What a pack of absolute retards. Here’s the CBOE trying to launch Bitcoin futures.
Bloomberg covers the uneventful launch.
Meanwhile, prices are racing higher with exuberance. BTC is +15% to 16,454 and most high profile ICOs are running up in kind, but to a lesser degree.
If you enjoy the content at iBankCoin, please follow us on Twitter
We are days away from Bitcoin 20,000 on the way to 100,000. Bitcoin is the future, everyone wants to pay with it and lose out on the money that can be made from credit cards and the free floated loans and the capital security from theft. Upward!!!
Sure, with the level of btc concentration, is should not be too difficult to suck fools in and manipulate the price as high as $100K.
Remember the old adage – gold is the money of kings, silver is the money of gentlemen, barter is the money of peasants, debt is the money of slaves and bitcoin is the money of fools.
I’m with enigma on the Bitcoin Cash vs Bitcoin battle.
It’s possible they both die a slow and painful death but if one will win over the other, Bitcoin Cash is it.
It’s faster and less expensive so why would any vendor choose something that is less competitive and gives the customer a worse experience?
I’m starting to see signs of a trend. It’s early but we could be at the beginning of a shift.
https://www.coindesk.com/new-viabtc-exchange-use-bitcoin-cash-base-trading-pair/
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-07/bitcoin-shunned-by-online-gaming-platform-steam-on-fees-swings
Cash has zero transaction rates, is completely anonymous and already in circulation, why are more businesses not using it?
Also the transaction costs can be massive http://mashable.com/2017/08/28/bitcoin-transaction-fees/#WdhXTEr5Mkqc
The bitcoin network’s theoretical maximum capacity is between 3.3 to 7 transactions per second compared to Visa who hit 47,000 per second.
Sarc…please…there are no old adages referencing bitcoin. As a long-time gold trader, I am sorry to say that storage is a big PITA. Crypto doesn’t have that problem. Loathe as I am to admit it, the world has changed. Reality is what we say it is. Crypto is every bit (pun intended) as “real” as gold. Minus the storage costs, or course.
Right now there are probably lobbyists getting paid by big banks to push regulation to curb bitcoin. There is no way they are giving up the pig trough of easy money from the current system without a fight.
Cryptos in crisis?
Never mind…that was 20 hrs ago. Carry on…
Those who are predicting the demise of BTC are very mistaken. Bitcoin and cryptos are here to stay. Saying they’re going away or going to zero is like saying the internet is going away. It ain’t gonna happen.
bitcoin is going to keep going up. What is going to stop it from going down? It has no financials, no costs besides electricity and it cannot be evaluated like any other asset. Other than costs to mine. It is way more efficient because it doesnt require thousands of workers. It will decrease costs and ultimately lead to zero fraud and possibly a radical change to tax thus leveling the playing field for the entire planet. Therefore the pigs will blow the thing up. Also the government has no plan to stop it. Completely mind blowing stuff here. The first company to use this as a trade and banking product will dominate like amazon once perfected. BUY and HODL.
“no costs besides electricity”
A $100 bill costs $0.125 to produce.
A $15,000 bitcoin costs upwards of $1000 to produce – and rising daily.
Crypto currecncies are here to stay, but Bitcoin will die (not anytime soon) because of it’s deflationary nature and built-in prodcution cost escalation and because it *is* expensive.
and cme stock looks like a good buy at this point. just saying..
NVDA is still a buy because of the rise in crypto. That is just one application for their GPUs. Autonomous driving is another.
Decentralized with no way to mine more than a specific amount of coins. 1000 holders control 40% and they are buying more not selling. 25% are lost and the remaining 35% are available for billions of buyers to bid up. This is as close to a sure thing as I’ve ever seen.
2017 End of yr target: 25,000
2018 End of yr target: 100,000
Bitcoin will end up being the preferred coin by institutions because of its high prices much like three and four-figure stocks. Add futures to that and you legitimize it. When Amazon accepts it for payment, every major retail will have to follow as well. Those will be more signs of adoption and moving to the mainstream. That said, there’s big opportunity in Ethereum wihich has more applications like smart contracts.
