At that time, you could not get any money, USD or BTC, out of the exchange. Those were not USD, those were GOXUSD because they could not be transacted with anywhere but the exchange nor transferred.
Same for the BTC there, they were GBTC, not real BTC.
The rumors I've heard tie this to activity spurred by changes in yuan valuation.
Does anyone know of a site that visualizes information that could add information to that hypothesis? I'm thinking something like trading volumes per geographical area.
I'm also curious what role bitcoin could play in mitigating currency risk. Are people using it to buy foreign currencies and keep them in secret bank accounts? Are they attempting to use Bitcoin as a store of value?
Bitcoin is very useful for three things, which are a store of value similar to gold (although it is more volatile), money remittance to other countries, and illegal or anonymous activities. I don't know how many people are using it for each, though.
Also as a side note it's typically very difficult to make bank accounts in other countries if you are not a resident.
I worked in data science at a tech startup that focused on remittance ($1 billion ARR). I was also offered a position at an early stage bitcoin startup in Vietnam, one of the top 'send countries' for remittance from the U.S. This is the first and primary Bitcoin service provider in Vietnam.
Bitcoin is not ideal for remittance in practice.
Speed: If you use your own wallet, waiting for the blockchain to propagate might actually be slower than currency through a remittance company. I don't know what the clearing process is for Bitcoin wallets SaaS, but Bitcoin is equal to if not slower than normal remittance tech startups. After all, speed is one of the factors these remittance startups are tackling to disrupt Western Union.
Rate: I can't speak universally, but doing remittance in or out of Vietnam with Bitcoin was too high last year. ~5% if we go USD -> BTC -> VND. ~10% in the reverse. These rates are indicative of the local currency being worthless. I also remember transferring Bitcoin internally in the U.S. last year through SaaS would eat out half a percentage.
Foreign workers who remit to their loved ones are price sensitive. That leaves Bitcoin as remittance viable to people who aren't price sensitive, at the asset of more anonymity. IMO, dirty money is not price sensitive. 10% fee to launder money is cheap. If you're already going down this road though, Vietnam mom and pop shops offer practically free remittance. They are unlikely to be regulated. And again, local Vietnam currency is useless. It's not stable or a good store of value. The government sets artificial exchange rates. People in Vietnam desperately want to exchange their money for USD, and are willing to pay a premium, which is still better than the governments rate, and so the remittance shop is able to offer people sending USD to Vietnam a free service.
A Bitcoin provider will have to exchange to and from the local currency if it's to be used for remittance. In the case of Vietnam, the exchange must exchange Bitcoin for the more worthless local currency, and hence charge the higher exchange rate. The provider in Vietnam has an underlying market exchange, actually, where there is no liquidity because people with Bitcoin expect a huge premium to exchange it for local currency.
I think Vietnam's situation can be generalized to other remittance countries where the local currency is undesired, and the government has locked down people exchanging it for USD.
I worked in data science at a tech startup that focused on remittance ($1 billion ARR). I was also offered a position at an early stage bitcoin startup in Vietnam, one of the top 'send countries' for remittance from the U.S. This is the first and primary Bitcoin service provider in Vietnam.
Bitcoin is not ideal for remittance in practice.
Speed: If you use your own wallet, waiting for the blockchain to propagate might actually be slower than currency through a remittance company. I don't know what the clearing process is for Bitcoin wallets SaaS, but Bitcoin is equal to if not slower than normal remittance tech startups. After all, speed is one of the factors these remittance startups are tackling to disrupt Western Union.
Rate: I can't speak universally, but doing remittance in or out of Vietnam with Bitcoin was too high last year. ~5% if we go USD -> BTC -> VND. ~10% in the reverse. These rates are indicative of the local currency being worthless. I also remember transferring Bitcoin internally in the U.S. last year through SaaS would eat out half a percentage.
