The most interesting thing for ne about this article is they use a dynamic bitcoin price ticket inline. Ive never seen that in an mainstream article, it always looks so dated when looking negatively at $100 or $500 bitcoin...
Plenty of people already have. Even if they come out with only 10% of the value of their holdings that is still a Huge return for what they initially put into it
Sure, by selling to greater fools. Every dime they made came out of some other fools pocket. Eventually the music is gonna stop playing and some fool is going to be left holding the bag.
can someone tell me something i've been wondering for a couple days now (considering taking the plunge and toying around with bitcoin): how fast can you execute trades on coinbase/gdax? obviously i'm asking if i could experiment with hft-esque strategies. is that possible or the clearing time too long?
note: on a very small scale (like ~100$ total "aum")
There are already open source implementation of arbitrage/hft style trading bots on GitHub. This a market with a large population of software engineers.
Exchanges have open APIs that you can use for trading. They execute pretty much instantly.
But GDAX is a vertically integrated exchange and retail trading platform, so the 0.1% taker fee is all you pay. A stock exchange won't talk to you directly so you must pay additional broker/clearing/bank fees.
Real all-in fees for stock can be 2 USD to trade 2k USD, so 0.1%, same as GDAX. But you can also find fees of 10 USD to trade 100k USD and many other rate examples which are either higher or lower.
I think a lot of people don't notice the huge difference between a traditional exchange (which does not handle money, only agreements about money) and GDAX (vertically integrated exchange + clearing house + trading application).
This is a fragmented wallet backup (Armory), so you would still need one more key before you can get access to the wallet's funds (the backup they showed requires 2 out of 3 keys for access).
If both items are products that store of value. If it cost 1x amount of energy to mine gold and 3x amount energy to mine bitcoins and keep it secure. Should bitcoin be value more than gold ?
Let's call it "differently liquid". Your question implies that gold is itself liquid, but it can't be spent in the way of cash, and in its physical form it cannot be as quickly traded for another asset the way a paper asset could be traded.
In this sense, bitcoin and gold are similar, though it is probably easier to trade gold as a paper asset, and easier to spend bitcoin as a currency.
But I don't think any of the above are a fair characterization of bitcoin beyond the current moment. It is changing too quickly. Over the next 6 months I can easily imagine bitcoin having further liquidity issues as popularity gains, block size limits # of transactions, etc. I can equally imagine the next 6 months easing these issues as the inflection point of these issues force change that has been unpalatable until no alternative was possible.
All speculation though, and probably not very insightful for anyone familiar with the topics. My point is simply that gold and its market dynamics will not change in that time frame, while bitcoin's must change, so comparisons to gold are stretching an analogy at this point.
On the other hand, gold will remain liquid in a situation where the technological fabric of current society breaks down. That kind of survivalist logic is one major reason why private individuals own gold.
If I keep Krugerrands stashed under my pillow because I expect Neo-Stalinists to one day take control of the continent and confiscate all property held in digital systems, it doesn't seem like Bitcoin will give me much peace of mind. Surely the New World Order will shut down my Internet access too?
(I could be wrong though. The Bitcoin maximalists are a weird bunch. I follow one such guy on Twitter, and he seems to post a lot of pictures of guns with USB sticks when he's not promising to take more Bitcoin tattoos or bashing Ethereum as "beta cuck fake coin".)
> I follow one such guy on Twitter, and he seems to post a lot of pictures of guns with USB sticks when he's not promising to take more Bitcoin tattoos or bashing Ethereum as "beta cuck fake coin".
There's a range of topics (money, power, sex, death) that do funny things to the human mind. When broaching said topics, most if not all people become unfathomably stupid in various ways.
Yes it's true, you can send bitcoin wallets through email. But only if you really must, which is never.
I'm not entirely sure how sending bitcoin wallets through email would solve liquidity issues though.
But again, you're right. The barbarous relic of forlorn ages can't be emailed. It must rely on the tentative lack of duplicator ray technology to avoid double spending problems.
>Where by "instantly" you mean "takes at least an hour and costs a fortune"?
No. I could email the private keys for any amount of bitcoin to anyone on earth instantly. Or do it with morse code over a telegraph...or smoke signals, it doesn't matter. Transactions on the blockchain are a different issue entirely.
That is trading volume, not liquidity. And we should be wary of the trading volume on bitcoin exchanges, a lot of it is manipulated. (In particular, I would never trust any numbers coming from Bitfinex)
Coinbase is not a sketchy exchange by any means, and while I'm cautious about Bitfinex their volume is quite believable given they are the default choice for non US persons.
That's also why I quoted USD, if you include crypto-crypto volume and some of the zero fee exchanges it definitely becomes nonsense.
Fiat liquidity will come once we get some more professional exchanges run doing bigger volumes.
The coin itself is of course quite liquid although transaction fees mean you aren't buying your weekly shopping with bitcoin. But maybe you can pay your monthly rent.
