DataIsBeautiful is for visualizations that effectively convey information. Aesthetics are an important part of information visualization, but pretty pictures are not the sole aim of this subreddit.
"Bitcoin" Google Search Trend vs Bitcoin Value [OC]
OC
![r/dataisbeautiful - "Bitcoin" Google Search Trend vs Bitcoin Value [OC]](http://web.archive.org./web/20240913192935im_/https://i.redd.it/2yt4fbzsktwy.png)
Archived post. New comments cannot be posted and votes cannot be cast.
Sort by:
Best
Open comment sort options
Best
Top
New
Controversial
Old
Q&A
![r/dataisbeautiful - [OC] The U.S. vs China: Who Has More Influence, and Where?](http://web.archive.org./web/20240913192935im_/https://b.thumbs.redditmedia.com/7oOtasmaAEQs6QjVIgKyiL3p5sDm-UxmxA_gGyXcUNo.jpg)
![r/dataisbeautiful - [OC] Which artists who performed at the 2024 Olympics Closing Ceremony gained the most monthly listeners on Spotify ?](http://web.archive.org./web/20240913192935im_/https://b.thumbs.redditmedia.com/6_Tn5Eex6JKGdq7D3tMwpNBtUdesOCB-cu66n6qGBOM.jpg)
![r/dataisbeautiful - [OC] Visualizing Shohei Ohtani's Chase for a 50-50 Season: Simulation of Home Runs and Stolen Bases with Probabilities for 30-30, 40-40, and 50-50 Clubs](http://web.archive.org./web/20240913192935im_/https://b.thumbs.redditmedia.com/pF7dV6ao6jEuRGi3u_0u2b_2O0n14s_3NpIk1kOo9_k.jpg)
![r/dataisbeautiful - [OC] Metacritic UserScore and CriticScore for PC Games (2000-2020)](http://web.archive.org./web/20240913192935im_/https://b.thumbs.redditmedia.com/HQXL1GhQ2by-XZa09aokS_oi9aMly7ihc_BCOaGdfqw.jpg)
![r/dataisbeautiful - [OC] The first person to run the length of Africa (Russ Cook/Hardest Geezer) in 6 maps](http://web.archive.org./web/20240913192935im_/https://b.thumbs.redditmedia.com/lZsWqSxtYWtND7zJrVyjudoZHKRqa3DdfleNNXKscxk.jpg)
![r/dataisbeautiful - [OC] What if the 2024 UK General Election was held under the German electoral system?](http://web.archive.org./web/20240913192935im_/https://b.thumbs.redditmedia.com/6o7o5D5ttwthuQz_6ihQJY92GR_K4ZGCwRwFKR76kMM.jpg)
![r/dataisbeautiful - The 10 Most Streamed Songs of the 2020s on Spotify (As of August 2024) [OC]](http://web.archive.org./web/20240913192935im_/https://a.thumbs.redditmedia.com/ybQKszBUK9LG95Yy286fjLkHn2gcxy6I62fg413_Y50.jpg)
![r/dataisbeautiful - [OC] Which European Countries Dominate Global Exports in Specific Products? A Visual Breakdown of World Export Leaders](http://web.archive.org./web/20240913192935im_/https://b.thumbs.redditmedia.com/mqA9P25oyM2BYRp-29uHUPusa9vuODVDN5bh7Ob4qJw.jpg)
![r/dataisbeautiful - [OC] World's Top Exporters: What Are African Countries Leading In?](http://web.archive.org./web/20240913192935im_/https://b.thumbs.redditmedia.com/xEWd9bTemsQ5LIDsEHYi-Zy87EPgGUr9-sTP3olMAkA.jpg)
![r/dataisbeautiful - [OC] US Median Household Income by Characteristics (2023)](http://web.archive.org./web/20240913192935im_/https://b.thumbs.redditmedia.com/m0DzTm0oO5Ohz6clTWMfzTacQgJmCl_amlxpkxdA0Qo.jpg)
![r/dataisbeautiful - [OC] GPT-4o: Pick a random number from 0-10](http://web.archive.org./web/20240913192935im_/https://b.thumbs.redditmedia.com/YGG0YPGgnl0i1g1UsDjp0qEwRcEA9NtIiHvFzjF3aBk.jpg)
![r/dataisbeautiful - [OC] Which Countries Will Contribute to the Next Billion in Population?](http://web.archive.org./web/20240913192935im_/https://b.thumbs.redditmedia.com/nICXq5oz_9NKK2pLgPBt5VX2LSTKJ60N6Jn4RPVxcfI.jpg)
![r/dataisbeautiful - [OC] I tracked sleep, diaper, and milk consumption data for my first child daily for 2 years.](http://web.archive.org./web/20240913192935im_/https://b.thumbs.redditmedia.com/rLWx-EItFdftm_oUFz_wRgxVFUbfRZPV_JwDnnHVUco.jpg)
I almost bought a single bit coin in 2011 for $11.... I royally screwed by not going through with it
You lost out on ~2k. I tried to buy £400 worth when they were $0.10 each but gave up as it was a hassle to buy back then. Current value would be $9.3 mil
Comment deleted by user
This is only if you have balls of steel and hold for years even during 80% drops instead of selling to take profit. People think it's so easy to be the guy that bought cheap and cashed out big, sure.
