I have no idea what to do with my 0.05 BTC. Just let them sit there, I guess as a curiosity of old days. I don't really feel that I fit into the moon community and I don't really feel I want to build anything around this tech just because it is not about tech anymore.
Had lots of Bitcoin sift through my hands. Anyone remember the Bitcoin faucets? Those were the times.
Sincerely, One of the first 1000 users of MtGox (proof in the leaked MtGox database :P)
As a non-physical thing, it's a good place to go when you're not sure about where to put your money. That used to be the role of the dollar, but this is a good alternative that has cheaper forex fees.
I think the long-term value of bitcoin will not be buying groceries, but storing money while you wait for your the storm your grocery stores currency is in to subside. Probably not relevant to Americans right now, but I'm sure some people in Latin America can see the value.
This claim is absurd. Bitcoin is patently bad as a store of value, and that's perhaps bitcoin's worse and and most ill-suited applications. Even ignoring the speculative pressures and value manioulation being conducted, just look at how much bitcoin's market value has been fluctuating. Even yesterday it suffered a 10% drop for no reason at all. Who in their right mind believes it's a good idea to store value in a highly volatile service subjected to such speculative pressures?
Nowadays bitcoin sounds a whole lot like a pump-and-dump scheme, where shills come out of the woodwork praising bitcoin's magic and supernatural properties to fool unsuspecting fools to keep pumping money into the fraud.
I think a lot of people hear "Digital Currency" and think 'something like Apple Pay', when Bitcoin's competition is closer to ACH/wire transfers.
It's not a tech that everyone needs to use, and most people will pay an expert to use it for them. But if successful, could be a valuable medium for receiving payments from low-trust entities.
For example, if a stock exchange accepted Bitcoin for funding accounts, you could get your account up, funded and ready to trade in less than an hour. Most stock exchanges now take several days for funds to clear.
I'm not so sure about that. You could have bought BTC anytime before the past week or so and it would have appreciated significantly, regardless of whether you bought it in a peak or trough. It's just a question of magnitude. E.g. if you bought 1 BTC at the lowest or highest price in 2015 you would still have outrageous returns on it today.
This is not to say it will continue being the case going forward but it's crazy to look back at.
It's got a pretty short, volatile history to be deciding that.
Those days are gone for Bitcoin, but I've found a cryptocurrency community elsewhere that reminds me of those early Bitcoin days. I jumped in full-time and I'm having a blast.
I logged in to my Coinbase account for the first time in years this week.
What was $0.01 worth of Bitcoin from a faucet is now worth $0.20. Incredible ROI!
Of course, I am banned from Coinbase for an innocous bank mistake. There's literally no other options to buy coins at 1-2% in the US.
[1] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/#markets [2] https://coinatmradar.com/
Bitcoin cash or something like etherium are worth a look at. Bitcoin cash, as the name implies, holds the value that bitcoin should be able to be used as electronic cash.
Oh, it's way worse than that. Now, a small country's worth of electricity is consumed every day to no end at all, except "mining" Bitcoins.
The end is existence of bitcoin as solution to fairly important problem of decentralized and censorship-resistant consensus mechanism over open ledger that everybody can transfer value within (and soon with convenient atomic swaps - across multiple chains). And that is just the lowest layer of operation.
Anybody claiming bitcoin mining is wasting energy assumes the solution to said problem is worthless or the problem doesn’t exist. Both of which I (and the market) disagree with.
As for whether there could be more “efficient” way to line bitcoins - this is irrelevant, because for every jump in efficiency there will be similar jump in mining difficulty by design.
The "small country" comparison is deceptive as the energy is equivalent to just a single nuclear power plant: 15 TWh/yr = 1.7 GW
Don't suppose there are any low-level wallet-finder tools out there in case it hasn't been overwritten? It's finally worth a couple days to give that a shot on all my old hard drives (I forgot which one it was long ago, which is part of why it hasn't been worth it so far).
This could well end the Ponzi scheme in a victorious way because people that mined them from almost nothing could extract a lot of real money from people (mostly speculators) who bought recently while totally tanking the valuation.
Wait... maybe that was always the plan... Is bitcoin actually a huge planned «Robin Hood» bubble?
Maybe I just bought a piece of something like the Berlin wall and when everything goes to shit and this whole train wreck evolves into something more sane later on in 100 years or whatever, my grand children can sell my 0.05BTC on Sothebys or something :D ..
Please can we move beyond commodity currency?
Hindsight 20/20 I guess
Don't kick yourself for spending when you did, because as I'm sure you're aware, it's just as likely that you could be now saying "Thank goodness I used those Bitcoins when they still worth something".
I bought a bunch at ~$1, then they jumped to $10 and it started to be fun, because I had a bunch more value to play with, then they jumped to $100, I thought screw this. This is not why I bought them and if they keep up this volatility, then they're not going to be useful for what I want to use them for (ie. buying/selling online).
I don't regret selling them when I did, and I don't think you should either.
https://www.yours.org/content/a-new-model-for-bcf-project-or...
Not true, see Segwit recently, soon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network
edit: -3 in an hour, why?
[0] http://segwit.party/charts/
[1] https://blockchain.info/charts/transactions-per-second?times...
There are a few things going against them.
- The CBOE and CME are both much larger futures exchanges and are going to be offering futures first
- since you can't net out futures contracts from different exchanges this means they tend to become winner take all
> One way Nasdaq seeks to differentiate itself seems to be in the amount of data it uses for pricing the digital currency contracts. VanEck Associates Corp., which recently withdrew plans for a bitcoin exchange-traded fund, will supply the data used to price the contracts, pulling figures from more than 50 sources, according to the person.
