Gave me yet another 'this feels like a bubble' moment, people getting excited about it while out in the pub!
Was having dinner in Thai Spice last week and chatting to a friend about cryptos, Iota in particular, and the waiter chimes in and tells us he is heavily on it and mentions another crypto he has that shot up in last couple of days.
It felt like that scene in The Big Short where the stripper tells Steve Carell's character that she has mortgages on 5 houses.
I never really went through my policy , had a good look today. everything covered from Gp visit ( get half the fee back within a few days , just upload receipt to app )dentist to reflexology , eyes, Glasses, contact lenses. Care on call app so you can chat live to a doc and get script sent to nearest chemist.
Jesus its some job. Obv Sky pay for it but if I leave I think I deffo will be holding on to it !
Was having dinner in Thai Spice last week and chatting to a friend about cryptos, Iota in particular, and the waiter chimes in and tells us he is heavily on it and mentions another crypto he has that shot up in last couple of days.
It felt like that scene in The Big Short where the stripper tells Steve Carell's character that she has mortgages on 5 houses.
Was doing my friday Italian on eh Friday and the same thing happened. We were talking about Bitcoin and our waiter starts off into how he bought some recently as well as some other coin he can't remember the name of and he's loving it. Lad was totally chuffed. Are these our shoe shine boys?
Nakamoto took a leaf from de beers strategy for selling lumps of rock, an artificially reduced supply, and strong marketing
This * x^n
Have you ever tried to sell a diamond, have you ever tried to spend a bitcoin?
Then for over a hundred years now DeBeers have been convincing stupid people to spend large sums of money on something indistinguishable from sparkly glass by convincing them that they are investing in something that is scarce.
TBH I still haven't figured out what people think they are getting when they buy BTC.
Originally posted by Opr
I'd love to know how much of the growth is caused by black markets. You have to think that over the last few years that the dark markets have grown significantly with many suppliers and consumers moving more and more online. If the growth is underpinned by those global black markets then the bubble talk is nonsense.
Opr
I wouldn't be so sure about that
Clearly the only value in or use for BTC is as a money laundering service, but I don't see why that means it is sustainable.
There is loads of use & value in BTC. It absolutely is 10000x more useful for nefarious purposes than your debit card, but that doesn't mean it's not useful for 'standard' activities too.
However, it is not a currency. It is right now, a highly volatile 'fiat only' commodity. Being valuable only because people say it is.
Waiting 10 minutes for a transaction to go through so you can pay Anita in the cafe 0.000001243 Satoshis for a Latte is not going to happen. It won't be a currency, because it simply cannot be used to clear transactions.
Other cryptos can, but none of them have first mover advantage, so I haven't a fucking breeze what any of them are worth.
Originally posted by Hitchhiker's Guide To...View Post
Met my 12 masters dissertation students for the year today and about nine of them want to do their dissertations on bitcoin. Send on your research questions! Ribble was a popular topic for some reason. Also opened a coinbase account last night but thankfully have no money.
Have you ever tried to sell a diamond, have you ever tried to spend a bitcoin?
Then for over a hundred years now DeBeers have been convincing stupid people to spend large sums of money on something indistinguishable from sparkly glass by convincing them that they are investing in something that is scarce. TBH I still haven't figured out what people think they are getting when they buy BTC.
I wouldn't be so sure about that
Clearly the only value in or use for BTC is as a money laundering service, but I don't see why that means it is sustainable.
Personally 5 figures so far
My mate who just bought an apartment for over 300k with BTC, fully paid off. Admittedly he sold his BTC to do it so a win for your camp there! I've only heard of house purchases with actual bitcoin in Australia and Dubai so far.
My mate who just bought an apartment for over 300k with BTC, fully paid off. Admittedly he sold his BTC to do it so a win for your camp there! I've only heard of house purchases with actual bitcoin in Australia and Dubai so far.
Tulip investors who got out early were also pretty happy with their gains!
