Howdy, Cred Forums, let's talk about Bitcoins.
Are they actually still relevant? Will they be relevant or more important in the future? Are they a flash in the pan fad?
Why do they have any value? Are they another baseless fiat currency based on the faith of the people using them, or is there more to them?
Do they have any legitimate use aside for drugs and child porn on the internet?
>Tl;dr Why should or shouldn't I give a fuck about Bitcoins?
I've bought my monitor and some other stuff from o.co with them, but it seems to be a pretty good store of money especially if you think China is going to implode. It's easy to buy and sell at least now. It's getting better.
>grid goes down for 5 seconds
>all your meme coins are gone
bitcoin will hit 1k usd before 2017. screencap this
I heard some big shot with a good track record predicted $3000 usd or more in 2017
But what makes the exchange rate so high? Is it just people putting faith in something that isn't tied to a government? Is it completely artificial?
How long can it keep increasing?
Bitcoin has a long ways to go before it could ever truly hit mainstream. Due to the current block size, it can really only do around 7 transactions per second at a maximum. Various credit cards can do 2000k+ transactions per second no problem.
Increasing the block size has been a very long debate and Chinese miners are pretty much calling the shots in the debate.
There are a few benefits to using Bitcoin over traditional payment methods. There's no central authority that can decide if your business can accept it as a payment method (credit cards/ Paypal can go out of their way to shut you down). The fees used to be pretty low, but this is relative to the block size debate.
Payments are pretty fast with 1st confirmation usually in 10 minutes. ACH transfers usually take a few days to go through.
I don't know how well it works as a functioning currency, but the idea behind transfers on the blockchain could be pretty useful even if Bitcoin served as a currency transfer protocol.
Supply and demand. The price is that high because someone is willing to pay for it at that price. What is the demand? It could be people want it because they think it's a better store of value than whatever they have, or because they can buy drugs or gamble with it, or because they're trading and they can make money that way. Prostitutes might want it because they can't get paid by VISA and it might be a little more private, Wikileaks might want it because VISA and MasterCard won't allow donations.
As long as there's demand, there will be a price. What that price will be, who knows. something between 0 and a lot.
Supply and demand. The supply of bitcoins continuously decreases as the reward for mining a block decrease.
But Ethereum instead.
Way better than shitcoin
Outside of the supply and demand aspect, trust in the network also plays a part. I'm not speaking about trusts in exchanges and users themselves, but the actual implementation of Bitcoin as a whole. There are millions and millions invested in securing the network and it just keeps growing.
I said 2000k+ I just meant 2000
Praise kek
Buy ethereum
Ethereum is a trick designed to make people who missed the bitcoin train think they can get super rich. It has no cap and is already 2x as high as it should be because Coinbase is keeping the price artificially high to scam people out of their precious bitcoin
Btc has value for the exact same reason gold has value.
I have made allot of money shifting my money between altcoins. I doubled my investment in the past 6 months and Im eyeing a coin that will be released soon, i have high high hopes for it. I would suggest throwing $1,000 into poloniex and getting into the game, if you can recognize a pump/dump pattern you can make money.
Btc is far too stable to make a significant return on IMO,but if you want to hold it I would keep a good chunk in Poloniex's lending program,its a huge return and the site hasnt been hacked as of yet (only downside is the risk of this)
If you want to make REAL money but not risk losing everything buy a large sum of ETH.
Would the demand be anywhere near as great if it weren't for bitcoins being essentially ubiquitous wherever illicit activity is?
Poloniex was hacked in 2014
NEVER leave your coins on an exchange unless you want to lose them
don't listen to pumpers
It's a meme currency designed to sucker idiots into investing in them rather than just accumulating physical assets.
I don't think anyone can answer that, we don't know who is buying coins and how they are being spent/not spent. I would say that in the early days, illicit activity was driving the economy, but today (just a guess), I think it might be hoarding.
That's an extremely funny statement, friendo. I conduct all my illegal dealings in Stirling. Just like most Americans conduct their illegal dealings in dollars.
coins are never gone when web goes down, you just can't move them. They are stored by your private key's ability to sign a transaction.
>Btc has value for the exact same reason gold has value.
Which is?
Who benefits from these "suckers"?
its 90 percent chinese owned
>Which is?
People want it more than they want worthless Kangaroobux
there is some truth to this.
If you have a digital exchange (therefore international) of value with no middle man, then it would attract behavior that the powers who control the middle men find wrong. It is not wrong for that reason, it is wrong when used to do wrong. The power to exchange value outside of an existing control structure is a game changer.
Th-thanks?
download openbazaar and tell everyone to use it so we can destroy ebay and keep more money for ourselves
it is a an asset of sorts. If the Internet fails, then yes, bitcoin fails. Beyond that if the math around cryptography is good, and the Internet continues to exist, it could be a perfect store of value.
Libertarian Cred Forumswould have understood. It would take to long to explain it to the current userbase.
Do it anyway :^)
>There are a few benefits to using Bitcoin over traditional payment methods. There's no central authority that can decide if your business can accept it as a payment method (credit cards/ Paypal can go out of their way to shut you down). The fees used to be pretty low, but this is relative to the block size debate.
If you've ever been forced to run a third party high risk merchant account this is very important.
>Not buying Trumpcoin
>not supporting the future empire and its new currency
Multiple factors. China is currently blowing up several bubbles at once: the real estate markets in Western Canada and Australia and also Bitcoin. They have a common origin: China tightly controls capital outflows. Chinese individuals (moreso than companies) are willing to pay a tremendous premium above cost as the price of getting their money out of the country and into "safe harbors," and they're using primarily real estate investments and crude money laundering via bitcoin to do so.
This will of course some day stop, the genius is in trying to figure out when.
... o.O
why were u ever forced to do this? sounds really shady.
what business are u in?
tell me bro we are user here
as long as people need to spend several hours researching how to even get bitcoins, it's never gonna reach the mainstream.
Gold has value because it is rare and immutable. Bitcoin, not so much.
If you can't hold it or otherwise fondle it, you don't own it. Fuck me up nerds.
Can't speak for him but the profit margin in things like online porn sites back in the early 2000s was determined largely by how hard you fucked people over. Autobilling, etc.
Chargebacks -- when consumers contacted their credit card company to dispute a charge -- was called a "scrub rate" and a company with too high a scrub rate would find it hard to do business, because banks wouldn't process for them.
Finding a bank that would process for a company with a high scrub rate (it varied over time what "high" was -- 5% made you radioactive) was the Holy Grail in these parts of the internet economy. People would find out about one bank that would accept business from these company and hide it well. Typically it was a rogue manager or the whole bank being connected through a strange chain of circumstances to some whitelisted company in Ukraine.
Anyway, yes. Those companies enjoy bitcoin because your scrub rate is meaningless and "processing" is distributed rather than being the domain of banks.
the industry is still going strong. punishtube.com is epiccccccccc
it's shiny
my dick is currently in your rectum
Rock hard right now tbqh. Are you near the border?