Is Bitcoin the Next Big Thing?

[Edwin]

Is anyone on here buying crypto currency at the moment, or are you waiting for it to stabilise? Interested to see if people think it’s going to go back up or carry on decreasing.

Is anyone going to admit to building up a crypto position on a public forum? Isn’t that dangerous, potentially?

(Not that any Acorn regulars are into kidnap and extortion, but...)

 

[Murray]

I was considering buying £500 worth of Bitcoin soon as a gamble

Is it still a lot to transfer atm?

 

[Edwin]

Things look exceptionally grim for credit card BTC buyers. Check out the results of this survey...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckj...er-being-hit-with-more-bad-news/#1dcc5fe267bf

 

[Edwin]

Not directly related to Bitcoin (probably) but the Dow has dropped over 1,000 points so far today.

 

[ian]

Is anyone on here buying crypto currency at the moment, or are you waiting for it to stabilise? Interested to see if people think it’s going to go back up or carry on decreasing.

Yes, I will be, but once it hits a target. I thought that might happen overnight, but it has bounced well from $6,600 to $7,300. However, my buy won't be in to Bitcoin, but Ethereum and some cost averaging on a very select few alt coins.

I was considering buying £500 worth of Bitcoin soon as a gamble

Is it still a lot to transfer atm?

I transferred a similar amount recently and was a few dollars worth, not anywhere near as much as it has been, but still high when you consider some other cryptos cost $0.004 to send any amount (like Stellar).

 

[Edwin]

Beware if you have a hardware Ledger wallet for storing your crypto, as a security flaw has just been discovered in all of them!
https://cointelegraph.com/news/newl...dger-hardware-wallets-puts-user-funds-at-risk

 

[Edwin]

Yes, I will be, but once it hits a target. I thought that might happen overnight, but it has bounced well from $6,600 to $7,300. However, my buy won't be in to Bitcoin, but Ethereum and some cost averaging on a very select few alt coins

You may get a chance soon, the rally has already fizzled back down to $6,800.

 

[dee]

Is anyone on here buying crypto currency at the moment, or are you waiting for it to stabilise? Interested to see if people think it’s going to go back up or carry on decreasing.

I'd happily buy more XRP now if i had spare cash. I'd wait till outcome of tether hearing to buy BTC . ETH likewise although its a safer bet long term.

BTC will probs heads towards 5k . Irrelevant to news its not even oversold yet on some technical indicators. It just went up so quick it seems like a massive trauma to most its gone down so much.

 

[ausername]

Its time to buy gold...

- Ausername, 6th February 2018 (price on this day $1342.95).

Also, up the BIN prices on your gold related domain names... the "sell your gold quick" companies will be popping up again.

 

[Edwin]

What happens to Bitcoin if it becomes unprofitable to verify transactions on the blockchain? Could this happen, even theoretically?

 

[ausername]

What happens to Bitcoin if it becomes unprofitable to verify transactions on the blockchain? Could this happen, even theoretically?

It can happen and has happened.

Depends whether there is also a complete collapse in longer term confidence wouldn't it?

A miner doesn't have to dispose of their bitcoin yield at that days price, assuming that they have capital reserves to subsidise electricity costs and other running costs.

So if a Bitcoin is worth $2000 and it costs $2200 to mine.... the big mining outfits may not worry about that $200 if they have confidence that the bitcoin could be sold at a later date for $3000.

Lots of high street retail chains only break a profit because of Q4.... so you could argue that this is what they do in Q1, Q2 and Q3, and this is also the reason why most retail administrations happen in January (reliant on Q4 to reach profitability, if that is a poor quarter then they suddenly don't have the money to meet their liabilities).

So I doubt that short term unprofitability would affect much.... the point at which they run out of capital would be the problem, if the price doesn't reach x level in y amount of time?

 

[ausername]

Apparently the difficulty just gets adjusted downwards, which makes the network less secure but adjusts the imbalance..... so if the Bitcoin price falls substantially, the 'difficulty' of finding the blocks becomes easier so less energy required. According to somebody on Reddit, after having just googled (not sure if true?).

 

[Edwin]

Ah, thanks. Presumably that opens other dangers, like a single large mining pool getting >50% as other players drop out and the difficulty plummets?

 

[dee]

Ah, thanks. Presumably that opens other dangers, like a single large mining pool getting >50% as other players drop out and the difficulty plummets?

Its already the case that about 20 large miners control 90% of the Bitcoin 5.5 exahashes

What you dont want happening are the master nodes to disappear ( they hold the full ledger from block 0 at about 100gb currently ) They dont get paid though, so its people that want to encourage the network

EDIT current network is about 6,622,799,000 GH/s allegedly. Just googled

 

[Edwin]

BTW I was talking more about what if it costs $5 to verify a transaction, but you can only earn $4 for doing so. Or is that another aspect of the same thing? Or algorithmically impossible?

 

[dee]

BTW I was talking more about what if it costs $5 to verify a transaction, but you can only earn $4 for doing so. Or is that another aspect of the same thing? Or algorithmically impossible?

I think due to dificulty level its already at the point in terms of power costs that its generally unprofitable unless you have virtually free electricity and pretty specialised hashing hardware ( asics) Thats why all the major mines are in places like china and countries that have pretty much free geothermal electricity

 

[Edwin]

I think due to dificulty level its already at the point in terms of power costs that its generally unprofitable unless you have virtually free electricity and pretty specialised hashing hardware ( asics) Thats why all the major mines are in places like china and countries that have pretty much free geothermal electricity

Gotcha. So if China successfully tweaks its Great Firewall to block everything even remotely Bitcoin related then presumably those mega-miners will have to shut up shop and other players in the ecosystem will need to step in to keep everything working...

 

[dee]

Gotcha. So if China successfully tweaks its Great Firewall to block everything even remotely Bitcoin related then presumably those mega-miners will have to shut up shop and other players in the ecosystem will need to step in to keep everything working

It wouldnt stop working. It would just mean there's less mining going on. The network would still be the same ( other than any master nodes from china going) With such a large drop in hashing it might make it even more profitable for the rest of the miners if the difficulty comes down to adjust

It would be interesting to know how much of the hashing power is in China

 

[dee]

Old article but still valid. Gives costs to mine bitcoin in electricity.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/27/bitcoin-mining-consumes-electricity-ireland

At those levels of electricity consumption, each individual bitcoin transaction uses almost 300KWh of electricity – enough to boil around 36,000 kettles full of water

 

[Edwin]

Wow! So if Bitcoin and all the other 2,000+ cryptocoins didn’t exist, the world would need meaningfully less electricity...

I wonder if the difference is enough to throw off future power needs projections?