
Bitcoin $600 - sillysaurus2
https://data.mtgox.com/api/0/png/24hours.png?Currency=USD?
======
lpolovets
I don't have a strong opinion on Bitcoin, but seeing the price double
repeatedly over the course of 12 months gives me a physiological feeling that
I can only describe as FOMO. I know it's irrational, and I'm not going to buy
any Bitcoins just based on my gut feeling, but it's still disturbing that
seeing a chart go up and to the right makes my brain think that I ought to be
buying a piece before it's too late. I bet this is what it felt like to be in
the middle of the Tulip Bubble.

~~~
mcv
It is already too late. You should buy when it's low, not when it's high. Wait
for the next crash, and then buy, if you want.

~~~
peteretep
Understand that no-one has any damn clue where the price is going. If you'd
invested at the peak of the last bubble and held on to it, you'd have doubled
your money. Work out a plan, write it down, stick to it regardless of price.
Mine is investing £100 on the same day of each month, including this month,
and selling in five years. Work out what your position is - mine is massive
realization in five years - and then don't b swayed by the day to day.

~~~
shocks
This seems like a pretty good strategy. A bit of fun, low risk. I bet a heavy
smoker spends more than £100 a month of cigarettes.

~~~
PaulRobinson
In the UK, £100 gets you about a week's worth of smokes for a heavy smoker.

Putting it in BTC rather than cigarettes is a sensible strategy because even
if BTC goes up in smoke (see what I did there?), at least that smoke didn't
end up inside your lungs.

I'm a smoker. I'm quitting. My cig spend will likely go on BTC. Maybe.

~~~
shocks
Haha, best of luck to you!

I noticed you're based in London, happen to work near Shoreditch? I'm in
contact with Dishoom - trying to get them to accept BTC. Another reason to
quit, eh? ;)

------
abiekatz
Satoshi Nakamoto in February 2009: "In this sense, [Bitcoin]'s more typical of
a precious metal. Instead of the supply changing to keep the value the same,
the supply is predetermined and the value changes. As the number of users
grows, the value per coin increases. It has the potential for a positive
feedback loop; as users increase, the value goes up, which could attract more
users to take advantage of the increasing value."
[http://p2pfoundation.ning.com/forum/topics/bitcoin-open-
sour...](http://p2pfoundation.ning.com/forum/topics/bitcoin-open-source)

------
oleganza
Prediction: it'll crash down to $450-$500 before reaching $700. But I bet
we'll see $1000 before December 31.

Also, we yet to see journalists screaming "insane bubble!" like in April, when
it hit $100. So far media was quite positive and informative.

~~~
StavrosK
Prediction: it'll rise up to $1000 before it crashes down to $400 before
December 31.

------
joelrunyon
Coinbase is trailing this (currently $510) quite a bit.

[https://coinbase.com/charts](https://coinbase.com/charts)

I don't understand why people keep price quoting mtgox as it seems it's not
very reflective of the other indicies.

~~~
heliodor
They still think MtGox is the measuring stick of bitcoin. They're late to the
news that MtGox is having problems and is best to be avoided.

MtGox is trading higher because people can't reliably and easily withdraw USD.
In order to take on this risk, the sell price is higher.

------
sheetjs
Note that this is only MtGox. Other places, like
[https://btc-e.com/](https://btc-e.com/), show a much lower price

~~~
awad
I'm relatively ignorant on BitCoin but would this not be a huge arbitrage
opportunity...?

~~~
gibybo
EDIT: It seems I've got the details wrong, please excuse this comment. I'm
just leaving my original text intact so the replies make sense.

The MtGox USD price is not real. At least not for the purposes of arbitrage.
Although it says $600 USD, no one (or almost no one) is actually buying or
selling BTC on MtGox for $600 USD. They are buying/selling it for other
currencies and MtGox is using an internal exchange rate to convert it to USD.
Their internal exchange rate does not reflect the risk free rate you can
actually get if you were to try to arbitrage it across borders (namely
china/japan). MtGox does not allow you to withdraw USD.

~~~
maximian
MtGox does allow you to withdraw in USD, it's just that you get put on a long
processing queue. The problem is that their Japanese bank has restricted them
to only 10 international wires per day. They've been having a really tough
time with banks. Interestingly, if you have a Japanese bank account, you can
withdraw Yen from MtGox within a few hours.