Foreign workers who remit to their loved ones are price sensitive. That leaves Bitcoin as remittance viable to people who aren't price sensitive, at the asset of more anonymity. IMO, dirty money is not price sensitive. 10% fee to launder money is cheap. If you're already going down this road though, Vietnam mom and pop shops offer practically free remittance. They are unlikely to be regulated. And again, local Vietnam currency is useless. It's not stable or a good store of value. The government sets artificial exchange rates. People in Vietnam desperately want to exchange their money for USD, and are willing to pay a premium, which is still better than the governments rate, and so the remittance shop is able to offer people sending USD to Vietnam a free service.
A Bitcoin provider will have to exchange to and from the local currency if it's to be used for remittance. In the case of Vietnam, the exchange must exchange Bitcoin for the more worthless local currency, and hence charge the higher exchange rate. The provider in Vietnam has an underlying market exchange, actually, where there is no liquidity because people with Bitcoin expect a huge premium to exchange it for local currency.
I think Vietnam's situation can be generalized to other remittance countries where the local currency is undesired, and the government has locked down people exchanging it for USD.
The chart in this article (Washington Post two days ago) shows the correlation between bitcoin price and yuan devaluation (scroll to the middle of the article):
I would expect the data to be from the blockchain and GeoIP of node from which the transaction originated? Of course still not 100% reliable, as theoretically people could use any node, but still interesting.
I was pointing out why 'can only be a very good thing' might be wrong. If bitcoin's advantages are enough to offset its drawbacks (of which enabling ransomware is one), that is a good thing. That is not a given, though.
The baloon will pop out soon. It's clearly a balloon - people using it to get money out of China. At some point, what goes in, will go out. Money Flow.
There will be another country where this happens. The fact that Bitcoin works well in this situation is further proof that it is a decent currency for international trade.
And speculation, as it says in the headline of that NYT article.
The volume of bitcoins bought with bolivars (Venezuela's currency) is inherently limited: you would only want to sell bitcoins in exchange for bolivars if you could spend the bolivars immediately. That basically limits the sellers to people already having bitcoin and living in Bolivia.
Doubtful. This is literally a revolutionary technology like the internet. The only hash coin that has proven stable over the long term. Why won't it just keep rising?
The blockchain, as we know it today, would not exist in any meaningful sense without tokens of value incentiving people to secure it (the miners). If you believe otherwise, you will need to demonstrate what that means and how it works. The two are currently inseparably intertwined.
Because theres no use for it besides activity people want to do anonymously (often illegal) or avoidance of state economies (like venezuala). Outside of that, its mostly speculation and hoarding.
I agree that Bitcoin and its underlying technologies are completely revolutionary, and that Bitcoin has proven to be the most stable implementation of these technologies over time. And I personally think that Bitcoin is worth many times more than what it is trading at now. However, the price and trading of Bitcoin over the past few weeks have been driven by hype and speculation, not by the unique value that the technology brings. When prices increase because of speculation, they will likely re-correct. I expect the price to drop again after the hype cools off.
> This is literally a revolutionary technology like the internet.
You can't say things like this without supporting them and expect to be taken seriously. Blockchains look to me like a brilliant approach to a real problem, but the approach is still not good enough to actually solve that problem. Also, most Bitcoin enthusiasts seem to misidentify the problem that it approaches.
You don't think it is an impressively innovative way of securing, recording, and transferring value?
There are major issues, volatility not being the least. And I'll be the first to admit I doubt many of its proponents more ambitious claims.
However, on a basic level, its capability to reliably store and transfer value has only grown and become stronger in the past 8 years.
If it's a bubble, it's certainly an incredibly long running, transparent bubble. There isn't hidden, crucial information, compared to assets like Madoff's fund and housing that were recent long-running "bubbles" (of a certain sort). In those cases, the hidden information becoming public would have ended those bubbles sooner.
It is an impressively innovative way of recording value (transferring and securing, not as much, but that's a discussion for another time). Plenty of things are impressive without actually solving the problems they try to solve, though. 1990s speech recognition software was impressive, but not actually suitable for its intended purpose.
> However, on a basic level, its capability to reliably store and transfer value has only grown and become stronger in the past 8 years.
