Urban75 Home About Offline BrixtonBuzz Contact

Bitcoin discussion and news

camouflage said:
Yup, 50k by June sounds right. Conservative even.
Click to expand...

Well at least we know who is holding and shilling their positions. To get to 50k would require a whole new army of mug punters gambling their rent money on 'easy riches'. If Arthur Daley was alive he would be having a punt to be sure. Probably Del Boy as well.....2018 will be the year when governments and finacial systems begin to crush this unregulated , undisciplined upstart once and for all. Back in the heady days of the dotcom boom every techie in the pub had a brilliant idea and a domain name that was going to make them insanely wealthy (I was a techie back then) most came to naught. This feels very much like Dotcom boom and bust 2.0 .
 
Last edited:
and the amount of processing required scales with the price of bitcoin right? so how much power will it be using then? £15k -> £50k = ~3x value so is that 3x electricity too? ie: more than 9 weeks of the average uk household electricity usage
and what happens when the payments for mining halve again, or when all the bitcoins are mined and people are paying more / all of the cost of transaction, being the electricity use, how many people will be using btc then, when it costs hundreds of pounds to transfer anything in a reasonable amount of time?
 
It's supposed to go up in time as more coins are mined as well isn't it?

Mining requires enormous amounts of computing power. According to some estimates, bitcoin’s power use already may equal 3 million U.S. homes, topping the individual consumption of 159 countries. The bulk of this mining goes on in China, where most of the electricity comes from coal, so this is a dirty business. The number of bitcoin in circulation is supposed to top out at 21 million; we’re approaching 17 million now. As the limit is approached, the coin-creating algorithms get more difficult to solve, meaning more computing power is required, and more carbon is generated. Even the most seemingly immaterial of things often have deeply material roots.
Click to expand...
 
Once all 21 million coins are produced, where's the incentive to mine blocks? Would the transaction fees have to increase hugely (given the computing power theoretically required to process a transaction by then) making the whole thing unfeasible?
 
phillm said:
Well at least we know who is holding and shilling their positions. To get to 50k would require a whole new army of mug punters gambling their rent money on 'easy riches'. If Arthur Daley was alive he would be having a punt to be sure. Probably Del Boy as well.....2018 will be the year when governments and finacial systems begin to crush this unregulated , undisciplined upstart once and for all. Back in the heady days of the dotcom boom every techie in the pub had a brilliant idea and a domain name that was going to make them insanely wealthy (I was a techie back then) most came to naught. This feels very much like Dotcom boom and bust 2.0 .
Click to expand...

It's no shill, its a prediction that we will see the accuracy or inaccuracy of in a few months. No fun making predictions if you dont say and write em down where people can refer to them later. You're right though, this is not financial advice. More like that thing football fans do when they try to call who will win the football... er... thing. I do not consider my agreement with the prediction as something anyone should make any sort of investment on and that's not why i agreed with 50k by June. I'm just a bloke on the internet saying things.

Besides this is on the basis of institutional money lining up to wet their beaks, not the ordinary people that so many on this thread seem to hate and despise as greedy subhumans for daring to wonder if they might be able to make some money with this crypto thing. Greedy money grubbing scum should know their place, how very dare they. God will punish them for coverting riches and the devils coin, they are morally weak but fear not, the Establishment will soon destroy this bitcoin nonesense and re-establish the good and natural order we all know and love amarite?
 
Last edited:
Look at them... fucking working class grubbers reckon they can profit in some sort of alternative system do they? They don't even have a stockbroker I bet.

article-0-000CA0E900000258-535_634x476.jpg


"2018 will be the year when governments and finacial systems begin to crush this unregulated , undisciplined upstart once and for all", indeed sir, and rightly. Kind of makes one want to do this face doesn't it, when the whiff of the ignorant rabble touches the nose...

1506583401008.jpg


I mean we can argue about energy-footprints and bubbles and sensible things like that all day but let's face it those are just details, it's the principal of the thing really, the principal! God has written the principals of decency into the laws of thermo-dynamics and finance itself, the rabble must know their place and technology has nothing to do with it.
 
