Tulipmania lasted 6 months. Bitcoin is now 8 years old.
Tulipmania includes the time it took for the belief that tulips were special and valuable to take hold, and the time it took for merchants to cross breed specific colors for the Dutch nobility. When you include the history behind the bubble and why it happened, tulipmania took decades.
That's not to say that Bitcoin will end the same way, but it is to say that bubbles don't start and end within 6 months.
The South Seas bubble is a more apt comparison. Many of the ICOs that are springing up are exactly like the fraudulent companies that arose in that era (some of them even sold tokens like ICOs!)
Believe it or not, tulip bulbs existed for a reaaaaaally long time before tulip mania. For the vast majority of Bitcoin's history, it has been known by virtually no-one outside of the tech circle, and its price was relatively stable/low [1]
This chart shows nothing interesting and is hardly scientific. Of course by lining up price charts of various speculative bubbles they will roughly line up. The chart also intentially discards the first 4 years of Bitcoin trading data (2010-2013) where Bitcoin has actually gained the most. None of the other assets in the chart even remotely compare to Bitcoin's gains in these 4 years. Also, it should really use a log scale: http://bitcoin.zorinaq.com/price/
> The chart also intentially discards the first 4 years of Bitcoin trading data (2010-2013) where Bitcoin has actually gained the most.
Sure, just like the comment being replied to discards several hundred years worth of tulip sales to say "Tulipmania lasted 6 months. Bitcoin is now 8 years old."
Bitcoin has, until this year, largely escaped widespread public notice beyond "isn't this odd/interesting" pieces in the media.
> For hacker news I expect people to be a lot smarter but apparently no one in the entire thread realized I said Tulipmania. Not Tulips.
Yes, and then you went and compared the tulip mania against the entire history of Bitcoin. The current orgy of speculation and people taking out mortgages to buy Bitcoin is a recent phenomenon.
Ok, since you don't seem to want to use the site as intended, I've banned the account. If you change your mind you're welcome to let us know at hn@ycombinator.com.
There were at least two previous Bitcoin manias and bubbles. I remember a lot of hype when it hit $70 (from single-digit prices), and then again when it hit $1000. Both times people said it was a bubble, and then the bubble popped.
The worst part of all of this Bitcoin speculation is that you have someone like the person you're replying to get on and talk out of their ass. Literally. And then they are the ones getting upvoted cause all the haters love to talk to trash with zero intellectual honesty.
This was part of Twitch from the very beginning. The idea that it's "new" is really just ignorant people finding out after the fact and then complaining about it as if it wasn't always there.
IIRC if we track the number of downloads or songs played, even spotify and youtube outcompete torrents by a huge margin, downloaded torrents are just not that popular for music nowadays compared to streaming. The legal services took over most of the mindshare and volume of music distribution, most of the people who used napster back then now get their music from a streaming service, not on a torrent.
Spotify was spun out of private torrent network libraries that still exist independant of spotify. Youtube still gets a lot of uploads from private torrenters trying to generate ad revenue. Just because they are percieved as legal and convienient they get more views, but ultimately where did the content come from?
MP3s are so small compared to the rest of the internet now that there's a glut of shady websites that cater to people trying to get MP3s. Rings tones are a great example why someone with a Spotify account might google an mp3 for a song. Meanwhile you've got tons of semilegal mixes on Soundcloud and Mixcloud. Spotify and Apple Music is just convenience.
These sites also cater to the leaks scene. Every single hot album to drop recently was leaked 24-72 hours before dropping on "official" sources like Spotify. This makes even those people that have Spotify accounts look for MP3s.
What bothers me about this whole thing is that I never bought it like a stock. I mined it YEARS ago when it was worthless.
Now all of a sudden I have to pay tax on something I already own? Seems like the government is double dipping. After all I already paid tax on the hardware, the internet connection, the electricity, and countless other market products that allowed me to mine said coin.
I have a couple of choices now.
I can either sign up for Coinbase and sell it and kiss 15% of it good bye or I can go on Newegg and buy stuff directly with Bitcoin.... or go to a bitcoin meetup and sell with cash in-person..... or go on vacation in Europe and get Euro and again keep it off the books.
