We don't even see this kind of stuff in a regular bubble. I think this is something new, either Bubble 2.0 or The New Dawn.
I lived through the IT bubble and it mostly went unnoticed among me, my friends and family. Literally everyone talks about Bitcoin though. I'm seriously thinking this is a first for humanity and the consequences will be extreme regardless of crash or paradigm shift. It's one for the history books for sure.
Can we just stop for a moment and look at what people are actually trading here? A decentralised protocol upheld by a cryptographic function. This can't be compared with any stocks or commodity. Maybe the crash will be the same but it is still different.
stocks and commodity holdings are just protocols too though - not technical ones but legal/contractual ones. It's still pretty crazy though given bitcoin doesn't even have a major (legal) use to anchor it.
The Crypto Kitty bubble already popped. I lost a paycheck, which sucks right before Christmas.
Ultimately I am probably lucky that I learned my lesson with "Captain Furball Cheezburger" instead of losing my mortgage when Bitcoin pops.
According to the CIA there is 80 Trillion dollars in the world in soft money. With 21 million Bitcoins, if 1% of all the worlds money was transferred to Bitcoin, each Bitcoin would be worth $38,000.
We are basically half way there. I wouldn't be surprised if it gets that high, but we I don't understand how people think it could keep going past that even theoretically. If someone understands the reasoning behind the $500,000 predictions, I would love to have that explained.
I see that number all the time as well, but i'm confused.
There is less than 2 Trillion in Gold in the entire world. If you divide 2 Trillion / 21 Million (total number of possible bitcoins), you would get BTC of $100,000 equals the market cap of Gold. Not $500,000.
By my math BTC of $500,000 would be 5x the market cap of gold. Would someone explain how my math is wrong?
Theoretically: Let's just agree with all bitcoin holders for a few moment to not to sell bitcoins to anyone but me. Then, I buy one satoshi (0.00000001 BTC) for one dollar. Just like that, the bitcoin market price is now 100 million dollars. With exactly one dollar "transferred" to bitcoin.
maybe you're in a different age group/peer group compared to when you lived thru the IT bubble?
someone else going thru the 2000s IT bubble may have said that too...
My guess would be that the .com bubble wasn't as easy to get involved in. With Bitcoin you can buy/invest in Bitcoin in 10 minutes with zero prior knowledge. With the .com bubble you had to find a specific stock to buy and go through all the rigmarole of buying it. The barrier to entry to this bubble (if it is!) seems much lower.
Most people have a tenuous knowledge at best about what stocks are or the ecosystem behind the stock market, how to analyze stocks, or what the rules of trading are (I managed to break one when I briefly thought I could daytrade from Sharebuilder years and years ago and got suspended from trading for a few days).
They don't understand it much more than most people understand Bitcoin. Not really. It's all 'buy X and hope the number goes up!', where X is a mutual fund or random company, just like with Bitcoin/Altcoins.
Most people will at least know that a share is a tiny fraction of a company, and why it has value. Bitcoin is more of a black box (to many), and thus more prone to hype (it's far easier to make grandiose claims about the future of a currency than it is to pretend a company will grow at nearly the same rate).
I'm pretty sure the opposite is true. Many people are already invested in stocks and, even in the .com bubble, many had accounts with etrade and the like--some of which were part of the bubble itself. All you had to do was transfer your cash/stocks to pets.com or whatever.
With bitcoin, you have to sign up for/transfer money to various sketchy exchanges that you've never previously used.
E trade and Ameritrade were new companies at the time. Buying stocks on your own without your bank/a brokerage was not commonplace actually and that was a pretty substantial barrier to entry.
Well, those are brokerages. I assume what you mean is that it was more common to call your broker on the phone and place an order (at a fairly high fee in most cases). That's fair. Even in the US, online trading really came in contemporaneously with the dot-com era. That said, even the newish online brokerages were regulated to a degree we don't see with cryptocurrencies.
With the .com bubble you had to find a specific stock to buy and go through all the rigmarole of buying it.
You mean click a mouse? Buying a stock in 1999 was a lot like buying a stock now. I don’t recall how fast one could go from account creation to trading, but eTrade has been around for a while. A lot of folks had a 401K account that probably had a trading account of sort as well, so there might not have even been a barrier.
Not saying you might not be right, but buying stocks wasn’t all that hard in the 90s, either.
It’s pretty much exactly the same, down to companies adding .com to their names and talking about their internet strategy and seeing their stock double.
There are so many other spectacular things with this bubble, down to the nature of the actual instrument itself. Cryptography, decentralisation, miners, forks, etc. The IT bubble was still a stock bubble. I think this is something new.
If you were an adult during the first one, we might be able to have a real conversation about this. If not, probably not so much.
This bubble is relatively small in comparison -- so far. The number of companies, the amount of the real economy affected, the sheer pervasiveness in daily life, etc. AOL single handedly carpeted North America with CDs. Internet technology revolutionized so many things it's hard to pick the most important, in the space of about 5 years. The one that still stands out to me personally is how it totally crushed international long distance calling. Hell, it completely revolutionized the _porn_ industry. Bitcoin is no comparison (again, so far).
That was uncalled for. I was very much an adult during the first one.
You are talking about the internet revolution in general and a comparison to blockchains could possibly be relevant but not in this discussion. You didn't trade the internet in the Dot-com bubble, you traded stocks. Bitcoin is different because that's the actual instrument being traded.
Not uncalled for at all. The people talking to me about Bitcoin and how big it is are almost all in their 20’s. They have a vague idea about the Internet bubble but they certainly didn’t live through it in any meaningful way. It’s like someone telling me I can’t properly appreciate the 70’s since I didn’t experience them as an adult. It’s totally true!
I understand the point you’re making about Bitcoin being mechanically different from “Internet”. However the average consumer was investing in “Internet companies” in the same way people today talk about investing in Bitcoin. There was very little deeper knowledge about the complexities of what they were putting their money into. The motivation then and now was simply greed and “wow this is big!”
My grandfather, who sold cars for a living, called me up out of the blue to ask me what he should invest in after Netscape went public. I was 24 and we’d never talked about the stock market in my life. I had no business experience (I was about to get a lot, it turns out, but had none then) and while I was doing a ton of Internet-related work, it wasn’t making anyone money. Yet suddenly I was an Oracle to a man in his 60’s who really should have been putting his money into the bond market if anything. Instead he invested it in Spyglass, on my half-hearted “well this is a company like Netscape I guess”, and then proceeded to tell me all about how it was doing for the next 5 years. If he were still alive today, I could imagine the same thing happening with respect to Bitcoin (except this time I would tell him I have no idea, and to put his money into something that generates cash).
Adding some more thought to this — if anything I think Bitcoin is running too hot. Crypto-currency in general has the potential to be a big deal. Ethereum especially. BTC as a mechanism of exchange is probably dead right now. It could recover, but it will require a lot for it to become more than a speculator’s wet dream. Ethereum, on the other hand, is a hacker’s wet dream. But it seems to have more long-term potential from my perspective...
In general, as compared to the Internet bubble, this year might be Bitcoin’s 1995 (the year Netscape went public and suddenly the Internet went from being something you read about in a magazine to something that could make you rich). The next 5 years were pretty crazy, and Bitcoin has a long way to go to equal it. But maybe it will get there. The only thing is, I think this might be 1995 and 2001 all rolled up together, and I don’t think that will be good for Bitcoin specifically, and maybe crypto currency in general.
