Topic: The Price of Bitcoin Doesn’t Matter Right Now | Wired - page 3. (Read 3108 times)

Isn't the whole point to be moving away from fiat currencies anyways? To me a lower BTC to USD exchange just means more bitcoin for my dollar

Oh, I get it.  So we are in the AOHell stages right now.   

Number of miners has nothing to do with the confirmation times.

The difficulty adjusts itself for current hash rate (though it takes some time to adjust) which makes it easy to mine BTC when the hash rate drops, so no matter how many miners are mining Bitcoin, confirmation times should not be a problem.

The BTC is still in early stages, even if its price is $100 or $1000. Infrastructures are being built and more will come.

WTF, I thought Wired liked to shit on us.

Really ? Then try to ask miners / services which accept BTC / investor
I don't mind too much

My first computer expierience was with a TI99 back in the early eighties. I had a lot of fun since then. I love Computers, the Internet and Bitcoin. Thanks to all of you guys to make me always a little bit smarter every day. (Michael Jackson voice:)  I love you all!

Unless we communicate what Bitcoin's potential problems are and why alt-coins solve them then yes it's possible Bitcoin going down could take all of crypto with it in the short term.

What are Bitcoin's problems?

It is the first iteration of an entirely new technology that has been unable to rapidly adapt to innovation and challenges.

1. Volatility - 100 000+ merchants selling in BTC, nearly all dumping immediately for Fiat. Solution: Currency stable BitAssets like BitUSD

2. Inflation - New coins coming onto the market in times of low demand can depress the price far more than the inflation rate. Solution: Low/No inflation alternatives

Bitcoin has also become quite centralized around mining pools & BitPay type services which has been solved by more decentralized alternatives and transactions that are confirmed in less time than it takes to use a credit card.

The Bitcoin Blockchain is limited compared to competitors which have things like Decentralized Exchanges built on them which solves a lot of the Gox, BitStamp etc. issues.

So Bitcoin could be replaced by a blockchain offering currency stable assets, with low inflation and fast confirmation times as well additional products and services like a decentralized trading exchange. In that event most of the problems crypto currently experiences would be solved imo.

How chould it Doesn’t Matter?
Lost of people broken.

Altcoins will die.

I think this might be a problem, as it would slow down confirmation times and other things.

You make some good points and I tend to agree with you, especially about the potential of bitcoin/the blockchain and that we're still in the early stages, but what is concerning is at what point can miners still operate and not have to shut up their systems because it is no longer profitable for them to do so?

There is going to be a big drop and then a big nothing followed by a run on altcoins.

I predict a big drop, then a big bump

Meh...the analogy is still relevant.  It's the Blockchain tech that is matters here.  BTC has tons of money invested even while the price is dropping.  BTC isn't going anywhere and right now, amidst the panic, it is a great gateway to a alts...a few which are worthy of note.

Which makes the analogy perfect...because altsvista sucked and so does feathercoin (arbitrary comparison)...

Time will tell though.

"Bitcoin is best thought of as a 5- to 10-year project, and we’re at the very early stages. An (admittedly imperfect) analogy is the early Web."

Many years yet to pick up more cheap coins, little bit each week is the safe way to go.

Add altavista to the mix.

That moment you realize the OP is some 18 year old kid who pretends to know what they're talking about....

What is that free help for if you don't mind me asking?

We had Lycos, Yahoo, Excite. Google came much later.

The price of Bitcoin has taken bit of a dive over the last couple of days, shedding over 20 percent of its value in the last 24 hours. The sell-off, like other sell-offs and rallies before it, draws a lot of attention and questions about what it means for the future of the technology. Here’s why I don’t focus on price much.

Bitcoin is best thought of as a 5- to 10-year project, and we’re at the very early stages. An (admittedly imperfect) analogy is the early Web.

Like the early Web, Bitcoin is an open platform that no one owns, and on top of which anyone can build without having to get anyone else’s permission. And just like the early Web, success requires investors, entrepreneurs, and developers to build out the infrastructure and applications that will make it useful to average users.

The World Wide Web was conceived by Tim Berners-Lee; he published a paper proposing it in March of 1989. The following year he worked to implement the idea in code, making the first website in December of 1990. The first popular Web browser didn’t come until 1993 when Marc Andreessen and the team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications released Mosaic. The following year Andreessen started Netscape and released the Netscape Navigator browser in 1994.

Those of us old enough to remember using Navigator to browse the Web over a Winsock connection on a 56k baud modem can attest that it was not the amazing experience we take for granted today. In fact, if you couldn’t see that the technology would evolve, you would have concluded that it was practically useless. For one thing, there was no easy way to find things on the Web. Well, we didn’t get Google until 1998.

Google is now the most visited website on the planet. Second to it is Facebook, and for many people the Web is virtually synonymous with social networking. Yet Facebook was not founded until 2004–a full 14 years after the Web was first conceived.

So here’s the parallel: Bitcoin was conceived by Satoshi Nakamoto and proposed in a paper published in 2008. He worked on implementing the idea into code, mining the first block of the blockchain in January of 2009. So, if we take the Web as a parallel, we’re at the stage in Bitcoin were we would hope to see a Mosaic level development, not a Facebook.

In other words, it’s early days. The Googles and Facebooks of Bitcoin–the killer apps that will make the technology indispensable for ordinary users–may not come for another 5 years.

Unlike the early Web, though, Bitcoin has a price ticker people look at daily, and so they wring their hands. Every dip and spike in the price gets a lot of attention and spells either doom or “irrational exuberance.” But as Marc Andreessen has pointed out, “the price of domain names didn’t determine the usefulness of the Internet.”

With a longer time horizon in mind, you can put the short-term drops and rallies in price of Bitcoin in perspective. So don’t worry so much.

SOURCE: http://www.wired.com/2015/01/price-bitcoin-doesnt-matter-right-now/