
Bitcoin at an all-time high - ca98am79
https://www.coinbase.com/charts
======
gchokov
The baloon will pop out soon. It's clearly a balloon - people using it to get
money out of China. At some point, what goes in, will go out. Money Flow.

~~~
nickthemagicman
Doubtful. This is literally a revolutionary technology like the internet. The
only hash coin that has proven stable over the long term. Why won't it just
keep rising?

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gchokov
Don't mistake blockchain with bitcoin. Please, don't.

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corobo
Care to explain the difference? It's much more useful in the long term to
educate rather than criticise.

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the_rosentotter
Go bitcoin! An alternative monetary system can only be a very good thing, and
bitcoin is one of a very short list of contenders.

~~~
pg314
> can only be a very good thing,

No. It has enabled the rise of ransomware.

~~~
oleganza
So did computers and tcp/ip. Should we roll them back too?

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pg314
No, that doesn't follow from my statement.

I was pointing out why 'can only be a very good thing' might be wrong. If
bitcoin's advantages are enough to offset its drawbacks (of which enabling
ransomware is one), that is a good thing. That is not a given, though.

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Marazan
While not as strong as previous years the bitcoin price-to-
GoogleSearchPopularity correlation is still strong.

For previous spikes price leads the search popularity on the upswing but
search popularity leads price on the downslope.

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nchuhoai
Does anyone know how to buy put options on Bitcoin? Or any other limited loss
way of shorting bitcoin?

~~~
xyzzy4
You can borrow Bitcoin from a friend, sell the Bitcoin on an exchange, and
then buy your friend the same amount of Bitcoin a month from now.

~~~
bboreham
That's a future, not an option. The potential loss is unlimited.

~~~
jerguismi
Potential loss = unlimited amount of money + friendship

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TYPE_FASTER
As much as I really don't care for the energy waste associated with mining,
when parents at the bus stop started talking to me about production block
chain deployments they were working on, it's obvious the block chain will be
adopted by the enterprise.

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r00fus
Jeebus where do you live where that bus-stop talk happens?

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droopyEyelids
The rumors I've heard tie this to activity spurred by changes in yuan
valuation.

Does anyone know of a site that visualizes information that could add
information to that hypothesis? I'm thinking something like trading volumes
per geographical area.

I'm also curious what role bitcoin could play in mitigating currency risk. Are
people using it to buy foreign currencies and keep them in secret bank
accounts? Are they attempting to use Bitcoin as a store of value?

~~~
xyzzy4
Bitcoin is very useful for three things, which are a store of value similar to
gold (although it is more volatile), money remittance to other countries, and
illegal or anonymous activities. I don't know how many people are using it for
each, though.

Also as a side note it's typically very difficult to make bank accounts in
other countries if you are not a resident.

~~~
automatwon
I worked in data science at a tech startup that focused on remittance ($1
billion ARR). I was also offered a position at an early stage bitcoin startup
in Vietnam, one of the top 'send countries' for remittance from the U.S. This
is the first and primary Bitcoin service provider in Vietnam.

Bitcoin is not ideal for remittance in practice.

Speed: If you use your own wallet, waiting for the blockchain to propagate
might actually be slower than currency through a remittance company. I don't
know what the clearing process is for Bitcoin wallets SaaS, but Bitcoin is
equal to if not slower than normal remittance tech startups. After all, speed
is one of the factors these remittance startups are tackling to disrupt
Western Union.

Rate: I can't speak universally, but doing remittance in or out of Vietnam
with Bitcoin was too high last year. ~5% if we go USD -> BTC -> VND. ~10% in
the reverse. These rates are indicative of the local currency being worthless.
I also remember transferring Bitcoin internally in the U.S. last year through
SaaS would eat out half a percentage.

Foreign workers who remit to their loved ones are price sensitive. That leaves
Bitcoin as remittance viable to people who aren't price sensitive, at the
asset of more anonymity. IMO, dirty money is not price sensitive. 10% fee to
launder money is cheap. If you're already going down this road though, Vietnam
mom and pop shops offer practically free remittance. They are unlikely to be
regulated. And again, local Vietnam currency is useless. It's not stable or a
good store of value. The government sets artificial exchange rates. People in
Vietnam desperately want to exchange their money for USD, and are willing to
pay a premium, which is still better than the governments rate, and so the
remittance shop is able to offer people sending USD to Vietnam a free service.

