It's Official: Bitcoin Was The Top Performing Currency Of 2015
For most investors, the major story of 2015 was the expectation and eventual fulfillment of a rate hike, signalling the start of tightening monetary policy in the United States. This policy is divergent to those of other major central banks, and this has translated into considerable strength and momentum for the U.S. dollar.
Using the benchmark of the U.S. Dollar Index, a comparison against a basket of major currencies, the dollar gained 8.3% throughout the year.
Despite this strength, the best performing currency in 2015 was not the dollar. In fact, the top currency of 2015 is likely to be considered the furthest thing from the greenback.
Bitcoin, a digital and decentralized cryptocurrency, staged a late comeback in 2015 to overtake the dollar by a whopping 35% by the end of the year.
Courtesy of: The Money Project
Bitcoin is no stranger to extremes. During the year it came into the mainstream in 2013, Bitcoin gained 5,429% to easily surpass all other currencies in gains. However, the following year it would become a dog, losing -56% of its value to become the world’s worst performing currency in 2014.
The second best performing major currency, relative to the USD, was the Israeli shekel. It gained 0.3% throughout the year, and the Japanese yen (0%) and Swiss franc (0%) were close behind, finishing on par with how they started the year.
The world’s worst performing currencies are from countries that were battered by commodities or geopolitical strife.
Ukraine’s hryvnia fell -33.8% in the aftermath of Crimea. Brazil’s real (-30.5%), the Canadian dollar (-15.9%), Russian ruble (-20.8%), and South African rand (-26.7%) all lost significant value in the purging of global commodities. Gold finished the year down -10%, and silver at -11%.
And as China devaluation accelerates, Bitcoin has been surging since the start of the year...
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Biometrics were probably never a good idea and they are on the way out. If someone hacks your biometric hash, you're screwed for life unless you can get plastic surgery to change your fingerprints or your retina pattern.
Passwords at least can be changed. Hardware wallets that currently exist use PIN numbers, just like a debit card does, and if you enter the wrong PIN, the time before you can retry another one starts to get longer and longer with each failure, so they're very difficult to brute force.
We'll agree to disagree on this one BadLib. I was just trying to open up some peoples imaginations. The hardware wallets the size of credit cards are in the works.
There will always be ways to hack codes, passwords, etc.. The goal is never to make it impossible, just to make it sufficiently difficult. I think this will continue to improve. Even brain hash wallet passwords are making things more easy.
Plus, you are assuming the cryptography won't change or get more complex.
If the biometric can be recorded and kept on the device, then I have less of an issue with it, and it's just a convenience thing.
The problem is that today we collect biometric info in centralized databases just like we do other kinds of personally identifying info, and that's just too attractive a target for hackers. No technology will ever be 100% safe against hacking, since a good chunk of hacking is social engineering - convincing someone with legitimate access to 'loan' that access to you, by arranging a scenario where they believe you're someone authorized to have it.
No cryptographic technique (other than multi-sig - which would make a wallet hard to use) is very effective against social engineering hacks.
Maybe you've just thought of a new 'ethereum' business model. Decentralized storage of bio-metric data. Only accesible through the blockchain. The goal of the hardware wallet is to place the encryption on the hardware so it is not hackable. You'd have 'pins' and 'secret words' that would also have to be encrypted into your bio-metrics. So... you know... less likely of theft.
But of course I get your point. They hack my computer and get my passcodes and steal my bitcoin....
...but, say in the case above... It isn't like my cash was just stolen and I don't know where it is. i have my address, we can then track where they send the money and how they funnel it. I know there are 'mixing' services, but point being, I just want to see the evil routed out, whether my loss or gain, is a gain.
We won't need money in the eventual future where labor is provided by autonomous robots. We just need humanity.
Bitcoin is just a transitional tool so that we don't go WW3 nuclear, end our species, right when things are starting to get fun and interesting.
Maybe (re: Ethereum), but my preference is that my permission to access a device should just be between me and that device, with no third party in the middle - decentralized or centralized.
