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Bitcoin peaks above $5,000 for first time
Bitcoin has crossed the $5,000 (£3,862) threshold for the first time. The virtual currency peaked at $5,103.91 in the early hours of Saturday, according to CoinDesk's price index. The record high helped push the total value of publicly traded crypto-currencies - including Ethereum and the Bitcoin-offshoot Bitcoin Cash - to more than $176bn. However, there has since been a sell-off. At time of writing, Bitcoin was 12% off its peak, at $4,485.
According to coindesk.com, one Bitcoin is worth $4085.63 at this moment (20170905_023428 UTC).
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Value of One Bitcoin Hits $5,000... Briefly
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The last time I saw him he was walking down Lover's Lane holding his own hand.
-- Fred Allen
(Score: 2) by Snow on Tuesday September 05 2017, @10:16PM (9 children)
The breakthrough of bitcoin is not 'anonymous', but rather 'autonomous'. With bitcoin, you can cut out the middle-man.
Bitcoin is not that great for micro-transactions. The fees are too high to make something like that viable (even on Bitcoin Cash where the fees are much lower). There will be layer 2 or off-chain solutions that will address the micro-transaction problem. (ie. you deposit $5 to the Wall Street Journal, they deduct .01 per page until you run out of money or request the balance returned).
The open blockchain can also be used an an anchor for other things - stocks, property titles, contracts, etc.
Bitcoin is still very, very new. Compare it to the early days of the Internet. It's real potential still hasn't been realized yet, but it will disrupt many industries.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday September 06 2017, @12:46AM (8 children)
The whole "genius" behind bitcoin is the open blockchain - but what made it really work in society was the implementation where "miners" could participate in the game and get rich, if they're early enough. The miners are supplying the work to make the open blockchain work, and they're volunteering for it because they are getting rich off the inflation of the coin. I foresee a house of cards failure: sooner or later the coin appreciation slows from 3.5x/yr to 2.1x/yr to 1.1x/yr. At some point, it won't sustain the cost of computing the blockchain and people will lose interest in mining.
That $5 transaction that works for the Wall Street Journal today might cost $50 or $100 to process in the future. Actually, it will never get that far - by the time it costs more than about $0.25 to process, everybody is going to lose interest and go back to using credit cards, backed up by the legal system and police force.
Lots of lessons to learn from bitcoin, but without a major revolution in the implementation, it's not the cash of the future.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Snow on Wednesday September 06 2017, @01:35AM (5 children)
You are right, and it shows how much isn't known by even techies. I really should write up an article.
If is becomes unprofitable to mine, then miners stop mining, and the difficulty will drop until mining is profitable again.
High fees are a definite problem and that is a large part of the reason we now have Bitcoin Cash. Bitcoin Cash is the revolution and I think it will overtake bitcoin and become bitcoin, after all, it is the bitcoin that is described in the whitepaper.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday September 06 2017, @03:21AM (3 children)
That is a little bit of genius, but there is no way that the community validated central blockchain can ever serve a population scale (millions per hour) of financial transactions. I suppose I should dig into Bitcoin Cash, but from what I remember from 2010, without blockchain validation, there's no way to prevent multiple spends, and a distributed multiple blockchain would be fraught with all kinds of problems.
There's just no way that my $3 purchase at the quickie mart should ever require a cadre of competing miners to solve anything to validate the transaction, and without that multiple source validation, there's a problem with multiple spends.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 06 2017, @05:12AM (2 children)
Small transactions are good for bootstrapping the network.
It is only natural that over time they will get priced off the network.
The current issue is that the block-size is being artificially limited. The core development team does not want to risk running into the limits of commodity hardware.
The Bitcoin Cash fork (with the larger block-size) will (hopefully) show how much transactions should really cost on commodity hardware.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday September 06 2017, @11:58AM (1 child)
And, in this statement:
the name "Bitcoin" becomes a misleading lie. Back in 2009, nobody ever thought of "Bitcoin" as a method to trade huge chunks of value, I think that's an idea that has evolved over time.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 06 2017, @03:35PM
Back in 2009 I did not think it would actually work.
Luckily, somebody decided they wanted pizza: which set a floor price.
(Score: 1) by baldrick on Wednesday September 06 2017, @05:59AM
which to my understanding is what proof of stake is all about
... I obey the Laws of Physics
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 06 2017, @02:02AM
So are you worried bitcoin will down, or up?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 06 2017, @03:19AM
Depending which fork you follow, Bitcoin transactions are already over $5.
https://cashvscore.com/ [cashvscore.com]