A new movie sets its doomed entrepreneurs amidst 17th-century “tulipmania”—but historians of the phenomenon have their own bubble to burst
When tulips came to the Netherlands, all the world went mad. A sailor who mistook a rare tulip bulb for an onion and ate it with his herring sandwich was charged with a felony and thrown in prison. A bulb named Semper Augustus, notable for its flame-like white and red petals, sold for more than the cost of a mansion in a fashionable Amsterdam neighborhood, complete with coach and garden. As the tulip market grew, speculation exploded, with traders offering exorbitant prices for bulbs that had yet to flower. And then, as any financial bubble will do, the tulip market imploded, sending traders of all incomes into ruin.
For decades, economists have pointed to 17th-century tulipmania as a warning about the perils of the free market. Writers and historians have reveled in the absurdity of the event. The incident even provides the backdrop for the new film Tulip Fever, based on a novel of the same name by Deborah Moggach.
The only problem: none of these stories are true.
What really happened and how did the story of Dutch tulip speculation get so distorted? Anne Goldgar discovered the historical reality when she dug into the archives to research her book, Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age.
“I always joke that the book should be called ‘Tulipmania: More Boring Than You Thought,’” says Goldgar, a professor of early modern history at King’s College London. “People are so interested in this incident because they think they can draw lessons from it. I don’t think that’s necessarily the case.”
But before you even attempt to apply what happened in the Netherlands to more recent bubbles—the South Sea Bubble in 1700s England, the 19th-century railway bubble, the dot-com bubble and bitcoin are just a few comparisons Goldgar has seen—you have to understand Dutch society at the turn of the 17th century.
For starters, the country experienced a major demographic shift during its war for independence from Spain, which began in the 1560s and continued into the 1600s. It was during this period that merchants arrived in port cities like Amsterdam, Haarlem and Delft and established trading outfits, including the famous Dutch East India Company. This explosion in international commerce brought enormous fortune to the Netherlands, despite the war. In their newly independent nation, the Dutch were mainly led by urban oligarchies comprised of wealthy merchants, unlike other European countries of the era, which were controlled by landed nobility. As Goldgar writes in her book, “The resultant new faces, new money and new ideas helped to revolutionize the Dutch economy in the late 16th century.”
As the economy changed, so, too, did social interactions and cultural values. A growing interest in natural history and a fascination with the exotic among the merchant class meant that goods from the Ottoman Empire and farther east fetched high prices. The influx of these goods also drove men of all social classes to acquire expertise in newly in-demand areas. One example Goldgar gives is fish auctioneer Adriaen Coenen, whose watercolor-illustrated manuscript Whale Book allowed him to actually meet the President of Holland. And when Dutch botanist Carolus Clusius established a botanical garden at the University of Leiden in the 1590s, the tulip quickly rose to a place of honor.
Originally found growing wild in the valleys of the Tien Shan Mountains (at the border where China and Tibet meet Afghanistan and Russia), tulips were cultivated in Istanbul as early as 1055. By the 15th century, Sultan Mehmed II of the Ottoman Empire had so many flowers in his 12 gardens that he required a staff of 920 gardeners. Tulips were among the most prized flowers, eventually becoming a symbol of the Ottomans, writes gardening correspondent for The Independent Anna Pavord in The Tulip.
The Dutch learned that tulips could be grown from seeds or buds that grew on the mother bulb; a bulb that grows from seed would take 7 to 12 years before flowering, but a bulb itself could flower the very next year. Of particular interest to Clusius and other tulip traders were “broken bulbs”—tulips whose petals showed a striped, multicolor pattern rather than a single solid color. The effect was unpredictable, but the growing demand for these rare, “broken bulb” tulips led naturalists to study ways to reproduce them. (The pattern was later discovered to be the result of a mosaic virus that actually makes the bulbs sickly and less likely to reproduce.) “The high market price for tulips to which the current version of tulipmania refers were prices for particularly beautiful broken bulbs,” writes economist Peter Garber. “Since breaking was unpredictable, some have characterized tulipmania among growers as a gamble, with growers vying to produce better and more bizarre variegations and feathering.”