Last edited:
BigTom said:
and the amount of processing required scales with the price of bitcoin right? so how much power will it be using then? £15k -> £50k = ~3x value so is that 3x electricity too? ie: more than 9 weeks of the average uk household electricity usage
and what happens when the payments for mining halve again, or when all the bitcoins are mined and people are paying more / all of the cost of transaction, being the electricity use, how many people will be using btc then, when it costs hundreds of pounds to transfer anything in a reasonable amount of time?
Click to expand...

I know right, it's like that club that failed because it got too busy. Nobody had any room to dance anymore so it closed.

Look, predicting that bitcoins price will reach a certain point is not the same as saying it will all work out wonderfully. You should know by now that the price of a thing does not necessarily represent how sustainable it is or how much of a good idea it is. Think again about the value of a price-tag or even a roaring trade in a thing. 50k by June looks likely to me... however that is not to declare a moral position on bitcoin but rather to describe what I think the market will do next. I do also think people need to examine what sort of attitudes they permit to slip into the criticisms they have of a thing, some of the noise does come down to a 16th Century Calvinist mentality against a tsunami of Dutch wealth that blew up everything from flowers to fashion at the time, some of it does in my opinion come down to mere elitism- we Brits are often completely clueless about just how hierarchical our culture is and a lot of these posts amount to "rah rah rah fucking money-grubbing poor people" imho.

Anyway the criticism of bitcoin has better arguments to deploy than elitist/Calvinist bullshit surely, with more appropriate and better documented and understood actual bubbles that one could evaluate comparisons to or actual draw-backs with the technology than having a kind of grudge against people looking to make some money and therefore being condemned as fools and mugs for it even though we all here live in a society that requires the making of money and the spotting of money-making opportunities in order to live. People might ultimately be wrong but I don't see why it's necessary to hate on them for trying, do people who invest in the stock-market or pay money into pensions or bank-accounts get this sort of hate? On this thread no, why is that?
 
Last edited:
To confidently assert that the cost of a thing will treble in six months is... quite out there.
 
kabbes said:
To confidently assert that the cost of a thing will treble in six months is... quite out there.
Click to expand...
Is it a bubble or not - you're predicting a slowing by half in the coming 12 months. That is everything a bubble is not.

Based on what I've seen, experienced, and understand, $20k in Jan and $100k in 12 months is absolutely reasonable.
 
camouflage said:
I know right, it's like that club that failed because it got too busy. Nobody had any room to dance anymore so it closed.
Click to expand...

? I don't understand this at all in relation to what I said.

Look, predicting that bitcoins price will reach a certain point is not the same as saying it will all work out wonderfully. You should know by now that the price of a thing does not necessarily represent how sustainable it is or how much of a good idea it is. Think again about the value of a price-tag or even a roaring trade in a thing. 50k by June looks likely to me... however that is not to declare a moral position on bitcoin but rather to describe what I think the market will do next. I do also think people need to examine what sort of attitudes they permit to slip into the criticisms they have of a thing, some of the noise does come down to a 16th Century Calvinist mentality against a tsunami of Dutch wealth that blew up everything from flowers to fashion at the time, some of it does in my opinion come down to mere elitism- we Brits are often completely clueless about just how hierarchical our culture is and a lot of these posts amount to "rah rah rah fucking money-grubbing poor people" imho.
Click to expand...

My ecological criticsm of btc is moral, sure. I think it's immoral to use such a huge amount of energy on something which such a small amount of actual use value, and whose use value can easily be substituted by other transaction methods which have a far, far, far smaller energy use. I don't think that is calvinist or elitist.

Anyway the criticism of bitcoin has better arguments to deploy than elitist/Calvinist bullshit surely, with more appropriate and better documented and understood actual bubbles that one could evaluate comparisons to or actual draw-backs with the technology than having a kind of grudge against people looking to make some money and therefore being condemned as fools and mugs for it even though we all here live in a society that requires the making of money and the spotting of money-making opportunities in order to live. People might ultimately be wrong but I don't see why it's necessary to hate on them for trying, do people who invest in the stock-market or pay money into pensions or bank-accounts get this sort of hate? On this thread no, why is that?
Click to expand...