The most recent times I've met someone and told them I was a programmer there next question has been along the lines of: "Do you have bitcoin/what do you think about bitcoin". Super strange.
Group A is talking about bitcoin a lot to mutually reassure themselves that buying into it was the right move (and also a bit to keep others from selling before they do).
Group B is talking about bitcoin a lot to mutually reassure themselves that staying out of it was the right decision (and also a bit to keep others out since all new paper money entering the exchanges weakens their arguments, at least superficially)
I think that defection rates between those groups are already very low and will keep shrinking.
I started to get tempted to get in the crypto craze after resisting it since 2011, until my mother, who can barely use a computer, told me last night "What is this Bitcoin that everyone keeps talking about, everyone is getting rich, we should get in on it". That was a definite sign to stay away.
She was still tempted even after I explained the bubble and reminded her that 2000 of our people died last time something like this happened in 1997. A lot of people are going to suffer this time, it's not going to be pretty.
I posted another comment here saying that if the value reaches a certain level the Bitcoin crash could potentially start a war. I removed it though since I was downvoted to oblivion. I guess it wasn't so far-fetched after all!
The technology behind it could maybe one day cause "the new dawn", but there's 0 chance this is anything other than people going full retard. It's like a smaller scale, equally as stupid/shitty version of that tulip craze that happened in the Netherlands like 400 years ago or whatever.
Looks like it [is a joke!]. I mean, the new website is only a day old, hosted with "Hostgator", uses a free theme (http://websites.simplesphere.net/piupiu/) and NGINX has directory listing switched on!
That and all the news reports are syndicated from the same place, so its just propagating all over the place.
That - or I am mistaken, in which case - "All Hail our new Blockchain overlords" :)
This person is claiming that the NASDAQ listing proves that they've changed their name. Yet the link itself clearly says "Long Island Iced Tea Corp", not "Long Blockchain".
So, it would show it, because it shows the company name. And the company name is not "Long Blockchain", so the link proves nothing and the gp is full of shit.
The price spiked after the press release announcing the name change. The press release caused a real spike.
It seems far more likely that the name change hasn't been made formal, or if it has, it hasn't trickled into Yahoo's database yet. The press release says:
> The Company intends to request Nasdaq to change its trading symbol in connection with the name change.
It's an intention. It hasn't formally happened yet.
> This person is claiming that the NASDAQ listing proves that they've changed their name.
No, I'm not.
I am claiming the spike did happen, which means even if the press release is a fake, people were happy to spike a company's value massively just on a name change that mentioned the blockchain.
> In conjunction with the shift in business strategy, the Company has submitted a request to the Securities and Exchange Commission to withdraw its previously filed S-1 registration statement relating to a proposed underwritten public offering, which was filed on November 11, 2017.
Pursuant to Rule 477 under the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, Long Island Iced Tea Corp. (the “Company”) hereby makes application to withdraw its Registration Statement on Form S-1, File Number 333-221737 (the “Form S-1 Registration Statement”), relating to the offering of the Company’s securities.
The Form S-1 Registration Statement was filed in connection with a proposed public offering of the Company’s common stock and warrants. The Company has determined that at this time it will not proceed with the registration and sale of the securities as contemplated in the Form S-1 Registration Statement. The Company has not offered or sold any securities under the Form S-1 Registration Statement.
Accordingly, we request that the Securities and Exchange Commission issue an order granting the withdrawal of the Form S-1 Registration Statement as soon as possible.
It's an pretty lucrative "joke" if you happened to own LTEA yesterday. Putting out fake press releases to move a stock price is less a "joke" and more "fraud"
This is the fourth or fifth of these I've seen in the last year. Riot Blockchain for example, which used to be a worthless, failing, tiny biotech company. Overstock.com pulled a version of this fraud (I'm calling it a fraud, they may be technically legally in the clear; I believe these companies are commiting intentional fraud however, knowingly misrepresenting critical facts about their business to shareholders).
As in, back around 1999, companies with Linux in their name saw their value skyrocket, regardless of how associated their core business was with Linux.
Supposedly a key reason VA Linux (now Geeknet) named themselves that way and used NASDAQ Ticker LNUX.
For people who missed out on the .com bubble don’t miss this out. It’s a good time to experience what a bubble looks like so you can detect one in the future...
Remember this buffet quote
It’s better to be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful
This one is crazier than the dot com bubble by far. I recently went around to lots of places and asked if anyone was actually using an ICO backed system. Crickets. People used the dot coms. Even most of the really bad ones had utility.
The housing bubble built actual houses. Even tulips grow.
This might be the first bubble with zero utility. Seems like the reductio ad absurdium of financial capitalism.
The irony is that many who started Bitcoin wanted to get away from the whole financial debt based bubble driven system. Bitcoin is becoming what it sought to escape.
I have used Bitcoin a few times to do actual transfers, but the bubble has ruined its utility.
Edit: yes there are some good ideas in the ICO space, but with a few exceptions most of the non-scam projects have been unable to actually ship working software that non-nerds can use. Even for those I don't know a single person using them for actual work or anything actually serious.
My biggest concern with the lack of underlying utility / value is does currency have any real, long-term value if there is no sovereign government willing to go to war to defend its long-term interests? Or if there's no underlying system of law to protect those that engage in it? Is the plan that sovereign governments use their resources to reinforce a currency that undermines its own?
It very well might if it were useful as a currency.
Hyper-deflationary token systems that not only don't scale but lose their utility when adopted are horrible currencies. The more people use a particular block chain the less utility it has because the system doesn't scale in either transaction volume or token price stability.
Since Bitcoin isn't a currency and never can be, and seeing as it's a store of value (which matches up to its profile in terms of mining difficulty, scarcity, etc), the question if you believe Bitcoin is going to actually one day be worth $3 or $5 or $8 trillion: which countries own outsized holdings of Bitcoin? The US and China to name two. Very large quantities of Bitcoin were mined & purchased in the US in the first 3-4 years of Bitcoin. And China has represented about half of all mining the last few years as the difficulty has soared.
> lack of underlying utility / value is does currency have any real, long-term value if there is no sovereign government willing to go to war
You just described the value in your question. A wealth store/transfer platform that does require armies to protect its "banks", as they are distributed/global, does not encourage wars.
> A wealth store/transfer platform that does require armies to protect its "banks", as they are distributed/global, does not encourage wars.
Sure it does. It uses an insane amount of power. Wars are fought over the resources to generate that power all the time. You could argue that the governments of the world are indirectly subsidizing crypto by using war to maintain a stable source of energy. With no government around to protect the river that powers the hydro dam, or acquire the oil / coal required for the power plants, what is gonna power these blockchains? Solar? Who makes the solar panels? That requires trade... who structures that trade? Government.
Sorry. Bitcoin, nor any blockchain, cannot function without the all mighty government.
> It uses an insane amount of power. Wars are fought over the resources to generate that power all the time
There has been a lot of exaggeration around the amount of power used for mining. It's less that the energy used to run Google, Facebook, and many industrial applications and certainly not remotely comparable to the bulk of oil consumption in 1st world countries.
(Don't get me wrong: I'm not a fan of Bitcoin and I don't use cryptocurrencies.)
