How To Use Bitcoin – The Most Important Creation In The History Of Man

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In contrast, the "bitcoin economy" is only worth about $1B.

My opinion is that bitcoin economy has never been "worth" $1 billion in any meaningful sense. The amount one gets by multiplying unit trading price at a given point in time by the total number of units in existence at that time doesn't correspond to anything real.

It would be more meaningful to compare, for example, trading volume during some time period, or some measure of market depth/liquidity.
 
I will do a search and see if I can find anything to back up my view. What would you consider to be an authoritative source? I don't think wikipedia would do in this case. Although defining a reputable source might be a debate in itself.
Modern Money Mechanics (a publication by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago) gives a reasonable introduction to how the money/banking system works in the US.
 
But it does show what an exceptionally bad currency bitcoin truly is.
The total lack of regulation allows for this.
It's nice for speculators, but imagine if you truly traded whatever commodity you work with for only bitcoins.
One week ago you bought a storehouse full of goods and today its worth a quarter of it's value.
No currency with such volatility is useful.

It's far too early to tell whether bitcoin will be a "bad currency". While it's extremely volatile now, it may be a lot less so in the future. It has to find an equilibrium in a world with $30 trillion USD, and numerous other fiat currencies bidding for it. It has to be recognized as a digital store of value before it can function as a currency.

I personally do not see how any currency can exist without some form of regulation to counteract people's natural tendency to rip each other off. And if it's going to be regulated my choice is a government I at least have *some* say in, rather than a few unelected businessmen.

Clearly a lot of those dumping their bitcoins now agree, or they wouldn't be cashing in their BTC's for dollars or euros.

How do you "regulate" a currency, other than by issuing more of it when it's perceived to be "expensive", and buying more of it when it's perceived to be "cheap"? Instead of private actors "ripping each other off", you merely have the state performing that function. Inflation is simply a tax, and you are merely advocating for government/central bank stealing to presumably gain some nominal price stability which, as i've demonstrated before, isn't even desirable given changes in productivity. Ben Bernanke is, to the best of my knowledge, unelected.
 
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I will do a search and see if I can find anything to back up my view. What would you consider to be an authoritative source? I don't think wikipedia would do in this case. Although defining a reputable source might be a debate in itself.

ETA: Wow. I'm faced with the realization that I have a relatively simple view of banking. You have given me some reading to do. I can find some support of what I'm talking about with commercial money but I don't think that's what you're talking about.

The money is created at the time it's borrowed. The central bank emits money any time it buys assets from, or lends money to its cronies.
 
That's more to do with the size of the economy than with any clever government regulation. The M2 money supply exceeds $10T and there is relatively little wild speculation on the value of the USD.

In contrast, the "bitcoin economy" is only worth about $1B. At that scale, it only takes a relatively small number of greedy speculators to send the price of bitcoins all over the place.

Is that what's happening? Is all this volatility being caused by a couple of bad apples? Someone posted that there are 20,000 accounts a day being created at Mt Gox. I think that's rather more than a few bad apples.

Don't you also agree that, in its history, bitcoin has acted much more as a commodity or a penny stock and not as a currency?

Also, how can a "greedy" speculator be distinguished empirically from a "rational" speculator?
 
Is that what's happening? Is all this volatility being caused by a couple of bad apples? Someone posted that there are 20,000 accounts a day being created at Mt Gox. I think that's rather more than a few bad apples.
The operative expression was "relatively small number" rather than "a couple" and was intended to indicate scale rather than an absolute number. Currency trading is big business practised by large institutions. In spite of the potentially large profits (or losses) to be made on bitcoin, I don't see financial advisers recommending investing in bitcoin. It is mostly individuals.

Don't you also agree that, in its history, bitcoin has acted much more as a commodity or a penny stock and not as a currency?
Not so sure about the "penny stock" description but it is definitely more a commodity than a currency. The rapidly changing value of bitcoin makes it less useful as a currency.

Also, how can a "greedy" speculator be distinguished empirically from a "rational" speculator?
Ok, you got me on the poetic licence bit. I would suggest however that bitcoin is attracting people who would not normally invest in stocks, commodities or currencies because there is potentially a quick profit to be had.
 
