Bitcoin - Part 2

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Delphic Oracle said:
When stripped of their emotionally derived/perceived "value", one of them still provides a number of practical physical functions like conducting electricity (or at least coating other conductors to prevent oxidation) among others.

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Reminds me of a video of a chemist in a gold vault mourning all those tons of gold that were lost to all the interesting chemistry it could do.
 
psionl0 said:
(snip)

The main differences is that one is heavy and shiny and the other only exists in a network of computers.

(Snip)
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But the really important difference is that when the miners and the bankers and exchanges have all died or passed on, you will still have physical usable metal gold in your hand (or your hole in the ground) if you bought gold with your fiat money.

If someone needs gold for industrial use they will pay the going rate (in currency of the day) to extract it from the ground.

If you bought crypto you are likely to have a piece of paper that said you paid a certain amount of fiat money for that piece of paper. When the computers shut down or no longer run the program, no-one will trade you anything for that piece of paper. It will be worth less than a common stamp is worth. No one will buy it.
 
PartSkeptic said:
But the really important difference is that when the miners and the bankers and exchanges have all died or passed on, you will still have physical usable metal gold in your hand (or your hole in the ground) if you bought gold with your fiat money.

If someone needs gold for industrial use they will pay the going rate (in currency of the day) to extract it from the ground.
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Any industrial value of gold is swamped by its speculative value. Why do you think that most of it is buried in vaults never to be seen?

PartSkeptic said:
If you bought crypto you are likely to have a piece of paper that said you paid a certain amount of fiat money for that piece of paper. When the computers shut down or no longer run the program, no-one will trade you anything for that piece of paper. It will be worth less than a common stamp is worth. No one will buy it.
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No more internet? In that zombie apocalypse scenario fiat currency won't do you any good either. Even breaking into the vaults and getting the gold won't help.
 
psionl0 said:
Any industrial value of gold is swamped by its speculative value. Why do you think that most of it is buried in vaults never to be seen?
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Do you get the folly of repeating the same similar quality in the face of numerous examples of their differences?

If anything that kind of reinforces they are almost nothing alike.

ETA: Especially delicious is that similarity being "the price is largely driven by speculative value."

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Samson said:
6 months and I won hands down. 35% annualised to 70.
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35% of what, ffs?

If I stake £100 on horses and golf and football over a 6 month period,
and get £135 in return, then I might reasonably claim a 35% gain.

You, however, never mention your stake-per-point, stop-loss or stop-win unless pressurised to do so. Then you stop doing that as soon as the pressure is off.
 
Delphic Oracle said:
Do you get the folly of repeating the same similar quality in the face of numerous examples of their differences?
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And you didn't just repeat yourself (except substitute "many" for "one")? :rolleyes:

Delphic Oracle said:
ETA: Especially delicious is that similarity being "the price is largely driven by speculative value."
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Do you deny that most of gold's price comes from speculation?
 
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psionl0 said:
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Do you deny that most of gold's price comes from speculation?
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The days of speculation driving the price the price of gold are long over.

The price results from demand. There is demand from industry, jewelry, and as a store of value.

If the value went down, there are a number of mines around the world that would shut down and stop production. That is already happening in South Africa. If industry then wanted gold it would then have to negotiate with other holders of gold. It is a commodity.

Bitcoin just has to change the rules to make more available.

Other crypto just hits a button without regulation to do an ICO.
 
psionl0 said:
You just contradicted yourself.
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If you remove the demand sourced from speculative value (storing), there will still be demand for gold for numerous applications.

If you remove the demand sourced from speculative value, what functional purpose does a bitcoin have that would create demand?

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Delphic Oracle said:
If you remove the demand sourced from speculative value (storing), there will still be demand for gold for numerous applications.
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But at a much lower price.

And the fact remains that majority of the world's gold serves no function except to occupy space in heavily secured vaults.

Delphic Oracle said:
If you remove the demand sourced from speculative value, what functional purpose does a bitcoin have that would create demand?
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Transfer of value. You can move bitcoin in any amount over long distances (and across international boundaries) in minutes and with relatively small cost.

OTOH gold takes much longer to transport over more than short distances and because of its weight, it is much more expensive to transfer more than a small quantity of it.
 
unfolding like dot-com — but 15 times faster

Bitcoin is unfolding like the dot-com crash — just 15 times faster
Bitcoin is behaving a lot like how the Nasdaq did during the dot-com bubble nearly 20 years ago, but the timeline is unfolding much faster, according to research published by Morgan Stanley on Monday.

"The Nasdaq's bear market from 2000 had five price declines, averaging a surprisingly similar amount of 44 percent," Shah said.