> You could argue that the governments of the world are indirectly subsidizing crypto by using war to maintain a stable source of energy.
> Sorry. Bitcoin, nor any blockchain, cannot function without the all mighty government.
This is a complete strawman. You just conflated the efforts being spent by countries to protect their entire wealth including stocks, gold, fiat money, derivatives with the efforts to access energy sources.
What does it do? I visited the site and I just see a token. What do I do with it? Transfer money? If so how does it differ from a less used higher transaction volume capable coin like Litecoin or Bitcoin Cash?
I see something about price stability but then there's a chart and it does not appear stable at all.
In the startup world we say if nobody can tell what your company does after 10-20 seconds on the site, you have a problem. At the very least they should be able to get the gist like "this is a networking company that does computer network stuff" or "this is for writing web apps."
Hi! I've never used or even heard of MakerDAO. Their page is shiny, but not being in finance, I can't figure out what the point of it is. Can you explain what is so "insanely powerful" about it? And why/how would anyone outside of coin-based investing and finance types "use it regularly"?
Well, Ethereum was basically an ICO and you're seeing lots of investment and potential development in that space. Even my company is planning to have a division start using Ethereum as a development platform over the next few years, and it's a large corporation.
As for the rest, most of those just raised their money in the past year or two and haven't had a chance to actually build their platform yet (if they're ever going to, I have a feeling a bunch of them are going to end up being vaporware).
> my company is planning to have a division start using Ethereum as a development platform
Hi! Serious question: can you explain more about what you mean here? I'm having trouble imagining what "development platform" means here, or how/why a division would use Ethereum as one. I'm guessing you mean something other than software development?
No, I mean software development. Ethereum has the concept of smart contracts, which are programmable to a certain extent (I haven't dived too deep into it myself, but then again, I'm not a part of that division).
Not the person that originally posted this, but the goals of Ethereum isn't to be a currency, its to be a decentralized computing platform. It implements a turing complete virtual machine that uses the blockchain as verification of the output of the software. Smart contracts are actual pieces of software executed by all of the nodes in the system, and they can communicate with each other. Running your software consumes Ethereum which is used to pay the nodes that verify the output.
Perhaps you can help me with my ignorance too; what advantage does it have over existing computing systems, be they centralised or decentralised, or is there a particular class of problem that they're particularly superior for?
The Ethereum platform shines for use-cases in which centralized trust is basically impractical or an impossibility. To me the Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) exemplifies the novel aspects of this kind of computation.
Sadly, the whole dApp ecosystem is flooded with initiatives that in practice would run better, and more efficiently outside the EVM. By this I mean the costs of running the contract on the blockchain do not really scale up to the benefits of running it in a decentralized, trustless context.
So your instinct, that it is not advantageous to run applications on the EVM is in fact correct in most of the use-cases I've seen so far (cough cryptokitties)
The general public is not talking about using bitcoin as a currency, or converting their daily spending habits into bitcoin, or even about the underlying tech and possible future applications for it. All of the "average-joe" hype is around getting rich quick off of it's meteoric rise. That's what scares me the most.
Bitcoin has some very serious problems with governance (code and policy governance that is, regulation governance is finally starting to happen, whether it will be good for bitcoin remains to be seen) which has led to very serious throughput problems (standard bitcoin can handle only 7tx/sec maximum, visa does up to 4,000tx/sec on it's busiest days) and cost problems (constrained throughput has pushed up transaction fees considerably compared to just a year ago). Bitcoin could increase it's maximum block size to 512MB to compensate but that would drastically increase the size of the blockchain as well as increase the cost of mining, how much that would decrease transaction fees is harder to determine.
Haven't you heard? Bitcoin is not a currency, and was never intended to be one; it's a "store of value"! No, really - the limited transaction rate is a feature, not a bug!
Similarly, yesterday I was at the barber's and 4 people were discussing Bitcoin. I texted a friend that we've reached peak hype, and it's time to sell.
I had a Lyft driver talking to me about it a couple weeks ago. The same driver who drove for Lyft in part because they paid him immediately which was good because he really needed to get new tires. (Pro tip: Probably not something you want to discuss with your current passenger.)
I'm sure we heard this frequently in the early days of the public internet. "What are we going to use this for?" Not a lot survived those early days, but enough did.
It will burst when everyone who could possibly be convinced to buy has bought. When the optimism is so contagious you start to doubt if it will ever really pop, that maybe this time it's different.
In the dotcom bubble, people were buying shares at prices such that justifying those prices would require companies to make more money than any company had made before. But people, including experts, said this time it's different because the internet will change everything, and those companies really will make more money than any company has before. Even though no actual hard data justified that optimism.
I highly doubt we're close to that point, to be honest. This is a global bubble. Billions of people around the world. Most of the money invested will flow in a few top coins -- not 200 different equities. The dot-com bubble was US centric, and the market went up to $6.7tn before imploding to $1.7tn.
If, in the mania of the 2000s, things could head towards $6.7tn, I don't believe that this bubble will be smaller in the age of loose monetary policy.
Money is essentially free today. A few weeks ago, Saudi Arabia paid $450m for a painting. If that isn't a sign of how money has lost its value, I don't know what is.
Would I bet everything I own on crypto? No, of course not. Can you still get a 10x return on money you invest today? I wouldn't be surprised. Even knowing there will be a major correction at some point, it's probably a mistake not to own at least some.
They're both Turing-complete blockchains which can run decentralized apps/smart contracts, and of course be used for transactions directly.
Ethereum (ETH):
Created in 2015, currently successfully running. Right now ETH uses a proof of work consensus algorithm with plans to move to a proof of stake algorithm over time. Its smart contracts can be coded in two purpose-built languages, and work is being done on cross-compilers to facilitate writing in more. ETH can currently handle ~20 tx/sec, but the community is very active in working toward vast improvements in this regard via very technical solutions (sharding, plasma), but they're not quite there yet. Ethereum is truly decentralized and runs tens of thousands of validating nodes.
EOS:
Planned creation date is in June 2018. Its smart contracts will use WASM (allowing the use of many general purpose computer languages), support parallel computation, and have some sort of ability to change deployed contracts to allow for debugging and updates. It will handle 100,000+ tx/sec out of the box, and transactions will have 0 fees. Instead of fees, percentage of holdings determines allowable transaction bandwidth (If you have 1% of EOS, you get 1% of EOS transaction throughput).
However, instead of tens of thousands of validating nodes, EOS will have 21, with all coin holders having the ability to vote for who these validators are. EOS will trust the consensus of these validators for transaction security. This is how EOS achieves such high transaction volume and zero fees. IMO, this is the main weakness of EOS.
Thanks for the breakdown. Very helpful. I'm somewhat disappointed with EOS's offering compared to ETH, as I'd always (wrongly) assumed they were providing a lot of innovations in an effort to reduce ETH market share in the whole 'dApp platform' space.
I think they do in some regards. 0 fees to run dApps combined with WASM-nativeness (write in many languages) seems objectively better than ETH when considering just those areas.
Back at the end of the dotcom bubble, I was working at some expo, messing with some servers behind a small stage that the vendor had set up. At the stage was the former finance minister of Sweden speaking about "the new economy" which is what the bubble was called in Sweden before it burst.
I specifically remember hearing him address the question (it might have been rhetorical or from the audience) as to how this was sustainable given that most of companies involved didn't actually earn any profits.
