Bitcoin discussion and news

[kropotkin]

Congratulations, you've come to accept that the train exists and has mass. And not only that, you've come to accept that the train is accelerating, and may very well still be accelerating come 2019. It is good that you are now concerned about what appears to be a massive brick wall on the tracks ahead. Some say maybe there's a tunnel, or a fold in the landscape that just makes it look like the train is heading straight into a massive wall from where we're standing now... but the main thing is that you accept the train exists, has mass, and is accelerating. A lot of people are still stuck on "there is no train" or "the train doesn't have any mass" or "the train will suddenly stop moving and disappear becoz tulips".

The train will suddenly stop moving because the resource cost to mine further bitcoins or process transactions will become too great.

 

[The Fornicator]

Isn't that like saying mobile phones won't take off because who's going to wheel a car battery around with them.

 

[teqniq]

Not really. That is a false analogy imo.

 

[keybored]

Isn't that like saying mobile phones won't take off because who's going to wheel a car battery around with them.

Not really. That is a false analogy imo.

A better analogy would be to say that a car battery isn't going to cut it. Due to an inherent flaw in the whole idea, the battery would have to double in size every year because the power needed to make a call increases over time.

 

[camouflage]

The train will suddenly stop moving because the resource cost to mine further bitcoins or process transactions will become too great.

No, in this scenario the wall itself represents all that, the train that is bitcoin's power demand slams into the wall of un-susteinability and perhaps makes a mess big enough to have political repercussions (campaigns, protests, amendments, clampdowns, riots, hashtags, sanctions, wars?)

By the way bitcoin difficulty can also adjust downwards, compromises security though so now you'd need the power of a few less stars or something to brute force it i guess. The free-floaty economics of the concept is supposed to bounce around between these supply/demand relationships and that is what we've seen happen. Other coins do adjustments much more rapidly, Bcash for example but that’s even worse.

The train doesn't suddenly stop moving because energy, momentum or inertia don't dissapear. Bitcoin "has mass" and it's travelling at speed- loans have been taken, bricks and mortar put together, hardware developed, power contracts drawn up, positions taken, projects launched, people employed, millions of hours sunk into code. Debts and obligations don't dssapear so the price doesn't go up or down for free.

If bitcoin could just tulip and go away then there'd really be no need to worry about scary ecological walls now would there. The ecological question is real and a concern because bitcoin is real and seems pretty fucking insistent on having a future.

 

[camouflage]

camo's on this trip where enquiring as to use value equates to superstition, with added 'the gods will punish us' piss-taking which funnily casts climate change as superstition. Oh and also anyone who is thinking maybe bitcoin is a not so great idea is an enemy of the working class. I think thats the gist of it anyway. Basically all the wrongs of religious thinking are put upon those who question.

Argue use-value all you want mate, the billions keep flowing though regardless of your opinion. Aren't theories supposed to give us an understanding of reality? If the reality doesn't conform to your theory than perhaps your theory is wrong. But whatever, I don't really see myself as an expert on any of this- just a concerned third party, but will try to ignore the five-hundred billion dollar elephant in the room if you insist.

Maybe I have been having a little too much fun on the whole "devils coin" thing, but knocking back religious propaganda is always a special kind of thrill for me even when it's become "received wisdom" religious propaganda. Bubbles are real of course, bitcoin may even be in one- I even consider bitcoin part pyramid (a sort of creepily hovering pyramid that will broaden, flatten- and may one day wrap-around and consume the global economy- so same like neo-liberalism then... crypto-liberalism?)

I even suggest that maybe a bitcoin-bubble may not take the form expected and turn up as a credit-bubble... but tulips are literally the worst example of a bubble that one could bring to fight a deflationary cryptocurrency. Please try harder.

Anyone thinking maybe bitcoin is a not so great idea is someone who should be able to articulate their arguments without resort to the tones of lazy elitism... all I'm saying to that is check those signals.

Actually. if you read my posts and came away with what you did then what's the point, nothing of this will penetrate anyway so here's some random words; pineapples, clogs, tea-cup, ostrich, purple. Make of em whatever you will.

 

[Yossarian]

It sounds like a closer parallel than tulips might be the dot-com bust - or the "British Railway Mania" of the 1840s.

There was a "collective hallucination," as this researcher puts it:

There were trustworthy quantitative measures to show investors (who included Charles Darwin, John Stuart Mill, and the Bronte sisters) that there would not be enough demand for railway transport to provide the expected revenues and profits. But the power of the revolutionary new technology, assisted by artful manipulation of public perception by interested parties, induced a collective hallucination that made investors ignore such considerations.

