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Rethinking Money With Bitcoin Quadrupling Since Cyprus
Since the beginning of the Cyprus debacle (followed by Russia's call for repatriation of all offshore capital and then Japan's willful debasement of their currency), which appears to have awoken many to the fact that banks and politicians can't be trusted , the 'price' of the virtual currency Bitcoin has quadrupled - touching an incredible $162 this morning. While most people believe the only way to 'spend' this currency is on drugs or blogging sites, Liberty Blitzkrieg's Mike Krieger points out there are in fact hundreds of places (growing daily) where this as-yet unregulated store of wealth can be spent. However, what is really driving this surge in demand for a different kind of 'money' is the wholesale loss of faith in the status quo - nowhere is this clearer than in the words and actions of the people of Cyprus and this devastating clip capturing the thoughts and feelings of ordinary Cypriots after their bank accounts were frozen. "Nothing has started yet... everything is going to fall down like dominoes because people don't trust the banks."
and perhaps this last bump is due to Portugal's latest attempt at herding cats...
And the following insightful brief documentary is how real people - not the mouthpieces projected on TV - feel in the streets of Cyprus about the confiscation of their savings...
And Brandon Smith's rather more direct take on the Bitcoin phenomena specifically - "Ignore It..."
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Quadrupling in less than a month?
When the music stops, someone will be left without a chair.
> When the music stops, someone will be left without a chair.
That would be Bernanke and Co.
I will have Bitcoins, Gold, Silver and cash when the music stops. What will you have?
Reducto ad absurdum: So, by your reasoning, anything that grows exponentially is bad or a bubble. Like the dividing cells of a fertilized egg is bad or a bubble?
If you can't hide behind generalities, you need to state how your analysis (not opinion or guess!) shows it to be a bubble growth, rather than a normal growth of exponential adaption of the market place.
if dollars/euros are losing value, and Bitcoin has risen exponentially the past couple of months, I don't see any reason not to mine it in the short term. Sure, you don't physically own anything, but at least some fucking Bitcoin Fed can't keep printing them. Unless Ben Bitcoin Bernanke is behind all this....hmmmm
It is opensource. You or anyone else can go and peruse the code looking for issues to undermine the system if you want. That in and of itself builds real trust in the medium because anyone can scrutinize it. You know at least what the deal is at any given time. Information arbitrage ensues trust. Not everyone wins but when everyone trusts the playfield and rules of the game the participants play. That is something the central banks, JPM, GS and all the other manipulators seem to forget.
When Amazon.com starts accepting Bitcoins, it will hit critical mass and there will be thousands of other sites that begin accepting it as well and it will skyrocket even more.
There was a report that came out about a week ago that described how if only 1% of world capital shifted into Bitcoin, it would be worth $700,000 per coin.
I own 100 BITCOIN cause if it survives the attacks it will surpass a million dollars per coin. If it fails I lose about the 3000 I paid for them. 3000 chasing a 100 million is an acceptable bet for me.
Why single out Amazon? What about the thousands... millions... of other businesses and employers out there?
Bitcoin? Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh...no!
I'd rather buy AUDJPY
Along the lines of what Brandon is discussing in the second video above, ZH posted a link to the History of US Money a while ago and I dug it up and posted below. Note the next evolution on the roadmap of currencies is the smartcard/electronic currencies. Generally, the survey through the currencies is rather interesting.
http://www.frbsf.org/currency/world/show.html
There's no rush to get into bitcoin. Let it shake out. I know it is skyrocketing right now, but that's not going to continue.
@Bicycle Repairman
Thank you for the breath of sanity - by all means, if anyone isn't comfortable with Bitcoin, don't use it. Inform yourself and follow along. I'd prefer this kind of stance versus the outright antagonistic dialog Bitcoin gets here.
Skype Trojan turns your computer into a Bitcoin miner.....
http://www.slashgear.com/skype-trojan-turns-your-computer-into-a-bitcoin...
"The malware immediately takes control of your computer and increases the victim’s CPU usage drastically. While the trojan’s primary use is for Bitcoin mining, it’s not its only capability. Bitcoin mining isn’t lucrative with just one PC, however, if there are many PCs infected and aimed towards a specific Bitcoin mining pool, it can be worthwhile"
Hackers are going to feast on Bitcoin....
> Hackers are going to feast on Bitcoin....
That's because idiots are using Windows and Skype. Try https://crypto.cat instead and get a Mac or a Linux machine.
I agree (I drive a Linux) But..... I don't think the majority of Bitcoin people are aware...
Bitcoiners are aware. The people that use services like Coinbase (run by GS trader Fred Ehrsam) aren't aware.
Yep and that is the difference between free market and regulated market. Who pays the consequences of actions. When the risk is transferred to the money holder so are the consequences.
