rkbabang

Nice post. I would add, I think there's a lot of over-thinking going on in this thread, with all due respect. I think there's a real chance Bitcoin has staying power ( periodic plunges aside). It could be as simple as this: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/18/opinion/bitcoin-boom-technology-trust.html?_r=0 Thank you for posting this. I think the author nailed it. Right down to his last statement saying that Bitcoin could be the Netscape of this generation. In the end it might not be Bitcoin itself that survives, but something out of this class of technology (or its descendants) is going to change the world, of that I'm sure.

I know about search bots, but would that account for hundreds of views to a single page in minutes? There is no need for google to load the page more than once (unless it changes). I can't think of 100 search engines, are there that many? Maybe there are a lot of other people/companies/government agencies/aliens who are crawling/indexing the web for whatever reason. I don't know.

I haven't done this, but maybe keep an eye out for companies that add "Blockchain" to their name.

You choices here is not when to participate. Yes it may be a lot safer to come in after the 'crash'; but you will be injecting NEW cash, and THINK you know everything - when in fact, you will have zero investment experience with the technology. Whereas your counterpart will be both using HOUSE money, AS WELL AS their investment experience in the technology. Materially less risk, and significantly better prepared to deal with it - is this really the position you want to be in? Yes in your early days there WILL be losses, it's why it is called tuition. SD Good point. Another thing to consider is that, while I think mattee2264 is exactly correct, I also think that we haven't even seen most of the bubble yet. The institutional money has barely started to come in and we haven't yet seen the pension funds and endowments, nor central banks start investing and I think we will see all of that before this crashes. You will see a mania that makes the tech bubble pale in comparison. My prediction is that yes the bubble will pop eventually and we may see a 90% reduction in price, but that even after that 90% reduction in price it might still be higher than it is today. For example BTC=$500,000 pre crash and $50,000 post crash (or even with a 95% reduction it would be $25,000) then taking another 10 years to reach $500,000 again.

That’s like saying you are going to buy up all the gold in the world for it’s current market cap. Do you know what would happen to the price if you tried? You’d send the market cap of crypto into the 100s of trillions. And once you did own all the gold or all the crypto the only thing you could do is sell/spend it for a lot less then you bought it for. Unless you like starring at your blockchain or fondling your cube.

Just hilarious. And things still don't get out of hand. CoBF at its best! S&M on CoBF! Maybe we need a new section for that.

You are correct. I think the word "blockchain" is becoming a trendy buzz word and you will see companies trying to get in on the hype with "blockchain based" this and "blockchain based" that in order to boost their stock price, but a private blockchain where you have to trust the people who control it is nothing but an inefficient database. If it isn't running on a public distributed blockchain then it isn't safe. To answer your first question right now most companies running on public blockchains (or planning to) are using Etherium. There is also IOT, ADA, EOS, NEO, and soon to be released Tezos, which support this kind of thing. Blockchains such as BTC, BCH, LTC, DASH, BTG, XMR, etc ... are just currencies. There is also Ripple which is only a currency and a private blockchain which I think will be valueless long term for the reasons that you enumerated (you have to trust Ripple the company). There is going to be a lot of money thrown at a lot of valueless things for a long time based on hype, buzzwords, and outright fraud before people in general understand this stuff.

Maybe a very small % of the bulls actually understand the technology. Most people are just jumping on the hype... recently had a friend (kind of a stoner, never invested in his life, does some football gambling) tell me he's concidering going into bitcoin as it seems like a guaranteed investment. ;D Based on the number of investors many of which just jumped in the last month and own very little you are correct, but weighted by the number of coins owned SnarkyPuppy is correct.

