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)
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.
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.
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
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.)
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.
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.
My guess is that this is probably pretty meaningless.
There are a few things going against them.
- The CBOE and CME are both much larger futures exchanges and are going to be offering futures first
- since you can't net out futures contracts from different exchanges this means they tend to become winner take all
> One way Nasdaq seeks to differentiate itself seems to be in the amount of data it uses for pricing the digital currency contracts. VanEck Associates Corp., which recently withdrew plans for a bitcoin exchange-traded fund, will supply the data used to price the contracts, pulling figures from more than 50 sources, according to the person.
This might be interesting as one of the things that everyone is worried about is price manipulation.
If you haven't thought about how futures work with respect to margin and marking at the end of the trading day you need to know that you can be required to deposit more money into your margin account if the futures trade moves against you on any given day.
This means the marking price is very important and lost of institutional money is worried that the exchanges are easy to manipulate.
> Nasdaq’s product will reinvest proceeds from the spin-off back into the original bitcoin in a way meant to make the process more seamless for traders, the person said.
This is awesome,, right now the CBOE and CME both have punted on the question of forks saying, they'll have a best efforts to figure it out.
One difference is that NASDAQ is a name everyone in the world knows while CME is fairly anonymous. Yes, I know they are bigger but I can assure you that if you ask random people in my country most would know NASDAQ while very few would know CME. Seeing NASDAQ is adding it will add to the hype.
> One way Nasdaq seeks to differentiate itself seems to be in the amount of data it uses for pricing the digital currency contracts. VanEck Associates Corp., which recently withdrew plans for a bitcoin exchange-traded fund, will supply the data used to price the contracts, pulling figures from more than 50 sources, according to the person. That appears to exceed CME’s plan to use four sources, and Cboe’s one. Nasdaq’s contracts will be cleared by Options Clearing Corp., the person said.
BitMEX bitcoin futures are already online. IDK how many price sources they pull?
Aren't there a few other companies already selling Bitcoin futures?
So here's a scheme that could be used to wildly profit in the fiat market. If you're what is considered a bitcoin "whale" holding millions worth of the currency you would just setup a short on bitcoin futures. Then you initiate a large sell from a well known whale wallet. This would trigger a large sell as stop losses are triggered. Profit then re-buy the dip.
> Do futures markets typically stabilize the price of a commodity?
Kind of. It doesn't necessarily stabilize the prices of the commodity so much as allow the transferring of the risk associated with price movements.
> Who loses out if a futures contract can't be fulfilled (for example due to lack of liquidity in the underlying market)?
The exchange acting as the clearing house is on the other side of each contract so they'd be left holding the empty bag. Exchanges deal with this by settling futures daily (so net cash movement based on current price) and by setting margin requirements on the members buying or selling contracts. The margin requirements vary based on the volatility of the future and for something like Bitcoin I wouldn't be surprised if was 100%.
What's particularly cool / safe (and interesting if you're a finance nut) about futures vs. actual trading of Bitcoins is that there is zero crypto involved. Everything is cash settled in dollars.
I think it kind of does, in a way. Let's say I go long on bitcoin, but purchase futures that are short on it. If bitcoin plummets, I may lose on the bitcoin position, but the futures I purchased will go up, limiting my losses.
Southwest did something similar with oil a few years ago. Fuel is one of the biggest costs to an airline, so when the price of oil spiked a few years ago, many airlines had to raise ticket prices + add fees to make up for the loss. Southwest, on the other hand, had oil futures betting on the cost of oil going up. When the spike happened, their costs went up too, but they could make up for it with the futures.
There was a 4 hour stretch this morning in which Bitcoin lost over 20% of its value. In the last 45 minutes it is up 13%. I wonder what a long straddle would cost on this thing.
Bitcoin has recovered from dips really well in the past weeks due to major buy pressure. Unfortunately GDAX (and Coinbase), Gemini, and other exchanges all went down at the same time this time around, making it impossible to buy the dip.
>... New York Stock Exchange owner Intercontinental Exchange Inc. is the only one of the four major U.S. exchange operators without public plans to offer bitcoin derivatives.
That's pretty big. A couple years ago people were very skeptical that the big players would ever start dabbling in Bitcoin.
I thought BTC going above 10000 was the end of the bubble, but with announces like that it's just the beginning.
Each time it grows I fear bigger damages... But I also hope I'm wrong and I'll be just proven to be a fool for not having a bigger amount of bitcoin (I mined some back in the days)
Hopefully it's not cash settled like the CME. That is the worst idea ever, and will probably cause a lot of people to get screwed over by market manipulation. Especially since the CME is basing the cash settlement price on a single exchange: GDAX. Anyone can go to GDAX and crash or spike the price for one minute at 4:00pm any day and trigger a bunch of margin calls on the CME.
Especially considering how easy it is to make a bitcoin transaction (compared to things like wheat, or oil...) it really should be "bitcoin settled".
If the bitcoin price was increasing linearly people would not be blaming the technology so much. Rapid exponential growth followed by abrupt decline in repeated cycles makes people confused.
It's still gambling in a sense however there is a major difference in the type of randomness you are exposing yourself to. At a casino or when playing cards it's very easy to compute probabilities of all possible events - hence the house always wins. Here in order to compute the probabilities of price movements you'd need to model millions of human agents across dozens of markets. So unless someone has a lot of insider information, you have a decent chance of making some money.
