Have any of you bought Bitcoins or spoken to anybody that has?
The underlying principle of removing the role of the banking industry from transactions (or at least limiting its influence) seems noble but it stinks of a giant scam IMO.
It's absolutely ridiculous, you magic this 'currency' out of thin air and then use it to buy real goods and services. Can you imagine a financial system that could possibly succeed on that principle? Oh...wait...never mind.
I have £600 invested in bitcoin. The exchange rate appears to have hit exponential growth. I intend to sell when its value hits £1200, which will hopefully be before the crash which is likely to happen eventually, say if SR gets killed off.
>>3344 MtGox. Your graph isn't flat at all and shows the growth mentioned in >>3246. Today's increase is not yet reflected on that graph, for the price is close to $60.
>>3366 I saw a comment from him where he was putting on a brave face. "It was a really nice pizza, I regret nothing" or something.
Poor bastard. I'm still kicking myself for not picking up a bunch when I noticed it going back up after the big crash, when I was dipping my toe in mining. I did think seriously of investing £50-£100 which would've paid off tidily if I cashed out now.
>Drugs are bought with ‘Bitcoins’, an untraceable digital currency. It is not regulated by any government or company but just by mathematical equations.
>The value is worked out by how many Bitcoins are in existence and how many are being traded. Another knock-on effect of sites such as Silk Road is that the value of a 'Bitcoin' have gone from being virtually worthless to trading at $70 - around £46 - each.
I haven't bought any bitcoins before, but given that it now seems to be gaining traction on mainstream sites, it seems like I couldn't really go wrong buying a few hundred quid's worth as an investment.
Am I mistaken in thinking this? It doesn't look like it's going to disappear any time soon and since the total number of bitcoins is close to the max now, the price will rise in proportion to the number of users, right?
>>3376 That depends on how much money a few hundred quid is, to you.
Personally I think it's inflating too fast right now and buying is bad, selling should be done as soon as possible, before it bursts. I'm no expert at economics, but I've not seen anyone with more knowledge than myself advocate investing at this point in time.
That said, they are fluctuating a great deal these days, so even if they decrease in value soon; they'll not take too long to approximate the same value in time.
>>3376 Almost ฿11M of the total ฿21M have been mined. Bitcoin was getting a lot of attention when it surged to $30+ in 2011 but it subsequently slid steadily to $5. Investing in Bitcoin could certainly pay off handsomely, but no investment where you can double your money in such a short time can be considered safe.
Some silly buggers have been trying to destabalise mt gox in order to affect panic selling so they can profit. The price continues to rise.
My £650 investment now stands at over £1800. Not sure when to sell.
I'll probably sell £650 so that I've got my original money back out and can rest easy knowing I haven't lost anything, then sit pretty a bit longer until the price increases some more.
>>3489 You can't just magic up currency lad, so yes.
Even if you printed your own currency, everyone else would be losing money by their money not being worth as much (hence why counterfeiting is bad). But because it's spread over such a large amount of people, they aren;t going to notice unless it's done to a ridiculous amount. As opposed to say mugging someone of an equal amount.
The way I understand is probably very simple, but I see 'currency' as meaning 'commodities and power' which are both limited. As opposed to simple paper money or numbers on a screen, which have no intrinsic value.
>>3514 I told myself I would sell at $200 but I left it, thinking it would head higher.
If I cashed out now I'd still make a healthy profit, but I'm inclined to 'wait and see'.
A currency is just a unit of exchange, used as an intermediary in trading. Currency emerged as a more efficient alternative to barter. Without currency, if I'm a sheep farmer and want some new shoes, I've got to find a cobbler who wants a shitload of mutton. With currency, I just need to find someone who wants mutton and the cobbler just needs to find someone who need shoes.
