Might have to do with the major exchanges being lagged pretty badly. They are getting hit with huge volume.Originally Posted by Romulus
And now we are seeing the decline.... lots are cashing out??
Virtually zero liquidity relative to the amount of bitcoin out there. Everyone is holding, which makes it easy for bitcoin to advance rather quickly. Although, at this time about 12 hours ago, there was only about 5k coins available at $150. Now there's 15k.
dropping like a rock!
To be fair, a 10K bitcoin order would send it back up to $145, whereas 10K bitcoins of selling pressure sends it back to $110.
So, basically, an order of 1/1000th of all bitcoin outstanding could drive prices up a little more than 10%, or down about 20%. Illiquid as all hell.
Bubble may have popped, buckle up.
"Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else"
- Claude Frédéric Bastiat
Every single one, eh?
Someone enlighten me beyond saying "You don't get it/how Bitcoins work." It'll never be anonymous in the physical world. If you want to use your Bitcoins to pay for food for a night out or use it to buy a stock, you have to convert it into Dollars, Yen, Euros, etc. That shows up as a line item on your bank statement. Congrats, you left a paper trail.
What if you use your Bitcoins to buy a tshirt from LewRockwell.com, and the government says tomorrow that all Bitcoin transactions on these websites that accept them (wordpress, lewrockwell, etc.) must report these. Then what? They'll turn over your Bitcoin #. "So what?" So, you still need the tshirt shipped to your address do you not? I guess if you wanted to go through the trouble of having it sent to some abandoned building with a fake name you could avoid some traceability, but it's not that hard to link "Bitcoin buyer XYZ" with "Invoice 1234" that got shipped to 321 A Street in Miami, FL. So you can't use it to buy real stuff.
I suppose the only way to have some sort of anonymity is to use Bitcoins to strictly purchase stuff that doesn't require it to be shipped to your address, or requires you to transfer Bitcoins out of the Web and onto the Fed's database of banks. How many virtual ice cream cones can you buy? That's all Bitcoins become. Online gift certificates to the few merchants that accept them for virtual goods. If you use them to buy anything that needs to be touched, then you lose anonymity BECAUSE you HAVE to give up your address, or name, or email. How else are you to get these goods? Fly to a warehouse everytime you buy something with Bitcoins? Exactly what am I not "getting", dannno? HAhaha...
That's with the big assumption that people are going to continue to trust the euro and not begin to adopt cryptocurrencies for more every day type transactions.
"He's talkin' to his gut like it's a person!!" -me
"dumpster diving isn't professional." - angelatc
"You don't need a medical degree to spot obvious bullshit, that's actually a separate skill." -Scott Adams
"When you are divided, and angry, and controlled, you target those 'different' from you, not those responsible [controllers]" -Q
"Each of us must choose which course of action we should take: education, conventional political action, or even peaceful civil disobedience to bring about necessary changes. But let it not be said that we did nothing." - Ron Paul
"Paul said "the wave of the future" is a coalition of anti-authoritarian progressive Democrats and libertarian Republicans in Congress opposed to domestic surveillance, opposed to starting new wars and in favor of ending the so-called War on Drugs."
Ya, you still don't really grasp how they work, or more importantly, how they could work.
You can already buy a god damn visa gift card with bitcoin and pay for anything you want. No bank statement.
Most bitcoin users have several wallets and you can use a new wallet for every transaction, there is no bitcoin "user#". So you can tie ONE transaction to ONE invoice. Who cares?
More products will continue to be developed that will fulfill the ability to make more anonymous transactions in more places. You are already supposed to report your bitcoin income and pay tax on sales, the benefit of bitcoin is that it is extremely difficult for them to prove anything or track anything, so it's pretty much voluntary unless they are able to prove otherwise.
"He's talkin' to his gut like it's a person!!" -me
"dumpster diving isn't professional." - angelatc
"You don't need a medical degree to spot obvious bullshit, that's actually a separate skill." -Scott Adams
"When you are divided, and angry, and controlled, you target those 'different' from you, not those responsible [controllers]" -Q
"Each of us must choose which course of action we should take: education, conventional political action, or even peaceful civil disobedience to bring about necessary changes. But let it not be said that we did nothing." - Ron Paul
"Paul said "the wave of the future" is a coalition of anti-authoritarian progressive Democrats and libertarian Republicans in Congress opposed to domestic surveillance, opposed to starting new wars and in favor of ending the so-called War on Drugs."