Hackers been hijacking machines and using them as botnets is nothing new. So they turn them into bitcoin miners in this instance back in napster days they were using them as fileservers for example or now as then to do DDOS attacks. It is a just a new take on an old game. And no they aren't so they get a momentary coin generating advantage then the difficulty factor adjusts and negates their hashing capacity advantage in relation to everyone else on the network.
Extraordinary Popular Delusion and the Madness of a Crowd .
If you where head of a central bank or goverment how would you crash the price of bicoins ?
take over and kill the exchanges ?
The International bankers/MSM/Globalist are experts at 'propaganda'..........they could kill bitcoin in 2 seconds..with some well placed stories...
and they will
1. If you're a Cypriot, Greek, Spaniard, etc, The Shit HAS Hit The Fan. Even though the power and internet are still on. Looks like they prefer BTC over AU or AG.
2. /How dare they exercise their free will, when American gold bugs have decreed that only gold is money? And how are gold speculators supposed to profit, when they run to BTC instead of gold? Damn SOBs are helping depress PM even more! /sarc
Those were all controlled takedowns....They were planned...
The coming Cyber attacks on the Banks will bring the Internet down...
5,000 years vs. four years
Any questions?
@Tinky
Is that the same flawed logic that faults a small child not being able to lift 200 pounds like a grown man?
absurd analogy
http://peculium.net/2013/04/03/the-end-of-ordinary-money-by-j-orlin-grabbe/
Why should it be "touching an incredible $162 this morning" considering the limited amount it's been created of? One should keep in mind how many of BitCoins could ever be created, how many has been and how long it would take for the rest to be. Math is more tangible time after time... Provided that it can keep its credibility, you could very well end up seeing its value up the roof but with no edibility. It seems like BitCoin is a primer to what the ideal should be and yet somehow inapt to reflect it.
guess you didn't hear about my MonkeyDung(c) chips. Also limited supply.
Based on comments for and against, "bitcoin" sure seems to be an BUY!!
best arguments for...but, too noivous
I'll make it simple 4 ya. That's what I do.
The more ridiculous it is, the more it rips. There's no tether to anything reasonable. So it's just the anii bidding higher.
Eventually, a huge 50% or more overnight crash.
You know it's coming.
What Bitcoin advocates don't understand is that at any moment the governments around the globe could declare Bitcoin a money laundering scheme and shut it down.
No one cares, musical chairs, new multimillionaires.
And what people talking out their ass don't understand is dencentralized networks can't be shut down no matter what anyone declares short of shutting off the whole internet. That will never happen since the government(s) will never give the surveillance and tracking potential of the internet allows them to map interactions as a directed graph pattern recognition math problem on a global scale. It is too ingrained into society for that to happen. The old luddites don't get it are going to die soon anyways one way or the other. They had their shot gen x is up next bitchez like it or not.
I find it odd that the very people that claim to be opposed to the Gubmint also give the Gubmint great powers that it doesn't actually have. There's no one entity that can shut down the net worldwide.
The State, as envisioned by Hegel and practiced down to this day of the Bush-Obama hybrid beast - is finished.
I don't, it is the same reason people stay in bad relationships and marriages.
Forget bitcoin, they could wreck the blockchain (ledger), shut down the internet, or discover an easy crack for very strong encryption. Forget precious metals, they could give you the death penalty if you are treasonous enough to use them for trade. Forget govt fiat, you know why already. Forget real estate, its not yours anyway. Get a skill you can use in barter then run and hide till there is nowhere left to hide. "How long will they kill our profits while we stand aside and look? Perhaps thats just a part of it, we have to fullfill the book." Bob Marley. You think all this shits an accident perpetuated by people that don't know better? Might be time for ZH to start looking for what virus started this cancer.
If the BitCoin rally were for real, gold and platinum would be rallying right along side. The fact that they aren't tells me BitCoin is a 2000-era Internet stock, i.e. it will have a bad ending once reality sets in.
Yea, we all know this, but we're morons, cause the really smart ones bought at <50 and are taking profits as we speak.
Maybe the really smart ones are selling to you AND still holding more than you.
Of course the metals are not manipulated at all. They are in a completely free market.
It makes economic sense that after Cyprus PM's went DOWN instead of up.
/sarc
Bitcoin is going up just as stocks and bonds are going up and the financial analysts predict nirvana and gold and silver bottom.
Bitcoin is a one time fraud.
I don't understand bit coin.
It seems to be as far from money as the sun is to the moon.
Maybe it's just that I am old fashioned about money.
I don't don't like any money that can be conjured on a computer or printed at will.
Bitcoin is worse than fiat but neither is money in the sense that precous metals are.
The metals are something with limited availability to begin with.
I like that.
But like I said I am old fashioned.
I'm amazed at how ignorant the vast majority of ZH bitchez appear to be re: Bitcoin. Many of you constantly trot out the same debunked objections to BTC, over and over and over again. I thought you all were traders, risk-takers, men and women of big balls, etc. Let me tell you how it is...
