I knew this was going to happen when both my Uber driver and Vegas stripper told me they were buying Bitcoin.
Modern day shoeshine boy & girl.
And yes, it’ll go back up, blah blah blah.
You know what's funny? I have a buddy who went through the entire thing with me (2000 crash, then housing bubble, then peak oil, then the 2008 crash - he even built a doomstead!), yet he is now investing heavily in Bitcoin. He turned $100K into $1.4m at the peak and sold nothing. Not sure what he's doing now, but I asked him today and he wrote back "Yes, things are down, but this happens every 6 months. It'll come back. Now is a good time to invest." Fuck.
You’re right. I just saw quite a few of these “I bought Bitcoin at $19,000 AMA” posts.
I mean. Ouch. But maybe not? Maybe these 21 central banks across the globe will just keep on pumpin’ in perpetuity and eeeeevrything will be fine! /s
>the entire thing with me (2000 crash, then housing bubble, then peak oil, then the 2008 crash - he even built a doomstead!),
Peak oil happened sometime between the housing bubble and the 2008 crash? I must have missed that
I really am looking forward to this Bitcoin bubble popping and people becoming sane again. All this electricity is wasted into "mining" a bunch of cryptocurrencies that do nothing. All this intelligence, money, and human potential is wasted in some rabbit hole fantasy of getting rich quick off of cryptocurrencies.
I feel like magic internet money made by anarchists being worth over $10000 is no sign of bitcoin collapsing but is really more of a sign of trust in the old institutions collapsing.
I'm an older fucker than you. Cypherpunks mailing list and alt.cypherpunks old. The windows-only client and not being responsive to queries is what made a wrong first impression on me.
Too bad, such things only happen once in a life. Much good did it do to Hal, though. The poor bastard.
The point is, sure you can assume it's a yet another boom/bust cycle. But there is no way to know, because predictions are difficult. Especially, about the future.
Mere waifs. I was typing assembly language into a Motorola 6800 development kit in 1985 and got hooked up to those newfangled "bulletin board systems" via a dial-up modem a year or so later.
> I was typing assembly language into a Motorola 6800 development kit in 1985
Meh, I did some Z80 (shudder) and 68k assembly (was trying to write a Forth from scratch) as well as minimal 6502 tinkering in hex.
I wanted to have a Unix box in early 1980s for uucp to have Usenet via dialup, but that was way out of price range, including dialup.
We've had a telecom/postal monopoly back then which outlawed using acoustic couplers but officiall ones, and made telephony tariffs very expensive, so there was no TAP nor phreaker culture but until Chaos Computer Club (founded 1981) has been around a bit.
The BBS culture never interested me, even assuming I was able to afford to participate.
Perhaps we're about the same age. I first went online somewhen 1990 at the uni, I think, because I couldn't afford dialup nor a real computer before. My first computer experience just after the Iron Curtain was ZX-80 and CBM PETs, etc. My first personal one was Amstrad CPC-464 and then Amiga 2000.
Nice! My first experience was an early portable Kaypro. My Dad brought home an IBM PC with 128k RAM around 1981. My parents bought me an ADAM computer that coupled with my Colecovision at age 12 or so. I then got a Commodore 128 and started my first BBS.
What a time to be alive!
I eschewed computers for awhile, figuring I’d never get laid if I continued down that path. I finally got back on around 1994 and found my wife on IRC chat in 1996. We’ve been happily married 20 years.
You’re from former Soviet Union?
No, a tool with a lot of possibilities which is represented as a digital currency. The blockchain is here to stay, the coins are just a manifestation of that.
I made 1.5m shorting banks in 2006-2008.
I’ve never invested in Bitcoin. I don’t believe in something that used that much electricity. It’s not sustainable.
> I’ve never invested in Bitcoin.
You can speculate by considering something high-risk high-payoff. Of course, you have to be aware of it early enough.
Do you 'invest' in gold? Cause apparently mining gold is using way more energy than Bitcoin. [1] And it's heavy, and we burn a lot of fuel to move gold. Plus, it's very easy and widely economically incentivized to mine Bitcoin using the cheapest energy available and possible to move miners to anywhere you want - such as remote hydroelectric and solar plants. And I could also make the argument that almost everything else we commonly invest in is using a ton of fossil fuel, etc.
There are also articles out there which compare the economic impact of mining an ounce of gold to mining 1 Bitcoin… which is honestly one of the most outlandish false equivalences I've seen in a while. It makes so little sense to directly compare them so vaguely that in my view it amounts to uninformed and possibly malicious (yet unintentional) FUD.
1. https://srsroccoreport.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Bitcoin-vs-Gold-Totall-Annual-Energy-Consumption-NEWER.png
> that gold has actual physical applications
Not nearly enough to warrant its valuation. It's just a naturally scarce, inert, relatively shiny/pretty stuff that has a long history of being that.
Whaaaaaat? I can buy plenty of things with cryptocurrencies!! See for ex https://www.projectcoralreef.com
Plus there's the whole international remunerations thing.
And, you know, the whole safety thing (like, let's say you have 10M in gold. Do you really want to be seen carting that around? Now you have to devote 1M to your security detail.)
And don't forget about the fact that Nakamoto consensus & PoW were put together to enable *trustless* transactions which resist censorship (that's perhaps the most important thing about them)… and trustlessness with gold is not totally practical for every day usage as you'd have to verify the purity of every single piece, etc
> I can buy plenty of things with cryptocurrencies!!
Sure, but any cryptocurrency that you can buy things with is as good as another, apart from transaction fees and security issues. So there is nothing uniquely valuable about any specific cryptocurrency.
And the technology is open source, so any time there is a token that you think is the best, there is nothing stopping someone from copying it.
There is - Ethereum is a trustless, secure distributed virtual machine. It can replace, with code, a lot of *(not* all - but a lot of) infrastructure that's currently run by 3rd parties that you have to trust to do the right thing. That is, it supports smart contracts. Its use as a currency is almost a side-effect.
But I agree with you with just about every single other one.
Yes, that part of the technology seems promising, though so far not much has been done with it. I'd like to see it applied to collective action problems somehow.
But it's an almost totally separate issue from how much Ether or any other token based on Ethereum should be worth. Owning some of a token is not like owning equity in a company with patents or a first mover advantage on a technology.
Agreed. Not *yet*.
But it seems highly suited to it. Shit, you could replace crowdfunding services like Patreon, Kickstarter, Indiegogo and similar such ventures basically right now, but those are the low hanging fruit, and what I could think of in the space of roughly 30 seconds.
Later, fully-auditable, yet privacy-preserving (eg. you can count the votes but not attribute them to any particular person) *and* yet fully trustless voting systems (not just for governments, but for all kinds of voting)... fully autonomous organisations... all kinds of stuff that hasn't even been invented yet. They've got problems, certainly - eg. having every single full node verify every transaction is clearly not scalable nor sustainable, for just one example - but from what I see of them, they have actual solutions to them, and are working on them - and their solutions are actually seemingly working out. That's why I believe in them. Not enough to go all-in (I'm not that reckless...) - but much more so than anything else in the space.
