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Bitcoin discussion and news

I have just sold all my btc. Personally I think we will get a double dip. I could be wrong, but this looks like the classic "bull trap". If so, we get a big blow out, and the price goes low. Then recovers to the mean, and all the pissing about stops and we can just use btc as a currency.
 
That's fun but pure troll. Relative to the all time high? Only a fraction of the total btc has been traded in the last few weeks. And of that only a tiny fraction would have been exchanged anywhere near the all time high.
 
Quite. The total value traded whilst the price was >$200 was probably a few tens of $m. It was there for what, two days?
 
I don't have a problem with gambling per se, but doing it on horses, football or Big Brother has never appealed. But a punt on whether or not I have confidence in other people increasing their confidence in a cryptographic nothing might be fun. Of course as an innocent in a clear confidence trick I'd expect to come unstuck eventually and tbh I can't see that much fun in studying the price daily or weekly to decide when to buy and when to sell. So the choice is to buy and hoard or, if they exist, to play around with a tool to set a strategy based on price rises and falls, transaction costs etc. That might be really interesting, and I suspect I'd learn a lot while I lose my shirt. What's out there to play with?
 
ah....

ScreenShot2013-04-13at123337_zpsf5a971b7.png


ScreenShot2013-04-13at123353_zps13e1eb52.png
 
It's simple enough. You need to deposit funds to your account. Then you can either place a "bid" if you have, say, USD. This is a fixed offer to buy a certain amount of btc at a certain price (you need to have the funds to back it up).

Or if you have btc then you can put in an "ask", which is a fixed offer to sell a certain amount of btc at a certain price.

All these bids and asks are lined up. If they intersect then a trade is made. The graph gives an indication of the depth and spread of the market. You can click on the line to see.

Then there are market orders. This means you just rock up and say "I have $1000,give me the cheapest $1000 worth of of btc currently on the market. As these market orders come in, they fulfil the bids and asks and change the market spread.
 
http://mobile.bloomberg.com/news/20...g-is-a-real-world-environmental-disaster.html

an interesting article on the real-world effects of Bitcoin. the last line is interesting

The trade-off here is that as virtual value is created, real-world value is used up. About 982 megawatt hours a day, to be exact. That’s enough to power roughly 31,000 U.S. homes, or about half a Large Hadron Collider. If the dreams of Bitcoin proponents are realized, and the currency is adopted for widespread commerce, the power demands of bitcoin mines would rise dramatically.

If that makes you think of the vast efforts devoted to the mining of precious metals in the centuries of gold- and silver-based economies, it should. One of the strangest aspects of the Bitcoin frenzy is that the Bitcoin economy replicates some of the most archaic features of the gold standard. Real-world mining of precious metals for currency was a resource-hungry and value-destroying process. Bitcoin mining is too.
Click to expand...
 
Yeah it's certainly a problem. I wouldn't underestimate the general energy cost of money though. I would imagine most currencies, even small ones, have a significant energy use. The ATM network of a national high street bank is probably not that far off. Paypal's server power us will be huge, as will Smile bank etc.
 
maybe, but that's all energy that's actually required to operate the physical machinery involved in distributing cash.

Bitcoin's energy consumption though is deliberately caused via this process of 'mining', which is basically a completely unnecessary use of energy when other methods of rationing supply could have been used instead that didn't involve the use of huge amounts of computing power.
 
Yeah it's a design flaw. It's because of the "proof of work" principle behind generating the algorithm. In order to produce the currency at a set rate, it has to get harder the more you are able to produce. It almost *has* to get more power consumptive.
 
Idaho said:
Yeah it's a design flaw. It's because of the "proof of work" principle behind generating the algorithm. In order to produce the currency at a set rate, it has to get harder the more you are able to produce. It almost *has* to get more power consumptive.
Click to expand...
just what the world needed right now eh.
 
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