Topic: Bitcoin: Should you stay or should you go? - page 33. (Read 34212 times)
Stay if you like new tech, go if you only want to make money.
Yeah I see what you are saying. I think the first step is to simplify the exchange process. I had to read up on how to buy bitcoins and tbh it was a total pain to get some. If you could just buy them direct from a bank account in stead of having to wait a week or pay a hefty transfer fee then that would go a long way to better adoption. That will be the first barrier to cross. The second will be transaction speed. The average person does not want to wait so long for a transaction to go through. They are used to credit cards and instant money. Third there needs to be some advantage that bitcoins have. Why would the average person use bitcoins in stead of dollars? If I get ripped off using my CC then I just call them and have the transaction reversed. BTC has no such thing. It needs to have an advantage for the average person and not just us.
1. Making an account at an exchange is most times easier than making an account in a bank. The only difference is, that people already have a bank account for a long time.2. Transactions are instant. Did you ever buy something with Bitcoin? I don't think so. For me it always takes less than 2 seconds.
3. Sure, reversing transactions seem like a good idea, until somebody reverses the transaction made to you. That happens all the time.
1. Ok true, there is one exception which is Kraken. Making an account there was a total pita for me.
2. Ha! no they are not. Money transfers between point a and point b can take up to 6 confirmations, and you are not guaranteed a confirmation every 10 minutes. Can you imagine waiting at starbucks for 20 minutes for your confirmations? Most of the time the site only needs 2 confirmations from me, but I have seen up to six. So in my experience transactions are not instant. Credit cards are instant. Bitcoin is not.
3. I have never had a transaction reversed on me, but I have done it twice to bad companies that tried to rip me off. I am not saying that reversals are a good idea, but it is super easy to get scammed using bitcoins. Until this changes it will be a barrier for wider adoption.
I am talking about paying with bitcoin, not money transfer. I guess, you have just used exchanges so far or put Bitcoin in your casino account.
To counter your hypothetical starbucks example: Some weeks ago, I was in a beerbar. I was pretty drunk, but I knew beforehand, that the guy was accepting Bitcoin and I asked him about it. He made a few clicks on his computer and showed me his screen. There was a QR-Code. I grabbed my phone, started Mycelium, pushed send, scanned the QR-Code, entered my pin and clicked confirm. He took a look at the screen and said something like "That's alright" and I left.
That is the real life case, with Bitcoin. So, please, unless you had a real bad experience, just accept, that, this is how it works and restrain from making up stories.
It should stay 
no matter what bitcoin price is higher or lower just be satisfied what bitcoin price because we dont control the changes price of bitcoin
no matter what bitcoin price is higher or lower just be satisfied what bitcoin price because we dont control the changes price of bitcoin 
Technologies thank Bitcoin gave us will stay forever 100%, as for bitcoin as currency - it's hard to say now, too controversial topic))
In Ken Burns' documentary The Dust Bowl someone pointed out that farmers (at least in the American midwest in the 1930s) had one business model: more. If prices are high, plant more to make more money. If prices are low, plant more to make any money. I'm not a miner myself, but I suspect that they are basically in the same economic trap (minus the chronic debt crop-farmers face). Maybe miners should be called farmers. But absent a worldwide-popular killer app, will there be a force adequate to overcome the selling done by miners trapped by the More business model? If not, I think the decline could be more or less orderly and ongoing for years: a Satoshi's the limit. But that should be OK for the system itself. The real threat might be high prices that get even higher.
Let's say a real killer app finally happens. With sky-high electricity costs and difficulty rates, governments might offer subsidized power in exchange for registering with the government, which would buy the bitcoins directly at a cost guaranteed to keep the number of non-registered (smaller-scale) miners to a stipulated minimum. Using smart contracts, those bitcoins could only be sent to addresses claimed by approved entities (corporations and companies of all sizes, registered Amazon merchants, ebay-sellers, etc.) Individuals would register as well if sales-tax incentives were offered for purchases that used approved addresses. Governments might justify all this as "making war on cash" -- part of its eternally failing War on Drugs. In any case, once a bitcoin is bought by the government, all transactions of that coin would be smart-contract approved.
