At this point virtually everybody I know in the tech space is buying at least one coin to "hedge" against bitcoin achieving "gold 2.0" status.
What are the chances that as this message echoes out to virtually any urban-dwelling or internet connected human on the planet we may all, as a human race, wind up accidentally embracing a unified digital currency while in pursuit of what amounts to a lottery ticket?
Bitcoin is no longer the only cryptocurrency, so it has to hold value against gold, diamonds (both of which are completely anonymous), all fiat currencies, as well as alternate methods of payment.
It is highly unlikely that it will be adopted as a currency for major business transactions (too unstable and unknown), and is completely traceable, so will not be adopted by major elements in the black market. In the end, if bitcoin specifically (as opposed to some alternate cryptocurrency) remains in use for a long period, it is likely to be for relatively small transactions in niche markets. Does that warrant it's current valuation? I have no idea.
Diamonds and gold make for quite shitty currencies
Gold is extremely laborious to move, and not divisible enough for most usage. Diamonds are not fungible or very divisible. Both are very susceptible to physical theft.
Network effects for money are very strong, and bitcoin has a huge first mover advantage. Any competing digital currency will require quite the innovation or distinguishing factor to gain any traction. It is becoming more 'known' and trusted with each month that passes. Pre-bitcoin-era financial groups are slowly yet increasingly giving it more legitimacy (Mainly VCs, a few funds, the occasional bank, and research groups -- also Second Market and the Winklevoss ETF are two big things to watch right now).
The main counterpoint currently is that bitcoin use is quite error-prone and hard to digest, but this seems more like a temporary roadblock to me. Y'all remember geocities and AOL right? Bitcoin will become much easier and more secure to use in the coming years. Software is relatively easy to improve, compared to gold, fiat, and the like.
There are some potential solutions to traceability, but it is uncertain how that will play out (I can't even pretend to fully understand the regulatory environments and international politics that will affect this). The one thing I can guarantee -- the way we use and conceptualize money is going to change drastically in the next several decades, and I think bitcoin will have a huge influence on this.
Bitcoins are very susceptible theft, as evidenced by the fact that someone heists a whole bunch of them from a website every other week.
You can't play off a good which is hard to move as "susceptible to theft" when you can log in and copy a data file and have succeeded in stealing a whole bunch of money.
I admitted using bitcoins currently is hard and expensive errors are easy to make. But this is a software issue. Old "good enough" security habits won't fly, as a lot money is on now on the line (old security issues usually didn't cause too much harm for most users). New practices/implementations will have to be developed, but I don't see why that won't happen.
Even nowadays with a few simple steps you can make your bitcoin stash VERY VERY secure. Install a fresh copy of linux on a USB, disconnect all networking capabilities, boot to the USB, create a new wallet/address (brain or paper) using established methodology, turn off computer, remove USB, presto, you have a un-hackable bitcoin address. You could even create a multi-sig stash that requires a digital signature from multiple people (2-of-3, 3-of-5, etc). Obviously, this is cumbersome and non-trival for the average joe. But with a small amount of imagination it is easy to see how everyday solutions could be developed.
Which part of those steps feels "simple" to you, compared to the various protections my credit card company and bank offer me?
You also haven't covered anything about backups, which means if you lose that USB or it dies, then poof all that money becomes unrecoverable permanently.
You can't even access that money now without booting an entire new OS on the computer, which means good luck spending it, not to mention, for a digital currency you might want network connectivity as well.
Creating backups is not that hard. Print out extra copies, give one to your sister/best friend/lawyer/whoever you trust. Or store the seed phrase (or memory jog that only you will understand) in many places. Upload encrypted versions to dropbox/gmail/etc. Put a copy in your locked safe. There are many options.
There are several tools that allow you to create a transaction offline (using similar steps to what I listed above, which only take 10-20 minutes) and then you can broadcast the raw transaction text to the network using something like http://blockchain.info/pushtx. Again, this only necessary for super secure storage of long term savings/investments/etc.
Lastly, one could easily keep small, day-to-day amounts on their smartphone, which can spent and transferred quite conveniently (average joe level convenient). Then top up this spending wallet every so often using your offline wallet (10 minute time commitment every week or two).
The options/methods for doing all of this will only get easier. We are in the pre-alpha stages of digital currency software right now. Think web in the early 90s.
It is not bitcoin that is susceptible to heists, the protocol is rock solid!
