Bitcoin has crossed $6,000 USD for the first time

https://twitter.com/coinhubplatform/status/921395537093332993

by electic • 9 years ago

75 124 9 years ago

twitter.com

leoharsha2• 9 years ago

Can anyone please tell me Is it a good time to buy ETH/BTC or am I too late?

aqme28• 9 years ago

No one knows the future. Do your research and see if you think it'll go up or not.

There's still a good chance you'll be wrong. Don't gamble what you cannot lose.

0x4f3759df• 9 years ago

This was asked recently, answers include {yes, no, maybe, I don't know} https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15491775

JoelTheSuperior• 9 years ago

Can you repeat the question?

underyx• 9 years ago

If you get and aggregate everyone's advice you'll get to the conclusion that the correct price for Bitcoin is exactly where it's at now.

baddox2• 9 years ago

Not quite. You’d have to weight each person’s advice for their willingness (and ability) to trade Bitcoin.

pmoriarty• 9 years ago

You're assuming it's priced fairly and there's no cheating or other manipulation in the price.

vkou3• 9 years ago

Too late to do what? Speculate? Transact?

In case of the former, nobody knows. In case of the latter... You probably shouldn't do it, unless you want to speculate.

rossdavidh• 9 years ago

No. Well, unless you don't care if they're going to be correct.

sAbakumoff2• 9 years ago

jump on to the bandwagon asap. Just invest a minor share of your savings that you can afford to lose and check the exchange rate in 1 year. It might give 50x profit or you can lose it all, but you can afford it)

sAbakumoff2• 9 years ago

why is it downvoted? is that a bad advice? why?

zeep• 9 years ago

I'm waiting for the next 20% drop, but there's a risk that it will never happen... it's probably not worth the wait though, if you plan on buying some...

mirrormind• 9 years ago

Its like any other speculative investment. Define how much you are willing to lose(risk). Once that condition is met, sell. If it goes up, take some profits. It's all about risk management and the discipline to stick to your rules.

AElsinore772• 9 years ago

Think of it as a high-risk hedge against future hyperinflation - the Fed can expand the monetary supply arbitrarily to infinity; but Bitcoin's expansion is limited by design.

I think of money as simply a distribution mechanism for the world's resources - a unit of currency can be thought of like a share; a right to allocate a portion of resources represented by that share. With the dollar, you can be diluted to infinity, with bitcoin, you cannot. With any fiat, it only has value because everyone else says it does. ETH is interesting because it is more than just currency, but it remains to be seen how valuable the ability to run decentralized apps will become.

albertgoeswoof3• 9 years ago

Think of it as a high-risk hedge against future hyperinflation - the Fed can expand the monetary supply arbitrarily to infinity; but Bitcoin's expansion is limited by design.

That's true of bitcoin, but not bitcoin forks. You can just fork the chain and there's your dilution / inflation e.g. Ethereum classic, Bitcoin Cash, both of those are taking value away from the Bitcoin and deflating the currency futher.

charlesdm• 9 years ago

The entire crypto market is worth $160bn at the moment (Bitcoin: $100bn). That is less than the market cap of Visa, or equals about the market cap of Mastercard. Global gold is valued at around $8.2tn (or $8,200bn).

This is not investment advice, but _IF_ (and that's a big if) some of these coins (mainly Bitcoin and Ethereum) successfully achieve some of their goals, today's price will be extremely cheap. If not, it will probably be expensive. Do your own research and then decide whether you think they can.

smnplk• 9 years ago

Ask John McAfee

holtalanm2• 9 years ago

wishing i had actually kept my mining program running when I experimentally installed it and ran it for about 30 minutes ~5-6 years ago now.

lawlessone• 9 years ago

if you have an account with any only pool you should probably check just to see,i still had a little in one pool after all that time.

diminish2• 9 years ago

I remember those times - does anyone know how many bitcoins one could make per computing time, every year since the beginning to see what opportunity is missed.

zby2• 9 years ago

6 years ago it was already too late for CPU mining (at least after March when I tried it).

tempay• 9 years ago

It could have been using a GPU.

ttul• 9 years ago

Wishing I had not transferred one Bitcoin to someone back in 2011 just to show them how it works. And then erased that old MacBook that was loaded with 10 BTC in its wallet.

shmageggy• 9 years ago

This made me realize I think I just recycled the hard drive with my old bitcoin wallet on it. I had half a bitcoin that I mined in a few nights on my old Geforce 4 GPU. Fuck me!

