I have been reading about bitcoins for months and really trying to understand the concept, just another bubble in the making....prices are surging. Up thousands and thousands of percent since 2009. I read another article how 3 guys made millions of dollars selling the computers that mine the bitcoins. $600,000 in one hour....Reminds me of the gold rush...everyone knows what happened. Why sell the computers ($7,000 a piece) that mine bitcoins when you can mine all the bitcoins you want? http://www.cnbc.com/id/101205416
The problem with Bitcoin is that it does not offer leverage, so to make $100.000 for example, you need to invest $100.000 and wait for the price to double (a 100% move). On the other hand in Forex, with a 100 to 1 leverage account, you only need a 1% move to double your money.
Im sure in due time they will have everything available to trade bitcoins with leverage. Supposedly its suppose to be a half a trillion dollar market... But after all done and said wtf is a bitoin....lets be real here, Im all about being innovative, but in reality this is something that really has no ground work for explanation.
let's say you are a bitcoin gazillonaire , how do you cash out ? I read, it's unlikely you will be able to ...
Cashing out 24 hours a day http://gigaom.com/2013/11/07/first-...ions-in-first-8-days-now-comes-the-hard-part/
I read there is no liquidity to support people cashing out, my intuition is the chart attests to that. AFAIK all the bitcoin millionaires are paper millionaires. Transactions take days, even weeks to get settled, how does this make it easy to cash out ? As for the ATM, at any ATM you can't withdrow more than X per day, and if people were to make massive withdrawals, wouldnt' that impact the bitcoin price ? My guess is, given the above, and the price rise, buying bitcoins today at the current price is utmost stupidity .
It's fine to be bearish on Bitcoin, but there are plenty of falsehoods and half-truths in the seven posts preceding mine. Transactions at Bitstamp take 2-3 days to settle. https://www.bitstamp.net/faq/#deposit_how_long So it's very similar to selling equities. If a paper Bitcoin millionaire wants to get out, they can, just as long as they don't use Mt Gox. What is a Bitcoin? A currency with many positives, and also many flaws. But a lot of the flaws of Bitcoin are the same as those for the US Dollar, and many other fiat currencies. Just as a Bitcoin only has value because someone is willing to accept it for payment - the same is true for the US Dollar. Regarding the "bubble" talk - sure Bitcoin could fall by a lot from here (above $500). But it was also (supposedly) a bubble in April at $266. Someone who said it was a bubble then was right - and also wrong. The price fell to below $100, and then has soared to over $500. The funny thing about Bitcoin is that it could be "worth" $1 (or less) in the year 2020, or it could be "worth" over $1,000,000. There are great arguments to be made each way.
I would think if anyone sold a large block, the price would crater. It appears not a lot of people are sellling because of this ridiculous belief prices are going higher. It seems as people are getting dumber and dumber with each subsequent bubble of these past 20 years. It's got something to do with today's media which really dumb down people. I would say bitcoin can never become a currency if people see it as an "investment" and that's where the whole thing falls apart, all the bitcoin crowd is in it for investment purpose, even when they say otherwise. This is probably the biggest collective pump and dump scheme in history.