It's been pretty terrible at storing value over the past 8 years, because of the volatility (though it's been pretty good as a speculative asset). Its capacity to transfer value has grown, but that's just because the ecosystem surrounding bitcoin has grown -- e.g. something like M-Pesa grew much more over the same time frame, just because more people accept it. This has nothing to do with the technology.
People use various technologies for various reasons, many having to do with specific characteristics of the technology itself. Accidental reasons do exist, but the technical deficiencies must be small enough to not overshadow the favorable accidental reasons. In other words, it has to be good enough, given the context, or it won't happen. So I don't think it's fair to dismiss adoption as meaningless.
I agree it is difficult to determine how well Bitcoin has "stored value" over the past 8 years. But I don't think speculation should be casually dismissed, as continued speculation rarely happens for many years without reasonable fundamentals supporting the space. Short term bubbles can possibly be more noise/mob-mentality than meaningful signal. However, many bubbles over time, coupled with a strong underlying trend, is definitely a powerful signal that something interesting is happening. Additionally, the volatility is decreasing year over year, which is another point in favor of bitcoin as a value storage mechanism.
I think one big problem in discussing bitcoin is people get hung up on different things that are supposedly the "purpose" of bitcoin, and then argue in circles about that. There are definitely some questionable ideologies in the bitcoin space.
As no single group is in charge of bitcoin, I'd personally would rather not assume any specific predetermined purpose, and just look at how the system is functioning and what the fundamental characteristics and dynamics seem to be.
I doubt it. You don't think Bitcoin has a fair market cap at around $10-20 billion? Seems like a reasonable range to me, especially since gold is worth way over $1 trillion. The gold bubble should pop way before Bitcoin does.
Gold actually physically exists and, aside from more practical uses, has been prized for decoration and jewelry for thousands of years. I don't really see that as a particularly good comparison.
The large majority of gold is held for purely monetary or investment reasons. Decorative and industrial usage contributes a minority share to the value of gold.
Yea, but if I have a lot of gold I don't have to worry that another, slightly different version of the metal is going to show up tomorrow and take away all of the value of my gold.
With Bitcoin however, assuming I believe that unregulated digital currencies are valuable, I'm still left with the question 'why is this one particularly valuable?'
The answers typically given include market adoption, support from companies, current value, and name recognition. These things have value, but none of them are intrinsic to bitcoin, and are all subject to rapid change.
For that reason, I don't consider bitcoin to be in any way 'stable,' especially since most of its value is driven by speculative investment rather than actual utility.
historically, sometime after the 1,000% gains over previous all-time highs.
This usually comes after an exchange experiences a loss of service. I would be curious to see what drama unfolds this time, since the exchanges are more numerous and seemingly more robust at this point in time.
Or big liquidation event. It's now a mainstream trading currency, a lot of retail dudes going just become it goes up. Let's see what happens :)
edit: not pair, but currency.
At least it is easy to short this time, but I hate the possibility of margin calls in periods of high volatility so I'm still aggravated that there are no standardized options contracts ready for this rally, since they have better profit potential and no margin calls when the price moves against you.
Bitcoin's intrinsic value is related to its ability to store a moderate amount of "debt" related data in an immutable way. As long as this "feature" continues to work well in our current economic environment, people/entities will continue using it. Saying it's going to the moon, or pop, is simply a result of a biased argument against the technology and neglects the real value in being able to say this transaction is related to these events created by human causality.
IOUs that can't be repudiated, payments that can be cryptographically proven, payments that can have conditional logic attached (e.g. third party escrow, without third party having access to the money) -- and all without the need of a centralized authority or PKI system. Those are the real values of the bitcoin system.
Mind you, there are a few downsides too - potential to create transactional race conditions if you control enough of the system; difficulty changing into other currencies; architectural decisions yet to be ironed out about how to scale to a mass audience.
Lack of ability to reverse a transaction could also be seen as a negative in certain lights -- no "visa, cancel this charge, they scammed me".
On lower level, Bitcoin's intrinsic value is the right/ability to write a new row into an immutable append-only decentralised censorship-proof spreadsheet table. It is valuable not only in economic context to create a border-less cash-like virtual commodity. It could be used for proof of publication or proof of existence and in many other ways.