Its websites coded by script kiddies such as inputs.io by an under 18 Australian who ignore security and then get hacked (or more likely do a runner with the coins themselves) once they get enough suckers to send them bitcoin
Bitcoins can be owned, so it's better to own them instead of storing them in someone's wallet on some website. Send you money to a shitty exchange nearby, buy bitcoins, move them into your own wallet immediately. Then you won't care if someone hacks the exchange.
What does P=NP have to do with anything? Bitcoin can be attacked in polynomial time i.e. the "51% attack." I am also curious to know what security promises you would be referring to.
51% attack is a myth. Do you seriously think that all BTC holders would just blindly jump to a suddenly revealed chain to allow some dud to revert 1000 BTC transaction? There would be some turbulence, no doubt, but people will quickly ban the source of disturbance or hire an army to go and shut it down.
Most probably, 51% will never happen because it's never economically justified. Even craziest anti-heroes must have earned a lot of money to risk pulling this off for very dubious reward. Some scientists don't like possibility of it, but it's their own bet on how reality works.
When I mentioned P=NP, I meant that Bitcoin rests on inability to quickly break hashes and ECDSA signatures. If we find such a method, it would probably be a proof of P=NP.
The 51% attack allows more than just reversing some transactions. It allows an attacker to selectively block transactions. It allows an attacker to deny the mining reward to miners.
Really though, the point has more to do with formalizing Bitcoin's security. You claim that it relies on the security properties of cryptographic hashes and of digital signatures, but what property of Bitcoin actually reduces to the security of hashes or signatures? What are Bitcoin's security guarantees? When you can at least state some security property Bitcoin achieves, then maybe you can prove that Bitcoin's security depends on hashes and signatures. Without such proof you cannot go about making statements about P vs NP being relevant to Bitcoin's security; indeed, it is hard to speak about "security" for Bitcoin at all.
I thought about buying a coin recently, but then I realized, I don't think Bitcoin will ever be successful as an online currency. The process of buying into Bitcoin, and getting money out of Bitcoin is a complete disaster in my book. Everyone is looking at Bitcoin as an investment, and the only people putting in the effort to join are those aiming for financial gain.
My prediction is the price is going to rise, faster and faster in the coming weeks. The hype is still building, people are seeing these 20% gains overnight, and thinking they're going to get rich. It feels like a pyramid scheme, where the people already owning coins are going out and recruiting others to buy into Bitcoin, to raise the value of their own wallet.
Now, time for a wild guess. I say it peaks at 900-1,000 two to three weeks from now, then starts to level off. People get worried not seeing gains, and decide to start cashing out in time for the holidays. By the new year, under 300.
If I had a coin, I'd hold it until the end. As others have said, I think it's going big, or going to zero in the coming years.
While it's very true that Bitcoin could use major improvements in general usability and user-friendliness, I don't know your ___location, but buying BTCs here in Poland is trivial - transfer money to bitcurex, buy and transfer coins out within 1-2 working days top.
Only if it's real growth, and not just a speculation bubble. The only way bitcoin reprsents real value is if people transact with it. My vague guess is that it can do that if its users can exhange to/from it per-transaction, because otherwise the value fluctuations will make it too risky.
It is a speculation bubble. People are betting that Bitcoin will become world money and be worth millions of products in many countries. Anything can become money only when it has value and acceptance which are created by speculators. Such bubble can pop only if some other, more promising thing may become money, or if there's a flaw in the currently hyped thing.
Bubbles pop because people lose confidence. The ways in which that can happen are infinitely varied. While the reasons you list can cause that, people also can lose confidence for irrational reasons or decide that their confidence was not rational. Most commonly their confidence will just align with what they perceive other people's confidence to be, causing feeback.
Remember there were people who dumped a lot of money into bitcoin at $200 last bubble and then bailed at $100 an extremely short time later.
Something like that will probably happen again with the current rise. The long term probably doesn't really care about the blips along the way though.
Or, in the case of cryptocurrencies, when something goes wrong with the underlying encryption. We are very far away from that eventuality (SHA256 is pretty damn secure and ECC is in the realm of "we don't think this will ever be broken unless the NSA curve weakness is real"). Still, one day.
Still, bubbles really worry me on a psychology level. All it takes on journalist to write an ignorant article on Bitcoin (which they never do) and then a whole bunch of other journalists then cite without research (which they never do) and POP!
>Or, in the case of cryptocurrencies, when something goes wrong with the underlying encryption.
I think it is actually exclusively confidence. Something could go horribly wrong with the underlying encryption and the perceived value would not drop until people recognised the implications of the problem and consequently lose confidence.
