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Bitcoin Trends in the First Half of 2015

146 pointsby ntomainoalmost 10 years ago

11 comments

Animatsalmost 10 years ago
The main trend for Bitcoin in 2015 is that not much happened. The price is within 10% of where it was at the beginning of the year. Transaction volume in dollars is flat, or down a little. Many of the companies which were accepting Bitcoin no longer are; those that are report low transaction volumes. (There are lots of merchants which &quot;accept Bitcoin&quot; because it&#x27;s an option in some shopping cart programs, but those just send the Bitcoins to Coinbase, which converts them to dollars and sends the funds to the merchant.)<p>The big trends in Bitcoin seem to be:<p>- Amateur hour is over. The remaining exchanges are bigger and seemingly more stable, although none of them are up to bank-level yet. New York&#x27;s Bitcoin regulation seems to have been accepted.<p>- Mining is more centralized than ever. Most of the big Bitcoin miners are in cold areas of China with cheap power. China has well over 50% of the hash rate now. This may just be a way to convert yuan to dollars. (China has currency controls, but encourages exports. For a few months, it was legal in China to buy Bitcoins with yuan through regular payment channels, then sell the Bitcoins outside China for dollars. That drove the $1000 Bitcoin bubble, and was shut down by the People&#x27;s Bank of China last year, causing the Bitcoin crash. <i>Mining</i> Bitcoin in China, and selling it outside China, is considered &quot;exporting&quot; and is a legal way to convert yuan to dollars.)<p>- Since the shutdown of Silk Road I and Silk Road II and the related arrests, Bitcoin is no longer considered a safe way to buy drugs. This doesn&#x27;t seem to have affected the price much one way or the other.<p>- Bitcoin ATMs are disappearing. In the SF bay area, Hacker Dojo and Workshop Cafe got rid of theirs, and Nakamoto&#x27;s doesn&#x27;t have theirs working. Hero City (a co-working space) may still have one.<p>History of Bitcoin:<p><pre><code> 2013: Wow! 2014: Aargh! 2015: Meh.</code></pre>
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ceallenalmost 10 years ago
No mention of the &#x27;stress test&#x27; that&#x27;s brought the network to its knees the past few days, or of the soft fork that resulted in suggestions to wait for 30+ confirmations? Puff piece.<p>C&#x27;mon Coinbase, at least spin them into a &#x27;&lt;X&gt; is actually good for Bitcoin, because &lt;Y&gt;&#x27; format.
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contingenciesalmost 10 years ago
Trends as I see them: decreased media interest, loss of trust in the Bitcoin Foundation and by extension the core development team, lots more government surveillance of related businesses (helped by a stabilization of centralized exchanges), still virtually no banks globally willing to work with Bitcoin-related companies, failure to achieve any real &#x27;killer app&#x27; at scale: beyond tax or forex-restriction evasion or international drug distribution.<p>On the plus side, scope creep seems to have slowed, more people are aware of the overall concept, and Merkle trees have begun to be applied experimentally to additional problem domains.<p>PS. Reading between the lines, new user growth has slowed dramatically at Coinbase. IIRC they sent an email this week begging for referrals, offering $25&#x2F;signup. And like all startups, it probably defines users as people who once gave them their email address, rather than actual regular users of some nontrivial part of the service. &quot;A trillion wallets!&quot; indeed.<p>PPS. What percentage of increased Bitcoin transactions are due to the use of automated gambling sites for Bitcoin-trail erasure type money laundering through numerous microtransactions?
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minimaxiralmost 10 years ago
I&#x27;m calling statistical shenanigans. While the data presented is likely correct, the narrative is completely misleading.<p>&gt; <i>While the price is down 9% YTD (as of July 13), it&#x27;s up over 213% over a two year time frame.</i><p>So they are ignoring the price drop from $1,000?<p>&gt; <i>This has attracted more institutional investors to the market and volatility has decreased as a result.</i><p>Chart indicates a gradual decrease, it&#x27;s hard to establish causality. Also, it ignores the fact that 50% volatility for a currency is absurd.<p>&gt; <i>As of June 30, there were 6,109 Github repositories referencing Bitcoin. By comparison, there were 2,352 Github repositories referencing Stripe and 2,318 repositories referencing Paypal. </i><p>Comparing a currency with a currency processor is blatantly comparing Apples and Oranges. How many GitHub repositories are there mentioning Coinbase?
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vdnkhalmost 10 years ago
Wow, the first graph in this article looks exactly like the graph of the bubble phenomenon (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;Amon5PR.jpg" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;Amon5PR.jpg</a>). I guess stability will increase, which is a good thing.
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sansworkalmost 10 years ago
I notice they are still pushing out the number of wallets and accounts they have as a sign of anything. Coinbase you are now a few years old and have raised over $100m. It&#x27;s time to leave behind local social networks, and underused sites everywhere and start reporting MAU. No one but fanatics care how many people have signed up. How many people regularly use your service.
slgalmost 10 years ago
&gt;As global events that highlight the restrictions of closed banking systems and insecure data security practices (e.g. the Greece debt crisis and recent United States Office of Personnel Management data breach) continue to occur, we believe that bitcoin is likely to be adopted by more people looking for digital money that is global, secure, and inclusive.<p>How would Bitcoin have prevented or mitigated the OPM hack?
