[2013] Bitcoin May Be the Global Economy's Last Safe Haven

[Passepartout]

Who knows?! I do know that my wealth manager did not invest my money in Bitcoin otherwise I would be rich by now!

Uh-huh. My wealth manager is me, and going on vacation is right there with me in that coach seat- not riding up front or in the private jet with the risk takers.

 

[md8287]

I posted in a similar thread a month ago as I debated getting into bitcoin at $8,000. Today it is double that. Yes it will stop someplace...most likely...but when. Only wish I put in more two weeks ago when I finally bought in but I’ve added a little every few day, including today ($1,000 ago). Now pushing $17k. Just a little more and I’ll make up for timeshare loss.

 

[WinniWoman]

I posted in a similar thread a month ago as I debated getting into bitcoin at $8,000. Today it is double that. Yes it will stop someplace...most likely...but when. Only wish I put in more two weeks ago when I finally bought in but I’ve added a little every few day, including today ($1,000 ago). Now pushing $17k. Just a little more and I’ll make up for timeshare loss.

And I waited and didn't buy any. Now I am not sure if I still should.........

 

[WinniWoman]

I heard that it is going to the Futures market this weekend. A whole 'nother thing now! Could be a bubble also. Who knows?

Meanwhile, now there is this thing called Lite Coin.

 

[TUGBrian]

there are actually a good number of other cybercurrencies available to buy/invest in that are nowhere near the value of bitcoin.

 

[MULTIZ321]

Bitcoin Hits New High Above $11,500 as the Winklevoss Twins Become the First Bitcoin Billionaires
By Oscar Williams-Grut/ Finance/ Business Insider/ businessinsider.com

"LONDON — Bitcoin is back to its winning ways, posting a record high on Sunday and making billionaires of the twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss.

Bitcoin suffered big price falls last week but recovered over the weekend. The digital currency hit a new high of $11,826.76 a coin on Sunday, according to data from Markets Insider, surpassing its previous high of about $11,300...."

I know this is old info in less that a week's time

Richard

 

[MULTIZ321]

Bitcoin is Now Breaking Through Major Price Barriers Every Few Hours
By Eshe Nelson/ Quartz/ qz.com

"It took nearly five years for the price of bitcoin to finally cross the first $1,000 mark. Comparatively, the next $1,000 increase was a relatively swift three-and-a-half year journey. In the past few months, though, bitcoin has broken through $1,000 thresholds every few weeks. In the past few days, it has taken mere hours.

Overnight, the price of bitcoin briefly climbed above $17,000, just eight hours after it first reached $16,000...."

Bonkers

Richard

 

[pedro47]

Bitcoin dropped this morning to $14,794.

 

[md8287]

Definitely a wild roller coaster.

Now $16,200.

 

[x3 skier]

Sounds a lot like”Tulip Mania”. At least back then, you wound up with some flower bulbs when the whole thing collapsed Or maybe the Hyperinflation of Germany prior to WWII when it took a wheelbarrow full of currency to by a loaf of bread. Or maybe a gigantic Ponzi operation.

I am amazed that people will pay extraordinary sums for some software “currency” created in somebody’s basement. Even the “money” created by the Fed is backed by the USA as “legal tender” while Bitcoin is based on the notion you can unload a crypto currency on somebody else who will accept/buy it.

P T Barnum was right.

Cheers

 

[PigsDad]

Hackers swipe over $64mn in bitcoin from cryptocurrency marketplace NiceHash

Yikes! What kinds of protection, if any, are available for Bitcoin holders?

Kurt

 

[VacationForever]

It is not backed by anything. So for a start, there is no protection for Bitcoin owners. Play and speculate all you want.

 

[pedro47]

This is my philosophy always buy low and sell high.

 

[Egret1986]

This is my philosophy always buy low and sell high.

I believe that would be anyone's ideal. I doubt anyone's philosophy is to buy high and sell low.

 

[x3 skier]

I believe that would be anyone's ideal. I doubt anyone's philosophy is to buy high and sell low.

Unfortunately that is the result of most small traders.

Cheers

 

[Egret1986]

Unfortunately that is the result of most small traders.

Cheers

Agreed. Folks get "jacked up" by all the hype and start thinking they need to get on-board the train. Unfortunately, the scenario of buying high and having to sell low can happen.

"On mature markets, traders would take immediate advantage of large price variations by buying at the lowest price and selling at the highest price, normally in a matter of seconds. Computers might even do it automatically. But the limited liquidity on bitcoin markets doesn’t completely allow for that—for now. And one reason is the difficulty some bitcoin holders have selling when market action is hot.

If you can’t sell when the price is rising, it might not be that big a deal. You just have to wait until trading calms down and you can get an order through, by which time the price will be even higher.

But if you can’t sell when the price is falling, that could be a major problem that compounds losses, intensifies selling pressure and wrecks confidence in the cryptocurrency. If you want to sell at $10,000 but can’t get an order in until the price drops to $8,000, the delay costs you $2,000, or 20%, on top of whatever the loss would have been at $10,000. As word gets out that sell orders may not be filled, more people are likely to submit sell orders preemptively, hoping to get in line while they can.

This can create the equivalent of a bank run, with more customers trying to get their cash out than Coinbase or any other exchange might be able to handle. Bank runs begin as psychological panics, which means that even if Coinbase had the assets on hand to fulfill all requests, technical problems preventing those transactions could freak consumers out just as much as if their money were actually gone. Once confidence crumbles, everybody wants their assets in hand, rather than in the system. That wrecks the market. For everybody wondering if bitcoin is a bubble about to burst, well, that’s one way it could burst."

