Survey: Bitcoin familiarity and use

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Bitcoin:How familiar are you with Bitcoin?

  • Bitcoin? Never heard of it.

  • I have heard of it, but have no idea what it is or how it works.

  • Heard of it, but could not care less.

  • Heard of it, but do not trust money I cannot hold in my hands.

  • Heard of it, and it is interesting.

  • I know what it is and generally understand how virtual currency works.

  • I own Bitcoin, but have never used it for a transaction.

  • I own Bitcoin, but rarely use it for transactions.

  • I own it, and use it all the time.

Results are only viewable after voting.
Gotta' get that speculative bubble frenzy goin' again via what is called "pump and dump"! Here's the "pump".

Bitcoin Tests $10k As Mysterious Crypto-Trader Dip-Buys $400 Million
16 Feb 2018

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018...mysterious-crypto-trader-dip-buys-400-million

How traders 'pump and dump' cryptocurrencies
14 Nov 2017

https://www.businessinsider.com/how-traders-pump-and-dump-cryptocurrencies-2017-11

Excerpt:

The group in question is the "PumpKing Community." It is one of many groups on the messaging app that appear to be dedicated to "pump and dumps" — coordinated buying that artificially inflates the price of cryptocurrencies, in the hopes of attracting outside buyers to then "flip" the currency onto at a profit.

Cryptocurrency markets remain largely unregulated and so these schemes aren't technically illegal — yet. However, the same schemes are illegal in the regulated markets that cover assets like stocks and bonds.
 
This makes one wonder how many other bitcoin market whales there are out there who could single handedly crash the market.

Meet The Single Man Who Crashed Bitcoin In 2018

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-03-07/bitcoins-tokyo-whale-sells-400m-bitcoin-bitcoin-cash

Bitcoin's Tokyo Whale revealed on Wednesday that he has sold off about $400 million in bitcoin and bitcoin cash since late September.

Nobuaki Kobayashi, bankruptcy trustee for Mt. Gox, the largest bitcoin exchange in the world before hackers absconded with tens of thousands of customers' bitcoins worth billions at recent prices, said he started selling in late September, meaning it's quite possible he sold at least some of the coins at the highs reached toward the end of last year.

So that explains - or reveals - the mysterious man on the offer-side of Bitcoin for two months.

Bloomberg reports that Kobayashi is sitting on another approximately $1.9 billion, which he says he plans to offload soon.

Odell explains "The arrows on the chart below mark the dates of each Gox wallet transfer. Worth noting, these aren't the dates of the sales, those most likely happened right after, these are the dates of the transfers to the exchange."

2018-03-07_13-24-57.jpg


Bitcoin’s Tokyo Whale Sold $400 Million and He’s Not Done Yet

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...-whale-sold-400-million-and-he-s-not-done-yet
 
Anyone here still using cryptocurrencies? I just saw where they were pretty much all taking a beating. Bitcoin is down 75% from its high and others are even worse.

I was never tempted to jump in as I looked at this as an unregulated investment. Not quite a Ponzi scheme, but not far away enough from that to put money into it.
 
I'm seeing a lot of stuff in the past few weeks related to Initiative Q.. which is the latest whatever in cryptocurrencies (although I'm not sure if it completely qualifies as a cryptocurrency). Personally I have yet to see a compelling answer for some of the fundamental problems with cryptocurrencies that will ever move them beyond "speculative markets"
 
And I was under the impression that the server farms that host Bitcoin transactions are the ones that for the most part mine the yet to be found bitcoins. That is their incentive for paying for the computers and the electricity to run the farms. What happens when almost all of the bitcoins have been mined? Why would I run a server farm for nothing or next to nothing? Or is there another payment scheme I am not aware of?
 