What's only been a few months? Bitcoin has been around for several years. There you have it--it's not investing; it's gambling. There's a 100% chance that the Bitcoin exchanges will have a glitch at some point, no? So knowing the past glitch resulted in a collapse in the value, you're hoping you're not caught holding Bitcoins at that point I assume. So it's not investing--it's gambling. I hope I hit black when I play roulette, too, but to say betting on black is investing is a joke. When I buy shares in a company, hopefully it's for investing purposes. You don't buy stock in a company knowing it's going to go bankrupt. If you are, you're gambling. Just like buying bank stocks in early 2009 when you could buy Citi for $1. Was it investing? No, it was gambling. You took a chance that government policy would basically rewrite the accounting laws and recap the banks. So, for someone who bought Citi at $1 it paid off. Someone who bought Bitcoin at $1 has paid off. But knowing that Bitcoin is at the mercy of a Bitcoin exchange that no one knows who runs it, and has no oversight, tends to be more of a gambling proposition.
Do whatever you want with Bitcoins. Like I said, I don't care. I do care when people make Bitcoin out to what it's not. It's not money. You can't contract with it. It surged 20% today. Fun for peer-to-peer transactions, but no business is going to contract this long term. Few people actually earn Bitcoins for a living (the few who mine them), so you're facing what Iceland faced: currency mismatching. In a contract, one side is going to get creamed. Either Bitcoins crash or they go parabolic. In either event, how long will the parties who lossed on that contract stay around?
Again, if you bought a house with a Bitcoin mortgage for 30 years, you already had to foreclose. It went up 5 fold from a month ago. If you bought a house for $100,000 worth of Bitcoins, your mortgage is now worth $500,000. How many people are okay with paying $500,000 for a $100,000 house?
Whoa, thanks for proving my point. Who are you going to buy the Visa card from? You are you going to buy the LewRockwell.com Tshirt from?
How are you going to take possession of these? Oh, by sending your "anonymous" Bitcoin payment that has your street address attached in order to receive the goods. In that case, all the government has to do is deem Bitcoin as a gigantic money laundering operation, and they don't even need to pass a new law. Every merchant who accept Bitcoins will have to turn over their transaction logs. And this is what the government will see:
Bitcoin payment received for $10. Purchased shirt. Sent shirt to: dannno, [your street address], [city], [state] [zip]
So, the jig is up. Then it comes down to how hard is it to backtrace Bitcoin transactions where no personal info is involved. You're again assuming it's "hackproof". Nothing is. If cyptography was full-proof, the Defense Department wouldn't need entire departments dedicated to network security. Nor would any private company. They'd just hire a temp programmer to secure the data, then set it and forget it. Only, the real world doesn't work that way. There's no device that's invented yet that makes something hack proof, so the government and the CIA will be able to identify Bitcoin users if it really wanted to.
Or maybe there's an easier way. The government could just have Google index every webpage in the universe (which is does) and grab all the user IDs and IPs of people pushing Bitcoin. So the people who say "Bitcoin is 100% anonymous" and subsequently said "I have $X in Bitcoin" makes me laugh. Now you've illustrated you have Bitcoins, and the government has your IP address. Then they can just take your laptop and find the Bitcoins on it, or search for the flash drive in your house.
LoL @ saying you're anonymous, only to post about it on a public forum where anyone can read it and thus trace your IP back to your home computer. Or internet cafe down the block.
Hey Gaddafi, are you going to short Bitcoin or what?
Nope, I have no skin in the game, nor will I ever. I pointed out Bitcoin will never be mainstream. Again, no one earning USD's is going to contract a mortgage, car loan, or business contract with someone demanding Bitcoins. It will either be a huge windfall for the person with USD's if Bitcoins crash to nothing as all of a sudden they can buy their car with $1 USD if a bitcoin is worth nothing, which it has shown it can do, or it's going to be a huge tax if Bitcoins go from $15 to $115 in a matter of a few months, which it has shown it can do. Likewise, no bank or lender is going to want to enter an agreement where they could give away something for virtually free if the currency they're demanding collapses. Or, if the currency they are demanding shoots to the moon and their debtor cannot pay, they lose that money they lent out.
I live in reality. Not "well, let's just see". I can't imagine pitching that to my boss, or anyone to anybody beyond a fanboy club. "Let's just wait and see". I guess it shouldn't be too surprising that those pushing Bitcoin so much are only willing to put in a couple hundred bucks. Why not more? It's as if people insist Bitcoin is this magic elixir with all of these properties, and will fight it day and night and laugh at critics who "don't get it", yet they're hesitant to put any meaningful amount of money down in the event they're wrong.
Wow the haters really hate, more than the lovers love.
Critics are haters... gotcha. Sorry I pointed out the obvious flaws with Bitcoins, and thus that means I'm worthy of the label "hater" which goes to diminish the logic I used, which makes perfect sense.
Are my criticisms not valid? Beyond saying "you don't get it/you're a hater" I have yet for someone to sit down and explain to me how they can expect to be anonymous with Bitcoin when they go on Facebook, Twitter, and online message boards, saying they own Bitcoin.
"You'll never find where I am because I use a proxy. By the way, I'm on 123 West A Street in Miami, Florida".
Cute, but streets in Miami are numbered, not lettered.