This might be interesting as one of the things that everyone is worried about is price manipulation.
If you haven't thought about how futures work with respect to margin and marking at the end of the trading day you need to know that you can be required to deposit more money into your margin account if the futures trade moves against you on any given day.
This means the marking price is very important and lost of institutional money is worried that the exchanges are easy to manipulate.
see: http://openmarkets.cmegroup.com/3785/understanding-margin-ch...
> Nasdaq’s product will reinvest proceeds from the spin-off back into the original bitcoin in a way meant to make the process more seamless for traders, the person said.
This is awesome,, right now the CBOE and CME both have punted on the question of forks saying, they'll have a best efforts to figure it out.
> Seeing NASDAQ is adding it will add to the hype.
Alright, I see your point. You’re considering how this announcement will affect the bitcoin price.
BitMEX bitcoin futures are already online. IDK how many price sources they pull?
Aren't there a few other companies already selling Bitcoin futures?
Well John McAfee thinks bitcoin will hit 1 million by 2020.
There’s no guarantee that the market won’t start buying into the whale’s sell, because the market thinks the price is low. But if it works, it’s the leveraged traders who have a problem, and they deserve to be wiped out, in my opinion.
Furthermore, it’s already possible to go short on several exchanges, so if this worked like magic it would be happening right now.
* Do futures markets typically stabilize the price of a commodity?
* Who loses out if a futures contract can't be fulfilled (for example due to lack of liquidity in the underlying market)?
Kind of. It doesn't necessarily stabilize the prices of the commodity so much as allow the transferring of the risk associated with price movements.
> Who loses out if a futures contract can't be fulfilled (for example due to lack of liquidity in the underlying market)?
The exchange acting as the clearing house is on the other side of each contract so they'd be left holding the empty bag. Exchanges deal with this by settling futures daily (so net cash movement based on current price) and by setting margin requirements on the members buying or selling contracts. The margin requirements vary based on the volatility of the future and for something like Bitcoin I wouldn't be surprised if was 100%.
What's particularly cool / safe (and interesting if you're a finance nut) about futures vs. actual trading of Bitcoins is that there is zero crypto involved. Everything is cash settled in dollars.
I certainly find this interesting, but I don't think it's a good vote of confidence for Bitcoin just yet, even if it's structurally safer for the exchange. For the most part futures are not cash-settled, or only cash-settled when it is very inconvenient for the buyer or exchange to settle them physically. If you buy futures, you are usually trying to gain speculative exposure to something that is otherwise very difficult to hold (e.g. oil futures vs oil barrels).
If there is no structural obstacle to settling futures physically, that implies there is another reason the market or the exchange doesn't particularly want to. This can mean various things; in the case of Bitcoin futures specifically, I interpret this to mean that the exchange would rather not handle Bitcoin directly, because historically holding a large amount of Bitcoin at once invites hackers to try and steal them.
That's pretty savvy and does seem good for overall safety, but from the perspective of financial stability, I think it's bad for Bitcoin's overall market confidence long term. My concern is that since Bitcoin is convenient to purchase and trade directly through existing exchanges, people who are long on Bitcoin should just buy Bitcoin directly, instead of Bitcoin futures.
100% is really farfetched more like 30%
Southwest did something similar with oil a few years ago. Fuel is one of the biggest costs to an airline, so when the price of oil spiked a few years ago, many airlines had to raise ticket prices + add fees to make up for the loss. Southwest, on the other hand, had oil futures betting on the cost of oil going up. When the spike happened, their costs went up too, but they could make up for it with the futures.
how like is being down planned? could there be more to this coicident?
> Conveniently GDAX (and Coinbase), Gemini, and other exchanges all went down at the same time
Prefer buy and ignore for a decade. Still a trade rather than an investment but at least you can only lose what you put in.
BTC moved 20% down in the last 24 hours. That's like a market crash in old money. Leverage that and life will get exciting, fast.
That's pretty big. A couple years ago people were very skeptical that the big players would ever start dabbling in Bitcoin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_derivative
E.g., the CME's weather futures and options:
http://www.cmegroup.com/trading/weather/
It's not like the Merc is really involved in weather. They just let people gamble on the weather.
Each time it grows I fear bigger damages... But I also hope I'm wrong and I'll be just proven to be a fool for not having a bigger amount of bitcoin (I mined some back in the days)
Especially considering how easy it is to make a bitcoin transaction (compared to things like wheat, or oil...) it really should be "bitcoin settled".
This is one of the complexities of the ETF filings, where the filers stated their intention to determine which fork the ETF represented by things like hashpower, market cap or other temporal data points. This is dangerous for many reasons, thus it is best for the contracts to represent all possible future forks and not make a decision on them, allow the private keys to be delivered and allow the party who the coins are delivered to take split as they see fit. While this condition could be represented in a cash settled contract, there are infinite possible forks and CME could not possibly keep up with them all, thus the only practical way to solve the problem is physical delivery of private keys.
Even still, cash settlement is terrible.
Sorry but you can't have futures on bitcoins that are settled in bitcoins.
It definitely makes it a pain for post-settlement management, and would likely prevent a lot of people from trading those futures, but why exactly is it not possible?
Of course I'd have to have got in early and had the balls not the sell, not lose the keys, not get hacked and not leave them on an exchange, for years.
Man we should instead of trading bitcoins trade fish in World of Warcraft. Insane times we live in.
If you feel differently about them than you do Bitcoin futures? Why?
Besides which, there's nothing underlying the US dollar either. Sure you can pay taxes, but that's about it. The rest of the economy is a shared belief, an illusion if you will.
Shocking alert: your existence is due to the permission of others.
