That's what the 1MB blocksize limit is for.
Update as of 11 March 01:44 UTC (4h43m after the SEC decision): BTC fully recovered!
It now stands at $1140, which is the level it was trading at just 2 days ago. From 09 March 00:00 UTC to the SEC decision on 10 March 21:01 UTC it gained +12% due purely to speculation ($1140 to $1280) and basically retraced these 12%: http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/bitstampUSD#rg10zig30-minzcz... I am impressed. I thought downward trading pressure would have lasted for days/weeks after the SEC rejection.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/pay-up-in-bitcoins-norway-pro...
There are many who would argue it is a good store of value since it can't be manipulated by the issuing state's monetary policy or susceptible to the poor fiscal management of the issuing state.
Several of the major volatility events in the past of bitcoin were related to Chinese government announcements or rumors regarding regulation/legality.
Sure one can transfer bitcoin without governmental approval (or against restriction), but that annoying need to convert to and from fiat in order to trade for other goods and services means that the governments still have a great deal of influence over bitcoin.
Sure but I was speaking to the OPs assertion that this particular event is proof that it is not suitable as a store of value.
>"Several of the major volatility events in the past of bitcoin were related to Chinese government announcements or rumors regarding regulation/legality."
Right but this is to be expected given that China recently has been the largest market for Bitcoin by volume no? [1]
>" but that annoying need to convert to and from fiat in order to trade for other goods and services means that the governments still have a great deal of influence over bitcoin"
Is that any more annoying or any more inconvenient than having your hard-earned savings devalued by your government?
[1]http://www.coindesk.com/estimating-data-china-real-bitcoin-t...
I wouldn't recommend holding fiat currency as savings, except for perhaps 2-3 months of salary equivalent in case of emergencies. The rest should be stored in other assets based on your risk profile.
But it is currently a fact of life that we must exchange our cryptocurrency for fiat if we want to buy goods and services most places. While the number of merchants accepting bitcoin is growing, it's still quite small compared to the number of merchants who take local currency.
Fiat money has its plusses, though. Directly related to the fact that governments _can_ manipulate them is the possibility of reputational currencies. Here, a state has managed its fluctuations and taken actions when prompted for sufficiently often that "news" affects them much less than commodities, since the markets assume the state will act well before it becomes an issue (this also damps good news, since to a certain effect the good news was "expected").
A good study in this phenomenon, and how to break it, is what's happened to Britain since the referendum. It has lost a lot of value, obviously, but also its volatility has gone sky-high.
Going back to OP's point, a well-managed fiat currency can be a better store of value than any commodity. Entertainingly, Sterling has lost a similar amount of value to BitCoin, but it took much longer and is regarded as a disaster. Although, like BitCoin, you'll be able to find fans swearing the exact opposite.
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/european-court-justice-ruling-bitco...
I find that Bitcoins are an effective hedge against conventional wisdom.
a good overview of the origins of the crisis. how politicians for their own shortsighted gains made one poor decision after another and led the country into financial crisis.
As many issues as Bitcoin has today, it has clear use cases.
How? Bitcoin atms were basically non-existent there and from what I read on /r/bitcoin at the time from Greeks no one there was accepting it in stores.
>There were capital controls restricting more than 100 euro worth of withdrawals from banks per day.
Yes and bitcoin didn't help this since the ways to get cash for your bitcoin involved international transfers which exposed you to those restrictions.
>Sure it's not helping you if you are buying a coffee but if it's saving parts of your pension that you worked your whole life to earn then it becomes very important.
I'm not sure what this has to do with the question above. Could you expand on it some more?
He said physical US currency was at a huge premium in the country because there wasn't nearly enough of it to go around, and the official exchange rate was clown shoes.
Other than that it's a much safer bet in Venezuela to buy USD than bitcoin though and that is generally what happens.
If you're poor in a country with a government like the Venezuelan one betting your limited funds on a speculative investment that requires an active internet connection to use doesn't seem wise or helpful.
How?
Those kind of statistical anomalies happen all the time, you must be aware of them if you look at real time chart. The bottom line is that you can't really know what the price is before a 30min period ends.
That being say, I expect the price to go down further after a bounce (disclaimer : I'm not a financial adviser, this is an opinion). Bitcoin was already at its all time high, and then there was the rumor of ETF, promising it will go even higher and will reach the moon. That's a big red flag to me. What seems the most plausible to me is that it will now enter a downtrend until it finds its support, then only start a new uptrend. I may be wrong, but at least I won't loose money.
I totally agree we can't use btc as a currency, though. I have a prepaid visa card that I can load with btc, but I only use it very rarely because it's annoying to have to look at chart to know when is the good time to load my card for this week's grocery. Things are settled, now, bitcoin is a speculative asset. It would be more interesting if cryptocurrencies like tether, which provide USDTether and EURTether, crypto currencies always indexed against their fiat counterpart, were finally available at scale.
Yes, there were in fact $4/gallon, $5/gallon, and even $8/gallon gasoline and diesel prices posted, many by noon. This also increased the price of everything shipped by truck for a while, too.
Prices came off that peak quickly, but took months to years to revert completely.
The price of a christmas tree drops precipitously the ~9PM on christmas eve every year, that says nothing about the value of a dollar.
Not saying that's what did or didn't happen on 9/11, though.
[1] - https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=E...
If I charge $1000 to eat a cracker from my cupboard, the value of a dollar didn't suddenly decrease by 99.99%.
Thus, "anything can happen" if a few key players agree behind closed doors and change the rules.
I think bitcoin is a quite useful transfer platform, but I think it would be foolish to store much of one's assets in BTC.
Loans absolutely will evaporate if hyperinflation occurs. Lets say you give a $1000 loan that pays out $2000 after two years and the value of the dollar drops 50% over the first year. You will still get $2000 in 1 year. Assuming the value of the dollar holds, you won't have made an actual profit. But what if the value of the dollar continues to drop? If you think its going to drop another 50%, you'd be better off selling your loan for $1000 now, in which case you've already lost half your value, assuming you can find a buyer.
I suspect you could probably put all the people in the world that got rich from buying at $1 and holding in a school classroom together for a chat and not be very crowded.
- being a good anonymous currency
- being a truly global currency for irreversible online transactions
- being a currency that's easily programmable
That's the three main use cases for Bitcoin. There are contenders for #1 (Monero, Dash), and for #3 (Ethereum). For #2 it's still the easiest because of the huge network effect behind it.
Traditional currencies can't compete with crypto for neither of the space. They are attached to systems that prevent transactions from being anonymous, global, irreversible or programmable.
Its design allows it to be pseudo-anonymous at best, while Monero, for instance, has anonymity built in. Therefore if one seeks a truly anonymous currency they cannot possibly find it in Bitcoin.
> Nothing about the currency actually changed.
You can say this about about everything: "while nothing about the pound changed, brexit caused the price to go down."
That's because Bitcoin isn't directly tied to any economy. But just as Brexit had a real world impact on the pound, the SEC decision had a real world impact on bitcoin: It is directly tied to how people perceive Bitcoin, which is an import aspect just as well.
That is a loss of 25% of its value. This announcement does nothing to hurt the utility of Bitcoin or its application as a medium of exchange. That drop certainly seems like a speculative investment bubble popping.