Collective Hallucinations and Inefficient Markets: The British Railway Mania of the 1840s by Andrew Odlyzko :: SSRN

People did make fortunes from the railways, just not those people. When governments, or companies like Apple, launch their own digital currencies, is anybody still going to want Bitcoin or Litecoin or whatever?

 

[kabbes]

The tulip bubble is only invoked to remind people that speculation bubbles do exist and seem real to those in them a thing the time. But the bitcoin situation is not exactly like the tulip speculation bubble.

No, it is far more like the Madoff pyramid. Note the value of that pyramid when it collapsed — over $60bn. Again, that was real people’s money. Take this:

Bitcoin "has mass" and it's travelling at speed- loans have been taken, bricks and mortar put together, hardware developed, power contracts drawn up, positions taken, projects launched, people employed, millions of hours sunk into code. Debts and obligations don't dissapear so the price doesn't go up or down for free.

Now insert the word “Madoff pyramid” and you basically get the same argument. Ok, so you replace “power contracts” with “broker contracts” and “millions of hours of code” with “millions of hours of marketing”, but it’s the same thing.

When the Madoff pyramid finally collapsed, businesses went bust, powerful individuals became bankrupt, the high and mighty ended up with a lot of egg on their face. There were vested interests in keeping it going. It broke anyway, because it was a pyramid, but it took a long time — something like 20 years. And some individuals made a lot of money in that time — returns were something like 10% per annum each and every year. Pyramids don’t necessarily collapse immediately.

The Madoff pyramid was also based on something tangible, by the way — the stocks the pyramid was built on were all real.

You seem to think there is a contradiction between being alarmed at the energy consumption of bitcoin on the one hand and noting it is a use value-free pyramid on the other. But there is no contradiction. Like the Madoff pyramid, the bitcoin pyramid can potentially sustain itself for a long time and, like the Madoff pyramid, the longer it sustains itself, the messier it will be once it collapses. But unlike other pyramids, this one also has massive real world consequences in terms of climate change. And those consequences are happening right now. If the pyramid keeps going another year or so, these consequences will become profound and irreversible, even once the whole thing dissolves.

 

[The Fornicator]

So not a bubble at all then.

 

[kabbes]

So not a bubble at all then.

What do you understand an investment bubble to be?

 

[The Fornicator]

Not this: https://bittrex.com/Home/Markets

You'll note the similarity with Forex trading - dozens of currency pairs, mostly paired with BTC and Ethereum,which are similar the $USD and euro of crypto.

You're right to correct your thinking in terms of a bubble but you have gone in diametrically the wrong direction in trying to work this as a ponzi 'scheme'. You don't seem to grasp the scale of a $trillion business that embraces every country and involves tens of thousands of individual actors.

 

[bimble]

It sounds like a closer parallel than tulips might be the dot-com bust - or the "British Railway Mania" of the 1840s.

There was a "collective hallucination," as this researcher puts it:


Collective Hallucinations and Inefficient Markets: The British Railway Mania of the 1840s by Andrew Odlyzko :: SSRN

People did make fortunes from the railways, just not those people. When governments, or companies like Apple, launch their own digital currencies, is anybody still going to want Bitcoin or Litecoin or whatever?

A couple of clicks away and by the same author is this Bubbles, Gullibility, and Other Challenges for Economics, Psychology, Sociology, and Information Sciences by Andrew Odlyzko :: SSRN

An attempt to create a 'gullibility index' by which to measure whether or not something is a bubble. (i can't get access to the piece of work itself but sounds really good)

 

[mauvais]

Not this: https://bittrex.com/Home/Markets

You'll note the similarity with Forex trading - dozens of currency pairs, mostly paired with BTC and Ethereum,which are similar the $USD and euro of crypto.

You're right to correct your thinking in terms of a bubble but you have gone in diametrically the wrong direction in trying to work this as a ponzi 'scheme'. You don't seem to grasp the scale of a $trillion business that embraces every country and involves tens of thousands of individual actors.

So what? The trade in subprime debt, credit default swaps and the like fits what you've just said, and yet I would still happily file them - in their sum total - under Ponzi schemes.

 

[camouflage]

The tulip bubble is only invoked to remind people that speculation bubbles do exist and seem real to those in them a thing the time. But the bitcoin situation is not exactly like the tulip speculation bubble.