ECC would break[1] (funnily enough I was under the false impression that ECC was quantum-resilient until I did research for this comment), SHA wouldn't[2]. As far as I know the end-of-the-world attack against Merkle hashing algorithms are mathematical proofs.
However, the combination of quantum computers and advances in mathematical attacks against Merkle-Damgard hashing algorithms is almost guaranteed to happen eventually. Honestly, when it comes to security, using SHA256 was a major oversight. SHA512 would have given much more longevity to the currency - considering that you are talking about an algorithm that encapsulates wealth; nothing is overkill.
The only semi-confirmed usage of quantum computers, to date, is finding minima/quantum annealing (DWave). Shor's algorithm (which would be used to attack RSA and ECC) has been demonstrated on a very small scale, although many doubt that it was a true demonstration[3] (read: unentangled particles means that Shor's algorithm wasn't truthfully demonstrated by IBM).
That is not a specific weakness of bitcoin. If encryption stops working, most of the worlds economic systems run into serious issues. Transferring money by _any_ electronic mechanism becomes problematic.
Correction: the only money that is being transferred by electronic means is Bitcoin. All the other payment channels do not transfer ownership, but promises. When your bank sends 100 bucks to another bank, there's no hard ownership being transferred, only an agreement between a bunch of people. That's why the current system is so fragile and so abused to no end.
With a regulated financial sector and overwatch of ISP data retention, you still need to somehow gain knowledge of the encrypted bits to deploy a quantum computing attack against them. Governments have an interest in ecommerce continuuing, and there's a limited time-horizon where you can actually mount an attack - so provided you route your transactions over "known trusted" paths, everything basically continues - especially while the only quantum computers are controlled by governments to start with.
BitCoin on the otherhand almost immediately runs into trouble, because it's entire basis is centered on the difficulty of cryptography problems. It can't function without distributing it's content widely (and indeed, completely), which means its immediately valueless - even if someone doesn't attack it, it's immediately known that at any point in time someone can simply create every coin that will ever exist and credit it to them.
1. The price keeps skyrocketing, so people hoard or buy
2. The price keeps skyrocketing, so people hoard or buy
3. The price keeps skyrocketing, so people hoard or buy
4. The price keeps skyrocketing, so people hoard or buy
etc... it all works out until it doesn't... it's long overdue for a major correction
Does not “correction” imply that there is a “correct” price for Bitcoin? Since it has absolutely no inherent value, what would this be? Zero? Or does its value derive from its utility as a medium of exchange (and associated transfer mechanism)? In that case, should its value be derived from the size of the global economy? (As done here: http://falkvinge.net/2013/03/06/the-target-value-for-bitcoin...)
Perfectly substitutable currencies have an exchange rate of either zero or infinity. If there's no reason to hold one over the other, you've no reason to ever give up your holdings of one or the other...until there's a slight imbalance, at which point 1 is clearly superior and you've a huge incentive to abandon ship as fast as possible.
In practical terms, government money is backed by the necessity of extinguishing tax obligations and debts within it's jurisdiction, so it's not perfectly substitutable. Bitcoin has no such benefit - there's never a reason to hold it because everything provided by it can be provided by other currencies. Of course, the fact exchanging out requires selling to a greater fool provides some stability, but therin lies the nature of a bubble - once people want out, there's absolutely nothing that's going to convince anyone else they should want in.
Of course if you hold Bitcoin, for any reason, you need to aggressively argue against this problem - and indeed all problems with Bitcoins, at least until you no longer hold Bitcoin.
Yes. Of course even the US dollar was backed by gold until 42 years ago. As you said, I can pay taxes with dollars. I can go to the NYC 24 hour USPS post office right now and buy commodities with a dollar. The government could privatize the Grand Canyon and compensate dollar holders thusly.
The kind of delusion thinking seen here about Bitcoins is akin to the delusional thinking I heard in 1999 regarding tech stock prices. Does anyone remember when Cisco's market cap was over half a trillion dollars? But Cisco actually did (and does) something that creates and stores real value.
There's all this talk of how Bitcoin is easier than this or that currency. Well it's (possible but) not easy to short Bitcoin. I certainly can short the dollar in a number of ways. I'm sure if Bitcoin was shortable it's price would not be where it is. It certainly means the inevitable fall will be harder though.
It's hard to say when Bitcoin's worth will crash, there's a lot of money sitting out there, waiting to speculate on something. But inevitably it will crash.
