Bitcoin falls further below $600 after breaching support

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Rosiman, 2014.05.13 23:42

Bitcoin Visions

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newdigital, 2014.04.23 21:17

Basicly this thread is not related to Cryptocurrencies. But as many traders are interesting in it (I see it from big popular thread in russian part of the forum) so it is most recent news related to it. Just one time only ... (other related Cryptocurrencies' news please post in your profile or in future blogs).

Just for information

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Cryptocurrency Trading News: Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin Stumble; Mastercoin Crashes

Last 24 hours were though full of joyous moments, but the cryptocurrency markets once again fell on a blink of speculations. This time, it is the much-talked-about Safecoin presale whose uncertainties are seeming to affect the entire cryptocurrency clan.
The sale guidelines released by MaidSafe said “the sale event will run until ten percent of all Safecoin (429,496,729) are sold or 30 days have passed, which ever happens first”. The company had promised to offer attractive leverages on both Bitcoin and Mastercoin for Maidsafecoin, but soon after the presale, the company dumped Mastercoin from the sale, leaving its market value in havoc.
While Bitcoin was able to sustain its value throughout yesterday, owing to US-based private equity firm NEA’s decision to invest a huge capital in Bitcoin companies, its altcoins including Litecoin, Dogecoin and others were not so fortunate. Here is how the market is looking for now:

BTC/USD

The BTC/USD is on a downtrend since Monday, after reaching to its peak at around $501.525. The pair gradually faced a series of pushes and pullbacks in last 24 hours, meanwhile finding resistance at $494 and support at $491. Right before entering today’s trading hours, the pair’s value once though fell slightly below the $490 mark, but recovered in the following hours.
At this time of writing, the BTC/USD pair is trading at around $490, falling 0.5% since 0000 UTC today.

Litecoin, Dogecoin also stumbles

Similar dips were seen in the altcoins as well. The LTC/USD once again slipped 1.55%, reaching $12.05 in the last 24 hours after touching the peak value of $12.35 yesterday. The downtrend is similar to the one of Bitcoin, for obvious reasons.
The DOGE/USD meanwhile fell a little too much within last 24 hours. The pair is currently trading around $0.00055, while at yesterday’s close it was trading at $0.00058.

Mastercoin Falls Ominously

As MaidSafe withdrew Mastercoin from its Safecoin presale, the MSC/USD fell massively around 50%, taking its value from the week’s peak $87 to as low as $50. The scandalized crash was never even reported by MaidSafe which further sent negative shivers throughout the cryptocurrency market.

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newdigital, 2014.03.31 09:42

For Bitcoin Lessons In The History Of Failed Currencies

If someone were to perfect a flying car, governments around the world would be faced with a conundrum. Over the centuries humans have developed a transport system complete with quaint country streets, bustling six-lane highways, electronic toll booths and police officers to monitor it all. So should the powers that be try to fit the flying car into the current model or create a whole new scheme that allows the new technology to flourish?

A comparable question of positioning is the biggest challenge facing Bitcoin and other digital currencies, says Ed Moy former director of the United States Mint. In an interview earlier this year Moy said, “Government moves very slow and cautiously. Digital technology moves very quickly, so eventually the conflict is going to be crypto-currencies moving faster than what governments are comfortable with.”

On Tuesday the U.S. government took a step toward fitting Bitcoin into the existing monetary framework when the Internal Revenue Service issued a notice declaring that virtual currencies will be taxed as property. The IRS pointed out that while Bitcoin may operate like “real” money “it does not have legal tender status in any jurisdiction.” So if you exchange Bitcoin for a good and that good is worth more than what you paid for the Bitcoin you need to pay tax on the difference.

While payment systems tend to evolve, specific currencies have come and gone over the centuries. Take for example the Continental Dollar of early America. Writing by email from Mongolia Jack Weatherford, author of “The History of Money,” explained that Brits immigrating to the American colonies were not allowed to import British money. After failed attempts to use the Mexican silver dollar — there simply weren’t enough to finance a revolution — they started issuing paper dollars  known as Continental Dollars.

“Like the Bitcoin, it was a revolutionary idea that got out of hand and the value of the dollars dropped drastically,” writes Weatherford. “After the revolution, the US abandoned paper money and returned to the use of coins. It took another century before the US government was able to create an effective paper money system.”

According to Benjamin Alsop, curator of the Citi Money Gallery at The British Museum, coins were first created about 2,200 years ago in modern Turkey, when people had already been tracking financial transactions in some way for about 2,000 years. These coins were created by some central authority as a way to standardize, but also brought control to the central authority. “I supposed that is one thing Bitcoin doesn’t do,” says Alsop.

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newdigital, 2014.03.29 09:44

After famed dealmaker Warren Buffett warned investors to stay away from Bitcoin, calling it "a mirage," venture capitalist (and Bitcoin investor) Marc Andreessen called him an "old white man crapping on new technology he doesn't understand."

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Legendary investor Warren Buffett and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen debate the merits of Bitcoin.