Not so sure about the "penny stock" description but it is definitely more a commodity than a currency. The rapidly changing value of bitcoin makes it less useful as a currency.

in the interest of fairness, and possibly the only time I have ever agreed with stillicho, it has/is trading like a penny stock, or more accurately a "pump and dump"

and look at the lack of liquidity in price quotes https://localbitcoins.com/buy_bitcoins

apparently the exchanges cant cope with heavy sell offs, you lose liquidity and quite literally cant sell at all while the price flies around
 
So far bitcoin to me is just a speculative oddity. I read (or maybe it was radio) about it being a digital version of baseball trading cards. But as a currency it seems to lack both microeconomic as well as macroeconomic benefits: microeconomically, it doesn't make sense to buy goods with it because you don't know what the price will be tomorrow. It may make sense to hold off the purchase, or maybe you should do it right now because you can't buy even a #2 pencil tomorrow. Macroeconomically, since it's unregulated, uncontrolled, it cannot be used to prop of the economy. It's just going to do what it does, and if it's bad for the economy, then it's bad for the economy.
 
in the interest of fairness, and possibly the only time I have ever agreed with stillicho, it has/is trading like a penny stock, or more accurately a "pump and dump"
Penny Stock: "also known as cent stocks in some countries, are common shares of small public companies that trade at low prices per share. In the United States, the SEC defines a penny stock as one that trades below $5 per share.[1] In the United Kingdom, stocks priced under £1 are called penny shares." - WIKI

Pump and Dump: "a form of microcap stock fraud that involves artificially inflating the price of an owned stock through false and misleading positive statements, in order to sell the cheaply purchased stock at a higher price. Once the operators of the scheme "dump" their overvalued shares, the price falls and investors lose their money." ... "Often the stock promoter will claim to have "inside" information about impending news." - WIKI

Neither word seems appropriate.
 
Anyone with any sense would have seen this coming. A big problem with Bitcoin as described early in this thread is that there are some people hoarding lots of coins, and they can do as they please in the market. The amount of hoarding is hard to pinpoint, but there might be one person holding as much as 25% of the currency if you read the paper that was quoted earlier in the thread.

Don't believe me? Take a look at this single transaction, which I believe caused the crash:

http://blockchain.info/tx/5d9ef693d41cb3bb4c6d98e70ea8b2cc91be29a804245a06ec8761d9cddc103c

From this article:
http://www.technollama.co.uk/we-need-decentralized-cryptocurrencies-we-just-dont-need-bitcoin

69k BTC sold in one go. The price is about to stabilize for a while as many big holders sold off their coins. Anyone actually buying bitcoins is a fool IMO, too unstable. Miners will make profits if they get out at the right time.

So it is not working as a currency.
 
I don't know about penny stocks, but your definition of pump and dump sounds pretty spot on.

ETA: In response to PsionIO. Anduin somehow snuck into the 30 seconds it took me to type this post.
 
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I don't know about penny stocks, but your definition of pump and dump sounds pretty spot on.
Rubbish. There are no false representations being made about bitcoin. It is just something you can buy, sell or transfer through a decentralized network. The price is what ever the market sets for it.

Even the fact that ownership of bitcoins is highly concentrated is public knowledge.
 
I don't know, there was certainly a lot of hype, and then a rapid crash after a few large investors liquidated their holdings.

I don't think there's any way to prove fraud, since I don't know if there's any way to follow the trail, but it certainly looks like it follows the right pattern. Assuming Anduin's mystery seller cashed out at the peak or near it, that's over 18 million USD.
 
I don't know, there was certainly a lot of hype, and then a rapid crash after a few large investors liquidated their holdings.
All to be expected when people gamble on the price of something. There will always be winners and losers.

I don't think there's any way to prove fraud, since I don't know if there's any way to follow the trail
On the contrary. The blockchain contains the entire history of every bitcoin transaction and is freely available for anybody to examine (where do you think anduin got his information from?) http://blockchain.info/

The only people putting out false information about bitcoin are those who see it as "immoral" or some sort of threat. They desperately try to associate it with bad sounding words like "fraud", "ponzi", "pyramid" etc even though bitcoin has none of their defining features.
 
Don't believe me? Take a look at this single transaction, which I believe caused the crash:

http://blockchain.info/tx/5d9ef693d41cb3bb4c6d98e70ea8b2cc91be29a804245a06ec8761d9cddc103c

From this article:
http://www.technollama.co.uk/we-need-decentralized-cryptocurrencies-we-just-dont-need-bitcoin

69k BTC sold in one go.

