Posted on 12/18/2017 7:02:41 AM PST by Enlightened1
Would you rather own 100% of Wal-Mart or every Bitcoin in existence? At one point such a question would have been completely absurd, but now things have changed. As I write this article, Wal-Mart has a market cap of 287.68 billion dollars. Wal-Mart is the king of the retail industry in America, and nobody else is even close. Bitcoin, on the other hand, is an entirely digital creation that did not even exist until 2009. No government or central bank in the entire world recognizes it as a legitimate currency, and there are very, very few retail establishments that are willing to accept Bitcoin as a form of payment. And yet at this moment, Bitcoin has a market cap of 310 billion dollars.
When the year began, Bitcoin had just crossed the $1,000 threshold, and now it is selling for more than $18,000. Of course other cryptocurrencies have been rising at an even faster pace. We have never seen anything quite like this before, and some are warning that this is a giant bubble that is about to burst…
Axel Weber, the board chairman of big bank UBS, has warned of a possible Bitcoin currency crash. With increasing numbers of small investors jumping on the cryptocurrency bandwagon, it is time for regulators to intervene, he says.
Bitcoin has surged from $1,000 (CHF990) at the start of the year to above $16,000.
The risks are due to a design fault, which leads to huge currency swings in both directions, Weber said in an interview with the NZZ am Sonntagexternal link.
(Excerpt) Read more at theeconomiccollapseblog.com ...
It no more artificial than the dollar.
The dollar is not backed by anything and the Fed prints money whenever they want to. You know Quantum Easing Unlimited?
That’s why China is abandoning the dollar. They know the Central Banks will just print off their debt to pay the T-Bonds. Thus, they will have a bunch of worthless money while we have the assets.
China, Russia, India, etc.. are all buying into Crypto.
Ditto Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and the Bank of America.
Ill give you a billion bitcoins for that vase!
“Worth.”
Sorry, but it’s not worth anything until it’s actually converted into dollars. What the idiot calls “worth” is the latest price quotation multiplied by the number of outstanding shares.
That is not “worth” anything.
Worth begins to happen when you start converting your shares into dollars. The act of conversion affects the quoted price.
Walmart has tangible assets. Bitcoin has nothing. The latest price quotation is based on what the most recent buyer paid for one share. He was willing to pay that based on the one who bought before him, and his own feeling that the price can only go up, not down.
Soon, many will realize that the run up in prices is a lot of expanding warm air surrounded by a roughly-globular-shaped substance with high surface tension.
No, if the dollar had been bid up to massive bubble proportions like this there would be severe economic dislocation due to imports from China and elsewhere becoming extremely, extremely dirt cheap and domestic produced goods becoming bizarrely expensive outside of the country. Tourism would be dead as a doornail. US oil production would die because it was so expensive. Those few Americans able to do so would be on a buying binge worldwide the likes of which the world has seldom seen.
Bitcoin - nothing other than people who own it crowing and saying it’s not a bubble, thinking it’ll keep on going up to the sky and beyond.
Like always with every bubble.
I suggest taking your profit now to cement it and ignoring any further gains because it’s going to crash and crash bad. There’s no kind of floor under this.
“I saw a piece the other day predicting the eventual collapse of “bitcoin”.It said,among other things,”try buying a car...or a house...with bitcoin”.”
It’s not the coin where the money is, it is with the blockchain development. Companies are investing in blockchain technology to secure payments without fraud.
In the next year or two, companies developing anti-fraud applications will be the hot stock. Look at a company like Ripple XRP.
You are trying to fight the last war instead of the current war.
That’s like looking back at World War I during World War II for tactical strategy.
You have to look at the current dynamics and not the past. History does not repeat. It rhymes...
I looked hard at buying $1,000 worth of bitcoin as a big risk, big profit possibility when it was going for $10. That would have been 1.8 million dollars today...
My daughter, a tech guru, talked me out of it...
Easy to see the deals you missed in hindsight. It is unlikely that I would have held it this long, anyway.
Bitcoin is backed by the full faith and credit of...uhhhhh...
You beat me to it.
It’s called supply and demand. The free market in other words.
It’s the same with the petro dollar. It’s worth what people think, but not backed by gold or whatever.
Bitcoins physical nature is the physical Internet, and it has inherent functionality in this form because of the properties of its protocol.
Its supply is also finite. Just because its physical nature is distributed in a unique way over the globe doesn’t mean its not physical.
Its as physical as the Internet.
People are speculating on bits of blockchain, bidding up what amounts to transactional data. The currency remains as always, dollars, euros, yen, renminbi, what have you. Why do people think transactional data showing that they bought something is so valuable, unhackable or not?
Bitcoin offers something almost all other currencies lack:
Anonymity, portability, and safety from easy confiscation.
Gold is easily confiscated.
Cash is more easily confiscated that Bitcoin, and harder to transport, much less portable.
Bitcoin or something like it, is the wave of the future, because national currencies have been so terribly managed by governments, who inflate them in order to loot them.
This is likely a bubble, but bitcoin is not going away. It has crashed before and come back.
Bitcoin is worth more than a dollar at the exchange rate.
There is a demand for it.
People are actually trading it vs. Zimbabwe that nobody wants.
Good reply!
I think we will hit 100k before that correction comes.
It said,among other things,”try buying a car...or a house...with bitcoin”.
You can buy a house with bitcoin - its been done.
You can buy citizenship in Vanuatu using bitcoin.
If you covert bitcoin, you can buy anything.
The problem with economic bubbles built on the greater fool theory..... is sooner or later, the greater fool doesnt show up.
So true - like refinancing our national debt.
It's the perfect scam, limit the total to 21 million, then half all the coins available to mining every four years. Greedy speculators will do the rest. Just like MLM. Bitcoin is the perfect vehicle for speculation. It's a genius scheme.
What percentage of current bitcoin value has been used as currency? I wonder if it’s even 1%.
It’s so unstable it’s practically useless as currency.
It’s the perfect scheme for greedy speculators.
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