Most of the overvalued companies involved during the bubble was consultancy companies making web pages for other companies.
I still remember being somewhat stunned by the answer he gave. He explained that that was not an issue since the new economy worked differently compared to the old one.
At that point I shook my head, focused my attention back on the servers and came to the conclusion that the bubble would burst sooner than later.
People who didn't understand the internet invested in the .com bubble. Compared to crypto/blockchain, the internet is a relatively straightforward thing to understand.
My suspicion is that, because a much higher percentage of the population isn't going to be able to make sense of blockchain, it will be easier for the finance industry and startups to trick idiots into investing, and they will have a deeper pool of idiots to draw from.
Just like the .com bubble, there is real value in blockchain. You just can't judge that from the investments.
People say this, but I maintain it isn't true. The only thing the blockchain is good for is when you cannot have any kind of central trusted authority. "Central authority" typically meaning government institutions like regulations and the legal system. Once you remove a central trusted authority, transaction costs get very expensive very fast. If you can't trust anybody but yourself it means you bear the cost of validating every single part of a transaction. You see this in the blockchain--it is massively more expensive to process a transaction than using a simple database. You see this in "smart contracts" because without a legal system to fallback on, you have to code every single edge case no matter how remote or you'll get fucked (which is actually impossible anyway, and is one of the reasons why the entire idea of "smart contracts" is a bunch of baloney...).
My point is, for 99.9% of every day things we have no need for any kind of distributed trustless ledger. The transaction costs for them outweigh the alternative of simply trusting people and using our legal system when something goes bad.
The only real use case for trustless distributed ledgers are for stuff that cannot use the legal system--eg organized crime, crypto-ransomware software, illegal drug trade, etc. For everything else, a database is all you need.
By the way, I'm not even going to go into the fact that "The Blockchain" only functions with mining, and the only way to incentivize mining is to bolt a "currency" on top like Bitcoin or ETH and then find a market to sell all the "coins" the miners generate. Take away that, and who the hell pays for the mining? If your answer is "the banks would" or "the parties would"... well, if they are gonna do that why the hell wouldn't they just pay for a traditional database instead? After all, that kind of cooperation sounds pretty centralized anyway and a large Postgres instance is a lot cheaper than thousands and thousands of miners....
>By the way, I'm not even going to go into the fact that "The Blockchain" only functions with mining
I'm not very informed but I was under the impression that the blockchain is just a technology that happens to be used for cryptocurrencies. When used for currencies it requires "mining".
But if one were to use the technology for tracking shipping containers or mail then what sort of mining would need to be done?
Take away the mining and all you've got is basically a less capable version of Git - which is somewhat the same data structure (a merkle tree)
So to answer your question indirectly, unless you like using inappropriate, inefficient data structures--if you are gonna be tracking shipping containers or the mail.... a good old fashioned database is what you need.
A lot of people realized that the dotcom bubble was a bubble well before it burst. The biggest sign was investors pouring money into startups that were sort of inherently incapable of generating the level of profit that would allow them to continue operating, e.g. Kozmo.com.
Hey don't diss Kozmo. I remember being a punk teenager and ordering a single 20oz bottle of soda and having it delivered by some dude in a car an hour later. Clearly, it wasn't a bubble :-)
Yes. Everyone knew it was all crazy. I think theres a perception that nobody knows about bubbles until it is too late. The truth is that people know, but they gamble that they'll be able to get their money out before it bursts.
Look at Bitcoin. Clearly a bubble. But... do you pull out, or do you roll the dice and see if it goes to $30k?
Yes, people who worked in dot com expected it. Those who did not thought they were smarter than us. Going to coffee shops was surreal - there were people who were telling us what our companies were doing.
Respectfully, what drives people to post tulip and dot-com bubble comparisons on literally every cryptocurrency / blockchain post? We saw it yesterday. We saw it last week. And a few months ago. And in 2016, and 2014, and 2012.
It's unfalsifiable and meaningless. We don't need to have this same "point" made on every post.
Perhaps we don't need a half dozen blockchain stories on the front page every day, it's borderline spam. These threads always rehash the same arguments on both sides.
You're commenting on an article in which a small soft drink company has just sextupled it's share price by changing its name to include the word "Blockchain", and you're not seeing a tulip angle?
If just one person is contemplating betting their mortgage on bitcoin and they are made to think differently because of a bubble post then it's worth it to me!
Guaranteed anyone foolish enough to bet their mortgage at those times, bought high and sold low in fear of losing it all. They are not the rational type.
Maybe. I don't necessarily think taking a huge risk with substantial upside is always an idiotic thing to do.
Yes it might be a gamble and speculation, but get it right in a bubble and you're (sort of) set for life. You can make a good calculated bet and see it pay off. Any engineer on $100k to 200k a year can probably afford to put $200k in crypto and recover if it evaporates.
If you compare to certain high risk shares trading on the stock market (i.e. some tech and biotech shares), even though crypto might have a 10x upside, I don't think investing in crypto is 10 times as risky. If you're aggressive, you're probably better off investing in crypto today than in the market.
Ok, so for majority of the rest of the population, without access to six figure incomes. Bitcoin is completely irrational. There is a guy in my shop right now, a shop full of guys making maybe $15 an hr at the high end, handing out his "bitcoin consultant" business card. These are the people making irrational bets on this, while those invested years ago are profiting on their foolish dreams. People with no money to be wasting, are wasting their money.
Yes, of course. And since they don't put in a significant amount of money, even if their investment were to go 50x, they probably wouldn't cash out and keep holding. That is a clear mistake, as it can be dangerous not to exit.
I was just pointing out that it can be profitable riding a bubble, as long as you're careful about it. I have an old money friend who put in a few million last year. That's exciting stuff.
One thing I wonder: since they own so little, do they even move the market?
Alone no, but the combined yes. There are a few big players that manipulate this market. The Winklevoss did it, and caused the first bubble in 2013. Then the market fell off the cliff, and sat a $200 for the next 3 years, until someone bought up tons at around $250-300 mark, and here we are again.
I agree. Tulips are more like the beanie baby craze. At least crypto and dotcom can be somewhat relatable. Yes, dotcom went crazy and crashed, but the internet did end up changing the world. Crypto though is no where near the scale of the dotcom mania.
I never really agree with all the bubble talk, but this one I can relate to. Everyone is creating their own crypto, ICO, blockchain technology, etc. Even people who don't really understand it are suddenly experts.
But that doesn't mean that it will all be bubble. In the end, the potential of cryptocurrencies competing with central banks is still there. But if they will, and which one, and which one is now under- or over-valued, is anyone's (calculated) guess.
Saying it's meaningless is just being obtuse. History shows these economic bubbles don't happen every day, and there's something for people to learn here if they haven't experienced one or heard stories from friends or family that have.
> We saw it yesterday. We saw it last week. And a few months ago. And in 2016, and 2014, and 2012.
You do realize that economic bubbles rise and fall in the span of years, right? This isn't going to inflate and then pop next week.
They don't need to read about tulip / dot-com bubbles in every single thread. It's not as if this viewpoint is novel, or some kind of secret. We get it.
> You do realize that economic bubbles rise and fall in the span of years, right?
Yes. And everyone making these bubble / tulip comparisons should acknowledge how the view is unfalsifiable.
