Wednesday, February 17th 2021
Bitcoin Breaks $50,000 Barrier, Hitting the Highest Value Ever
Cryptocurrency has in the past few years gained a lot of popularity, mostly fueled by Bitcoin's rapid growth and its massive price increasing over time. Today, Bitcoin, the world's leading cryptocurrency, has managed to make history and broke the record of 50,000 USD. As of now, on February 17th at 07:00 UTC, Bitcoin has reached 50,452.60 USD value. What is driving the price up you must wonder? It is the market adoption of the currency. Tesla Inc. has invested 1.5 billion USD in Bitcoin as it intends to accept it as payment for its products. Next up is Mastercard, which is preparing to support cryptocurrency on its network. In addition to Mastercard, Apple is also preparing its services for cryptocurrency payments. Right now, the market cap of Bitcoin is $935,359,977,182 at the time of writing, just shy of one trillion USD.
Source:
TweakTown
94 Comments on Bitcoin Breaks $50,000 Barrier, Hitting the Highest Value Ever
This comment here actually makes some claims. But these claims also happen not to be true. Otherwise, I would have said total bullshit but I'm in a good mood. Where in the hell did you hear that it takes "three weeks" to transfer Bitcoin? And what does it even have to do with crypto farms in China???? Bitcoin transfers take 10 minutes at most! And that's literally anywhere around the whole damn world. Show me a bank that will transfer your money anywhere in the world in 10 minutes?! Yea, if you want to talk about efficiencies, there is no match for crypto! Mining is just the process of making new crypto. It has nothing to do with transferring it from A to B. I can't even imagine where this connection in your mind comes from besides a very bad understanding of crypto. Yes, mining is inefficient. blabla, whatever. But once you have the coins, there is no system that is more secure and efficient for exchanging currency between two individuals than crypto. Full stop on that.
The other part of crypto and especially Bitcoin is the value it has in terms of investment. Bitcoin is the new gold in many ways. I would even say it's the evolution of gold. Gold isn't actually limited in supply as many people like to claim. Bitcoin is. People never questioned the inherent value of gold for thousands of years even though its utilitarian value is very limited. It has a value beyond its utilitarian value. That's just the way it is and some things are just like that. Nobody questioned it before because maybe they owned some gold or didn't care to look into it enough. But Bitcoin can actually be seen as digital gold just without many of the inefficiencies that gold brings like where you can store it (and who you can trust to store it for you). Bitcoin removes all that and lets you store it in your own virtual wallet that nobody can steal from you, not even the government. You can just claim that you forgot the password or whatever and they literally can't do anything. Have fun burying your Gold in the woods and hoping nobody finds it.... Yes, some people actually do that. So yes, Bitcoin just made Gold digital, even if you don't want to use it as a currency. Most of the people here are just angry they didn't mine/buy this stuff when it was pennies on the dollar and now have to cry about it. Grow up! And really, what's so damn bad about some tech-savvy individuals getting rich off of this? Is it better to leave everything to the 1%??? Alternatives are always good. And I can imagine there were also a lot of really poor geeky people who are now filthy rich. The horror, right? I really don't get all this crying about having alternatives.
I think you just need to get up to speed.According to the studies I have seen, it's not even a minor use case.That's going to change then if you are in a place that accepts mastercard. Also, I assume you have paypal? Then you can buy with crypto.
The end times state One world currency, And chips to be implanted into everyone. Covid PPL? What ya think is up with forced vaccines? Tin foil hat is on :pimp:
- What is a "product", and how many of them are fundamentally reliant on blockchain tech to exist? I.e. how many of them could have existed just as easily without any relation to crypto or blockchain tech? If one is trying to prove the usefulness of a technology, one needs to demonstrate that it either enables us to do something new, or to do something far better or more efficiently than previously. So far I've seen evidence of neither.
- The fact that there are >8000 cryptocurrencies out there tells us exactly two things: that it's far too easy to create one, and that creating one is incentivized through the promise of creating something potentially valuable. There being a lot of something says nothing of its inherent value - just look at shell companies in tax havens. There are thousands of those, and the only things they are useful for is tax evasion and other forms of theft. Existence is not proof of usefulness or value.