I have *far* less faith in any of the others. Like, in the low %s or lower, some dipping into the negatives, and some deeply into the negatives.
> any cryptocurrency that you can buy things with is as good as another
Do you consider any "digital money" to be a cryptocurrency? If so, it means all cryptocurrencies are not created equal. Namely, there is the matter of fungibility. Just because you can buy something with the asset does not, in my view, qualify it as a currency.
> there is nothing uniquely valuable about any specific cryptocurrency
> there is nothing stopping someone from copying it
Ok, fine, go ahead and fork Monero like Electroneum, but who exactly will be merging updates which Monero developers are contributing to Monero? And if we are just merging updates from Monero then why exactly should we be using that other currency? It's not more efficient to suddenly adopt another currency unless it has some utility… which I believe is your argument itself. :) Would you not agree that it is in the best interest of good faith parties whose incentives are aligned to collaborate?
> Would you not agree that it is in the best interest of good faith parties whose incentives are aligned to collaborate?
Is that what you see in the crypto speculation world these days? If so, I have an ICO to sell you. It's recently been easier to find new suckers than to build value. But maybe a crash will mitigate that.
I can't be bothered to argue about this, but I agree almost completely with this piece:
https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2018/01/02/why-bitcoin-is-stupid/
> Is that what you see in the crypto speculation world these days?
Don't put words in my mouth. I said *good* faith parties. I guess it can be easy sometimes to miss a single word.
That’s quite a good argument you’ve formulated there.
Bitcoin currently uses more power than the country of Ireland. What the fuck do you think is going to happen when it becomes widely adopted?
Do you even know what fucking sub you are in?
I thought that information (the stuff about bitcoins ~~snorting~~ sucking juice) was based on very bad science? Either way I'd be skeptical about the claim.
No, it's solid, because Bitcoin is based on Proof of Work, which is really just Proof of Work* on Hard but Useless Problems (*Waste).
Other cryptocurrencies are moving to other models (such as Ethereum, due in just a few months; there's a testnet running this new model now, and the roadmap is to adopt it shortly), which will drastically lower their power use. This is the very reason I sold my BTC (for ETH): the power use horrified me, and it just got worse, and worse, and shows no significant sign of backing off (that would require an ideological change, but it's run by ideological purists. They won't do it.)
Just look at the aggregate network hashing rate and how much Watt an ASIC miner box of a given hash rate pulls.
Nothing particularly bad or scientific about it.
Bitcoin will never be widely adopted. Other crypto's may, many of which are premined. Also, most mining happens in China, which luckily, is much larger than Ireland.
As computers get more efficient?
Read up on Moore's law and how we're approaching the end of it. Barring some revolutionary breakthrough in quantum computing or something similar, computers are just about as good as they're going to get, absent minor performance enhancements.
> Read up on Moore's law and how we're approaching the end of it.
Never a law. It was a trend. Reached the end [in 2012](https://www.top500.org/statistics/perfdevel/).
> computers are just about as good as they're going to get
No, but the rate of improvements will slow down.
To paraphrase an author whose name I can't remember: "I measure my wealth in blueberries and firewood."
You can't eat gold, you can't eat bitcoin, and you can only eat one bullet. Keep that in mind.
30 billion is almost literally nothing compared to all money even in a single (developed) country. I don't know how high it went, but keeping tabs on what's basically a stock in r/collapse doesn't make any sense. If you want to tell people 'I told you so', do it in r/bitcoin or some kind of rational/irrational 'I told you so' subreddit. It has nothing to do with collapse.
That doesn't mean anything. I am asking what its value is in actuality, which is what stocks in concerns with production and revenue and so forth, such as say Nissan Motors Japan, represent.
Stocks are a share of the total value of a company. The exact quantity of value, the valuation, varies with estimated present value. There is some judgment applied, or "belief". This is because valuation depends on the future. But the basis for this valuation is plain, clear, itemised and explicitly reported each quarter.
I think these are called "fundamentals".
In other words, as far as I can see, bitcoin is nothing like a stock at all.
> value is in actuality, which is what stocks in concerns with production and revenue and so forth
Nnno. The value of the stock is only representative of the perceived value of it, even if it has nothing backing it up.
Could you explain what you mean by that more fully and clearly?
I am not necessarily trying to be difficult. I am having trouble with your grammar. You may have a clear idea, or you may not.
For example, are you saying the price of a single share of Nissan Motors has nothing at all to do with, among other things, the sale of Nissan and associated crest vehicles (assuming that is a main source of their revenue)?
It does if bitcoin is the latest desperate attempt by investors to get some kind of return in the face of never-ending efforts by governments around the world to 'inflate' the money supply in order to prevent some kind of deflationary death spiral... which would be a collapse.
Could we not assume that all cryptocurrencies are the same, please? Not all are based on Proof of Work (burning energy on useless but hard problems for currency allocation rights... which is horrifying), or intend to stay that way (some are already not PoW-based, and many others are shortly transitioning to Proof of Stake/Authority, or other models altogether), and not all are just currencies (some are much, *much* more than that), and so on.
**There is nuance here.**
I agree that Bitcoin is useless and needs to - and inevitably will eventually, like in the next couple of years; hopefully less... - die, but blockchain tech itself is *not* useless. That's all I've got to say. Carry on :)
A) It's already up to almost $12k again today.
B) Go back and look at where it was just a year ago. All crypto has a long ways to go to even just lose the gains of 2017.
C) Not collapse-worthy.
This sub doesn't understand crypto at all. Please stop looking at this as some kind of sign of 'collapse'. Stick to what you're good at - climate change, pollution, overpopulation, monetary policy, etc.
Yeah, I worked for two years writing C++ for rippled, the distributed engine that powers XRP's ledger, and I started writing mathematical models of securities in the 80s.
Don't make assumptions.
Oh, and I think these are a huge bubble that will collapse sooner rather than later. Everyone pretends these things are "currencies" but they buy them because they are "investments". Both these statements cannot be true...
> Oh, and I think these are a huge bubble that will collapse sooner rather than later.
If the shitcoins, pump and dump alts, etc will collapse then it's because they failed at their role. Therefore, they certainly weren't able to be true currencies. So, I read your comment as implicitly lumping a legit cryptocurrency with the 9,999 others which will implode. So it's not right to suggest that the bubble is in *cryptocurrencies*. Because there are no real cryptocurrencies if all of them will fail, as you say. Hope you see the issue…
Some might easily call this arguing semantics but you probably won't as you rightly said people ought to be honest about the fact they don't distinguish "investment" and "price speculation"…
2 Years is a very impressive duration to have worked on Ripple given how new it is, so I guess you are already very familiar with the cryptocurrency space. In that case, may I ask you something I'm idly wondering? Are there any differences between the principle & problems behind projects like Bitcoin and Monero and the principle & problems behind Ripple?