Klathmon• 9 years ago

I just learned last week. I found the word bitcoin next a last modified date of 2011 in my backups while looking for something else.

My heart kind of started racing as I looked through it. The backup was of a mining program I was using, and it had the address that I was mining to. Looked up the address, it has 13.3 BTC in it!

I started unpacking the whole archive to find the wallet, only to learn that I didn't backup the wallet.dat. I don't know why I didn't, probably some combination of it being worth like $30 at the time + not knowing exactly where the private key was stored.

But it brings the total amount of bitcoin i've lost over the years up to 23.3...

conn01• 9 years ago

I think hackernews should rename to vcnews

chollida12• 9 years ago

I love bitcoin, this rise comes just 3 days after it had its biggest one day drop in a month. At this point it must be a CTA's dream instrument, all it does is seem to trade on momentum:)

So if China shutting down exchanges, the CFTC coming out and claiming tokens used in ICO's fall under its jurisdiction, confusing regulations everywhere, and huge recent gains can't stop it, I'm not sure what will.

As a side note, if there are any Bloomberg engineers around, come on VCCY<GO> is really awful.

Put some time into it, its not like virtual currencies are going away any time soon.

soVeryTired2• 9 years ago

CTAs tend to have built in risk control :)

chollida12• 9 years ago

No one said they didn't:)

Not a big deal most people don't understand that industry. The point I was going for is that CTA's, more than anyone else, love good momentum stories as they are the original trend followers.

api• 9 years ago

I've asked it before but: how is this a desirable characteristic for a currency?

This level of deflation is as bad as too much inflation, though the problems it creates are different. Why would anyone actually use Bitcoin if simply sitting on it will yield a greater return than investing it in anything? So far it seems more deflationary than gold. If this keeps happening won't this actually crowd out the currency application and lead to Bitcoin becoming nothing more than a speculative bubble?

It's hard to determine but I'd love to see some data on Bitcoin use vs. its price in USD/EUR.

zby2• 9 years ago

To be useful money needs some reasonable market cap - because it could not store or move too much value without that.

baddox2• 9 years ago

Being a “currency,” for any definition of that term, doesn’t have to be and isn’t the only criterion for success for Bitcoin.

heelhook• 9 years ago

You’re thinking about this wrong; bitcoin is meant to be used more as a store of value rather than as a currency for transactions. You should think about it more as hold than dollars.

Also, new assets and specially new asset classes are predictably going to have high volatility at first, until the market knows what to make out of it and finds the right value for it. In relative terms, bitcoin is still a pretty new asset, specially since new people are coming into the market every month.

rsynnott2• 9 years ago

If this keeps happening won't this actually crowd out the currency application and lead to Bitcoin becoming nothing more than a speculative bubble?

I think it'd be reasonable to say that this has largely already happened. Beyond the volatility, it's terribly impractical to use as an actual currency due to the transaction fees these days.

mrep• 9 years ago

Yep, it's also terribly unforgiving to use.

Lose your wallet password and your money is gone.

Fat finger an address sending it to the wrong account and its gone.

Bug in someone's code and the coins get stolen in a hack: gone.

sbenitoj7• 9 years ago

Great point, luckily unlike fiat currency, developers can fork the code and create a new currency if they don’t agree with the way things are being run. This happened when Bitcoin forked into Bitcoin Cash (which has a blocksize that’s roughly 8x larger than Bitcoin, and has very very low transaction fees) and its likely going to happen again around mid-November when Bitcoin forks again. Unlikely that all these forks will survive, only time will tell what the market actually values!

sbenitoj7• 9 years ago

Central banks have (without evidence) claimed that deflation is a universally “bad thing” in order to justify inflating the currency every single year (AKA stealing from savers, and transferring wealth to the people who are the earliest recipients of the inflated currency).

Gold would have become the standard around the world if governments had not used coercion to prevent it from becoming so, and instead replacing it with fiat currency (which they can control and benefit from).

If Bitcoin, or another cryptocurrency, replaces fiat, it’s value will be worth several orders of magnitude of what it’s worth today, which is why many people are holding it instead of spending it at the moment.

However, people will not simply “horde” Bitcoin forever in anticipation of its price going up any more than people currently spend every single fiat dollar/euro/yen they have for fear of it going down in value due to inflation.

You may ask, “but why WOULDN’T they hold it instead of spend it if they anticipate the value increasing each year?” The answer is because people HAVE to live in the here and now, they have to pay for things like food, rent, entertainment, cars, fuel, etc. So they can’t get around having to spend some amount of money to live.