Edit: Ask yourself new investor if you think bitcoin is going to $10,000 will you hold if it returns to $1,000 before achieving this? That's when things get interesting and words are cheap and hindsight is 20/20.
I'm investing in your comment to rise
Edit: I sold at 96 after stock advice by oh_SHIT_my_DICK_out
It's at 118 now, you missed out man.
SELL SELL SELL!! ITS ONLY GOING DOWN FROM HERE!!!
I'm investing in supersigned at 92. Let's see you blow baby!
Should have held, it's at 335 now. You have to look at the overall trend bro. Maybe calculate some moving averages.
Went to 482, you lost
It's at 611... I think it'll keep going up. I'm dumping my life savings into it and buying 2. I'll hold regardless of what happens just to be a part of this bizarre disruptive innovative technology. Or at least until your comment reaches a mil
Honest question then. Let's say I buy cheap, spend like $20. Years later the value has dropped to even less when I bought it. What am I missing other than the $20 I spent before? It wasn't a very large investment so I don't miss it very much.
You're missing the hundreds of thousands of dollars you could've had by not selling at a more opportune time
the hard thing is to not sell when your $0.10 turns into $1.00 then falls back to $0.50 at that point you will want to sell. sometimes it will go back up way past $1.00 but a lot of times it will go to 0. Bit coin is a real outlier and you can't easily predict thous ahead of time.
I think you answered your own honest question.
By your logic you should make an investment right now in litecoin... and in Monero... and Dogecoin... and every other cryptocurrency.. and in every startup in the world.
Point is, it's easy to look back and say, huh I only could've lost €20, but there are so many small investments and bets out there that it's an exercise in futility, nobody knew for sure bitcoin would take off. I always hear people justifying long odds sports bets saying, it was only €5, I had to do it. It's silly logic.
I didn't say SPENT cheap I said BOUGHT cheap. You wouldn't be bragging about having held one bitcoin and buying it at only $20 yrs ago and forgot. You'd be pleased sure but you'd keep it to yourself since people would ask why you didn't spend more on it when it was cheap.
I got in with mining. I stopped mining because, at the price it was, I calculated the cost of power wasn't worth it. I was only making about 0.5btc a week for probably ~$10 of power, and that was about twice what it was worth at the time.
Today, those coins would be worth $900 a week.
Comment deleted by user
You're right. I bought a bunch a few years ago and sold them for a bit of profit instead of a huge windfall if I still had them.
I used to roll my eyes pretty hard at the "HODL" comments, but those guys have balls of fucking steel to hang on like this.
You likely would have sold by now so don't feel too bad.
I bought at 900 bucks. Easy to say: I was going to... Harder to put your money where your mouth is. You could always buy Bitcoin now.
BTC 106 USD 2030. You heard it here first.
The funny thing is, a bitcoin will actually need to be worth much more to become "global".
There's a maximum of 21 millions Bitcoin that's going to be mined (except if they change the algorithm) which funnily enough will happen near 2030 (it won't actually really happen before 2140, but we will be really really close to 21 millions in 2030).
There's at least $25 trillions in the US alone. Just to support that economy, it means a value of $1.2 million by Bitcoin.
I feel like that's going to be an issue and will push alternative to be even bigger (which is actually happening right now).
If you believe in the long term usage of Bitcoin, then the currebt price isn't so bad.
Comment deleted by user
Comment deleted by user
Comment deleted by user
Disregard females, acquire bitcoins.
It was cheap because it was a hassle and a lot of people don't buy stuff that is hard to buy
no it was cheap because you couldn't do anything with them yet, they were just some thing some guy made up and uploaded.
I'll sell you 1000 yellow_viper bucks for 0.10$ each, and I'll accept any payment method.
What about Stanley nickels?
I can exchange at a 100:1 ratio but there is a $5 cash conversion fee
Yeah, but then you might have been tempted to sell it when it hit $500 and then still hate yourself today.
Since bitcoins will run in the future, individual bitcoins might continue growing in value. What if they will be worth $10,000 next year? Or $100,000? Nobody really knows.
I did buy about 10 bitcoin around that time for £20 each.
Sadly I spent them all on Silk Road. I could definitely have more fun with £10k now than however much fun I had with the stuff I bought.