No, it is far more like the Madoff pyramid. Note the value of that pyramid when it collapsed — over $60bn. Again, that was real people’s money. Take this:



Now insert the word “Madoff pyramid” and you basically get the same argument. Ok, so you replace “power contracts” with “broker contracts” and “millions of hours of code” with “millions of hours of marketing”, but it’s the same thing.

When the Madoff pyramid finally collapsed, businesses went bust, powerful individuals became bankrupt, the high and mighty ended up with a lot of egg on their face. There were vested interests in keeping it going. It broke anyway, because it was a pyramid, but it took a long time — something like 20 years. And some individuals made a lot of money in that time — returns were something like 10% per annum each and every year. Pyramids don’t necessarily collapse immediately.

The Madoff pyramid was also based on something tangible, by the way — the stocks the pyramid was built on were all real.

You seem to think there is a contradiction between being alarmed at the energy consumption of bitcoin on the one hand and noting it is a use value-free pyramid on the other. But there is no contradiction. Like the Madoff pyramid, the bitcoin pyramid can potentially sustain itself for a long time and, like the Madoff pyramid, the longer it sustains itself, the messier it will be once it collapses. But unlike other pyramids, this one also has massive real world consequences in terms of climate change. And those consequences are happening right now. If the pyramid keeps going another year or so, these consequences will become profound and irreversible, even once the whole thing dissolves.

Thanks for the quality reply. I get what you're saying... the pyramid in bitcoin is how it's meant to charge-up the adoption curve and so far that feature has been working as intended. So where are we headed, will the bitcoin pyramid collapse... or will it continue to work as intended and remain expansive long enough (along with the halvenings) to become the new normal, so that instead of collapsing it just shifts the paradigm (flattens, broadens, engulfs the world economy). And if that's the case then what happens then, does it strangle us in deflationary economics and choke us on our own waste-products and send the survivors back to subsistence farming... or does it usher in a new age of peace, justice and freedom for all?

Personally, I reckon same-shit-different-day. Even if bitcoin in the longer run (after some 'issues' have been ironed out) proves to be a really good idea full of amazing possibilities you have to account for the fact that humans fuck things up, humans always fuck things up. First we'll figure out how to involve the sex-industry in whatever new invention (done) then we'll figure out how to attack the environment with it (sort-of doing) and then we'll figure out how to weaponize it (should be a way to squeeze some sort of city-killer out of this thing, wonder if DARPA is already on the case). Bitcoins pyramid dynamic has all the upside in the world to feed on (money and mindshare), I don't think it'll collapse till it's done, whatever that turns out to mean. We could end up wishing it had collapsed, what if the pyramid collapsing Madoff-style turns out to be the good outcome and preferable to the alternative?

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Among the many, many nonsenses you've been coming out with, camouflage, is this spurious notion that you can apply terms like inflation and deflation to bitcoin. You can't.

 

[BigTom]

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?

I'm sure processors will get more energy efficient but you can't wave technological advances as a solution when the amount of energy use is an issue right now, and using carbon free/neutral/sustainable energy sources for btc means not using them for other things, so you have to justify btc's energy useage regardless of the climate change problem.
Your last sentence does not match what I see people's criticisms of btc and btc speculation as. I don't think anyone who is criticising the speculators is criticising poor people doing it any more or less than rich people doing it.

"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.

btc has some use, so it won't collapse to nothing, question is where does it collapse to or does it keep increasing in value. It's an odd thing because for someone buying drugs the value of btc doesn't matter, because what you are buying is priced in £/$. Price only matters to the speculators, miners and I guess the people running exchanges and things like that. So it's hard to disconnect the price driven through use of btc and the price driven through speculation, as the users of btc are only going to be put off by higher transaction fees, not by higher prices.

btc believers are often overzealous envangelisers and ime mostly libertarians so not so much not give a fuck about society as flat out deny its existence. They drove btc through the initial period, the mtgox failure which I thought would destroy btc by exposing its lack of security and potential for manipulation by certain individual players in the markets, and kept it going until criminal organisations and silk road gave it a use beyond international money transfers. Prior to that I saw it like a local currency - people who have an ideological belief in it use it but it doesn't have utility really, it's more hassle to use than normal currency, so you won't use it unless you are driven to for other reasons.
More recent speculators are not libertarians but are get-rich-quick schemers...

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.