And yep, if there is a 'key' to get past the 'great filter' implied by Fermi's paradox, Bitcoin and permission-less d-apps seem like the leading candidates thus far. I just wrote more about that idea in a response to you above.
Imagine this:
......
TREZOR: The Bitcoin Safe
https://www.bitcointrezor.com/
....
But the size of a credit card, with biometric scanning. Comming to a world near you. 1-2 years is my guess.
I have a Trezor, and it's already pretty tiny. It's not flat, so not so convienent to carry in a wallet, but it hangs off a key chain quite nicely.
Hell even women can buy and use BTC now, either those people truly don't get it or they are in their deep ideology much like a radical Islamist !
I'm 37 and Bitcoin is for morons who can't wait to be chipped by TPTB.
Chipped? LOL oh please. What is wrong with you lot.
When you have read the final chapter, it's pretty easy to predict the future. Yes, thye will use Bitcoin or some other varient to either chip you or force you to use it as payment.
I think we've all read the book. Ever think maybe it was all a scripted scam? to be able to place on the world people once the power and technology was in place? A script?
Perhaps it doesn't have to be that way. Although it is true to a sense the people will not wake up until disaster strikes.. I guess it's human nature, and that's been known for Aeons.
LOL, you have no fucking idea what you are talking about. I suggest you educate yourself. No one is going to spoon feed your ass, do your own work.
What happens to BitCoin if you die and your relatives cannot get to your account? And if your relatives CAN get to your account, then hackers can too!
Actually, that is a good question.
Basically it's like gold at the bottom of the ocean. It's out of circulation, but it's still there. Ultimately, the price of bitcoin will have to go up, as there will be ever increasing 'lost bitcoins'. (one argument why small inflation numbers are good).
Technically, lost bitcoins are still recoverable... because they are just a mathematical hash, that takes MASSIVE amounts of computing power to 'guess' at. So, like lost sunken boat gold explorers (for profit), there will be 'recognized accounts' that have been idle with known amounts locked away. These will be searched for just like today's gold hunters on the open seas. It takes MASSIVE amounts of money to find the gold on the bottom of the ocean, so it's only valuable if gold is valuable. Bitcoin will be the same. Some of the bitcoin hunters will use supercomputers and tons of hints about the persons life, estimated passwords, etc., to try and unlock the hash. Ultimately they are recoverable, just 10,000 leagues under the sea.
Ultimately of course, it doesn't really matter. All our lives would be better on this earth in this life if we could just stop the guberments and banksters from looting us. Bitcoin is just a tool to help us get there.
Transferring an estate today takes lawyers and banks and forms and all sorts of crap I'd rather not deal with. Bitcoin allows you to transfer value directly to another person without a trusted third party in the middle, so there are a number of ways to solve this problem much more easily than you can with the present status quo.
Since Bitcoin is programmable you could set up a transaction to send all of your bitcoin to one or more people at some date in the future, unless you cancel the transaction before it executes. Essentially, you draw up your 'will' in the form of a time-delayed transaction. If you don't die before that date, you cancel the transaction. If you're dead and can't cancel it, then the transaction executes and everyone you specified gets paid.
And that's just one way. You could also set up a transaction that instead of depending on a 'proof of life' cancel signal instead has a way to discover and validate 'proof of death' by checking either a government records database or the database of a private company that serves the same purpose.
Again BadLib, you beat me in words. That of course is exactly what 'ethereum' will provide (plus much more)... all sorts of contractual laws. Stocks, escrow, wills, etc.. Just it's hard enough explaining how bitcoin works, let alone trying to dive into how contracts will work in the 'ether'.
My only point is... if you don't set up a contract, or lose your password, it is actually still recoverable, just at substantial computational (time) costs.
Eventually though, like you said... we'll all just have perpetuating contracts that transfer once we cease to authenticate them.
Nice of you to say, but I think you're doing just fine with your own words. Bitcoin that's 'lost' might theoretically be recoverable, but probably not in a cost-effective (or time-effective) way. An easier way to handle this is probably to set up an insurance contract with a d-app that provides that service. If your coins are lost, you file a claim and get new ones. And since the 'lost' coins are always visible, if they ever move to a wallet that can be tied to you, then you'd be talking to law enforcement.