1. BTC is new so of course there's going to be a risk. As we've seen so far, lots of risk.
2. The foundational system of BTC should not be confused with organized exchanges. That is, how BTC works is not the same as how you trade fiat money for pre-existing BTC.
3. All of the well-publicized hacks to date have hit the organized exchanges. None of the attacks have dented the underlying BTC system.
4. The underlying BTC system is a cryptographic thing that has proven itself to be secure in the wild, wild, world of hackers looking to steal money. When and if this system is broken, your ordinary online banking will be equally insecure.
5. When and if enough shit hits enough fans that the Internet goes dark your BTC money will probably be as worthless as your 401K. Money will be the least of your woes. Until then, the system works.
6. The quantity and schedule of new BTC creation by the system is hardwired into the source code. There are exactly 25 new BTC created on average about every nine minutes. The quantity created is scheduled to halve occasionally and the total quantity will eventually reach 21,000,000 several years from now. You're free to examine the same source code that everybody else uses by looking at https://github.com/bitcoin.
Although anybody can easily make a copy of the source code and change it for personal consumption, the new edition would simply not interfere or interact with the existing system.
6. There is no single set of balls to squeeze in order to do anything with (or to) the underlying system. The source code and everything needed to re-create the system, complete with all of the balances, and continue its operation is massively and redundantly distributed.
7. The best use of BTC, IMHO, is to use it as a speculative vehicle and as a means of storing value. It's really nice to do international travel and still have BTC stashed away somewhere out of sight of prying eyes.
8. I hear you can buy drugs using BTC. I also hear you can do the same using fiat money.
9. "market cap" on this is presently about $1.6 Billion. The price is rising much faster than the quantity of new coins and is the dominant driver of the market cap. A 10x increase in price puts the cap at $16 billion which is still chump change in the grand scheme of things. A 100x increase gives us BTCUSD = 16,000 and a market cap of $160 gigabucks. The reason I care about market cap is that at this stage of the game BTC is still a gnat pissing in the Cheerios of TPTB so BTC has plenty of room to grow. We all know that exponential growth is not infinitely sustainable. However, short spurts of it are great to get a piece of. Eventually though, TPTB will probably take notice and try to fuck this up. But that's all they _can_ do. But at what point does this become TBTF ? Go ahead punk, make my day.
10. It's easy to start a new BTC like system by copying the software. Let's call that BTC2. The BTC2 system will easily co-exist with BTC and will not interfere with it. The BTC2 system can use an exact copy of the source code and work identically with BTC or can alter the software as much as desired. There have been numerous attempts to do this and a handful of these new currencies have gained some traction.
For those of you who are truly lusting to get in on the action of these alternate currencies, before the runup in price, I refer you to Vircurex. There, you can trade five other alternate currencies with BTC. Scam or not, these other currencies are attracting interest from the boundless pool of greater fools. A typical price for one of these coins, at this instant, is BTCPPC = 0.00235101. As you can see, there are several orders of magnitude of potential price rise still available. I leave it as an exercise for my aspiring billionaires to compute how much "real" money would be required to boost these prices.
I posted the link to Vircurex a few days ago and within hours their server was down. I was embarrassed to have linked to what might have been the latest hack. However, the last few days have revealed that their server was crushed by a vast increase in new users and is presently back on line. You may see them at https://vircurex.com/welcome/index?referral_id=204-9665
Regardless of your opinion about this, why not take a look? If you don't feel comfortable selling the golden stack in order to go all in on BTC, then don't. But it's something very interesting and it's certainly worthy of closer inspection.
BTW, if it makes you all feel better, you should read some of the comments about money, and the nature of, and all that over on the BTC forums. They are just as confused when they venture out of their sandboxes. Please send
BTC donations to 1PS8kSgtY67TDD4KmEhndB9SZ7c8c98o8X
So the million bitcoin question is this:
With the value of bitcoins appreciating so rapidly, is anyone spending them on anything? That Porsche bought for 300 bitcoins (at the time $42,000ish) now cost the buyer $57,000.
If people are using bitcoins not as a currency (exchanging it for goods/services), and are only interested in holding their coins as an exponentially increasing asset, how quickly does the whole system sieze up and fail?
someone I know (who isn't me, of course) bought 20 bitcoins in November (at around 12€ each) last year, used 10 to by online weed that lasted him a couple of months, and kept the rest on his account in Mt.Gox. He happily awoke one of these days of late, discovering his remaining 10 BTC were worth more than 1300€!
More seriously, involving geo-politics/geo-economics: when a Cypriot couldn't perform any financial transaction at all during more than a week, the ones with BTC could still get their money rolling under the radar of any government or financial institution.
Bitcoin is the natural evolution of money in the Internet age, an evolution in which governments and banks become obsolete or relegated to impossible regulating roles. It's funny but the national currencies may well one day all become subject to the BTC standard (or another similar crypto-currency). I'd say the biggest danger for Bitcoin is some technical flaw in its design that would render it unreliable. Until then, its user base is likely to grow and grow and grow.