I wanted bitcoin when I first discovered what it was when it was under a dollar. Too bad I was young and poor and couldn't afford anything. I begged my parents for a computer to let me mine it, but they didn't believe in it. There went my shot at being a millionaire before 30 lol - although I still think bitcoin has a very long way to go, and could still potentially make a lot of people a lot of money. Limited supply and only growing demand and acceptance will really put bitcoin on the financial map in the coming years. Wouldn't surprise me if it broke a 1T market cap by 2023.
Hope you're giving your folks a hard time about it.
Comment deleted by user
well, she wasn't wrong.
Comment deleted by user
He should install a ticker app on their phones as a daily reminder.
20-20 Hindsight
Issue with bitcoin is the altcoins, Ethereum is a nice prospect too as it allow for smart contract and faster transaction ( and cheaper!). Ltc is another one. However, BTC is so big that it keeps growing and is more stable compared to the other. I.e: Ethereum has a lot of people who own big chunk of it allowing them to just control the market. BTC could, potentially one day, fall to another token. Though I'm not too sure about that because of BTC widespread popularity you would need a truly remarkable token to take it completely down.
Luckily you don't have to only buy bitcoin. It's easy to buy Ethereum, Litecoin, or pretty much any other legitimate cryptocurrency. It's not hard to diversify enough to eliminate the risk of another token overtaking bitcoin IMO.
true. I only buy ethereum to trade because the transaction speed is so quick
While I understand your points, they are in fact common misconceptions. I'll start with your Ethereum point, with transactions being faster and cheaper, that is because their transactional volume is a fraction of that of bitcoin. Ethereum hasn't solved the scaling problem just by increasing block speed. In fact, if used for large transactions, you'd likely see a more crippled network than bitcoin at the moment (which just yesterday, I send multiple thousands of dollars with, in 30 minutes, for $1.29 per transaction. Not too bad in my opinion). Bitcoin has other scaling methods in the works that will make bitcoin even more usable. Using a different pipeline doesn't mean that you have solved the problems of the main pipeline.
Ethereum was developed for smart contracts and programmatic purposes.It was never designed to beat bitcoin. It was designed to compliment it. Thinking it is going to take over bitcoin is the equivalent of those guys that dump a lot of money into making their massive pickup trucks go faster. Sure it's possible, but it was designed for completely different uses, and you're going to run into limitations for exactly that reason.
And you are indeed correct that bitcoin is and will always remain king, baring some catastrophe, and/or some astronomically better option. At which point, the bitcoin software would simply adopt the methods of that chain, and continue on with the same blockchain.
You get a major advantage being literally the founding technology, in an open technology space. And setting the bar as open source means everyone else needs to be open source as well. Just like Ethernet has changed drastically over the years, and mainly just holds the name, bitcoin has and will continue to change drastically. The code now hardly holds the same form as it was with bitcoin 1.0. But no one is going to just say, "well, I've now quit my job and developed technologies around this platform for 8 years now, but let's just go with the next platform to get some headlines because it doesn't have issues yet." There's too much money, hardware, infrastructure and notoriety around bitcoin to fail. Anything that shows up afterwords will always be "that thing that is trying to be like bitcoin but not really".
I actually did own 0.9 BTC back when it was around $200. I sold when it hit $400.
I want to trade hindsight for foresight.
Do I hold on to my 0.032 bitcoin? Or cash it in for the whopping $58?
Hold it. It might be worth thousands some day, and you won't miss 60 dollars.
You don't know how poor I am...
EDIT: If only Reddit Gold was valuable!!
If you need $58, then sell it and get your $58. If you don't need it, then keep the bits and see what happens
Even if it keeps climbing, it won't be worth thousands next year. You aren't retiring in your $58 worth.
If you need the cash - sell now while it's high. Buy again when it inevitable crashes. Boom.
I have not yet been successful trading hindsight for foresight.
Hindsight tells me you should have bought more bitcoin in the first place. It also tells me I should have bought more bitcoin as well.
I found .04 in my btc-e wallet yesterday and cashed it in for $80, then found .02 in my coinbase wallet that i forgot about a while ago. SO i got like $120...which i am reinvesting into LTC :) Hooray bad memory!
Sounds like you made an easy $200. You should be happy
Investor part of my brain is happy. Gambler part of the brain is not. Logical part of my brain is okay with those outcomes.
You can still buy some BTC now. Otherwise you may be posting in 2023 when a bitcoin is worth $20k saying you almost bought in at $1,800 but missed the opportunity.
While that would be great gains missing out on 10x gains isn't the same kind of thing. In the early days you could have invested like twenty bucks and be worth tens of millions now. That level of utterly crazy growth isn't coming back. I do hope to see a $25k bitcoin someday though, but who knows if it'll get there. It's either gonna happen or it'll be worthless. But so far it's persisted so who knows.
That's the exact same thing people said when it hit $1 in 2009, then $10, then $100, now over $1000 and will continue to say at $10,000, $100,000...and so on.