I don't know why the edit of my last post spawned a new one, but that's why there's a dupe above and below here.
BadLib, if my spidey sense had any abilities... I'd say you are deeply invovled with ethereum. Good on you, contratual law based on distributed paid-by-computation networks is absolutely the future.
I'm just bummed I missed the initial investment window and have to wait to buy some on the open market.
Just an interested observer for now. But I do have a lot of ideas for d-apps and tokens focused on harm reduction: BetterThanUberCoin, HookerCoin, SelfFundedRockBandCoin, CornerStoreCoin, etc.
I didn't really start digging into Bitcoin until about three months ago, so I was late to the party for the Ethereum pre-sale. One week into my dive down the 'rabbit hole' the thought hit me that as cool as Bitcoin is, what we really need is a Turing complete VM that can mine a blockchain by executing business logic, because that has the potential to change the whole corporate datacenter model of cloud-based app delivery in a way that's hard to censor. My head was spinning with the possibilities (as well as the amount of work I'd need to do to make that happen).
Fortunately, the next day I found out that I was reinventing Ethereum, two years after VB already had - lol.
Your mind is sharp BL, and no doubt you are older and wiser than I am. I can tell by your ability to speak honestly without insulting people, a problem I am still working on.
One major problem with Bitcoin is energy consumption. For now it is okay, but the algorithms ecourage ever-increasing amounts of waste. This will have to be tackled in the future and it shall. Of course, again, maybe that energy waste is a required 'backing' of the system. So, don't know on that one.
*BTW, they say when the technology is ready, the people invent it. There are numerous examples throughout history where simultaneously in other parts of the world 2 or 3 men came up with the same new idea. Also, look in to the '100 monkey effect', as it may play a large part if you want to believe in that sort of thing.
I'm still working on that problem too. Staying away from ad hominem is like anything else, it takes practice.
There's nothing more frustrating (at least to me) than feeling like a point I've made hasn't been heard, understood, or acknowledged, and that's usually the first step down the slippery slope towards a flame war.
I have fallen into that trap countless times in the past, and I never liked the outcome, so I decided a few years ago to try to get better at avoiding it. My first attempts at doing that sucked. Instead of calling someone an idiot, what I'd end up doing was finding a really 'clever' way to call them an idiot without being too obvious about it. And that's really arrogant, because it turns out that people are generally exceptionally good at detecting that sort of thing when it's directed at them, regardless of how 'clever' you think you're being.
So, it's a work in progress for me as well, I just try to do the best I can. What I find helps me the most is trying to imagine the point of view of the other person and why they might have it, to take their comment at face value instead of reading anything into it, and then responding sincerely, even if I might think their point of view is absurd. It ain't perfect, but that's what usually works for me. Above all, I try to remember that it's another human being on the other end of the conversation, and they have a whole backstory that explains why they believe what they do, and that personal history is going to be different from mine.
There are a number of points of view on the energy costs of securing the network, and I think it's something that will sort itself out in time. Instead of looking at hashing as 'waste' I tend to look at it as something more like an entropy 'shield' which requires a certain POW magnitude n order to penetrate.
Could builders of castles have spent their effort more productively building something other than ten foot thick stone walls filled with rubble? Absolutely - but they could really only do that if they lived in a world where people wouldn't take advantage of their not building those labor intensive fortifications.
Heinlein described the simultaneous discovery thing quite nicely in one of his books by saying something to the effect of - you can't build railroads until it's 'railroad building time,' and once it's railroad building time, railroads become inevitable. Someone is going to invent them. What impresses me the most about Vitalek is that he's about half my age. At his age, I was completely preoccupied with nonsense, so the fact that he is so focused and so talented at this point is pretty remarkable to me.
Bravo. Ad hominem avoidance is noble, classy, and important for being productive and happy. Our reptilian brains magnetically latch onto to such battles, so constantly reminding oneself not interested in that is important. Not interested is the mantra.