Regarding price - MtGox's has been fairly in step with BTCChina's price.
BTCChina and MtGox both represent the top exchanges by 30-day volume, so it
would seem to me that MtGox's price is more accurate than BitStamp's price
which lags miserably behind every rally.

~~~
sliverstorm
_They 've been having a really tough time with banks_

Although from what I was reading the last time this came up, these issues are
largely caused in no small part by poor decisions on the part of MtGox.

------
tinco
"Daddy, why aren't we rich?"

"Well you see, when Bitcoin was only worth $8, Daddy tried to buy some, but to
buy them he had to scan his passport and send it to MtGox, Daddy thought that
was a bother, so he shrugged and moved on."

"I am hungry daddy."

:(

~~~
QuasiAlon
You have to send your passport to MtGox?! I thought the whole point was
anonymity

~~~
tinco
It's very much not so. Bitcoin is the least anonymous way of value
transactions ever, there's a public ledger of every single transaction.

~~~
QuasiAlon
Huh. If it's so not anonymous, why do so many people claim it's great for
black market buying, money laundering, etc. ?

~~~
tinco
That's a good question.

The reason is that it's perceived as anonymous is that there is no ceremony
involved with making a bitcoin 'bank account', that means that you can do it
without identifying yourself. You can make a Bitcoin address even without
connecting to the internet, you can make a private key that fits to an
address, and not let anyone know that you have it.

Now you have an anonymous account, that you can send money to, but everything
that happens to that money is public.

Order a Pizza delivered to your door, paid with bitcoin? Gone anonymity. Are
you the one person that buys 3 apples every tuesday at a particular food stand
paid with bitcoin? Gone anonymity.

Relevant to this example: Every entity that exchanges Bitcoin for Dollars or
Euros is legally required (anti-money laundering laws) to identify you. In
Canada they apparently even need your palm print.

------
fat0wl
This is a doubled thread... I asked a bunch of questions on the old one
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6753033](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6753033)).
Now I found this article that seems to address a lot of my reservations about
Bitcoin so I thought I'd post.

[http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/view_from_ch...](http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/view_from_chicago/2013/04/bitcoin_is_a_ponzi_scheme_the_internet_currency_will_collapse.html)

~~~
fat0wl
This is interesting as well -- [http://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-
bubble-2013-11](http://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-bubble-2013-11)

------
jimmcslim
Debatably, a big issue with Bitcoin is that there is no reliable/trustworthy
way to short sell it (I could be misunderstood). I think academic study has
suggested that markets that can be shorted are less susceptible to bubbles
than those that aren't. If there was a ready pool of people ready to trade a
view that the Bitcoin price should be lower than it is, perhaps there would be
less volatility/exuberance?

------
johnyzee
All buyers, no sellers, price will continue up. There is a steady stream of
new people hearing about Bitcoin, believing in the idea, and wanting a piece
of it for when it becomes a dominant world currency. Everybody is holding,
nobody's selling. This will continue for a good long while - there are still
very few people outside tech circles who own bitcoins.

~~~
user24
my (nontechy) mother in law mentioned them to me yesterday, I (techy) bought 2
kebabs last night with bitcoin (through takeaway.com). I think you're right
that mainly techy people have them at the moment, but I also think that with
the right friendly UX exchange we could soon be approaching a tipping point.

Another thing; I didn't buy from my usual takeaway because they didn't accept
bitcoin. So bitcoin acceptance was the primary factor in making me choose a
new takeaway.

~~~
alfiejohn_
When someone without knowledge in the markets tells you to buy something, it's
time to get out. They either heard that golden advice either on TV, the radio
or read it in a newspaper but the common denominator was that it was probably
a paid ad by someone who wants to offload as much as possible to the next
sucker^Winvestor.

So remember, when your bus drivers or barista tells you to buy Microsoft
shares, it's probably best to consider Put options.

~~~
user24
> When someone without knowledge in the markets tells you to buy something

You're probably right, but she wasn't saying "buy it" just mentioning its
existence.

And the buy/sell mentality only really applies if you're planning on "cashing
out" at some point.

------
jimmcslim
A few thoughts:

1\. I'm probably too lazy to look this up, but given mining Bitcoins
essentially boils down to solving hard math problems and there is no
centralisation, what prevents collisions from two miners mining the same
bitcoin at the same time? Is there a GUID element involved? (if so, then
perhaps collisions are possibly, just extremely unlikely as to be practically
zero).

2\. If the bitcoin mining difficulty increases on a known path, would it be
possible to tie the current BTC price (probably would have to try estimate a
forward price) vs the current cost of GPU processing on EC2 (ie. via Amazon's
spot market mechanism). Has anyone done this?