Miners are also paid to conduct transactions. The people who run the ‘mining machines’ also run the stuff to make transfers of bitcoin work. They get a percentage of each transaction. I had bought a few litecoin back right before bitcoin went live in the Chicago exchange. Got out after I mostly double my money in less than two weeks. I could have almost tripled it if I got out few days earlier. I still have a small percent of one Litecoin floating around out there in one of my wallets. Was probably worth about $50 at the height and it’s now prob worth about $10. And I also have some other minor alt coin just sitting in a virtual wallet somewhere. Maybe about $20 worth.
 
Crypto crash spreads: Mining firms shut down as bitcoin continues to plummet
22 Nov 2018

https://siliconangle.com/2018/11/22/crypto-mining-firms-shutting-bitcoin-price-continues-plummet/
Excerpt:

Leading the headlines, U.S. bitcoin mining firm Giga Watt Inc. declared bankruptcy yesterday saying that it owed $7 million to creditors. According to Coindesk, the company said in a court filing that it had estimated assets worth less than $50,000, whereas its estimated liabilities are in the range of $10 million to $50 million.

Giga Watt is not alone, however, with the downturn also affecting mining operations in China. China has long been the most popular country for bitcoin and cryptocurrency mining thanks to the low rates the Middle Kingdom charges for electricity. But even with a lower cost base, miners still require a certain price to be profitable and that floor has already been passed.

The South China Morning Post reported that Hong Kong-based mining platform Suanlitou announced this week that it couldn’t cover electricity fees for a 10-day period in November and that it was canceling all orders for new equipment.

Others miners have been forced to remove at least four models of bitcoin mining machines, including the Antminer S7 and Antminer S9 from Bitmain Technologies Inc. as well as Canaan Inc.’s Creative’s AvalonMiner 741, as they have become too expensive to operate under present market conditions.

Some reports suggest more than 20,000 mining rigs have gone dark and mining companies are selling them as scrap, even pricing the devices per kilogram versus selling them individually.

BTC got down to $3,696, so I was expecting an artificial buying pump of it by the relative few huge owners of BTC, probably Chinese considering where most the mining is taking place, to stop its fall and bring people back into buying BTC instead of selling in order to prevent it from reaching this apparent $3000 tipping point where even the largest miners lose money mining:

Bitcoin Risks Mining Death Spiral If BTC Price Plunges Below $3K
Falling prices risk downward spiral for BTC transactions.
26 Nov 2018

https://cryptobriefing.com/bitcoin-falls-network-destabilizing/

$3,000: Bitcoin’s Event Horizon

Despite the most recent sell-off, mining is still (barely) profitable in some wholesale energy markets. But even those profits are starting to thin, with reports of some mining installations selling their ASIC equipment “by the kilo.”

The sell-offs are likely to continue if Bitcoin prices sink past $3,000 USD – the average price of producing one bitcoin in China, where 74% of all mining occurs.

It’s not quite clear how far the downward cascade could bring the price of Bitcoin. In the long run, of course, hashing power and difficulty levels would both sink until they reached an equilibrium, with rewards just high enough to sustain the remaining miners.
 
Bitcoin Mining Rig-Maker Holds 'Fire-Sale' After Hash-Rate Collapses Again
5 Dec 2018

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018...t-collapsed-again-second-largest-drop-history

According to Autonomous Research LLP. Fundstrat Global Advisors LLC., there is consolidation among miners that perform complex calculations to generate the digital currency after the recent plunge rendered many of them unprofitable. Fundstrat notes that 100,000 individual miners have been shut down in the last several months as mining operations go bust.

“We are entering in the phase when there’s a flushing out of the market,” said Malachi Salcido, head of Wenatchee, Washington-based Salcido Enterprises, which has one of the largest mining operations in North American with 22 megawatts of power deployed and 20 megawatts in development.

“There will be relatively few operations that come out the other side.”

Salcido told Bloomberg that only a few miners could afford to stay in the game. He said margins before costs like depreciation and taxes dropped from about 40% to 20% during the slide in hash rate, but margins jumped back up to 40% as smaller rivals closed shop.

