In late 2009, the most visible seller was NewLibertyStandard[1], who had a unique pricing methodology[2].
You could buy roughly a thousand bitcoins for $1. This was widely considered overcharging.
[1]: http://newlibertystandard.wetpaint.com/page/2009+Exchange+Ra...
[2]: "During 2009 my exchange rate was calculated by dividing $1.00 by the average amount of electricity required to run a computer with high CPU for a year, 1331.5 kWh, multiplied by the the average residential cost of electricity in the United States for the previous year, $0.1136, divided by 12 months divided by the number of bitcoins generated by my computer over the past 30 days."
There weren't even 1.3 million bitcoin in circulation at that point [1]. If you bought every bitcoin, you could have accumulated about 1.1 million BTC for $850.
[1] http://blockchain.info/charts/total-bitcoins?timespan=all&sh...
Indeed, 1.3 million is over 10% of all bitcoins available at the moment.
But there is no doubt that buying that many bitcoins at that time would have been difficult. The few sellers you would have been able to find would have probably raised their price when seeing your interest.
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/oct/29/bitcoin-fo...
Satoshi implored people in December 2009 (several months after this post) to postpone mining using GPUs for as long as possible[1].
Interestingly, despite growing worldwide adoption of Bitcoin, comments about it on HN continue to be more or less evenly split between doubters and optimists. And I wouldn't be surprised if comments to this submission are evenly split between those same two camps.
No amount of evidence or reasoning seems to persuade either camp to change its views!
Instead, I think the point is that the volume of doubters and supporters still seems to be about equal; whereas many technologies appear to shift proportion of support vs. doubt more significantly over time.
While it is quite clear that Bitcoin has "value" as long as people are willing to trade it (i.e., indefinitely), there is still no reason to assume that it will ever stop having these extreme fluctuations.
To the contrary, I'd say that, as time progresses, we observe Bitcoin having the same problems that the gold standard had, mixed with an additional proneness to speculation.
At scale, things gain stability. If a newborn loses a pound, that's 10% of their weight. If I do, it is .5% of mine.
Think of the difference in waves occurring in a big pool vs a little pool, when a person of the same weight dive in it. In a little pool, a person dives, the waves are proportionally very big. In a big pool, the person diving hardly affects the water in its totality.
The same applies to Bitcoin. The more each coin is worth, the less big buyers and sellers will impact the overall market.
So, if Bitcoin had a total market capitalisation of, say, 10 trilliion, then even big players would only affect a few Satoshi as they buy in and out of the market, therefore the fluctuations would decrease.
Of course, there's still be people who had held on to their coins from the very beginning, so their leverage on the total market would be big, still. But such people would be very few and far between, because everyone has a selling point. Also, it wouldn't be in their interest to rock the boat very much, just as it isn't in any central bank to buy too much gold in one go, because their movements affect the market price much more than people buying and selling at the margin.
Actually I was thinking about this yesterday, and I think if/when goods start to be priced in BTC (not just "fixed USD value converted to current BTC equivalent") that could help anchor the value of BTC.
ram1024 1655 days ago | link [dead] | fold
i'm having trouble wrapping my head around the logistics of this...One interesting observation about the two comments, is both authors are still occasionally posting to HN, if you click thru. Its a long lived community.
But it's ram1024 and he is hellbanned:
ram1024 1656 days ago | link [dead] | fold
i'm having trouble wrapping my head around the logistics of this... -----
Hah!
How much is your monetary bet then?
I actually expect I'd have lost the bet if they'd taken it, due to my way too generous terms but that's not the point.
The point was to try to illustrate that "oh it'll crash" is a nonsense prediction.
Be concrete, and put your money where your mouth is, or realise that you haven't actually thought it through.
I was a bit taken aback that the tone of this submission was, "See! Bitcoing worked!"
Uh, no one outside of a few small circles has any idea what it is. And any currency as volatile as Bitcoin is broken.
right now there is so much fluctutation within BC it might as well be tulips. maybe it will become a stable currency, maybe it won't.
I don't know it's worth $0.10, $100, or $1000000...
In short, that's begging the question. It's like saying "tulips are great because it lets me give people tulips".
Perfectly Fungible
Perfect Liquidity
Perfect Stability
Right now bitcoins are commodities. Any bitcoin is equally valuable as any other bitcoin; bitcoin's value derives from its purchasing power and from its exchange rate to other mediums of exchange. It has great liquidity and fungibility. However it has inherent stability problems as well as ambient ones:
Currently it experiences volatility by virtue of transactions not being demoninated in BTC, and of its exchange rate to other mediums of exchange. A large part of this is because it is consistently attracting large pools of people who wish to acquire it. The recent price spike appears to be a consequence of Chinese interest in acquiring bitcoin rapidly increasing. Eventually the number of people who want to possess bitcoins will grow as a function of the population on the planet, rather than as a function of new groups of people deciding it has become appealing. This will introduce some stability.
However, there's a fundamental flaw in that the pool of bitcoins is fixed, and that possessors know the finite size of the pool of bitcoins a priori. This exerts deflationary pressure on BTC, and as others have noted, discourages its spending. BTC is vastly more liquid than gold is, for example, but the stability of its value will always be an impediment to its usefulness as a currency.
This doesn't spell the doom of Bitcoin; it doesn't need to be a perfect currency, just a better currency than other currencies. It is already the most liquid commodity on the planet. It is at least as fungible as USD; attempts by coinvalidation to ruin this notwithstanding. Should the deflationary pressure of bitcoin compared to its circulation become sufficiently small, it will have inherent qualities to make it the best currency available, which can lead to it becoming more widespread.