After all the money Dutch speculators spent on the bulbs, they only produced flowers for about a week—but for tulip lovers, that week was a glorious one. “As luxury objects, tulips fit well into a culture of both abundant capital and new cosmopolitanism,” Goldgar writes. Tulips required expertise, an appreciation of beauty and the exotic, and, of course, an abundance of money.
Here’s where the myth comes into play. According to popular legend, the tulip craze took hold of all levels of Dutch society in the 1630s. “The rage among the Dutch to possess them was so great that the ordinary industry of the country was neglected, and the population, even to its lowest dregs, embarked in the tulip trade,” wrote Scottish journalist Charles Mackay in his popular 1841 work Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. According to this narrative, everyone from the wealthiest merchants to the poorest chimney sweeps jumped into the tulip fray, buying bulbs at high prices and selling them for even more. Companies formed just to deal with the tulip trade, which reached a fever pitch in late 1636. But by February 1637, the bottom fell out of the market. More and more people defaulted on their agreement to buy the tulips at the prices they’d promised, and the traders who had already made their payments were left in debt or bankrupted. At least that’s what has always been claimed.
In fact, “There weren’t that many people involved and the economic repercussions were pretty minor,” Goldgar says. “I couldn’t find anybody that went bankrupt. If there had been really a wholesale destruction of the economy as the myth suggests, that would’ve been a much harder thing to face.”
That’s not to say that everything about the story is wrong; merchants really did engage in a frantic tulip trade, and they paid incredibly high prices for some bulbs. And when a number of buyers announced they couldn’t pay the high price previously agreed upon, the market did fall apart and cause a small crisis—but only because it undermined social expectations.
“In this case it was very difficult to deal with the fact that almost all of your relationships are based on trust, and people said, ‘I don’t care that I said I’m going to buy this thing, I don’t want it anymore and I’m not going to pay for it.’ There was really no mechanism to make people pay because the courts were unwilling to get involved,” Goldgar says.
But the trade didn’t affect all levels of society, and it didn’t cause the collapse of industry in Amsterdam and elsewhere. As Garber, the economist, writes, “While the lack of data precludes a solid conclusion, the results of the study indicate that the bulb speculation was not obvious madness.”
So if tulipmania wasn’t actually a calamity, why was it made out to be one? We have tetchy Christian moralists to blame for that. With great wealth comes great social anxiety, or as historian Simon Schama writes in The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age, “The prodigious quality of their success went to their heads, but it also made them a bit queasy.” All the outlandish stories of economic ruin, of an innocent sailor thrown in prison for eating a tulip bulb, of chimney sweeps wading into the market in hopes of striking it rich—those come from propaganda pamphlets published by Dutch Calvinists worried that the tulip-propelled consumerism boom would lead to societal decay. Their insistence that such great wealth was ungodly has even stayed with us to this day.
“Some of the stuff hasn’t lasted, like the idea that God punishes people who are overreaching by causing them to have the plague. That’s one of the things people said in the 1630s,” Goldgar says. “But the idea that you get punished if you overreach? You still hear that. It’s all, ‘pride goes before the fall.’”
Goldgar doesn’t begrudge novelists and filmmakers for taking liberties with the past. It’s only when historians and economists neglect to do their research that she gets irked. She herself didn’t set out to be a mythbuster—she only stumbled upon the truth when she sat down to look through old documentation of the popular legend. “I had no way of knowing this existed before I started reading these documents,” Goldgar says. “That was an unexpected treasure.”
My mate who just bought an apartment for over 300k with BTC, fully paid off. Admittedly he sold his BTC to do it so a win for your camp there! I've only heard of house purchases with actual bitcoin in Australia and Dubai so far.
Don't forget that even though I am objectively correct about diamonds it doesn't mean that there isn't a never ending stream of fools parting with their money to buy them from Debeers.