> Cryptocurrencies and blockchains are significant technological innovations.
Hardly. The Blockchain uses the same kind of underpinnings as git. In fact, for many applications git might even be a better data store than The Blockchain--it doesn't require a bajillion miners consuming several hydroelectric dams worth of power to stay online.
In this case it's probably justified: one of the hallmarks of "modern" bubbles, or at least of modern speculative hype that doesn't work out, is that renaming a company based on the hype increases its stock price without any change in the fundamentals. This has a long history, including companies during the dotcom bubble increasing their stock price by giving themselves techy names.
Out of curiosity, if this piece of news is evidence of a bubble, does they mean that if cryptocurrencies were NOT a bubble, that would somehow prevent this company from changing its name and mission and increasing in value?
I’m not immediately seeing how that would be the case.
Might've made the value increase wait until they actually did something more than only change their claimed mission, given, per the article: "Long Blockchain so far has little to show for its aspirations. It has no agreements with any blockchain firms, and says “there is no assurance that a definitive agreement with these, or any other entity, will be entered into or ultimately consummated.”"
Wait wait, you're right. I'm going to go get a dog puppet for my new business, Bitcoin Pets.
When people trade their respective government legal tender for a cryptocurrency and engage in trade of some form with said cryptocurrency a bubble?
Is the current total outstanding global debt a bubble from where it was 20 years ago?
Are institutional purchase of negative yielding bonds a bubble?
Are global central bank purchases of global stocks a bubble?
From where I sit, the bickering over the price and how justifiable it is/isnt where, is ignoring the larger societal changes taking place. All I know that, in Indonesia, I can have a website with a monero miner on it, and use the proceeds to pay for electricity, food and shelter directly.
This wasn't happening 5 years ago. And this says nothing about tax enforcement, law, and even warfare that won't go untouched by this.
For the non marginal users of crytocurrency, typical speculation rules with financial instruments still apply, but for those who can do what they couldn't before… yeah, this is just the beginning.
Where the .com boom had infinite (or seemed like) players. There is only a handful of crypto currencies that have any faith. It's not betting on the right horse if there is only one horse. The only winners are/will be people who reap their gains from now until the bubble collapse.
Timing is everything. I was invested in both (admittedly not much) and made a bit of money but certainly nothing remotely life changing--and way more than offset by other investments.
But if you were a smart investor during the .com bubble, you might have invested in Amazon or Ebay.
And if a frog had wings, it wouldn’t bump it’s ass when it hops. If you were a smart investor, you stayed the hell from internet stocks (because just like ICOs, the vast majority were losers). What you describe as “smart” was just someone who got lucky or had a crystal ball.
Not that I followed my own advice, but at least I learned something for the tuition I paid.
I was playing Pai-Gow poker at a casino with my parents and some friends. The game has side bets, which pay out if you get a good hand, independently of whether you win or lose, and (inversely) proportionate to the probability of the hand. By the numbers they're terrible bets (while Pai-Gow has the, I think, third-lowest house edge, after craps and blackjack), so my friend and I don't bet them, but my parents do. My friend got a great hand, full house maybe, and my dad said, "bet you wish you'd made the side bet," and we both said, "no, we don't."
Identifying bubbles with absolute certainty may be impossible, but identifying them with a reasonable amount of confidence is possible. They follow similar paths.
I think the original quote is "The stock market has forecast nine of the last five recessions." 1966 https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Paul_Samuelson But the idea probably applies to most predictions :)
There are means of prediction/identification that will not identify exactly when it collapses but identifies the potential.
Has the cost of the thing separated from it's usefulness? (Bitcoin is too slow and expensive for transactions. It's too volatile to be a storage of worth.)
Does slapping unrelated products with it's name boost that products purely from branding?
Bubble Talk Cycle: Not talking about a bubble, discourse of a bubble, denying a bubble, seeing a bubble, late investors rushing into to get gains from the bubble.
Shoeshine boy: Everyone is excited about bitcoin, seeing the large numbers you start getting random people proffering as the next sure thing.
Identifying bubbles is not all that hard; very few bubbles are not widely recognized before they burst, and very few not-bubbles are widely identified as bubbles.
Predicting the timing of a bubble bursting, OTOH, is hard, as is predicting the natural support level they will revert to.after bursting.
The volatility has kept me away since friends starting talking about it back when it was $50, and obviously I’m kicking myself now. But while the risk then was from the unknown, the risk now feels more like it’s from the inevitable, so I’m staying out.
The only reason this made any news is because it's tied to blockchain. Penny type stocks do this pump and dump scheme all the time with whatever is hot. Biotech was big for awhile, then pot, and now blockchain (and I'm sure I missed a few in there).
There is a serious point here - as someone more familiar with the alcoholic beverage of the company's original name than its wholesome products, I think we need some blockchain-themed cocktails for the holidays (it's probably been done... does anyone have recipes?)
Stir Japanese whiskey (2 oz), dry vermouth (1 oz), absinthe (teaspoon), and Peychaud's bitters (2 shakes) well with cracked ice, then strain into a chilled cocktail glass.
Optional: micropipette the drink into 100,000,000 smaller drinks.
A decent beer that's been left out a little too long - solid fundamentals that haven't necessarily achieved quite what you want, and may be on the verge of going bad at any moment. Add bitters to taste.
1. Use a freezer to make a tray of ice cubes
2. Use a kettle to boil water
3. Pour the boiling water over the ice and enjoy lukewarm water that required an excess of power to create.
I think this is likely not “small companies chasing a fad” but rather “penny stock promoters doing their usual thing: grab a listed entity for five figures then run a boiler room, citing the most recent successful boiler room.”
Unqualified Americans can’t invest in startups or ICOs. Blockchaina are the only assets that are growing that they can invest in. That deosn’t even include the rest of the world.
Unqualified Americans can invest in some startups since the Jobs Act under Obama, but for various reasons it hasn't been very popular. Startups are hesitant to use it because they're afraid of being blackballed by VCs... or at least that's the FUD.
Look at the 5 year chart, there have been a few large jumps in the company's stock price in the past. Don't think that "blame the Bitcoin" works for those.
WTF. Clickbait title. Even bloomberg knows it's not accurate. From the story itself: "Long Island Iced Tea Corp. shares rose 238 percent after the company rebranded itself Long Blockchain Corp."
238 != 500
Anyways, I think it's still crazy what blockchain mania is doing/causing.
Check the chart at the bottom of the article. It went up 500%, then dropped. Since the article, it seems to only be up 190%.
I imagine that over the intervening period, some value investors independently investigated the exact nature of Long Blockchain's technical innovations in the distributed thirst-quenching space.
Except the industrial value of gold which is around 10% of its use and not the quality/pure one, how is gold better than bitcoin? The favorite argument and the only argument is its history, yet when someone tries to use the same historical argument of bitcoin going up and up for 7 years, the elitist, NY folk will quickly follow with "Past performance is not an indicator of future outcomes".
I think people here are just salty because they think they are smart yet didn't saw the value in the crypto/blockchain, especially that is up their geeky alley.
if you keep a ton of gold in your house, good luck.. keeping it safe, there are safe ways to keep bitcoin, cold storage, etc. is not like is impossible.
yes, this is what hold bitcoin back but is getting better, the amazon device can be software signed, also you could encrypt your keys and upload to all cloud hosts.
