The Gaming Den

Oh God, bitcoins are STILL a thing.

I still can't believe that in a battle between the ego and privilege of survivalists, libertarians, and Dilbertian engineers and actual currency you should bet on the nerds. Not in any sheer financial or non-stupid sense, just in pure useless determination.

Between this and Ron Paul fanboyism, it's apparent that libertarian delusions are more resilient than the collective ant population and more entrenched than WWI soldiers on the Western front. My word.

Of course Bitcoins are still a thing. I mean, if you bought any of them for nearly thirty dollars or even ten you're feeling like a goddamn fool. But that's to be expected. Bitcoins have fallen to probably their natural value: roughly one hit of meth. Remember that drug dealers set up underground economies in Tide liquid detergent and even other drugs.

The idea of having your drug income come in a form that you don't owe taxes on is very attractive to the would-be Capones of the world. So bullshit barter economies are very attractive to drug dealers.

Bitcoins are completely ridiculous and have no natural value. But they will probably sustain a price in the roughly "one hit of meth" range for quite some time because if nothing else the drug cartels will continue supporting them at that level for the foreseeable future.

-Username17

Be fair, I'm sure it's still good for ordering hits and purchasing child pornography and all other financial transactions for illegal activity*. Sure, the article was from back when BitCoin was a big thing**, but if it's still doing well in the drug trade, I imagine it's doing well for the other illegal stuff.

*I mean, except the financial transaction of "Give me all of your money or I'll shoot you in the face."

**Rather, as big as it actually was.

I wouldn't say it's doing well in the drug trade. I mean, it's losing market share to stolen bottles of Tide liquid laundry soap for fuck's sake.

I'm just saying that as long as a couple cartels are willing to swap Bitcoins for meth, the value of a Bitcoin can't fall much below $5.

Of course, the music stops as soon as the FBI reverse engineers the transaction records from one captured meth lab and a couple hundred people get V&. Once that happens, the value of Bitcoin will no longer be supported by crystal meth and it will blow away.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:Of course, the music stops as soon as the FBI reverse engineers the transaction records from one captured meth lab and a couple hundred people get V&. Once that happens, the value of Bitcoin will no longer be supported by crystal meth and it will blow away.

There was a hilarious thing on the news last night, talking about the abundance of meth labs. Key parts:

"It's really profitable ... all you need to start it up is (lists ingredients)" - from the police. Nice one there, telling us how to do it.

"The number of meth labs in the country has exploded."

So lets say you are Greek, would it be smart to invest into bitcoins then?

Bitcoin and its future hold no real mystery for me. The real mystery is why the hell are drugs being traded for laundry detergent? Is there some cartel that is going to come out with a laundromat service in the near future? Are they really cleaning clothes with it or is there some ingredient that has real functional value in the drug-making/selling world?

Tide has a very stable price, it's recession proof, and you can sell it on the black market easily. Basically it's a commodity item that is non-perishable, is not going to bubble and burst, and is easily turned into 'liquid' assets. Sorry for the pun.

Essentially, because Tide can be easily converted into dollars and is difficult to track, especially considering most of the trade uses stolen containers anyhow, it's a real convenient method of paying for drugs.

I want to make some stupid laundering money joke now...

So do I, because it's just too easy.

So Paul Krugman weighed in on the whole BitCoin idea. He pointed out that backing your currency with wasted resources in the past was still wasting resources and pulled out the old 18th century Adam Smith quote about how it was stupid to do that. That's not the great thing though.

The great thing is that when he did that, a bunch of libertarian nutjobs invaded the comments on his blog to rant about how liberal central banks are treasonously destroying the value of your money with inflation.

Interestingly, BitCoin prices have gone way up since the days when people were hacking wallets and causing panic selling of the stuff. It got all the way up to $260 last week. And then, predictably, people realized that was stupid and started panic selling and price halved over a period of one day. Then it halved again. According to the BBC, that crash is being blamed by the loss of confidence from someone deciding to give away 50 BitCoins to random recipients on Reddit.

So to recap: BitCoin is a bubble market that uses up real resources to produce something with no inherent value. BitCoins are not a store of value or a sound investment. The unregulated market is full of fraud, and subject to titanic instabilities and apparently manipulatable on a global scale by people chatting on message boards throwing around less than twenty thousand dollars worth of assets. Why is this still a thing?

-Username17

Bitcoin prices are being bubbled by tech entrepreneurs like those creepy Facebook rowing twins.

So libertarians are once again proven to be tools of the over-class and not rebels who are sticking it to the establishment.

I've heard BitCoins described as the beanie babies of electronic currency. After this last week that makes a lot of sense.

Juton wrote:I've heard BitCoins described as the beanie babies of electronic currency. After this last week that makes a lot of sense.

