BTC volatility is nothing compared to the bloodbath that just occurred in CHF:<p><a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/quote/CHFUSD:CUR" rel="nofollow">http://www.bloomberg.com/quote/CHFUSD:CUR</a><p>Yeah, it's "only" 20-30% move (depending on currency cross) but in highly leveraged FX markets even 1% can wipe people out.<p>Personally I never cared about Bitcoin "value". In my mind it is a great medium of settlement and not a store of value (which it might also be; given long enough outlook).<p>First we need to grow the Bitcoin economy to a decent size and then we can talk about "price stability". Transaction volume at the moment grows rather slowly. The rest is just speculators.
If we look at bitcoin for what it <i>is</i> (the technology and theory behind it), it hasn't lost any real value. If it did (e.g., if a major flaw were discovered in the technology to render it useless), then people wouldn't still be trading bitcoin. We have to remember that for every bitcoin sold (at any price), someone on the other side of the transaction is still <i>buying</i> those bitcoins. If it were truly "dead" or indisputably flawed, trading would come to a halt because there would be no bids for something truly useless.<p>Instead, what we're looking at with the recent price decline is simply a reflection of how people <i>feel</i> about bitcoin - and in this case, that opinion has everything to do with factors that are irrelevant to the technology (failed exchanges, criminal activity, etc). If bitcoin were a public company, of course those kinds of things would matter (it doesn't matter if public opinion is wrong; it can still ruin your business), but since bitcoin's usefulness and underlying value do <i>not</i> rely on public opinion, it remains unaffected at the core by any of these recent events.
There is no blood. Bitcoin isn't viable (yet!) as a long term store of value but anybody that thought that it was should outsource their financial services to Nigerian princes for a better long term return on investment.<p>If and when bitcoin will be usable as a long term store of value we'll be a decade down the line at least, and if it hovers around $10 by then then I think it should <i>still</i> be considered a small miracle. The hardest challenge that bitcoin has is not to stabilize as a currency (because it isn't) but to simply stay alive. So far so good on that front.
I find all these elaborate theories for why the price has fallen, a bit ridiculous.<p>Here's my simply hypothesis.<p>1. People got bored waiting for legitimate uses for Bitcoin that aren't in some way or another black market trade. I'm one of them.<p>2. The recent online black market busts made even those who were just betting on Bitcoin being a black market currency, uneasy.
It's weird, because I feel like there is a story on the general volatility of bitcoin. There's also a story on the general incompetence (as much as I can say this as being completely unqualified in running a financial institution) of the companies running exchanges and the like.<p>I don't get why that stuff isn't being covered more in detail (the headline writes itself: "When will bitcoin exchanges stop screwing up?"), but the fact that some guy invested a bunch of money in BTC when it was worth 3 times as much? Get in line with literally everyone else with assets in it.
> subject to decline every time the compute power to "mine" the Bitcoins got cheaper<p>But the network reacts to that by making it more difficult, and thus more expensive, to mine. That's very much not the reason bitcoins become less valuable - assuming the same amount of money being poured into newer/faster mining equipment, it'll always cost the same to mine a block.
The short-term market price doesn't have a lot to do with it's long-term viability. Liquidity is relatively tiny hence shocking volatility.<p>Anyone's bitcoins only represent a loss on a particular day if they actually choose to sell them or spend them.
Same goes for people gloating when the price is up.<p>There's 3,600 bitcoins per day being generated creating a significant downward pressure on the price. But reward halving is ETA July 2016, marking a significant change in supply and probably the day-to-day price.<p>I can understand the schadenfreude for anyone who has watched people become very wealthy and watched other presumably greedy people subsequently 'lose' tons of money.<p>The majority of my holding will be likely to sit for 10 years or so and I will admit I was wrong if I've made a significant loss and I probably will sell them off. People can have their schadenfreude then. In return, I'll agree not to gloat if the price sky rockets.
There is only one relevant graph and it's the bottom of these two IMHO<p><a href="https://twitter.com/Hello_World/status/555454120258457601/photo/1" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/Hello_World/status/555454120258457601/ph...</a>
Congrats to Adam Kessler for discovering that Bitcoin is volatile.<p>But how could this sharp minded journalist miss the <i>real</i> silicon valley scandal that nobody writes about?<p>Coffee is hot, millions of investors get burned <i>every day</i>!
Merchants lose about $500 billion/year to transactions fees, chargebacks, fraud and equipment fees. Want to know what the inherent value of Bitcoin is? Then think in terms merchants desire to avoid payment processing fees in a 3.6 trillion dollar marketplace. Guys like Draper, with wealth sufficient to absorb significant paper losses to volatility, are playing the long game and betting on bitcoin reducing transaction fees globally.