Efficient markets, price contains all available information, rational expectations and whatnot there were. Oh, yeah, almost forgot,
I don't even know what a bubble means. These words have become popular. I don't think they have any meaning.
- Eugene Fama, Nobel Memorial Prize laureate in Economics
This reminds me of during the dot com boom. An analyst said that business to business sector is worth some huge amount of money, and B2B stocks started booming.
So a janitorial supply company changed their name and their symbol to BTOB and exploded in value.....
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 263 ms ] threadI'm thinking:
Ageless, blockchain, AI VR company
I lived through the IT bubble and it mostly went unnoticed among me, my friends and family. Literally everyone talks about Bitcoin though. I'm seriously thinking this is a first for humanity and the consequences will be extreme regardless of crash or paradigm shift. It's one for the history books for sure.
Ultimately I am probably lucky that I learned my lesson with "Captain Furball Cheezburger" instead of losing my mortgage when Bitcoin pops.
According to the CIA there is 80 Trillion dollars in the world in soft money. With 21 million Bitcoins, if 1% of all the worlds money was transferred to Bitcoin, each Bitcoin would be worth $38,000.
We are basically half way there. I wouldn't be surprised if it gets that high, but we I don't understand how people think it could keep going past that even theoretically. If someone understands the reasoning behind the $500,000 predictions, I would love to have that explained.
Bitcoin can handle 3-7 transactions per second.
There is less than 2 Trillion in Gold in the entire world. If you divide 2 Trillion / 21 Million (total number of possible bitcoins), you would get BTC of $100,000 equals the market cap of Gold. Not $500,000.
By my math BTC of $500,000 would be 5x the market cap of gold. Would someone explain how my math is wrong?
Thanks for reassuring me that a bitcoin wont ever be worth anything within an order of magnitude to $38,000.
They don't understand it much more than most people understand Bitcoin. Not really. It's all 'buy X and hope the number goes up!', where X is a mutual fund or random company, just like with Bitcoin/Altcoins.
With bitcoin, you have to sign up for/transfer money to various sketchy exchanges that you've never previously used.
You mean click a mouse? Buying a stock in 1999 was a lot like buying a stock now. I don’t recall how fast one could go from account creation to trading, but eTrade has been around for a while. A lot of folks had a 401K account that probably had a trading account of sort as well, so there might not have even been a barrier.
Not saying you might not be right, but buying stocks wasn’t all that hard in the 90s, either.
My dad ruined his retirement fund buying Nextel options that ended up worthless.
Bitcoin is a dumber bubble though.
I've only got in it what I can afford to lose, personally, which isn't a whole lot, but it's still some skin in the game, at least.
Even the rumors show that this is going in the same direction.
This bubble is relatively small in comparison -- so far. The number of companies, the amount of the real economy affected, the sheer pervasiveness in daily life, etc. AOL single handedly carpeted North America with CDs. Internet technology revolutionized so many things it's hard to pick the most important, in the space of about 5 years. The one that still stands out to me personally is how it totally crushed international long distance calling. Hell, it completely revolutionized the _porn_ industry. Bitcoin is no comparison (again, so far).
That was uncalled for. I was very much an adult during the first one.
You are talking about the internet revolution in general and a comparison to blockchains could possibly be relevant but not in this discussion. You didn't trade the internet in the Dot-com bubble, you traded stocks. Bitcoin is different because that's the actual instrument being traded.
My grandfather, who sold cars for a living, called me up out of the blue to ask me what he should invest in after Netscape went public. I was 24 and we’d never talked about the stock market in my life. I had no business experience (I was about to get a lot, it turns out, but had none then) and while I was doing a ton of Internet-related work, it wasn’t making anyone money. Yet suddenly I was an Oracle to a man in his 60’s who really should have been putting his money into the bond market if anything. Instead he invested it in Spyglass, on my half-hearted “well this is a company like Netscape I guess”, and then proceeded to tell me all about how it was doing for the next 5 years. If he were still alive today, I could imagine the same thing happening with respect to Bitcoin (except this time I would tell him I have no idea, and to put his money into something that generates cash).
In general, as compared to the Internet bubble, this year might be Bitcoin’s 1995 (the year Netscape went public and suddenly the Internet went from being something you read about in a magazine to something that could make you rich). The next 5 years were pretty crazy, and Bitcoin has a long way to go to equal it. But maybe it will get there. The only thing is, I think this might be 1995 and 2001 all rolled up together, and I don’t think that will be good for Bitcoin specifically, and maybe crypto currency in general.
Group B is talking about bitcoin a lot to mutually reassure themselves that staying out of it was the right decision (and also a bit to keep others out since all new paper money entering the exchanges weakens their arguments, at least superficially)
I think that defection rates between those groups are already very low and will keep shrinking.
She was still tempted even after I explained the bubble and reminded her that 2000 of our people died last time something like this happened in 1997. A lot of people are going to suffer this time, it's not going to be pretty.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albanian_Civil_War
----
Looks like it [is a joke!]. I mean, the new website is only a day old, hosted with "Hostgator", uses a free theme (http://websites.simplesphere.net/piupiu/) and NGINX has directory listing switched on! That and all the news reports are syndicated from the same place, so its just propagating all over the place.
That - or I am mistaken, in which case - "All Hail our new Blockchain overlords" :)
https://finance.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3ALTEA
Whether or not the press release is a fake, the spike is real.
So, it would show it, because it shows the company name. And the company name is not "Long Blockchain", so the link proves nothing and the gp is full of shit.
It seems far more likely that the name change hasn't been made formal, or if it has, it hasn't trickled into Yahoo's database yet. The press release says:
> The Company intends to request Nasdaq to change its trading symbol in connection with the name change.
It's an intention. It hasn't formally happened yet.
No, I'm not.
I am claiming the spike did happen, which means even if the press release is a fake, people were happy to spike a company's value massively just on a name change that mentioned the blockchain.
http://www.nasdaq.com/press-release/long-island-iced-tea-cor...
Is this the withdrawal it talks about?
---
Pursuant to Rule 477 under the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, Long Island Iced Tea Corp. (the “Company”) hereby makes application to withdraw its Registration Statement on Form S-1, File Number 333-221737 (the “Form S-1 Registration Statement”), relating to the offering of the Company’s securities.
The Form S-1 Registration Statement was filed in connection with a proposed public offering of the Company’s common stock and warrants. The Company has determined that at this time it will not proceed with the registration and sale of the securities as contemplated in the Form S-1 Registration Statement. The Company has not offered or sold any securities under the Form S-1 Registration Statement.
Accordingly, we request that the Securities and Exchange Commission issue an order granting the withdrawal of the Form S-1 Registration Statement as soon as possible.
---
As in, back around 1999, companies with Linux in their name saw their value skyrocket, regardless of how associated their core business was with Linux.
Supposedly a key reason VA Linux (now Geeknet) named themselves that way and used NASDAQ Ticker LNUX.
History never repeats but it rhymes
For people who missed out on the .com bubble don’t miss this out. It’s a good time to experience what a bubble looks like so you can detect one in the future...
Remember this buffet quote It’s better to be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful
The housing bubble built actual houses. Even tulips grow.
This might be the first bubble with zero utility. Seems like the reductio ad absurdium of financial capitalism.