There will continue to be criminals and gangsters who will want to leverage BTC as long as they are able to.
One thing I really don't understand is what people think all the other cryptos are going to be used for.
Don't forget that even though I am objectively correct about diamonds it doesn't mean that there isn't a never ending stream of fools parting with their money to buy them from Debeers.
There will continue to be criminals and gangsters who will want to leverage BTC as long as they are able to.
One thing I really don't understand is what people think all the other cryptos are going to be used for.
Think of them as a brute force grid search for the 'optimum currency'
I wouldn't be so sure about that
Clearly the only value in or use for BTC is as a money laundering service, but I don't see why that means it is sustainable.
The two being linked means that the price rises aren't solely driven by rampant speculation. More people buying and selling on the Dark Market means more demand for bitcoin. Those markets are only going to grow over the next few years which should mean the demand for Bitcoin will grow.
I don't understand why you don't see the link between having such a strong market underpin its value. Any currency has value in large part due to the fact it can be used to buy and sell goods and services. If you have one currency that is the dominant force as the Global currency of exchange in black market transactions it can only grow as demand for it rises. People are always going to want to buy and sell these type of good and services.
Hopefully that will expand in the future towards more daily usage in everyday life but at the moment it feels like you are getting to invest in the success of the global black market indirectly. Those markets aren't going away and will only grow in areas where bitcoin is the dominant currency of exchange.
Think of them as a brute force grid search for the 'optimum currency'
But they are not and simply cannot be, sure the tech evolves but that does not mean that the optimum one will have any intrinsic value.
If there is going to be a Central bank backed Crypto Currency anywhere, it will emerge fully formed from that CB and nowhere else.
No central bank would ever consider using an existing scheme, the idea is ridiculous.
There is loads of use & value in BTC. It absolutely is 10000x more useful for nefarious purposes than your debit card, but that doesn't mean it's not useful for 'standard' activities too.
However, it is not a currency. It is right now, a highly volatile 'fiat only' commodity. Being valuable only because people say it is.
Waiting 10 minutes for a transaction to go through so you can pay Anita in the cafe 0.000001243 Satoshis for a Latte is not going to happen. It won't be a currency, because it simply cannot be used to clear transactions.
Other cryptos can, but none of them have first mover advantage, so I haven't a fucking breeze what any of them are worth.
The two being linked means that the price rises aren't solely driven by rampant speculation. More people buying and selling on the Dark Market means more demand for bitcoin. Those markets are only going to grow over the next few years which should mean the demand for Bitcoin will grow.
I don't understand why you don't see the link between having such a strong market underpin its value. Any currency has value in large part due to the fact it can be used to buy and sell goods and services. If you have one currency that is the dominant force as the Global currency of exchange in black market transactions it can only grow as demand for it rises. People are always going to want to buy and sell these type of good and services.
Hopefully that will expand in the future towards more daily usage in everyday life but at the moment it feels like you are getting to invest in the success of the global black market indirectly. Those markets aren't going away and will only grow in areas where bitcoin is the dominant currency of exchange.
Opr
A poster on 2p2 tried to do some analysis on what value the black market supported but it was more like $500 a coin.
At the end of the day, most people are buying hoping there's bagholders coming after them.
The transaction fee and time taken is far too high for it to be used an every day currency.
Was having dinner in Thai Spice last week and chatting to a friend about cryptos, Iota in particular, and the waiter chimes in and tells us he is heavily on it and mentions another crypto he has that shot up in last couple of days.
It felt like that scene in The Big Short where the stripper tells Steve Carell's character that she has mortgages on 5 houses.
Haralob who's very bullish on crypto in general, doesn't think much of iota for some reason.
A poster on 2p2 tried to do some analysis on what value the black market supported but it was more like $500 a coin.
At the end of the day, most people are buying hoping there's bagholders coming after them.