This is the best bitcoin investment advice I've seen:
People who didn't buy a Bitcoin a month ago feel the same way.
My buddies brother had a ton of them he won way back when. (I think he won then anyways, not sure) He then gambled them all away. Pretty sure he still has no idea what he lost and I'm sure not gonna tell him.
I actually thought about buying about 10€ worth back when I first heard about them. They were about ~10c each then. But stupid me decided "Nah, what for?"
buy altcoins then
But which alt-coins are going to succeed? There are literally hundreds of them?
Maybe XEM, maybe Dash, maybe Monero, hell, maybe even Ripple. Lots to choose from. Screw it, just bought $1000 worth of XEM. Wish me luck boys!
I almost bought 100 for 1.00 each. You're telling me!
You're not alone.
could still buy in dez 2016 for 200 and sell now for 8x more. Quite nice for just 5 months. It's not that simple though as you need to ensure not getting scammed buying/selling and taxes are another matter.
The lowest bitcoin got in 2016 was around $375 and in December 2016 it was $750. The last time bitcoin was $200 was October 2013. The closest it's been to $200 since was $214 in January 2015.
Seems you're right and i have shitty memory. Small fix: August 2015 bitcoin had one low at 209 before it climbed to 400.
Btw you can beat the market price from the widely known exchanges looking arround, there are smaller national exchanges offering partially more favourable prices. The hard question is the risk involved and legalities.
I decided not to buy at $380, waiting for it to fall a bit more. Then it shot up to $800 and has been rising ever since.
Not to mention back in 2011 when I saw them at ~$20 and thought it was a silly way to spend my money.
sigh.
The price is always too high.
Here's what you do.
Go back and look at threads just like this one from 1-2 years ago.
Notice they say the same things but at much lower values.
Realise now is the same situation.
3.Go to your favorite exchange and diversify yo
bondscryptocurrencies nigga.I bought 50 bucks worth when it was around 200 dollars a bitcoin.
If I were to withdraw now I would get 455 having made 405 dollars profit, multiplying my investment by nine...
Idk if I should... Am I being too greedy?
Anyone got any theories on what may have caused the search spike at the end of 2016?
Probably Gladiacoin. I have this coworker who won't shut up about it.
EDIT: It started up in November of last year. It's like a MLM/Ponzi scheme for Bitcoin trading.
Fake id vendors using bitcoin
There are actually several ponzi schemes that use bitcoin now. It makes some sense since bitcoin's value has been rising. The ponzi leaders don't have to do anything to make money other than wait for the price to rise. When bitcoin corrects, hopefully some of these schemes will die out.
I've heard of one in the Philippines and another in Nigeria.
lots of factor. A big one I know is Venezuela has a lot of people moving its money into bitcoins due to inflation. Another ( although not sure if that happened at the end of 2016 or more recently) reason is also that a lot of chinese are moving their money towards crypto to hide money away. This is just information I gathered from different articles, so I could be 100% wrong
I read Australia is adopting it officially July 1st as well.
I'm not sure what you mean by "adopting it officially" -- I think you mean they're recognizing it as currency, thus stopping double taxation on it.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/australia-will-recognize-bitcoin-as-money-and-protect-bitcoin-businesses-no-taxes
Also discussion about possible bitcoin backed funds. Winklevoss twins have a few $100m in the coins (back when they were $300 each) and were wanting an electronic fund started.
Usual talk of them being accepted in more places.
Various stuff going on in China between crack-downs and relaxation of crack-downs.
Brexit and people wanting to move 💰?
Bit offtopic, but I had just got a new job in 2014 and a few months in, the IT guys all got fired because they installed bitcoin miners on everyone's workstations that mined at night. Years later the software hadnt been completely removed and was causing random issues here and there.. I wonder if it was still going into their wallets?
It is.
It's like office space. That's dope.
CPU mining hardly nets anything, so it's not a huge amount. Definitely costs your company a lot in electricity costs, though.
It'd probably add up fast with 500 stations that you don't pay for at all
Not really. A typical good workstation CPU from the era can do maybe 5 million hashes per second, 10 on the higher end. Let's just assume 2 thousand megahash (2 giga-hash) for the lot because most company CPUs are pretty shit. The situation is pretty different if these are e.g. CAD workstations with GPUs.
In 2014, the overall hash rate was about 10,000 Thash per second.
25BTC block reward * 52,500 blocks in 2014 = 1312500 BTC mined.
Divide by 10 million, then double it, to get your IT guy's share for a grand total of 0.26 BTC. And that's only if they mine 24/7 for a whole year.
At current prices, that's $500 split between however many IT guys, who all lost their jobs as a result. Yeah, I'd hardly call that adding up fast. It was only about $50 at 2014 prices, too.