People who invest in stock markets get flak on here certainly, not on this thread because this is about btc. The pure greed and fuck everyone else attitude from many btc investors is something to draw out hate but you are not reading people's criticisms right imo, your posts above the reply to me didn't seem like you'd got the same understanding of the other person's post about regulation etc that I did.
If btc is a bubble / pyramid scheme then anyone who has made money has done so ripping off the people who came in after them. That's a bit different to having a job to make money.
 
BigTom said:
? I don't understand this at all in relation to what I said.



My ecological criticsm of btc is moral, sure. I think it's immoral to use such a huge amount of energy on something which such a small amount of actual use value, and whose use value can easily be substituted by other transaction methods which have a far, far, far smaller energy use. I don't think that is calvinist or elitist.
Click to expand...

I'm not saying your concerns amount to calvinism or elitism, it's a fair concern... I'm saying that a lot of things are being mixed into criticisms unexamined. "Rah rah rah energy use"- ok fair enough, although it's by no means a foregone conclusion that there won't be technical advances or particular energy sources prefered even just for economic reasons becoz- "rah rah rah fucking poor people looking to make a buck". Wat?

BigTom said:
People who invest in stock markets get flak on here certainly, not on this thread because this is about btc. The pure greed and fuck everyone else attitude from many btc investors is something to draw out hate but you are not reading people's criticisms right imo, your posts above the reply to me didn't seem like you'd got the same understanding of the other person's post about regulation etc that I did.
If btc is a bubble / pyramid scheme then anyone who has made money has done so ripping off the people who came in after them. That's a bit different to having a job to make money.
Click to expand...

"If btc is a bubble / pyramid scheme"... but it's by no means the consensus that bitcoin is a bubble or pyramid scheme, sure some think that but people who actually beleive in the technology don't think that so it's not fair to accuse them of anti-social behaviour (or to assume they don't give a fuck about society anyway) when it could only be anti-social if they didn't actually believe in what they were doing. Some people really don't give a fuck and even worse- really do think that bitcoin is just a bubble/pyramid scheme but have determined that they're going to make theirs "regardless muthafucker what", but they don't represent the bulk of this space, if you don't believe in crypto your a lot less likely to have made that much money in it because you're more likely to get out and back to the dollars you're really into as soon as you've made a ten or twenty or fifty percent gain. Maybe you'll come back and do the same again, maybe even several times... you're not going to be building datacentres for it though, you're not going to be spending hours of your life coding for it, or selling things you consider valuable for bitcoin etc.

And anyway even if you are a mere mercenary then hey, you took your risks, you looked at the same information everyone else can look at and you timed it well and you got out, things could have gone the other way, you could have timed it wrong and got buried when the bubble burst or the pyramid scheme ran out of resources and collapsed. And if you weren't speculating on bitcoin then maybe you'd have speculated purely for the money on coffee or pork bellies or property instead who knows. That's just business as usual in our whole society daily, that's how a lot of people make a living in our capitalist economy- as far as that goes bitcoin is just another thing that exists in our way of life. As I said before- we're talking about money at the end of the day.

Let's say you have nothing to do with bitcoin you just work at the counter in Primark- then by that judgement you're guilty of economic genocide, you hate and wish ill to the women of Bangladesh and because you have a mobile phone you are looking to feast on the squidgy innards of dead-children in the Central African Republic because of your blatant use of mobile phones and the rare bloody-Earths that they contain. fuck, in our incumbent system even paying your council tax means you're investing in Big Tobacco and helped inflate the Iclandic banking crisis, weapons and dirty energy too no doubt- that's where it all goes you know. (I bank with the Co-Op, it's been braught by Barkleys now... there's no escape, we're all the guilty facilitators of evil).

By the way the idea that bitcoin is about making transactions in an alternative way is controversial, in the bitcoin community we recently saw what looks like the triumph of one point of view (bitcoin isn't about buying fucking coffee, it's about savings and pensions and controlling your wealth rather than store it somewhere in the deeply known-to-be-flawed-and-corrupt incumbent financial system) over a different point of view (it's about buying coffee- y'know, like Visa or a sort of Paypal). So yeah it's a costly technology if it's for one thing, juries out re the cost/value of the other stuff though. anyway if bitcoin is still around in fifty years then I reckon people will chuckle at how energy intensive it used to be "in the old days" because it was all so primitive compared to however the technology works and runs on if bitcoin is still around by then. but even this isn't to say it will all work out in the end... whenever a society makes a new technology it requires more energy to build and maintain all the new infrastructure... technological advances usually mean doing more faster and cheaper, perhaps cutting down on the amount of energy required to do the thing than previously- but then meaning far far more of the thing can now be done, meaning larger overall energy use because the 50 unit widget now costs only five units so let's make fifty thousand of em now instead of the 500 we used to get by with. but then how will that dynamic play out against bitcoins deflationary nature and the anti-consumerist effect of people being less willing to spend a form of 'money' that grows in purchasing power over time? I dunno.