This one is good as well: http://thereformedbroker.com/2017/10/18/an-evening-in-wonderland/ "The stampede is coming I mentioned a few weeks back that you can practically smell it in the air – the big money is coming into this space. I can’t imagine how that doesn’t blow the price up into the stratosphere. For all of Jamie Dimon’s protestations, his firm is experimenting with cross-border transfers using blockchain. So is every other major financial institution – or at least they’re thinking about it and planning it. The big rumor going around last night is that Goldman Sachs is going to launch market-making in crypto currency for their clients in the third quarter of 2018. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but multiple people who don’t know each other are saying it. And why wouldn’t they? If that’s what their customers are asking for (and they are), then of course they will. This is the institutionalization of something that right now is still on the fringes of finance. What will that mean for the prices of coins? Pensions and endowments Another thing that was kind of hinted at – pension and endowment money dipping a toe in. We’re talking about trillions of dollars in these pools. If even 1% of that starts looking for allocation, forget about it. Ari Paul from Blocktower says the pensions aren’t coming in until the custodian issues are worked out. With a traditional investment like a stock or a bond, your big risk is that they will drop in value. With crypto, you have that issue too, but then you have an added risk that you don’t have with stocks and bonds: Your holdings can disappear from theft! Nobody worries about their stocks being stolen. Everyone worries about their coins being hacked. Solidifying the custody system is going to take time. Ari mentions that someone asked him “When will the University of Chicago buy in?” His reply is “Six months after Yale does.” Everyone laughs. But it’s true. The way Ari looks at it, right now, if someone at a college endowment takes the risk upon his or herself to buy Bitcoin, they face ridicule or a firing. But eventually, that career risk flips around the other way. Imagine someone from the Yale Endowment makes a splash in Bitcoin and gets written up everywhere for how forward-thinking they are. All of a sudden the CIOs at all the other endowments are being questioned “Why the hell didn’t you do that? Did you even look at it?” This is how manias are fueled, by the way – institutional ass-covering. They all did this with hedge funds in the 90’s and commodities in the 00’s. It hasn’t begun yet in this arena. This is me talking – a major endowment announcing Bitcoin investments coupled with Goldman launching an exchange could be light’s out. That could be the sequence of events that causes a stampede."

I have a 16 year old daughter and nope I would not. I wouldn't feel very comfortable leaving her alone with another old male Senator either. But given the choice, I'd pick one who hasn't been accused of the things he has. That doesn't mean he is guilty and should be punished though. He wasn't running for girls gym coach at a middle school or asking to be alone with my daughter. There are no 14 year old girls currently in the Senate. In fact that is the perfect job, because they are all adults there (and mostly ancient ones at that).

Yes, it's the liberals have a lot of soul searching to do. Not the fine people of Alabama who voted for a pedophile. You know, the Christians with the family values and all. SMH. I admittedly haven't followed the whole Moore thing too closely, but it is my understanding that he isn't a convicted pedophile, he is a man who is accused of being a pedophile. Let's not engage in witch hunts. If I accuse you of rape does that make you a rapist and should it ruin your career? When someone makes an accusation shortly after they are raped (like say Juanita Broaddrick) I'm a lot more likely to give it credence, but these accusations from long ago coming up just when a politician happens to be running for office strikes me as not quite as believable.

People seizing power and covertly stealing from the general population? The economy is best left untouched by 'policy makers'. They'll only fuck things up like they have shown throughout history. Policy makers are messed up in their own ways but there is a very sound economic rationale behind why fiat is better than bitcoin. No there's not. There is Keynesian dogma and brainwashing which a child understands is bullshit. People never spend their money if it increases in purchasing power? How naive must you be to buy that ... But believe what you wish. This falls under freedom of religion for me. To the people not understanding why it's an improvement over gold I simply refer to this blogpost from 2012 http://moneyandstate.com/bitcoin-libertarian-introduction-used-care/ the same Keynesian dogma prevented a depression like the one experienced post 1929....i would rather believe in reality than conspiracy theories. What you meant to say is that the central bank didn't cause a depression this time like it did 1929.

Not sure I understand how it has "no game changing benefits" as compared to gold when you can transact in bitcoin literally without an intermediary. Exactly. Say you want to transfer $1B worth of gold to someone on the other side of the planet. This would be much easier, faster, and cheaper to do in Bitcoin. Say you want to leave the country and take your entire net worth with you. You could literally memorize 12 english words and take a Billion dollars with you in your head.

Ha! Be careful what you search for as you just might find it.

I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that it was never possible before. In all the history of mankind up until Satashi published his white paper, any currency created by man would have been easily inflated and would require you to trust the issuer. So no, there is no precedent.