- Even if the vast majority of those >8000 "coins" were created by staunch idealists wanting to create a democratically controlled and decentralized international currency of the future, the extreme number of alternatives would render them all useless, and thus "shitcoins". >8000 competing standards just means nobody can agree on anything.
You're right that it's not a Ponzi scheme - that's a very specific form of scam, after all. But given the massive amount of fraud and crime related to cryptocurrency in general, it's a pretty reasonable approach to think of it all as a scam. The uncomfortable consequence of something being decentralized and unrelated to any type of government or supragovernmental organization is that there's an inherent lack of accountability, after all.As for it being "only for money laundering" - not only, but it is a major use case, and something that can't really be controlled for. This is a fundamental issue of cryptocurrencies just as with any other unregulated exchange system.
As for it being a lottery: no, it's not a lottery, it's a gamble. As is all investment. The only real difference from for example stocks is that you can't generate stocks by running your GPU for a few weeks and wasting a bunch of electricity. But at least the stock market - which is indeed nothing more than organized gambling at this point - has some claim to being linked to actual value of some sort. Crypto is valuable because people with money agree that it's valuable - it's pure abstraction, all the way down. The thing traded might as well be magic unicorn dust or leprechaun beards, as those would be just as linked to any real value as crypto is. Cryptocurrencies are only, and it's worth underscoring only, an arbitrary item attributed a value so that it can be traded and gambled with. This is nothing new - after all, perhaps the most traded commodity in the finance "industry" (calling that an industry is really a stretch!) is promises. Promises to pay someone back, promises that you'll owe someone if they do X for you, promises that you'll be able to transform X money into >X money, etc., etc. Finance is fundamentally built on ever-increasing layers of abstraction, which is why it's so important to have strong regulations as those abstractions can link back to actual people and actual lives and cause actual harm when things go bust.None of that proves that it's useful or necessary. It just shows that it can (barely) do what conventional currencies and payment systems already do. Which returns us to the issue that making an alternative solution that doesn't do anything new or better is just making a mess - and when that mess enables crime and causes major environmental harm, that is deeply problematic.Thanks for actually engaging with the arguments, though sadly you're conflating two things here: cryptocurrencies as an extension of the concept of blockchain, and cryptocurrencies as a system for money transfer. My argument did not engage with both, so conflating both in your answer makes the answer ill suited. The example I provided was meant as an example of people arguing that blockchain will somehow revolutionize everything, where secure transactions is one of the chief arguments. If that argument relies on tokens/coins/whatever being pre-calculated, then it literally removes the question of blockchain tech from the equation - the same could be done with any traceable, open transaction system. Unless the processing of the transaction requires some unique input from the transaction itself and uses that to generate a unique output, you're essentially just using a system of high-tech receipts, after all. So unless the blockchain tech is used to generate a secure proof of transaction after the fact, I don't see how it makes a difference.
I never said that making a transfer with Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency takes any amount of time. But again, your argument here is rather ... hollow. Sure, global banking systems are slow and ponderous, and can stand to be improved. But ... how does that relate directly to blockchain tech or cryptocurrencies? Yes, they present an alternative, but they also present a heap of other new solutions and challenges entirely unrelated to accelerating money transfers. So if that's your end goal, you still need to take into account the other effects of the technology in question. You can't divorce the (relatively minor, especially given the extremely high threshold of entry) increase in transfer speed from other consequences such as the (frankly utterly ridiculous) need to waste massive amounts of electricity producing the medium of transfer, or how the fundamental anonymization and deregulation of the system enables massive criminality and no oversight. Call me conservative, but I'd much rather wait a day or two and pay a small fee than have my money transfers underpinned by massive pollution with literally nothing to show for it.As for this part though ... well, let's just start with "People never questioned the inherent value of gold for thousands of years even though its utilitarian value is very limited." Have you missed the fact that for those thousands of years, the major global currency was salt? Gold as a major trade commodity and dominant standard of value is a relatively new concept, precisely because of its low usefulness. Gold was for baubles and was only valued by monarchy/emperors/the ultra-rich, while salt made life livable for humans and created global trade routes. It's true that some sort of gold standard has existed in parallel with salt as the major denomination of value in many situations, but given its lack of use and scarcity (then), it was of little to no actual consequence outside of very select circles. So stating that "people never questioned the inherent value of gold" is just pure nonsense.