Bitcoin moves 10x more per day than Amazon’s margins. How is a retailer going to price a product where at any given time they don’t know if they are making or losing 10%?
We can’t possibly think futures will solve that?
Institutional money is likely to be looking at Ripple / XRP. It is specifically designed around international remittances between central banks and other large financial institutions. They very intentionally have a very large supply, and are built to scale and perform at these high volumes.
American Express has already announced a partnership with them and several banks are in the testing phase already. The first hedge fund to announce they would be denominated in a cryptocurrency instead of fiat currency chose XRP.
https://news.bitcoin.com/new-100-million-cryptocurrency-hedge-fund-to-use-xrp/
This hedge fund is no big deal. Thin kabout the possibilities:
1) All cryptos crash. Well, they are paying salaries in XRPs and transactions in cryptos as well, so their costs plunge. If clients ask for redemptions, their redemptions are paid out in a crashed currency.
2) If XRP does badly, but other cryptos do well, then the hedge fund expenses go down, but the hedge fund Assets Under Management goes up
3) If XRP does well, their AUM will go up tremendously, making up for increased costs.
So in reality, the only way they could screw up is if they fail to prperly hedge their XRP expenses by investing an insuffiecient amount of their AUM into the XRP currency iteself.
It’s actaully a much more conservative, hedged, approach than paying salaries, etc. in USD while investing in cryptos
And although you may have never seen Ripple / XRP in the headlines, it has the #4 market cap of all cryptocurrencies.
Everyone is totally just going to sit around and watch people buy and never sell and become trillionares. No one is going to make a concentrated effort to lose money in order to gain market share…even though they do that in every other industry on the planet.
Don’t forget, equity issuance peaked in 1995 and has been falling ever since. Stocks never went down in the last 22 years right?
Hi blackgld,
But isn’t this a key issue? When the “asset” is held by a select few, what incentive is there for the rest of the masses to then try and use this as the prime crypto?
If it becomes too difficult or too expensive to try and obtain due to concentration of holding, won’t the masses just switch to something else?
Once this starts to happen, a crypto isn’t like a work of art where scarcity makes it more valuable. Scarcity will make it less likely to be taken up. Once this happens, it has no value.
The holders of Bitcoin have a fine balancing act.
If Bitcoin truly wants to be a universal “currency”, it has to ensure there is enough of it floating around to ensure anyone wanting to utilise as a means of exchange (which is what currency is) can do so conveniently and without prohibitive costs.
If it lacks liquidity, why would mainstream mom and pop even bother with it – they will choose something else.
Bitcoin as it currently exists is more suited to be an asset class, a store of value, like gold. It has the brand image and first mover advantage and is still the main bridge between fiat currencies and crypto, and almost every altcoin is traded against BTC so by default it has a huge advantage as the “reserve currency” of crypto trading at this point. The same kind of advantages the US dollar has as the basis for world oil pricing.
This isn’t The Highlander, where there can be only one. There can be another crypto that may win for easy daily consumer transactional use, built around fast transaction times and scalability. Another (or likely several) for privacy, designed for anonymity for either purchases or transfers between individuals or corporations or governments. Another for institutional use cases like international remittances / transfers between central banks and large financial institutions across the world.
Yes, many of the altcoins out there today are flashes in the pan, nothing more than an ICO money grab or pump and dump scheme or ponzi (Exhibit A: Bitconnect). There will be insecure coins that will go down after their blockchains are corrupted or exploited. Some tech is better than others, and done development teams are better than others. There will be many losers. But there will also be many winners, not just one.
Madness is right-on-the-money, which is why I predict the eventual failure of BTC.
Also, why would any digital currency be preferrred for day-to-day transactions, but not preferred to store or transfer large amount of values? Either way, security is key, whether you are talkng millions of small transactions or a few large ones? Transaction speed can be important as well. That gap in transactions approval may allow a bad actor to double spend.