I did some analysis and I think the global black market can support bitcoin at a value of $100k+
Never mind the fact that it is impossible to do an analysis quoting some randomer on a internet forum has no value never mind the sample size of said randomers.
I still feel most of the value is in these markets and I think you make a good point about Bitcoin trail so if a shift does take place I think it will be towards coins which place emphasis on anonymity like Zcash and Monero. At least I know the reason why people are buying these coins.
I did some analysis and I think the global black market can support bitcoin at a value of $100k+
Never mind the fact that it is impossible to do an analysis quoting some randomer on a internet forum has no value never mind the sample size of said randomers.
I still feel most of the value is in these markets and I think you make a good point about Bitcoin trail so if a shift does take place I think it will be towards coins which place emphasis on anonymity like Zcash and Monero. At least I know the reason why people are buying these coins.
Opr
Are you saying you think most of the value is from black markets? After the first couple of drops when Bitcoin fell out of favour with speculators it found a level supported by economic activity (most of it illegal) but that was a long time ago. Coinbase has had days where 100k accounts have been opened, this price growth is from speculation not actual activity.
Are you saying you think most of the value is from black markets? After the first couple of drops when Bitcoin fell out of favour with speculators it found a level supported by economic activity (most of it illegal) but that was a long time ago. Coinbase has had days where 100k accounts have been opened, this price growth is from speculation not actual activity.
I don't know how much value to attribute to black markets and it isn't really possible to tell without knowing how much of black market trade has moved to these areas of the internet. While silk road generated a level of support for BTC at the time it was still quite niche and underground. That has all changed. The economic activity that supported a certain BTC price a few years ago I imaged is ten fold now.
I only knew a few people 2-3 years ago who dabbled in buying stuff from Silk Road but nearly all of the people I know who still smoke weed or buy anything like that regularly do it on the DM now. I think the generation below that will all buy in this way. Dealers themselves are all sourcing on these markets now.
I don't know what weighting by which it is underpinned by these markets but $500 seems ludicrously low. Clearly the market is being driven to a large extent by speculation but equally if bitcoin was only activity driven this year I think it would have done very well outside of mass general buying.
The few people who i have spoken to who seem to know anything relevant about the cryptocurrencies and block chain in general seem to suggest long term ethereum as the most viable and a great product. Once things settle down, it's most likely the one to look at.
Worth viewing without having seen the source film?
I mean the room is worth seeing as it's genuinely enjoyably bad but I'd say once you're aware of the story you'd be fine, it's one of those truth is a stranger than fiction scenarios where you'd genuinely find the plot far fetched if you didn't know it was 100% accurate.
Jermaine Pennant was contacted by his former club Real Zaragoza recently after he abandoned a Porsche at the railway station in the Spanish city five months ago – and promptly forgot that he owned it.
According to an article published in the Spanish newspaper Marca, Pennant said that he did not remember having owned the car when Real contacted him. The club then opened the car, discovering the keys on the seat within.
The car had a customised licence plate with the registration "P33NNT". The former Arsenal and Liverpool star signed for Zaragoza on a free transfer in the summer of 2009 but he struggled to make an impact with the La Liga side. During his spell in Spain he infuriated coach Jose Aurelio Gay after turning up late for training three times in the space of two weeks.
Last August, he signed for Stoke City on a four-month loan deal, which was then made permanent in December, to the delight of the player. "The atmosphere around the place is brilliant, so I am looking forward to the fact that I am here at Stoke now for the long term and back in the best league in the world."
Some predicted but they think it will be intermittent . As it stands England look a touch of value at 5.7 imo. Lot of historical weight built into that imo and doesn't reflect their actual competitive position in this test.
Facebook have hired Weston for their Christmas party. Some setup.
There's some big changes there in management or in their ideas. Samhain Festival, Santa's Grotto (brutal, but 1st year of it) and hiring the place out for Facebook Xmas party. Maybe they just got an events company on board to bring in revenue. All good though to have more things on nearby. Expecting the IPO to move there next year!
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