And Bit Coin refuses to roll over, back up to 730$. :bravo:
Does anyone have bitcoin right now?
EPIC ! High of 1224$ 
Although, in case anybody needed more proof these crypto-currencies are just a fad right now, check out the prices of all the other online currencies.
People are going bat shit crazy right now for online currencies, but just like with tulip bulbs, beanie babies, and pogs, this will all end in tears…
If you bought at $200 and sold your investment out multiple times and still holding extra; who’s laughing? If you got into Litecoin and tripled your investment in a few days? Some people are willing to take on risky, unconventional, non–traditional investments seeking a large payout while others are happy with inflation matching govt loans aka bonds, and there are plenty in the middle. I doubt the guys who mined/bought cheap, and cashed out for millions on top would care what their ‘scheme’ is all said and done.
If you are involved in merchant processing and high volume low price tag ecommerce (micropayments), you might understand the potential in BTC or other e-coins. They are both relatively new market realities, and people who are in a traditional brick and mortar mindset won’t get it. Kind of like print media, music or the movie industry. The world does change and evolve.
As with all investing, research and stick with your risk comfort level.
This is not that much different than investing in penny stocks (often manipulated as pump and dumps). And right now this is getting pumped big time right now. buying is not a problem as long as you aren’t left holding the bag at the end. A lot of good people are going to lose their hard earned money in this scheme.
A basic truth about investing:
Not all investments that make money are good investments, and not all investments that lose money are bad investments. The thing that determines whether it was a good or bad investment is the diligence in analyzing the variables at the time of investing, not the end result.
Buying Bit Coin and seeing a massive return on your money does not make it a good investment. How could it be good? There is absolutely nothing quantifiable in it’s value, it’s a random flip of a coin. Therefore, REGARDLESS of the returns you see trading Bit Coin, it can never be considered a “good investment.” You could make 10 million dollars trading Bit Coin, but that still would not qualify as a “good investment.” At best, it’s a poor investment that happened to work out and pay off huge returns.
On the flip side, a person who diligently values an investment from all angles and makes a quantifiable, mathematical decision to invest can never be accused of making a “bad investment.” At worst, it’s a good investment that didn’t pay off, but if the initial investment variables were all considered, it was good.
If someone wants to speculate, then go ahead, there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s definitely a time and a place for speculative bets, as long as they don’t represent too large a portion of your fund. But just don’t confuse speculative bets that happen to pay off with “good investment.” They will always remain speculative bad investments, regardless of how many millions it makes. 
Bitcoin or something handles international Internet payments is a really useful idea.
But as a store of money, it’s a complete disaster because of its volatility.
So what you would have to do is collect all traded bitcoins from individual transactions , pool them and trade them for real currency hourly or daily to avoid being caught out.
[quote=“headhonchoII”]Bitcoin or something handles international Internet payments is a really useful idea.
But as a store of money, it’s a complete disaster because of its volatility.
So what you would have to do is collect all traded bitcoins from individual transactions , pool them and trade them for real currency hourly or daily to avoid being caught out.[/quote]
I’m not really sure how this is at all better than a streamlined paypal setup. Paypal isn’t friendly towards int’l transactions AFAIK but at least the money in my account is stable. The absolute last thing I want in my currency holdings is instability like bitcoin has. That reduces this to an investment that has almost no fundamental reason for being priced at any amount (0.0001c, 1c, 1$, 1,000$ or 1M$).
Exactly! 1,000,000$ makes as much sense from a fundamental standpoint as 0.01$. And do these Bit Coin traders really think the US government is just going to allow money to be flying around with no record of it? You can buy drugs, guns, and hire hit men and nobody can trace it? Give me a break. When Bit Coin becomes more annoying than a mosquito, watch how fast the US government slaps the shit out of it.
Anybody else know of any “currencies” that have intraday volatility of 30%-40% ? 
It seems that what the world is waiting for is a stably traded Internet currency.
That one should have some ability to at least float with major currencies like the USD or Euro.
Internet currencies can trade without transaction fees or extremely low transactions fees in micropayments. You just cant do that now with Paypal.
You can even just transfer bitcoins in a hard drive.