... and yes you can say all this and it's not exactly wrong but that doesn't make speculation right. Aside from inherited money you can either work for money, run a business (=work other people for money) or speculate. Of the three someone is likely to get as much flak for running a business but at least a business can produce things that are of use to people, that improve lives in some way. Speculation adds nothing of value, and just pushes up the price for people who are wanting to buy the thing that is being speculated on to actually use it (not a problem with btc as mentioned above but is an issue with metals and food I believe).

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).

I have no idea why you've said all this. Anyone transacting in btc is directly responsible for the electricity processing that transaction is using. If that person can conduct their transaction via a different method (which will use order(s) of magnitude less electricity) they should do so. You can't escape capitalism but this is like louise mensch on hignfy talking about occupy protesters drinking coffee.

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.

Is anyone using btc as a long term store of value now? I can't believe that, it's price is far too volatile and future too unproven. Yeah people are saying "btc is my pension" because they are expecting to speculate and make enough cash to retire on.
Climate change is an issue here and now. 50 years can fuck off quite frankly, you can't just imagine it'll be orders of magnitudes more efficient and therefore not worry about the insane amounts of electricity being used and carbon being generated when we are massively behind the best ideas of what we need to do to minimise the affects of climate change. Anything btc can do can be done more efficiently by existing systems.
and if nike's production processes used many orders of magnitude more energy than adidas' to produce effectively the same product then I would say not to buy nike, of course. Nothing to do with bling chavs or what nike's look like and I don't think anyone on this thread is saying anything like that, nor would I pretend it's a criticism of capitalism at all, effective or not.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Price wobbling as South Korea threatens regulation. Another of the big lies about btc is that it's impervious to government control. It very clearly isn't. The Chinese govt seems to be tolerating/encouraging it at the moment. If it ever changes its mind, the bubble will collapse within days.

 

[JimW]

Price wobbling as South Korea threatens regulation. Another of the big lies about btc is that it's impervious to government control. It very clearly isn't. The Chinese govt seems to be tolerating/encouraging it at the moment. If it ever changes its mind, the bubble will collapse within days.

Weirdly they've cracked down hard on the trading of the coins just not the mining

 

[camouflage]

Price wobbling as South Korea threatens regulation. Another of the big lies about btc is that it's impervious to government control. It very clearly isn't. The Chinese govt seems to be tolerating/encouraging it at the moment. If it ever changes its mind, the bubble will collapse within days.

South Korea's Bitcoin Regulation is Highly Optimistic, False Reports Claim Ban - Coinjournal

“The South Korean government has no other choice but to follow the regulatory frameworks and trends established by other leading governments. While there certainly exists a negative reputation attached to the cryptocurrencies, the government’s stance is to allow what has to be allowed, for the benefit of the South Korean market.”

 

[camouflage]

Among the many, many nonsenses you've been coming out with, camouflage, is this spurious notion that you can apply terms like inflation and deflation to bitcoin. You can't.

thanks, there was previously the concern I should take your thoughts more seriously.

 

[Ranbay]

And here comes the drop

 

[Ranbay]

Told ya

 

[Kesher]

Very interesting interview

 

[The Fornicator]

It's a primer of sorts. As this thread demonstrates everyone is in their own place on the curve of understanding the scale of change afoot.

 

[Chilli.s]

Just love the idea that the banks are shitting themselves over it.

 

[The Fornicator]

A nice turn of phase saying this was "an extinction level event".

 

[teqniq]

@ the above interview:

'can it overcome it's unstable nature'

lol.

E2a

He's talking transhuman stuff as well.

E2a again, sorry.. I got bored and had a fag, came back and he was still babbling so I hit stop.

 

[Fez909]

Just love the idea that the banks are shitting themselves over it.

The banks are in on it. Look up Ripple. 2nd biggest crypto-coin now. Growing at ridiculous rates (3000% in a few months).

It's funded by Bank of America, The Royal Bank of Canada, Santander, UniCredit, Standard Chartered, Westpac Banking Corporation and more.

 

[maomao]

How does one get hold of small amounts of btc now? Bittylicious wants to change a minimum of £100 worth. I can't see me needing that much in the foreseeable future.

 

[The Fornicator]

I started off on Kraken, mainly because it was in the EU (Denmark), though of course that may mean nothing.

They will need proper ID (like a driving license, a photo of you (from your phone is fine) so they can see the two match, and obv bank account details - you will be transferring to them from your a/c. It takes several days to get sorted. Anyway, it's an option: https://www.kraken.com/en-us/help/faq

Fwiw, I wouldn't trade with Kraken as they're withdrawn the stop loss option. But for just holding BTC, it's up to you but they seemed fine.