But of course there is a hitch: the market might -- probably would -- start falling at the first serious preparation of any such control. And not all governments would go along. Indeed, bad-boy governments like Russia, China, and N. Korea could do their evil part by simply subsidizing their own miners and pointedly refraining from any address-control at all. In any case, as the difficulty-rate fell along with the price, there would be less need for government-subsidized electricity, the effort at control would fail or stall. I see such a cyclical development as an integral part of bitcoin pricing, really just like any other currency feedback-control, such as international trade balances. As the price goes up, the next-generation of legislators would give "voluntary" control a try, they and the voters having forgotten the first lesson of say, twenty years earlier. (People do forget history, right? Eighty years after making marijuana possession a federal crime, it's still a federal crime.)
In short: High prices = high difficulty levels = attempts at government licensing of miners.
What all this adds up to is that there could be a "natural" price ceiling, being essentially a function of governments' natural tendency to seek control over as much as they can, particularly in the area of finance versus the fact that most people naturally know that governments can never be fully trusted, particularly in the area of finance. It might be true that if the above scenario began to play out, miners might begin closing up shop for the good of the system (perhaps obligated to so so through their own smart-contracts, which governments in turn might try to suppress) the way miners are careful not to allow any pool of miners to get a 51% advantage. Down would go the price, mining returns to the desktop using conventional quantities of electricity, thus making less feasible any control by governments. Back and forth it would go. Governments' attempts to control Bitcoin using miners could become just as unending as their Wars on Drugs.
In sum, a killer-app won't necessarily make pre China-bubble buyers rich. It might even make them poor again.
Let's say a real killer app finally happens. With sky-high electricity costs and difficulty rates, governments might offer subsidized power in exchange for registering with the government, which would buy the bitcoins directly at a cost guaranteed to keep the number of non-registered (smaller-scale) miners to a stipulated minimum. Using smart contracts, those bitcoins could only be sent to addresses claimed by approved entities (corporations and companies of all sizes, registered Amazon merchants, ebay-sellers, etc.) Individuals would register as well if sales-tax incentives were offered for purchases that used approved addresses. Governments might justify all this as "making war on cash" -- part of its eternally failing War on Drugs. In any case, once a bitcoin is bought by the government, all transactions of that coin would be smart-contract approved.
But of course there is a hitch: the market might -- probably would -- start falling at the first serious preparation of any such control. And not all governments would go along. Indeed, bad-boy governments like Russia, China, and N. Korea could do their evil part by simply subsidizing their own miners and pointedly refraining from any address-control at all. In any case, as the difficulty-rate fell along with the price, there would be less need for government-subsidized electricity, the effort at control would fail or stall. I see such a cyclical development as an integral part of bitcoin pricing, really just like any other currency feedback-control, such as international trade balances. As the price goes up, the next-generation of legislators would give "voluntary" control a try, they and the voters having forgotten the first lesson of say, twenty years earlier. (People do forget history, right? Eighty years after making marijuana possession a federal crime, it's still a federal crime.)
In short: High prices = high difficulty levels = attempts at government licensing of miners.
What all this adds up to is that there could be a "natural" price ceiling, being essentially a function of governments' natural tendency to seek control over as much as they can, particularly in the area of finance versus the fact that most people naturally know that governments can never be fully trusted, particularly in the area of finance. It might be true that if the above scenario began to play out, miners might begin closing up shop for the good of the system (perhaps obligated to so so through their own smart-contracts, which governments in turn might try to suppress) the way miners are careful not to allow any pool of miners to get a 51% advantage. Down would go the price, mining returns to the desktop using conventional quantities of electricity, thus making less feasible any control by governments. Back and forth it would go. Governments' attempts to control Bitcoin using miners could become just as unending as their Wars on Drugs.
In sum, a killer-app won't necessarily make pre China-bubble buyers rich. It might even make them poor again.
Bitcoin ll grow.
No doubt about it in my mind.
What we need is legislation to allow Wall Street entrance and some form of wider adaption via that chip 21 s about to make.
That would be enough for BTC reaching the sky.
No doubt about it in my mind.
What we need is legislation to allow Wall Street entrance and some form of wider adaption via that chip 21 s about to make.
That would be enough for BTC reaching the sky.
As long as there are capital controls, there will be a reason for Bitcoin. It already has it's killer app, most people just don't care. That's fine, enough do care to keep it going.