One person’s useless is another’s breakthrough, critical mass solution to one of humanity’s oldest and most fundamental problems: tracking who has/owes what.
[+] [-] mads|8 years ago|reply
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|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] DennisP|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ajdlinux|8 years ago|reply
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|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Kadin|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] megaman22|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antonios|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jchanimal|8 years ago|reply
Please can we move beyond commodity currency?
[+] [-] nadam|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Havoc|8 years ago|reply
Hindsight 20/20 I guess
[+] [-] sbenitoj|8 years ago|reply
https://thebitcoincash.fund/
https://www.yours.org/content/a-new-model-for-bcf-project-or...
[+] [-] argo_|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TomK32|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ohhhlol|8 years ago|reply
Not true, see Segwit recently, soon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network
edit: -3 in an hour, why?
[+] [-] chollida1|8 years ago|reply
There are a few things going against them.
- The CBOE and CME are both much larger futures exchanges and are going to be offering futures first
- since you can't net out futures contracts from different exchanges this means they tend to become winner take all
> One way Nasdaq seeks to differentiate itself seems to be in the amount of data it uses for pricing the digital currency contracts. VanEck Associates Corp., which recently withdrew plans for a bitcoin exchange-traded fund, will supply the data used to price the contracts, pulling figures from more than 50 sources, according to the person.
This might be interesting as one of the things that everyone is worried about is price manipulation.
If you haven't thought about how futures work with respect to margin and marking at the end of the trading day you need to know that you can be required to deposit more money into your margin account if the futures trade moves against you on any given day.
This means the marking price is very important and lost of institutional money is worried that the exchanges are easy to manipulate.
see: http://openmarkets.cmegroup.com/3785/understanding-margin-ch...
> Nasdaq’s product will reinvest proceeds from the spin-off back into the original bitcoin in a way meant to make the process more seamless for traders, the person said.
This is awesome,, right now the CBOE and CME both have punted on the question of forks saying, they'll have a best efforts to figure it out.
[+] [-] Kiro|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] westurner|8 years ago|reply
BitMEX bitcoin futures are already online. IDK how many price sources they pull?
Aren't there a few other companies already selling Bitcoin futures?
[+] [-] LeoJiWoo|8 years ago|reply
Well John McAfee thinks bitcoin will hit 1 million by 2020.
[+] [-] lern_too_spel|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bochoh|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] londons_explore|8 years ago|reply
* Do futures markets typically stabilize the price of a commodity?
* Who loses out if a futures contract can't be fulfilled (for example due to lack of liquidity in the underlying market)?
[+] [-] koolba|8 years ago|reply
Kind of. It doesn't necessarily stabilize the prices of the commodity so much as allow the transferring of the risk associated with price movements.
> Who loses out if a futures contract can't be fulfilled (for example due to lack of liquidity in the underlying market)?
The exchange acting as the clearing house is on the other side of each contract so they'd be left holding the empty bag. Exchanges deal with this by settling futures daily (so net cash movement based on current price) and by setting margin requirements on the members buying or selling contracts. The margin requirements vary based on the volatility of the future and for something like Bitcoin I wouldn't be surprised if was 100%.
What's particularly cool / safe (and interesting if you're a finance nut) about futures vs. actual trading of Bitcoins is that there is zero crypto involved. Everything is cash settled in dollars.
[+] [-] swalsh|8 years ago|reply
Southwest did something similar with oil a few years ago. Fuel is one of the biggest costs to an airline, so when the price of oil spiked a few years ago, many airlines had to raise ticket prices + add fees to make up for the loss. Southwest, on the other hand, had oil futures betting on the cost of oil going up. When the spike happened, their costs went up too, but they could make up for it with the futures.
[+] [-] wyldfire|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ISL|8 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act
[+] [-] slg|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] g09980|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] richardw|8 years ago|reply
Prefer buy and ignore for a decade. Still a trade rather than an investment but at least you can only lose what you put in.
BTC moved 20% down in the last 24 hours. That's like a market crash in old money. Leverage that and life will get exciting, fast.
[+] [-] colemannugent|8 years ago|reply
That's pretty big. A couple years ago people were very skeptical that the big players would ever start dabbling in Bitcoin.
[+] [-] alex_duf|8 years ago|reply
Each time it grows I fear bigger damages... But I also hope I'm wrong and I'll be just proven to be a fool for not having a bigger amount of bitcoin (I mined some back in the days)
[+] [-] fragsworth|8 years ago|reply
Especially considering how easy it is to make a bitcoin transaction (compared to things like wheat, or oil...) it really should be "bitcoin settled".
[+] [-] junkscience2017|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] argo_|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chx|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 98Windows|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] virtuexru|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] sctb|8 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[+] [-] psyc|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deadmetheny|8 years ago|reply
Exactly none of it, considering that Bitcoin as a currency is fairly useless unless you're buying drugs or you're a botnet operator.
[+] [-] stevespang|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] asdjasldkjkljd|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] dailyvijeos|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anonymous5133|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cgmg|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brianorwhatever|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tonetheman|8 years ago|reply
Man we should instead of trading bitcoins trade fish in World of Warcraft. Insane times we live in.
[+] [-] chinathrow|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonknee|8 years ago|reply