[mads]

Man, this is just weird. I just bought 0.05 Bitcoins (you know FOMO and all that) and it just feels so much more empty than back in the days when I mined them myself with my brand new dual Xeon CPU and later on was thinking grand thoughts and building little projects with epaper ink displays to display QR codes on small devices that would work on low bandwidth connections and maybe offline. Lots of problems to be solved back then, but Bitcoin is just the same now. Nothing was solved. No progress and scams everywhere and people being all religious about Bitcoin. Every man for themselves and to the moon... These days I am even getting scam calls from something called the Bitcoin Academy with people cheering in the background, when it reaches the all time high. No kidding...

I have no idea what to do with my 0.05 BTC. Just let them sit there, I guess as a curiosity of old days. I don't really feel that I fit into the moon community and I don't really feel I want to build anything around this tech just because it is not about tech anymore.

Had lots of Bitcoin sift through my hands. Anyone remember the Bitcoin faucets? Those were the times.

Sincerely, One of the first 1000 users of MtGox (proof in the leaked MtGox database :P)

[swalsh]

I've always been a negative detractor of bitcoin. But then I realized the problem was it was marketed wrong. As a currency, it's a nightmare of a creation. But as a store of value, it's actually pretty good. As long as you don't buy in at one of the speculative bubbles (which admittedly is when the majority of people get in), it's been pretty good at more or less maintaining its value.

As a non-physical thing, it's a good place to go when you're not sure about where to put your money. That used to be the role of the dollar, but this is a good alternative that has cheaper forex fees.

I think the long-term value of bitcoin will not be buying groceries, but storing money while you wait for your the storm your grocery stores currency is in to subside. Probably not relevant to Americans right now, but I'm sure some people in Latin America can see the value.

[geezerjay]

> I've always been a negative detractor of bitcoin. But then I realized the problem was it was marketed wrong. As a currency, it's a nightmare of a creation. But as a store of value, it's actually pretty good.

This claim is absurd. Bitcoin is patently bad as a store of value, and that's perhaps bitcoin's worse and and most ill-suited applications. Even ignoring the speculative pressures and value manioulation being conducted, just look at how much bitcoin's market value has been fluctuating. Even yesterday it suffered a 10% drop for no reason at all. Who in their right mind believes it's a good idea to store value in a highly volatile service subjected to such speculative pressures?

Nowadays bitcoin sounds a whole lot like a pump-and-dump scheme, where shills come out of the woodwork praising bitcoin's magic and supernatural properties to fool unsuspecting fools to keep pumping money into the fraud.

[cwkoss]

I think you're right.

I think a lot of people hear "Digital Currency" and think 'something like Apple Pay', when Bitcoin's competition is closer to ACH/wire transfers.

It's not a tech that everyone needs to use, and most people will pay an expert to use it for them. But if successful, could be a valuable medium for receiving payments from low-trust entities.

For example, if a stock exchange accepted Bitcoin for funding accounts, you could get your account up, funded and ready to trade in less than an hour. Most stock exchanges now take several days for funds to clear.

[amenghra]

The reason things take days to clear is not because the underlying money moving rails are slow.

If/when your stock exchange starts accepting bitcoins, they may still continue to take days to clear things.

[cwkoss]

For what reason do you think a stock exchange would want to add artificial delay to Bitcoin deposits?

I could see holding a portion as 'pending' until many confirmations, or perhaps until the Bitcoin can be liquidated on the market, but both of those seem like they could still resolve an order of magnitude faster than the 'competition'.

[amenghra]

The very same reasons they have delays right now. Institutions are able to move money pretty quickly and cheaply between themselves.

The reason you don’t get that as an end user is because of compliance, fraud, etc.

[cwkoss]

I'd argue that Bitcoin would eliminate the fraud aspect (users can not 'fake' deposits), but compliance could certainly remain as an issue.

[knownothing]

> As long as you don't buy in at one of the speculative bubbles

I'm not so sure about that. You could have bought BTC anytime before the past week or so and it would have appreciated significantly, regardless of whether you bought it in a peak or trough. It's just a question of magnitude. E.g. if you bought 1 BTC at the lowest or highest price in 2015 you would still have outrageous returns on it today.

This is not to say it will continue being the case going forward but it's crazy to look back at.

