I don't envy the gamblers who are jumping in and out of the moves recently, if you're that careless with your money then good luck to ya. I will never invest in a bubble and right now bitcoins are the definition of one. Having said that I am waiting to give it a go, but it's currently far too erratic for my taste. I do however envy the "nutters" who invested in a digital currency when it was just a baby. I remember watching a youtuber called 'davinci' back in 2011, he pleaded with his viewers to invest a few bucks into bitcoin and all he got in return was hate on a mass level, predominantly from permabull silvertards. I hope he made a bucket-load of money for sticking to what he believed in, certainly deserves it.
Silver & Bitcoin rise and fall compared with the USD. I have both. Both historical charts have spikes akin to "Tulips".
Would someone please explain this popular market analogy to me? As far as I can tell they are both unique commodities that have offered vastly different properties for the time periods they gained popularity in. But much of what I keep hearing in regard to Bitcoins surging popularity is as according to Peter Schiff, "Tulip mania all over again!" Help me understand the similarities and/or differences between a perishable flower and an internet cryptocurrency?
The term "tulip mania" is now often used metaphorically to refer to any large economic bubble (when asset prices deviate from intrinsic values). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania The asset could be anything.even Mars Bars
Anything can be viewed as an asset with high value if enough hype is used to pump it up. Just look at some of the utter garbage being sold as "art" for big dollars. My farts could be such an asset if I had the right PR people pump and hype it. Value is always in the eye of the beholder. Perhaps to some BitCoin lovers, pm's have no value worth investing a penny in. To me, BitCoin has no value and I will never spend a penny on it. Those who spend hundreds of dollars on a BitCoin and then lose their shirt when the music stops playing, I have no sympathy for you. You took that roll of the dice and you are the only one to blame. If you made out well, then congrats. .
Plenty of people have purchased silver when it was in the 30's & 40's. They have lost a considerable percentage of purchasing power and perhaps feel sorry for buying silver when it was in an apparent bubble.
It's two very different things. Of course it's true that silver/gold can fall significantly like we have seen in 2013, but physical gold and silver can't disappear like crypto electronic digits in a system prone to cyber hacking and corruption. Besides, who can say with certainty that some people haven't already been able to defeat the alleged failsafes on this created-out-of-thin-air scheme called BitCoin? .
I am all in the silver camp and not looking to enter the bitcoin camp, however physical silver can/has been lost/stolen just as bitcoin can/has been lost/stolen
I have Bitcoins and PM's. My PM's are a "scheme" derived from the Earth via a mining process. My Bitcoins are a "scheme" derived from a digital mining process. Both processes require energy expenditure (cost). Bitcoins and PM's provide aspects I value. Both are subject to "bubbles". Both have various flaws. Physical metals don't exist for near instantaneous trades longer than one arm length, rendering them useless for many present day trading applications. Bitcoins are a potentially useful trading currency. PM's provide somewhere to store wealth I have to wonder what went through the minds of people when the scheme of trading with gold and silver was introduced to their societies. The introduction of Bitcoins possibly helps to explain some of that. Language like "scheme", "Tulip Mania" & "Bubble" applies to PMs and Bitcoins.
I've read the words of a great many experts talking about gold as the ultimate store of wealth. They will often mention the inflation a Weimer Germany as the greatest example of how gold functions in a collapsing economy with massive civil unrest. What many of them forget to mention is that gold's transportability perhaps contributed to it more worth than any other asset, for those suffering at the sharp end of the mood of the masses. Unarguably, this transportability is something that Bitcoin does even better than gold.
At the end of the day, silver, along with just about everything else that can be sold or traded, only has value because enough people agree that it does. Silver may have industrial applications, but, even so - it is only 'valuable' for those uses because enough people agree that it is worth using for those things. The value of just about anything is essentially "whatever somebody is willing to pay for it".
Potential brain wallet capacity: 21,000,000 btc Potential prison wallet capacity: A few bars (? You tell me, I'm new to stacking )