Earlier this month, famed dealmaker Warren Buffett warned investors to stay away from Bitcoin, calling it “a mirage,” saying that, while it may be a better way of transmitting money, the “idea that it has some huge intrinsic value is just a joke.” While interviewing Bitcoin investor Marc Andreessen at a CoinSummit “fireside chat” (minus the fire) Tuesday, I asked him to respond to Buffett. He supplied the missing flames.

“The historical track record of old white men crapping on new technology they don’t understand is at, I think, 100%,” said venture capitalist (and younger white man) Marc Andreessen. Fellow Andreessen Horowitz partner Balaji Srinivasan quipped that Bitcoin has outperformed Buffett’s “Berkshire Hathaway by a lot in the last year.” (42 minute mark)

Andreessen’s “skewering” of Buffett has gotten lots of news coverage, but the answers were actually rather glib. Lots of burn, but not much kindle. So I followed up with Andreessen, whose firm has made Bitcoin plays including a $25 million investment in Bitcoin wallet and merchant processing service Coinbase, for a more substantive response to Buffett’s Bitcoin criticism. Here’s Buffett’s full Bitcoin takedown:

“Stay away. Bitcoin is a mirage. It’s a method of transmitting money. It’s a very effective way of transmitting money and you can do it anonymously and all that. A check is a way of transmitting money, too. Are checks worth a whole lot of money just because they can transmit money? Are money orders? You can transmit money by money orders. People do it. I hope bitcoin becomes a better way of doing it, but you can replicate it a bunch of different ways and it will be. The idea that it has some huge intrinsic value is just a joke in my view.”

Buffett says Bitcoin is a very fast anonymous money order. Companies that send money orders make money off of them, so investing in the companies that control the money orders makes sense (the Coinbases and Bitpays of the world) but the money orders themselves (i.e. Bitcoins) aren’t worth buying as an investment. That’s a valid critique. During our chat, Andreessen and Srinivasan said Bitcoin is the “next Internet.” People often compare it to Internet protocols that enabled the development of email and the World Wide Web as we know it. But protocols and the “Internet” don’t make money; the valuable systems built on top of them do. Buffett is essentially saying Bitcoin is a protocol like TCP/IP that isn’t a money maker, and is encouraging investors not to drop $600 bucks/coin (even if unlike TCP/IP, the supply of Bitcoin is limited).

“This is a standard trope of technology criticism by people who don’t understand technology,” says Andreessen by email. “‘Yes, sure, it’s great technology, but it won’t be useful or valuable in the way that those crazy nerds think it will be useful or valuable.’ I’ve heard it my whole life applied to every new important technology. It’s fake sophistication — it sounds nuanced but it’s not.”

Andreesen says the argument “completely misses the logic flow of how Bitcoin works.” When I suggested that the actual value of “a bitcoin” is arbitrary, and that more important than the value is the fact that it’s fluid, and easily converted to “real money,” he objected.

“A value of a BTC is not arbitrary, in fact it’s the opposite of arbitrary,” he says. “It equals the value of a single slot in a finite sized public cryptographic ledger through which value can move. The total Bitcoin ledger has value corresponding to the volume and velocity of transactions that will run through it in the future; by extension, each slot in the ledger has fractional value determined by the total number of slots (which, in Bitcoin’s case, are limited to 11 million today and 21 million ever).”

“So saying what Warren is saying is like saying ‘a car is great technology but it’ll never actually get anyone from point A to point B,” he continued. “Bitcoin is great technology BECAUSE it lets people get value from point A to point B through the public ledger; that functional use creates the value of the ledger, and a single BTC has a corresponding fractional value of the ledger.”

To belabor the car analogy, isn’t Bitcoin more like a taxi than a car one owns? The value is in giving money a ride from one place to another. Those in the taxi don’t care what the taxi’s worth, just how much the ride will cost, i.e. what the Bitcoin transaction fees would be. So why does the value of the Bitcoin taxi matter, and why should people invest in it assuming it will go up? In fact, it seems problematic if you care about the value of the taxi (or the Bitcoin), because then you might not want to drive it/use it, assuming it’s going to get more valuable. That means fewer slots on the ledger that can be used for value transfer — the whole point of Bitcoin.

Andreessen then broke out economic theory, saying that the velocity of money will overcome the effect of Bitcoin hoarders, and that hoarders will essentially lead to more valuable Bitcoin.

“The market cap of the ledger needs to be high enough to accommodate all of the value that wants to PASS THROUGH it in any period of time (volume & velocity of value passing through),” Andreessen wrote. “So then, the intrinsic value of a BTC is emergent from the functional value of the ledger as a way to exchange value (or, more accurately, emergent from the collective forecast of the future volume & velocity of value that will pass through the ledger).”

This of course assumes that lots of people settle on using Bitcoin as their cryptocurrency of choice, rather than one of the alt-coins out there or a cryptocurrency without a limit on coins created. And it requires lots of systems dependent on Bitcoin, to up the amount of value that wants to pass through.

So Buffett and Andreessen’s disagreement will remain unresolved. Only a time traveler could declare the victor.

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