Precious metals have been used as currency for a long time, because they have intrinsic traits that make them a useful unit of exchange for primitive peoples. They're inherently scarce, durable and portable and can be proved to be authentic fairly easily. Coinage was a good way of providing a consistent and trusted weight of metal, in a quantity that was convenient to exchange. The ridges on the edge of a ten pence piece are a throwback to this - coins were originally ridged to prevent people from shaving off the edges of gold and silver coins for profit.
If there's no functioning currency, people will simply use whatever is suitable. When the German economy collapsed between the wars, people took to trading in cigarettes. Rolling tobacco used to be the currency of British prisons, but they switched over to phone cards when smoking became less popular. In many US prisons, they use pre-packaged snack cakes.
The first paper money were gold and silver certificates, written out by pawnbrokers. People found it convenient to store their metal with a pawnbroker and give someone the pawnbroker's slip. Eventually, government took over that role, guaranteeing bank notes against a store of silver. The pound sterling was once literally that - a pound weight of sterling silver.
Many governments realised that they could print more banknotes than they had metal to back it, which was of course highly profitable for the government. The problem with that is that as you print more money, the money in circulation falls in value due to simple supply and demand. If there's more money in circulation but the same amount of stuff to buy with it, the value of money will fall. We call this process "inflation" and it's why things always get more expensive over time.
Inflation is very useful to a government for several reasons. Governments are heavily indebted, but if the value of a pound falls, it's effectively cheaper to pay off your debts. Inflation also encourages people to spend money rather than hoard it, which is good for the economy. Too much inflation can be risky and discourage investment, so most governments aim for inflation of a few percent per year.
Eventually, governments abandoned their store of precious metals entirely, creating what we call a "fiat currency" - a currency with no direct material value that is backed purely by confidence in the government that prints it. Fiat currency is a win-win for all sorts of dismally nerdy reasons, but it comes with a big risk attached. A government has complete reign in manipulating that currency and a collapse in confidence in the government can lead to a collapse in the value of that currency. A common vicious cycle is that a government with severe debts prints more money to pay their debts, which reduces the value of their money, which means they need to print more of it. This is hyperinflation, which happened in Germany in 1923, Hungary in 1946, Zimbabwe in 2008 and many other places and times. This is extremely destructive, because people lose confidence in the value of money and spend it as soon as possible.
Bitcoin is currently experiencing the opposite, hyperdeflation. The value of bitcoin is increasing at an exponential rate, because supply is very limited but demand is increasing rapidly. The more Bitcoin increases in value, the more people who want to buy it, on the expectation that they'll make a big profit. The key problem is the opposite to that of hyperinflation - nobody with Bitcoins wants to spend them, because they expect them to increase in value.
The problem for Bitcoin is that a currency is only worth what people will exchange it for. Nearly all of the current value of a Bitcoin is the expectation that, in the future, lots of people will want to exchange things for them. As it stands, transactions where Bitcoins are exchanged for goods or services represent only a tiny fraction of all Bitcoin transactions. The sum value of all the goods in the Bitcoin economy and all of the non-Bitcoin currency held by Bitcoin bureaux de change is vastly less than the nominal value of all Bitcoin in circulation. The entire value of a Bitcoin is the expectation that Bitcoins will be valuable in future, which is an extremely fragile state of affairs.
Since you seem to know what you're talking about, I have a follow up question relating to your last point about its value being based on expectation. AFAIK, governments haven't yet decided how to deal with cryptocurrencies if they actually became widely used - is there a particular legislative move they could take that we should keep an eye out for that would render bitcoin effectively worthless?
They could easily outlaw various trading activities that make cryptocurrencies practical, which would severely undermine the value of any cryptocurrency. The clear example would be the UIGEA, which stopped internet poker companies from doing business with US customers by banning US banks from doing business with foreign gambling companies.
Bitcoin only has any real value today because it is freely convertible back into "real" currency. The drug dealers on Silk Road are reliant on being able to convert BTC to cash to buy more stock; Their customers are reliant upon being able to convert their cash into BTC. The speculators buying BTC as an investment have no real intention of spending them, but invariably expect to cash them out for their own national currency. Bitcoin therefore doesn't currently function as a fully-fledged currency, but a sort of financial derivative. For the moment at least, Bitcoins are essentially useless without a means of converting them to proper currency.
