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About LinkBacksRead more.Other major exchanges suggest Mt. Gox has been "weeded out" due to bad practice.
Read more.Other major exchanges suggest Mt. Gox has been "weeded out" due to bad practice.
Bad news for any company accepting bitcoin as payment method!
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Anyone leaving large quantities of money in an offshore, unregulated account are just asking for trouble. Same goes for banks as well as bitcoin sites.
The vast chunk of my bitcoins are stored in a paper wallet stored in a safe, this way a website can't steal them, I don't lose them if my computer dies or is hacked, and I can't sell them without thinking about it properly (which has saved my bacon a few times).
Bitcoin will recover from this, and in fact I think that MtGox dying is actually a good thing as they have been dodgy for a LONG time, and anyone using it has been a fool as they have had issues for over a year with regards to withdrawing cash.
Still don't see how Bitcoins are actually worth any money. You don't have to do anything to get them yet they are worth hundred of pounds each.
True, but when it comes down to it, you can say the exact same about any currency. It has no intrinsic value of itself, it's only down to what you can exchange it for.
Yes and no. With normal currencies, they are exchanged to show the exchange of wealth from one person to another for whatever reason ie work done or generosity (still waitingOriginally Posted by b0redom
) whereas with bitcoin, you are using your GPUs to sort through code and coming up with some more code which is meant to signify wealth of some sort.
If any of that made any sense whatsoever.
Currencies are underwritten by a central authority which is trying to make it stable the whole time.
True, you will get some stupid ones, Zimbabwe or anywhere that people try to manipulate things massively for their political goals, but as Argentina showed you can also use the central authority to fix the problems and bring order. (inflation-less conversion)
Bitcoin is different. The production of money in sterling is governed by how fast the economy is or isn't growing. The production of bitcoin is limited by the algorithmic designs, it is very pyramid like.
Think of a currency where if you held your money, it would increase in value faster than any underlying asset. This isn't good, this is why governments always try to have inflation on their currency, all be it low. If you adopted bitcoin as a currency you would in effect have a deflation currency. You wouldn't ever want to buy anything, because it will always be cheaper to buy it tomorrow.
Bitcoin isn't a currency, it's a tradeable speculative asset.
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So you're not mining for money per se, you're mining for something which is worth as much money as the demand for it. Essentially like going out and mining for gold.
No.
I really dislike the analogy that people put round that mining coins is mining gold.
Coin mining is the whole P=NP thing. You can quickly multiply 5*5 to see its 25, but working out all the factors of 25 is hard! (25/2,25/3,25/4,25/5 ah got it, it's far more calculations, now lets go find the prime factors for: 600851475143 by hand).
The rate of coins probably being mined, is a bounded function. As such mining and the costs of mining have no relation to the value and demand for coins. If bitcoin went to $10k tomorrow, mining would cost the same it did yesterday.
Gold on the other hand is different. Gold is mined with big real world costs, there are places which have gold, but it isn't economically viable to mine. If golds price surged say 100x there would be far more profitable areas to extract it from. The supply would rise a little bit too.
So no, I don't even consider bitcoins to be a commodity like gold.
It's not a currency, it's not a precious metal style commodity, it's a tradeable asset, that's it.
Most people I know who talk about bitcoins are often educated, above average IQ, but smack of what have the Romans ever done for us when it comes to economics. There are reasons central banks exist.
There is a libertarian / anarchist movement too with bitcoin, I get that, but don't reject history, we've made the mistakes before, let's not do it again.
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I really don't see the problem with this, in fact it solves the biggest problem with the world right now in that most people spend WAY more than they earn, wracking up debts for all sorts of silly things. Most people are walking around with a phone in their pocket that is effectively on loan!
If you save your cash, bitcoins, whatever.. it SHOULD be worth more in the future, why is it a good thing to be effectively forced to spend what you've worked hard for otherwise risk losing value due to inflation?
Spending what you've earned is a good thing. Otherwise no-one buys products and services and we'd have to move from a capitalist market to government hand-outs. Eventually people would start bartering goods and spending turnips instead of coins, and we'd move back into a stable inflation based capitalist economy again.
What's not good is governments spending more than they get in taxes, which is happening in the UK, the USA and most other countries. To get around this, they just create more money which makes your money saved or being earnt, worth less. That's the sucky part of all this and it's getting worse year on year.
Ask your parents, or grand parents how much they bought their first car and house for to realise how much the value has changed in only the last 50 years. It's NUTS!
