Topic: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion - page 29888. (Read 26711605 times)

SHA-2 being broken is always a possibility.  Keep in mind that all public crypto schemes rely on a conjecture
for which there is no compelling theoretical argument or empirical evidence,

And there are many other developments that could make bitcoins worthless, for example

* The US government bans crypto-currencies.
* Everybody chooses to use Dogecoin instead of Bitcoin
* The Bitcoin blockchain stops being maintained because
** Mining becomes unprofitable
** Other crypto-coins become more profitable to mine
** It got all messed up and the network cannot agree on the fix

and so on.  Surely there are many more possible disasters no one has thought of.  (One year ago crypto-currencies were believed to be untraceable and un-seizeable, for example.)  That is why one cannot put a probability on "price will crash to zero"...

The nuclear industry once sponsored a very thorough safety study that examined all the ways in which a nuclear plant could possibly fail, and concluded that, assuming several hundred operating reactors, there might be one partial meltdown every century or so.  That was before Three Mile Island, of course.  According to the principles of that study,  three separate reactors melting down down at the same time would be less likely than a meteorite killing Santa Claus; and the possibility that an unloaded reactor could explode and become a major nuclear risk was not even considered.

NASA too once sponsored a very detailed study of the Space Shuttle's safety.  It concluded that the chances of a total loss were about 1 every 100,000 launches.  The actual rate turned out to be 1 every 50 launches.

True. You should monitor Ripple very closely.

More Bitcoin ATM´s about to arrive in Canada:

http://bc.ctvnews.ca/canada-s-first-crack-pipe-vending-machines-come-to-vancouver-1.1676803

The above is correct, bitcoin may drop again several times, and potentially more significantly many times in the future, but the likelihood of it dropping to zero is almost non-existent.

Can someone who remembers the old labcoin scam threads post a time clock counting down till the Mt. Gox news update

Apart from whether or not you believe democracy is a moral way to organize society, it has and will always slide back to a pathocracy masquerading as a democracy.

For Bitcoin to crash to zero a fundamental flaw in the code would have to be found or SHA-2 broken. For the later there are backup coins with Scrypt or SHA-3. Only other way, if confirmed over-unity is archived, which would make Gold worthless too.
All are extremely unlikely.

Edit; It may crash to zero in a few hundred years time

We have been trying that for years; it doesn't work.

You are right; governments, banks and corporate media are not going anywhere but they will never change unless they are forced to - not by protests and demonstrations which achieve nothing but by innovation that threatens their very existence.

Explanation

I find this to be an excellent rebuttal when faced with people suggesting that regulation will somehow help Bitcoin...

Why should I have an answer better than anyone else's? 

But since you ask:  I think any solution has to be through politics.  I am not a libertarian; I believe that getting rid of banks and governments is neither possible nor desirable, and instead we must fight to have good governments and tightly regulated banks with strictly limited powers.

People must fight in the streets if necessary to end the plutocracy (une dollar, one vote) that has dominated the world, and restore democracy (one man, one vote).  I still cannot believe that the people of Italy and Greece, for example, could let the banks appoint governments which put the banks' profits above the very life of their citizens.   

It will not be an easy fight.  Along the way, the people in every country must somehow get rid of corporate media, and wrestle control of the internet away from big corporations, which will always prefer and support plutocracy over democracy.

735 usd stamp and 4540 cny Huobi
I've had a good feeling about Mondays lately lol

Forget money for the moment, that's just a placeholder for resource allocation and thinking in terms of the money can lead to errors that are hard to spot.

The human race and, in particular, the west has made enormous productivity gains over the period since the industrial revolution. A fair bit of that is exploitation of non-renewable resources but also a lot of technological innovation, mechanization, specialization and similar things also mostly ending in 'ion'. Arguably if everyone was productive, we could be getting along with 4 hour work weeks (per household). But out of the ashes of feudalism has arisen a new ruling class. This class has incubated a whole segment of the population that is unproductive. Rather than work to minimize this unproductive segment of the population, the ruling class has conspired to maintain it and ensure its growth for, by managing the transfer of resources from the productive class to the unproductive, the ruling class takes a large share of those resources for themselves. Since the productive and unproductive parts of society vastly outnumber the ruling class, this allows the ruling class to become very resource rich indeed.

However, there is a reckoning. For the productive segment, growth is dependent on productivity. Successful productivity allows for a larger family. Growth of this segment is self-limiting. However, for the unproductive segment, they receive their resources no matter what and often in proportion to the size of the family. So this segment is allowed to grow unchecked and becomes ever more the drain on the productive segment.

Then there are other factors. This drain on the resources of the productive has a negative effect. Declining reward means lesser effort. Fewer resources earned (in real terms) restricts the size of families which, in turn, produces fewer offspring educated in the habits of the productive. The ruling class must increase the pool of the unproductive (food stamps, unemployment) and draw harder on the resources of the productive (taxes, quantitative easing, bail-ins) in order to feed their own rapacious appetites. It becomes impossible to turn back.

Until one day, there are too many unproductive and the final straw breaks the back of the productive.

It's not if. It's when.

My price prediction formula (can you see what it is?) is starting to fail, but can't resist making another guess.

Again, for tomorrow 2014-02-10 at 19:00 UTC (not before that, not after that):

Huobi: 4450 plus or minus 25 CNY.
Bitstamp: 690 plus or minus 10 USD.

This prediction is free of charge, and worth every cent of it. 

Stamp and BTC-e are going up actually.

So this forum needs three more buttons: "laugh at", "fight",  and "capitulate". 

Jorge how do you suggest we deal with current corruption within the financial industries.

Corporations are getting the tax benefits of human beings and the safety from the laws governing people far too often now a days. Since HSBC could afford to pay the tiny fines on their AML//KYC infractions and the media conglomerates that blast the main stream news never cover these occurrences all that closely, what out there is more transparent than BTC...not including the exchanges cause that is a third party trust factor that one takes when choosing where to trade.

Then they make a hollywood movie about you.

more like random buying pressure, ppl bored?

looks like death