back
102 comments
At this point virtually everybody I know in the tech space is buying at least one coin to "hedge" against bitcoin achieving "gold 2.0" status.

What are the chances that as this message echoes out to virtually any urban-dwelling or internet connected human on the planet we may all, as a human race, wind up accidentally embracing a unified digital currency while in pursuit of what amounts to a lottery ticket?

The important question on the other side: What are the chances that we all, as a human race, wind up accidentally embracing a digital tulip?
Only if Bitcoin fails at its promise and can't be fixed. E.g. some crypto breakthrough makes all security worth nothing.

Only if P=NP, in other words.

I thought about buying a coin recently, but then I realized, I don't think Bitcoin will ever be successful as an online currency. The process of buying into Bitcoin, and getting money out of Bitcoin is a complete disaster in my book. Everyone is looking at Bitcoin as an investment, and the only people putting in the effort to join are those aiming for financial gain.

My prediction is the price is going to rise, faster and faster in the coming weeks. The hype is still building, people are seeing these 20% gains overnight, and thinking they're going to get rich. It feels like a pyramid scheme, where the people already owning coins are going out and recruiting others to buy into Bitcoin, to raise the value of their own wallet.

Now, time for a wild guess. I say it peaks at 900-1,000 two to three weeks from now, then starts to level off. People get worried not seeing gains, and decide to start cashing out in time for the holidays. By the new year, under 300.

If I had a coin, I'd hold it until the end. As others have said, I think it's going big, or going to zero in the coming years.

While it's very true that Bitcoin could use major improvements in general usability and user-friendliness, I don't know your location, but buying BTCs here in Poland is trivial - transfer money to bitcurex, buy and transfer coins out within 1-2 working days top.
Only if it's real growth, and not just a speculation bubble. The only way bitcoin reprsents real value is if people transact with it. My vague guess is that it can do that if its users can exhange to/from it per-transaction, because otherwise the value fluctuations will make it too risky.
It is a speculation bubble. People are betting that Bitcoin will become world money and be worth millions of products in many countries. Anything can become money only when it has value and acceptance which are created by speculators. Such bubble can pop only if some other, more promising thing may become money, or if there's a flaw in the currently hyped thing.

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.fr/2013/04/bitcoin-...

That's pretty much the reason behind every bubble.
Forget these 10 reasons. The real 10 reasons are

1. The price keeps skyrocketing, so people hoard or buy 2. The price keeps skyrocketing, so people hoard or buy 3. The price keeps skyrocketing, so people hoard or buy 4. The price keeps skyrocketing, so people hoard or buy

etc... it all works out until it doesn't... it's long overdue for a major correction

Does not “correction” imply that there is a “correct” price for Bitcoin? Since it has absolutely no inherent value, what would this be? Zero? Or does its value derive from its utility as a medium of exchange (and associated transfer mechanism)? In that case, should its value be derived from the size of the global economy? (As done here: http://falkvinge.net/2013/03/06/the-target-value-for-bitcoin...)
I don't think it is "long over due" There will probably be another correction just like there have been two or three already but if you look at each BitCoin "bubble" each is about 5x larger than the previous one so I would think we will see prices rise to at least the 1,000 neighborhood before retracting and when it does I don't see it going lower than $250 - $300 ever again unless something happens to make it worth zero.
It's pretty interesting how this comment can also be said for equities as well.
What do you mean by long overdue?
I still think Moldbug has by far the explanation of the increasing moneyness and price of bitcoin: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2013/04/bitcoin...

So when people say bitcoin is "bubble" they are essentially correct - although the condescension is usually misplaced. All money is a bubble in the sense that its reservation demand is far higher than its use value warrants. This is true for the dollar, and it's also true for gold, which also has a large element of "moneyness".

"The Silk Road shutdown resulted in brief, but shallow sell off and subsequent rebounded within a few days. This event showed the world and governments that illegal activities were a very small fraction of the transactions taking place on the bitcoin network."

I would say it showed that Silk Road was a small fraction of all BC transactions, but that still doesn't speak to the total amount of illegal activity going on BC.

That said, it does imply to me that either: (1) The total percentage of BC transactions being used for illegal transactions really is low (as the article implies), or: (2) The remaining entities using BC for illegal purposes are confident that what happened to the Silk Road won't happen to them.