A Bitcoin provider will have to exchange to and from the local currency if
it's to be used for remittance. In the case of Vietnam, the exchange must
exchange Bitcoin for the more worthless local currency, and hence charge the
higher exchange rate. The provider in Vietnam has an underlying market
exchange, actually, where there is no liquidity because people with Bitcoin
expect a huge premium to exchange it for local currency.

I think Vietnam's situation can be generalized to other remittance countries
where the local currency is undesired, and the government has locked down
people exchanging it for USD.

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danbruc
At least close to it, still a few Dollars to go, the all-time high is
$1,216.73 from 2013-11-17 on the Mt. Gox. [1]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_bitcoin#Prices_and_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_bitcoin#Prices_and_value_history)

~~~
TheDong
Frankly that value shouldn't count.

At that time, you could not get any money, USD or BTC, out of the exchange.
Those were not USD, those were GOXUSD because they could not be transacted
with anywhere but the exchange nor transferred.

Same for the BTC there, they were GBTC, not real BTC.

~~~
xyzzy4
That's not true. I withdrew some Bitcoin out of the exchange at that time. It
was a month or so later when it was impossible to withdraw any funds.

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popol12
Don't think about bitcoin as a western individual. Think of it like you were
in a poor/developping country, where 95% of the population doesn't have a bank
account. Well, bitcoin gives an international bank account to anyone. With the
growth of internet in these areas, Bitcoin will grow.

~~~
watty
Right, but what % of those people in poor/developing countries have the
internet access and knowledge to securely manage a Bitcoin attack?

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andrewd18
Given how regularly Western Bitcoin exchanges are hacked, I'm not convinced
anyone has the knowledge to securely manage a Bitcoin attack.

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bdcravens
Not sure where they're getting that data; Bitstamp's all time high was 1163
which hasn't been broken yet (likely will today)

[http://bitcoinity.org/markets/bitstamp/USD](http://bitcoinity.org/markets/bitstamp/USD)

~~~
curiousgal
Many Exchanges have prices higher than that.

[https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/#markets](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/#markets)

~~~
bdcravens
True, but I think you want to limit yourself to BTC/USD pairs, and to
exchanges that were trading at the last ATH.

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bagosm
Does this article take into account bitcoins that are in wallets lost forever?

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jason_slack
Is BitCoin mining still mostly done by huge mining farms running ASIC miners?

Can someone with 4 Titan-X cards even mine anything worthwhile? Given
municipal electricity is very cheap, etc?

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mikeash
It looks like you could expect around 800 million hashes/second doing Bitcoin
mining on a Titan X. The current Bitcoin hash rate is about 2.5 quintillion
hashes/second.

The current reward for a block is 25 bitcoins, plus whatever fees are included
in the transactions which are relatively small at the moment, as I understand
it. A block is mined roughly once every 10 minutes, so that's 3600
bitcoins/day mined. At $1100, that's about $4 million/day.

You could expect to see, on average, an amount relative to the proportion of
total hashing power you bring. That would be $4 million * 8e8 / 2.5e18 = 0.13
cents/day, approximately. (Note, not $0.13, but $0.0013.)

So, yeah, not really worthwhile.

~~~
npongratz
> The current reward for a block is 25 bitcoins

If I may offer a slight correction: the reward per block halved to 12.5
bitcoin in July 2016 [0]. Doesn't materially change the results [1], but
probably worth mentioning for posterity.

[0]
[http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36763524](http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36763524)

[1] 1800 bitcoin / day mined @ $1100/BTC is $2MM/day, so one would gross $2MM
* 8e8 / 2.5e18 = $0.00064/day. And at today's ~$900/BTC, $0.00052/day.

~~~
mikeash
Thanks for pointing that out. I looked it up, but must have found an old
source.

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asdz
Yet Mtgox still owe me my bitcoin :/