If they were GPU workstations, then at best you're looking at a 100 fold improvement, and that's for pretty high-end shit in 2014. So $50,000, roughly, for today's prices, or $5,000 for 2014. Current hash rate is well over a million Thash, so just go ahead and drop that to perhaps $50 for mining all of 2016.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Non-specialized_hardware_comparison
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison
https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate?scale=1×pan=all
r/TheyDidTheMath
With bitcoin hitting an all time high, I wanted to determine if there were some way of determining if its value was primarily driven by speculation. I realize this doesn't really prove that, but it's interesting to see that search traffic tends to lead spikes in value. It would be interesting to plot this against the number of bitcoin occurrences in headlines.
Data came from google trends and Coinbase records downloaded from Bitcoincharts API. The datasets were merged using a pretty simple python script which output to CSV, charts then made using google sheets. If anyone is interested in the raw data or the script, let me know.
I actually did some research on this. From an economic perspective (my thesis was) that bitcoin becomes more valuable the more people are willing to accept it as a medium of exchange. Ideally I think you would chart price against a dated list of retailers who accept bitcoin weighted by revenue.
The conclusion of what I'm almost certain was flawed econometrics was that bitcoin's "internal metrics" such as cost to mine a bitcoin or transaction fees had an impact on price. Google and Wikipedia views had a positive relationship, but not at a significant level iirc.
Isn't it the exact definition of a currency value?
From early empires' coins to the recent greek crisis, it's all a question of trust that the other person will accept such or such currency for what it's supposed to be worth.
Yes, but that doesn't directly translate to gains or losses in value for established currencies. The USD and other reserve currencies, for example, are already widely accepted as a medium of exchange by basically everyone in the world. Gains or losses in their value are determined by other things like macroeconomic factors and carry trade.
Bitcoin is in a unique position because it isn't tied to the economy of any country or group of countries, and is also just a much newer idea, so I guess the question of who accepts it becomes much more important.
Comment deleted by user
If all that shit goes down theres a lot of other shit you'd be worried about besides the price of bitcoin though
Just curious, why does bitcoin need a GPS network?
I doubt even Gold and Silver would hold much value if the world was plunged into that much disarray that the internet became unavailable.
Yes and no. I agree with your definition of currencies. However where most currencies are valued by their governments debt, trade balances, interest rates and so on, BTC doesnt have those metrics; its value must be based on something else (once again, my hypothesis was that the 'something else' is suppy/demand.
I also considered an alternative though, that the price is influenced only by speculators, and BTC has no rational, fundamental method of valuation.
Which currency would you hold up as the poster child of a rock solid method of valuation?
Bitcoin is built around the concept of a limited supply. If demand grows faster than supply (estimated by people willing to accept) then you will see the price of it increase. That is all fine... and actually how most currencies get their value relative to others.
Where Bitcoin gets ugly is that there is a maximum number that can be mined so at one point supply growth stops while demand may continue. This is where the flawed economics can quickly kick in.
The cost to mine limits the supply. By limiting supply growth you are manipulating supply v demand.
Transactions fees do the opposite. They limit demand. A cost to acquire or use Bitcoin limits its acceptance.
I have been a bitcoiner for a long time, and my view is that retailers do not have much to do with value of bitcoin. Bitcoin transaction fees are now $1-2, so that kills a lot of the lower-value purchase use cases (e.g., coffee). Instead of using bitcoin to make purchases, people seem to be using it as a store of value. If anything, the number of retailers now is lower than in 2015, but the price of bitcoin is 6x higher.
I like to think of bitcoin as digital gold. Practically no one accepts gold for purchases, but it still has a high value.
I came to the same conclusion. I think it's funny how excited speculators are about transaction volumes when those are just buy/sell orders at the exchanges or transfers between wallets. Digital gold, nothing more, nothing less.
That's the problem I have with it personally. I see the rising tx fees (0.70$ USD on a small tx currently, if not more) as making bitcoin less and less attractive. It's already to the point where I'm not entirely sure it's an improvement over using a credit card on everyday spendings, if there even were a lot of stores accepting bitcoins. And a new store considering adding support might have a serious requestioning the move depending on what they sell.
I think people in affluent nations won't use it as a medium of exchange until the volatility matches existing currency. If local currency is erratic like say, in Venezuela then Bitcoin is attractive and might eventually build enough volume to become viable. Even then hoarding is still going to be a problem for a long time. I'm still skeptical.
Skeptical is good. The best default position. Bitcoin has an average volatility of about ~2.5% the last year which is significantly more than ~0.5% usd/gold and ~0.3% of usd/eur.
That said, bitcoin has held its value much better than any traditional currency the last two years. It has had less negative volatility than pretty much anything. It has done especially well against the ruble, bolivar, and rupee where bitcoin has been a safe haven asset for locals looking to avoid undesirable inflation or economic contexts. It has also done extremely well against the yen and usd despite no adverse economic contexts, where investors see bitcoin as a useful hedge due to its lack of traditional correlation to other asset classes. IMO bitcoin is carving out a very substantial if not niche market for itself as a digital commodity, risk hedging, remittance enabling, safe haven asset.