Also, mining pool concentration is a big problem with BTC’s security and risk of a 51% attack, especailly when so much of it is concentrated in China.
At the present trajectory Bitcoin will be bigger than the world by the end of March.
I define the world as all global stocks, bonds, cash, bank deposits, gold and all global real estate.
At which point you will either own Bitcoin or you will own nothing.
That’s wrong thinking. Bitcoin is money in the sense that it is a store of value and it is gaining acceptance as a unit of payment. If you think about it there is an endless demand for money. It’s the bubble that keeps going on. The demand for bitcoin will grow and the potential market is currently the market value of money which is $150 trillion. Not saying it will get there or even close, but a couple of $trillion in market cap puts my holdings well into eight figures—-and I am nobody.
I can dig that. The last sentence is really in jest. It’s really just the ridiculousness of the slope and what it means on a couple month time line.
While I believe that Bitcoin/Crypto still has a long way to go, into the trillions, ultimately it will cause fiat currency, and itself, to both become worthless. Its meteoric ascent in dollar terms will have profound psychological effect upon confidence in all fiat currencies; eventually the US dollar will be seen as the equivalent of the Zimbabwean dollar, in Bitcoin/Crypto terms. This is already happening in other currencies and is one reason why China fears it so. As we witness the failure of other national fiat currencies one by one, the USD simply becomes the last man standing.
But surely the collapse in the value of crypto will follow – because there will be no legitimate psychological benchmark of its value. What happens next is anybody’s guess – but I do not think that a crypto can become a global unit of transaction (aka remember the global digital divide – 70 percent of the world simply could not implement such a system – they are falling farther behind as I write).
It’s going to have a profound effect upon government, law, property rights and capitalism. Ride it up while you can but don’t forget the final destination. It will not be a utopian dream world.
“there will be no legitimate psychological benchmark of its value” WTF? The legitimate psychological benchmark of its value is currently close to $17k USD per bitcoin. It started at $0.06 USD. What further legitimacy do you require?
When it causes the dollar to be seen as worthless, how do you measure its value? There is a symbiotic, almost parasitic, relationship between the two.
Once everything fails, one measures its value by something that has an intrinsic, recognized and established value – 1oz gold, the standard.
You are thinking like a 3,000 year old man.
Bitcoin is revealing how really weak the dollar is as a form of currency. Rather than say, “bitcoin is in a bubble”, you could instead say fiat currencies, like the dollar, are basically worthless because it takes over 16,000 dollars to equal one bitcoin “. In a new information based, mobile and digital age, crypto currencies are appropriate and make more sense as a store of value than gold, which is cumbersome and expensive to store.
Precisely. Bitcoin/crypto exchange is revealing how little confidence there is in fiat (and government).
I’m not against precious metals, they have their place, but I just don’t think that they will be a viable alternative to CCs.
In reality value is not in metals, or fiat, or crypto. When you come right down to brass tacks, it is energy (as power per unit of time) that is the true measure of value – ultimately expressed in terms of kW-h or mJ.
In a sense CCs link to this measure already; at least when they are mined.
Yes. In an ancient agrarian economy where barter was the means of exchange, commodities like crops and cattle and labor were currency. As geographic boundaries were breach and trade became inter-regional, coins and currency made more sense to use, and standards were developed. In the Information Age with no global boundaries because of the internet, it’s now time that a new medium of exchange becomes adopted. That is why CC is making more sense. I look at fiat currency as the bridge from coins and paper currencies to CC. That not to say that remnants and vestiges of these old systems can’t exist concurrently. It’s just that we are only in the first inning of a new asset class and monetary unit.
You are stating it backwards. The US dollar is now worth 0.0000625 bitcoin.
Yes, bitcoin is stronger than the dollar because it takes far less than one bitcoin per dollar. And that trend has obviously been growing stronger in the past 4 years.
I’m old school. Just filled up the pickup truck with salt.