Quote from: Robert Paulson on December 20, 2014, 12:36:47 PM

Quote from: csharp11 on December 20, 2014, 11:36:58 AM

Quote from: Melbustus on December 20, 2014, 07:47:39 AM

Quote from: csharp11 on December 20, 2014, 05:19:06 AM

Quote from: cbeast on December 20, 2014, 04:24:29 AM

Quote from: csharp11 on December 19, 2014, 02:25:54 PM

Quote from: ndnhc on December 19, 2014, 02:21:22 PM

Quote from: csharp11 on December 19, 2014, 02:15:19 PM

Quote from: hector3115 on December 18, 2014, 10:55:54 PM

When you think its over and all is lost. We have bottomed.

I remember watching CNBC when the S&P was at 666 and it felt like the world was ending and nothing could turn it around. That was actually the best point to invest in a lifetime.

Bitcoin will have its day and it will be glorious.

Ignorance is bliss. The S&P depends on US economy - large scale businesses. Bitcoin is 100% speculation.
There is the difference. Not only - the more it gets integrated as a payment method, the more merchants would benefit from lower values. When prices boomed it was because Chinese speculants drove it way over the line of resistence and market was severely overbought.

Bitcoin is based on Bitcoin economy. There are companies that deal with bitcoin on a regular basis.
Though, most short term trends are due to news and speculation, it need not be so in the long-term.
100% is NOT speculation.

S&P companies have MA (Material Assets) worth Billions including buildings, machines, vehicles, planes, power-plants etc. They have huge personnel of people creating wealth.
It's an indice created by the largest companies in the US. They are backed up by banks, USD as a currency and a huge community with 300+ million people, who makes sure of the currency's liquidity, which secures bank liquidity, which secures the market as a whole.

Bitcoin is invented by an unknown soft dev and businesses accept bitcoin as long as it can be traded for USD and other regular currencies. If exchanges stop their business through fiat currencies, there is no way to calculate a price for it anymore.

All empires say such things. The hubris of too big to fail and trickle down economics is also laughable in through the optics of history. Central banks have enjoyed the power to destroy any nation that opposed them through financing violence. HSBC supporting terrorists is just BAU. Just as the printing press ended the dark ages, bitcoin will end the tyranny of central banks.

You are right about exchanges though. They need to be regulated and then replaced with decentralized markets. Then things will be priced in Bitcoins.

And yet, although "laughable" it has very solid ground. Bitcoin doesnt. It only has value, until it is traded for USD. If there were no currencies bitcoin wouldn't have any value. Worst thing - currencies have existed since the dark ages, and bitcoin depends on computers and the internet. Without it this currency would cease to exist.

Bitcoin is useful to me nearly every day. Right now, it's a better way to pay for stuff; quicker, more secure, more flexible, etc. I expect legacy payments to catch up to those transactional benefits in time, though, which brings me to...

Bitcoin is also useful to me as a way to store value with no counterparty risk. I keep bitcoin stored in ways that will always be accessible only to me and those with whom I share it. I can access funds when I need to, and never have to worry about banking issues or capital controls.

Those are both very useful properties, and, in the long-run, utility drives demand...whether you're talking about food, gold, dollars, houses, or bitcoin.

Quicker - yes, flexible - yes, secure - NO. Someone can steal millions of dollars worth in a matter of minutes without even knowing who you are, only using your Wallet ID and password (mnemonic on blockchain).
And you need the internet to use bitcoins - a network that might not exist in the future. However, banks have and will exist as long as people live in this political reality.

And again - the more it gets integrated the more the price will devaluate. Otherwise it wouldn't be profitable for businesses. Too few use it today, because of price fluctuations and difficulties thereof - mainly tax based and cashflow projection based.

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?id=AMBSL,

you want to stay on the central planned titanic be my guest.
im going with real honest money.

I try to explain as simple as possible, but its hard to argue with people, stubborn for god knows what. I understand that you love Bitcoin. So do I. But that has nothing to do with it.

Lets face facts. No one gets paid in Bitcoin. And no one probably will. At least on paper. So Bitcoin is not a real factor on the market. Bitcoin can only be mined, exchanged or bought. It cannot be worked for, it cannot be used for buying property (theoretically there is such possibility, but due to IRS complications I don't think anyone would risk it).

Second - paper money have been around for hundreds of years. And coins (silver, gold, copper, nickel etc.) for even more. Even If we get back to basics - gold coverage of money etc. There will be stable world currencies. Bitcoin wouldn't be one of them. It has absolutely no value.

The USD is only legal tender - true. However, a lie is not exactly a lie, when 7.8 billion people believe in it. Simply put.

What do I mean - although most of the money are not in existence today, they will exist 20 - 30 years from now. How? Well easy - USD (for instance) has at least 400 million people worldwide using it (not counting banks, IMF, World Bank, BIS etc.). Not only - it is traded against properties with real value - real estate, cars, Oil rigs, and all kinds of stuff, that actually is worth something. It also has so many regulations and institutions working 24/7 to keep it stable, and a whole country, whose entire policy is to keep it safe at any cost.

Bitcoin has no back up. NONE. NADA. ZERO. It has nothing. It has no real value. It's all speculation. That doesn't necessarily mean that it will die, but If we have to be real - it cannot outstand fial currencies. Why?

Lets say that fiat currencies disappear - banks worldwide go bankrupt blah, blah. OK. So now the only real currency is gold, and the few left banks are minting gold coins. Now how exactly will anyone convince me to exchange my gold coins for a currency that I wouldn't be able to use. I wouldn't be able to use it, because in the current situation banks will absolutely forbid anything that inflates currencies. Since they won't be doing it, the only thing left is speculation. And since there won't be any global stock market, forex market etc. the only thing that will keep inflation going are cryptos.

Why wouldn't banks keep inflating it? Because most people, driven by their insane, insatible greed don't keep in mind that the whole thing is a house of cards, and don't want to believe that one day they might wake up with no money. Same thing as the guy in Cyprus, who had 800,000 EUR in his bank account only to wake up one beautiful morning and find that his bank has frozen 700,000. Imagine how he felt...

In conclusion - and although very few people will admit that, I am 100% sure, that if you ask all users of the forum if they would prefer a million dollars (cash) or ~3,300 BTC they will take the dollars.

Quote from: Melbustus on December 20, 2014, 04:00:25 PM

That makes no sense. Do the math on what happens if bitcoin gains any sort of traction in markets for which it's suited (remittances, international transfers). It's capital base needs to be an order of magnitude higher (at least) to handle even the tiny success cases. And that's not even considering the store-of-wealth scenarios for which bitcoin is suited (ie, taking a small slice of the gold or "offshored capital" markets).

Just a few words - quantity (users) over quantity (per user). In order for the market to grow, there is no need of more people owning full %s of the market. Exactly the opposite - the more people owning bitcoin, the better for the currency. Why? Because right now a person with 20000 bitcoins should he decide to sell will devaluate the price significantly. It might be irreversible for years. Or forever. No one can really say. If the market corrects itself to more realistic values, say 25$/BTC it will gain huge popularity, and if people are not driven by greed - 10000% profits, but really by their desire for better currency, then it could reach 200 million users worldwide in a few years. When you have so many people demanding and using it (even for coffee, breakfast, cigarettes, tamponts etc.) that is what creates liquidity. And every store will want to join in. Then the large ATM manufacturers will create proper (secure) ATMs, and banks will start to adopt it. But no bank is going to take seriously a currency with a few million users, most of which - whales with huge market share; no transaction security; huge fraud risk etc. etc.

Again - I like Bitcoin, but get real.