Bitcoin Hits a Milestone: $100,000

[RandiFan1290]

Source: The New York Times

In May 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz, an early cryptocurrency enthusiast, used Bitcoin to buy two pizzas from Papa John’s. He spent 10,000 Bitcoins, or roughly $40 at the time, in one of the first purchases ever made with the digital currency.

It has turned out to be the most expensive dinner in history.

On Wednesday, the price of a single Bitcoin rose to more than $100,000, a remarkable milestone for an experimental financial asset that had once been mocked as a sideshow and a fad. The total cost of those pizzas today: $1 billion.

Bitcoin now stands as arguably the most successful investment product of the last 20 years. The value of all the coins in circulation is $2 trillion, more than the combined worth of Mastercard, Walmart and JPMorgan Chase. The motley assortment of hackers and political radicals who embraced Bitcoin when it was created by an anonymous coder in 2008 have become millionaires many times over. And the invention has spawned an entire industry anchored by publicly traded companies like Coinbase, a cryptocurrency exchange, and promoted by celebrities, athletes and Elon Musk.

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/04/technology/bitcoin-price-record.html

[Scrivener7]

1. And it will wreck our environment faster than we're already wrecking it. Woohoo.

[EarthFirst]

2. LLM (AI) says: "Hold my beer..." nt

[multigraincracker]

3. Tulip bulbs reach a new high.

Sell your home and buy them now.

[Bengus81]

4. Monopoly money at it's best....

If you sold a car you owned for $30,000 would you rather have bitcoin payment or a certified check from the bank? How about it your sold your home?

[cadoman]

7. the good news is MAGATs will continue accumulating these worthless tulips...

...and be left with nothing, while liberals have real USD and investment value from the Biden economy.

There are definitely some trends that are in our favor.

[yankee87]

12. Socialism buyout

Willing to bet when they lose everything, they'll want a socialist buyout.

[LudwigPastorius]

16. Except Trump is talking about using your tax dollars to buy a bitcoin "strategic reserve".

...which will do nothing but erode the value of the US dollar. Ironic, because most of his supporters cited inflation as a reason to vote for that shithead.

[Bengus81]

22. That Trump would want to buy bitcoins should be the biggest red flag.....

Of course as usual using other peoples money but he's the only clown I've heard of going BK owning Casino's.

[hueymahl]

13. Depends

Do I need the cash now or in the near future? Then I will take the cash. Do I want to hold for several years? I'll take BTC.

Everyone on here loves to bash bitcoin. But it is a real investment. Even Jerome Powell calls it digital gold.

[womanofthehills]

20. Probably Bitcoin

Just trying to figure out how Bitcoin worked, I started buying small amts to figure out how to buy it and how to get a wallet. . I only bought about $600 -($20 to $40 deposits here and there) when that $600 became $1200, I spent $300 of it and today it’s almost $1400.

[Bengus81]

5. So what...certain Trump watches are "worth" $100,000.

Buy all of those watches you can!!

[moniss]

6. So a made up thing backed by nothing is

now worth incredible sums. Sure we can survive people who think like this. Sure we can.

[William Seger]

8. This is why it's absurd to use it as a "currency"

With the price fluctuating so much and so fast, if it's used as currency, either the buyer or the seller gets screwed in virtually every transaction. The only rational reason to use it as a currency is to hide a transaction that could otherwise be tracked. People buy bitcoin with the hope of getting rich when other people buy bitcoin hoping to get rich -- almost like tulips and Beanie Babies, except that those actually have some intrinsic value.

I would never buy bitcoin because it's entirely based on software. After 35 years as a software developer, I've developed a healthy distrust of it. What I would worry about is that someday, some smart person will find a way to hack it, which would immediately make your "investment" worthless. (And if I ever did buy bitcoin, I wouldn't be dumb enough to leave it in a "wallet" on someone else's computer.)

[BobTheSubgenius]

11. Borrowing a term from the collapsing economy of the PRC, it's a "greater idiot" product.

You buy it in the hope that in increases in "value" and, one day, a "greater idiot" will come along and buy them from you.