According to Lex Sokolin, the London-based global director of fintech strategy at Autonomous, said the hash rate had collapsed 36% from its peak in August, problem-solving difficulty has dropped about 10%, making it easier for mining rigs that have weathered the storm to earn Bitcoins.
According to the data from Blockchain.com, the difficulty to mine bitcoin and the hash rate has both declined by over 15%, the second biggest drop in Bitcoin's 10-year history. The first plunge occurred in 2011, as the rate plunged 18%.

While that is great news for big miners, the consolidation increases huge risks for traders and HODL community vested in the network’s success. With fewer mining operations, there is a chance that several miners could partner together to execute a so-called 51% attack, according to Ryan Selkis, co-founder of crypto researcher Messari. In such a maneuver, controlling miners can reverse transactions and stop new ones from confirming -- potentially making off with billions in other people’s money.

With millions of mining rigs being deleveraged from the network, we must ask one question: where do old rigs end up?
In short, it seems like many have ended up on eBay:

Ebay%20deals%20miners.png


And worse still, RT reports that the world’s second largest bitcoin mining hardware maker has held a flash sale of its products to “celebrate” the recent crash of the most popular cryptocurrency, while minor players are being squeezed from the market.

The belated Black Friday was announced by Chinese company Canaan Creative, which was behind the first bitcoin mining ASICs, last week. Speaking to CoinDesk, a representative of the firm, Steven Mosher, said all the company’s miners can be purchased for $200 each until stock depletion.

As crypto prices plunge, Canaan Creative considered the situation as a way of cheering on a new period in the cryptocurrencies development and the right time “to celebrate” being “at a bottom.”
 
Beautifully done auto-updated infographic at this link:

https://coin360.com/

How low will they go? The interesting mechanism at work for all cryptocurrencies not just BTC:

...the cost of mining bitcoin is not a fixed-dollar amount. There is a feedback mechanism in mining any commodity that applies to bitcoin: as the price of bitcoin increases, new miners enter the market, increasing the effort required to mine a bitcoin, as its reward will be shared among a larger group of miners. Similarly, when the price of bitcoin falls and miners exit, the cost of mining decreases. However, the number of miners cannot fall below a certain level, because without the miners providing the computing power to maintain the ledger, the bitcoin blockchain will not remain viable.

Mining at a cost higher than the cost at which you can sell in the futures market destroys value. So, any rational investor — even one who strongly believes the price of bitcoin will rebound — has no incentive to mine if the cost of mining is higher than the future price and is better off buying in the futures market. And unlike gold, which can retain its value even if mining activity stops, bitcoin can have no value absent the mining activity that maintains the ledger of who owns it. Absent the mining activity, bitcoin is a just a set of encrypted numbers with no value.

BTW, the fact that all cryptocurrencies are crashing in sync shows that psychology, the "I can't miss out on this" buying just because the prices were rising was and is the key factor in the prices, not to be confused with the VALUES, of all of these.

That said, big gains could be made at HUGE risk by investing in a bottom overshoot -IF- there isn't an outright death spiral. One would need the ability to get in and out very quickly, converting to cash on the way out, setting some price rise like 50% as the trigger point to get out. This would be like playing penny stocks. As always, the extreme difficulty is correctly guessing the bottom and riding things out awaiting an upward movement, possibly to your investment's "death," if you guess the bottom wrong. Anyway, count me out on that scheme. I just find this all interesting to observe from a distance.

"You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out." - Warren Buffett
 
As someone who has played in the crypto market for several years now, as Winston says, getting out quick is the key to survival and is not as easy as it appears on face value.

You can sell on the exchanges however if there is a crash good luck in getting your cash. You can sell face to face, a bag of cash for a digital exchange and you can always exchange one crypto for another, as there are some cryptos that are arguably more legitimized and stable than others.

Face to face may seem cloak and dagger but there is a market of people who will do this, I know. Knowing how these exit strategies work and not only in place but validated, is vital in my opinion.