Infinity isn't a number to start with, it's an expression of a limit. i.e. if you need something, then how much you'll pay for it is effectively unlimited. The idea is, that how the price changes is basically only limited by how quickly your various agents can buy it.
You see the problem with this when artificial agents get into bidding wars - because they react so quickly, they end up creating massive price volatility because when it's worth buying its worth buying and when it should be sold they can't dump it quick enough.
In practice every thing has some type of limits - i.e. even computers operate over limited time intervals, and any individual actor has limited resources so eventually something exhausts itself (i.e. everyone might have dumped Currency 1 for Currency 2, but even if no one holds any any more, they'd still be trying to sell it off if they did - ergo, we never reached a finite "price" for it.
I don't think it is "long over due" There will probably be another correction just like there have been two or three already but if you look at each BitCoin "bubble" each is about 5x larger than the previous one so I would think we will see prices rise to at least the 1,000 neighborhood before retracting and when it does I don't see it going lower than $250 - $300 ever again unless something happens to make it worth zero.
I mean it hasn't gone down two days in a row for over a month now and is increasing in price 10% per day. It's not just going to straight up to the moon like people think. There will be bumps along the way and it's overdue for one.
So when people say bitcoin is "bubble" they are essentially correct - although the condescension is usually misplaced. All money is a bubble in the sense that its reservation demand is far higher than its use value warrants. This is true for the dollar, and it's also true for gold, which also has a large element of "moneyness".
"The Silk Road shutdown resulted in brief, but shallow sell off and subsequent rebounded within a few days. This event showed the world and governments that illegal activities were a very small fraction of the transactions taking place on the bitcoin network."
I would say it showed that Silk Road was a small fraction of all BC transactions, but that still doesn't speak to the total amount of illegal activity going on BC.
That said, it does imply to me that either:
(1) The total percentage of BC transactions being used for illegal transactions really is low (as the article implies), or:
(2) The remaining entities using BC for illegal purposes are confident that what happened to the Silk Road won't happen to them.
No matter how small it was, it was probably the largest money-bitcoin-money faction.
Lots of people mine and trade coins. But only the few thousands (hundreds?) Silkroad users were actively pumping money constantly into the system, giving a much needed reality check of how much people will pay for a made up currency with established made up money.
> Investment-wise, the prognosis is still the same as it ever was: BTC will either become a huge thing worth a lot, or it will be worth near zero
Almost but not quite: it must surely go to zero at some point, because chances are extremely high that we haven't accidentally hit the holy grail of digital cryptocurrencies and no better thing could ever be possibly come along for all eternity. Before that happens, it will most likely become a bigger thing than now. So I think most folks are just wondering two things: before we reach zero, how much bigger will it become (multitudes? exponentially bigger? orders of magnitude? or just another $3.50 higher?) and over what timeframe.
And even the most educated guess at those two questions is as good as any other, truly.
> Almost but not quite: it must surely go to zero at some point, because chances are extremely high that we haven't accidentally hit the holy grail of digital cryptocurrencies and no better thing could ever be possibly come along for all eternity.
Bitcoin mathematically approximates Byzantine concensus with arbitrary parcitipants. This is the fundamental insight over the fundamental hurdle that made all prior attempts at cryptocurrencies (for decades) non-starters.
What is the space of cryptocurrencies that exploit the Byzantine insight, but are somehow better than Bitcoin? I would suspect that it is very small, or nil.
So unlike you, I don't think there is a high chance of something better coming along. I think there is a low but significant chance.
A slight digression:
I _do_ think that bitcoin may end up being the "gold" used to resolve balances between crypto-banks that have their own currencies. The advantage of such a system is confirmation in almost no time, and not having to pay a transaction fee to get your transaction into a block (which could be large as contention for block space rises).
But other cryptocurrencies backed by bitcoin will have to be redeemable for bitcoin, always. If you sever the link, they become worthless.
Now if they increase the block size limit to keep transaction fees low, there may never be any need for other cryptocurrencies backed by bitcoin.
Investments always have an exit time frame; if you never end up exchanging them for something else, then their worth is as meaningless as if the price were zero. This is as true of a business as it is of stock or currency trading.
I look at market trading similarly to competitive games of strategy like Chess now, because they share this nature of having to carefully exchange resources over time to achieve an increasingly advantageous position.
