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Comment by taspeotis | Hacker News Reader

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taspeotis

> Wait for a week, 10 days before making conclusions on the price of Bitcoin

My conclusion is that it's pretty fucked up [1].

Nov 15 $US430

Nov 22 US$843

Nov 29 US$1137

Dec 6 US$552

Dec 13 US$869

Dec 18 US$584

Pick one of those dates before today and imagine saying "wait for a week ... before making conclusions on the price of Bitcoin".

[1] https://coinbase.com/charts

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Interesting, you already have the dec 18 value while the day is far from over. You have a strange way to pick up numbers.

That price seems way high indeed. But I think the point still stands.

It's down to ~480 so it's lost $100 in 30 minutes. Let's just say that my strange way of picking numbers can be described as "flattering" ... at worst.

Today I've seen it back at 530 and now at 520. Who knows, I wouldn't be surprised if by EOB we're back above 600.

As parent said, with Bitcoin you have to look at things in a different way since it works in a very different way than anything else we've ever seen.

But does it really? It looks like rampant speculation to me. I've seen that many times in markets.

Have you seen before a functioning globally distributed ledger system being speculated on in the markets ?

Have you seen a <insert something that for some reason it will be different this time thing here> is generally a poor argument. But one speculators cling to and try to convince others of adamantly.

No, you should pick numbers on a daily average with an indication of the daily variation on the value if you want to be fair, not at a precise instant, because Bitcoin can have as much as 30% variation in a given day, so I too can make up numbers out of thin air by picking up a very biased time during the day.

It ended the day at $582 [1].

> because Bitcoin can have as much as 30% variation in a given day

Hence, "pretty fucked up".

[1] https://coinbase.com/charts

30% is either "f+++ed up" or a massive opportunity for daily trading, depending on your point of view. I see it rather as the second.

It doesn't matter what dates or time taspeotis picks; his point is that at any date and time Bitcoin is too volatile to meaningfully function as a currency.

No major currency suffers from 30% intra-day volatility against other currencies. It would make pricing goods and services essentially impossible. Who would care about saving up to 5% on credit card fees if they're suffering 30% arbitrage losses because they set/update their prices at the wrong time of day?

Wait for a year. Two years. Three years.

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