But sound money (money with low to no inflation) does cause people to spend LESS money than fiat currency because there’s a much larger opportunity cost.

soVeryTired2• 9 years ago

Central banks have (without evidence) claimed that deflation is a universally “bad thing” in order to justify inflating the currency every single year (AKA stealing from savers, and transferring wealth to the people who are the earliest recipients of the inflated currency).

TIPS. JGBis. Linkers. Come on man, this makes you sound like a crank.

Gold was the standard. It didn't work out very well.

slg5• 9 years ago

Inflation encourages spending and investing while deflation encourages saving and hoarding. It isn't a surprise that people who want to see the economic activity want inflation over deflation. It also isn't a surprise why the general population would prefer deflation over inflation. I can understand how someone can make an ethical or moral argument for deflation, but I don't know how you make a economic argument that deflation is better for the future of the country than inflation.

Geee• 9 years ago

This isn't deflation, but convergence to a stable value. It's an S-curve.

virtuexru• 9 years ago

I always recommend this article to anyone interested in Bitcoin, it's a great read: https://fee.org/articles/what-gave-bitcoin-its-value/

diminish2• 9 years ago

Basically I don't see any target value for bitcoins and there's no bubble since this is a once upon a life time opportunity. Basically since number of bitcoins will be limited - total value of all bitcoins must be a fraction to total human wealth. Tech leaders and SV have strongly stood behind bitcoin and blockchain with convincing arguments, and put their credibility behind it and each day by increasing valuation of Bitcoin they prove why tech matters on this planet.

Edit: /S If a bubble forms and people's finances get hurt, that'll have very negative effect on the credibility of SV and tech sadly.

albertgoeswoof3• 9 years ago

convincing arguments

well, not really

Don't get me wrong, blockchain tech is really amazing. But whether it has an actual use in the real world is very much TBD.

jonknee4• 9 years ago

Basically since number of bitcoins will be limited - total value of all bitcoins must be a fraction to total human wealth.

Or they could be worth nothing?

kovek• 9 years ago

Are there no valuable use cases with Bitcoin?

Jtsummers• 9 years ago

0 is a fraction of total human wealth.

lord_jim• 9 years ago

The value of bitcoin, as with other currencies, is the value people believe it holds. More concretely, this would be the value of goods or services you can exchange it for today, and/or the future value you believe the currency will hold.

Your argument reminds me of a classic eBay seller problem: you can price your rare collectables however you want, but if no one is buying, they are worthless

thefalcon• 9 years ago

And if people are buying them for $5000 last month and $6000 this month...?

appleflaxen• 9 years ago

you are exactly right, but all the same criticisms apply to fiat.

the difference between fiat and bitcoin is that bitcoin cannot be arbitrarily manipulated by the state.

there is a fairly large, latent inflationary pressure on the dollar in the form of the national debt that has no credible prospect of reversing. the dollar has been a historical safe haven, but there is a reason that china is trying madly to diversify its foreign currency reserves.

empath75• 9 years ago

"Basically I don't see any target value for bitcoins except that there's no bubble since this is a once upon a life time opportunity"

Why? I can start my own blockchain tomorrow, and so can anyone else. If people perceive bitcoin distribution as being fundamentally unfair, they can just stop using it and switch to the some other crypto currency.

electic2• 9 years ago

If it makes anyone feel better. When the Bitcoin whitepaper came out, I read it and thought it was neat. Then came the first mining program and I installed it on my computer and it ran the CPU up. I said, "This is dumb." and uninstalled it.

Huge mistake.

chrisabrams4• 9 years ago

It's not too late. If you think that it was dumb then, imagine 10 years from now..

electic2• 9 years ago

Oh, I totally agree. It is not too late at all to buy now. However mining, can't do it as an individual.

joering2• 9 years ago

Unsure why you being downvoted; its actually quite good advise. If you disagree then let's get into time machine and I tell you 10 years ago that one bitcoin will be $6,000. As laughable back then as it is to think one bitcoin will be $25,000, which I believe will become once all coins are mined and there is limited quantity available in circulation.

make3• 9 years ago

that's not how it works. having bought a lottery ticket was still not a good idea even if you won. meaning, bitcoin is still a risky asset, like back then, there is no reason little reason to reliably assert that it will still go up, and not down.

sp00ls• 9 years ago

Similarly, I was living in dorms (free electricity) at the time bitcoin made its debut (well not really, but it was still very early). I started mining using my fairly beefy desktop. After months I decided it wasn't worth the small amount of 'money' I had made and just deleted everything. That PC is long gone, wonder how much money I would have now if I still had that wallet. Damn.