Fucking Christ, what tells me that my ex has a bunch of bitcoins stashed somewhere? (Her family made a killing of Beanie Babies back in the day, and despite my bullshitting about her I have to admit she's exceptionally good at predicting bubbles before they start then jumping off at the right time. She could probably make a killing as a financial adviser if she took the time to learn a bit more about the macro end of economics).

I love Bitcoins. I don't own them, I'm not that fucking stupid. I just love the entertainment provided by the people who use them.

Magic the Gathering Online eXchange's official explanation for why volatility has exploded in the last week is that malicious hackers are deliberately attempting to destabilize bitcoins to create opportunities for profit. They then go on to state that there is "pretty much nothing that can be done". Magic the Gathering Online eXchange is where the majority of bitcoin trade takes place.

I love how the official answer to any bitcoin trouble is always unnamed "hackers."

No one wants to admit that online currency acts more like the volatile commodity market and not like the semi-stable currency market, essentially making it nearly useless as a medium of exchange.

I hope the smily is because of how funny it is that people actually think that will happen.

Kaelik wrote:I hope the smily is because of how funny it is that people actually think that will happen.

Oh...it won't hit 650? Because it was over 900 today. I got my first BTC at 0.8 in 2010.

You're behind the curve you fucking ape.

Because this is an image thread:

So I know what you're thinking - "holy hell Winnah's been here almost three years and it turns out he's a raving fucking lunatic." But I don't think you'll appreciate how fully raving fucking lunatic he actually is until you google the names in those watermarks. Heads up: some of it's arguably not SFW, because for some reason I will never understand there is a part of the blogosphere where tits, conspiracy theorists, goldbugs/sound money loons, and conservatism intersect. If you think that sounds weird and uncomfortable, it is.

aLSo You WiLL FiND PeoPLe WHo TyPe LiKe THiS FoR No ReaSoN - aNyoNe eLSe ReMiNDeD oF BeiNG TeN oN THe iNTeRNeT oR DiD i JuST eMBaRRaSS MySeLF?

Kaelik wrote:I hope the smily is because of how funny it is that people actually think that will happen.

I actually had to stifle my laughter when I saw the comic, for that very reason. Maybe because my mind was running slow and I got to process it in real time it snuck up on me with the giggles.

"Hunh, okay, Bitcoin is going to get murderized. Um, okay I guess."
"Oh wait, he's gonna get the pellet and eat the other currencies!"
*snort*
"Someone probably made this thinking it was true."
*slow grin*
"Ehehehehehee!"

Yeah, using the "nine hundred dollar price" as evidence that BitCoin is viable as currency is nothing short of insane. Here's what happened: somebody recommended at a senate hearing that BitCoin be treated as a legitimate financial service. Then, the asking price on one of the BitCoin exchanges briefly went up by more than three hundred and fifty percent. Since then, the asking price has been falling, and has lost a fifth of its "value." This is all in the last week.

This level of volatility makes it a priori unusable as a currency. We're talking about a level of price volatility beyond even junk bonds. It's like beanie babies or penny stocks. For fuck's sake, these large price shifts are happening because of senate committee testimony. Not even a senate committee final policy recommendation, let alone an actual law or policy change.

But beyond that, the price is reacting the wrong way, because the small number of people trading in these things happen to be fucking idiots. When a senate committee says that an operation like a BitCoin exchange should be treated like a legitimate financial service, that isn't good news. That doesn't mean you've finally made it to the big times and it's all champagne from here on out. It means that the FBI thinks you should be subject to audits and taxation and that the way you've been running your businesses breaks numerous federal laws.

The FBI telling a senate committee that BitCoin should be considered an online proxy payment service and treated like a legitimate financial service like PayPal is not good news if you happen to be heavily financially involved with a BitCoin exchange. And the fact that one of the BitCoin exchanges reacted as if it was great news shows that they are even more clueless and out of it than was immediately obvious from the fact that they are participating in the trade of a volatile fiat currency backed up by no nations, no corporations, and no organizations with any real production other than a couple of second rate drug cartels.

-Username17

Winnah wrote:

Kaelik wrote:I hope the smily is because of how funny it is that people actually think that will happen.

Oh...it won't hit 650? Because it was over 900 today.

Have you ever played the game Pacman? I ask, because the image specifically conveys a belief that bitcoins will eat a bunch of other currencies.

I don't care about the current value of a purely speculative investment. Speculation inherently creates highs. That doesn't mean the US dollar will cease to exist because bitcoins are so much better. Bitcoins literally cannot be used for their most common current use: Speculative investing, if they absorbed other currencies. The fact that people continue to use bitcoins primarily for speculation indicates they are not willing to use it as an actual currency, which is not surprising.