Hmm... if I owned any bitcoin I guess i would sell at this point. I can not imagine it just rising like this for much longer, but honestly I do not understand the dynamics of why this is happening so I am just defaulting to "what goes up must come down" type reasoning.<p>Random non-technical people I know are just getting into the cryptomarket this week and last as they have heard it is a good must win investment. But is that really driving up the prices?
I think we're beginning to see the end of bitcoin, as much as I love the technology. It'll be a few years (maybe), but it's just too inefficient from a power standpoint. If the protocol is changed to a memory intensive proof-of-work rather than power intensive, or perhaps to a proof-of-stake or other means, then it may survive.
Many are scratching their heads: "WTF? When will Bitcoin come crashing down?"<p>The thing is, if individual and institutional investors decide, in the aggregate, that Bitcoin is a new kind of asset in which they want to have a <i>tiny</i> amount of exposure, the price could still go up much higher.<p>Investors worldwide currently own around $300 trillion in financial assets.[a] If as a group they decide to hold, say, 2% of their wealth in Bitcoin, say, to diversify away <i>from all countries on earth</i>, then Bitcoin's marketcap would go up 30x, from around $200 billion to $6 trillion. The number of bitcoins is fixed, so the price would go by a similar multiple.<p>Note that before Bitcoin it was impossible to diversify away from all countries on earth.<p>[a] <a href="http://money.visualcapitalist.com/worlds-money-markets-one-visualization-2017/" rel="nofollow">http://money.visualcapitalist.com/worlds-money-markets-one-v...</a>
At this point its no longer a currency. Steam stopped accepting it, and I doubt anyone wants to buy anything with it. Its just a commodity, but one with no underlying value, perhaps like tulip bulbs. I don't think this is going to end well.<p>Which is a shame, because the blockchain is amazing technology.
Another fluff piece about - Bitcoin hits $x. Given the price now on coinmarketcap, we might as well post - "Bitcoin hits $16,000" in couple of hours.<p>What I seriously want this guys to write about: Where is the volume coming from? Bitcoin has crossed 20k on the Zimbawean exchange Golix. So what is happening now?
I wonder if now would be a good time to invest in ethereum or litecoin. I mean, when the bitcoin bubble burst, will it drag down the price of other cryptocurrencies or cause a mass migration to them?
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.<p>Whereas this article is the opposite, it has no content. It's just <i>trivia</i>. There's nothing special about crossing $15k, particularly since most trade isn't even denominated in USD.
No one disputes that it will fall at some point, but obv. no one knows when .<p>All it takes is for some of the major holders who accumulated before 2016 or so to unload and the price will fall a lot.
people thinking " Oh I just get out when the price starts falling" are utterly mistaken:<p>Transactions now taking several hours might then take several days.<p>Already getting Error 520 on Kraken