[melm00se]

9. Pin meet bubble

[Jacson6]

10. And tomorrow it could drop to $1.

Nothing is backing bitcoin and this is all speculation on the part of the buyers. IMHO.

[hueymahl]

14. Bitcoin is digital gold

It is a legitimate part of a balanced investment portfolio. For some reason, DU hates bitcoin to the point you can't even have a rational discussion about it.

[RandiFan1290]

15. Here's the thread from 2013 when it hit $200

https://www.democraticunderground.com/1014448892

[hueymahl]

17. Love it!

[William Seger]

23. With any luck, you'll never find out why bitcoin is not gold

Since you're gambling, not investing, luck is exactly what it takes.

[hueymahl]

24. The chairman of the fed, Blackrock, Fidelity and multiple nation states disagree with you

But that's fine. Everyone has a different comfort with risk.

[William Seger]

28. Gold is in demand for electronics manufacturing and for jewelry

... OR you can hoard bricks of it in hopes of the price going up. While the price might go down due to reduced demand, demand is not going to disappear. Despite those recommendations, I'll continue to believe that anyone who thinks bitcoin is just like gold is incorrect.

[Fla Dem]

18. Don't understand this whole bitcoin business.

Where do you invest in bit coin? on the internet?

Where / who does your money go? Who owns the Bit Coin businesses. Can I just say "Hey I'm selling bit coins, called "Lucky BitCoins" for $50,000 each. Invests now while they are cheap. Eventually as bitcoin investors flock to buy "Lucky BitCoins" I raise the price to $75,000 each. So I get rich selling nothing and when I become a billionaire, I just say whoops, the bottom fell out and your "Lucky BitCoins" are now worthless.

Is that how it works? Sounds like a scam to me.

Sorry if this is a stupid description of Bit Coins, it's just how it sounds to me.

[womanofthehills]

21. You can start by signing up with a popular company like Coinbase

Or super easy - just buy it on PayPal.

[hueymahl]

25. The genius of bitcoin is it is not owned or controlled by anyone

It is decentralized. No company or nation state can control it. You control your own money.

To be fair, when I first hear about it 12 years ago, I thought exactly the same thing. It was a fad/scam/ponzi scheme, etc.

It is a different paradigm. I had to really educate myself about the fundamental nature of money and its history to really understand it. We went from trading shells, pretty beads, salt etc to silver and gold. Paper money was more convenient to carry around than gold. Checks even easier than paper money. But both required a central bank or monarch to get paid back. Bitcoin is an evolution of that system and eliminates the trusted middle person (banks, governments). In most of the developed world, our institutions are trusted. But in a billion people live under regimes without consistent rule of law. It is a revolutionary technology in those areas.

[LiberalFighter]

19. Fake money

[lapfog_1]

26. further proof that it is more ponzi like scam than currency

a) people relate the value of the currency ( bitcoin ) to the USD ( so which is the real currency? )
b) the value has increased due to speculation rather than decrease over time due to inflation.

So, like many other speculative "bubbles" we are probably getting into another bitcoin bubble.

[comradebillyboy]

27. The pump phase is about to turn into the dump phase.

The biggest scammers will be dumping soon and the novice crypto investors will be left holding the bag.

[snot]

29. Both BTC & the Dollar are fiat money in that...

Last edited Sat Dec 7, 2024, 03:35 PM - Edit history (3)

neither are backed* by gold or other thing of material value. The have whatever value users explicitly or implicitly agree to give or accept for them.

That said, the Dollar can be inflated; BTC cannot.

So long as Trump or his successors continue to view BTC favorably (and I'm not sure how long that will or won't last), i expect BTC to continue to do well.

One downside of BTC, however, is that it takes a lot of research to really understand it and how to use it, at least at this point in the game. I think that's a big part of why it's encountered so much resistance (i.e., a great deal of the resistance has come from people who haven't done that research).

Apart from that, pretty much every criticism ever levelled against BTC is equally true about the Dollar.

(NOTE: Few if any other kinds of crypto share BTC's most important virtues, because unlike BTC, they nearly always ARE centralized and CAN be inflated.)
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* I.e., as a matter of law, convertible into.