Anything that goes up fast will come down fast. That simple is that. The sooner you sell your speculative investment the more likely you'll get your money back (at the expense of other people). I sold some leftover coins of mine after 2x in price and that's still phenomenal gains from just some random coins I saved for any next purchase.
The value of BTC will slowly rise but naively extrapolating from the last year or so only I'd say the realistic value is still below $100. I'm pretty confident that roughly $50 is a rather stable floor for the years coming.
I can't comment on the post because I'm on a train with spotty 3G coverage. Which begs the question. WTF is going on with this trend of JS loaders? If your site takes too much time to load, stop nagging users and just take the time to properly optimize the site.
Just like with every bubble, some people will wait and wait again to invest in... Only once all their friends will have gain some money speculating, once the main media will say it's an easy way to make money, when they'll have the feeling that eveybody else is making money, only then will they invest in... And loose everything the next day, after the bubble collapse.
So, if you're planning on speculating with bitcoins, do it right now, or never do it... The chances are it's already too late btw, since people are already mentionning exponential growth.
Case in point: I hold quite a few bitcoins. I am waiting to sell them. The deciding moment will be when my mom mentions bitcoins to me the first time. That will be the trigger ;)
Donations - Bitcoin is great for it, and there are many organizations, small and big, that accept it. One of them (not mine): http://seansoutpost.com
eBay style trading - I once bought a $100 trillion Zimbabwe dollar bill for Bitcoin. Think of the irony - using hyper-deflatory currency to buy hyper-inflatory currency :)
In bigger cities you can buy drinks and food with it in certain pubs/restaurants.
There are many more legitimate uses for Bitcoin, and even if most people hoard most of their stash, when you have to pay for something many tend to spend their Bitcoins if they have the possibility.
That's not really true, a lot of us more sensible people want to 'cash out' a little slowly as the price goes up, and what better way to cash out than actually spending the bitcoin on an actual product and supporting the economy? I'd be willing to bet that as people suddenly find themselves with tens or hundreds of bitcoins, and that they can buy a pizza for 0.05 BTC, they are quite open to the idea of receiving what is essentially free pizza. Sure, that pizza could be worth five pizzas tomorrow but you still have a decent chunk in bitcoins and if the whole thing plummets to earth then at least you got something delicious.
My point was rather meta, but it was the choice of language. "Pizza effectively for free" - lots of things about Bitcoin seem to involve people hoping they get something effectively for free.
In the case of the price volatility for hoarding bitcoin while it rises, it underscores the deflationary nature of the currency - no economic value has been contributed by someone holding the BTC, but they've gotten richer regardless. Sitting around doing nothing with the BTC did not produce any economically valuable activity - it wasn't invested or used to finance starting that pizza place, for instance.
Important to note that credit card processors charge not-insignificant fees to the merchants. So paying cash in BTC is a win for the customers who want to support that business.
There are bitcoin transaction fees (that can only increase if bitcoin gains more widespread usage), as well as exchange fees if merchants need to pay payroll, taxes, or buy supplies in their countries currency.
Oh, and the value frequently fluctuates double digit percentages in a day.
To be fair, credit card processors offer significant protections for consumers. I don't think we should discount the issue of fraud, especially given the recent Bitcoin heists.
Not compared to a stable currency like USD. If you did a ton of sales this week when the price is at an all time high, and when it comes to pay payroll next week and the value falls by half -- guess what, you're out of business.
If goes btc keeps going up like this for 10 years 1 BTC will be worth more than all dollars in the world today.
I think i'll keep hoarding 3 euro coins instead, at least you can make bullets out of them.
As for investments.. those usually have (or promise to have) a thing called yield.
If i put my money in the bank, they give me an interest. BTC doesn't.
If my bank goes bankrupt, my deposit is insured. If my BTC wallet is stolen...
And this is before we even start talking about regulatory risk. Again: BTC is a fantastic technical endeavour, but to call it an "investment" is quite a long shot. Call it a bet.
What a headache. Just to buy a cup of coffee I need to boot up Linux on a USB disk, input a 500 digit hash, call my brother for the rest of the hash, and my cousin in Sweden for the rest of it, make the transfer an wait for 15 minutes for it to transact, then I get my coffee. Yea. I'd feather have GOLD, SILVER AND COPPER coins. Even digital representations maintained by a bank.
Also, I'm glad I didn't agree to pay my mortgage in bit coins when the value was $11. The 70X increase in price would BITRUPT me! :)
If they were stolen, who do I call to help me get them back? If I loose the keys to get into my coins, who will help me get access back to my cash. Does the UN have a BitPolice squad hunting down bit theft? If I were to declare bankruptcy would I have to declare my bit coins as a part of my estate? Is there a BITRUPTSY court?