It would be very easy for a government to make the argument that due to the risk of fraud or money-laundering, banks will be banned from doing business with Bitcoin bureaux de change. It would only take a Daily Mail headline about "SECRET ECONOMY FOR JUNKIES AND PAEDOPHILES" for that policy to become a major vote-winner. Bitcoin advocates argue that that's not a problem because Bitcoin will develop a fully-fledged economy, but that's a total sham. A vicious cycle would rapidly develop, because Bitcoin is and will continue to be an inferior currency - you can't pay your gas bill or your council tax in Bitcoins if you can't convert them to Sterling. Given the choice, nearly everyone would prefer to be paid USD or GBP than in BTC, because BTC is obviously an inferior currency under such conditions. The only current non-convertible currencies are the Cuban Peso and the North Korean Won, which should give you an idea.
It's a really interesting project and I think there are some fantastic ideas at the heart of it, but I think it has been over-egged by people who don't understand economics and lack a clear sense of what a currency is and what gives it value. I think that BTC is vastly overvalued due to a speculative bubble and should be somewhere around $15, based on the level of real spending. I think the market-makers know this to be the case, because I've tried to bet against the value of Bitcoin and nobody will take my money. None of the "exchanges" will let me naked short or take a put option, which to me speaks volumes.
Yes, but they also have the advantage that they can be used for all goods and services within a local area, which is something BTC does not have. To the average man on the street, it doesn't matter that the Egyptian Pound only really has value on the macro level because of its potential exchange with the USD, because he's using it to pay his bills and buy his groceries etc.
I''ve only got to paragaph four, but this is nonsence. No offense meant, don't take this as a flame. Thi is textbook Economic Science. Unforyunatley, as with the vast majority of ES, it has no basis in fact, history, of the development of currencies.
I'll keep this brief, and offer a good primer afterwards.
1st para: I need to find a cobbler who wants a sheep. No. You need a cobbler who *at some point* will need a sheep. For the vast majority of the time cobblers have existed, you would know that cobbler personally, as you would live in the same tribe, village, or street. You drink in the same pub, if they existed. You get a pair of shoes, then when he needs mutton he pops over to pick it up. This fallacy is the perfect example of how ES fails to understand social and societal roles in the exchange of value.
2nd para: Not wuite. While silver was used as a means of local currency in the Roman times, this was because it was easily hammered into flat strips that could be torn up. Coinage only existed for governments and traders. No normal person would ever have seen a coin for thouands of years - they had other means of exchanging value.
I don't want to fully engage with this, as I've only just woken up. Anyone who is interested in this subject would to well begging, borrowing, stealing or torrenting "Life Inc." by Douglas Rushkoff. It's neither left wing (Marxist) or right wing (ES). Easy to read, well researched and written book,
by one of the smartest people I have ever come accross. The first third of this book is all about the emergence of national currency, and the history of exchange/currency itself. Possibly the best non-fiction read I can recommend anyone.
Right, now, if anyone needs a hangover this year get in touch, and I will happily give you mine in exchange for a full English...
>>3529 That post was really interesting, thanks. >>3518 was also interesting (and I'd assume yours), despite >>3540's still-drunk and mostly incoherent critique.
I remember reading at the depth of the big Bitcoin crash of 2011 that the estimated cost of each bitcoin for the miner was about $2 in terms of hardware + electricity over the lifetime of said hardware, which was approximately equivalent to its market value at the time. Might have been $5 or something, I'm not sure and it's not that important. Anyway, if that's the case then surely as long as the trading value of each Bitcoin is above that value then the smarter move would be to engage in mining? Why would anyone who is interested in speculating in Bitcoin pay directly for them (at $200 a pop) when they could invest in hardware with the same money? Obviously it'll take longer to see ROI but if you're investing then you should have an eye for the longer game, no?
