Thank you for the affirmation, I was beginning to suspect I was a Russian bot (which would break my Estonian Vanaema’s heart to no end).
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And it’s fascinating to read them and think about why you make them.
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As an older guy let me give you some financial advice, boom and bust. You’re welcome.
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Well, we will see if bitcoin impacts the economy in a significant way. I think it might, but it’s still a small fish in a big pond if you compare it to the global money supply. In any case, if it already is affecting the economy, all the more reason to be aware of what’s going on with it.
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I personally love bitcoin, for the simplest and purest reason possible.
The change leftover from a sack of weed I bought ten years ago might put my kid through college.
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BTW, the UN has an online course on Cryptocurrencies free for anyone to take. Probably a bit simple for this crowd, but the best primer I have seen yet.
http://gpml-crypto.org/modules/Crypto%20English/launch.html
There was value, then there wasn’t. Not advocating for crypto because I’m already all in on a home in Vancouver. Well I could get behind an ICO if it was called TulipCoin. Better yet “BoingBoingCoin”. As a group we have the skills. Me, I’m just the ideas guy.
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Is there a path to a “bitcoin” thing that’s not so energy hungry?
I know nothing about cryptocurrency, don’t have any, probably never will. Although I’m sad I didn’t buy some back in ~2015 when I read (but barely understood) Satoshi’s white paper. Still don’t get how it’s spent, either.
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Every time I’ve ever thought about buying Bitcoin would have been a good time to do it. I noticed this trend a few years ago, but the trend goes back to its emergence.
Too bad I’ve never actually bought any; now would be a great time to sell.
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I regret not getting some at some point. Don’t own a single bitcoin. Guess I’m no true hacker.
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Now if only Bitcoin could be used as some kind of currency…
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An uncle sagely told me to never buy speculative investments - only sell. Seriously, forward looking, when is the right time to buy/sell anything?
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Time to sell then?
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Makes me said i sold mine for like £2 grand years ago, but and that was for like 3rd of a coin at the time, but hay is what it is,
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Generally the “value” of Bitcoin is whatever the “whales” (big holders of Bitcoin) want it to be. According to the US Commodities and Futures Trading Commission, much of the “trading” that is going on is basically shuffling Bitcoins back and forth to generate volume and artificially drive the “value” of Bitcoin up. In the regular stock market this is called “wash trading” or “painting the tape”, and is quite illegal.
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It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to talk about the “market cap” of a cryptocurrency, which is just whatever the last “token” (like, 1 BTC) was traded for, multiplied by the number of outstanding tokens. It’s not anything like the market cap of a company because you could never realise even a fraction of it – Bitcoin trading is so thin that prices would immediately plummet into the abyss. “Market cap” is a word that cryptocurrency proponents use because it sounds familiar to the unwary and makes cryptocurrencies look more normal.
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When they trade - do they pay each other in Bitcoin? “This time I’ll buy a coin for $2 of Bitcoin- next trade you buy it back for $2.50” and so on? Or do they just trade between different accounts they own in that fashion?
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It’s more like foreign exchange currency trading. They buy large quantities of BTC using USD (or vice-versa) using an account on one of the exchange sites, with the USD value of BTC going up or down according to the aggregate (and perhaps whale co-ordinated) speculation. As @anselm notes, the BTC doesn’t represent equity in anything, though, which is why the “market cap” designation is misleading. No-one who really understands finance applies that term seriously to any currency; using it with BTC is kind of a “tell” about the real purpose it serves.
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That’s why things like Tether were invented. Tether is a “stablecoin”, a cryptocurrency that started out with the claim that every single “Tether” that was made available was backed by 1 US dollar in the notional vaults of the Tether organisation (a claim that has never been independently verified, seems more and more unlikely given the numbers of Tethers in circulation, and is not something that the Tether guys will aver when under oath in a court of law). That, in the minds of people who deal in cryptocurrencies, makes Tether a viable surrogate for actual US dollars, which are a hassle to move into and especially out of the cryptocurrency universe in large quantities.
The nice thing about trading BTC for Tether and vice-versa is that it can all take place inside a crypto exchange and never needs to touch an actual bank (i.e., institution that is bound by the laws and regulations pertaining to the financial industry). You only need to involve a real bank if you want to have actual US dollars.
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So it’s the Belize Dollar. But I can just pay in dollars and cut out a middle man. It’s not an investment and it’s not a currency- but people describe it as one or the other whenever someone questions it being either. It sounds like an MLM play or Ponzi scheme.
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