No matter how small it was, it was probably the largest money-bitcoin-money faction.

Lots of people mine and trade coins. But only the few thousands (hundreds?) Silkroad users were actively pumping money constantly into the system, giving a much needed reality check of how much people will pay for a made up currency with established made up money.

Investment-wise, the prognosis is still the same as it ever was: BTC will either become a huge thing worth a lot, or it will be worth near zero.

The only difference is the % of total BTC you can buy given your availabe assets.

For some people that % is now close to nil, whereas before it wasn't, so they've missed their opportunity.

For others, the % is still significant. Those people should probably still get into BTC if they agree with the premise of this comment.

> Investment-wise, the prognosis is still the same as it ever was: BTC will either become a huge thing worth a lot, or it will be worth near zero

Almost but not quite: it must surely go to zero at some point, because chances are extremely high that we haven't accidentally hit the holy grail of digital cryptocurrencies and no better thing could ever be possibly come along for all eternity. Before that happens, it will most likely become a bigger thing than now. So I think most folks are just wondering two things: before we reach zero, how much bigger will it become (multitudes? exponentially bigger? orders of magnitude? or just another $3.50 higher?) and over what timeframe.

And even the most educated guess at those two questions is as good as any other, truly.

Anything that goes up fast will come down fast. That simple is that. The sooner you sell your speculative investment the more likely you'll get your money back (at the expense of other people). I sold some leftover coins of mine after 2x in price and that's still phenomenal gains from just some random coins I saved for any next purchase.

The value of BTC will slowly rise but naively extrapolating from the last year or so only I'd say the realistic value is still below $100. I'm pretty confident that roughly $50 is a rather stable floor for the years coming.

Do you have any logical/economic basis for this speculation you have so confidently pronounced?
tl;dr JS_loader == BAD_UX

I can't comment on the post because I'm on a train with spotty 3G coverage. Which begs the question. WTF is going on with this trend of JS loaders? If your site takes too much time to load, stop nagging users and just take the time to properly optimize the site.

Just like with every bubble, some people will wait and wait again to invest in... Only once all their friends will have gain some money speculating, once the main media will say it's an easy way to make money, when they'll have the feeling that eveybody else is making money, only then will they invest in... And loose everything the next day, after the bubble collapse.

So, if you're planning on speculating with bitcoins, do it right now, or never do it... The chances are it's already too late btw, since people are already mentionning exponential growth.

Case in point: I hold quite a few bitcoins. I am waiting to sell them. The deciding moment will be when my mom mentions bitcoins to me the first time. That will be the trigger ;)
To Bitcoin owners out there: out of curiosity, what kind of stuff do you buy using Bitcoin?
Donations - Bitcoin is great for it, and there are many organizations, small and big, that accept it. One of them (not mine): http://seansoutpost.com

eBay style trading - I once bought a $100 trillion Zimbabwe dollar bill for Bitcoin. Think of the irony - using hyper-deflatory currency to buy hyper-inflatory currency :)

In bigger cities you can buy drinks and food with it in certain pubs/restaurants.

There are many more legitimate uses for Bitcoin, and even if most people hoard most of their stash, when you have to pay for something many tend to spend their Bitcoins if they have the possibility.

given the crazy rise in prices I doubt anybody is spending any, apart from people who maybe want to, uhm, clean some money.
Food and beer, mostly. Handy when you run out of cash and don't want to walk to the ATM few blocks away :-)
Curry takeaways and PC games, also to send money to techie friends is much easier than even online banking.
Server and computer parts on amazon, loads of them
How many of these transactions are tulip-style speculation, and how many are real use of bitcoins as a currency for exchanging labour and goods?
Huh, nothing about the approach of a big buyer's holiday and the end of the tax period?
Your idiotic mobile theme renders this as a gigantic, unscrollable "0%"
And breaks scrolling.
If goes btc keeps going up like this for 10 years 1 BTC will be worth more than all dollars in the world today. I think i'll keep hoarding 3 euro coins instead, at least you can make bullets out of them.
Some investments go up really fast for a while, and then go up more slowly after that. Do you have good arguments for why bitcoin couldn't do this?
What a headache. Just to buy a cup of coffee I need to boot up Linux on a USB disk, input a 500 digit hash, call my brother for the rest of the hash, and my cousin in Sweden for the rest of it, make the transfer an wait for 15 minutes for it to transact, then I get my coffee. Yea. I'd feather have GOLD, SILVER AND COPPER coins. Even digital representations maintained by a bank.