~~~
teraflop
Regarding #1: it's not really coins that are mined, it's blocks (which happen
to include a reward paid to the miner). Blocks are numbered and include a hash
of their parent, so you can get a tree-like structure of blocks. But only the
longest branch "counts", so miners have an incentive to spread information
about the current highest block as quickly as possible.

In cases there two blocks happen to be mined simultaneously there's a brief
period of uncertainty regarding which transactions were committed and who
earned the mining reward. But as blocks are generated on both branches at
random intervals, eventually one will become longer and snowball from there.
The key is that the average time between blocks is about 10 minutes, muck
longer than the communication delay between miners.

As to #2: first of all, the Bitcoin protocol knows nothing about exchange
rates. And secondly, in a market-based exchange, you can't just "tie" a price
to anything. You could set up a fixed-price exchange, but if the market price
was different from the one you picked, either buyers or sellers would look
elsewhere to get a better deal. (That is, unless you provided some additional
benefit over the existing exchanges that was considered valuable enough to
make up for the price difference.)

~~~
jimmcslim
I didn't explain myself for #2 very well... I can imagine a setup where a bot
is monitoring the exchanges for the current BTC price, and perhaps (if such
data is exposed) the market depth at and near that price. Then, monitor the
Amazon spot price for GPU instances (if Amazon makes GPU instances available
at spot rates, otherwise use their fixed price). At some point, the cost of
BTC in USD would be greater than the cost of EC2 compute hours in USD required
to obtain coins, in which case ramp up EC2 instances and get to work!

~~~
nutate
I'm afraid the spot price of EC2 has never been even close. EC2 GPUs are
nVidia anyway, which don't have the specific on die instruction that made
ATI/AMD cards so good for mining back in 2010-2012. That's all been superseded
by ASIC tech which is already in a race to smaller and smaller feature sizes.

The math can be most easily done at mining.thegenesisblock.com

------
aj700
All bitcoin has done so far is make the people with as little as $50 to spare
(in 2011, 2012) into rich people. The rest of us in recession hit Europe have
merely been screwed by it. I'm not saying it will crash or won't, but it's
promoted more inequality than most other instruments.

and saying "the value of the bitcoin economy is $5bn" or whatever is
disingenuous. Economies are measured by the FLOW of money - the gdp, not the
STOCK - the total value of the money supply in a different currency. The
amount of money changing hands is what matters - and afaik, that's miniscule
in comparison.

~~~
olalonde
> All bitcoin has done so far is make the people with as little as $50 to
> spare (in 2011, 2012) into rich people. The rest of us in recession hit
> Europe have merely been screwed by it. I'm not saying it will crash or
> won't, but it's promoted more inequality than most other instruments.

Distributing a brand new decentralized currency is a hard problem. I think
Bitcoin did a pretty good job with its mining reward mechanism. Also, it's not
"all" Bitcoin has done. Would you say "all" Paypal has done is make Peter
Thiel and co rich?

> and saying "the value of the bitcoin economy is $5bn" or whatever is
> disingenuous. Economies are measured by the FLOW of money - the gdp, not the
> STOCK - the total value of the money supply in a different currency. The
> amount of money changing hands is what matters - and afaik, that's miniscule
> in comparison.

When people quote Bitcoin's market cap they generally do so to illustrate how
tiny Bitcoin is compared to USD or other currencies. The fact that it is still
so small is an argument people use to justify its rising price. If anything,
using a lower figure is what would be disingenuous.

------
blackdogie
This chart might be of use, [http://www.davidmcwilliams.ie/wp-
content/uploads/2013/11/Ana...](http://www.davidmcwilliams.ie/wp-
content/uploads/2013/11/Anatomy-of-a-typical-bubble.jpg)
[http://www.davidmcwilliams.ie/2013/11/18/the-view-from-
germa...](http://www.davidmcwilliams.ie/2013/11/18/the-view-from-germany) via
here. As to where we are in the 'bubble' that's anyone's guess. You just need
to be ready when it does crash.

~~~
brazzy
I give it less than 10 days until the crash.

~~~
user24
you realise that people said that when it reached the dizzy heights of
$10/BTC, $100/BTC, $200/BTC, etc. The April 2013 crash looked like a massive
spike until a few weeks ago, now it's a tiny blip. Who's to say whether the
November 2013 spike will look like a tiny blip in 6 months?

