wallet's holdings: just generate new keys (addresses) and broadcast a transaction of all the wallet's money to those addresses. If you can get the message to the network's nodes faster than the attacker, the money will be "signed away" before they can use it, and such attempts will be rejected as double-spends.
There is no corresponding feature for physical cash.
While you could construct a procedure to spend cash remotely without one powerful intermediate, this property is just built into to *coins, and it is simply how they work.
Are you sure about that? For the most part those transactions would simply be reversed. Bitcoin exchanges seem a lot more exposed to computer security breaches to me.
> With cryptocoins, you have the advantages of keeping dollars under your mattress while still bring able to spend them anywhere that accepts them.
Paper currency is a bearer instrument. It can be used for offline payments. Cryptocoin can't be. Both parties need to be connected to the rest of the coin network so the transfer can confirmed by other nodes.
Not to say that cryptocoins have no under-the-matress advantages. They are a lot easier to hide than cash and you can make backup copies of them, which obviously can't be done with cash.