

BTC $141 USD - niggler
https://mtgox.com/#

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AndrewDucker
How are people still actually using it to _buy_ things?

My problem with this rate of change is that it makes it harder to use it as a
means of buying things.

If I see an item for sale for 2.5BTC then it can take me an hour to translate
my GBP into BTC. Then I carry out the exchange, and then they have to transfer
it back to their currency (if they want to spend it on most things).

If the value has gone up 15% in that time then what price should they be
charging me?

Should a shopfront be updating its prices on an hourly basis?

I'm all for BTC being valuable, but it needs to have _some_ stability to be
used as a method of value exchange.

~~~
swinglock
I bought a domain at Namecheap. That sent me over to BitPay which I gave the
current USD price in BitCoins and an hour later Namecheap had accepted the
payment.

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Devilboy
And two days later you regretted not hoarding the bitcoin instead.

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swinglock
I don't, the price was good and the amount was tiny. Sure it would have been
better today but I needed it yesterday.

That wasn't the point though, the point is yes, you can buy stuff and it's
simple. Apart from the hour it takes to confirm the transaction (this is done
by the BitCoin network, nothing any user or particular party needs to do) it
was much less of a hassle than paying with a credit card... at least if you
already have the BitCoins.

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russellallen
A currency which changes in value by around 40% in a 24 hour period is
completely useless for the transactions I mostly deal with. We worry about a
few percent change over weeks and insist on hedges.

Imagine saying to someone - I'll put 1000 BTC into your venture when you reach
the next milestone in two months. What's that going to be? USD 100,000? USD
50,000? USD 1.50?

~~~
niggler
"A currency which changes in value by around 40% in a 24 hour period is
completely useless for the transactions I mostly deal with"

1\. IIRC Silk road uses some average price rather than the spot price

2\. Does anyone provide BTC hedging? Seems like a pretty useful and profitable
service.

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ragmondo
To enable hedging, someone would have to take a forward position in USD/BTC ..
and at the moment, the market is in contango ( see
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contango> ) which means that the sentiment is
that the price will continue to increase for the near term ... ie you'd have
to be very brave indeed in order to put a limit on the expected BTC price.

~~~
niggler
"you'd have to be very brave indeed in order to put a limit on the expected
BTC price."

Or quote a fairly aggressive price (so that the hedger pays a significant
premium for the service)

Also, how are you getting futures/forward prices on USDBTC?

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bryanlarsen
Standard bubble advice applies here.

1) the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. (Keynes)

2) a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Bank your profits. It turns
exponential gains into linear gains, throwing away a huge amount of potential
profits. But a small amount of real profit is worth more than a huge amount of
potential profit.

~~~
codesuela
Just sold my BTC for about 75% profit within a few weeks, still probably gonna
bite myself in the ass if Bitcoin ever hits 1000 USD

~~~
jaimebuelta
75% profit within few weeks seems EXTREMELY good to me. I can't really see the
problem (yes, I know for a emotional point of view. Just think about 75% in a
few weeks)

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Nursie
But it's still not a bubble, no sir, the bitcoin economy has just really
kicked in to the tune of 40% growth in the last 24 hours...

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pazimzadeh
The latest price is always here:

<http://bitcoinity.org/markets>.

I'm not sure that a new submission is required every day.

~~~
rplnt
I'm sure they are not required and they are annoying even. Especially when the
submission adds absolutely nothing. And as a bonus links to a page that is not
valid few minutes after posting.

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daveungerer
I'm surprised that someone hasn't started another Bitcoin yet. Is it harder
than just changing some initial seed? Because the artificial scarcity of
digital currency is what's allowing for these high prices.

Then all you need is intermediary parties that will exchange your V2 Bitcoins
for V1 Bitcoins (which will currently have the highest acceptance for buying
things). Over time, V2, V3 etc. may even become accepted directly by
merchants, if they become big enough.

UPDATE: Thanks for the info on additional ones. This is getting really
interesting. So my initial scarcity hypothesis was wrong, which means it's
just pure herd mentality. Hopefully over time the availability of multiple
currencies will lead to some sort of equilibrium though.

~~~
rheide
Litecoin. Namecoin. Ixcoin. Ppcoin. Terracoin. Devcoin.

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mkr-hn
That's a lot of tulips.

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bluedevil2k
_cough_ sell now _cough_

~~~
rheide
Yet people aren't. Apparently there's still enough belief to warrant this kind
of growth.