I seriously doubt that this is evidence of anything.

First of all, how do you know that this is a single person selling 69k BTC, and not a single person buying 69k BTC - which should have sent the prices skyrocketing instead? How can you tell this difference from the transaction history? - Take a moment to think about it.

The thing is, unless you can link some of the involved addresses to a bitcoin exchange, you can't tell if this is a buy or sell, or something completely different altogether (like someone just consolidating their addresses). The thing to realize is that flows that do affect the market occur at the real-currency side of the economy, not at the BTC side, and could only be traced through data logs of an exchange. - Consider this: if a speculator purchases all their bitcoins at an exchange and sells them all later, without ever withdrawing them, then even a huge sale would not appear in the blockchain - at all.

From the publicly available data, there's one thing we can tell for sure: nobody attempted to sell 69k BTC at an exchange in one go. Even at Mt. Gox, the market is simply not deep enough to allow that to happen. Such a sell order would wipe out outstanding buy orders, causing the price to drop over 50% instantly. That's just not what happened. The drop from $266 to $125 took six hours, during which only some 55k BTC were traded at Mt. Gox in total - and this figure already includes all the sell orders from the panicking public.
 
The operative expression was "relatively small number" rather than "a couple" and was intended to indicate scale rather than an absolute number. Currency trading is big business practised by large institutions. In spite of the potentially large profits (or losses) to be made on bitcoin, I don't see financial advisers recommending investing in bitcoin. It is mostly individuals.

Not so sure about the "penny stock" description but it is definitely more a commodity than a currency. The rapidly changing value of bitcoin makes it less useful as a currency.

Ok, you got me on the poetic licence bit. I would suggest however that bitcoin is attracting people who would not normally invest in stocks, commodities or currencies because there is potentially a quick profit to be had.

I wonder just what kind of people are buying them. It might be instructive to have a public accounting of the major owners. Those Harvard twins claim to own a lot of them but there doesn't seem to be any way to verify it. They could be simply promoting ownership to maintain the price above a certain level.

I take it you own zero, right? Does anyone on here own any?
 
I seriously doubt that this is evidence of anything.

First of all, how do you know that this is a single person selling 69k BTC, and not a single person buying 69k BTC - which should have sent the prices skyrocketing instead? How can you tell this difference from the transaction history? - Take a moment to think about it.

The thing is, unless you can link some of the involved addresses to a bitcoin exchange, you can't tell if this is a buy or sell, or something completely different altogether (like someone just consolidating their addresses). The thing to realize is that flows that do affect the market occur at the real-currency side of the economy, not at the BTC side, and could only be traced through data logs of an exchange. - Consider this: if a speculator purchases all their bitcoins at an exchange and sells them all later, without ever withdrawing them, then even a huge sale would not appear in the blockchain - at all.

From the publicly available data, there's one thing we can tell for sure: nobody attempted to sell 69k BTC at an exchange in one go. Even at Mt. Gox, the market is simply not deep enough to allow that to happen. Such a sell order would wipe out outstanding buy orders, causing the price to drop over 50% instantly. That's just not what happened. The drop from $266 to $125 took six hours, during which only some 55k BTC were traded at Mt. Gox in total - and this figure already includes all the sell orders from the panicking public.

Thanks for the clarification, I didn't check the actual volumes at Mt.Gox, I had assumed that they were higher.

This is still highly troublesome, the movement took place before all of the shenanigans, it could have been a large holder amassing bitcoins, it could have been a transaction, etc. But there is one person with enough Bitcoins to wipe out the value if they sell. I just checked and the BTCs are still in the receiving address. Just sitting there, a large pile big enough to destroy the value of Bitcoin in one go.
 
I wonder just what kind of people are buying them. It might be instructive to have a public accounting of the major owners. Those Harvard twins claim to own a lot of them but there doesn't seem to be any way to verify it. They could be simply promoting ownership to maintain the price above a certain level.

I take it you own zero, right? Does anyone on here own any?

I used to have 0.10, but the wallet is lost, which sort of proves the point.
 
I take it you own zero, right?
I have about 0.02 BTC lying around somewhere.

A few months ago I could have bought about 10 BTC on Ebay for $230 (twice the Mt Gox rate at the time) but I didn't get one of these. ;)
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