Next up:To paraphrase this a bit based on the immediate context: we should never object to anything or try to change something that we deem harmful or problematic. That's what you're trying to say there, right? If not, what is the point of that sentence? Are you actually arguing that because people in ancient times (or the 19th century, or whenever) didn't question something, we shouldn't either? (Regardless of the fact that the initial premise, that they didn't question it, is false.) Because that is ... quite absurd. How is any sort of progress supposed to happen if we don't question how the world works? And questioning arbitrary measures of value with limited availability seems like a prime candidate for some close examination to me.And there comes the jealousy argument, and the belittlement of people disagreeing with you. It's too bad, really. Initially it actually seemed like you were trying to have an on-topic discussion. That probably sounded better in your head.I have to ask: would you say the same if you didn't happen to be within the group mentioned there? Say, if we redefined it to "what's so bad about some experts in sewing getting rich off of this?" - would you make the same argument? Because it's rather hard to ignore the possible self-interest underpinning such arguments. Also, presenting it as if "leaving everything to the 1%" is the only alternative is the most plain-faced false equivalency I've seen in a while. (And yes, that includes that ridiculous post I responded to previously.) It really shouldn't need saying, but there are more alternatives than "leave everything as it is" and "make cryptocurrencies the new standard for [something]". There are many, many, many alternatives besides those two, and many of them are far better.
Beyond that, though, these two last quotes seem to betray something fundamental to your support of this: you're benefitting from it, so rather than engage with the uncomfortable sides of it and risk losing those benefits, you're couching some really base selfishness in a skin of rationalizations. "What's so damn bad about [me] getting rich off this? [...] [You're] just angry that [you] didn't mine/buy this stuff when it was pennies on the dollar and now have to cry about it. Grow up!" That there? That's the emotional core of your argument. That's the most honest and truthful thing in your entire post. That shows us where you are coming from. And it's just as hollow and selfish an argument as it is every single time someone lucky enough to succeed within capitalism raises it against the people criticizing the system they are benefiting from.
This is where the fundamental issue of the "crypto will save the world" argument comes in: it has zero solutions towards actually solving real problems in the real world. In fact it's far more likely to exacerbate many major problems, as that is what happens when you deregulate something. Deregulation becomes a free-for-all, and who wins in a free-for-all? Whoever has the most resources. There are always a handful of exceptions (people with ingenious new solutions etc., people rushing to copy those new solutions), but the general rule is that those with the most resources always come out on top. I mean, your alternative of "leaving it to the 1%" assumes that crypto somehow doesn't do that. Which ... well, it does. There might just be a few new members of the 1% along the way. And that's how harmful myths like "the American dream" aka. the myth of individual success in capitalism, proliferate. The adage of "Anyone can succeed in a capitalist society - but everyone can't" really can't be repeated enough.
Capitalism is a system of high-stakes, intensive competition, with close to winner-take-all outcomes. It is a system where there will and must always be more losers than winners - if everyone won equally, that wouldn't be competition in a capitalist sense, and the system would fall apart. The system relies on a mythos of success to encourage people to play the game, and to avoid those on the bottom to organize against those on the top. It relies on a constant flux of failures with a few steady successes rising to the top. Why? Because capitalist society is a massively complex collection of interlinked systems in which any ordinary individual actor has zero chance of any real control over their own situation. The only ones with any control are the ones with massive amounts of resources - i.e. money. Some small fry will always luck out with a fortuitous combination of luck, timing, an idea or solution, hard work, etc., but those have always been and will always be the minority - there are easily a thousand losers for every winner. And by upholding the tantalizing ideal of "anyone can succeed" without mentioning the uncomfortable addendum "but everyone can't", the 1% get to keep their power. Crypto does exactly zero to counteract that. And arguably makes the issue worse, as it serves as yet another tool for those with a lot of resources to further entrench their position.Only to those with the resources to make use of them.Really? Really poor geeky people? Even if RX 570s were pretty good for mining and >$200, someone really poor is rarely able to afford a $200 GPU, let alone several. DIY PCs in general aren't very accessible to the poor. "A lot" is also pretty vague. Are there a few thousand people out there who have made millions on crypto? Sure, but most of those were already quite wealthy, as they could afford a lot of expensive hardware. Are there hundreds of thousands that have made perhaps a few thousand on crypto? No doubt. That hardly qualifies as "filthy rich" though. If I were to guess, I'd say the amount of people going from "really poor" to "filthy rich" through crypto is in the low hundreds at best. They would after all have had to risk going without food and shelter in order to pay for this hardware, a risk it's highly unlikely many would be willing or able to take. For reference, the US had an average poverty rate of 12.3% in 2019, with a population estimated at 328,239,523, so 40.4 million US citizens were living in poverty in 2019. I really don't see how even a few thousand poor people lucking out on crypto would amount to anything compared to that.