A currency with lower transaction costs in time, and which has growth characteristics which trend toward following the value of productive output of the human race will certainly be better. USD are inherently worse.
I still believe its just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Bitcoin.
Here's some random data to back that up.
https://www.surveymonkey.com/blog/en/blog/2013/03/25/print-b...
The printed page is centuries if not millennia away from becoming a niche subculture.
Not kidding. And I don't see how others can't see them either.
But that is the nature of perception. You either perceive something or you don't and it's difficult to tell someone "there is a ship out there!" when their eyesight is too crappy to discern it. They end up having to trust you and trust is problematic.
Think about it. Bitcoin is robust enough that it could have only been developed with the resources offered by a government, the currency records all transaction histories, and we still have absolutely no idea of who this Satoshi Nakamoto guy is, assuming he's not some government taskforce. Didn't it strike anybody as odd that the same congress and government that normally takes an extreme luddite stance was so enthusiastic about Bitcoin? They can hardly wrap their heads around things like Google Glass and net neutrality, and yet they're absolutely pandering over Bitcoin.
Something isn't right here.
I bet the list of failed companies and "haters" who called it accurately is much much bigger.
Although I do like the nostalgic value of these posts.
Crypto-currency good. Bitcoin not so much.
The absolute problem with bitcoin is, is that it cannot be used as a currency. If one bitcoin can buy you one "x" today, two "x" tomorrow and in a week only half an "x", what is the point of spending it? Its value fluctuates way too much and that's why so many people are getting on board. They want to be in the elevation towards another all time high.
I am not saying that Bitcoin does not have a future, but key in this future is that all those investors and startups on the get-rich-quick-with-a-very-high-potential-to-loose-a-lot-scheme have to abandon ship. The value of Bitcoin has to stabilize because at this point it is not a viable currency. Currently it is just an asset so many people are interested in, which drives the price only further up.
As soon as it stabilizes or drops we will see what it will d o with Bitcoin its popularity and acceptance for other goods and services.
Well let me blow your mind a little bit:
I own some Bitcoin, and I've been spending bitcoins every month for the last four or five months to pay my rent and other living expenses.
And I'm not "cashing out" because I think there's a bubble that will burst. I'm as bullish on Bitcoin as anyone. I fully expect it to hit $10,000 within the next 10 years. I think there's a good chance it'll one day be 10% of the Gross World Product, which would mean they'll be $500k each.
So why am I selling Bitcoins to pay rent? Because I have enough that I can hold onto some of them, enough to be a worthwhile investment, and at the same time sell some off in order to allow me to work on my passion project. That's worth more to me than the abstract possibility of a large windfall in the future.
Hoarding doesn't make sense if you're a human being. If you're a human being, at some point you're like "Fuck it, I'm buying that JetSki!"
BTC, as a main currency, would exert a negative pressure on investment.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1532670 - Bitcoin P2P Cryptocurrency | 1217 days ago | 24 comments
Some other early, popular posts about Bitcoin:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1942708 - Imagine your computer as a wallet full of Bitcoins| 1088 days ago | 36 comments
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1998144 - How to Get Started with Bitcoins | 1072 days ago | 47 comments
I might be considered a conspiracy nut: But "decentralized, anonymous, crypto" + "currency" sounds like a contradictio in terminis to me. Especially the "anonymous" part.
Thanks HN!
Remember that negative and critical viewpoints are normally perceived to be from the the more intelligent person. Unfortunately people who are more accepting of new and novel ideas can at first seem like the less intelligent of the group. (Probably because they are not quick to dismiss and put down a thing, and thus have less to say at first glance)
The only solution is to think for yourselves and research the positions presented.
(Should I give you a much-much longer list of posts where people expressed their doubt and eventually they were right?)
many people ? Are you generalizing over a single post ?
I wonder how many people who make bold public statements about things ever change their mind? Or if they just become entrenched in their opinions.
As far as a hosted shared drive goes, Dropbox does a great job.
However, there's also the fact that a typical user doesn't have to download the whole blockchain in order to use bitcoins--they'll be connected to the nodes that do (that are dedicated for that purpose).
Oh wait, what did I just do?
>Well this is an exceptionally cute idea, but there is absolutely no way that anyone is going to have any faith in this currency.
> joedoliner.com jdoliner@gmail.com https://twitter.com/jdoliner
Like I said, I quite liked the polarity of the comments and the fact that it was the first post on bitcoin in HN ..
But it snow-balled into this !
The only person that I know that is always right is my wife.
Various estimates for the future BTC value range from $2,000 to $1,000,000.
There are plenty of new bitcoin merchant and users every day and the USA won't stand while the rest of the world adopts THE next store of value/currency/commodity/new category.
It is also possible that people here on HN do not have enough intuition about ideas, which could possibly change the world just like bitcoin is doing it right now. It's fun to read retrospective posts here on HN, but apparently innovation starts elsewhere..
It's an interesting property of markets that they can seemingly boostrap themselves, just so long as there is support during the initial growth stage. You don't have to believe in Bitcoins to trade in them, you just have to believe someone wants them. This might be why black markets and transaction privacy are so essential to making the currency work. Since there are a large number of people who need to make their payments private, the rest of the market believes that the currency has intrinsic value in its exclusivity in certain transactions.
I am asking, because I tried to find the first post on reddit.com (obviously before /r/bitcoin was created) and couldn't really retrieve anything useful.
I was searching by date ranges on site:reddit.com and was getting user profiles not posts.
I wish I could be such a dreamer, capable to understand the idea and its potential and have a bit of drive and courage to give it a try.