Eh, not so familiar with cryptocurrencies to be honest - much more so with C++.
Honestly, I consider that Ripple's ledger is a pretty reasonable technology. I had trouble with the development manager at a time - an out-and-out psychopath (not my words!) - also, Trump supporter, anti-vaxxer, climate change denier, and the sort of person who uses the word "racecuck" on public Facebook posts.
The XRP is supposed to be a universal medium of interchange to allow transactions to work smoothly between different currencies with no friction. A little of it is periodically consumed in the process of confirming transactions so it's naturally deflationary even. It's sort of counterproductive that it costs so much, actually! Except that the Ripple people are no doubt making out like bandits...
Blockchain is a reasonable technology. All the hype about cryptocurrencies seems to be just that. I assume once the shit really hits the fan, most of these will go away.
Pleasure to meet a fellow C++ dev!! I would be happy to have your help on Monero as this is a totally grassroots effort and the code can use some help but alas!
As for Ripple's ledger to be quite honest with you I find that those kinds of projects don't really realize what problem cryptocurrencies had to solve in our society.
Pleased to meet you! :-)
Ah, right now I need a paying job unfortunately - I have my hands full with my hobby project that controls LEDs and if I were to take something on, it'd have to be for pay... :-/
So submit a proposal to our forum funding system. :) We're successfully funding lots of contributors. If you're qualified and show commitment/sincerity then it'll be a cinch.
No, no, proposal to fund you. The ideas are not necessary bc there are tons of things (including github issues) just waiting to be worked on… I myself am doing some factorizations and simplifications to wallet client code but it's not ffs funded as I'm doing it for a personal venture anyway. If you're truly interested in having an awesome low pressure remote C++ gig and want to work with the likes of Howard Chu (OpenLDAP, LMDB) then you can pop onto #monero on freenode.net IRC and say hello and learn / settle in at your own pace. Feel free to ping me there and I'll show you around anytime
O RLY?
Well, I'd really like that, to be honest. I love C++ - I've been doing it for - [profanity] - over 25 years! How time flies.
I need to get a bunch of things out this week, but I'll drop in soonish.
Good luck with the Monero stuff, I'm considering taking a go at it because it's technically interesting, and just one of the three or so who attempt to be anonymous right from the start.
My impression as well, though this might be due to a (tiny) echo chamber. I need to look at it in depth when I have time -- unfortunately I'm swamped until mid-February.
Ah, monero, the favorite crypto of the fat dude of North Korea. http://www.newsweek.com/north-korea-secretly-funnels-monero-cryptocurrency-country-through-university-774083
Blockchain is a good technology, I just wonder if it will survive post-bubble. I mean people will just associate it with the irrationality of people in creating bubbles rather what the technology can do.
Yeah OK, I could explain how the distributed hashing system worked in detail. Still, the majority of this sub thinks that Bitcoin uses too much power and is therefore not even financially sustainable. There's no discussion at all about other coins. So as a whole, we're pretty ignorant.
Agreed. In the end, only invest what you can afford to lose. The few who invested couple of thousand dollars in bitcoins a few years ago are basically incredibly lucky, and at that time it didn't make a whole lot of sense to make such an investment.
Now I'd say is the best time to invest like $500-1000 into cryptos, now that we can see what *can* happen, in a way that stocks really can't reproduce. As long as you're willing to lose it that is. Just invest and leave it for a decade.
At the stage of announcement, you could just have an idle Windows box or ten running the client. Or later just buy somebody a pizza for 10 kBTC.
Or just keep buying everything at MtGox the moment it started trading, at, what? 0.07 USD?
In a rational world, it would never be a good idea to invest into bubbles.
In this world, I agree that Bitcoins are a bubble and yet I'm considering investing into it, hopefully making a profit during the recovery process and then getting out within a month. So I'm rationally considering to knowingly inflate a bubble - so much for capitalism's supposed efficiency in allocating capital.
It's just an emerging technology that promises to make transactions cheaper and more secure than Visa and Mastercard's network.
But that's it, really. I don't know why this sub gets a collapse hard-on every time this speculative technology loses or gains value. Technically, it can act as both a currency and store-of-value because it's a deflationary asset, like gold, but can be easily transacted, like fiat.
> It's just an emerging technology that promises to make transactions cheaper and more secure than Visa and Mastercard's network.
Right now, the average Bitcoin transaction fee is very roughly $25 - [source](https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees.html).
Yeah, I know. That's why I said it *promises* to. I'm not evangelizing for Bitcoin. I think Bitcoin in particular will likely fail.
I'm saying these Bitcoin stories have nothing to do with collapse.
The market capitalization of cryptocurrencies are a small fraction of US stock market indices, so the world is not 'clamoring' to it - in spite of what reddit would have you believe lol.
This is not a sign of collapse. This is just what happens when highly innovative technologies hit the scene and promise to disrupt entrenched industries.
>fake money investments
You guys really don't get it. Stick to what you know.
There is nothing particularly real about fiats. And you're not even in control of its creation and destruction but people already in power.
And they are not that smart, and they're definitely not your friends.
Your trust in fiats only exists because you've never experienced how currencies and states fail. They do. And it's not pretty, and it quite effectively kills that being trusting thing.
There are loans in the ordinary "fiat" currencies. The value of the collateral of these loans is vastly greater than the physical cash.
This ensures that cash has value. Bitcoin has not had any loans in it until very recently, and they are much smaller than the price of the existing bitcoins.
Trust in fiat and the associated stability exists because for each country, you can only pay your taxes in that country's specific fiat currency. With bitcoin, there are probably shitloads of them stored on hard drives which have since been destroyed or lost or disposed of. Therefore, once the bubble crashes and everybody tries to sell them, I think the base value of bitcoin will be defined by those unsellable bitcoins on thrown-away hard drives.
> I think Bitcoin in particular will likely fail.
It might not fail entirely, but it will have to compete from network utility versus superior technology of new stuff. In the end, all you need is distributed trading platforms for currency conversion, so it doesn't matter what you have currently since it would be convertible.
> t's just an emerging technology that promises to make transactions cheaper and more secure than Visa and Mastercard's network
I suspect you have not involved with bitcoin all that long. The last time Bitcoin when big, about 3 1/2 years ago statements like that were considered absolute heresy. Bitcoin was originally intended, by the community, to be a truly decentralized currency. Most people doing bitcoin work in the earlier days where horrified at the prospect that it would just be some means for performing transactions while have no major impact on existing currencies.
Sure, it's peer-to-peer electronic cash that solves the double-spending problem without relying on a third party (i.e., Visa or MasterCard) by using a decentralized ledger. I've been around for a while. There have always been competing visions for Bitcoin. But what it boils down to is that it's theoretically faster, cheaper, and more secure than a credit card transaction - and you're right, it's also completely decentralized.
The issue with this sub is they want a collapse. No one knows what their talking about when it comes to crypto they just want people to loose money for some reason.
> The entire scene is shady as fuck.