It's this creating money out of thin air that is so great about bitcoin, because whilst most people "don't get" how they are created, there are rules to it, the number created is finite, is fairly steady in how it increases and how it gradually slows down. Having a finite supply of something is useful for everyone.
The closest they've come to doing that is the various bond buying programs that the US and UK govts have done in recent times to stimulate the economy. That's a very limited measure (only last few years) and certainly not normal practise.
The programmes are being scaled back, not increasing.That's the sucky part of all this and it's getting worse year on year.
House price inflation is more to do with supply and demand, not anything related to the currency. Cars likewise are much more expensive to make than they used to be - yes, they cost more, but a lot more materials, building and R&D goes into them.Ask your parents, or grand parents how much they bought their first car and house for to realise how much the value has changed in only the last 50 years. It's NUTS!
Why is having a finite supply (ultimately decreasing if you account for losses) of something good?It's this creating money out of thin air that is so great about bitcoin, because whilst most people "don't get" how they are created, there are rules to it, the number created is finite, is fairly steady in how it increases and how it gradually slows down. Having a finite supply of something is useful for everyone.
No they don't, you've some serious miss conceptions about state debt and central banking. Can I suggest getting a copy of a book such as The Undercover Economist.
Erm, because buying a car 50 years ago was much more of someones median income you mean? Or just ignoring things like decimalisation and the labour government messing things up?
It isn't greated out of thin air, if you'd read my post above you'd see I do have a workable understanding of how they are chrunched and why I think having the finite supply isn't useful for everyone at all. I mean the coins won't be growing inline with the population, this would effectively make those born poorer than those who owned coins before.
There is absolutely no good reason for having such limitation, except to maintain value for those who are long, but having it bounded by probability isn't going to help that.
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Because when it comes to a store of wealth (greed, investment, saving for your kids) then it's better to know in advance exactly how many of an item exists. This is why limited editions are worth more, why people like collectables etc. I'd rather have 1 millionth of the total of something that is fixed, than buying 1 millionth of something now, that in 10 years will be 1 billionth of the total.
For example, would you rather buy shares in a company that would just keep diluting their stock (and your percentage ownership) year upon year, or a company that fixed the quantity and so your percentage holding would never change?
Depends on the point, the strategy, of the investment.
Diluting the shareholding doesn't bother me to any extent, UNLESS control is an issue. One (unlisted) company I held (past tense) shares in gave me 50%. Any dilution, even a single share, would have given the other single shareholder control. There, any tiny dilution = massive dilution, to the point of complete loss, of control.
On the other hand, if I hold 0.00001% of a major listed company, and it gets diluted to 0.0000099%, it makes no difference at all to "control" and a purely theoretical difference to voting rights.
So .... for that major company, a stock split or rights issue could be used to reduce the price of a share, to aid trading volumes. What I care about is the value, going forward, of the investment, and/or dividend income. And some shares I've had have been aimed at asset appreciation, at capital growth, not at income.
Growing a medium company to a large one, done well, results in my shareholding being worth more, even if the proportion I own has shrunk. For example, a policy of not paying dividends but reinvesting ALL profits will, if the company is successful, result in faster growth than otherwise. So, if I want income, that's not a share I'd buy. But if I want capital gain, it is, if I believe in the business plan. And, I might find myself paying 40%, 45% or under Labour, conceivably 50% on income, like dividends. But maybe 20%-ish on capital gains. And 0% up to the annual capital gain threshold. So, I've already used my income tax PA so any further income gets charged at full marginal rate. But if I buy shares which reinvest and don't pay dividends, I can sell enough shares to keep the annual capital gain under the CGT threshold and pay no tax on it at all. And THAT means that my interest is in the capital value of that shareholding, and my level of control and share dilution is irrelevant.
Consider this. A given share is desireable, but the unit cost is high, say, £150 per share. That alone reduces trading volumes. But, make a rights issue, 3 for 1, and I have 3 times as many shares, but for a popular share, increased trading volumes often means the unit price is higher than one third of the old price. I can then sell some shares, to the point where the value of the investment is what it was before, but I take the gain from that rights issue now, by crystalising part of it. And if that comes at this time of year, I'm going to be looking to use that CGT annual threshold, or I lose it.
So, yes, in SOME situations, I might well buy shares where I expected to keep diluting my shareholding, and percentage of ownership. It entirely depends on my strategy for that company, and neither "control" nor dividend income is necessarily the point of the investment.
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