As someone actively working in this space for the past 3 years, I have a few observations on Bitcoin's price movements:
* The only parameter that in any way is correlating to Bitcoin's price is it's transaction count over time. In fact, if you take out Bitcoin's extreme price spikes they almost completely match up. number of transactions should go through the roof one the Lightning Network is functional.
* The only real world application of Bitcoin that I have seen so far has been 1) Black markets; 2) International money transfer (it's faster to do Bank-Exchange-Bitcoin-Exchange-Bank in most cases than direct bank to bank transfers. That should tell you something about the current state of banking.
* Using market caps for a commodity is ridiculous. The only meaningful parameters to track is nr of transactions, depth of order books globally, nr of exchanges in countries.
Side note: I don't hold any crypto currencies anymore. I don't invest in things which I can't have direction over.
Plus the bank gets to charge interest while they hold it, a week at my bank and a week at the receiving bank, for multiple transactions is a nice little earner.
> only real world application is black markets; money transfer
Currently bitcoin is in between a commodity & a currency. Given that the R3 bank network will be more of a transfering network and btc having difficulty with scaling, I see bitcoin as a currency. It bas lots of potential uses, here are more than the ones you touched on currently:
* Pricing and purchasing conduit to all major crypto currencies.
* Crypto speculation/investment vehicle.
There are more applications than the 4 we listed but I somewhat agree with transaction vol being the metric. For all other alts and btc actual trade volume is more important than market cap. like fiat, it is based on trust and ascribed value. just because there are provable transactions and known amounts, volume & transactions are an insication of value (or perceived value) and this likelihood people begin accepting them
R3 offers no efficiencies over incumbent transfer systems. SWIFT/ACH/etc are far more efficient than R3. R3 seems to be figuring that out, and is rapidly pivoting from their original goals (including blockchain)
It isn't built yet, but ACH is pretty bad, so I can't imagine R3; regardless of what tech they go with, being worse. It started in 74 so its 4 decades old. I'm not saying you are wrong but I would like a bit more color. I am not excited about R3, bug given the backers (all major banks & payment inst) I assumed it was moving forward & poised to take ach in the next 3-5 years
Chinese second-class investors are doing another pump-and-dump scheme now using the #HalvingHype.
Bitcoin has gained no consumer adoption, most new development is happening with Ethereum, and Bitcoin got replaced in headlines with Blockchain.
I see this final pump-and-dump as a desperation move. Imagine this applied to stocks as "Let's pump AMZN, because if we don't, it will go out of business."
This time, the pump is done by miners predominantly and the volumes are small as people moved to more profitable investments long ago
It's like asking - is the next major version of something just a hype.
Okay, Bitcoin was good, it introduced the concept of the blockchain and solved a long-standing issue in a very energy inefficient way.
To run all this computing power just so that Chinese thieves and speculators can sneak out stolen money or increase it as they either lack means to invest elsewhere or it'd be just too sophisticated for them to do, is a ridiculous concept that cannot be sustained for too long!
P.S. By promoting Bitcoin, you support Climate Change, illicit businesses, and stinky speculation.
Just by breathing you can also say I support Climate Change, illicit businesses and stinky speculation.
Where are ethereums killer apps? Something so groundbreaking that it takes the world by storm. The browser, or bittorrent for example. Or is it just another chain in the centipede of cryptocurrency "innovation"?
A lot of this has to do with unease within the Chinese economy. Gold is also being bought around the same clip, and long term bonds have yields that are plummeting despite a possible rate hike.
It's kind of a pity that three years have passed since it arguably went mainstream (among the tech literate at least) and the most prevalent use case is still by and large speculation. Making money is cool and all but the technology had a lot more promise than this.
What? Living in a country with a broken financial and banking system I'm relying on Bitcoin for storing and transferring value. Check out Bitcoin search trend for South Africa, North African countries, Pakistan, and Venezuela.
Other reasons to use bitcoin: Drugs, Money Laundering, CryptoLocker, Capital flights, etc...
Up until this month - most of the speculation has been dead. That's why coinbase is pivoting. The majority of bitcoin is being used by people who need it in order to run their businesses.
This is inevitable as everyone saw what happened at the litecoin halving last summer (if you don't pay attention to such things, it was a massive spike then dump).
OKcoin is not the only exchange... Yes, you can't trust many of the Chinese exchanges. But there are 10s of thousands of bitcoins being traded daily on many different (non-Chinese) exchanges that don't fake their volume.
it wouldn't be a flash crash if there was no demand. it would be a crash. the flash crash happened because there was insufficient liquidity on one exchange - as soon as the market sought to fill the gaps, it went right back up.
Bitcoin has maybe 3 million users (maybe). Twitter has 300 million. I'm investing in both, and I wonder how much Bitcoin would be worth at 300 million users. The network effects are going to be fun to watch
No, I think HN realizes Bitcoin price isn't correlated to number of users. After all, the number of "users" hasn't grown that much over the past 30 days, even though the price is up 50%.
Hacker News has been the most Bitcoin friendly of the communities I visit on a regular basis. It probably has the highest ratio of Bitcoin enthusiasts you'll find in a mainstream community outside of drug fora and the Bitcoin community itself.
If this story can't find an audience here, it's not going to do better elsewhere.
I've no idea. Is utterly meaningless. A more meaningful comparison would be "what $ value has been transferred using each network over the last 12 months"
A more meaningful comparison would be the market cap of various bitcoin exchanges; the flaws with that comparison are pretty much the same as the flaws with comparing bitcoin to WU in general.
The best data I could find on this is in their 2015 annual report, which says they've had $81.6 billion in consumer-to-consumer transfers[0], which made up 79.21% of their revenue[1], so I guess we can estimate an annual turnover of $103 billion, which comes out to $282 million per day over the year of 2015.
Nope, I'd assume that B2B has lower fees/margins, so the actual daily volume should be higher than my calculation said above. Still, it should be enough to establish that WU is still a fair bit ahead of BTC.
Doesn't that by necessity include all the change as well? So it's a misleading number if you want to take it for "this is how much people are paying each other with bitcoin"
Keep in mind though that anyone with reason, could easily fake a lot of volume: 2 address, starting amount, swap back and forth until you eat up the whole thing with fees.
* The only parameter that in any way is correlating to Bitcoin's price is it's transaction count over time. In fact, if you take out Bitcoin's extreme price spikes they almost completely match up. number of transactions should go through the roof one the Lightning Network is functional.
* The only real world application of Bitcoin that I have seen so far has been 1) Black markets; 2) International money transfer (it's faster to do Bank-Exchange-Bitcoin-Exchange-Bank in most cases than direct bank to bank transfers. That should tell you something about the current state of banking.
* Using market caps for a commodity is ridiculous. The only meaningful parameters to track is nr of transactions, depth of order books globally, nr of exchanges in countries.
Side note: I don't hold any crypto currencies anymore. I don't invest in things which I can't have direction over.