 

[md8287]

This can create the equivalent of a bank run, with more customers trying to get their cash out than Coinbase or any other exchange might be able to handle. Bank runs begin as psychological panics, which means that even if Coinbase had the assets on hand to fulfill all requests, technical problems preventing those transactions could freak consumers out just as much as if their money were actually gone. Once confidence crumbles, everybody wants their assets in hand, rather than in the system. That wrecks the market. For everybody wondering if bitcoin is a bubble about to burst, well, that’s one way it could burst."

That is what happened yesterday but on the buy side. Once it crossed $17 Coinbase started to crash due to heavy buy volume.

By the way the #1 selling app on App Store yesterday was Coinbase. Lots of new buyers coming, if not scared by Coinbase technical problem yesterday.

 

[Egret1986]

That is what happened yesterday but on the buy side. Once it crossed $17 Coinbase started to crash due to heavy buy volume.

By the way the #1 selling app on App Store yesterday was Coinbase. Lots of new buyers coming, if not scared by Coinbase technical problem yesterday.

My son talked about buying in some time ago. I started to text him yesterday to see how "rich" he is now. Maybe I'll start the "dialogue" with him today. He's a young fella and very savvy in my mind. Me, I'm an old fart looking towards retirement and I'm too scared of this kinda stuff.

 

[WalnutBaron]

I saw this today in the newsletter from my financial advisor: Bitcoin watch: Looking for Bitcoin exposure without having to deal with tokens, mining and eye-popping volatility? Fundstrat says potential Bitcoin/Blockchain equity plays include Bitcoin Investment Trust (OTCQX:GBTC), MGT Capital Investments (OTCQB:MGTI), HIVE Blockchain Technologies (OTCPK:RELF), U.S. Global Investors (NASDAQ:GROW), DigitalX (OTC:GGXF), Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA), AMD (NASDAQ:AMD), CME Group (NASDAQ:CME), CBOE Holdings (NASDAQ:CBOE), Overstock.com (NASDAQ:OSTK), Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS) and Square (NYSE:SQ).

 

[MULTIZ321]

Bitcoin Is None of the Things It Was Supposed to Be
By Adrianne Jeffries/ Dead Dreams/ theoutline.com

"The cryptocurrency was supposed to replace the finance industry. Instead, it has replicated it.

On Thursday, the price of Bitcoin fluctuated by thousands of dollars in a 24-hour period. The Coinbase app — which lets you buy and sell cryptocurrencies, and is the number two free app in the App Store as of this writing — started freezing and throwing errors, which the company said was due to high traffic. At one point, I tested the app by trying to sell some of my (very small) amount of Bitcoin, and the app simply buckled. “Bitcoin sales are temporarily disabled,” it said in an error message.

This is not how Bitcoin was supposed to work.

In fact, most of the current Bitcoin economy, worth around $276 billion at the time of writing, is antithetical to the premise of Bitcoin.


Let’s go back to the beginning of Bitcoin. The first stop for anyone seriously interested in Bitcoin is the Bitcoin white paper: the canonical document written by Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, in 2008. “I've been working on a new electronic cash system that's fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party,” Nakamoto wrote when he posted the proposal to a cryptocurrency mailing list. This sentence describes everything Bitcoin was intended to be, and the qualities that first got people excited about it, the key terms being “cash,” “peer-to-peer,” and “no trusted third party.”...."

The price of Bitcoin increased by thousands of dollars in one week. Coinbase


Richard

 

[MULTIZ321]

Bitcoin Jumps Another 10 Percent in 24 Hours to Pass $19,000
By Timothy B. Lee/ Tech-Policy/ Bitcoin/ Ars Technica/ arstechnica.com

"Bitcoin's price set a new record on Saturday as the virtual currency rose above $19,000 for the first time on the Bitstamp exchange. The gains came just hours after the currency crossed the $18,000 mark. Bitcoin's value has doubled over the last three weeks, and it's up more than 20-fold over the last year.

Bitcoin's value keeps rising despite a growing chorus of experts who say the currency value is an unsustainable bubble. One CNBC survey this week found that 80 percent of Wall Street economists and market strategists saw bitcoin's rise as a bubble, compared to just two percent who said the currency's value was justified. Another survey reported by The Wall Street Journal this week found that 51 out of 53 economists surveyed thought bitcoin's price was an unsustainable bubble..."


Richard

 

[easyrider]

I just noticed a dealio for bitcoin this morning. Emil Oldenburg has just sold all of his bitcoin. He is a co-founder of bitcoin.com, not bitcoin. He also promotes bitcoin cash and I think that is what he bought with the sale of his bitcoin.

https://nordic.businessinsider.com/...is-bitcoins-because-its-as-good-as-useless--/

http://www.smh.com.au/business/mark...s-bitcoin-com-co-founder-20171218-p4yxty.html

Bill

 

[dominidude]

A dialect is a language without an army.
Only prophets with armies survive their own preaching.
Only by force (by being threatened with the use of an army) did paper money become accepted instead of other forms of payment (like gold, salt, copper, etc).
Have we not learned anything from history yet?

 

[md8287]

Right now, and this time last week, BitCoin price is/was $17,600.
$44million worth traded in that window.
What is all this volatility talk.
Just because it went up to and down from $20k during the week?!?!?!?

 

[easyrider]

Oddly, it seems like every time bitcoin looks like it is about to tank it comes back with a vengeance. Probably people buying the dips.

Bill