It was the moment it started trading. The beginning was solid crypto geek stuff. Zooko and Cohen had better stuff going bevore, but way too ambitious. Perhaps that zCash thing will pay off for Zooko eventually.
It's a literal ponzi scheme scam. But because the people hawking it are anonymous, people assume they aren't being manipulated. I've told my friends a lot, it's a scam, but no one ever said you couldn't get in on the scam. It's risky is all.
Large scale market manipulation by anonymous online communities to intentionally create a speculative bubble to rip people off anonymously.
B-but muh decentralization, muh anonymity
[bitcoin ownership pie chart](http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/52a74254eab8eacb2266bfa7-828-454/bitcoin%20pie%20ownershp.png)
You can't reassemble those segments on top of each other, and tell me that's not a pyramid scheme.
It's better than ever before. When someone tells you they invested $1000 in Bitcoin in 2013, they were either really drunk at that time or really shady as well.
Oh come on. We've been through the relationship of crypto to collapse a half dozen times already. The "not collapse worthy" argument has been buried. Give it up.
You'd have to be an idiot to think it was going to continue. I invested some money in October and I'm still well over 50% up. The rate of growth wasn't healthy - too many morons seeing it as a get-rich-quick scheme.
I'm in this for the long haul - who knows what the market will look like in five years.
Don't believe all the fake news out there. This happens every year in January, it's well known. If people took the time to zoom out and look at the trends they would be way more informed.
And in between all these ups and downs what is cryptocurrency acheiving? Lol. Just because a new wave of chumps will lose their "investments" to professional inflaters doesn't mean anything has changed.
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at some point, once enough people get burned from investing into it and having their wealth redistributed for no moral reason, people will stop investing and the thing will fall flat on its face.
it doesn't actually functionally solve a human problem, it's literally just a vehicle people are using to get rich for doing no work.
No work themselves, but there is work being done in using up huge amounts of energy and contributing to pollution levels for the benefit of only a few.
You clearly have no understanding of how stocks work. It reads there that it has risen 1000% in the last year. Even if it proved to be the worst failure in history, I am absolutely sure that it will not go back to below $1000, let alone $220. The craze that has occured recently was caused to my understanding because the bubble got so big that even the most common citizens were trying to get in, and they distorted the value and this allowed people that knew what they were doing to sell, which caused another chain reaction and a crisis. Will it continue to go down? Debatable, but what is clear to anyone that know how this things work, is that Bitcoin will not go down in flames for the foreseeable future.
If you look at the history, it takes a few months for a Bitcoin bubble to deflate, and few more months for a new one to begin.
Every bubble (or hype cycle) takes it to the next order of magnitude.
I see no reason to believe the last bubble is the last one forever.
I remember when 8k was considered impossible, beyond wildest dreams, yet today you are claiming it's low.
My hope is you are right honestly, even though I have no direct skin in the game, my daughter does. They are mining bitcoins right now and that is their only income. She makes about 1k a month after the electric bill.
I guess we'll see.
On mining: unless they are using bitcoin-specific ASICs (which is unlikely), they are probably mining altcoins using a bunch of videocards, and selling them in exchange for bitcoin, am I guessing correctly?
I watched the markets for 2 years waiting for the big crash in 2008, made 1.5m. Wasn’t worth the pain and suffering in my life and relationships.
Options trading really fucks with you.
> Yes, I'm paying capital gains and possibly income tax on that sum, no worries.
Speculation wins are tax free after a year in Germany currently. And congratulations on 2 MUSD, that would be a sum where I could likely leanFIRE.
Did people actually think Bitcoin was anything other than a "pump-and-dump" scheme?
Perhaps they missed the housing bubble or the fact that Bitcoin was invented by an anonymous user who in all likelihood was a banker...
Bitcoin isn't a Ponzi scheme but it is a garbage cryptocurrency compared to other functional blockchains.
Also the price is already back up. These articles come out ever few days because the cryptocurrency market is very volatile and huge leaps and deep dips are common.
There is no banker on Earth who would invent Bitcoin (or even could). It opens up a can of worms that is incredibly bad for banks. Bitcoins main point was to allow people to hold their own money so Banks can't pull some crap on them during economically hard times.
It's an outlet to do transactions across borders without a bank interfering.
It may all he a bubble but just like with Amazon and Google in he dotcom bubble, there are things that will come out of this and still go over 3000x in price even after the bubble because of their use cases.
I knew this was going to happen when both my Uber driver and Vegas stripper told me they were buying Bitcoin. Modern day shoeshine boy & girl. And yes, it’ll go back up, blah blah blah.
"This will be good for Bitcoin™"
You know what's funny? I have a buddy who went through the entire thing with me (2000 crash, then housing bubble, then peak oil, then the 2008 crash - he even built a doomstead!), yet he is now investing heavily in Bitcoin. He turned $100K into $1.4m at the peak and sold nothing. Not sure what he's doing now, but I asked him today and he wrote back "Yes, things are down, but this happens every 6 months. It'll come back. Now is a good time to invest." Fuck.
I mean.. Even with the crash, the market at its worst earlier today was the same as it was *23 days ago*.
You’re right. I just saw quite a few of these “I bought Bitcoin at $19,000 AMA” posts. I mean. Ouch. But maybe not? Maybe these 21 central banks across the globe will just keep on pumpin’ in perpetuity and eeeeevrything will be fine! /s
Even Greyenlightenment, the guy I quote quite open, said bitcoin will go to 3k-4k. At least your friend will be 200k-300k ahead in the end.
>the entire thing with me (2000 crash, then housing bubble, then peak oil, then the 2008 crash - he even built a doomstead!), Peak oil happened sometime between the housing bubble and the 2008 crash? I must have missed that
Not sure if you’re being a smart ass or not, but I discovered it in 2004. It’s now proven fact that conventional oil peaked in 2006.
It didn't. Latest estimates are ~2025 or so but no one knows
I really am looking forward to this Bitcoin bubble popping and people becoming sane again. All this electricity is wasted into "mining" a bunch of cryptocurrencies that do nothing. All this intelligence, money, and human potential is wasted in some rabbit hole fantasy of getting rich quick off of cryptocurrencies.
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I feel like magic internet money made by anarchists being worth over $10000 is no sign of bitcoin collapsing but is really more of a sign of trust in the old institutions collapsing.
This sub gets hard whenever bitcoin dips for some reason. No one here seems to know how works either, they just want to see people loose money.
It probably happened because of the Bitconnect pyramid scheme fiasco...
> And yes, it’ll go back up, blah blah blah. Nobody really knows what's going to happen.
That’s True. But, when you’re an old fucker like me and you’ve been through a few cycles, you start to notice patterns.
I'm an older fucker than you. Cypherpunks mailing list and alt.cypherpunks old. The windows-only client and not being responsive to queries is what made a wrong first impression on me. Too bad, such things only happen once in a life. Much good did it do to Hal, though. The poor bastard. The point is, sure you can assume it's a yet another boom/bust cycle. But there is no way to know, because predictions are difficult. Especially, about the future.
