Posted on 02/19/2016 10:06:48 AM PST by Citizen Zed
For years the conventional wisdom in finance has been that bitcoins are a silly technological game, a bubble, and a fad.
Today: Not so much.
Bitcoins have just gotten serious, and people are going to have to start paying attention to this digital currency. That means investors, governments, and those trying to fight crime as well.
This was already true even before the news out of California that criminals just used bitcoins to extort $17,000 in blackmail from a hospital and make, so far, a clean getaway.
Bitcoins are booming. They have doubled in price in the last six months. Indeed bitcoins were actually the best performing currency in the world last year. I ran an exhaustive screen on FactSet, making sure to include everything from the Afghanistan afghani (down 16% against the U.S. dollar DXY, -0.19% ) to the Zambian kwacha (down 42%). Bitcoin trounced them all. The dollar value of each bitcoin jumped 40% during 2015, from $310 to $434. (The currency in second place, the Gambian dalasi of all things, was nowhere near: It rose just 9% against the U.S. dollar.).
At current prices, the total value of bitcoins in the world now tops $6 billion. That's quite some "fad."
(Excerpt) Read more at marketwatch.com ...
“The drop was due to a couple reasons: A) the Chinese locking down their citizenry from trading in BTC. B) The thefts of wallets by trading sites (only a few, but significant). The Chinese are slowly getting back into the game and are also trading in LTC now (which really took a nose dive but seems to be slowly recovering).”
And yet the values of REAL currencies don’t bounce up an down like yoyos by several hundred percent because of things like “Chinese locking down their citizenry from trading” or “thefts of so-called digital ‘wallets’”
Yes, it is.
I wonder how may bitcoins have been misplaced or lost and will not be used again. Or if bitcoin users get locked away for crimes or die - what does that do to the theoretical growth of the bitcoins money supply?
Real gemstones (not diamonds) are a better option. They are a better store of value, are portable, and untraceable. The only real downside is a lack of fungibility (you lose value if cut), but that can be overcome by purchasing various sizes.
Jewels have proven themselves in every SHTF scenario. You can’t easily transport or conceal PMs, but you can smuggle or sell jewels anywhere.
Only 21 million bitcoins will be mined. Certainly a number have been lost. For crimes, the feds have seized them, in the past and later auction them off.
The pseudonymous inventor of bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, has about one million bitcoins under his control, coins that he mined early on, when bitcoins were worth only fractions of a penny, but he hasn’t spent even one coin, as far as I understand it.
According to the bitcoin software, each bitcoin can be divided up into 100 million pieces, with one one-hundred-millionth of a bitcoin being called a “Satoshi”. This is the smallest unit of bitcoin, kind of like a penny is for the dollar.
So, there will be a total of 2,100,000,000,000,000 Satoshis mined - a lot. What each Satoshi will be worth, ultimately, is anyone’s guess.
Most seem to think that in the long term, a bitcoin will be worth either zero (failure of btc) or something huuuge.
The “network effect” of bitcoin will bitcoin to retain dominance or supercede nearly all other altcoins. Look up “network effect”.
However, I’m looking forward to zcash, at z.cash URL, which will have really strong anonymity features, much stronger than bitcoin. It is supposed to come out later this year.
Bitcoin is not really anonymous, as you can be tracked down by various means. Not with zcash. zcash is being made by reseachers at MIT, Johns Hopkins, and the Technion in Israel.
How would you know if bitcoin or similar currencies were really created by the US government as a way to monitor crime?
Plenty of other cryptocurrencies out there...BTC is the biggest market cap by far tho.:
https://coinmarketcap.com
Define “long run” ;-) Cryptocurrencies have/hold value like any other “fiat” currency...but you are right, 98% of them just exist so “miners” can try and profit from them...when the “difficulty” gets too high they drop the coin and move on to the next “big thing”. The real value lies with the Bitcoin blockchain “distributed ledger” technology.
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-future-of-the-blockchain-2014-4?op=1
There is profit in selling a house and a steak. If you raise the price of gold, it’s a scam. You can’t do anything to the gold to make it worth more, unless it’s a scam. I could be wrong, but I doubt it.
The bitcoin software is open source and is supported by many libertarian-minded coders. There is no evidence in the code that any government has a back door into the cryptocurrency.
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