joshstrange• 9 years ago

Lol, well I did the exact same thing, mined 100 BTC on my CPU, turned it off, and forgot about it. That computer had been formatted at least twice before 1 BTC even hit $1. I comfort myself with the fact that I would have sold when it hovered around $8.

shubhamjain• 9 years ago

I have no idea if it's a solvable problem but this is a ridiculous issue with bitcoin when you think of it as a serious currency: not only that its supply is artificially limited, a large number of early coins are either in possession of its owner (who we are not even sure will ever show up) or are lost in accidents like these.

thearn4• 9 years ago

I wonder, is BTC liquid enough that you could actually get your $600k if you suddenly were able to recover them? I haven't dabbled in crypto coins, so I have no idea how the exchanges really operate in practice.

3pt14159• 9 years ago

I bought in at $3 USD / $4 CAD after trying to find someone to sell it to me while I watched it go from $1 to $4. I was broke at the time so I borrowed money off my credit card.

Sold almost all of it at $200 to $400. Felt like a complete baller. Who else has made 50x to 100x their money in a couple years? Who else takes a credit card cash advance and is right about it?

Sold some more at $6k CAD, overall I've cashed 250x my investment and still have some, but right now it's worth 2000x my original buy price and it's a bit batty to look at the current price. Could have bought a really, really nice house in Toronto if I'd just held on until today.

But you know, 2000x is, on a log graph, not that far from 250x. So unless bitcoin goes to $50k or $500k a coin I'm not going to be a touch sour.

Edit:

Also, this reminds me. I should go through my comment history and find people like tptacek that were very confident that bitcoin couldn't be securable:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2607706

It was a pain in the butt, but I secured bitcoin just fine. Bitcoin is one of those thing where you can go through what you said 10 years later and say "What did I say there? Yep that was right, nope that bit was a bit off, yep it wasn't banned by x, nope that person was wrong that it'd get shutdown within the year."

So much of what we arguable is unknowable, like generics in Go or whether mutable state is a good thing for certain programming applications. But the nice thing about investing is you get to find out how right you were.

And you're only really, truly right after the gains are realized.

dplgk• 9 years ago

I remind myself of this all the time. If I owned a decent amount of BTC early on, I absolutely would have sold it when it hit $1,000 or even before that. So no use in regretting not buying low and selling at $6000 per BTC

aw3c2• 9 years ago

So did you reconsider your thinking that it is dumb as a concept or do you regret not speculating actual money on it?

Sir_Cmpwn• 9 years ago

Remember that bitcoin pizza? Today worth $60 million.

albertgoeswoof3• 9 years ago

Probably related to http://btcgpu.org/ (another fork of the chain coming in 4 days)

It's interesting that despite bitcoin being deflationary by design, you can just fork the chain and do quantitative easing that way.

Pretty much all the cited benefits of cryptocurrencies are disappearing in implementation, unfortunately.

aboodman• 9 years ago

It only works if people use the forks, which ... doesn't seem to be happening yet.

zanny• 9 years ago

The incentives are completely backwards on why anyone would want to. All the value is trapped in the blockstream bitcoin core client - deviating from that sets the value of all those coins, all of which were already mined and are already owned by wallets that may never even come on the fork.

Thats 80% of all coins. Yeah, your fork can kind of start from scratch, act like the 16.6m coins that came before never happened, that most of them will be dead forever, and start mining from there and treating all the new coins mined (of the remaining 4.4m let) as the monetary base. But then you get any momentum and suddenly "dead" money is flooding the market from legacy wallets. Wallets that didn't contribute to the growth of the fork, that didn't harden the blockchains integrity on the fork, that simply installed a program and had a fortune ready to go with no effort and no commitment to that currency at all.

There is already the problem that vast amounts of bitcoins blockchain hasn't moved in years. Millions of coins that are being treated as dead that could come back to life at any time. But there is no way to know what wallets are actually gone - dat files lost, passwords forgotten, etc - and which ones are just waiting to cash out.

Fundamentally the problem is there are two groups of people here - futurists that want to overturn fiat, and investors that want to make (fiat) money. It is why we have not seen a cryptocurrency that can behave like real money yet - the closest we have gotten was dogecoin, which started as a joke and was completely abandoned by its original developers and left to rot.