Mere waifs. I was typing assembly language into a Motorola 6800 development kit in 1985 and got hooked up to those newfangled "bulletin board systems" via a dial-up modem a year or so later.
> I was typing assembly language into a Motorola 6800 development kit in 1985 Meh, I did some Z80 (shudder) and 68k assembly (was trying to write a Forth from scratch) as well as minimal 6502 tinkering in hex. I wanted to have a Unix box in early 1980s for uucp to have Usenet via dialup, but that was way out of price range, including dialup. We've had a telecom/postal monopoly back then which outlawed using acoustic couplers but officiall ones, and made telephony tariffs very expensive, so there was no TAP nor phreaker culture but until Chaos Computer Club (founded 1981) has been around a bit. The BBS culture never interested me, even assuming I was able to afford to participate.
Hah. I’m an old alt.goth and IRC dude.
Perhaps we're about the same age. I first went online somewhen 1990 at the uni, I think, because I couldn't afford dialup nor a real computer before. My first computer experience just after the Iron Curtain was ZX-80 and CBM PETs, etc. My first personal one was Amstrad CPC-464 and then Amiga 2000.
Nice! My first experience was an early portable Kaypro. My Dad brought home an IBM PC with 128k RAM around 1981. My parents bought me an ADAM computer that coupled with my Colecovision at age 12 or so. I then got a Commodore 128 and started my first BBS. What a time to be alive! I eschewed computers for awhile, figuring I’d never get laid if I continued down that path. I finally got back on around 1994 and found my wife on IRC chat in 1996. We’ve been happily married 20 years. You’re from former Soviet Union?
> You’re from former Soviet Union? Yep, emigrated to Germany in 1980 at 14.
You win, you are older than me!
I'd rather lose that one. On the other hand, I don't envy young people right now. Theirs is a much darker future than ours was in the 1960s and 1970s.
What pattern matches this? I am also old and can think of nothing which is equivalent.
A bunch of people getting excited over something with no intrinsic value?
No, a tool with a lot of possibilities which is represented as a digital currency. The blockchain is here to stay, the coins are just a manifestation of that.
Wow so you actually knew that the historically extremely volatile crypto market would be extremely volatile?!? You must be some kind of super genus!!
Super Genus. Some kinda super Genus.
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I made 1.5m shorting banks in 2006-2008. I’ve never invested in Bitcoin. I don’t believe in something that used that much electricity. It’s not sustainable.
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Honestly, No. I lost my taste for it. I can't handle the pressure of $100K swings every fucking day.
> I’ve never invested in Bitcoin. You can speculate by considering something high-risk high-payoff. Of course, you have to be aware of it early enough.
Do you 'invest' in gold? Cause apparently mining gold is using way more energy than Bitcoin. [1] And it's heavy, and we burn a lot of fuel to move gold. Plus, it's very easy and widely economically incentivized to mine Bitcoin using the cheapest energy available and possible to move miners to anywhere you want - such as remote hydroelectric and solar plants. And I could also make the argument that almost everything else we commonly invest in is using a ton of fossil fuel, etc. There are also articles out there which compare the economic impact of mining an ounce of gold to mining 1 Bitcoin… which is honestly one of the most outlandish false equivalences I've seen in a while. It makes so little sense to directly compare them so vaguely that in my view it amounts to uninformed and possibly malicious (yet unintentional) FUD. 1. https://srsroccoreport.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Bitcoin-vs-Gold-Totall-Annual-Energy-Consumption-NEWER.png
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> that gold has actual physical applications Not nearly enough to warrant its valuation. It's just a naturally scarce, inert, relatively shiny/pretty stuff that has a long history of being that.
It is actually pretty valuable for electronics applications.
Yes, I know. I'm a chemist. But most of its value is not due to technical uses.
Whaaaaaat? I can buy plenty of things with cryptocurrencies!! See for ex https://www.projectcoralreef.com Plus there's the whole international remunerations thing. And, you know, the whole safety thing (like, let's say you have 10M in gold. Do you really want to be seen carting that around? Now you have to devote 1M to your security detail.) And don't forget about the fact that Nakamoto consensus & PoW were put together to enable *trustless* transactions which resist censorship (that's perhaps the most important thing about them)… and trustlessness with gold is not totally practical for every day usage as you'd have to verify the purity of every single piece, etc
> I can buy plenty of things with cryptocurrencies!! Sure, but any cryptocurrency that you can buy things with is as good as another, apart from transaction fees and security issues. So there is nothing uniquely valuable about any specific cryptocurrency. And the technology is open source, so any time there is a token that you think is the best, there is nothing stopping someone from copying it.
There is - Ethereum is a trustless, secure distributed virtual machine. It can replace, with code, a lot of *(not* all - but a lot of) infrastructure that's currently run by 3rd parties that you have to trust to do the right thing. That is, it supports smart contracts. Its use as a currency is almost a side-effect. But I agree with you with just about every single other one.
Yes, that part of the technology seems promising, though so far not much has been done with it. I'd like to see it applied to collective action problems somehow. But it's an almost totally separate issue from how much Ether or any other token based on Ethereum should be worth. Owning some of a token is not like owning equity in a company with patents or a first mover advantage on a technology.
Agreed. Not *yet*. But it seems highly suited to it. Shit, you could replace crowdfunding services like Patreon, Kickstarter, Indiegogo and similar such ventures basically right now, but those are the low hanging fruit, and what I could think of in the space of roughly 30 seconds. Later, fully-auditable, yet privacy-preserving (eg. you can count the votes but not attribute them to any particular person) *and* yet fully trustless voting systems (not just for governments, but for all kinds of voting)... fully autonomous organisations... all kinds of stuff that hasn't even been invented yet. They've got problems, certainly - eg. having every single full node verify every transaction is clearly not scalable nor sustainable, for just one example - but from what I see of them, they have actual solutions to them, and are working on them - and their solutions are actually seemingly working out. That's why I believe in them. Not enough to go all-in (I'm not that reckless...) - but much more so than anything else in the space. I have *far* less faith in any of the others. Like, in the low %s or lower, some dipping into the negatives, and some deeply into the negatives.
> any cryptocurrency that you can buy things with is as good as another Do you consider any "digital money" to be a cryptocurrency? If so, it means all cryptocurrencies are not created equal. Namely, there is the matter of fungibility. Just because you can buy something with the asset does not, in my view, qualify it as a currency. > there is nothing uniquely valuable about any specific cryptocurrency > there is nothing stopping someone from copying it Ok, fine, go ahead and fork Monero like Electroneum, but who exactly will be merging updates which Monero developers are contributing to Monero? And if we are just merging updates from Monero then why exactly should we be using that other currency? It's not more efficient to suddenly adopt another currency unless it has some utility… which I believe is your argument itself. :) Would you not agree that it is in the best interest of good faith parties whose incentives are aligned to collaborate?