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deadmik3almost 10 years ago
I believe this is what&#x27;s referred to as the &quot;pump&quot;
xasosalmost 10 years ago
&gt; 47% of Coinbase users are now from countries outside the US<p>I wonder what the country breakdown estimation is for all Bitcoin transactions. I would guess more international use than Coinbase numbers
jhanschooalmost 10 years ago
I really doubt that most people see Bitcoin&#x27;s features as pluses rather than minuses.<p>I have always thought that the financial institutions we have in mainstream currencies are institutions that societies want. If ever Bitcoin goes mainstream, the Bitcoin economy would end up a lot like the world economy when it was gold-backed, albeit one where the transaction costs were not physical but hidden in the work done in blockchains.<p>It seems to me like people are mistakenly thinking that Bitcoin&#x27;s lack of financial institutions are a property inherent to the currency rather than the simple fact that Bitcoin is a currency that is not mature enough to have actors sufficiently invested in it to want to create regulatory institutions on top of the currency.<p>Correct me if I&#x27;m wrong, but it seems to me easier to regulate Bitcoins than say, gold. It is far easier to trace and verify the provenance of Bitcoins than that of gold, and hence far easier to classify Bitcoins into &quot;clean Bitcoins&quot; and &quot;dirty Bitcoins&quot;. A cabal of influential institutions can simply refuse to deal with wallets and businesses that deal in &quot;dirty Bitcoins&quot;, and that can serve as a basis of institutional regulation of Bitcoin as a currency.
Olognalmost 10 years ago
91 year old billionaire Charlie Munger has referred to Bitcoin as &quot;rat poison&quot;. His friend, 84 year old Warren Buffett has said Bitcoin is &quot;not a currency&quot; and advised people to &quot;stay away from it&quot;.<p>Now you can ascribe this to them being old fuddy duddies who &quot;just don&#x27;t get it&quot;. You can also ascribe this to the wisdom of people who lived through the Great Depression, World War II etc. and have seen every scam and snake oil pitch under the sun.<p>Which is exactly what Bitcoins are. They are worthless, they have no value. They&#x27;re not only a scam, they&#x27;re a scam that should be obvious on the face of it, like subprime real estate, or a Pets.com IPO. People talk about a Silicon Valley bubble - nothing is more indicative of a bubble than Bitcoins. These guys may not know the specifics of blockchain algorithms, but from decades of hard experience they can distinguish value from non-value, and Bitcoins have no value.<p>I can&#x27;t think of a commodity it makes less sense to hold onto than a Bitcoin. Gold has value, as do other precious metals, oil has value - Bitcoins have no value. The only comparison I&#x27;ve seen made to Bitcoins is fiat money, but it would take too long to fully explain why Bitcoins don&#x27;t have the value of a US dollar in a post here.<p>I was warning people of this scam here when Bitcoin was over $460 ( <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6753545" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6753545</a> ). It has since fallen to $290. It will be falling to $0.<p>For some laughs, read <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bitcoin.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;faq#why-do-bitcoins-have-value" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bitcoin.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;faq#why-do-bitcoins-have-value</a> - &quot;Bitcoins have value because they are useful as a form of money. Bitcoin has the characteristics of money (durability, portability, fungibility, scarcity, divisibility, and recognizability) based on the properties of mathematics rather than relying on physical properties (like gold and silver) or trust in central authorities (like fiat currencies).&quot;<p>What? Commodities which <i>already have value(!)</i> become currencies because they have &quot;durability, portability, fungibility, scarcity, divisibility, and recognizability&quot;. Gold has all of those properties so it has made a good currency through history - but even if it had none of those properties, it derives its value from it being a commodity with useful physical traits - like the ability to fill a tooth, or conduct electricity, and so forth. Bitcoins have no such traits - they have the traits which would make a commodity with value a good currency, but it has no inherit value as a commodity!<p>Witness all the angels and VC&#x27;s who sing the high holy praises of this scam. Are they just complete fools who have no understanding of the economics they claim to have expertise in, or are they just scammers trying to fleece suckers out there? I don&#x27;t know the answer to this, but at the end of the day, all the VC&#x27;s and seeders and angels on Twitter etc. who support this Bitcoin scam are either fools or thieves. Keynes said markets can remain irrational longer than he could remain solvent, but it&#x27;s inevitable that Bitcoins price will go to $0. Since my first statement of this here, Bitcoin has gone from $460 to its present $290. It will inevitably go to $0, no matter how many of the scammers downvote this post so people won&#x27;t see it. Because no matter what anyone says, the market cap of the $5 trillion worth of gold mined will never change more than an order of magnitude (barring some amazing chemical technological advance). Whereas lack of doubt is all that is keeping Bitcoin&#x27;s $4 billion market cap from going to $0. From it&#x27;s scammy beginnings (the anonymous &quot;Satoshi&quot;), to all the legal problems and scams of Mt. Gox, Butterfly Labs etc., it&#x27;s only a matter of time before this Ponzi scheme comes to an end. More instructive than that is all the existing VC&#x27;s, seeders, angels etc. who are vocal in their support of this scam - that&#x27;s what you should really remember.
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