This person gets it
Yeah I see what you are saying. I think the first step is to simplify the exchange process. I had to read up on how to buy bitcoins and tbh it was a total pain to get some. If you could just buy them direct from a bank account in stead of having to wait a week or pay a hefty transfer fee then that would go a long way to better adoption. That will be the first barrier to cross. The second will be transaction speed. The average person does not want to wait so long for a transaction to go through. They are used to credit cards and instant money. Third there needs to be some advantage that bitcoins have. Why would the average person use bitcoins in stead of dollars? If I get ripped off using my CC then I just call them and have the transaction reversed. BTC has no such thing. It needs to have an advantage for the average person and not just us.
1. Making an account at an exchange is most times easier than making an account in a bank. The only difference is, that people already have a bank account for a long time.2. Transactions are instant. Did you ever buy something with Bitcoin? I don't think so. For me it always takes less than 2 seconds.
3. Sure, reversing transactions seem like a good idea, until somebody reverses the transaction made to you. That happens all the time.
1. Ok true, there is one exception which is Kraken. Making an account there was a total pita for me.
2. Ha! no they are not. Money transfers between point a and point b can take up to 6 confirmations, and you are not guaranteed a confirmation every 10 minutes. Can you imagine waiting at starbucks for 20 minutes for your confirmations? Most of the time the site only needs 2 confirmations from me, but I have seen up to six. So in my experience transactions are not instant. Credit cards are instant. Bitcoin is not.
3. I have never had a transaction reversed on me, but I have done it twice to bad companies that tried to rip me off. I am not saying that reversals are a good idea, but it is super easy to get scammed using bitcoins. Until this changes it will be a barrier for wider adoption.
I think you should all go. Then come back after I buy on the dip 
But seriously bitcoins are not going anywhere. What we are seeing is just a bump in the road.
But seriously bitcoins are not going anywhere. What we are seeing is just a bump in the road.
Yep, and that's a very good thing. But the price isn't shooting through the sky in celebration. Nor will it. We need big institutional use *and* easy, enjoyable use.
Without a defining killer app, I am confident that Bitcoin will, in fits and starts, inevitably return to its 2009 levels. It would be pointless to guess how long that process will take; or when that killer app will appear although I am also confident it will appear at some entirely unpredictable point.
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in the meantime: Nasdaq and Nyse are joining the bitcoin club
I think the idea of bitcoins hitting the 2009 prices is laughable. There would need to be a total collapse of the system, and Gavin's plan is trying to prevent that. Even if nothing is done bitcoins will drop in price because transactions won't go through anymore, but it wont drop to nothing.
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at that point it's dead by any means, anything below 10 is the death of bitcoin, actually i would say sub 100, miners can't sustain their business with such price...
I'm not sure I understand. If today's crop of miners start to bail out because falling bitcoin prices cannot pay for their electricity and hardware, then won't the difficulty level required to find successful hashes fall proportionately? This would invite new miners to enter the field using lower-powered computers. I don't see why theoretically this could not continue all the way back to ordinary desktop PCs, like in 2009.
because we have better technology, this mean that even one random guy with one tera could performs a 51% attack if we return below $10 in price
I suppose it is possible that in the foreseeable future a machine that performs at a thousand times the current rate will be available at a price that will make mining $10 bitcoins profitable. If one random guy has that rate, so will lots of other random guys and a 51% attack won't happen. The important thing is that the blockchain's utility to non-mining users is independent of its price. If you are doing instantaneous conversions from bitcoin to fiat, who cares what the bitcoin price is? But a defining killer app would probably encourage all those casual users to hold bitcoin, if only to make things that much simpler for themselves -- they've already got the bitcoin loaded in their gaming account and aren't worried about an immediate or ongoing fall in fiat value.
We can only wait and see. In the meantime, look for a sort of stair-step pattern of declines. In my view, those declines won't stop -- there is no floor except the Satoshi -- until the defining killer app happens. And nobody knows when or what that is going to be.
ok but my point is that it will be far easy to overcome the netowork hashrate, because the diff will not be 300peta as it is right now, if the price decrease below 10
this will force the big farms to leave, and thus creating an opportunity for malicious users that want to attack the network
You're right. But I think VisiCalc had to be purchased separately. It didn't come with the computer. That probably was the final straw for the guy.
The cost of new programs and peripherals was discussed in the WSJ story. The reporter accompanied an Apple II salesman. At a library he recommended some peripheral piece of equipment, and said the cost was "two fifty" [or something like that -- all this from memory]. The librarian said "That sounds reasonable." When the salesman clarified that "two fifty" actually meant $250.00, the librarian just laughed.