[krrrh]

Let’s see how everyone feels after the next correction. The headlines today seem to change every time I load google news. Up 10%, down 20%. There’s no way to know where it will go from here.

[heurist]

I had bought about $50 worth of BTC a year ago and it's now worth $800. Did the bitcoin economy grow that much in the last year? I've heard of increasing adoption by banks and governments but I don't know to what extent they're investing. I don't follow it closely and at this valuation, I have no idea whether it's a good investment or not. Should I sell it now before the inevitable crash? Should I buy more? I don't trust myself to understand this kind of speculation yet.

[ChrisRazzzz]

Ask yourself first, why did the value climb 16x? If you cant answer that then I caution purchasing more. I would also spend some time understanding what "investing" is vs what speculating\gambling is.

This is gambling.

[Frogolocalypse]

> Ask yourself first, why did the value climb 16x?

Oh I can do that. I expect it to be 100x or more greater than what it is today. The reason why it is 16 as opposed to 8 or 32 is simply the speed of the uptake. It is going up in value because it is in the process of deflating the fixed-asset debt bubble. The only real question is, how big is that bubble.

> I would also spend some time understanding what "investing"

Investing is understanding what the value proposition is, and investing accordingly. You don't, and that's fine. Don't assume that other people have your understanding of the asset class in question though.

The question you should be asking is, why do you think it's important when other people invest in things that you don't understand.

[CodingGuy]

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=bitcoin

This is the reason why the price is exploding.

[knownothing]

Yes. But I already stated that in my response. We do not know the future and you shouldn't trust anyone who tells you differently.

My point is that there have been skeptics and people saying it's a bubble or too volatile for nearly all of Bitcoin's history. But if you bought BTC and held it--at any high or low, for any significant amount of time--you made a lot of money (either realized or unrealized, that doesn't matter).

[goodside]

> But if you bought BTC and held it--at any high or low, for any significant amount of time--you made a lot of money (either realized or unrealized, that doesn't matter).

This isn't entirely true. If you bought Bitcoin anywhere near the height of the late-2013 mania (which is of course a lot of people, since that's why the price was so high), you lost half your value within a month or two and then had to hold until 2017 before you started to break even. You lost 70% if you held for a year and a half and gave up.

The market from June to November 2011 was even more disastrous, falling from $29 to almost $2 and not recovering until February 2013.

These are obviously cherry-picked dates, and you'd clearly have made a profit eventually if you kept holding, but it's still very possible to hold Bitcoin for years and lose money.

[knownothing]

Right. You would had to have bought and held until today for my claim to be true (and it is only true at the time I write this). But it's still the case that you could have bought in any peak or trough in the periods you're referring to and still have significant realized/unrealized gains right now.

[mirimir]

The thing is, for someone who bought a year or more ago, anything less than a 50% correction is small. Also, prudent folk take some of their winnings out of play.

[Frogolocalypse]

Bitcoin would have to drop 85% in value from where it is now to only have doubled in value over the past year. I'll take 100% yearly value growth any day of the week.

[geezerjay]

Your argument boils down to claiming that a pump and dump scheme is sound investment because those who enter early can still earn some cash when the bubble bursts.

Ponzi schemes are similarly profitable but for some reason they are frowned upon.

[lunchables]

That's the same as it's been for the last few years. This isn't even a huge correction (yet) in bitcoin terms.

[ceejayoz]

> But as a store of value, it's actually pretty good.

It's got a pretty short, volatile history to be deciding that.

[zzzzzzzza]

also much more difficult for average person or even gigantic corporation to secure than a physical good e.g. gold. And coins change over time with forks n crap, gold just stays gold.

[nicky0]

It's very easy to secure. Just generate a private key offline and never tell it to anyone.

[y4mi]

Gold is very easy to secure. Just dig a hole and throw it in. Nobody will find it if you don't tell anyone about it.

Seriously! A digital key is NOT easier to secure than a physical one. If anything, it's harder.

Gold only becomes hard to store if we're talking about huge quantities

[nicky0]

Print the key on paper and put it in a safe. How is that not easy?

Or etch the key on a piece of metal, seal it in plastic, and throw THAT in the ground, if your are that way inclined!

I don't see the difficulty.

