BitCoin: "The Most Dangerous Project We've Ever Seen"

Liquidity. Or universality of recognition of value.

Except it seems a lot of people haven't bothered to do that.

Not the cash you have on you, however, and lots of people are in the same boat as you, not just the folks holding BitCoins.

Not if you keep it in a safe.

And the odds of that happening to a significant amount of it are effectively nil. There's also silver.

My dream of a currency based on back rubs is becoming more and more likely every day.

In a EMP scenario greenbacks and gold are worthless.

Gold/Silver will eventually become useful again but it's mostly a barter system for the first few years.

And safes are not protection against fire unless you've got a real good fire rating on your safe.

Tgere really is no point to bitcoin except money laundering.

And escaping capital controls, and sending large amounts of money to arbitrary locations for low fees.

I dallied with Bitcoin, just stuck my toe in, and doubled my money. Bailed out a week earlier than I should have, but hey ho.

I treated it much like a stock, wait for the idiots to panic sell (Chinese controls) and then buy, wait for the same idiots to panic buy (Oooooh! lets get to it to over 10k!) and sell.

Blockchain technology has quite the future ahead of it, Bitcoin may have, but currently the market is driven by the idiots, so I have zero idea what it's true value is against other currencies. I may have another dalliance next time a government makes a statement causing a sell-off and driving it back down, as I reckon the idiots stupidity may get it over 20k in the next 12 months, but I want to see a drop under 6k before I buy.

Right. It seems like a stock or collectible to me. The price seems to be driven by how desperate the highest bidder is. And the exchange rate with the greenback is something I'd associate with either collectibles or the winner's currency over the loser's toward the end of a war (see: Confederacy), which latter certainly doesn't describe the situation.

The closest allegory to Bitcoin is gold, it's economic movements are amplified versions of what the Gold Standard went through before nation states decided to control it further.

And, like gold, it has to be mined, with the easiest deposits quickly getting hoovered up and continued mining requires improvements in technology.

And, also like gold, it's value is entirely predicated upon desirability. Gold has minimal objective value, we'd obsessed over it for millennia before we found any actual use for it other than jewellery, or armour whose owner was to shortly - and briefly - discover why everyone else had plumped for iron. Even today a piddling small percentage is used for anything industrial. Yet we place great stock in it.

Whether Bitcoin will maintain that long term is another thing - crap like Juicero proved that we'll swallow any old bullshit just so long as it's internet connected, but it doesn't always stay down.

But in terms of trading, yeah, treat it like a stock. If you've got a chunk of excess cash and time to keep an eye on things, it's a good short term investment to play the troughs and peaks. You'll never call the top/bottom right, but you can incrementally increase your money rapidly, just pick minimum and maximum % shifts.

I only fully bailed out because of a late paying client and almost 5 years of my cash reserves dwindling due to house, holidays and wedding costs, I was initially just going to take out my initial investment and keep the rest in play, buying/selling as and when. I'll probably get back in the game in the new year...

Apparently, if you add digital cats to your cryptocurrency, it'll crash the network.

That bit isn't entirely accurate as an analogy. While it's true that for individuals an increased level of technology is required to keep mining, the overall number of bitcoins produced is constant regardless of the level of computing power put in overall.

No analogy is entirely accurate, they're only ever approximations for illustrative purposes.

Without knowing the details, using this much computer power for "mining" appears to be an awfully ineffficient use of energy.

Oh, it is. I suggest reading up on the Monero scripts doing the rounds on web pages.

Finish any drink first though, otherwise you risk spraying the room with the resulting WTF.

What's sad is that there's a volunteer software program called BOINC which allows people to use their spare computer cycles for scientific research. (I've got the program running on all my PCs, doing things like climate research, looking for asteroids, and other things.) Many of the users have been asking the developers to come up with some kind of currency system for it, so that either you get a BOINCcoin after so many hours of processing time, or if your computer discovers something, and the developers have all refused to do this. With a system based on something like that, there'd at least be a benefit for all the computing resources put to use.

I can see no way this could possibly end badly.

And if you needed any more proof that BitCoin's a bad idea, I submit this;

It looks like a bubble to me.

RT has spent the last year plus pimping bitcoin at every single opportunity. Apparently, Putin and his corrupt cronies see it as a way to get around western sanctions and launder ill gotten gains.

Joke cryptocurrency hits $1 billion.

And Bitcoin prices start to fall.

Also moose aren't exactly known for being the brightest investors

Damn, and I decided this week I was going to invest. But now that it's slumping...

Buy Low!

I mined a few altcoins in 2014 and forgot about them. I opened up my old wallets this weekend and found they're worth about $7k now.

My magic beans are going quite low...

A great scam is to launch a crypto currency but premine the easiest blocks first. According to Ars Technica a bunch of this outfits do exactly that. If the currency takes off they got all the easy ones and can be the first to cash out.

If every company, hedge fund, computer nerd, or whoever has the ability to start their own cryptocurrency what happens to the idea of digital scarcity? You're potentially shelling out loads of cash to own computer code. I remain indifferent about this whole market.

Warren Buffett is not a fan.

Kodak is getting into the cryptocurrency game. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/10/kodak-shares-have-more-than-tripled-since-announcing-kodakcoin.html

We should rename Wordforge to Block Chain Forge.

I bet we increase membership by 5000%.

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42630136

My favourite part of the BBC article on this is them quoting one expert on how it makes no sense followed by another saying he expects many more companies to do the same thing.