Also, I'm glad I didn't agree to pay my mortgage in bit coins when the value was $11. The 70X increase in price would BITRUPT me! :)

TOO MANY BIT COIN QUESTIONS:

If they were stolen, who do I call to help me get them back? If I loose the keys to get into my coins, who will help me get access back to my cash. Does the UN have a BitPolice squad hunting down bit theft? If I were to declare bankruptcy would I have to declare my bit coins as a part of my estate? Is there a BITRUPTSY court?

n.b. the article is about why (in the author's eyes) the price of bitcoin skyrocketed. It's all very much past-tense, observation not prediction.
This Bitcoin rise rases some interesting questions for me, even if it rings alarm bells at the same time.

What is the value of a currency? Is it the inscription 'I promise to pay the bearer on demand...', which nowadays will not be fulfilled? Is it the power of the organisation backing it? Perhaps the simplest explanation is best - what can you buy in other goods you might want with this currency? But that leaves you open to manipulation as you are entirely dependent on your perception of what other people think this is worth, which can change in an instant as we have seen with stock markets or indeed government-backed currencies where confidence is lost. So a good confidence trick will be worth as much as or more than a solid currency, until a moment of panic.

If you try to base it on the current value of goods in the world divided by the currency in circulation (say 11m coins), Bitcoin has a large climb in value ahead of it if it were to become a world currency, and if no other currency were in use. What is the USD worth if you price it this way though with only 3b in circulation and ?

If you say the value of a currency is its ability to buy other goods Bitcoin is currently worth a lot compared to other currencies and prices in it are deflating rapidly, but it has crashed before and will again, because the only measure of value seems to be confidence in its possible future uses, and that makes it very hard to pin down the value. It would be interesting (but I suspect impossible) to try to calculate a value for each Bitcoin based on actual use to buy goods of known value at the present time (as opposed to speculative trading).

If you base it on its use value as a medium of exchange, I have hesitations about the utility of Bitcoin, because of its anonymous nature (not tied to verified IDs), lack of regulation, deflationary policy, and lack of backing, and thus hesitations about its value. As a result of the free-floating value and lack of regulation, I suspect Bitcoin prices will behave far more like stock markets (a random walk) than like a normal currency which is pegged to others to some extent, and thus will be difficult to establish as a medium of exchange because of the volatility.

I also find it hard to believe if it is successful that it will not be supplanted by some other digital currency which has fewer of its limitations and is more suited to transactions between people who do not value anonymity above all, and wish to be protected from fraud, and the govs and corps that would like to track them. All you have to do to set up a competitor is establish some rules and get people to use it - something which corporations or governments can easily achieve if their monopoly on the money-supply is threatened in a meaningful way.

Now I'm kicking myself for not buying into BTC last week!
I did buy 1.5 BTC last week, just for fun. Bought another 1 BTC tonight. I may regret the latest purchase, or both purchases, I dunno. But, since I found myself wishing I'd bought more last week, I bought some more tonight.

When I bought those 1.5 BTC at ~$200, I had planned to buy more when the inevitable crash came. It may still come, but I'm feeling pretty confident the size the BTC market has grown so much as to make it likely the new low that it falls to is gonna be well above that $200, maybe even above the $500 it's trading at now. Timing the market is often a bad idea, so I setup a small monthly buy tonight, as well, so I won't be tempted to try to figure it out.

^ People like this. The real reason bitcoin is going up in value.
I bought $9,000 worth of BTC at $7 two and a half years ago.

I sold them when it hit $30. :-(

Bandwagon + Peer effects = a "gold" rush. btw, the current exchange rate - $600 is making it worthless for everyday payments or small shopping. It is just a mass hysteria.
>btw, the current exchange rate - $600 is making it worthless for everyday payments or small shopping.

Huh? Why? You can buy fractions of a bitcoin, you know.

the price of bitcoin is skyrocketing.

why? "more buyers than sellers"

Completely OT but what's up with the scrolling? Why would you do that?