[lunchables]

You can do the exact same thing with bitcoin. Write the write the recovery key on a piece of paper and bury it in a box.

The advantage of bitcoin is you can encrypt it and store it offline in as many locations as you want.

[mirimir]

Over the past ~7 years, the price has increased by ~10^5. There have been some bubbles, for sure. But all that has paled over the past year. The price could crash, certainly. Still, if futures become available, it could spike a lot higher before it does.

[wpietri]

And this is exactly what makes it a terrible store of value. As Wikipedia says, "The point of any store of value is risk management due to a stable demand for the underlying asset." Stable demand is definitely not a characteristic of Bitcoin.

[sprafa]

one word: gold

no reason it stores value outside of the fact that we all agree that it does, and we all accept it for curreny. Bitcoin is at that point. It's turning into digital gold.

I agree with the original commenter. Looking at Bitcoin as a currency with terrible UX kept me from investing for the past years. Now it's going past inflection point - it's a store of value that will be acceptable everywhere soon.

[wpietri]

You'd do better to spend a minute Googling before saying something so definitive. The use of gold for jewelry and industrial applications outweighs the investment use of it:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/274684/global-demand-for...

Gold has been valued from time immemorial for its unique aesthetic and practical properties entirely aside from its value as a currency.

That's clearly distinct from, say, paper dollars, which indeed have value only because we agree that they do (and because they're backed by the robust efforts of a government, of course).

[mirimir]

Yes, demand has overall increased dramatically since 2010. And it's still increasing. Perhaps dramatically. You can characterize that as unstable, if you like. But given that my mean cost basis is well under $1K, it's stable enough for me.

[charlesdm]

How much did the value of Peter Thiels Facebook stock go up since he initially invested?

[mrb]

«the price has increased by ~10^5»

Actually more than 10^6: http://bitcoin.zorinaq.com/price/

[makk]

Something that consumes an unbounded amount of electricity is hardly a "non-physical thing."

[vasilipupkin]

Why can't people in Latin America just buy gold or dollars to store value ? I mean it's a circular argument. To say bitcoin is a store of value, there has to be an apriori reason why it has value. It can't be a store of value because it is. Right ?

[ericb]

It is like if you and I took turns paying for lunch periodically and we used a ledger to track who paid what, and who owes who. The ledger itself is bitcoin. The ledger paper is worthless, but the entries on it "have value." For you and I, the ledger "has value" because that's where the history is.

If you printed 50 new blank ledgers, they wouldn't have value because they don't have the history and our mutual agreement.

Bitcoin is the worldwide ledger (WWL).

[matt_wulfeck]

Except it takes usually 2 to 3 days for the ink to dry in the ledger, and costs you $3 every time you wrote in it, and consumed more electricity than your house does in a week, and you do it this way because you want it to be trustless.

[lunchables]

His analogy isn't perfect with all respect to bitcoin, but it is for that explanation. And transaction fees doesn't really matter when it's used as long term value storage for a significant amount of money. The small transaction fee is basically irrelevant.

[vasilipupkin]

I don't get it. why is it a store of value? what makes it have value? For example, suppose I just got paid and I buy bitcoin today. What is the force that will make my bitcoins not be worth 0.5X over the next 20 years ?

[vasilipupkin]

ok, so I had an upsight, to borrow Neil Stephenson's terminology. Speficifcally, that POW coins are inherently flawed. There is no fundamental reason to own one of them.

POS coins on the other hand, are a different animal. If you own a POS coin, you get paid transaction fees for helping verify transactions. Thus, POS coins make fundamental sense, can be valued accordingly and create a reason to actually own the coin - and should, therefore, prove a better store of value than POW coins. Of course, POS is somewhat theoretical, but if Ethereum can pull it off, it should supersede bitcoin. Now, ELI5 why I am wrong, please.

[droffel]

Try this article from Paul Sztorc:

http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/

Definitely not ELI5 material though.

[vasilipupkin]

ok, I skimmed through it. I admit, I didn't get it. However, I don't think it addresses my fundamental point: there is no reason beyond speculation to own a POW coin. There is a reason, independent of speculation, to own a POS coin.