To make a cash replacement, it would need enough minting of coins to cause inflation enough to keep people from stockpiling coins. But who wants to mine your cryptocurrency or hold it early on in its life if its depreciating in value from its own algorithms? The whole point of why people adopt early into cryptocurrencies is that if they blow up they just made millions from trivial amounts of effort by just being there first. Classic pyramid scheme.

But all crypto today has to be a pyramid scheme to get the adoption to start having momentum to operate as it is intended. Without the gamble of making a fortune how many people would have early on started bitcoin startups or invested in mining? If the promise was that a coin worth a dollar today would be worth a dollar ten years from now because the blockchain itself would generate enough coins to peg the exchange rate, the only first mover advantage you get is in how much less electricity it costs to mine early on assuming the coin takes off and becomes popular.

That can still be an incentive. It is still a gamble of course, but it is also an incentive. The problem is when you are one of those investor types with some large cash in a small neighborhood shopping for your next get rich quick scheme the humble coin trying to push the future is a lot less interesting than the pyramid scheme promising ludicrous returns if it can get enough fools to buy into it.

bdcravens• 9 years ago

I've seen zero discussion of that fork, and I'm pretty active on /r/bitcoin (and other places in the community)

I did find a few references to it, only on searching, and most seem to think it's a scam.

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/734i6s/as_it_turns_out...

the_stc4• 9 years ago

I do not mind having Bitcoin keep going up. But as a business owner that relies heavily on cryptocurrencies, I would really love it if things were more stable. We are building a business on privacy, anonymity, and cryptocurrency as a backbone. We're extrajurisdictional, so banking to USD or other fiat is very tricky. Tether is a great idea, but the current company looks very unstable. If there's a crash, they seem unlikely to be solvent.

Our company would pay a premium to get into a solid, pegged-to-USD coin. At least 5% if not more. Or even a coin that's pegged to an ETF. Of course we cannot satisfy KYC laws so it'd need to be a freely traded token, really.

I really hate the "hodlrs" and the complete lack of focus on how this is supposed to work for real businesses that use it as a means to an end, and not an end by itself.

I see this a lot talking about the 2x chain. People sometimes discuss it in terms of what's better for the BTC price. Why is that a goal at all? Other than the obvious reason of making current users richer?

erentz• 9 years ago

If you want to transact in USD shouldn’t you use USD rather than a different currency (BTC)? And if you want to use a block chain to transact in USD shouldn’t you use something designed for that like Ripple?

the_stc4• 9 years ago

That'd be swell. As an EJC, transacting in USD is more difficult, hence we must use cryptocurrencies.

Is Ripple pegged to USD? I do not want anything complicated, just a coin or token that has a 1:1 ratio with USD. Charge me 5% or 10% to buy them or 5% on cash out.

ikazaki• 9 years ago

I believe this is because we are still very low on the adoption curve. Once it gains mass adoption and it is used more as a form of payment, the price will stabilize.

2x was made by businesses for businesses. It is supposed to solve the high fees and long confirmation times (at least on the short term) which are crippling businesses.

the_stc4• 9 years ago

I do not really care about Bitcoin politics, but I will say as a user and business, the fees and confirm times are ridiculous and need a fix now, not in "18 months" when LN comes out (and then who knows how long until high adoption of LN).

Hopefully it will stabilize.

deweller• 9 years ago

Yes. This.

A peggable USD coin with a decentralized exchange for BTC would be most valuable.

6nf• 9 years ago

There is a coin like this - Tether. As the name implies it's tethered to the USD so one Tether is always traded at around one USD.

koolba• 9 years ago

What's the volume / liquidity of Bitcoin these days?

Say you're Tim Draper and you're sitting on 30K (bought at $600 from the US Gov in 2014 [1]). Would it be possible to offload them for $180M or is the order book too thin?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Draper#Bitcoin_auction

dharma12• 9 years ago

Pretty good but still prob wouldn't want to dump that in a single day/single exchange

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/volume/24-hour/

todayiamme2• 9 years ago

Say what you will, but this irrational exuberance is precisely that; irrational. I knew about Bitcoin 6+ years ago, when I read a blog about someone buying a sandwich with this newfangled currency. But I didn't rush to mine it. I didn't rush to buy it either. I was simply indifferent to the prospect of it, and I don't regret it.

Here's why. Bitcoin's thesis is that it possesses inherent value because it will become a medium of exchange i.e. people will trade in bitcoin, thereby using it as a store of value, and making it valuable. And yet, that hasn't happened yet. While it's hard to estimate the velocity of money for something like Bitcoin, and the "Bitcoin days destroyed" metric isn't accurate either, it is quite clear that as Bitcoin as a store of wealth rises rapidly in value, its utility as a currency correspondingly drops in value; thereby invalidating the central thesis on which the question of its value rests.