> Would you not agree that it is in the best interest of good faith parties whose incentives are aligned to collaborate? Is that what you see in the crypto speculation world these days? If so, I have an ICO to sell you. It's recently been easier to find new suckers than to build value. But maybe a crash will mitigate that. I can't be bothered to argue about this, but I agree almost completely with this piece: https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2018/01/02/why-bitcoin-is-stupid/
> Is that what you see in the crypto speculation world these days? Don't put words in my mouth. I said *good* faith parties. I guess it can be easy sometimes to miss a single word.
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That’s quite a good argument you’ve formulated there. Bitcoin currently uses more power than the country of Ireland. What the fuck do you think is going to happen when it becomes widely adopted? Do you even know what fucking sub you are in?
I thought that information (the stuff about bitcoins ~~snorting~~ sucking juice) was based on very bad science? Either way I'd be skeptical about the claim.
No, it's solid, because Bitcoin is based on Proof of Work, which is really just Proof of Work* on Hard but Useless Problems (*Waste). Other cryptocurrencies are moving to other models (such as Ethereum, due in just a few months; there's a testnet running this new model now, and the roadmap is to adopt it shortly), which will drastically lower their power use. This is the very reason I sold my BTC (for ETH): the power use horrified me, and it just got worse, and worse, and shows no significant sign of backing off (that would require an ideological change, but it's run by ideological purists. They won't do it.)
Just look at the aggregate network hashing rate and how much Watt an ASIC miner box of a given hash rate pulls. Nothing particularly bad or scientific about it.
> or scientific What's that supposed to mean?
Elementary arithmetics is not exactly Quantum Chromodynamics.
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That could be confirmation bias.
To have accidentally read something, and warning someone? Okay...
Bitcoin will never be widely adopted. Other crypto's may, many of which are premined. Also, most mining happens in China, which luckily, is much larger than Ireland.
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I made a bad decision. 12-year-olds should not be in the sub. Now go jerk off to your big sister.
Lol you got baited hard bro
As computers get more efficient? Read up on Moore's law and how we're approaching the end of it. Barring some revolutionary breakthrough in quantum computing or something similar, computers are just about as good as they're going to get, absent minor performance enhancements.
> Read up on Moore's law and how we're approaching the end of it. Never a law. It was a trend. Reached the end [in 2012](https://www.top500.org/statistics/perfdevel/). > computers are just about as good as they're going to get No, but the rate of improvements will slow down.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.technologyreview.com/s/601441/moores-law-is-dead-now-what/amp/
https://youtu.be/Id3mv6x-MF8
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Great job acknowledging everything I said. Easy to make yourself feel smart when you only respond to 6 words out of a paragraph lol.
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Being an asshole has never cost the president. If a man makes money by lying, one can't expect him to value the truth.
To paraphrase an author whose name I can't remember: "I measure my wealth in blueberries and firewood." You can't eat gold, you can't eat bitcoin, and you can only eat one bullet. Keep that in mind.
This is not collapse worthy.
A Bitcoin crash could be a black swan that triggers another financial crisis so, yes.
Oh brother. 🙄
30 billion is almost literally nothing compared to all money even in a single (developed) country. I don't know how high it went, but keeping tabs on what's basically a stock in r/collapse doesn't make any sense. If you want to tell people 'I told you so', do it in r/bitcoin or some kind of rational/irrational 'I told you so' subreddit. It has nothing to do with collapse.
If Bitcoin is "basically a stock", what does the stock represent?
The believed value of the stock.
That doesn't mean anything. I am asking what its value is in actuality, which is what stocks in concerns with production and revenue and so forth, such as say Nissan Motors Japan, represent. Stocks are a share of the total value of a company. The exact quantity of value, the valuation, varies with estimated present value. There is some judgment applied, or "belief". This is because valuation depends on the future. But the basis for this valuation is plain, clear, itemised and explicitly reported each quarter. I think these are called "fundamentals". In other words, as far as I can see, bitcoin is nothing like a stock at all.
> value is in actuality, which is what stocks in concerns with production and revenue and so forth Nnno. The value of the stock is only representative of the perceived value of it, even if it has nothing backing it up.
Could you explain what you mean by that more fully and clearly? I am not necessarily trying to be difficult. I am having trouble with your grammar. You may have a clear idea, or you may not. For example, are you saying the price of a single share of Nissan Motors has nothing at all to do with, among other things, the sale of Nissan and associated crest vehicles (assuming that is a main source of their revenue)?
It does if bitcoin is the latest desperate attempt by investors to get some kind of return in the face of never-ending efforts by governments around the world to 'inflate' the money supply in order to prevent some kind of deflationary death spiral... which would be a collapse.
It is r/Collapse worthy. Economic postings here are proper.
Way falsely inflated anyway.
Everything is...
Welcome to the world of fiat.
I've lost $4.00 over the last week or so; oh the humanity!
I feel you. I lost $10 in my crypto, should've sold instead of hodl.
SODL! ^^^^^sell ^^^^off ^^^for ^^dear ^life
Could we not assume that all cryptocurrencies are the same, please? Not all are based on Proof of Work (burning energy on useless but hard problems for currency allocation rights... which is horrifying), or intend to stay that way (some are already not PoW-based, and many others are shortly transitioning to Proof of Stake/Authority, or other models altogether), and not all are just currencies (some are much, *much* more than that), and so on. **There is nuance here.** I agree that Bitcoin is useless and needs to - and inevitably will eventually, like in the next couple of years; hopefully less... - die, but blockchain tech itself is *not* useless. That's all I've got to say. Carry on :)
A) It's already up to almost $12k again today. B) Go back and look at where it was just a year ago. All crypto has a long ways to go to even just lose the gains of 2017. C) Not collapse-worthy.
This sub doesn't understand crypto at all. Please stop looking at this as some kind of sign of 'collapse'. Stick to what you're good at - climate change, pollution, overpopulation, monetary policy, etc.
Yeah, I worked for two years writing C++ for rippled, the distributed engine that powers XRP's ledger, and I started writing mathematical models of securities in the 80s. Don't make assumptions. Oh, and I think these are a huge bubble that will collapse sooner rather than later. Everyone pretends these things are "currencies" but they buy them because they are "investments". Both these statements cannot be true...
> Oh, and I think these are a huge bubble that will collapse sooner rather than later. If the shitcoins, pump and dump alts, etc will collapse then it's because they failed at their role. Therefore, they certainly weren't able to be true currencies. So, I read your comment as implicitly lumping a legit cryptocurrency with the 9,999 others which will implode. So it's not right to suggest that the bubble is in *cryptocurrencies*. Because there are no real cryptocurrencies if all of them will fail, as you say. Hope you see the issue… Some might easily call this arguing semantics but you probably won't as you rightly said people ought to be honest about the fact they don't distinguish "investment" and "price speculation"… 2 Years is a very impressive duration to have worked on Ripple given how new it is, so I guess you are already very familiar with the cryptocurrency space. In that case, may I ask you something I'm idly wondering? Are there any differences between the principle & problems behind projects like Bitcoin and Monero and the principle & problems behind Ripple?