[throwaway413]

WWL, now that’s good...checks domains

[seibelj]

Uh... you have to physically store those things? Easy to steal? Can't send to someone across the country instantly? Bitcoin is way better than gold or dollars when you are in an unstable country. People in Venezuela are huge crypto-heads for that reason

[jonknee]

> Easy to steal?

Bitcoin is perhaps the most commonly stolen store of value the world has ever seen. It has its advantages, but being difficult to steal (or lose permanently!) is not one of them.

[seibelj]

Perhaps it's easier to steal in different ways. Computer-based hacks, bugs, social based attacks (phishing, etc.) sure... but harder to break into a house and steal, as the private key can be hidden better. Easy to assume the safe is where 20 gold bars are.

[pfisch]

Pretty sure cash is the most commonly stolen store of value in the world.

[lunchables]

Source please.

[vasilipupkin]

Right, but you could create a crypto thingie that is tied to gold or dollars. I agree with what you said but it doesn't tell me how to calculate the price of bitcoin

[anonymous5133]

It can get seized by the government. Any traditional assets or physical assets that is. Bitcoin and crypto is significantly harder to do that. You basically need to get the private key. IMO, this is the main reason that it is a a superior store of value compared to gold, dollars or traditional assets. If your government is corrupt then it is reasonable that the police will seize your gold. Not much of a store of value if it can just be taken away from you.

[vasilipupkin]

Understood, but that doesn't explain why it's a store of value meaning why can't bitcoin cost 5k vs 10k

[hw]

supply vs demand. More and more people are getting introduced to bitcoin, understanding it and buying into it. There's also a cap on the total number of bitcoins, so scarcity is another factor. Just like why gold is worth X instead of X/2

[geezerjay]

> More and more people are getting introduced to bitcoin, understanding it and buying into it.

That's pretty much the definition of a pump-and-dump scheme.

[vasilipupkin]

ok, but gold sometimes is worth X and sometimes X/2, if you actually plot the chart of gold. Gold is not exactly a great investment

[jcoffland]

Why are you easily able to see gold as having intrinsic value but not Bitcoin? Both are valuable because a lot of people say so. There is no other value but utility and most currencies, including the dollar, do not have any utility other than their ability to function as currency.

[vasilipupkin]

Gold has physical value, right ? For example, used in electronics, jewelry, etc. but gold is a terrible investment so if bitcoin is like gold should we also assume it's a terrible investment like gold ?

[cordite]

I like the concept, but it’s rate of change and lengthy transaction period and confusing transaction fees make it inhospitable for goods and services that I’d use it for.

[DennisP]

I also remember the early Bitcoin days. I didn't get any until over $100 but I came across it before it was worth anything. I remember the faucets, the alpaca socks, the triumphant day when a bitcoin reached parity with a dollar, all of it. It was a glorious, happy community of idealists back then.

Those days are gone for Bitcoin, but I've found a cryptocurrency community elsewhere that reminds me of those early Bitcoin days. I jumped in full-time and I'm having a blast.

[pera]

Which community?

[DennisP]

Ethereum. Admittedly there's a dark side of scammy ICOs, but there's also lots of open source coding and idealists trying to change the world.

I don't think Ethereum is the only cryptocurrency community like this, it's just the one I'm involved in.

[patrickk]

One of the best things about Ethereum is how Vitalik focuses mostly on important technical solutions to difficult problems, notably scaling the network to millions/billions of tx/s - crucial to Ethereum's future success. He rises above the noise, it's really impressive given his young age.

https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/931323377008046080

[dingo_bat]

> idealists

> hard fork because people didn't want to honor smart contract

Does not compute.

[emsimot]

Just because some people have different ideals to yourself doesn't make them any less idealistic.

[dingo_bat]

Honoring a contract you got into is not idealistic?

[detailyang]

Ethereum community is so cool, I envy you can join it with full time:)

[DennisP]

What's stopping you?

[zenlikethat]

I’m not OP, but I like Monero. However any question like this is likely to get brigaded with everyone’s favorite bag to hold^W^W^W currency.

[DennisP]

Monero's cool too. Probably most projects that are reasonably young and successful, and have something new and different about them.

[ajdlinux]

> Anyone remember the Bitcoin faucets?

I logged in to my Coinbase account for the first time in years this week.

What was $0.01 worth of Bitcoin from a faucet is now worth $0.20. Incredible ROI!