How long does it take a reasonably high-end GPU to mine a bitcoin now, anyone know?
(My spellchecker suggested "bitchiness" instead of "bitcoin". I have no joke but it seemed funny anyway.)
GPU mining is nearly dead and the serious miners have already sold off their GPU rigs. By design, the difficulty of bitcoin mining increases exponentially over time. The new game in town is using FPGA and ASIC chips, which are custom-designed processors that do nothing but bitcoin hashing. By dint of specialisation, these chips are vastly quicker than GPUs and much more power-efficient, but they're also expensive and are useless for anything but hashing. The risk in buying one of these machines is that mining will only be profitable for a relatively short period - it won't take long for the difficulty to exceed the cost of electricity. Once that happens, you're left with a useless lump of hardware. The biggest issue is the incredible volatility in pricing, which makes it very difficult to predict your ROI. We're now down from $266/BTC to $92/BTC in under a week, so future pricing is really just guesswork.
No, lad, the difficulty of mining does not increase over time. The level of difficulty is dynamic. This is how they are able to keep the output of bitcoins at a constant predictable rate.
When the ASIC miners all come online (if they EVER do lol) the difficulty will shoot up a great deal.
Conversely, if a whole load of people decided to drop out of the network, difficulty would drop significantly also.
Think of it like this:
>More processing power = Higher difficulty
>Less processing power = Lower difficulty
>>3555 If by "no" you mean "yes" and "probably" you mean "almost certainly", then yes, you're right. Otherwise I'm just going to point and laugh at you.
>>3564 You might as well say the price increases over time (the two are of course loosely related). I doubt that'll be much comfort to the people who just lost half their investment.
>>3566 >You might as well say the price increases over time
You might as well say that. However, unlike claiming that the difficulty rises over time, you're likely to be wrong.
The ASIC miners are already online and hashing. BFL miners may be vapourware, but Avalon have already shipped their first batch of 65Gh/s miners and are due to ship another 600 tomorrow. A top of the range GPU does somewhere around 0.8Gh/s.
>>3572 Congratulations, you've superimposed two unrelated lines on a chart, and demonstrated that they're unrelated. Would you like a gold star in your exercise book?
>>3574 Right, because if Bitcoins were worth $5 tomorrow, nobody would stop mining, everyone would happily continue at a loss and there'd be no cause for difficulty to fall as consequence. This certainly didn't happen between Sep-Dec '11 when many felt the price would never recover.
Maybe, but that would be by coincidence and not by design. Difficulty will only increase if more processing power is added to the mining effort. It could quite possible happen that a lot of people leave if bitcoin collapses or some other catastrophe.
So therefore, difficulty does increase, but not by design.
What is in the design is for difficulty to increase with processing power so that the output of coins remains a constant.
>>3588 Right hang on. In 2017 the number of Bitocoins generated per block chain will halve and then keep halving over the following years until 21mil is reached. With the caveat that I don't know what I'm talking about, doesn't that mean that by design it will get harder to mine coins as time goes on?
Well not quite. Difficulty only goes up in relation to the processing power being used in the network. It does not relate to the amount of coins being produced.
By the way that you say coins will be harder to mine, because the amount in a block will be halved, you COULD say that, yes, it will get harder to mine coins in that sense, but not NECESSARILY difficulty wise.
Even though processing power may indeed get better with time due to Moore's law etc, this does not relate to the amount of processing power that MAY be available in the Bitcoin network.
I'm trying to think of a simple way of putting it.
Say you are in a maths class and the teacher gives out 10 gold stars every day, and you have 10 students working on the problem, this will be fine at the difficulty level of the problem the teacher has set.
Now, once the students get the hang of performing the teachers sums, he will increase the difficulty of the sums so that they are still only solving 10 a day. Conversely, if they are finding it too hard and not able to answer the 10 a day he would decrease the level of difficulty of the sums to such a level that the students are still getting 10 a day correct.