Depending on the time. Wikipedia views are more of an influencer at the beginning of bitcoin. I agree, now bitcoin is its own economy. The long term rise in bitcoin means more people use it. Did you publish a paper? Care to share?
I'll dig it up later tonight, along with some more advanced papers which I based my research on.
What's interesting now is that the current volume of transactions shouldn't really justify the price we're seeing. It's lower than usual, but price is skyrocketing. Which is why I'm on the sidelines and not participating.
I disagree with your hypothesis. The reality is that Bitcoin has far more in common with gold bullion than it does with any currency. It's just easier to trade electronic "gold" than it is to buy or sell actual gold. I would suggest that the actual utility of Bitcoin is 99.9999% owners use it as store of value (investment) and .0001% as a currency. The majority of transactions are buy/sell/transfer at the exchanges, not at Amazon or the grocery store. It's far less convenient to buy Bitcoin to then buy something somewhere else. What I think is hilarious is that Bitcoin promoters can't let go of the fact that the system is not a viable currency. They think that higher adoption will reduce volatility. That isn't based on ANY economic or financial theory. Nations bring stability to their currency through monetary supply and fiscal policy. Bitcoin lacks a nation and has no flexibility in its (fixed) supply. This means it will remain volatile like gold. Also, since it has no country and citizens that only deal in it, anyone who is using it as a currency is unnecessarily subjecting themselves to commodity risk. It's not saving anyone time or money in transaction processing. Business owners have to pay bills in their nation's currency, which means if they accept Bitcoin, they have to cash it out, which just takes days to do (wire transfer). My final say is, no matter how much adoption in terms of accepting Bitcoin and using it in transactions increases, bitcoins cannot achieve pricing stability because the primary use will always be a store of value (investment).
From an economic perspective, the limited supply of bit coin will drive its value. This leads to hoarding, which implies a impending failure of Bitcoin as a medium of exchange.
Using "flawed" as an adjective to "econometrics" is redundant.
you could do the same thing for other big cryptocurrencies. at this point, that would not be a lot of additional work - but might show that all cryptocurrencies work in similar fashion
Comment deleted by user
Unlike fiat, Bitcoin's supply is limited. That means its price will continue to increase over the long term so long as demand is increasing. In terms of adoption, its still in the early days.
And this is IMO it's major flaw. The fact that it has a limited supply ensures a rise in "value" as demand increases. This rise in "value" incentivises saving rather than spending as the rise in bitcoin price may outweigh the gain you get from taking the risk of spending it. The blockchain technology is amazing but Bitcoin isn't an ideal implementation of it as a currency as it's extremely illiquid and incentivises saving. It also puts an unacceptable amount of power into the hands of the few early adopters. I would really love to hear a dissenting opinion though.
The constant encouragement of spending, growth, and profit is consumeristic. It's destroying our planet.
Planet health aside: inflation is the process of central banks (in the case of fiat) creating more money to keep the value of our currency constantly decreasing at ~2% a year. First, what this does is concentrates wealth into the hands of the people that have the ability to create and spend the money first. That does not include us little people. Second, inflation is the opposite of what should be happening. As our civilization is advancing, it takes less time and resources to produce an equivalent output. This is the case across basically all production. So why, then, should prices be increasing? What makes sense is the dollar should grow stronger with every passing day since production is becoming more efficient. Devaluing currency is actually the opposite of what should be happening.
The reason we want 2% inflation rather than deflation is to discourage Uncle Scrooge from locking up all his money in a bin where they are a utility to nobody. I would say that the massive increase in liquidity(spending) the last 100 years have directly caused the increased wealth(aka human wellbeing) of our society today. What is destroying our planet is mostly bad technology(carbon based energy).
But the part that worries me the most is the extreme power-gap inherent in Bitcoin. A few extremely wealthy early adopters will have massive anonomous power. Imagine what the Koch brothers could do if they knew nobody could trace anything back to them.
Interested in the raw data and the script pls
I've sent it to you in a PM
Could I also take a look at it? Thanks!
You haven't included the closure of Silk Road, which caused an instant and significant dip in BitCoin value, which I would guess also coincided with people googling for it a lot. That would be interesting.
It's unclear on the data which causes which, just that they are correlated.
Yeah I think you could argue that sudden spikes in bitcoin's value could lead to higher google search interest.
I bet the guy that purchased a burger in the beginning for like 30k bitcoins i think it was, regrets that decision deeply now.
It was a pizza actually, and it only cost 10k bitcoins back in 2010, which was a pretty good deal considering it was the first recorded Bitcoin payment. That's only worth about $18.6 million today, and pizza is pizza.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=137.0
pizza rises over time too though, so it balances out
source: have cooked pizza
if it was never used as actual money it'd be completely worthless right now
This guy gets it. The only legitimate value of bitcoin rests in its applications. If people weren't spending it, then it's just the next tulip or beenie baby hype train.