[varbo]

I'm trying to send $700 in bitcoin to purchase something. It's going to cost me $65 to buy the coins and several hours of time.

Of course, I am banned from Coinbase for an innocous bank mistake. There's literally no other options to buy coins at 1-2% in the US.

[sidko]

Here's a list [1] of 400 exchanges you can buy Bitcoin from, 34 of trade BTC/USD. This doesn't include some sites that charge a premium and allow you to buy with debit cards. There are also Bitcoin ATMs, over 1000 of them in the United States [2].

[1] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/#markets [2] https://coinatmradar.com/

[akvadrako]

That's not a useful response. ATM's will likely have over 1-2% in fees, and just trading USD isn't enough - you need a way to get your money in and out.

[sushid]

Gemini and Kraken are just two I can list from the top of my head.

[wmf]

Isn't Gemini 0.25%?

[jdironman]

I just tried registering with them and the reg page is down for maintenance.

[ohhhlol]

yes or lower, https://gemini.com/fee-schedule/

[mirimir]

Create an Electrum wallet. Find a friend who has Bitcoin. Meet for lunch/dinner. They transfer ~70 mBTC to you, with a 1-2 mBTC fee. After 2-3 confirmations, you give them $710-$720 cash. Done.

[cortesoft]

With a process so simple, why would anyone ever use cash?!

[mirimir]

Well, OP could just ask about mailing cash, instead of using Bitcoin ;) And do recall that OP has been banned by Coinbase, and doesn't want to pay over 1-2% fees. So they're a rather special case.

[arcticbull]

The 3% fee here is the same as a credit card but without any of the benefits, since a credit card nets you purchase protections, extends the manufacturers warranty, 2% or more in cash back and you don't have to pay it off immediately, and it also clears in seconds instead of hours. And the merchant pays the fee not you. Am I missing something?

[mirimir]

OP specified Bitcoin, so hey. Maybe there's a reason. OP?

[PhrosTT]

For the record Coinbase is adding 100k users a day. So people need to dial down the expectations...

[alextheparrot]

The number mentioned for the record is wrong: Coinbase has added 100k users in a day, it is not adding 100k users per day [0]. That’s not evening considering the number of users who may be fraudulent, they are hiring [1].

[0] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1NgvD2kFT69mSXuJPzPDu...

[1] https://www.coinbase.com/careers/923993

[j_s]

They are hiring and getting flagged off Who's Hiring (did they do this to themselves? never seen anything else like it) for mentioning MongoDB:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14902743

[sah2ed]

@jessepollak [0] wrote in the thread you linked to saying: "NOTE: A spammer posted this same post below, not sure why. ".

It was a spammer's post that was flagged not Coinbase.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14903400

[SilasX]

Down? They've had tons of money and time since June[1] to scale up to handle much larger volume. They don't have a real excuse for these major outages. I got a recruiter email but didn't want to go near them because of how flaky they apparently are.

(Gemini has been much better but they went down for a lot of today too.)

[1] When they had ~4 volume related outages.

[zeep]

I would be surprised if Coinbase didn't get sued because of their bad service... locking people's money when the market is going crazy.

[zipwitch]

This is (as someone who hasn't played around with bitcoin much) something I've been curious about. How easy is it to get significant amounts of bitcoin turned into cash? This is particularly applicable at a moment like the present. If I had, say, 25 bitcoins that I wanted to trade into dollars _right now_ what hurdles stand in my way, and how long would it take to clear them?

[zenlikethat]

There are liquidation limits on the exchanges. I think Coinbase limits to $10k USD in exchange for your Bitcoins. You can get increases by providing additional identity verification. IRS is way up in Coinbase’s business since this is essentially a huge potential avenue for laundering and tax evasion.

[usrusr]

So it might be that bitcoin is rising and rising ever more not just because owners are bullish on future development but also because some of those who are not are disallowed from selling? Best store of value ever, backed by inability to sell.

[cdiddy2]

gemini?

[goldenkey]

Im also banned from coinbase for asking them to hurry my verification because I needed to buy vitamins. They are a pretty miserable company. How can they claim to sell something "useful" then ban you if you mention using it? They basically are admitting to selling a security if that is the case..wondering if we could take all the nonsensically banned users and do a class action lawsuit against them. It would be one thing if I said drugs but I didnt. They banned me for fucking vitamins.