Keep in mind that whatever exit strategy you decide on, and I would explore all of them, none of them will work the way you expect,
 
So if cryptocurrency mining gets consolidated into a few large enterprises, doesn't cryptocurrency run the risk of becoming the very thing it was created to be an alternative to? If just a few places mine and do transactions you no longer have the worldwide dispersion that was one of the things that made it unique. Power to manipulate or even shut it down will be held be a few large players. Something to think about.
 
Nvidia has taken a big dive due to the decline in Bitcoin prices. Their video cards power allot of these mining rigs. Maleware / botnets also mine Bitcoin for hackers.

JD
 
I had a little disposable income last year and I fell for the hype and bought some. Worth about 1/3 of what I paid now.
 
Zeus-cat said:
So if cryptocurrency mining gets consolidated into a few large enterprises, doesn't cryptocurrency run the risk of becoming the very thing it was created to be an alternative to? If just a few places mine and do transactions you no longer have the worldwide dispersion that was one of the things that made it unique. Power to manipulate or even shut it down will be held be a few large players. Something to think about.
Click to expand...
Great point!

Note the excerpt I posted above pointing out that 74% of BTC (and I'd GUESS other crytpocurrency) mining is done in CHINA. So, to support the bleeping IP thieving Chicoms buy BTC and help to move currency hegemony to THEM.

I think I may have pointed out here in the past how the fact that the dollar is the world's reserve currency gives us a HUGE advantage economically AND geopolitically, so Americans hating central banks / fiat currencies and wanting them to be bypassed with cryptocurrencies really need to take that into consideration. ALL of our geopolitical adversaries do everything possible to fight the dollar hegemony which they'd LOVE to topple. Cryptocurrencies would be one way. An end to dollar hegemony would be far worse than any injustices Americans suffer through the central banking/fiat monetary system and would act to trigger a huge worldwide crash due to the long standing, primary defect of a central banking / fiat monetary system - CONTINUED AND VAST ACCRUED GROWTH OF DEBT and economic systems effectively worldwide now DEPENDENT upon that.
 
Resurrecting this thread after more than three years to see if opinions have changed.

There is now more talk of ‘Central Bank Digital Currency’, pegged to the value of the US dollar. If it was transactional, not speculative, would you have a use for it? A free replacement for PayPal, Zelle, Venmo, etc? International payments?
 
Blackleaf99 said:
Look at any piece of US paper currency in your wallet. What does it say at the top? FEDERAL RESERVE NOTE.

"Note" to pay what ? Pay to whom ? Pay when ? No one has any idea of the answers.

All paper currency in the US is illegal as money per sections 8 & 10 of the US Constitution. Don't believe me ? Read it for yourself. Only gold and silver is legal money in the US.

Paper money was originally used as a warehouse receipt for gold stored and accounted for officially. The paper warehouse receipt is not itself money but a convenient paper substitute for money (gold + silver) that is stored. Money substitutes are referred to as 'currency'. The total amount of money substitutes + real money (gold or silver) is called the currency supply. However, the actual money supply is only the total gold + silver stored and accounted for.

Real money vs. illegitimate money (currency) is how the US government swindles people. This is precisely where the lack of understanding by most people occurs.

Originally, the value of paper currency was fixed according to the price of gold. On August 15, 1971, the United States withdrew from the Bretton Woods Accord taking the US off the Gold Exchange Standard. After that, the government was free to print (read: inflate) all the fiat currency they wanted.

Hence, US paper currency is no different than Bitcoin. Except one is physical, one is virtual. Both have the same intrinsic value as Monopoly money. Zero.

View attachment 279452
Click to expand...
There are big differences. In practice Bitcoin consumes huge quantities of energy to maintain. It's a huge vampire saying feed me.

Also in practice, Bitcoin aids in a lot of illegal activities which affects YOU even if you are ignorant of it.

Some countries are banning Bitcoin and so should we.
 
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