Without causality, storing a number in a row in an immutable table isn't going to happen. Bitcoin's value is certainly derived from its ability to keep things immutable, but keep in mind there is another force at play here as well: human based causality.
If you are willing to take some counterparty risk (and who isn't, amiright?) bitfinex has plenty of leverage and options-type trading. Chinese exchanges also offer high leverage to many customers if you really like the idea of gambling.
Years ago I built an options and futures trading platform for Bitcoin but we were strangled by regulatory compliance and I shut it down. There are always a few around but the problem with the market is that no major holder of Bitcoin wants to hedge their position in the slightest. It's such a highly volatile asset in and of itself.
Don't think about bitcoin as a western individual. Think of it like you were in a poor/developping country, where 95% of the population doesn't have a bank account. Well, bitcoin gives an international bank account to anyone. With the growth of internet in these areas, Bitcoin will grow.
The problem right is that $0.25 transaction fees are now common- Not exactly ideal for a developing country (though the current price spike is mostly unexplained, so it's totally possible it is succeeding for some developing country use cases, despite the high fees)
If bitcoin prices drop to anything like they were 6 months ago it's even worse than that: you'd spend more on electricity than you would earn by mining.
It looks like you could expect around 800 million hashes/second doing Bitcoin mining on a Titan X. The current Bitcoin hash rate is about 2.5 quintillion hashes/second.
The current reward for a block is 25 bitcoins, plus whatever fees are included in the transactions which are relatively small at the moment, as I understand it. A block is mined roughly once every 10 minutes, so that's 3600 bitcoins/day mined. At $1100, that's about $4 million/day.
You could expect to see, on average, an amount relative to the proportion of total hashing power you bring. That would be $4 million * 8e8 / 2.5e18 = 0.13 cents/day, approximately. (Note, not $0.13, but $0.0013.)
I was curious myself so I just had to look it up. As far as I know, everything is ASICs now. I don't believe there are any more big steps to take from there, just refinement to chip design and fabrication.
If I may offer a slight correction: the reward per block halved to 12.5 bitcoin in July 2016 [0]. Doesn't materially change the results [1], but probably worth mentioning for posterity.
As much as I really don't care for the energy waste associated with mining, when parents at the bus stop started talking to me about production block chain deployments they were working on, it's obvious the block chain will be adopted by the enterprise.
82 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 191 ms ] thread[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_bitcoin#Prices_and_...
At that time, you could not get any money, USD or BTC, out of the exchange. Those were not USD, those were GOXUSD because they could not be transacted with anywhere but the exchange nor transferred.
Same for the BTC there, they were GBTC, not real BTC.
Does anyone know of a site that visualizes information that could add information to that hypothesis? I'm thinking something like trading volumes per geographical area.
I'm also curious what role bitcoin could play in mitigating currency risk. Are people using it to buy foreign currencies and keep them in secret bank accounts? Are they attempting to use Bitcoin as a store of value?
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/#markets
Sort by volume. It's not as accurate as you requested but it's close enough.
Also as a side note it's typically very difficult to make bank accounts in other countries if you are not a resident.
Bitcoin is not ideal for remittance in practice.
Speed: If you use your own wallet, waiting for the blockchain to propagate might actually be slower than currency through a remittance company. I don't know what the clearing process is for Bitcoin wallets SaaS, but Bitcoin is equal to if not slower than normal remittance tech startups. After all, speed is one of the factors these remittance startups are tackling to disrupt Western Union.
Rate: I can't speak universally, but doing remittance in or out of Vietnam with Bitcoin was too high last year. ~5% if we go USD -> BTC -> VND. ~10% in the reverse. These rates are indicative of the local currency being worthless. I also remember transferring Bitcoin internally in the U.S. last year through SaaS would eat out half a percentage.