The irony is that many who started Bitcoin wanted to get away from the whole financial debt based bubble driven system. Bitcoin is becoming what it sought to escape.
I have used Bitcoin a few times to do actual transfers, but the bubble has ruined its utility.
Edit: yes there are some good ideas in the ICO space, but with a few exceptions most of the non-scam projects have been unable to actually ship working software that non-nerds can use. Even for those I don't know a single person using them for actual work or anything actually serious.
Hyper-deflationary token systems that not only don't scale but lose their utility when adopted are horrible currencies. The more people use a particular block chain the less utility it has because the system doesn't scale in either transaction volume or token price stability.
You just described the value in your question. A wealth store/transfer platform that does require armies to protect its "banks", as they are distributed/global, does not encourage wars.
Sure it does. It uses an insane amount of power. Wars are fought over the resources to generate that power all the time. You could argue that the governments of the world are indirectly subsidizing crypto by using war to maintain a stable source of energy. With no government around to protect the river that powers the hydro dam, or acquire the oil / coal required for the power plants, what is gonna power these blockchains? Solar? Who makes the solar panels? That requires trade... who structures that trade? Government.
Sorry. Bitcoin, nor any blockchain, cannot function without the all mighty government.
There has been a lot of exaggeration around the amount of power used for mining. It's less that the energy used to run Google, Facebook, and many industrial applications and certainly not remotely comparable to the bulk of oil consumption in 1st world countries.
(Don't get me wrong: I'm not a fan of Bitcoin and I don't use cryptocurrencies.)
> You could argue that the governments of the world are indirectly subsidizing crypto by using war to maintain a stable source of energy. > Sorry. Bitcoin, nor any blockchain, cannot function without the all mighty government.
This is a complete strawman. You just conflated the efforts being spent by countries to protect their entire wealth including stocks, gold, fiat money, derivatives with the efforts to access energy sources.
I see something about price stability but then there's a chart and it does not appear stable at all.
In the startup world we say if nobody can tell what your company does after 10-20 seconds on the site, you have a problem. At the very least they should be able to get the gist like "this is a networking company that does computer network stuff" or "this is for writing web apps."
As for the rest, most of those just raised their money in the past year or two and haven't had a chance to actually build their platform yet (if they're ever going to, I have a feeling a bunch of them are going to end up being vaporware).
Hi! Serious question: can you explain more about what you mean here? I'm having trouble imagining what "development platform" means here, or how/why a division would use Ethereum as one. I'm guessing you mean something other than software development?
They wrote up a blog post about some practical use cases for it: https://www.blogs.conduent.com/2017/12/05/the-possibilities-...
Sadly, the whole dApp ecosystem is flooded with initiatives that in practice would run better, and more efficiently outside the EVM. By this I mean the costs of running the contract on the blockchain do not really scale up to the benefits of running it in a decentralized, trustless context.
So your instinct, that it is not advantageous to run applications on the EVM is in fact correct in most of the use-cases I've seen so far (cough cryptokitties)
https://globenewswire.com/news-release/2017/12/21/1268978/0/...
I was just 15 but one of my current day co-workers was active at the time and he lost a lot of money in shares that he thought would keep their value.
Shares he had received from employers.
But with cryptocurrencies people can't stop talking about how it will burst. Maybe that will change things in a somewhat psychological way.
In the dotcom bubble, people were buying shares at prices such that justifying those prices would require companies to make more money than any company had made before. But people, including experts, said this time it's different because the internet will change everything, and those companies really will make more money than any company has before. Even though no actual hard data justified that optimism.
If, in the mania of the 2000s, things could head towards $6.7tn, I don't believe that this bubble will be smaller in the age of loose monetary policy.
Money is essentially free today. A few weeks ago, Saudi Arabia paid $450m for a painting. If that isn't a sign of how money has lost its value, I don't know what is.
Would I bet everything I own on crypto? No, of course not. Can you still get a 10x return on money you invest today? I wouldn't be surprised. Even knowing there will be a major correction at some point, it's probably a mistake not to own at least some.
They're both Turing-complete blockchains which can run decentralized apps/smart contracts, and of course be used for transactions directly.
Ethereum (ETH):
Created in 2015, currently successfully running. Right now ETH uses a proof of work consensus algorithm with plans to move to a proof of stake algorithm over time. Its smart contracts can be coded in two purpose-built languages, and work is being done on cross-compilers to facilitate writing in more. ETH can currently handle ~20 tx/sec, but the community is very active in working toward vast improvements in this regard via very technical solutions (sharding, plasma), but they're not quite there yet. Ethereum is truly decentralized and runs tens of thousands of validating nodes.
EOS:
Planned creation date is in June 2018. Its smart contracts will use WASM (allowing the use of many general purpose computer languages), support parallel computation, and have some sort of ability to change deployed contracts to allow for debugging and updates. It will handle 100,000+ tx/sec out of the box, and transactions will have 0 fees. Instead of fees, percentage of holdings determines allowable transaction bandwidth (If you have 1% of EOS, you get 1% of EOS transaction throughput).
However, instead of tens of thousands of validating nodes, EOS will have 21, with all coin holders having the ability to vote for who these validators are. EOS will trust the consensus of these validators for transaction security. This is how EOS achieves such high transaction volume and zero fees. IMO, this is the main weakness of EOS.
Greenspan called it "Irrational Exuberance" in 1996 [1], although I personally don't remember it being that bad then.
By 1999, the word "bubble" was all over the media.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrational_exuberance
I specifically remember hearing him address the question (it might have been rhetorical or from the audience) as to how this was sustainable given that most of companies involved didn't actually earn any profits.
Most of the overvalued companies involved during the bubble was consultancy companies making web pages for other companies.
I still remember being somewhat stunned by the answer he gave. He explained that that was not an issue since the new economy worked differently compared to the old one.
At that point I shook my head, focused my attention back on the servers and came to the conclusion that the bubble would burst sooner than later.
My suspicion is that, because a much higher percentage of the population isn't going to be able to make sense of blockchain, it will be easier for the finance industry and startups to trick idiots into investing, and they will have a deeper pool of idiots to draw from.
Just like the .com bubble, there is real value in blockchain. You just can't judge that from the investments.
People say this, but I maintain it isn't true. The only thing the blockchain is good for is when you cannot have any kind of central trusted authority. "Central authority" typically meaning government institutions like regulations and the legal system. Once you remove a central trusted authority, transaction costs get very expensive very fast. If you can't trust anybody but yourself it means you bear the cost of validating every single part of a transaction. You see this in the blockchain--it is massively more expensive to process a transaction than using a simple database. You see this in "smart contracts" because without a legal system to fallback on, you have to code every single edge case no matter how remote or you'll get fucked (which is actually impossible anyway, and is one of the reasons why the entire idea of "smart contracts" is a bunch of baloney...).
My point is, for 99.9% of every day things we have no need for any kind of distributed trustless ledger. The transaction costs for them outweigh the alternative of simply trusting people and using our legal system when something goes bad.
The only real use case for trustless distributed ledgers are for stuff that cannot use the legal system--eg organized crime, crypto-ransomware software, illegal drug trade, etc. For everything else, a database is all you need.