No sale!
The cost of new programs and peripherals was discussed in the WSJ story. The reporter accompanied an Apple II salesman. At a library he recommended some peripheral piece of equipment, and said the cost was "two fifty" [or something like that -- all this from memory]. The librarian said "That sounds reasonable." When the salesman clarified that "two fifty" actually meant $250.00, the librarian just laughed.
No sale!
who had bought an Apple II. The reporter asked the man what he thought of his purchase. The man stared glumly at the Apple for a moment and then sourly commented: "The damn thing just sits there."
That's a pity really, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisiCalc already existed back then for the Apple ][.
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at that point it's dead by any means, anything below 10 is the death of bitcoin, actually i would say sub 100, miners can't sustain their business with such price...
I'm not sure I understand. If today's crop of miners start to bail out because falling bitcoin prices cannot pay for their electricity and hardware, then won't the difficulty level required to find successful hashes fall proportionately? This would invite new miners to enter the field using lower-powered computers. I don't see why theoretically this could not continue all the way back to ordinary desktop PCs, like in 2009.
because we have better technology, this mean that even one random guy with one tera could performs a 51% attack if we return below $10 in price
I suppose it is possible that in the foreseeable future a machine that performs at a thousand times the current rate will be available at a price that will make mining $10 bitcoins profitable. If one random guy has that rate, so will lots of other random guys and a 51% attack won't happen. The important thing is that the blockchain's utility to non-mining users is independent of its price. If you are doing instantaneous conversions from bitcoin to fiat, who cares what the bitcoin price is? But a defining killer app would probably encourage all those casual users to hold bitcoin, if only to make things that much simpler for themselves -- they've already got the bitcoin loaded in their gaming account and aren't worried about an immediate or ongoing fall in fiat value.
We can only wait and see. In the meantime, look for a sort of stair-step pattern of declines. In my view, those declines won't stop -- there is no floor except the Satoshi -- until the defining killer app happens. And nobody knows when or what that is going to be.
i think bitcoin price is going to continue to have this downward trend for much longer now. it is slowly going down but it is not gonna reach the 2009 state again.
i think it is going to stop eventually and start going up again after this phase is completed. and we are gonna have another bubble, not as big as before but still a bubble.
i think it is going to stop eventually and start going up again after this phase is completed. and we are gonna have another bubble, not as big as before but still a bubble.
It's easy to say the price will continue to go down as it has been doing so for quite a while now. Nothing new here. Stop waiting for bubbles, they always pop.
I prefer a stable growth spreaded over several years instead of 1 or 2 bubbles. Have patience.
There will be more bubbles in the future while the overall mean goes up. Insanely huge bubbles. Millonaries are at play here. It will be a matter of knowing when to get out an buy back again at the bottom. IT take a lot of risk and luck tho.
i think bitcoin price is going to continue to have this downward trend for much longer now. it is slowly going down but it is not gonna reach the 2009 state again.
i think it is going to stop eventually and start going up again after this phase is completed. and we are gonna have another bubble, not as big as before but still a bubble.
i think it is going to stop eventually and start going up again after this phase is completed. and we are gonna have another bubble, not as big as before but still a bubble.
It's easy to say the price will continue to go down as it has been doing so for quite a while now. Nothing new here. Stop waiting for bubbles, they always pop.
I prefer a stable growth spreaded over several years instead of 1 or 2 bubbles. Have patience.
Quote
at that point it's dead by any means, anything below 10 is the death of bitcoin, actually i would say sub 100, miners can't sustain their business with such price...
I'm not sure I understand. If today's crop of miners start to bail out because falling bitcoin prices cannot pay for their electricity and hardware, then won't the difficulty level required to find successful hashes fall proportionately? This would invite new miners to enter the field using lower-powered computers. I don't see why theoretically this could not continue all the way back to ordinary desktop PCs, like in 2009.
because we have better technology, this mean that even one random guy with one tera could performs a 51% attack if we return below $10 in price
i think bitcoin price is going to continue to have this downward trend for much longer now. it is slowly going down but it is not gonna reach the 2009 state again.
i think it is going to stop eventually and start going up again after this phase is completed. and we are gonna have another bubble, not as big as before but still a bubble.
i think it is going to stop eventually and start going up again after this phase is completed. and we are gonna have another bubble, not as big as before but still a bubble.
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