Foreign workers who remit to their loved ones are price sensitive. That leaves Bitcoin as remittance viable to people who aren't price sensitive, at the asset of more anonymity. IMO, dirty money is not price sensitive. 10% fee to launder money is cheap. If you're already going down this road though, Vietnam mom and pop shops offer practically free remittance. They are unlikely to be regulated. And again, local Vietnam currency is useless. It's not stable or a good store of value. The government sets artificial exchange rates. People in Vietnam desperately want to exchange their money for USD, and are willing to pay a premium, which is still better than the governments rate, and so the remittance shop is able to offer people sending USD to Vietnam a free service.
A Bitcoin provider will have to exchange to and from the local currency if it's to be used for remittance. In the case of Vietnam, the exchange must exchange Bitcoin for the more worthless local currency, and hence charge the higher exchange rate. The provider in Vietnam has an underlying market exchange, actually, where there is no liquidity because people with Bitcoin expect a huge premium to exchange it for local currency.
I think Vietnam's situation can be generalized to other remittance countries where the local currency is undesired, and the government has locked down people exchanging it for USD.
Bitcoin is not ideal for remittance in practice.
Speed: If you use your own wallet, waiting for the blockchain to propagate might actually be slower than currency through a remittance company. I don't know what the clearing process is for Bitcoin wallets SaaS, but Bitcoin is equal to if not slower than normal remittance tech startups. After all, speed is one of the factors these remittance startups are tackling to disrupt Western Union.
Rate: I can't speak universally, but doing remittance in or out of Vietnam with Bitcoin was too high last year. ~5% if we go USD -> BTC -> VND. ~10% in the reverse. These rates are indicative of the local currency being worthless. I also remember transferring Bitcoin internally in the U.S. last year through SaaS would eat out half a percentage.
Foreign workers who remit to their loved ones are price sensitive. That leaves Bitcoin as remittance viable to people who aren't price sensitive, at the asset of more anonymity. IMO, dirty money is not price sensitive. 10% fee to launder money is cheap. If you're already going down this road though, Vietnam mom and pop shops offer practically free remittance. They are unlikely to be regulated. And again, local Vietnam currency is useless. It's not stable or a good store of value. The government sets artificial exchange rates. People in Vietnam desperately want to exchange their money for USD, and are willing to pay a premium, which is still better than the governments rate, and so the remittance shop is able to offer people sending USD to Vietnam a free service.
A Bitcoin provider will have to exchange to and from the local currency if it's to be used for remittance. In the case of Vietnam, the exchange must exchange Bitcoin for the more worthless local currency, and hence charge the higher exchange rate. The provider in Vietnam has an underlying market exchange, actually, where there is no liquidity because people with Bitcoin expect a huge premium to exchange it for local currency.
I think Vietnam's situation can be generalized to other remittance countries where the local currency is undesired, and the government has locked down people exchanging it for USD.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/01/03/why-b...
(Not a very strong correlation, in my opinion. Note the short arbitrary time period chosen.)
There are a number of exchanges in China with zero cost trades, which distorts volume figures.
http://fiatleak.com/
Most of the volumes do come from China.
Edit: I was incorrect. See below, it seems this doesn't apply for this website as they aren't using volume data from exchanges.
No. It has enabled the rise of ransomware.
I was pointing out why 'can only be a very good thing' might be wrong. If bitcoin's advantages are enough to offset its drawbacks (of which enabling ransomware is one), that is a good thing. That is not a given, though.
http://bitcoinity.org/markets/bitstamp/USD
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/#markets
For previous spikes price leads the search popularity on the upswing but search popularity leads price on the downslope.
The volume of bitcoins bought with bolivars (Venezuela's currency) is inherently limited: you would only want to sell bitcoins in exchange for bolivars if you could spend the bolivars immediately. That basically limits the sellers to people already having bitcoin and living in Bolivia.
You can't say things like this without supporting them and expect to be taken seriously. Blockchains look to me like a brilliant approach to a real problem, but the approach is still not good enough to actually solve that problem. Also, most Bitcoin enthusiasts seem to misidentify the problem that it approaches.
There are major issues, volatility not being the least. And I'll be the first to admit I doubt many of its proponents more ambitious claims.
