This is all completely hilarious. I mean think about what all of us are doing here. These coins only exist because we believe they exist and have value. I'm not naysaying -- it's legitimately funny. We're building rigs to "mine" internet coins like a slot machine that only costs electricity, and some of the world's smartest people have spent so much time thinking about it and building on it. And now we have Bitcoin Cash which is nipping at 25% the value of Bitcoin. That means anyone who bought at $300 just 3x'd their money. 3X! Do you know how hard it is for like almost anyone in the world to triple their money? I know BTC went up by like 130% in the last 60 days, but BCH is now theoretically a separate store of value. And you only 2x'd your money on that old crufty BTC. Cool kids got 3x on BCH.

The whole thing is just amazing and absurd and absurdly amazing.

But you can't actually get your money, unless you find someone credulous enough to buy these coins for another currency.

The absurd figures both in the growth of BTC over the 2 years (1700% gains!) and the sudden materialisation of value ex nihilo for BCH at 25% the market cap of bitcoin should be a good sign that this market is almost entirely based on speculation and could melt into thin air very soon, though it may well break new records before it does. Anyone getting in to either currency at this point is IMO going to lose their money.

https://bitcoincharts.com/charts/bitstampUSD#rg730ztgMzm1g10...

By that same token (lol), isn't it hilarious what the U.S. is doing here? Money in our bank accounts only exists because we believe they exist and have value. The $100 bill in my back pocket would only be useful to wipe my ass if everyone else didn't value it.

Cryptocurrencies are brand new, so they're incredibly volatile, sure. But it can be "real money" just as much as money, because really what is money?

An idea.

Exactly. But holy smokes:

The fact that both BTC and BCH exist now means that there is ${BTC + BCH} market cap now, right?

If you put $3k into BCH and $3k into BTC, your investments will grow or fall independently of each other, depending on how BTC or BCH does. But if BCH reaches parity with BTC, that means the world now has ${2xBTC} of value in it, right? I mean yes, set aside the question of what "value" means, but that's what the numbers are showing?

In other words, BCH was one of the biggest things anyone could have done to grow the Cryptocoin ecosystem as a whole, then? Coinmarketcap shows $68B for BTC and $13B for BCH. Ethereum is $27B, and that took like four years to get to this point.

So, true or false: BCH just created half the total value of ETH within the last month or so?

What justifies this? Is everything going to explode? I need a mathematical or investment framework to think rationally about the implications of this.

Are we in danger of any kind of "pop"? The 2008 housing crash affected the world. Anyone know how big these babies need to grow before a pop would cause problems for the world economy?

I'm not even convinced it will pop. But I've also read Madness of Crowds, and the temperament here reads identical to the worldwide investment craze portrayed in it. It didn't last forever. (I guess once all the naysayers stop naysaying about BTC, then it's time to worry. Till then, though...)

Instantaneous price is not value. The concept of "market cap" for these coins is ... fairly weak. It's not a good real measure.

We are going to have a massive crypto bubble-- this is fundamentally new technology so its going thru the technology adoption life cycle and pops every time it gets to a wider audience--- and it hasn't yet gone mainstream. Everyone knows about it, but nobody trusts it yet.

We're at the point like in the 1990s when the idea of using your credit card on the internet seemed foolish and just asking to lose your money.

Once people become comfortable with it we will have a massive bubble, fortunes will be made and lost and it will make 2001 and 2008 look positively sedate.

I don't think BCH will still be around by the time that happens, though.

"Market cap" in cryptos is meaningless. If you add up everything on coinmarketcap.com, you get $146 trillion total. About $60 trillion is the total GDP of the ENTIRE WORLD. ($75 trillion if you include M3.)

Any number that makes out that tokens whose entire real-life pricing is based entirely on speculation is bigger in some sense than all real world economic activity may not be a good measure.

CORRECTION: $146 billion. Sorry, I failed at counting zeroes!

Money is confidence in its purest form.

The thing about national fiat currencies like your $100 bill is that millions of people are forced by the state to transact in that currency and none other, and it is backed by the promises and threats of the state. When the confidence in that backing evaporates (as happened with Assignats for example in post-revolutionary France, originally backed by property, later backed by thin air), bad things happen and what seemed valuable can overnight lose its value. All that is solid melts into air.

Forced to transact but not forced to own. You can accumulate your wealth in gold, real estate, Dogecoin or S&P 500 stocks, and liquidate just enough to pursue a transaction.

That's what I thought when Bitcoin crashed from $30 to $17 in 2011. I wrote "There's no revenue model here. All growth comes only from new investors. This is a bubble in its pure form."

What I didn't see was that the use case of getting money out of China was enough to propel Bitcoin to thousands of dollars. When that started, it looked like the People's Bank of China was going to ease up on exchange controls and crack down on Bitcoin. The PBC did neither.

"The mountains are high and the Emperor is far away."

Basketball points also only exist because we believe they exist and have value. We're building stadiums and hiring refs and training athletes and maintaining rulesets and running games, which all use up a ton of resources and take up time from very expensive humans (players, engineers, logistics experts, coaches, statisticians), all to feed an arms race for getting more of those points.

Markets can be quite irrational in the short term, especially when people don't realize how centralized BCH is.

Just trade it with that in mind. Bad news for commodities typically means a constriction in the supply with the same amount of demand. Price goes up, just like with oil or orange juice prices.

People thinking about bitcoin like a company's stock or the stock market contribute to why they can't comprehend the train wreck to all time high prices.

Hopefully there will be good ways to go bearish by the time Coinbase enables Bitcoin Cash.

> Hopefully there will be good ways to go bearish by the time Coinbase enables Bitcoin Cash.

You can short it on Bitfinex...

It's a good step forward, but mature financial instruments like stocks have option contracts, which also allow expressing negative sentiments. Short sellers are vilified by company management, but they do introduce financial discipline and focus on the book value vs perceived value.

they will have finished booting out all of the US users by the time Coinbase enables BCH trading.

So if I have btc I don't necessarily have BCH unless I did something? I didn't know there was a time window.

All of the BTC you had on August 1st, 2017 was replicated on the BCH chain when they forked off of the BTC chain.

Depending on your wallet there are mechanisms to separate out your BCH and BTC (Because it's a fork you need to be careful about this, as replay attacks might be possible.)

See your wallet maker for specific advice

> as replay attacks might be possible

BCH added at the eleventh hour a replay protection mechanism, so that's not the biggest issue. The risks are mostly sending BCH to an address which expects only BTC (or vice versa), and allowing less tested wallet software access to your private keys (which is why the recommendation is usually to first send everything to a new BTC wallet, before importing the now spent private keys into the BCH wallet).

What about paper wallets?