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The payment service, Stripe, has ended its support for Bitcoin due to rising transaction fees and long confirmation times. Particularly the latter contribute to failed transfers. So Bitcoin is over as an experiment, and more are realizing that. However, the expectation is that some other cryptocurrency will become widely used, eventually.
Therefore, starting today, we are winding down support for Bitcoin payments. Over the next three months we will work with affected Stripe users to ensure a smooth transition before we stop processing Bitcoin transactions on April 23, 2018.
Despite this, we remain very optimistic about cryptocurrencies overall. There are a lot of efforts that we view as promising and that we can certainly imagine enabling support for in the future.
[ TMB Note: Yes, this will absolutely break our ability to accept BitCoin. Again. Which is fine this time as BitCoin transaction fees are now as high as the minimum price for a year's subscription. If you have a preferred alternative that we can accept without actually touching cryptocurrency, drop the info in a comment. ]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by tftp on Thursday January 25 2018, @01:58AM (4 children)
You are probably multiplying all the supply of BTC to the coin price. This is not the market cap. This value is not even applicable, as you cannot separate shares outstanding and treasure shares. Here is an analogy that explains what BTC looks like.
Print 17 million pieces of cut paper. Call them coins. Sell 1,000 of those coins - perhaps, to yourself - for $10K each. Then declare that you are a multibillionaire, as your "market cap" is $170B. Is it really so? How would you go about, say, buying the Trump Tower? At what point it is good to notice that nobody else wants your cut paper? Why then it would be different with cut numbers?
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Thursday January 25 2018, @09:16AM (1 child)
Maybe you are confusing the definition with the meaning. The definition of market cap is precisely the price of the last unit traded (the smallest possible fraction of a bitcoin, a single share, a euro cent, ...) times the number of existing units. You convincingly explain that the there might be little meaning to market cap in some cases, OTOH it is of use in many other cases (also in the Bitcoin case). The pro tip here is: also take into account volume.
(Score: 1) by tftp on Thursday January 25 2018, @04:24PM
(Score: 2) by hoeferbe on Thursday January 25 2018, @02:11PM (1 child)
Your analogy breaks down due to a simple point. There is no 1 human that controls all the bitcoin. The ~16.8 million bitcoin in circulation, as of 2018-01-23, [blockchain.info] are spread out among as many as possibly 10 million people [btcnn.com]. So, a single person does not just set an arbitrary price and thus declare the market capitalization.
The price of bitcoin is determined by the market -- by those ~10 million people and newcomers wanting to purchase or divest themselves of bitcoin. If nobody wanted bitcoin, then the price would go down to $0/BTC. But as it stands, the market has collectively determined bitcoin to be worth $11,282/BTC as of 2018-01-23 [blockchain.info], thus having a market cap of ~16.8E6 BTC * $11,282/BTC = ~$189.5 billion.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 25 2018, @05:45PM
No, tftp is correct, albeit overstating things.
The problem is that prices of almost everything is inherently unstable, and the act of selling anything causes the price to drop a bit. If you have a massive and robust market, that price difference it is typically not a big deal. For example, if $50M worth of Walmart stock were to be sold by a hedge fund, it would only slightly blip in the price. However, if $50M worth of bitcoin were to suddenly be sold, there would be a major impact on the list price of bitcoins.
tftp was only exaggerating in his example, by noting that the list price of bitcoins is not the price that they could all be sold at. A better analogy, albeit more technical and esoteric, is saying that you own 100M shares in a thinly-traded penny stock. Technically that would make you a multi-millionaire... but if you tried to cash out you'd quickly find out that you only have a few thousand dollars of real-cash.
Bitcoin's market capitalization may be ~$189.5 billion... but that's a dramatic exaggeration of the real cash money floating around the system.