Bitcoin is pretty ingenious and linking it with guns and drug is unfair. You can trace all transactions , it’s the same with bank account transfers, don’t see the difference to be honest. You just need a dodgy bank like HSBC in Mexico!
Bitcoin is designed to resist wholesale money printing’ , that’s the cool bit. Of course due to instant and massive trading it is ironically extremely volatile.
So remove the volatility and you’ve got a winner.
Yeah, because I’m sure governments have no problem at all not having control over a currency… 
Yeah, because I’m sure governments have no problem at all not having control over a currency… [/quote]
But what can a government do?
If two people agree that disruptive economic innovation ‘x’ has value, who can stop them trading disruptive innovation ‘x’.
Governments will just have to adapt to the disruptive innovation of the Internet and what us folks choose to do with it.
John Locke would be pleased. 
I was toying with the idea of issuing a scrip currency redeemable in bananas.
Bananas are highly perishable, so nobody would (I hope) ever attempt to “cash in” their scrip, but the value of a banana is pretty constant (believe it or not) across seasons, cultures, countries, and time: presently, about $1/kg, which is quite convenient. The effective exchange rate against USD would therefore be about $0.10 per Banana. So hopefully “Bananas” would circulate almost like fiat currency.
This coming year, I’ll have to pay for farm labour. On top of standard wages (the going rate is pretty low in that region) I figure I could issue Bananas as a sort of bonus. It would all be a bit of a laugh, but simultaneously a serious economic experiment. The farm will offer produce for sale priced in Bananas, as well as bought-in stuff that we don’t grow, like rice, fuel, cooking equipment, and whatnot; everyday items that people might ordinary buy from the sari-sari store [corner store]. So Bananas would actually be ‘spendable’, and it might cut down on petty pilfering if people know they can get anything the farm produces ‘for free’. It isn’t really free, of course, because they’re paying for it with their labour. Obviously, Bananas will be free to circulate outside the farm employee community, so they could (for example) exchange Bananas that they don’t want to spend personally with friends and neighbours, or perhaps buy stuff from them, and the Bananas would eventually circulate back to the farm. The number of Bananas in circulation would be limited (roughly) by the number of actual banana plants I have, so people can see the currency has concrete value. With 500 plants, I could have maybe 200,000 Bananas (US$20K) circulating in the local community, which should be pretty interesting to observe.
Just wondering whether to issue Bananas as notes, electronic tokens in an e-wallet, or something more esoteric … little metal serial-numbered bananas, maybe 
.
Well … no. Their usual kneejerk reaction is to just shut it down. I’ll have to be a bit careful with the Bananas idea, because governments hate anything that interferes with their economic puppet-strings.
[quote=“finley”]I was toying with the idea of issuing a scrip currency redeemable in bananas.
Bananas are highly perishable, so nobody would (I hope) ever attempt to “cash in” their scrip, but the value of a banana is pretty constant (believe it or not) across seasons, cultures, countries, and time: presently, about $1/kg, which is quite convenient. The effective exchange rate against USD would therefore be about $0.10 per Banana. So hopefully “Bananas” would circulate almost like fiat currency.
This coming year, I’ll have to pay for farm labour. On top of standard wages (the going rate is pretty low in that region) I figure I could issue Bananas as a sort of bonus. It would all be a bit of a laugh, but simultaneously a serious economic experiment. The farm will offer produce for sale priced in Bananas, as well as bought-in stuff that we don’t grow, like rice, fuel, cooking equipment, and whatnot; everyday items that people might ordinary buy from the sari-sari store [corner store]. So Bananas would actually be ‘spendable’, and it might cut down on petty pilfering if people know they can get anything the farm produces ‘for free’. It isn’t really free, of course, because they’re paying for it with their labour. Obviously, Bananas will be free to circulate outside the farm employee community, so they could (for example) exchange Bananas that they don’t want to spend personally with friends and neighbours, or perhaps buy stuff from them, and the Bananas would eventually circulate back to the farm. The number of Bananas in circulation would be limited (roughly) by the number of actual banana plants I have, so people can see the currency has concrete value. With 500 plants, I could have maybe 200,000 Bananas (US$20K) circulating in the local community, which should be pretty interesting to observe.