FWIW I don't think the current price is sustainable at all. Bitcoin can be worth this much (and more) but it needs to gain that value through mass adoption of applications, not through speculation.
Everyone has this story but I had a chance to buy a ton of Bitcoin back in July of 2011 (IIRC). I'm pretty sure it was July 2011 due to who I was with and where but I'm worn out, on a long road trip home and hungry. We all stop in a McDonald's that has TVs on the walls and the news is talking about Bitcoin falling to a few bucks overnight. I remember telling my cousin what it was and she was bored (ha). I ate my fries and we all finished the trek home.
Later that night I have a good friend wake me from a nap and link me to a forum where groups of people that owned a lot of Bitcoin were offloading them for cheap. We tried to mine it back in the early days with hopes of making money but we didn't stick with it. Yet, we always spoke of how we could invest in old computers to mine them, etc. Anyway, I go to the forum.
Most wanted around $20-30 per, some higher and some lower. However, one group was selling for $4 per but you had to buy a minimum of 50. I feared (in order) a scam, Bitcoin never regaining value and loss of an immediate chunk of cash. Why even sell that low, right? Maybe they had so many that $4 was some recoup on investment? Still, I passed like a chump idiot mook with donkey brains but the site looked sketchy and as if it were made an hour before.
Friend bought his own lot and has most to this day. I can't talk to him without hearing about it so I rarely do (ha). He sold less than 5 about a year ago for a couple grand and he still has over 50 that I know of for sure. He had over 100 at one point and I know that's nothing compared to some people but he spent $4 a piece for his.
Not sure of the price atm but I know $4 of bitcoin is about 1/40th of a single bitcoin. Roughly.
TL;DR Should have risked a few hundred bucks but I'm apparently a cheapskate moron and my buddy isn't except for all the time when I'm not and he is.
Meh, all things considered, at that time, you made the right decision in a way. You couldn't have known it was gonna explode and it does sound really scammy. Everyone in the world had the 'opportunity' to buy them early, but it'd be stupid to invest to invest in something you knew nothing about.
A bitcoin is worth $1850 so $4 would be about 1/450th of a full bitcoin
Yeah, that's been my rationale for a while. It did look very scammy at the moment and I'd have likely sold when it was back to $400-500.
I just found out today, in this thread, the current price (ha). It was a few hundred last I checked so another quick sting and back at suppressing the "what if".
Yup they've risen over 300% in 12 months. You can still invest, just be able to afford to lose every penny you put in
More like 1/425
There was a bot on Reddit about 4 years ago that tipped bitcoins for a brief time. I was lucky enough to get tipped and held onto it since.
Edit: the bot u/bitcointip
I was tipped 0.03BTC at the time which was worth about 2.79USD. Now that 0.03BTC is worth about 62USD.
Wow. You could get a gram of heroin on TOR browser shipped to your house in 3 days. I find that hilarious. Thanks for the tip, now I'm a junkie.
Same here man, someone gave me a dogecoin tip and it's now $44!
Oh, right, I definitely got tipped by that thing. I don't know if I ever collected though - am I shit outta luck?
ChangeTip? I got an email when they went out of business last year saying there was 0.1 BTC in my account. It's like finding $180 in your pocket!
Buy bitcoin(s)
Raise more publicity about bitcoin and get more searches going
???
Profit
This is actually a real problem, it's really hard to get unbiased information about things like Bitcoin because a ton of people have a ton of money invested in them. "This is good for Bitcoin" is a common shitpost/comment whenever there is bad news or price drops.
I'm a teacher and make sure to teach all my econ students about it! ;) Doing my part!
opportunist... like a true economist.
teaching about what a bubble is hopefully
Something I'm seeing from this thread is that Bitcoin was so damn hard to buy, that everyone was "almost" rich even though only a few people actually are.
It is/was.
Sure, if your were tech savvy and in the loop you could even have mined your own. But for the average person, it's basically ghost story's.
Are you in the USA? It is easy to make an account at Coinbase, Gemini, or Kraken if you are interested in buying.
RadicalDog is saying years ago Bitcoin was more difficult to buy, not now.
I think OP means in the past, when Bitcoin was literal cents, it was hard to buy. And I would probably agree with that thought. None of those services existed then.
There was some bloke in the news in the UK. Had bought about £20 worth at <1p each when he was a student. 3 years pass and he throws away the old HDD. Week later he reads in the news about them being £100 each! Current value £4m or something. There was BBC news video of him walking round the landfill site looking for it. He was pissed then. Must be 10x worse now....