~~~
brazzy
You realise that nothing you wrote casts any doubt on my prediction? And that
I didn't say the soon-to-come crash would be the end of Bitcoin? The leadup to
the April crash looked exactly like what we see now: rapid and accelerating
price increases within a few days.

BTW, I correctly predicted the April crash 2 days in advance.

~~~
user24
> The leadup to the April crash looked exactly like what we see now

Past performance is not an indicator of future results

> I didn't say the soon-to-come crash would be the end of Bitcoin

You said "I give it less than 10 days until the crash" which sounds rather
dismissive. I think you should work on your communication.

~~~
user24
also, 10 days is a massive amount of time for bitcoin. It doesn't take much to
say "the price will go down a bit some time in the next 10 days".

~~~
brazzy
> 10 days is a massive amount of time for bitcoin.

Well, that says really all there needs to be said.

> It doesn't take much to say "the price will go down a bit some time in the
> next 10 days".

OK, let me be more precise: "the price will go down to less than half its
peak."

~~~
user24
You're on.

I bet 0.00125 BTC that the lowest price as reported at
[http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/bitstampUSD](http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/bitstampUSD)
won't fall below $321 USD until after Nov 29.

To clarify, I will pay out under the following circumstances:

You reply agreeing before this reply is "12 hours ago"

I accept your reply

On 2013-11-30:

Load
[http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/bitstampUSD](http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/bitstampUSD)

Tick "custom time"

Set start date as 2013-11-18

Set end date as 2013-11-29

If the "Lo" price is less than 321, I will pay.

Otherwise you owe me 0.00125 BTC

Deal?

This will be interesting :)

~~~
user24
By the way I think my terms are more than reasonable;

Bitstamp traditionally has lower prices than MtGox, so that's in your favour.

My terms are such that if _any_ trade happens below $321, you win - not just
daily average or what have you.

~~~
brazzy
I'd take the bet but can't be bothered to acquire BTC for this purpose - which
is kind telling, as is the fact that there's probably no better way to
conducht the transaction either.

I find it amusing that the payout would be skewed in your favor by the nature
of the bet.

~~~
user24
It's a shame that you won't take the bet, as I think you have a fair chance of
winning it actually.

Well, cheers anyway. Maybe I'll buy something in 10 days with the bitcoin I
would have paid you ;)

> the payout would be skewed in your favor by the nature of the bet.

Yes, if I'd won, the amount would be worth more in dollars than if I lost. But
if you're sincerely predicting a crash, you don't believe I'd have won.

~~~
sejje
He's still laying you odds. He has to buy the bitcoins at today's price, and
if he cashes out, he gets them at...well, half the price, since that's the
terms of winning.

So he literally gets his money back.

I think you should make the bet in dollars.

------
kristianp
Here's my little PSA, I wouldn't use mtgox to trade bitcoins, the price is
inflated on there for a reason:

[http://www.cryptocoincharts.info/#jump-btc-
usd](http://www.cryptocoincharts.info/#jump-btc-usd)
[http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1mi4h7/mtgox_withdr...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1mi4h7/mtgox_withdrawal_delays/)

------
Tycho
You could say that fundamentals have not changed, so it's a bubble. But the
end-game is bitcoin becoming a major currency (although, if it does that, it
will inevitably become the reserve currency), so the price should be subject
to intense political risk _and_ also a long way from it's potential peak. So
it's not really like the tulip bubble.

~~~
randartie
It has changed, US Government is talking about it.

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-18/u-s-agencies-to-
say...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-18/u-s-agencies-to-say-bitcoins-
offer-legitimate-benefits.html)

------
huhtenberg
That's just pure speculation now.

~~~
VMG
As is your analysis.

------
twentysix
It will be interesting to read about these reactions in the future.
[http://talkingbitcoin.com/](http://talkingbitcoin.com/)

------
vinchuco
Experiment:

Buy X amount of USD into BTC

wait for the price to rise to X+ε

Sell for your original X amount in USD

Watch the other ε amount in BTC ride the waves

~~~
user24
Better experiment:

Buy X amount of USD into BTC

wait for the price to rise to X+ε

Buy X amount of goods, using BTC to pay, thus supporting the economy.

Watch the other ε amount in BTC ride the waves

~~~
vinchuco
I stand corrected

------
Osiris
This was posted 14 hours ago. It's since jumped to $750.

------
newbrict
vires in numeris