Another method is honing a detector for when as issue is stated personally vs impersonally. Segregating the two is crucial. I'll viciously attack an issue while carefully segregating the person, even complimenting the person. Goes so far to avoid flame wars. Refuse to let their matches light anything on my side, and light no matches myself.
The words "you" or "your" are dangerous because we don't know squat about the person on the other end. The words "is," "are" etc. will spark debate because we're making general sweeping statements about the state of the world others probably can find exceptions to. Talking factually about ourselves evokes no reaction because no one can argue.
Declining levels of inflammatoriness:
1. You should buy bitcoin.
2. Bitcoin is good to buy.
3. I buy bitcoin because I like it.
I really like how you've broken that down. Adding 'imo's' to the appropriate spots is something I always try to remember to do to avoid the 'is' problem. Very cool.
"One major problem with Bitcoin is energy consumption"
Do you have any idea how much energy it takes to produce an ounce of gold? That isn't a disadvantage, it is the reason gold is scarce. Don't tell me that it is uncommon in nature, because that isn't true. In fact, there is enough gold desolved in sea water to pave all the streets of DC. But the amount of energy necessary to concentrate it makes extraction economically impossible.
Like gold, the high energy extraction cost of Bitcoin is the reason it is scarce.
I don't think that it is possible for a blockchain to be secured by arbitrary computational work. How do you prove that you did the work or that the work was valuable, not unnecessarily inefficient, not redundant, etc.?
Also, the code in Ethereum transactions that miners are verifying is being executed by perhaps thousands of nodes. That is a huge redundancy, i.e. inefficiency, therefore I think most computation will be done in traditional ways.
I'm not sure it is either, but it's something I like to think about. Some people think proof of stake won't work either, but I'm not informed enough about it yet to venture an opinion I could defend.
Transferring an estate today takes lawyers and banks and forms and all sorts of crap I'd rather not deal with. Bitcoin allows you to transfer value directly to another person without a trusted third party in the middle, so there are a number of ways to solve this problem much more easily than you can with the present status quo.
Since Bitcoin is programmable you could set up a transaction to send all of your bitcoin to one or more people at some date in the future, unless you cancel the transaction before it executes. Essentially, you draw up your 'will' in the form of a time-delayed transaction. If you don't die before that date, you cancel the transaction. If you're dead and can't cancel it, then the transaction executes and everyone you specified gets paid.
And that's just one way. You could also set up a transaction that instead of depending on a 'proof of life' cancel signal has a way to discover and validate 'proof of death' by checking either a government records database or the database of a private company that serves the same purpose.
You could also set things up using a multi-sig technique so that your wallet is always accessible to you to spend from instantly, but if you haven't made a transaction from it in some specified amount of time, then alternate keys (keys held by your relatives) become 'active' so that your relatives can unlock the wallet, as long as enough of the multi-sig keys (3 of 5, or 15 of 20, etc.) are presented.
Really, the possibilities are endless and easy, and most imporantly, under *your* control - which is one of the reasons I like the darn thing as much as I do.
bit coin is shit. i can't use the fucking bitcoin to buy food at the store, or pay for bills, pay by utilities or even eat a some crappy fast food. until i can do those basic things with bit coin, it is just another fad.
Eternal Ignorance shill paid for worthless human mind. Try not to think too much you may hurt yourself. There's blocks for you to throw at the other retarded kids in the corner over there.
https://www.shiftpayments.com/
Problem solved.
You probably need to learn more about Bitcoin before you do any more posts.
Specifically, learn about cold storage in paper wallets. I keep most of by Bitcoin that way. Can't be stollen, can't be hacked. But can be lost or destroyed. Which is why the relatives I trust have copies.
The same thing that happens if you buy your gold deep and don't tell anyone where it is. It is lost forever. If you have enough BTC to worry about making sure it is left to someone else, get a lawyer and put your codes into your probate like any other property. As for hackers, no one has 'hacked' bitcoin itself in a meaningful way. If the BTC encryption is broken, then that likely means quantum computers are on the scene, and that means the world is forever and drastically changed anyway.