However, on a basic level, its capability to reliably store and transfer value has only grown and become stronger in the past 8 years.
If it's a bubble, it's certainly an incredibly long running, transparent bubble. There isn't hidden, crucial information, compared to assets like Madoff's fund and housing that were recent long-running "bubbles" (of a certain sort). In those cases, the hidden information becoming public would have ended those bubbles sooner.
> However, on a basic level, its capability to reliably store and transfer value has only grown and become stronger in the past 8 years.
It's been pretty terrible at storing value over the past 8 years, because of the volatility (though it's been pretty good as a speculative asset). Its capacity to transfer value has grown, but that's just because the ecosystem surrounding bitcoin has grown -- e.g. something like M-Pesa grew much more over the same time frame, just because more people accept it. This has nothing to do with the technology.
I agree it is difficult to determine how well Bitcoin has "stored value" over the past 8 years. But I don't think speculation should be casually dismissed, as continued speculation rarely happens for many years without reasonable fundamentals supporting the space. Short term bubbles can possibly be more noise/mob-mentality than meaningful signal. However, many bubbles over time, coupled with a strong underlying trend, is definitely a powerful signal that something interesting is happening. Additionally, the volatility is decreasing year over year, which is another point in favor of bitcoin as a value storage mechanism.
I think one big problem in discussing bitcoin is people get hung up on different things that are supposedly the "purpose" of bitcoin, and then argue in circles about that. There are definitely some questionable ideologies in the bitcoin space.
As no single group is in charge of bitcoin, I'd personally would rather not assume any specific predetermined purpose, and just look at how the system is functioning and what the fundamental characteristics and dynamics seem to be.
With Bitcoin however, assuming I believe that unregulated digital currencies are valuable, I'm still left with the question 'why is this one particularly valuable?'
The answers typically given include market adoption, support from companies, current value, and name recognition. These things have value, but none of them are intrinsic to bitcoin, and are all subject to rapid change.
For that reason, I don't consider bitcoin to be in any way 'stable,' especially since most of its value is driven by speculative investment rather than actual utility.
This usually comes after an exchange experiences a loss of service. I would be curious to see what drama unfolds this time, since the exchanges are more numerous and seemingly more robust at this point in time.
What is this supposed to mean? It sounds a bit like carving IOUs in stone but that is probably not what you were hinting at.
I would consider Rai Stones as a good analagy, given they also stored suffering in a trustworthy way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones.
When I say "suffering" I'm referring to the amount of causality associated with a given amount of value stored, not the human emotion attached to it.
Mind you, there are a few downsides too - potential to create transactional race conditions if you control enough of the system; difficulty changing into other currencies; architectural decisions yet to be ironed out about how to scale to a mass audience.
Lack of ability to reverse a transaction could also be seen as a negative in certain lights -- no "visa, cancel this charge, they scammed me".
http://www.eltiempo.com/tecnosfera/novedades-tecnologia/bitc...
Can someone with 4 Titan-X cards even mine anything worthwhile? Given municipal electricity is very cheap, etc?
No.
It seems you really need a huge hardware investment to mine anything and you must mine long term to even pay for the investment you made.
What are current miners like, hardware wise?
The current reward for a block is 25 bitcoins, plus whatever fees are included in the transactions which are relatively small at the moment, as I understand it. A block is mined roughly once every 10 minutes, so that's 3600 bitcoins/day mined. At $1100, that's about $4 million/day.
You could expect to see, on average, an amount relative to the proportion of total hashing power you bring. That would be $4 million * 8e8 / 2.5e18 = 0.13 cents/day, approximately. (Note, not $0.13, but $0.0013.)
So, yeah, not really worthwhile.
If I may offer a slight correction: the reward per block halved to 12.5 bitcoin in July 2016 [0]. Doesn't materially change the results [1], but probably worth mentioning for posterity.
[0] http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36763524
[1] 1800 bitcoin / day mined @ $1100/BTC is $2MM/day, so one would gross $2MM * 8e8 / 2.5e18 = $0.00064/day. And at today's ~$900/BTC, $0.00052/day.