[ceejayoz]

> Im also banned from coinbase for asking them to hurry my verification because I needed to buy vitamins.

You don't see how that might be a red flag? What vitamins could possibly be so important that you couldn't wait a little while, and would be unavailable from another source?

Plus, the rudeness of "I'm more important than everyone else in the queue, hurry up" can't have helped.

[stale2002]

He might be rude, but honestly a company should be expected to deal with rude customers.

It is their job to do deal with slightly rude customers, and I don't think they should be banning anybody for something so small as "being asked to go faster".

[ceejayoz]

The rudeness can't have helped, but I'd imagine the "I desperately need my 'vitamins' that can only be bought with Bitcoin" bit is what got the account flagged.

[SilasX]

Right, but (without knowing any more details about the case), I'd hope they needed more than that one thing to "nope" him away.

[goldenkey]

It actually was vitamins from a foreign shop that took international payments thru bitcoin. I could have shown them if they wanted proof. However they never let me have any recourse. Just instaban, goodbye. As hard as it might be to believe its their job to remain professional. And they failed at that. My account didn't get flagged - I got outright banned- lets not mince words. Coinbase is ran by a bunch of assholes.

[chmpgne]

Bitcoin itself is being harmed by the core developers who refuse to do anything to address the insane fees: bitcoin needs more bandwidth and throughput in its blocks, classic supply and demand.

Bitcoin cash or something like etherium are worth a look at. Bitcoin cash, as the name implies, holds the value that bitcoin should be able to be used as electronic cash.

[antonios]

All you bcash advocates should go learn a thing about the infeasibility of solving a (hyper)exponential scaling problem with linear "solutions" (aka block size increase). Alternatively, leave these matters to the engineers.

[Frogolocalypse]

No one is interested in the centralized bcash. It is a crypto in name only.

[qsucvatz]

Bitcoin is Bitcoin Cash. We immediately restored the ability for Bitcoin to be adopted with low fees and fast confirmations by using 8 MB blocks.

The median income for the world is $6/day. High fees are unaffordable and unadoptable. The Core team has done Bitcoin an enormous disservice; like setting autopilot into the terrain.

[Frogolocalypse]

You call your alt whatever you like. I'll call it bcash so that it removes confusion from peoples minds that it isn't bitcoin. The only thing that alt has is a name they've stolen from bitcoin. So bcash it is.

No one cares about the fees. If they did, they'd use litecoin. Blocks 4x the speed of bcash and bitcoin, and they have segwit too, so double the capacity of bcash.

[xur17]

8MB blocks don't solve the longterm scalability problem. I agree that high fees are unacceptable, but I'd rather wait for a solution that allows order a transaction increase of several orders of magnitude rather than scaling it linearly (and therefore reducing the number of people that can actually use it).

[lawlessone]

Bcash was just an attempt to prevent Segwit and keep fees high under the guise of doing the opposite.

[Kadin]

> Lots of problems to be solved back then, but Bitcoin is just the same now. Nothing was solved. No progress

Oh, it's way worse than that. Now, a small country's worth of electricity is consumed every day to no end at all, except "mining" Bitcoins.

[keymone]

How is that “worse” though? This is free market at work. Energy being spent securing the bitcoin network will always correlate with value of bitcoin.

The end is existence of bitcoin as solution to fairly important problem of decentralized and censorship-resistant consensus mechanism over open ledger that everybody can transfer value within (and soon with convenient atomic swaps - across multiple chains). And that is just the lowest layer of operation.

Anybody claiming bitcoin mining is wasting energy assumes the solution to said problem is worthless or the problem doesn’t exist. Both of which I (and the market) disagree with.

As for whether there could be more “efficient” way to line bitcoins - this is irrelevant, because for every jump in efficiency there will be similar jump in mining difficulty by design.

[FranOntanaya]

That's the puzzling part. A lot of work has gone into Stake / Mixed proof chains that don't depend on consuming horrendous amounts of energy. There isn't a good reason to expect money not to shift to more efficient ledgers when things settle down.

[keymone]

Proof of work has one big advantage over proof of stake - it makes bitcoin backed by value of infrastructure and energy dedicated to mining it.