Just wondering whether to issue Bananas as notes, electronic tokens in an e-wallet, or something more esoteric … little metal serial-numbered bananas, maybe .
Well … no. Their usual kneejerk reaction is to just shut it down. I’ll have to be a bit careful with the Bananas idea, because governments hate anything that interferes with their economic puppet-strings.[/quote]
Bananas rot too fast to be a useful currency according to Locke’s quite well-defined standards. It might be more useful to trade a few ripening bananas for an apple, which might last a little longer, and henceforth be traded for a handful of fresh nuts, which may be stored for later use or traded on for a more lasting material such as wood.
If one has no use for wood, or a suitable place of storage for such, one could trade such a combustible and rottible commodity for copper pieces or scripts printed by a citizen in good standing, an association of such (a bank of mutually assured funds?), an government, or other perceived guarantors of value.
I think we are agreed.
[quote]But what can a government do?
If two people agree that disruptive economic innovation ‘x’ has value, who can stop them trading disruptive innovation ‘x’.
Governments will just have to adapt to the disruptive innovation of the Internet and what us folks choose to do with it.
John Locke would be pleased. 
[/quote]
We’re not talking about a technology here, we’re talking about a currency. As it happens, a currency that makes it very difficult to track certain types of transactions, cross border uses, as well as tax implications. Of course there are many things the government can do to put a stop to this if they so choose. You’re starting to sound like the gold bug types talking about a currency that’s going to circumvent the government system and stick it to the man. Like it or not, Bit Coin only has a future if the US government says it does.
Also a reminder, the US dollar is backed by the full force of the United States economy. Bit Coin is absolutely baseless in every way imaginable. It’s actually kind of funny that one of the reasons people hate the US Dollar so much is made laughably worse with regards to Bit Coins.
People talk about the demise of the US Dollar and how it lost so much of it’s purchasing power but that’s kind of ridiculous. It didn’t lose purchasing power, it’s quite close to where it’s always been. Only for people who literally put it in a shoe box did it lose value. For anybody with a brain, it’s the same value it’s always been…
No, the point is you would trade representative money denominated in Bananas, just as a US$ was (orginally) redeemable for a fixed amount of gold. The money itself will most likely be tokens in an electronic wallet. You wouldn’t actually pass physical bananas around, any more than Americans used to trade in physical gold bullion while they were still on the gold standard. Nobody in their right mind would actually go to the issuer and say, no thanks, I really don’t want this scrip - I want my bananas. But they could, in principle. I suspect a few enterprising people will go into banana arbitrage.
My gut feeling is that a currency standard does not have to be durable as long as it’s fungible and self-reproducing, ie., if one unit of account rots, another will be available somewhere to represent the coin, note, or whatever, which is still in existence. And as I said, the interesting thing about bananas is that bananas have low volatility over both short and long timescales - unlike gold. Any given banana doesn’t, of course, but a vague, conceptual “kilo of bananas” always has about the same value (relative to other commodities and currencies).
Since bananas are such a fundamentally useless object (unless you really, really like bananas) I’m curious to see how this will pan out in practice.
[quote=“BrentGolf”]
We’re not talking about a technology here, we’re talking about a currency. As it happens, a currency that makes it very difficult to track certain types of transactions, cross border uses, as well as tax implications. Of course there are many things the government can do to put a stop to this if they so choose. You’re starting to sound like the gold bug types talking about a currency that’s going to circumvent the government system and stick it to the man.[/quote]
It’s a new form of currency made possible by technology, the same as coins were made possible by neolithic technology, and printed money was made possible by industrial printing technology.
I don’t invest in bitcoins and have no vested interest in it, but I’m interested in the disruptive effect of new technology and the fact that relations of production affect and eventually define the social structure.
According to your theory, the government defines everything. According to mine, the government will have to adapt or die.
Nonsense. The best the US government can do is make its own citizens fill out some silly forms whenever they make transactions in bitcoins.
Bitcoin seems less environmentally destructive because you don’t have to dig out the gold or plant bananas everywhere to make more of them easily.
But I wonder what happens when you get better computers, quantum computers, will they start to use lots of energy to mine it?
It’s interesting because there’s no central bank that can change the rules. The rules are set in stone for Bitcoin.