I will buy several thousand Bitcoins for $10 soon enough and trade them for some Elf Pogs and a Furby.
Even with the Mt Gox disaster, Bitcoin is still well over $500 per coin. Mt Gox isn't the only exchange out there. Coinbase is another one which is still going strong, but the same could happen to them. Bitcoin can still survive without these exchanges. I suspect there will be a shift in the way people store their coins.
No one was ever meant to store coins on the exchange. That's their fault. You're supposed to use a 256 aes encrypted service like coinbase and then store your savings on a cold storage paper wallet
Natural growing pains for a new currency/technology. Mt Gox will be replaced with something better. The reason bitcoin won't go away is there is a clear need for what it can do. It will do for money what the internet did for information sharing.
The fact that you can buy mundane things with Bitcoin is irrelevant- because, you know, I can buy mundane things with dollars too. Bitcoin needs to demonstrate, you know, why should I use this thing over dollars, especially something that jumps up and down in value as much it does? And really, there's only two reasons. Idiot ideologues who want to fight THE MAN...and criminals, especially money launderers.
All u had to do was read the thread. Your question has been answered repeatedly. I can send a trillion dollars to China instantly on a Sunday, when banks aren't open, using bitcoin. No third party needed. Go do that with dollars. here is that advantage put to use for the betterment of mankind. Here is a simpler application for you. If you and I were eating lunch and you wanted to give me $6.38 for some reason but don't have any money on hand or you couldn't make the exact amount. How would u do it? write me a check? pay me next time you see me (whenever that is)? You can transfer me a detailed picture instantly but cant give me $6.38 instantly even though you own far more than that. This is a basic advantage of digital currency.
That's like having dollars but being unable to use the banking system. If you have to keep all your bitcoin in a wallet, then you risk losing that wallet - it's like keeping your cash under a mattress. If the "banks" (exchanges or other online wallets) are at risk of hacking, and bitcoins are anonymous so you don't have much recourse, it makes it difficult or impossible to use as a currency. This isn't an advantage of bitcoins. This is having bitcoins instead of dollars. They function the same way in your example - you have to have coins in your bitcoin wallet just like you would have to have dollars in your regular wallet. And you have the same security issues - if you have access to your wallet at lunch, digital or regular, it can be stolen.
I can send you an Amazon gift card worth $50 to you in five minutes, that doesn't make it currency. Hell, I can buy more stuff with an Amazon gift card that I can with bitcoins. And let's not mention that while there may or may not be middlemen when I send 5 bitcoins to John...there definitely are when John attempts to turn his 5 bitcoins into dollars. I had a friend who tried that. He had to go through multiple websites, and lost about 15% of his value when he finally got his Bitcoins into dollars. It's almost like people are trying to pressure him to stay with Bitcoins for some weird reason.
So now you are trying to make a new argument? Before you argued bitcoin had no benefits over the dollar and now you argue that it is not really currency. Well to address your new argument, you are wrong, bitcoin does meet the definition of currency. Secondly, who cares if it meets some definition. The question that matters is 'does it meet some demand?' and it does as previously shown. if your friend lost 15% then he is ignorant about bitcoins. accessing your digital wallet would have far more security then accessing your wallet. A wallet has no security. That was the whole point of what i wrote. With digital currency you have total instant access to your money which is secure. As opposed to a wallet.
And therein lies the problem with Bitcoin and any other cryptocurrency. Too wishy washy to be a viable and trusted form of mainstream currency. People loathe fiat money tied to central institutions, but that is the main reason you are not waking up in the middle of the night and possibly losing all your money within several hours. Bitcoin is a nice commodity, it certainly will never be a stable currency.
Ok maybe I don't totally understand the mechanics of bitcoin, but wouldn't I have to possess bitcoins to be able to send them to someone else? Let's say I wanted to send $20 million to someone. Thats about 35,000 bitcoins or so. If I try to buy 35,000 bitcoins I am going to move the market significantly due to the illiquid nature of bitcoins. So I guess what I am asking is how to do you move large sums of money without it moving the market?
The stock trader in me was thinking it was a good time to buy bitcoin for a bounce after the mt gox collapse.
Oh you would move the market. You are not wrong. in fact the total value of all bticoins right now is about 7 trillion dollars, so buying and moving a trillion dollars worth of bitcoins would certainly move the market. That's not the point of what I wrote.
No I am just talking about moving $20 million. Looking at the chart and volume it looks like moving that much money would cost you about 5% to 7% or so maybe more. Also, I don't think the value of bitcoins is $7 trillion. I thought it was $7 billion. http://cryptmarketcap.com/
i love how people can just erroneously make comments like this.. saying it like its the end-all it will be stable once it is all mined out so the liquidity pool is larger, and ultimately when the surrounding infrastructure is built up.. so if someone sneezes, it won't matter. and when the banking cartels decide to pull the next plug for a crash, bitcoin will skyrocket. because, you know, its not run by banking cartels. this is digital gold, ppl.