Here are rough estimations for the velocity of money for BTC;

http://charts.woobull.com/bitcoin-velocity/

https://charts.bitcoin.com/chart/velocity

Even if these are filled with inaccuracies, the general trend seems to be quite clear. People use BTC as an asset not a currency. And as such, the idea that it's a savvy investment belies the fact that it's value as an asset is entirely psychological in nature and completely ungrounded from actual metrics like fiat currency (though again fiat currency does run on trust, but the difference is that it's a marker of exchange thereby measuring the economy and its productivity gives an estimate of its value).

Further, even if it was a valid currency, then what we're witnessing over here is hyperdeflation in action, and it is fundamentally irrational to expect it to continue.

The reasoning for the above points is quite straightforward and simple. The magic of money and capitalism isn't that you can hoard gold and get rich. No, it's that you can make money. It's the idea that value can be created and destroyed through the economic actions of human beings, and that money as a concept serves as a measure of wealth as opposed to wealth. It's why we moved away from the gold standard - it was fundamentally irrational and in the long run, would have caused the exact phenomena we're seeing with BTC.

If you really think that somehow as a store of value BTC is going to become some significant fraction of human wealth, then go ahead buy this. But if you give it any rational thought whatsoever, then you'll see clearly that this is the tulip mania in action and that timing your actions to beat the market is even more irrational.

So no I don't regret passing up on buying BTC, precisely because it was and is a lottery ticket and I'm not in the business of buying lottery tickets no matter how well conceived they may be.

Right now, the most rational thing to do is to bet for it to fail. And then figure out how to time that bet. Because the farther it rises, the harder it will fall.

Good luck.

fragsworth• 9 years ago

So no I don't regret passing up on buying BTC, precisely because it was and is a lottery ticket and I'm not in the business of buying lottery tickets no matter how well conceived they may be.

Dude, this is nonsense. Everyone regrets passing up on buying BTC because it's currently worth $6k because you can sell it right now for that money. Anything else is complex rationalization to make yourself feel better.

todayiamme2• 9 years ago

Look life is filled with lottery tickets with unknowable odds, playing every lottery out there just in case you win is foolish and a misallocation of resources. I'd much rather invest it into myself and build a game where I know the odds.

My life isn't a lottery ticket.

zzalpha• 9 years ago

Nonsense indeed...

I made what I believed was a rational risk assessment at the time (back when MtGox was spinning up... Not exactly the most credible days for BTC) and decided to avoid the hype.

Could I use the money now? Sure. It's money.

But I don't regret the decision now because I was acting on the information I had.

Heck, even now, it's possible for someone to buy BTC and for it to crash. Should those people regret their decision even if, in their estimation, it's rational now?

To be blunt: if you spend any time regretting these types of things you're a gambler, not an investor, and will find yourself tricked into trying to time markets. And that will eventually bite you in the ass.

As for me, the same reasoning that kept me out of the market then keeps me out now: I don't believe in the fundamentals and I'm not a gambler. Full stop.

For those who do, the should buy and hold for the long term to realize the most gains.

But "it's worth a lot more now than it was 10 years ago" is not fundamentals. It's just the irrational assumption that past performance predicts future behaviour.

atomashpolskiy• 9 years ago

But that's the whole point. It's completely irrational to regret not buying a winning lottery ticket, because it might as well not win. The only question is, what were the odds?

monort• 9 years ago

Your chart shows that velocity of BTC is the same as velocity of USD M2. Is USD not a medium of exchange by this logic?

Bitcoin is a replacement precisely for M2 (base money + deposits), because with a fractional reserve deposits are as much usable as a medium of exchange, as the base.

buttershakes• 9 years ago

I think this is just the tip of the iceberg for Bitcoin. Time will tell if I am right or wrong. If we think of it as simply a currency, or a store of value we can place limits on its value based on what we know about gold, fiat currency, etc. We can extrapolate and come up with a valuation that we think is appropriate. However, its not just any of those things. It's a paradigm shift in digital ownership of value, and could potentially be a record of and a secure digital token for a huge variety of physical goods, virtual services, etc. Whether this happens is largely dependent on scale, but we will leave that argument for another thread since the troll army will show up. Bitcoin is something entirely new in the history of value transfer and ownership, stop trying to compare it directly with the systems that will be eclipsed by it.

Bitcoin has crossed $6,000 USD for the first time

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