In contrast with proof of stake there is quite literally nothing at stake.

[mrb]

Miners use less electricity (~15 TWh/yr today) than Christmas decorative lights in the world (probably 20 TWh/yr, of which 6.6 for the US alone according to US DoE). If we can afford to spend that much energy not even on useful lighting—just decorative—surely we can afford to run a transformative financial system such as Bitcoin.

The "small country" comparison is deceptive as the energy is equivalent to just a single nuclear power plant: 15 TWh/yr = 1.7 GW

http://blog.zorinaq.com/bitcoin-electricity-consumption/

[megaman22]

Shit, somebody gave me 0.05 BTC a few years ago to go to a talk about what it was all about. Hopefully I still have that paper wallet, it must be worth close to $500

[ashark]

I got .20-someodd (.28, maybe? Maybe have even been in the .3 range.) years ago from spigots and a very brief experiment with mining, then thoughtlessly formatted right over the damn hard drive with the wallet on it and went "oh well, not like it's worth anything".

Don't suppose there are any low-level wallet-finder tools out there in case it hasn't been overwritten? It's finally worth a couple days to give that a shot on all my old hard drives (I forgot which one it was long ago, which is part of why it hasn't been worth it so far).

[mads]

After I upgraded, I gave my Xeon Workstation to my Mother and actually kept the miner running when I gave it to her. She complained it was a bit slow, when she used Photoshop, so I turned the miner off and she was happy. There must have been something like 300 or 400 coins in that wallet.

I should ask her if she still has it next time I see her, but I am pretty sure she threw it in the garbage.

[ISL]

If it exists, you should ask her today. 300 coins is ~$3M.

[makomk]

Probably. I actually wrote one about half a decade ago, though I'm not sure how well it works with recent or really old versions of the software: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=25091.0

[Twisell]

That would actually be hilarious if a suffisent number of geeks tried to cash in the bitcoin that is dormant somewhere massively and at the exact same time.

This could well end the Ponzi scheme in a victorious way because people that mined them from almost nothing could extract a lot of real money from people (mostly speculators) who bought recently while totally tanking the valuation.

Wait... maybe that was always the plan... Is bitcoin actually a huge planned «Robin Hood» bubble?

[mads]

Sounds about right. I paid 500 euros for my 0.05BTC piece of history (there were some fees and all that of course).

Maybe I just bought a piece of something like the Berlin wall and when everything goes to shit and this whole train wreck evolves into something more sane later on in 100 years or whatever, my grand children can sell my 0.05BTC on Sothebys or something :D ..

[hackermailman]

I went through all my old blockchain.info temporary wallets from 2014 in gmail the other day to collect the spare change I left in them at the time that is now worth $2k. Took 9hrs to confirm moving them, which is ridiculous. Guess it's time to switch to Monero or Zcash for use as a currency.

[antonios]

Lots of things to be improved, but even if nothing changes and Bitcoin is frozen exactly as it is right now, it would provide the best store of value we have for years. This "honeybadger" resilience attribute is rather an advantage for a store of value. Especially now that the big players will get in the game (CME, Nasdaq etc.)

[jchanimal]

Shameless plug for my project from back in the everything is possible days. https://www.wired.com/2014/07/document-coin

Please can we move beyond commodity currency?

[nadam]

You should not think of bitcoin as a payment network, and do not expect its tech innovate rapidly. It is digital gold. Its most important property is to be secure and battle tested. I think bitcoin will be even bigger than it is now. If you zoom out into hundreds of years timeline, it has a historical significance: to store value in an extremely secure and relatively convenient way without trusting a third party. That is big. Probably will be bigger than 172 billion dollars market cap. It is competing with gold, which is something like $7 trillion. If you are interested in the future of payment, than you should invest into sometinhg like Dash instead, which is specifically designed and marketed for payment. Its price is rising rapidly, but it has not blown up as much as bitcoin yet. I hold an almost equal amount (in dollar value) in Dash as in Bitcoin.

[Havoc]

Yeah I think I purchased a month of VPN with like half a bitcoin. Oops.