By the way, I'm not even going to go into the fact that "The Blockchain" only functions with mining, and the only way to incentivize mining is to bolt a "currency" on top like Bitcoin or ETH and then find a market to sell all the "coins" the miners generate. Take away that, and who the hell pays for the mining? If your answer is "the banks would" or "the parties would"... well, if they are gonna do that why the hell wouldn't they just pay for a traditional database instead? After all, that kind of cooperation sounds pretty centralized anyway and a large Postgres instance is a lot cheaper than thousands and thousands of miners....
I'm not very informed but I was under the impression that the blockchain is just a technology that happens to be used for cryptocurrencies. When used for currencies it requires "mining".
But if one were to use the technology for tracking shipping containers or mail then what sort of mining would need to be done?
So to answer your question indirectly, unless you like using inappropriate, inefficient data structures--if you are gonna be tracking shipping containers or the mail.... a good old fashioned database is what you need.
Hey don't diss Kozmo. I remember being a punk teenager and ordering a single 20oz bottle of soda and having it delivered by some dude in a car an hour later. Clearly, it wasn't a bubble :-)
Look at Bitcoin. Clearly a bubble. But... do you pull out, or do you roll the dice and see if it goes to $30k?
Yes, people who worked in dot com expected it. Those who did not thought they were smarter than us. Going to coffee shops was surreal - there were people who were telling us what our companies were doing.
It's unfalsifiable and meaningless. We don't need to have this same "point" made on every post.
Otherwise you risk just being in a positive-reinforcement echo chamber.
In fact, if they sell today, they'd probably be set for life.
Yes it might be a gamble and speculation, but get it right in a bubble and you're (sort of) set for life. You can make a good calculated bet and see it pay off. Any engineer on $100k to 200k a year can probably afford to put $200k in crypto and recover if it evaporates.
If you compare to certain high risk shares trading on the stock market (i.e. some tech and biotech shares), even though crypto might have a 10x upside, I don't think investing in crypto is 10 times as risky. If you're aggressive, you're probably better off investing in crypto today than in the market.
I was just pointing out that it can be profitable riding a bubble, as long as you're careful about it. I have an old money friend who put in a few million last year. That's exciting stuff.
One thing I wonder: since they own so little, do they even move the market?
But that doesn't mean that it will all be bubble. In the end, the potential of cryptocurrencies competing with central banks is still there. But if they will, and which one, and which one is now under- or over-valued, is anyone's (calculated) guess.
> We saw it yesterday. We saw it last week. And a few months ago. And in 2016, and 2014, and 2012.
You do realize that economic bubbles rise and fall in the span of years, right? This isn't going to inflate and then pop next week.
> You do realize that economic bubbles rise and fall in the span of years, right?
Yes. And everyone making these bubble / tulip comparisons should acknowledge how the view is unfalsifiable.
Cryptocurrencies and blockchains are significant technological innovations. There is more to discuss than making the same tired tulip comparisons.
Hardly. The Blockchain uses the same kind of underpinnings as git. In fact, for many applications git might even be a better data store than The Blockchain--it doesn't require a bajillion miners consuming several hydroelectric dams worth of power to stay online.
See the story above.
> And a few months ago. And in 2016, and 2014, and 2012.
Nothing changed other than paper gains increased.
Is this implying that cryptocurrencies have not evolved over that time period? I think you know that this is false.
1. they are slower
2. it is more difficult to cash them out
Looks like utility decreased.
Everyone is fearful about the blockchain bubble right now, it seems. Time to be greedy? :)
I’m not immediately seeing how that would be the case.
Wait wait, you're right. I'm going to go get a dog puppet for my new business, Bitcoin Pets.
Is the current total outstanding global debt a bubble from where it was 20 years ago?
Are institutional purchase of negative yielding bonds a bubble?
Are global central bank purchases of global stocks a bubble?
From where I sit, the bickering over the price and how justifiable it is/isnt where, is ignoring the larger societal changes taking place. All I know that, in Indonesia, I can have a website with a monero miner on it, and use the proceeds to pay for electricity, food and shelter directly.
This wasn't happening 5 years ago. And this says nothing about tax enforcement, law, and even warfare that won't go untouched by this.
For the non marginal users of crytocurrency, typical speculation rules with financial instruments still apply, but for those who can do what they couldn't before… yeah, this is just the beginning.
But if you were a smart investor during the .com bubble, you might have invested in Amazon or Ebay.
The question is, will there be an Amazon or Ebay cryptocurrency, and which one?
Edit: 32 with over a billion dollar cap.
And if a frog had wings, it wouldn’t bump it’s ass when it hops. If you were a smart investor, you stayed the hell from internet stocks (because just like ICOs, the vast majority were losers). What you describe as “smart” was just someone who got lucky or had a crystal ball.
Not that I followed my own advice, but at least I learned something for the tuition I paid.
Unfortunately predicting bubbles is nigh impossible. Bubbles can only be defined after they exist.
Has the cost of the thing separated from it's usefulness? (Bitcoin is too slow and expensive for transactions. It's too volatile to be a storage of worth.)
Does slapping unrelated products with it's name boost that products purely from branding?
New financial instrument backing the bubble? In this case we have the holy grail where the backing instrument is the thing itself! https://www.forbes.com/sites/investor/2017/05/31/cryptocurre...
Bubble Talk Cycle: Not talking about a bubble, discourse of a bubble, denying a bubble, seeing a bubble, late investors rushing into to get gains from the bubble.
Shoeshine boy: Everyone is excited about bitcoin, seeing the large numbers you start getting random people proffering as the next sure thing.
That's not what the parent said. They said "detect one".
"detect" != "identifies the potential"
no?
Predicting the timing of a bubble bursting, OTOH, is hard, as is predicting the natural support level they will revert to.after bursting.
Never fails.
Looks like there's already a bitcoin cocktail floating about: http://www.barmeister.com/drinks/recipe/7511/?o=by_date
"On the first day of blockchain, my true love gave to me: a ve-ry small pri-ime number!"
Stir Japanese whiskey (2 oz), dry vermouth (1 oz), absinthe (teaspoon), and Peychaud's bitters (2 shakes) well with cracked ice, then strain into a chilled cocktail glass.
Optional: micropipette the drink into 100,000,000 smaller drinks.
Don't know what (some amount), Anything else (little bit), Unknown item (in large portions)
1. That I have been drinking
Give it to someone you've never met.
Enjoy.
(Not really a cocktail, but oh well :p).
The question is who is going to be the Chrome Browser and Firefox?
If BTC is Netscape, I'd say ETH is IE6 and it will stay for a while. Chrome and FF is not even on the horizon.
You mean IPOs
238 != 500
Anyways, I think it's still crazy what blockchain mania is doing/causing.
I imagine that over the intervening period, some value investors independently investigated the exact nature of Long Blockchain's technical innovations in the distributed thirst-quenching space.
https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?CIK=LTEA&owner=excl...
I think people here are just salty because they think they are smart yet didn't saw the value in the crypto/blockchain, especially that is up their geeky alley.
It's also a lot harder to accidentally lose.
Case in point: https://www.wired.com/story/i-forgot-my-pin-an-epic-tale-of-...
I don't even know what a bubble means. These words have become popular. I don't think they have any meaning. - Eugene Fama, Nobel Memorial Prize laureate in Economics
So a janitorial supply company changed their name and their symbol to BTOB and exploded in value.....
[0] https://mobile.nytimes.com/1999/04/14/business/company-news-...