Regarding the price that people are willing to pay for Bitcoin, what has become relevant is how people judge, not merely other people's willingness to pay, but other people's estimate of how others might be willing to pay. Relevant here is the Keynesian beauty contest, a reference to a practice in which towns used to give awards to those who could get guess who the prettiest girl in town was, with "prettiest" being determined by the other people in town:<p>"It is not a case of choosing those that, to the best of one's judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those that average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be. And there are some, I believe, who practice the fourth, fifth and higher degrees."<p>(Keynes, General Theory of Employment Interest and Money, 1936).<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest</a>
"I think the technology used to implement the Bitcoin payment system is fascinating - public ledgers and crypto and block chains will all be game changers. Bitcoins themselves? More of a necessary component to creating a new financial system."<p>Another article that seems to suggest that the blockchain has value with Bitcoin. I've heard others (pmarca in particular) promote this view, and I think it's far from validated. At the moment, BTC is the most important incentive to mine, and mining is the most important factor in establishing the blockchain's security.<p>It's true that, in the future, we might be able to come up with other incentive structures to encourage mining (the Bitmessage protocol is one such example). But if we want one blockchain, and we want it to be as secure as possible, how could we ever come up with an incentive that is as universally desirable and infinite as money?
> Their value was always in Fantasyland and subject to decline every time the compute power to "mine" the Bitcoins got cheaper, which it does every day.<p>The creation of new bitcoins is limited by the network adjusting the difficulty in case new bitcoins (blocks) are created too quickly.<p>The network hash rate has increased enormously over the past few years, by several orders of magnitude. Yet the average number of bitcoins created per 10 minutes is still only 28.7920673077, or around 15% above the target value of 25.<p>This is measuring from block 210,000 to the current block (339,357). This period has taken 780 days, so far, so the average number of blocks per 10 minutes is: (339357-210000)/780 / 24 / 6 = 1.151682692 (or 15.168% above the target of 1 block per 10 minutes).
Yet another article from someone who has an obvious personal issue with Bitcoin. For some reason, Bitcoin destroys objectivity in journalists.<p>Remember when Bitcoin crashed from ~$32 to near zero and everyone said that Bitcoin was dead? I do. THAT was a crash. Even I gave up on Bitcoin for a few days. The author of the article missed a chance to detail Bitcoin's crashes and its recoveries from those crashes.<p>Even if Bitcoin goes to zero because the network gets attacked, the blockchain itself is now just as much part of network technology as any other protocol.<p>Digital cash ain't going anywhere, be it Bitcoin or an improved version of the idea.
The Bitcoin crash is similar to crashes in other financial markets and is a signature of self organized criticality:<p><a href="https://charlesmartin14.wordpress.com/2015/01/16/the-bitcoin-crash-and-how-nature-works/" rel="nofollow">https://charlesmartin14.wordpress.com/2015/01/16/the-bitcoin...</a>
If you have no stakes in Bitcoin, you don't care. If you believe Bitcoin will succeed, you want positive press. If you believe Bitcoin will fail and you are still invested, you want positive press to get out as well as possible. Nobody really wants negative Bitcoin press.
Maybe these publications are hesitant to comment because they realize they're not economists. They write and think about products. If we concede for the moment that, as product, Bitcoin is sound then we are left with what Bitcoin's role in the economy is. This is uncharted territory and lots of people have already been burnt being overly optimistic or pessimistic about them. But no one knows.<p>Because of this uncertainty, Bitcoin has had a major PR problem since the moment it went mainstream. And since the perceived value of a (quasi-)fiat currency means a lot, it has been a net negative for the future of Bitcoin. It has suffered under the weight of tremendous doubt, however slight.
This guy has the causality wrong. Bitcoin gains value when there is press coverage.<p>The drop in value is BECAUSE of the decline in press coverage, not the other way around!
Welcome to market reporting ... the S&P 500 has dropped about 5% in the last month. And in my newsfeed I find "up 2%" from a dozen places.<p>Now this is not a lie. That particular day the S&P was up 2% (and it does indeed mention that the days before it was down 3% and 1%), but the point I'm making is there was little mention of downward market movement the days before.<p>It's weird. In every other reporting it's bad news that sells, and you have trouble finding good news. In market news only upward (or very large downward) movements get mentioned.
The maximum number of bitcoins is capped at 21 million. The current number in circulation is around 14 million. Now, my intuition tells me (but I might be wrong) that if a currency is used to pay for goods (and not just for speculation), the value of the currency in circulation should roughly match the total value of the goods that can be exchanged with it.
If this is true, and the total of e-commerce sales is now (completely ballpark estimate) around $1.4trillion, then in a world where all online transactions are made in bitcoins, the value of a single bitcoin should be of approximately $100k.
That means that in the process of a widespread adoption of bitcoin as a real currency for online transactions, its value should rise from the current $200 to $100k, a factor of 500. And this is a huge problem, because any currency that is used for buying goods must have a value that is consistent (and possibly slightly decreasing) in time, otherwise nobody really wants to use it. It's completely foolish to part from a bitcoin in exchange for a phone today, when at some point in the future that same bitcoin will be valued 3, 10, or 500 times more.<p>Bottom line: the bitcoin is trapped. The more goods can be bought with it, the more its value rises, the less people are actually willing to use it. And this cycle will go on forever, as the total value of goods will keep increasing at a high rate, while the number of bitcoins increases at an progressively lower rate until it stops completely at the cap of 21 million.
People don't like to publish much while they're still smarting from losing large amounts of "money". It helps that Bitcoin wasn't just an asset, it was an <i>ideology</i>: that the deflationary shrinking-resource represented by coin mining was <i>necessarily valuable</i>. People don't like questioning ideologies like that: it threatens their entire sense of how the world can be a good place at all, it feels from the inside like a nihilistic pit of darkness.