
Bitcoin crosses $10B market cap again - ivank
http://coinmarketcap.com/
======
Inthenameofmine
As someone actively working in this space for the past 3 years, I have a few
observations on Bitcoin's price movements:

* The only parameter that in any way is correlating to Bitcoin's price is it's transaction count over time. In fact, if you take out Bitcoin's extreme price spikes they almost completely match up. number of transactions should go through the roof one the Lightning Network is functional.

* The only real world application of Bitcoin that I have seen so far has been 1) Black markets; 2) International money transfer (it's faster to do Bank-Exchange-Bitcoin-Exchange-Bank in most cases than direct bank to bank transfers. That should tell you something about the current state of banking.

* Using market caps for a commodity is ridiculous. The only meaningful parameters to track is nr of transactions, depth of order books globally, nr of exchanges in countries.

Side note: I don't hold any crypto currencies anymore. I don't invest in
things which I can't have direction over.

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ChuckMcM
The reason for slower bank-to-bank over international borders is probably more
related to managing liability than it is to inefficiency.

~~~
brighton36
Long settlement times are a feature, not a bug. It reduces externality costs
(drugs and terror) and reduces insurance costs. (reverseability)

~~~
celticninja
Plus the bank gets to charge interest while they hold it, a week at my bank
and a week at the receiving bank, for multiple transactions is a nice little
earner.

~~~
kalleboo
Wow, what bank takes a week to do an international wire? For me it always
seems to arrive the next business day.

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nikolay
Chinese second-class investors are doing another pump-and-dump scheme now
using the #HalvingHype.

Bitcoin has gained no consumer adoption, most new development is happening
with Ethereum, and Bitcoin got replaced in headlines with Blockchain.

I see this final pump-and-dump as a desperation move. Imagine this applied to
stocks as "Let's pump AMZN, because if we don't, it will go out of business."

This time, the pump is done by miners predominantly and the volumes are small
as people moved to more profitable investments long ago

~~~
johndevor
> Bitcoin has gained no consumer adoption

[https://coin.dance/volume/localbitcoins](https://coin.dance/volume/localbitcoins)

How do you explain away the increased adoption in nearly every country listed
there?

And Bitcoin ATMs are growing at a steady clip:

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

These are two metrics of real growth that goes against what you're describing.

~~~
nikolay
All local ATMs I know closed down...

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vinchuco
I want to see what happens after 28 days:
[http://www.thehalvening.com/](http://www.thehalvening.com/)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3o89yz/the_halveni...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3o89yz/the_halvening/)

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partiallypro
A lot of this has to do with unease within the Chinese economy. Gold is also
being bought around the same clip, and long term bonds have yields that are
plummeting despite a possible rate hike.

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Mahn
It's kind of a pity that three years have passed since it arguably went
mainstream (among the tech literate at least) and the most prevalent use case
is still by and large speculation. Making money is cool and all but the
technology had a lot more promise than this.

~~~
brighton36
Up until this month - most of the speculation has been dead. That's why
coinbase is pivoting. The majority of bitcoin is being used by people who need
it in order to run their businesses.

~~~
mifreewil
Pivoting? Adding Ethereum as another asset on their exchange is not pivoting.

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NobleSir
This is inevitable as everyone saw what happened at the litecoin halving last
summer (if you don't pay attention to such things, it was a massive spike then
dump).

~~~
shocks
So I take it you bought loads of bitcoin a few weeks ago?

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NobleSir
I wish.. I just spent 5 years of minimum wage grad school so my pockets are
not that deep.

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davidgerard
There is question as to whether this is even real, or just Willybotted up.
This article is from March, but it hasn't stopped:
[http://www.bitcoinfuturesguide.com/bitcoin-blog/reminder-
chi...](http://www.bitcoinfuturesguide.com/bitcoin-blog/reminder-chinese-
bitcoin-spot-exchanges-okcoin-and-huobi-are-faking-a-majority-of-their-
trading-volume)

What happens if you try to cash in at these prices? There's no actual demand,
so the price flash-crashes: [http://qntra.net/2016/06/mere-265-bitcoin-sell-
causes-flashc...](http://qntra.net/2016/06/mere-265-bitcoin-sell-causes-
flashcrash-at-coinbase-chronically-thin-orderbook-to-blame/)

~~~
dwaltrip
OKcoin is not the only exchange... Yes, you can't trust many of the Chinese
exchanges. But there are 10s of thousands of bitcoins being traded daily on
many different (non-Chinese) exchanges that don't fake their volume.

Coinbase, Bitstamp, and Kraken, three of the more reputable USD exchanges,
have had a combined volume of over 30k BTC alone in the past 24 hours.
[http://bitcoinity.org/markets/list?currency=USD&span=24h](http://bitcoinity.org/markets/list?currency=USD&span=24h).

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throwoverflow
I wonder if Chinese price manipulation has anything to do with the upcoming
Australian Bitcoin auction in late June.

~~~
brighton36
there is no such thing as price manipulation.

~~~
bdcravens
Only volume manipulation.

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fhood
Yeah, look at dogecoin, still fighting, much determination. Never give up
dogecoin.

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gchokov
Scam at its best.

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statoshi
$10B down, a few trillion to go.

~~~
oh_stasi_tokama
Should be a matter of weeks.

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wildchild
New wave of cryptocurrency scam started in May. How long it will last this
time?

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fiiiauuush
As long as there is criminal activity, there will be cryptocurrencies.

~~~
tdurden
...and fiat currencies

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LAMike
Also bigger than Twitter.

Bitcoin has maybe 3 million users (maybe). Twitter has 300 million. I'm
investing in both, and I wonder how much Bitcoin would be worth at 300 million
users. The network effects are going to be fun to watch

~~~
LAMike
Lol HN really doesn't like Bitcoin. Sour grapes I guess

~~~
bdcravens
No, I think HN realizes Bitcoin price isn't correlated to number of users.
After all, the number of "users" hasn't grown that much over the past 30 days,
even though the price is up 50%.

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curiousgal
Surpassing Western Union's market cap.

~~~
underyx
I've seen this comparison a lot but I have no idea what the significance is.
Why does this matter?

~~~
lordnacho
Probably because WU is a money transmission network, so somewhat comparable to
what Bitcoin does.

~~~
underyx
But doesn't market cap mean two entirely different things for a company and a
currency?

~~~
dantudor
Bitcoin transaction volume in USD for the last 24 hours was $ 224 million. Not
sure how much WU turnover in transaction value a day...

~~~
underyx
The best data I could find on this is in their 2015 annual report, which says
they've had $81.6 billion in consumer-to-consumer transfers[0], which made up
79.21% of their revenue[1], so I guess we can estimate an annual turnover of
$103 billion, which comes out to $282 million per day over the year of 2015.

[0]:
[http://s1.q4cdn.com/568883301/files/doc_financials/2015Annua...](http://s1.q4cdn.com/568883301/files/doc_financials/2015Annual/2015-Annual-
Report.pdf) \- page 66

[1]:
[http://s1.q4cdn.com/568883301/files/doc_financials/2015Annua...](http://s1.q4cdn.com/568883301/files/doc_financials/2015Annual/2015-Annual-
Report.pdf) \- pages 59 & 64

~~~
throwawaysocks
Most of their revenue = Most of their volume is questionable. Do you have any
sense for whether revenue and vole are roughly correlated here?

~~~
underyx
Nope, I'd assume that B2B has lower fees/margins, so the actual daily volume
should be higher than my calculation said above. Still, it should be enough to
establish that WU is still a fair bit ahead of BTC.

