Enraged Bitcoin Users Smash Their iPhones
(Disclosure: I'm long Bitcoin, no position in AAPL at the moment)
I found the following pretty amusing and thought you guys might as well. I'm a big supporter of Bitcoin because I see the amazing potential (beyond even currency) in it, but some Bitcoiners are downright evangelical about it. So I guess I shouldn't be surprised to see the violent reaction by some in the Bitcoin community to Apple's removing the Blockchain app from the App Store for no apparent reason last week. Many think it's because Apple is about to introduce a competing payment processing platform, but who really knows? I happen to think buying Bitcoin at this moment is akin to buying shares in the Internet in 1994. It's entirely possible that I'm wrong, but I won't risk not capitalizing on lightning striking twice. I just think it's ironic that Apple is making a conscious decision to alienate the very demographic that brought them to the dance: early-adopting technophiles who think they're something special (no better definition of the Bitcoin crowd). At least they were good enough to video themselves smashing their iPhones:
I wonder how many of them followed this up with a visit to an Apple store to purchase a replacement. Damn the man!
Naw. Die hard Bitcoiners are all Android, all the time. For some reason the Android platform lines up better with their "ethos" and, from a more practical standpoint, the Bitcoin apps on Android are way better.
Long Bitcoin - do you simply buy with regularity and hoard at this point? Or mine them at all? A friend and I have been talking about Cryptos for a year or so. He currently mines with a Butterfly Labs setup and holds.
It would have been a real protest if they piled their iPhones up and burnt them in front of the security gate at the Cuppertino campus
If the bitcoin type technology is actually endorsed by national and global institutions, they will issue their own currency. The existing supply is too small to serve as a global currency. I'm waiting for the next price drop so I can cash in on the post shock defiance....they're good to trade but a very bad investment.
Each individual bitcoin is divisible into 100 million pieces. At even a $1 million per coin valuation, the smallest fraction will still be much less than a penny.
Also, if Apple made their own currency, it would not be decentralized, which is the whole point
Short Bitcoin, long the decentralized cryptocurrency space
So far I have found much win in dogecoin. In for $10 and the value right now is ~$280 since the beginning of December. At the very least it has been interesting to go along for the ride and learn a few things. I even mined them myself.
For those of you who like actual data, rather than blowhard WSO posters, bitcoins have been getting crushed lately:
http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=XBT&to=USD&view=1Y
Aside from my neo-luddite tendencies and how I am not an early adopter of anything, I wouldn't dream of touching bitcoins until they were at least federally insured, such as how a bank account is insured by the FDIC and a bank will reverse fraudulent credit card charges. Just wait until the Bitcoin software is seriously hacked and all of your virtual bitcoin money vanishes in a puff of smoke.
The beauty is that you don't need a bank for bitcoins - you are the bank! The security issue is a real threat, but can be mitigated thru multiple offline wallets / cold storage. Putting coins into an online wallet, kind of like a bank, presents the greatest security threat. Another popular way to get your wallet hacked is to put your wallet into your cloud storage like dropbox.
Remember what the great warren buffet once said.
"Sometimes, incidentally, it's much easier in these transforming events to figure out the losers. You could have grasped the importance of the auto when it came along but still found it hard to pick companies that would make you money. But there was one obvious decision you could have made back then--it's better sometimes to turn these things upside down--and that was to short horses. Frankly, I'm disappointed that the Buffett family was not short horses through this entire period. And we really had no excuse: Living in Nebraska, we would have found it super-easy to borrow horses and avoid a "short squeeze.""
It feels like a lot of large companies and investors and writing off Bitcoin without taking the time to understand what it really is--a protocol akin to the Internet (ironically people did the same thing in the early years of the Internet).
When Marc Andreessen compares Bitcoin's innovation to the Internet and Bill Gates says "Bitcoin is a technological tour de force", you'd be ignorant not to keep a close eye on it and maybe, just maybe attempt to dig into it further before just writing it off as a bubble like so many have.
I own a small amount of Bitcoin, mostly for the same reasons Edmundo does.
@"wannabeaballer" @"Edmundo Braverman"
I don't want to say I told you so, but...
http://www.businessinsider.com/silk-road-hack-2014-2
Oh, no doubt. BTC is the same as cash. If it gets stolen, it's gone. That's why everyone is moving to cold storage wallets now.
I'm still not sure how Bitcoin is better than a debit card.
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