This Bitcoin rise rases some interesting questions for me, even if it rings alarm bells at the same time.
What is the value of a currency? Is it the inscription 'I promise to pay the bearer on demand...', which nowadays will not be fulfilled? Is it the power of the organisation backing it? Perhaps the simplest explanation is best - what can you buy in other goods you might want with this currency? But that leaves you open to manipulation as you are entirely dependent on your perception of what other people think this is worth, which can change in an instant as we have seen with stock markets or indeed government-backed currencies where confidence is lost. So a good confidence trick will be worth as much as or more than a solid currency, until a moment of panic.
If you try to base it on the current value of goods in the world divided by the currency in circulation (say 11m coins), Bitcoin has a large climb in value ahead of it if it were to become a world currency, and if no other currency were in use. What is the USD worth if you price it this way though with only 3b in circulation and ?
If you say the value of a currency is its ability to buy other goods Bitcoin is currently worth a lot compared to other currencies and prices in it are deflating rapidly, but it has crashed before and will again, because the only measure of value seems to be confidence in its possible future uses, and that makes it very hard to pin down the value. It would be interesting (but I suspect impossible) to try to calculate a value for each Bitcoin based on actual use to buy goods of known value at the present time (as opposed to speculative trading).
If you base it on its use value as a medium of exchange, I have hesitations about the utility of Bitcoin, because of its anonymous nature (not tied to verified IDs), lack of regulation, deflationary policy, and lack of backing, and thus hesitations about its value. As a result of the free-floating value and lack of regulation, I suspect Bitcoin prices will behave far more like stock markets (a random walk) than like a normal currency which is pegged to others to some extent, and thus will be difficult to establish as a medium of exchange because of the volatility.
I also find it hard to believe if it is successful that it will not be supplanted by some other digital currency which has fewer of its limitations and is more suited to transactions between people who do not value anonymity above all, and wish to be protected from fraud, and the govs and corps that would like to track them. All you have to do to set up a competitor is establish some rules and get people to use it - something which corporations or governments can easily achieve if their monopoly on the money-supply is threatened in a meaningful way.
I did buy 1.5 BTC last week, just for fun. Bought another 1 BTC tonight. I may regret the latest purchase, or both purchases, I dunno. But, since I found myself wishing I'd bought more last week, I bought some more tonight.
When I bought those 1.5 BTC at ~$200, I had planned to buy more when the inevitable crash came. It may still come, but I'm feeling pretty confident the size the BTC market has grown so much as to make it likely the new low that it falls to is gonna be well above that $200, maybe even above the $500 it's trading at now. Timing the market is often a bad idea, so I setup a small monthly buy tonight, as well, so I won't be tempted to try to figure it out.
My thinking is that if bitcoin becomes a monetary standard for online commerce it's orders of magnitude undervalued. If not, it's probably overvalued. So it's a perfect asymmetric bet. The most you can lose is the price of buying a few (or many) bitcoins. The most you could win is 100x or maybe even more. It's kind of like making an angel investment, except that instead of investing in a single company, you're investing in an entire economy. Imagine if instead of being able to buy shares in Pets.com or Altavista in 1995, you had a chance to buy a share in the Internet as a whole. That would have been an awesome asymmetric bet
"Imagine if instead of being able to buy shares in Pets.com or Altavista in 1995, you had a chance to buy a share in the Internet as a whole."
That's a really striking, and almost frightening, way to look at it. I felt my chest tighten when I read that analogy, actually. It is tempting to go overboard...but, if my gut instinct is right, there's no way to go overboard (aside from going bankrupt buying BTC). Which makes me think I'm probably missing something.
Nonetheless, I'm long BTC, and I intend to go more long as the days go by and I have more disposable funds.
$38500 aint bad, but it isn't $771000. I wish I would of purchased more than one when it was around $65 (right after the first pop). Now I'm trying to find the thumbdrive that contains the bitcoins that I got from the original fountain.
Bandwagon + Peer effects = a "gold" rush.
btw, the current exchange rate - $600 is making it worthless for everyday payments or small shopping. It is just a mass hysteria.
What are the chances that as this message echoes out to virtually any urban-dwelling or internet connected human on the planet we may all, as a human race, wind up accidentally embracing a unified digital currency while in pursuit of what amounts to a lottery ticket?