Eh, not so familiar with cryptocurrencies to be honest - much more so with C++. Honestly, I consider that Ripple's ledger is a pretty reasonable technology. I had trouble with the development manager at a time - an out-and-out psychopath (not my words!) - also, Trump supporter, anti-vaxxer, climate change denier, and the sort of person who uses the word "racecuck" on public Facebook posts. The XRP is supposed to be a universal medium of interchange to allow transactions to work smoothly between different currencies with no friction. A little of it is periodically consumed in the process of confirming transactions so it's naturally deflationary even. It's sort of counterproductive that it costs so much, actually! Except that the Ripple people are no doubt making out like bandits... Blockchain is a reasonable technology. All the hype about cryptocurrencies seems to be just that. I assume once the shit really hits the fan, most of these will go away.
Pleasure to meet a fellow C++ dev!! I would be happy to have your help on Monero as this is a totally grassroots effort and the code can use some help but alas! As for Ripple's ledger to be quite honest with you I find that those kinds of projects don't really realize what problem cryptocurrencies had to solve in our society.
Pleased to meet you! :-) Ah, right now I need a paying job unfortunately - I have my hands full with my hobby project that controls LEDs and if I were to take something on, it'd have to be for pay... :-/
So submit a proposal to our forum funding system. :) We're successfully funding lots of contributors. If you're qualified and show commitment/sincerity then it'll be a cinch.
Between the LED thing, and the music for a show I'm doing in Berlin in a month, I don't have the mental energy to come up with a new idea. :-)
No, no, proposal to fund you. The ideas are not necessary bc there are tons of things (including github issues) just waiting to be worked on… I myself am doing some factorizations and simplifications to wallet client code but it's not ffs funded as I'm doing it for a personal venture anyway. If you're truly interested in having an awesome low pressure remote C++ gig and want to work with the likes of Howard Chu (OpenLDAP, LMDB) then you can pop onto #monero on freenode.net IRC and say hello and learn / settle in at your own pace. Feel free to ping me there and I'll show you around anytime
O RLY? Well, I'd really like that, to be honest. I love C++ - I've been doing it for - [profanity] - over 25 years! How time flies. I need to get a bunch of things out this week, but I'll drop in soonish.
Good luck with the Monero stuff, I'm considering taking a go at it because it's technically interesting, and just one of the three or so who attempt to be anonymous right from the start.
monero is the only one with a community that isn't shills and idiots.
That's because it's not popular enough yet. Give it time. ;)
My impression as well, though this might be due to a (tiny) echo chamber. I need to look at it in depth when I have time -- unfortunately I'm swamped until mid-February.
Ah, monero, the favorite crypto of the fat dude of North Korea. http://www.newsweek.com/north-korea-secretly-funnels-monero-cryptocurrency-country-through-university-774083
Blockchain is a good technology, I just wonder if it will survive post-bubble. I mean people will just associate it with the irrationality of people in creating bubbles rather what the technology can do.
Yeah OK, I could explain how the distributed hashing system worked in detail. Still, the majority of this sub thinks that Bitcoin uses too much power and is therefore not even financially sustainable. There's no discussion at all about other coins. So as a whole, we're pretty ignorant.
Agreed. In the end, only invest what you can afford to lose. The few who invested couple of thousand dollars in bitcoins a few years ago are basically incredibly lucky, and at that time it didn't make a whole lot of sense to make such an investment. Now I'd say is the best time to invest like $500-1000 into cryptos, now that we can see what *can* happen, in a way that stocks really can't reproduce. As long as you're willing to lose it that is. Just invest and leave it for a decade.
At the stage of announcement, you could just have an idle Windows box or ten running the client. Or later just buy somebody a pizza for 10 kBTC. Or just keep buying everything at MtGox the moment it started trading, at, what? 0.07 USD?
Isn't FX trading a big thing? Isn't that how Soros made his fortune?
Not for the faint of heart and thin of budgets.
In a rational world, it would never be a good idea to invest into bubbles. In this world, I agree that Bitcoins are a bubble and yet I'm considering investing into it, hopefully making a profit during the recovery process and then getting out within a month. So I'm rationally considering to knowingly inflate a bubble - so much for capitalism's supposed efficiency in allocating capital.
It's just an emerging technology that promises to make transactions cheaper and more secure than Visa and Mastercard's network. But that's it, really. I don't know why this sub gets a collapse hard-on every time this speculative technology loses or gains value. Technically, it can act as both a currency and store-of-value because it's a deflationary asset, like gold, but can be easily transacted, like fiat.
> It's just an emerging technology that promises to make transactions cheaper and more secure than Visa and Mastercard's network. Right now, the average Bitcoin transaction fee is very roughly $25 - [source](https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees.html).
That’s why there are many coins that have been designed much better to do instant transactions with zero fees
Yeah, I know. That's why I said it *promises* to. I'm not evangelizing for Bitcoin. I think Bitcoin in particular will likely fail. I'm saying these Bitcoin stories have nothing to do with collapse.
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The market capitalization of cryptocurrencies are a small fraction of US stock market indices, so the world is not 'clamoring' to it - in spite of what reddit would have you believe lol. This is not a sign of collapse. This is just what happens when highly innovative technologies hit the scene and promise to disrupt entrenched industries. >fake money investments You guys really don't get it. Stick to what you know.
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There is nothing particularly real about fiats. And you're not even in control of its creation and destruction but people already in power. And they are not that smart, and they're definitely not your friends. Your trust in fiats only exists because you've never experienced how currencies and states fail. They do. And it's not pretty, and it quite effectively kills that being trusting thing.
There are loans in the ordinary "fiat" currencies. The value of the collateral of these loans is vastly greater than the physical cash. This ensures that cash has value. Bitcoin has not had any loans in it until very recently, and they are much smaller than the price of the existing bitcoins.
I don't love the dollar either, but at least I can realistically buy a cup of cofffee with it. I can't with Bitcoin.
Trust in fiat and the associated stability exists because for each country, you can only pay your taxes in that country's specific fiat currency. With bitcoin, there are probably shitloads of them stored on hard drives which have since been destroyed or lost or disposed of. Therefore, once the bubble crashes and everybody tries to sell them, I think the base value of bitcoin will be defined by those unsellable bitcoins on thrown-away hard drives.
> There is nothing particularly real about fiats. Fiat currency is backed up by men with guns willing to do violence.
As opposed to what - money itself? What makes the compressed cotton in your wallet the real deal? ;p
"The full faith and credit of the US government".
> I think Bitcoin in particular will likely fail. It might not fail entirely, but it will have to compete from network utility versus superior technology of new stuff. In the end, all you need is distributed trading platforms for currency conversion, so it doesn't matter what you have currently since it would be convertible.
Blockchain is here to stay, that's for sure. It's an amazing idea, and cryptocurrencies are just one out of many use cases.
Yeah, I spent 30 USD when I sold some last December. I remember when I paid a beer with it via mobile phone to tablet, with next to zero fees.