Getting in early on a new tradable commodity always allows a handful of people to get somewhat rich. That doesn't make that fact anything but a continuation of the status quo for a fundamentally unequal system.
If "not even a minor use case" is based on it being less than 0.5% of transfers, that's a poor metric - most crypto transfers are people buying and selling crypto to each other after all, so it being a tradeable commodity interesting to finance people makes transfer numbers balloon. If youre basing it on actual sums of money, remember that all financial benefit from stolen crypto, scams, ransomware, etc., relies on said money being laundered - and that is most likely to happen through crypto. Even if we assume that half of it is lost or laundered elsewhere, that is still at least a billion dollars of money laundered every single year through crypto. I'd call that major.
i am not exclaiming myself of this sheit.
www.valuewalk.com/2020/07/money-laundering-traditional-banks-cryptocurrencies/
but i am sure you can find something that is totally the opposite.
and dont forget bitcoin is still so small its just a fart in the wind against big banks +++
Nothing wrong here, i hope you enjoy your "traditionnal" money as much as i like my "crypto" money.
Unregulated capitalism creates inequality. It is a fundamental trait of the system, as it promotes wealth as an ideal and thus makes people hoard it. And there isn't enough money to go around to make more people rich than poor. So, sorry, but unregulated capitalism does indeed create more losers than winners. And as the world has moved towards less regulation over the past 3-5 decades, economic inequality has skyrocketed, working and middle class wages have stagnated (literally 30 years ago in the US) and social mobility has all but frozen. Capitalism is a lottery of birth and circumstance where what you start out with largely determines your outcome, which is shown by how the vast majority of rich people are born into wealth. People like to promote myths like "work hard, and you can become rich too", but there is literally zero truth to that. There is no direct causal link between hard work and wealth, and there never has been - that's a useful myth for business owners to keep people slaving away rather than demanding better conditions. Some succeed from unlikely circumstances through some combination of luck, opportunity, outside help, work, and other factors, but far more fail. Always. And just as many succeed without any hard work at all, of course. Capitalism is typically sold to us as a meritocracy, but it has never, ever been one. And it never will be. It's a game rigged in favor of those with wealth.
I'm not in any way denying that the world has become better in most ways over the past century. And capitalism has contributed to that (mainly through spreading its ideology of growth) but most increases in general prosperity have been brought about by explicitly anti-capitalist movements and policies - workers' rights movements, women's rights movements, etc. Without them, most people would be far, far worse off than they are today, and the rich would be richer. Concessions and rights have been won through collective action against the wealthy and powerful. So general prosperity (and a large portion of the increased productivity over the past century) is a hard-fought outcome of countercultural movements struggling against the consequences of capitalism, not an outcome of capitalism itself.
And of course we're rapidly running into a wall of reality regarding the myth of infinite growth fuelling capitalism, with the environmental damage we have wrought over the past centuries starting to become unmanageable. And given that capitalism fundamentally requires growth (unless you have significant growth, you'll have a crash), that's an insurmountable issue. We can't keep consuming resources like we have. Capitalism is fundamentally unsustainable. I'm not familiar with "rational optimism", but if it's promoting a view that capitalism is beneficial for most people and a good way forward for humanity, then it's too caught up in the ideological baggage of capitalism to see reality.
Have a look.
www.nasdaq.com/articles/stop-the-bitcoin-fud%3A-criminal-cryptocurrency-transactions-are-falling-2021-01-20
2.1 percent is not even in the realm of "major"
And also I have to point out the obvious, there is no reliable way to know any of this for sure. One thing for sure is that crypto made it easier than ever to hide money away.