Bitcoin Costs More than Gold?

[dualstow]

Well crap.
http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2017/03/ ... -1-0-gold/

[dualstow]

And what's this RMG stuff? Did we talk about it in the Gold § of the forum last year?
http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2016/11/ ... stitution/

[dualstow]

oh, sorry about that.
I thought at least the blogs would be public. I'll look for an alternate source in the morning.

[Libertarian666]

Bitcoin is over $1232 per ounce? Wow!

[dualstow]

Bitcoin is over $1232 per ounce? Wow!

heh heh. Per unit, anyway. Bit-ounce.

[Libertarian666]

My point was that you can't say "x > y" meaningfully if x and y don't have commensurate units.

[dualstow]

I know, and I think the authors did, too.
This is as close as we can get, though.

[LC475]

Per ounce?

Arrgh, Libertarian666 beat me to my joke!

Bitcoin does, indeed, have an extremely high per-ounce price.

[dualstow]

I recall that some years ago, a guy with a Greek name pondered whether to buy an ounce of gold or a share of Google. Also not, eh...commensurate. But, I'm pretty sure both were worth close to $800 at the time of the article.

It was fun to follow, even though I only got to do it in retrospect.

No idea how much 1 bitcoin was worth at the beginning, but it's amazing that it's worth so much. I'll probably never buy it.

[frugal]

Hi.

I still have a paper with bitcoin offered by Marc here at forum.

I am rich ahahah or not

[dualstow]

Me too, frugal. We're not rich, but I'm sure all his gifts add up to a sizable sum. Very generous!

[Maddy]

"Inadequate" is when, like me, you don't even know what Bitcoin is.

[dualstow]

"Inadequate" is when, like me, you don't even know what Bitcoin is.

It's a kind of made-up digital currency, and while the dollar and other non-metal-backed paper currencies are also kind of abstract, it's easier to trust them when you can go down the street and hand some to the guy behind the counter and get a sandwich.

There are some businesses out there accepting bitcoin as payment, including PointedStick's once-upon-a-time 3D printing business, so he probably knows most about it than most of us, from experience.

Also, the UK's Royal Mint lets you buy gold with it according to that 2nd article I linked. I haven't looked at the official page that closely, but it looks interesting: http://www.royalmint.com/rmg

Like with gold and foreign currencies, the price relative to the dollar changes.

I saw a program about & read about people who tried to do a transaction and the recipient merely took the bitcoin without delivering the goods. I'll stick with credit cards and having numerous agencies track when and where I shop.

How is a new bitcoin created? Well, that's complicated.

[Kriegsspiel]

"Inadequate" is when, like me, you don't even know what Bitcoin is.

Bitcoin is ephemeral. Gold is forever.

[frugal]

Me too, frugal. We're not rich, but I'm sure all his gifts add up to a sizable sum. Very generous!

hi

i dont know how to use it.

how people transfer bitcoin to money.?

he is a great guy. he has a lambo and he already burnt one engine of it...

[dualstow]

"Inadequate" is when, like me, you don't even know what Bitcoin is.

Bitcoin is ephemeral. Gold is forever.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leekfrith_torcs

[dualstow]

Ok, sorry I'm so late on this. No paywall here:

MARCH 4, 2017 —Bitcoin certainly doesn’t glitter, but that isn’t stopping it from catching the eye of traders around the world.

Worth less than a tenth of a cent in 2009, the value of a single bitcoin reached a high of about $1,293 on Friday, surpassing the value of an ounce of gold for the first time. The surge of interest hinges on optimism that the Securities and Exchange Commission will approve the first US bitcoin exchange-traded fund this coming week, lending an unprecedented level of credibility to the crypotocurrency.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/2017/ ... ld-for-now

This is old news, but it is a project of the Winklevoss twins, those guys who sued Zuckerberg over the creation of Facebook.

Here's the link that was embedded in the text above, "worth less than a tenth of a cent" -> http://historyofbitcoin.org/

[dualstow]

And here is that old thread that frugal was talking about if you want to see how it all went down or just relive the love.

:: Bitcoin giveaway! ::

ADDED: at one point, Marc de Mesel, our generous patron, wrote:

For people who are curious about how much someone received you can lookup any address and see their balance and transactions.

Go to blockchain.info and simply copy paste the address in the top right corner there.

So I pasted iwealth's address and saw 0.1 bitcoins. I think that's how much Marc was giving out.
Oh, wait. Frugal's wallet has 0.2 bitcoins. So that was probably what we received, and iwealth spent some.

[dualstow]

... and the Winklevoss etf has been rejected by the SEC.

[Kriegsspiel]

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/arti ... ustainable

"Updated calculations with optimistic assumptions show that in a best-case hypothetical, each bitcoin transaction is backed by approximately 90 percent of an American household's daily average electricity consumption. So even though that's still about 3,994 times as energy-intensive as a credit card transaction, things could be getting better since 2015.

Unfortunately, it's more likely that things are getting worse. A new index has recently modeled potential energy costs per transaction as high as 94 kWh, or enough electricity to power 3.17 households for a day. To put it another way, that's almost enough energy to fully charge the battery of a Tesla Model S P100D, the world's quickest production car, and drive it over 300 miles."

[dualstow]

Very interesting, a transaction's energy costs.
A friend of mine wanted to partner with me and another guy to mine these things, but energy & heat were part of the problem for me.

I don't care if bitcoin, a single whole bitcoin, attains a price that is 10x that of an ounce of gold.
If I can't easily use it, I'd rather not have it.

[Jack Jones]

Very interesting, a transaction's energy costs.
A friend of mine wanted to partner with me and another guy to mine these things, but energy & heat were part of the problem for me.

I don't care if bitcoin, a single whole bitcoin, attains a price that is 10x that of an ounce of gold.
If I can't easily use it, I'd rather not have it.

If you can use Emacs, you can transact in Bitcoin.

[dualstow]

Ha! I can do it, Jack, but where can I use it? Amazon?
Or, can I convert it to cash if not?

[Jack Jones]

Ha! I can do it, Jack, but where can I use it? Amazon?
Or, can I convert it to cash if not?

Yeah I wouldn't bother with it unless you had a need. You can convert your bitcoins to cash via localbitcoins.com

[dualstow]

Thank you!