Interesting and exiting technology imo, but part of 'exiting' is an element of danger, we just don't know how all this will play out- but surely hating on people looking to build wealth in our capitalist world is a waste of time and veers alarmingly into mere unexamined calvinist propaganda and pro-establishment elitistm as a principal. Slagging off the Nike Corporation because there is already Adidas and anyway Nike's are ugly in my opinion and for blingy chavs and anyway what's wrong with plimpsols" is not an effective criticism of Capitalism itself.
 
Last edited:
Forgot to say the point about transaction costs in the face of bigger bitcoin action is just a part of market dynamics... if transaction costs go so high that people can't afford to transact in bitcoin anymore then they'll stop transacting in it thus allowing transaction costs to fall again. Also as the price of bitcoin goes up this drives investment in new infrastructure that expands the capacity of the bitcoin network to support the increasing volume... it's all fairly basic supply/demand stuff and certainly not a subject that somehow hasn't been noticed.

It is kind of amusing when you see one of those people that starts out saying "bitcoin is based on nothing, thin air" end their point by talking about energy costs and insufficient infrastructure to handle demand... which is it, does this shit take up space in the world or not? You can't have it both ways! (not saying that's what you're saying BigTom, just an aside).
 
I think this is the interview where the $50k number actually came from although I think another talking-head on CNBC/Bloomberg called Tom Lee may also said that number for his own reasons in another interview. Anyway interesting reasons given by this guy in this interview.

 
camouflage said:
I think this is the interview where the $50k number actually came from although I think another talking-head on CNBC/Bloomberg called Tom Lee may also said that number for his own reasons in another interview. Anyway interesting reasons given by this guy in this interview.
Click to expand...

He gives zero reasons though. He just says its 'hypervoletile'. He sells people hedged bets, offering them less risk than actually owning bitcoins.
 
bimble said:
He gives zero reasons though. He just says its 'hypervoletile'. He sells people hedged bets, offering them less risk than actually owning bitcoins.
Click to expand...

Interesting as in he's not actually saying $50k for a bitcoin for starters. Anyway your interesting may vary.:)

Imo a four or five times increase over 6 months in bitcoin price is well within its capabilities.
 
Last edited:
Thoughtful and balanced comments from camouflage. Thank you.

One additional thought from me; blockchain and possibly crypto is potentially revolutionary. There hasn't been a revolution in history - industrial, electrical, computer/internet/digital - that hasn't consumed huge energy and resources in the proto phase. It absolutely comes with the territory.

You want to kill crypto, the engine of blockchain - then you better think very hard about killing decentralised innovation.
 
How is 'crypto' potentially revolutionary? Hardly anybody uses it. Hardly anybody could use it even if there were a demand for it, which there isn't, because the technology is so awful at the moment that the blocks get clogged up with just a few thousand transactions on them. It really is just a way for people to buy drugs over the internet, one with a shitty pyramid attached to it that uses up disgusting amounts of energy. The rest is delusional nonsense, of which there has been a mountain on this thread recently.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

Protag
Israel-Iran conflicts - news and discussion
6 7 8 9 10
Replies
277
Views
15K
krtek a houby
krtek a houby
PR1Berske
Hamas/Israel conflict: news and discussion
519 520 521 522 523
Replies
16K
Views
676K
agricola
agricola
WhyLikeThis
Mpox - news and discussion
9 10 11 12 13
Replies
387
Views
22K
Cerv
C
emanymton
Good news! Silvio Berlusconi dead
Replies
16
Views
1K
gentlegreen
gentlegreen
Yuwipi Woman
The Good News Thread
Replies
5
Views
891
platinumsage
platinumsage
Back
Top Bottom