(..getting ready to eat my own words, real soon..)

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freakyterrorist
Surely this madness has to end soon?

Also seriously regretting not buying it when it was "expensive" at <$5 :(

~~~
nkozyra
Some of us bought ours around $.85 and sold when there was _no way_ it could
go any higher around $30.

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niggler
"Some of us bought ours around $.85 and sold when there was no way it could go
any higher around $30."

Picking tops and bottoms is a fool's game.

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crazytony
Not being fluent in the ins and outs of bitcoin: what is driving this? Is it
pure speculation? Are more people trying to get in on the BTC wagon (riding
the Cyprus wave)?

~~~
Nursie
Speculation.

There doesn't seem to be any evidence that (in the world of BTC) the Cyprus
situation has triggered anything other than rampant speculation by non-cypriot
libertarians who already distrust central banks and now have a boogeyman to
point at.

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meerita
It makes impossible for a developer to charge BT on any service. Tell me how
you do it without being overpriced the next day.

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EarthLaunch
Calculate the exchange rate automatically? This is not 1900.

~~~
meerita
Really? I wasn't my point. I was talking about make use of the bitcoin value
as a statement. Of course I can charge in Yens and convert it on the fly to
dollars or pounds, but that wasn't the point.

It's really to make Btc popular on a website when every refresh can bring you
a new value. It's horrible for business. Btc right now is only useful for
trade than for other low end business operations as paying one month of
hosting or buying a toy.

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polshaw
I cannot ----ing believe it. I thought there would be a bump when it hit $100,
but not this much. It's just insane, I was calling it a bubble since $30, and
it's doubled again and again..

I wonder how low the crash will go? I'm guessing it won't be below $30.

~~~
Nursie
Depends how many people get badly burned by this I would have thought. It
could pretty easily drop to almost nothing if confidence is completely bust,
as the 'fundamentals' supporting the price of BTC are far from obvious.

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Matsta
My 2¢ is that it's gonna crash like it did a couple years back. Then would be
the best time to buy, since it will probably do this crazy business once
again.

~~~
paulhodge
Of course, it's not going to crash very far if enough people are thinking
this.

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kmfrk
I guess the y-axis should be logarithmic at his point.

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Yuioup
I still don't understand how a nonexistent coin could be worth anything. No
really. How does solving an algorithm translate into value?

~~~
niggler
Value, be it in gold or silver or USD or EUR or bitcoin or cars or art, is a
perceived phenomenon. Something has value because others are willing to trade
it for goods and services (or for other forms of value). Gold and silver are
trusted stores of value because they have been used in that capacity for
centuries (and for a very long time, USD were silver certificates so there was
real metal backing the paper)

The underlying value of BTC, IMO, is the anonymity feature (the ability to
conduct commerce without a clear centralized record identifying you by name).
Once that is compromised, it's not clear what value BTC will have.

~~~
ragmondo
Anonymity is not really the selling feature of bitcoin - in fact it really
only offers pseudo-anonymity.

The fact that no-one else can just "print" bitcoins, and that you can transfer
funds at internet speed to anybody else anywhere in the world and that (after
a short time), the transaction cannot be reversed are the main utilities.

~~~
jaimebuelta
Yes, I think it is possible, in the long run, to figure out who's behind a
wallet, assuming that the Bitcoin use is frequent and convenient (meaning no-
super-high-inconvenient-counter-measures are used, but a regular use of
currency)

In that case, my concern is that I think it will be possible to determine ALL
the transactions of that wallet. Making it even less anonymous than regular
currencies.

I could be missing something, but if confirmed, that could be a problem for
using Bitcoin as a regular currency

~~~
Nursie
There are various laundering schemes, and there's nothing stopping you using
new wallets constantly.

But yes, in effect, every transaction is traceable and public, AFAICT.

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jaimebuelta
Yes, I understand that there are things that you can do. But, as those are in
the way of convenience, we can assume that not everyone will take the extra
effort to create constantly new wallets, etc.

So, in case someone can trace you to a wallet, that someone can know all your
transactions (of course, only the transactions for that wallet), which is a
huge potential privacy risk.

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nsns
It's like in Germany in the 30's.

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glennos
I was thinking that as well, but it's actually the opposite. Germany
experienced hyperinflation, where the value of the Mark decreased rapidly.
This is the currency increasing in value, so "hyperdeflation" I guess.