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-south-east-wales-25134289
Friend of mine, who is currently in jail, told me we should each throw down $1000 and buy a shit load of bitcoin. Said it would be the future. Price was around $0.50 or something very close. We came to an agreement that we would hold it for 10 years, and then make a decision on whether to sell, or stay vested. It came time to make the purchase, but he had blown most of the money he set aside on drugs. We called it off and never really pursued it.
Fuck me.
Man.... the amount of drugs he could buy with that type of money....
I bought 4 off a bloke in the street on his phone. He normally sold gold/silver coins. Paid about £70 each for my first 2. £120 each for my next 2. Now at £1450 each. Thought it was dodgy - turned out to be legit and he was a good guy. I still have them on my PC. Bit worried about losing them... copied 0.1 to my phone - then lost my old phone. Bet the person who got the phone didn't even know what the bitcoin app with them on was! He'd have £145 now - more than the Samsung S2 was worth at the time.
use a wallet with a mnemonic passcode you can write down and remember - happened to me - my pc died - re-installed wallet on new pc, typed it in, voila, still had them
Comment removed by moderator
Look up BIP39. That is the specification behind that and should take several millennia to crack anything.
I tried to "mine" bitcoins and never found one, this was back in 2014. Evidently, you need specialized machines to do it now.
You can mine other cryptocurrencies profitably with a home computer running a few graphics cards.
Which ones?
Ethereum is the big one at the moment. It was designed to prevent asics from taking over the miner pool and is currently one of the bigger cryptocurrencies (2nd or 3rd behind bitcoin in market share).
Thank you for your Original Content, SecondNad! I've added +1 to your user flair as gratitude, if you didn't already have official subreddit flair. Here's the list of your past OC contributions.
For the readers: the poster has provided you with information regarding where or how they got the data (Source) and the tool used to generate the visual (Tools) for this
[OC]post. To ensure this information isn't buried, I have stickied this link below for your convenience:https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/6aiked/bitcoin_google_search_trend_vs_bitcoin_value_oc/dheufbh
I hope this sticky assists you in having an informed discussion in this thread, or inspires you to remix this data. For more information, please read this Wiki page.
Yes, thank you, SecondNad!
How do you know the rise in value isn't making people search for it more?
Comment deleted by user
You're right, I misread his comment above.
Seems like OP's making a causal implication to me.
'Tends' is the operative word. The association is likely very circular. He didn't say 'search traffic leads to spikes in value', its a small difference, but its important.
That still sounds like a correlation to me. Search traffic spikes correlate to subsequent spikes in value.
It has for me, i know its been rising like crazy lately, so i keep checking to see if the remainder from last time i bought drugs is enough to buy more drugs with yet.
PSA: Please no one take investing advice from any of these comments. They're equal parts sunk cost fallacy, attempts to time the market, and willful ignoring of opportunity cost.
Very interesting correlation.. I wonder if the inverse will be true: if people stop taking interest in bitcoin, it will stagnate and maybe devalue. I suppose the causation is inherent within the relationship between bitcoin consumer interest, acquirement and trade.
clever -but might as well chart Hollywood actor wages per film vs people who've heard of that person (googled their name). They would argue the more people have heard of them - the more people will search for them / the more interest in them.
Basically - people who haven't heard of something aren't going to search for it, and vice versa!
What would happen if someone secretly created a quantum computer then stole everybody's bitcoin wallets with a brute force attack from a quantum computer? Would they be billionaires?
That makes no sense at all. And if someone did happen to 'steal' everyones bitcoin, the currency would become completely worthless, and all they'd own is a number.
If you create a computer capable of breaking the encryption in Bitcoin, then stealing bitcoins is not the most profitable thing you can do with that.
I love how the one of the biggest reasons bitcoins took off in price was the shutdown of Silk Road. An underground drug trading system got a digital currency to multiply in price by a stupid amount.
Google:
What is Bitcoin? How does Bitcoin work? How to buy Bitcoin? Will Bitcoin fit in my butt?
Got me to laugh. +1.
Why buy Btc when you can trade it against the major currency pairs. I think that's where the $$$ is. Not in the product but how volition it is.
Great vizz! How do you normalize the values. Avoiding double axis this way looks very good!
Since the scale is from zero to one, I'd imagine you'd normalize by just making them a percentage of the maximum value for each, which happens to be current and concurrent for this data.
It's not even a percentage. Just divide each data set by its maximum value.
So this means that we need to make "bitcoin" more searched for... then the value will increase!!! Everybody copy and paste spam bitcoin into google!!!
Comment deleted by user
Big time investors are working that angle already.
Ehh, Bitcoin has the biggest infrastructure, best minds, investors, international support etc. I don't see Ethereum going anywhere past it's first initial hype, alts are secondary really but glad crypto is gaining traction overall.
Ethereum is more sustainable though, and is more than just a currency.
Ethereum has a huge scaling problem to get past first. They still need to get to PoS so don't put the cart before the horse.