Hindsight 20/20 I guess

[andrewwharton]

I've said it before and I'll say it again. We've been cruising past orders of magnitude ($0.10 > $1 > $10 > $100 > $1000 > $10000) and at any one of those jumps it seemed like the top of a bubble and just as likely to go in the opposite direction with the same velocity.

Don't kick yourself for spending when you did, because as I'm sure you're aware, it's just as likely that you could be now saying "Thank goodness I used those Bitcoins when they still worth something".

I bought a bunch at ~$1, then they jumped to $10 and it started to be fun, because I had a bunch more value to play with, then they jumped to $100, I thought screw this. This is not why I bought them and if they keep up this volatility, then they're not going to be useful for what I want to use them for (ie. buying/selling online).

I don't regret selling them when I did, and I don't think you should either.

[copperx]

"I don't regret being a millionaire, and you shouldn't either."

[andrewwharton]

You can't judge the quality of decisions you made in the past based on what you know now. Imagine going to a casino, putting $100 on red in the roulette wheel, black coming up and then thinking, "Man, I really regret putting it on red, I should have put it on black".

How is that in any way useful or going to improve future decisions? Bet on black, because you know, that's where the trend line is going?

Case in point: Do you short Bitcoin now or not? Who freaking knows...

[chrisan]

Its still the right attitude to have or else every hindsight choice is going to be regret, and we'll be talking trillionaires. No one can predict the future. It could have gone down to 0.10 instead of up to 1000. Should everyone buy in now and expect the value to go up to 20k?

[endless1234]

Do you regret not buying every penny stock that went up in value, every roulette ball that landed on red you didn't bet on? From a get rich quick standpoint there is no difference.

[Havoc]

Well I certainly missed the bus on this one. But I also think it's too late to climb on now.

As I said I bought VPN with it when this stuff was in baby stages. Now at 10k USD valuation the real world usage hasn't grown all that much from there...certainly nothing like the price growth. So I'm staying really fkin far away from this.

People called it right & made a killing of it - more power to them. Realistically this can't going though without some monster sized improvement in the underlying non-speculative transaction volume.

Real world utility and pricing have to converge at some point. Right now they seem to be growing apart exponentially and all I can think of is RIP whoever is on the wrong side of that when it returns to reality.

[sbenitoj]

Have you checked out the Bitcoin Cash community on r/BTC? There’s plenty of hatred for Core developers on there, but there’s also a lot of grassroots projects going on, like the Bitcoin Cash Fund that recently raised about $85k to fund projects that spread adoption of Bitcoin Cash — feels a lot more like the early days.

https://thebitcoincash.fund/

https://www.yours.org/content/a-new-model-for-bcf-project-or...

[lawlessone]

Bcash is just a pump and dump

[sbenitoj]

How do you define, specifically, a pump and dump vs a legitimate cryptocurrency?

[geezerjay]

> vs a legitimate cryptocurrency

Is there such a thing?

[argo_]

Nostalgia and technology should'nt walk together.

[TomK32]

9999.95 BTC more and I'll send you two pizzas.

[ohhhlol]

> Bitcoin is just the same now. Nothing was solved. No progress

Not true, see Segwit recently, soon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network

edit: -3 in an hour, why?

[schmichael]

Segwit is used in a small fraction of transactions[0] and SegWit2x was cancelled. While the price has skyrocketed the actual transaction rate has barely moved[1].

[0] http://segwit.party/charts/

[1] https://blockchain.info/charts/transactions-per-second?times...

[Frogolocalypse]

All that demonstrates is that people dont care that much about txn fees. If they did, they would create segwit wallets.

[schmichael]

Combined with the low transaction rate I would assume people don't care about Bitcoin as currency -- only as a rapidly appreciating asset. As long as the price keeps skyrocketing why would you ever spend any unless you had no other currency?

[Frogolocalypse]

Not really. I have a bitcoin debit card. This essentially puts the money in my wallet into bitcoin. The way bitcoin has been doing over the past year, all it does is make everything reduce in price relative to the time I put the money in the wallet.

[qsucvatz]

How can we count votes of people who don't have the money for a single transaction fee? I thought Bitcoin was supposed to be better because it was the cheapest?

[Frogolocalypse]

You subsidize them then. Mining isn't free. Running a node isn't free. Bitcoin was never about being cheap, it's about protecting your purchasing power.