Trading volume could be another red flag. Since December, bitcoin trade volumes have jumped nearly 300 percent, Shah said. But each rally ahead of the bear markets saw volumes fall.

"The follow-up rally for both bitcoin and the Nasdaq always saw falling trading volumes," Shah said. "Rising trade volumes are thus not an indication of more investor activity but instead a rush to get out."
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The real story is fraud

A Brief History of BitCon
Is the price of Bitcoin set by its utility to launder money? Or is it almost entirely a fraud? I used to believe that capital flight in China and money laundering (mostly to avoid international sanctions on Russia) was causing most of the price increase in Bitcoin. But the evidence is conclusive that the price rise in 2013 is almost entirely the result of fraud in Mt. Gox.

The capital flight out of Cyprus was just a convenient narrative to get people to fall for the price increases. The real story, as it is often in financial bubbles, is fraud...

One of these tricks is called “Painting the Tape”. It’s super easy to understand... By September 27, 2013, there’s almost indisputable evidence that Mark Karpeles — or someone inside Mt. Gox — was Painting the Tape...

Maybe Mt. Gox manipulated the market out of necessity to win back some of the lost money for their customers. But one thing is clear, they didn’t have that $3M to buy 10–20 Bitcoin every 5–10 minutes for 5 months.

By making the purchases anyway, Mt. Gox was effectively counterfeiting money.

If you had to venture a guess what happened to Mark Karpeles, you’d probably assume he ended up in jail. You’d be wrong. Mt. Gox’s bankruptcy proceedings repaid the customers in Japenese Yen to the tune of $400 per Bitcoin. That’s pretty ****** for them since most of those coins were purchased at the inflated price of around $1200. Mark Karpeles got to keep whatever was left, which now amounts to about two billion dollars.

Along Came Spoofy

Until April of 2017, Bitcoin hovered around $1000 per coin without much volatility. Then along came Spoofy, a bot that started spoofing prices on BitFinex daily to successfully manipulate the price of Bitcoin through the roof.

Spoofy gets its name from a type of market manipulation called “Spoofing”. Spoofing is pretty easy to understand, like Painting the Tape. Here’s how it works:...

The way the Bitcoin exchanges work is a fraudsters wet dream. See, in the stock market, all exchanges MUST be fully compliant. They’re all on the same playing field. They also all deal in Fiat money, that’s issued by mostly reputable entities like the US and Chinese governments and the European Central Bank.

But with cryptocurrencies, only a select few of the exchanges are compliant. This creates an important advantage: the illusion of security for an uninformed trader. You might think that because Gemini is fully compliant, you’re somehow immune to things like Spoofing. You’re not...

But — somehow — there is something even scarier than the Tether corporation’s money printing habit. Not only was Tether incorporated in the Paradise Papers. It’s linked to BitFinex, a freaking exchange! So again, like with Mt. Gox in 2013, we have a corporation counterfeiting — this time one-billion+ dollars — to Paint the Tape.

From October 5 to December 17, armed with the monopoly money that is Tether, Picasso Paints the Tape like a mother-*********** master. In a mere 73 days, Picasso paints the price of Bitcoin from $4229 all the way to $20,089...

And is it really surprising? Giancarlo Devasini was arrested for selling pirated copies of Microsoft Windows in 1996. In 2012, he posted at length, how easy it is to manipulate an illiquid market like Bitcoin. This is just after asking users to join a literal Bitcoin Ponzi scheme which he has since tried to delete. What could go wrong with someone like him running a financial exchange?
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The one constant in the Bitcoin threads is how consistently wrong I've been when I've thought that Bitcoin simply must collapse in value and the bubble will burst :o. While I can understand why the value of Bitcoin has shot up, I don't understand why the value of Bitcoin has been so comparatively resilient.

Nothing would now surprise me, whether the value drops to (close to) zero or sets off for the stratosphere from its current value :boggled:
 
psionl0 said:
But at a much lower price.

And the fact remains that majority of the world's gold serves no function except to occupy space in heavily secured vaults.


Transfer of value. You can move bitcoin in any amount over long distances (and across international boundaries) in minutes and with relatively small cost.

OTOH gold takes much longer to transport over more than short distances and because of its weight, it is much more expensive to transfer more than a small quantity of it.
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You've forgotten the premise was "gold and bitcoins are totally alike" haven't you?

LOL

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psionl0 said:
No, the statements about the utility of gold are strictly yours.

I already showed you what I actually said. You attempted to go OT and failed.
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Barely a handful of sentences since you made your assertion have had anything to do with sourcing.

The topic of this thread is bitcoin in general. Take your armchair modding off somewhere else, k?

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