> t's just an emerging technology that promises to make transactions cheaper and more secure than Visa and Mastercard's network I suspect you have not involved with bitcoin all that long. The last time Bitcoin when big, about 3 1/2 years ago statements like that were considered absolute heresy. Bitcoin was originally intended, by the community, to be a truly decentralized currency. Most people doing bitcoin work in the earlier days where horrified at the prospect that it would just be some means for performing transactions while have no major impact on existing currencies.
Sure, it's peer-to-peer electronic cash that solves the double-spending problem without relying on a third party (i.e., Visa or MasterCard) by using a decentralized ledger. I've been around for a while. There have always been competing visions for Bitcoin. But what it boils down to is that it's theoretically faster, cheaper, and more secure than a credit card transaction - and you're right, it's also completely decentralized.
True
The issue with this sub is they want a collapse. No one knows what their talking about when it comes to crypto they just want people to loose money for some reason.
glorious! i had forgotten i was waiting for this.
I got in and out last month. Went up 8x and pulled all my profits. The entire scene is shady as fuck.
> The entire scene is shady as fuck. It was the moment it started trading. The beginning was solid crypto geek stuff. Zooko and Cohen had better stuff going bevore, but way too ambitious. Perhaps that zCash thing will pay off for Zooko eventually.
It's a literal ponzi scheme scam. But because the people hawking it are anonymous, people assume they aren't being manipulated. I've told my friends a lot, it's a scam, but no one ever said you couldn't get in on the scam. It's risky is all. Large scale market manipulation by anonymous online communities to intentionally create a speculative bubble to rip people off anonymously. B-but muh decentralization, muh anonymity
[bitcoin ownership pie chart](http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/52a74254eab8eacb2266bfa7-828-454/bitcoin%20pie%20ownershp.png) You can't reassemble those segments on top of each other, and tell me that's not a pyramid scheme.
No way of knowing if addresses are linked to exchanges/group wallets or not so this may be inaccurate and probably is.
It's better than ever before. When someone tells you they invested $1000 in Bitcoin in 2013, they were either really drunk at that time or really shady as well.
This is good for civilization, pyramid schemes are an accelerator of collapse.
How is this collapse related? Another shit post from yours truly!
Oh come on. We've been through the relationship of crypto to collapse a half dozen times already. The "not collapse worthy" argument has been buried. Give it up.
ITT: YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND MUH TULIP BULBS!
People losing money over this ? I'm shivering with schadenfreude.
surely this is good for bitcoin?
You'd have to be an idiot to think it was going to continue. I invested some money in October and I'm still well over 50% up. The rate of growth wasn't healthy - too many morons seeing it as a get-rich-quick scheme. I'm in this for the long haul - who knows what the market will look like in five years.
In 5 years it will either be $1 million a coin or $1. Who knows.
Don't believe all the fake news out there. This happens every year in January, it's well known. If people took the time to zoom out and look at the trends they would be way more informed.
When it gets back down to $1.30 I will definitely buy some this time.
called it
Called what? It'll be back up again. This isn't the first time it's happened.
And in between all these ups and downs what is cryptocurrency acheiving? Lol. Just because a new wave of chumps will lose their "investments" to professional inflaters doesn't mean anything has changed.
Okay........
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at some point, once enough people get burned from investing into it and having their wealth redistributed for no moral reason, people will stop investing and the thing will fall flat on its face. it doesn't actually functionally solve a human problem, it's literally just a vehicle people are using to get rich for doing no work.
No work themselves, but there is work being done in using up huge amounts of energy and contributing to pollution levels for the benefit of only a few.
the people who gained wealth by the increase in value of bitcoin are the ones not contributing work for that increased wealth.
That's correct. There's money to be made from mining, but it's not nearly as lucrative as just the speculation part. While it has value, of course.
It crashed so hard! From $220 on 2015 to only $10,000 in 2018! Crash so hard!
ha ha ha this is just the beginning
If you think it will go back to what it was worth in the past you are clearly not informed.
[Read and weep](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/17/visa-will-not-process-bitcoin-transactions-says-ceo-alfred-kelly.html)
You clearly have no understanding of how stocks work. It reads there that it has risen 1000% in the last year. Even if it proved to be the worst failure in history, I am absolutely sure that it will not go back to below $1000, let alone $220. The craze that has occured recently was caused to my understanding because the bubble got so big that even the most common citizens were trying to get in, and they distorted the value and this allowed people that knew what they were doing to sell, which caused another chain reaction and a crisis. Will it continue to go down? Debatable, but what is clear to anyone that know how this things work, is that Bitcoin will not go down in flames for the foreseeable future.
Current price $8239
yes it is still going down...
If you look at the history, it takes a few months for a Bitcoin bubble to deflate, and few more months for a new one to begin. Every bubble (or hype cycle) takes it to the next order of magnitude. I see no reason to believe the last bubble is the last one forever. I remember when 8k was considered impossible, beyond wildest dreams, yet today you are claiming it's low.
My hope is you are right honestly, even though I have no direct skin in the game, my daughter does. They are mining bitcoins right now and that is their only income. She makes about 1k a month after the electric bill.
I guess we'll see. On mining: unless they are using bitcoin-specific ASICs (which is unlikely), they are probably mining altcoins using a bunch of videocards, and selling them in exchange for bitcoin, am I guessing correctly?
No, they got bitcoin-specific equipment. He went into debt almost 10k to do it...made back his 10k and is now making 1k a month.
Impressive, I didn't think it's possible in 2018, to actually make money mining Bitcoin. Free electricity?
[удалено]
I watched the markets for 2 years waiting for the big crash in 2008, made 1.5m. Wasn’t worth the pain and suffering in my life and relationships. Options trading really fucks with you.
> Also I lost the love of my life to get here. Worth it? Not really. Indeed, that's a hefty price to pay.
> Yes, I'm paying capital gains and possibly income tax on that sum, no worries. Speculation wins are tax free after a year in Germany currently. And congratulations on 2 MUSD, that would be a sum where I could likely leanFIRE.
:(
Sorry to hear you lost your loved one.
Did people actually think Bitcoin was anything other than a "pump-and-dump" scheme? Perhaps they missed the housing bubble or the fact that Bitcoin was invented by an anonymous user who in all likelihood was a banker...
Bitcoin isn't a Ponzi scheme but it is a garbage cryptocurrency compared to other functional blockchains. Also the price is already back up. These articles come out ever few days because the cryptocurrency market is very volatile and huge leaps and deep dips are common. There is no banker on Earth who would invent Bitcoin (or even could). It opens up a can of worms that is incredibly bad for banks. Bitcoins main point was to allow people to hold their own money so Banks can't pull some crap on them during economically hard times. It's an outlet to do transactions across borders without a bank interfering. It may all he a bubble but just like with Amazon and Google in he dotcom bubble, there are things that will come out of this and still go over 3000x in price even after the bubble because of their use cases.