Stripe in Bitcoin hype flight while fans blindly gobble up crypto-cash Payment biz Stripe on Tuesday said it plans to phase out support for Bitcoin payments – citing declining interest among merchants and rising transactions times and fees. "[W]e've seen the desire from our customers to accept Bitcoin decrease," said Stripe product manager Tom Karlo. "And of the businesses that are accepting …
for the bigger fools to crystallise their losses.
Funny, I looked for a bitcoin exchange rate plot to see how it had been doing recently and a poll on the site side bar reads
"Which cryptocurrency would you use to send a transaction you did not want anyone to know anything about?"
Where 'anyone' obviously means the tax man and/or law enforcement. The utility of cyrptocurrencies for evading the law and taxes only goes so far.
But it has no property that would make it a sensible investment: there is no inherent value behind bitcoins and there is no business behind it that would create value & profit.
So what will happen once the value of a bitcoin falls below the electricity cost for mining one? Will the whole thing break down once the bit chain stops getting updated? It'll happen as soon as the investors get scared - a Bit Black Monday.
Much like precious metals then, or paper money.
Paper money has it's own ethos, but precious metals always had the Oooh, shiney. Me want timeless classic from QVC to wear on head when out clubbing (other neanderthals) for kingship and be buried with it....
@AC
Except paper money isn't normally seen as in investment, sure you can make money trading currencies if you have enough capital, but it's not really and vehicle for investment.
Paper money is a store of value, an IOU. Just an easy way to transfer money from one person to another. Cryptocurrencies could serve a similar purpose, but then their valuations would be boringly stable, just like most currencies are, short of a national crisis.
But some people (idiots) think that cryptocurrencies are an investment and that the value should magically increase. I don't know what that belief is founded upon, because there is no reason for the value to increase as it has.
Scarcity of a non-existent item is not a rational reason for it to increase in value. The reason they have gone up is because people believe it will go up and they are afraid to miss out. This is same sort of mentality that leads to just about every market bubble, and they always pop eventually, sometimes catastrophically, remember Beanie Babies?
Looking at the comments on here I think i can safely assume Crypto-Currencies will thrive and are worth investing in.
I mean seriously, I thought people in IT were meant to be forward looking, all I see is people looking backwards and complaining things were better in the old days:
I've been following ElReg for a while and I've seen:
Virtualisation will never catch on
Outsourcing never works
Cloud is too insecure
And yet in the real world we live in today - all 3 are common place if not the norm
While not all Crypto-currencies are going to survive, some will and will be worth a lot more than they are today. Bitcoin isn't perfect as a currency, but as a store of value it has a lot going for it
They are discussing this stuff at Davos, its going to go main stream at some point.
> when the bitcoin price falls below the cost of it's production.
Actually what happens is that the miners choose what transactions go into the block that they are going to mine - there are IIRC up to 2.400 transactions per block. Crucially, each of those transactions can specify a reward (in BC) to go to the successful miner. So what will happen is that the transactions that go into the block are those that give enough reward to the miner to make it economic for them.
> when the bitcoin price falls below the cost of it's production.
Also, if people decide it's not economical to mine, they'll drop out of mining it and move to another coin (if they can). This will decrease the difficulty to mine (due to lower network hashrate) and raise rewards for those still in the game (since they'll solve more blocks due to lower difficulty). Eventually it will hit an equilibrium where it's still profitable to mine. It's the same with any proof-of-work crypto.
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