Rand Paul 2016
I'm not made up on whether or not I support bitcoin, but it seems like a lot of the criticism of them are similar to the same problems we see with our fiat Fed notes. Really I don't want to jump in the middle of it but here's my take:
a) Anonymity doesn't exist at all in this market; I'm just gonna bust that bubble here and now. Gov't tracks everything. If your intention is to point out that bitcoin supporters are selling the idea as an 'anonymous' system and in reality we know it isn't, then point taken, because it's supporters aren't being honest (or at least, being a little naďve). But I also don't see that as a mark against bitcoin, itself, because hell, it's simply neither better nor worse than what we have now. Fiat currency use isn't anonymous (maybe if you buy a pack of gum at a store at night, if they don't catch you on the 7-11 security camera walking into the store). You won't be buying a house with fiat without filling out loads of paperwork. You can't open a bank account without disclosing 110% of your personal identity (thanks, PATRIOT ACT). So even if you can't do any of that with bitcoin, at the very least it's no worse than what we have now. Big brother is watching, have a nice day.
b) Talk of mortgages and contracts is basically moot because if you remember not so far back we had a massive mortgage crisis where people suddenly found themselves underwater on homes that were valued at more than they were worth. It didn't happen in a bitcoin world, it happened in an FRN world. Yet, I have to give a point to bitcoin on this, because where in our fiat system, there was a massive bailout involved in the mortgage industry, bitcoin offers no such promises of bailouts. It may be rough sailing at times, but there's no Fed. Reserve system in bitcoin to do something drastic and interventionist, as is the case currently with our FRNs.
c) Hacking and counterfeiting concerns? Well, as far as I know, there's been no hacking at the fed. But Bernanke counterfeits money all day long like it's nothing. Bitcoin has yet to be hacked or counterfeited. The Fed has yet to be hacked but it does counterfeit, so I award this round to bitcoin.
d) Government doesn't like competition. I do wish people would stop stating that government is going to crack down on bitcoin and use that as an excuse to say it is a flawed system. The government cracks down on everything it doesn't approve of. That's not a reflection on bitcoin, it's a reflection on the government.
That's all I can think of at the moment. I do keep up with these threads but I haven't made a decision either way. I'm just buying a bit of silver here and there, but even that is not secure since FDR showed us that all it takes is an executive order to seize precious metals. I also know that the FRN system we have now, especially the way they are running it behind closed doors, is both immoral and unsustainable. Bitcoin isn't immoral based on what I understand about how new coins are created, and I think it scores points for being transparent. Whether or not it is sustainable, who knows? Chaos and uncertainty have the potential to decimate currencies, whether digital or paper.
Last edited by nobody's_hero; 04-04-2013 at 10:26 AM.
This is getting silly.T.S. Eliot's The Hollow Men
"One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors." - Plato
We Are Running Out of Time - Mini Me
Bitcoin: Easy come, easy go?
Thats my question, whos bidding it up at these price levels?
"An idea whose time has come cannot be stopped by any army or any government" - Ron Paul.
"To learn who rules over you simply find out who you arent allowed to criticize."
People that are reading stories like this:
http://thehill.com/blogs/on-the-mone...t-wealthy-iras
Or perhaps like this:
http://read.thestar.com/#!/article/5...e8e4ace70a95e3
It doesn't matter how much bitcoin is in relation to fiat if the economy is there to support it as prices can be priced in fractions of a whole BTC.
Last edited by DGambler; 04-06-2013 at 08:14 AM.
“…I believe that at this point in history, the greatest danger to our freedom and way of life comes from the reasonable fear of omniscient State powers kept in check by nothing more than policy documents.”
Are you scared yet?? I'm not worried about cyberwarfare at all. Not even a little. Now... cia, dhs, local police... those are some scary ass people.
I think you are right about #3 though. I won't be the least bit shocked when some people get hammered, or bitcoin gets legislated out of existence, probably with an amendment to some "security bill" or something.
We have allies many of you are not aware of. Watch the tube. Show this to your 30 and under friends. Listen to it. Even if you don't like rap, it has 2.7 million views.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmBnvajSfWU#t=0m16s
Cut off one min early to avoid war porn.
Flash in the pan or not, there is a organized campaign now to undermine Bitcoin. The top world counterfeiters have acknowledged the threat openly and are no doubt acting to destroy their competition.
What I am afraid of is this. jp morgan and goldman sachs might be buying up all these coins and have been when BTC was valued lower and are waiting and will just dump all there coins very soon then buy them up on the way down and just keep doing this over and over again.
BTC will not be a good currency until it is less volitile.
The reason I think this is because the big banks will see this as a threat and would want to crush it. This is the best way to crush it by manipulating the market, I mean look at silver prices, lol.
So What I would do is this. Sell your BTC before they do and then just wait and buy when it corrects.
BTC can eventually be a great way to move wealth out of a country,
"They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
-Benjamin Franklin
You weren't talking to me, but no matter. How could someone short it when there's no way to value it?
Same way you short any other stock.
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