Even the high estimate is under 25%. http://fortune.com/2017/11/25/lost-bitcoins/ "3.79 million bitcoins are already gone for good based on a high estimate—and 2.78 million based on a low one. Those numbers imply 17% to 23% of existing bitcoins" AND: "both estimates make a critical assumption that coins belonging to bitcoin’s inventor, Satoshi, are gone for good" Take Satoshi's coins out of the estimates and you get 2.75M to 1.73M lost coins or 10% to 16% And these estimates are considering a large amount of coins which haven't moved in a while to be lost (30-50%), no one really knows which are lost and which are simply being held. Stupid question - how can bitcoins get lost, just by losing the digital keys? yes, if you lose your flash drive, but I think you can recover your wallet if you remember your key. Yes the only way to access a wallet is to know the private key. And it is a long hexadecimal number which is pretty much impossible to memorize. Most modern HD wallets derive the keys from a hash of 12 words which can be memorized, but that didn’t exist back when the first wallets were created by Satashi. There is no way he has his key memorized. It has to be saved electronically or printed on paper. If it is lost, then it is lost forever.

Artificial Stupidity? “Forever generating unique inspirational quotes for the endless enrichment of pointless human existence” http://www.iflscience.com/technology/ai-trying-to-design-inspirational-posters-goes-horribly-and-hilariously-wrong/

I don’t expect 20X returns in 2018, but I am still bullish on its prospects. But I didn’t expect 20x gains in 2017 either and here we are. Your guess is as good as mine. Maybe it will be back at $100 this time next year or $100,000.

heh. Roy Moore Retires From Politics To Spend More Quality Time With Someone's Kid https://politics.theonion.com/roy-moore-retires-from-politics-to-spend-more-quality-t-1821235915 Another great quote I read this morning went something like: This shows that voters will not knowing elect a sex offender. Unless of course the only other option is Hillary.

LOL, that is hilarious. Are you new to reddit?

I agree completely. "but most of the companies from that era never panned out." And some of the companies from that era turned into great companies and phenomenal life changing investments. You just have to ask yourself if you are investing in Amazon.com or pets.com. And if you will panic when the first crash comes or not? I think there is a good chance that there is at least 1 amazon.com of cryptocurrencies/blockchains on this list: BTC, BCH, ETH, XTZ, XMR, DASH, NEO. Which is why I own all of them. If all but one of them ends up being worth 0 I think that I still might do OK. And of course we haven't had our year 2000 yet (I'd say we are still in 1997 with 3 years to go), so will I be able to force myself to hold through it and even buy more? I don't know. The reason I think it isn't anywhere near the top yet is that almost everyone thinks that it is. Everyone I talk to, many of which never heard of bitcoin until this year, says its a bubble and references tulips, etc. That is more like 1995-1996 when the first internet stocks went crazy catching everyone's attention and almost everyone just knew that it was a crazy bubble, than 1999-2000 when almost no one was saying it was a bubble anymore and everyone was all in.

I'd say it's more analogous to removing some of the weights that have been previously applied to the ankles of a healthy runner.

My feeling is that they are really lost. Satashi is either really patient and really believes in bitcoin, or he’s already extremely rich enough that billions of dollars doesn’t tempt him at all. I know I would have sold some by now if I were him. The other 2 possibilities are that he lost the keys or he is dead. If you read some of the code and the messages that he had on forums I have no reason to believe that he would sell any of it, he talks a lot about the bailouts of certain banks within the code. What would be the point would be of creating bitcoin to become a decentralized currency just to become cash rich. He seems like a textbook Austrian. "Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts. Their massive overhead costs make micropayments impossible." He/they could sell $10M worth today to live off of in the meantime and not even make a dent in the size of the holdings.

My feeling is that they are really lost. Satashi is either really patient and really believes in bitcoin, or he’s already extremely rich enough that billions of dollars doesn’t tempt him at all. I know I would have sold some by now if I were him. The other 2 possibilities are that he lost the keys or he is dead.

For me it's: 1's and 0's (I'm a digital guy). As for investing... I'm just winging it like almost everyone else. "one of the most fundamental yet still under-appreciated truths of human existence, which is this: everyone is totally just winging it, all the time." https://www.theguardian.com/news/oliver-burkeman-s-blog/2014/may/21/everyone-is-totally-just-winging-it