<-- Dollar is rising becuz of this : moar warz
moar warz , more uncertainty
more uncertainty, more demand for dollar
But
This is not the end yet
Its like a flame which burns moar at end
before ....
the inevitable
doom
Everyone has a bitcoin until the man shuts down the internet.
EBT cards, also don't work when the internet is down. Neither does Amazon. Just saying. You're talking apocalypse mad max scenario. Gold and Silver don't do shit either at that point. But... toilet paper will always come in handy.
Don't forget to stock cigarettes, and boooooz....
Btw, you do realize, the entire globe's internet has to go down simultaneously right? All satellites? All backup power hardened networks? Right? All solar panels have to stop working? All coal generating powerplants have to shutdown? Right? All wind generators and hydro electric have to wiped out too? Right? And then, if the internet ever revives itself, bitcoin is alive again, all btc accounted for and blockchain intact. Good God, please, I am tired of the Apocalypse stupidity. Just live free or die hard.
I don't think you understand how much infrastructure is involved with keeping the net running on a global scale. A simple example is that in the county I live in 140 mile from silicon valley (where I once worked as an Electronic Engineer), a single fibre optic cable was cut somewhere out in the sticks and everything shut down. No ATM, no internet, cell phones land lines were all dependent on this one cable. Similarly there are large vulnerable fibre cables run under the ocean which interconnect the world. Not to mention the thousands of power hungry server farms which keep the internet running. If we truly had a fault tolerant system where our computers were connected locally I might be inclined to agree with you. In a national emergency I can imagine governments getting overrun by hackers or using control of the internet as a weapon to control an enemy or an insurrection. If you can't hold it in your hand you don't own it in this next phase of chaos.
How fast was the infrastructure restored?
Bitcoin is global, the global infrastructure doesn't die at the same time.
Jeogo1: Have gold, silver, food stashes, water, pet food, lead, jacketed lead, lead delivery systems. Those are only for the small time lapses when the grid is down locally. By all means, prep well with physcial stashes. The global grid never goes down entirely at the same time, your bitcoins are safe. Jeez, everyone thinks bitcoiners are saying you're supposed to sell everything you have and buy bitcoin. None of us bitcoiners are advocating that. Educate yourself on how to start fire and build shelters, as I do. After you're done with how to start fire in 20 ways, educate yourself on what bitcoin is and why (with the help of technology, man made) we can use it to solidify a different type of barter system. Bitcoin is an anti-bankster, anti-guberment currency, for the people by the people.
I agree with you. I'm all for having electronic currency locally. I've read "mastering bitcoin" and I'm ready to work with it. Just not ready for the global bitcoin deal until after the reset occurs and things settle down.
Yeh, forget the ciggies, no one but a few hillbillies, and the kind of folks youll be wanting to point your guns at, smokes anymore
.
Clean Water, Food, Salt, Seeds, Booze, Shelter and such are the staples of the post-EMP world.
Gold and Silver, not so much. Expect incoming from the Au/Ag HODLRs...
BTC is back more than ever Good !!!
Long BTCUSD, short everything else !
I'll just leave this message here....
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And the actual message being about 1/4 as long?
Bitcoin is not a "currency" it is a medium of exchange.
Isn't the primary definition of a currency "a medium of exchange" ?
Bitcoin (big 'B') is a medium of exchange - a network for transferring value p2p; bitcoin (little 'b') is the name for a unit of currency that circulates on that network. A satoshi is a much smaller unit of currency on that same Bitcoin network.
It's troublesome to me that bitcoin has already been the victim of government confiscation. That tells you the government is already in there as much as anybody. Not good for the long term. It's just a matter of time before world governments decide they need to "manage" the system. In the meantime, some people have benefited from its features, such as the Greeks. Proceed accordingly.
"Bitcoin" is no entity or legal person or anything like that. It cannot be a victim of anything in a literal sense.
Some people have had their bitcoins taken by governments and that has been due to carelessness, bad practices, or cooperation - we don't really know.
What do you mean by "in there as much as anybody"? Getting involved in some way with something is all but inevitable. So what?
And then what? Set up a committee to investigate the feasibility of doing something about it?