Which do you think I'm gonna end up doing?
PS: My address has never been tied to an IRL transaction.
PPS: God damn it's easy to troll HN. More salt than the dead sea.
If someone raises chickens from eggs; pays for feed and cares for them until they are full-size, and then sells them, he has to pay taxes on that income, even though he already paid for the food and the upkeep. There's no double dipping here.
You can find an accountant who can give you advice on how to account for the cost of mining the bitcoin to reflect your effective cost basis (or wing it; the IRS has reasonably good instructions for this sort of thing).
If you go to Newegg and buy stuff, you are obligated under US tax law to pay the capital gains taxes based on the fair market value of the products purchased. If you go to a bitcoin meetup and sell with cash, you are still obligated to pay taxes.
Your legal obligations are clear; whether you can commit the perfect crime or not and get away with it is another matter.
Except it is double dipping, we've just come to see it as the norm. Somewhat similar to Comcast wanting to charge Netflix for the data you've already paid for.
> If you go to Newegg and buy stuff, you are obligated under US tax law to pay the capital gains taxes based on the fair market value of the products purchased. If you go to a bitcoin meetup and sell with cash, you are still obligated to pay taxes.
I recently bought a GTX 1080 TI with USD
Amazon wanted to charge me 7%.
Newegg charged me no state tax.
Newegg is not obligated to collect sales take from you if they don't have a nexus in your state. Amazon has a nexus almost everywhere and thus collects sales tax from you regardless of where you order from. That's only true for orders place with Amazon itself; independent sellers at Amazon are responsible for specifying their own taxes that will be collected.
None of this, whether it's collected or not, eliminates your requirement to pay the sales or excise tax of your home State. In fact, if you go out of your way to order something or perform a transaction in a way that explicitly evades sales tax then you could be in legal trouble with your State's tax agency.
So, you're the worst type of person in the US. You want high taxes for everyone else, but you do everything you can to avoid them for yourself.
Please do actual liberals a favor, and don't tell anyone you're a liberal. You're not, and we don't want our genuine attempts to improve the world to look like we're just self-serving thieves.
I'm sorry but no amount of introspection is going to make me go "You know what, he shouldn't pay his taxes!"
As for schadenfreude I have no qualms about people getting rich with bitcoin, good for them. People get rich lots of different ways. Just pay your goddamn taxes. I do and I didn't even grow up in the US.
> What bothers me about this whole thing is that I never bought it like a stock. I mined it YEARS ago when it was worthless.
If you mined gold, planted corn, or raised chickens and then subsequently sold any of them you'd pay taxes on the proceeds as well.
> PS: My address has never been tied to an IRL transaction.
Short of using a tumbler to anonymize your source bitcoins and fraudulently declaring a different or fake person as the recipient of the purchase, I don't see how this is possible if you're buying something online.
You don't have to pay any tax on Bitcoins you own. You have to pay tax on the USD proceeds you make from their sale. This is no different from any other source of income in the US. Even bartering you have to pay taxes on: https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc420
You can of course disagree with the concept of income tax, but Bitcoin is no special goose in that regard.
> or go to a bitcoin meetup and sell with cash in-person..... or go on vacation in Europe and get Euro and again keep it off the books
Just to be clear, you're unironically proposing to meet to participate in commercial exchange with someone you can trust not to kill or rob you on account of publicly-funded security, get to the airport on publicly-funded roads or trains, burn energy financed or outright subsidized by public infrastructure, fly out of an airport paid for with public funds and transit safely across the Atlantic using air traffic control and radar services provided by your fellow citizens to get to Europe to enjoy a vacation many Americans can't afford. All to avoid paying taxes on speculative gains.
I think the parent is surprised/upset at being asked to pay tax on a capital gain and to some degree I sympathize. It seems somehow unfair to tax what can feel like an existing possession. However, as I understand it a big reason for having capital gains tax is that without it rich people find ingenious ways to turn what is really income into capital gains and hence avoid taxes altogether. For this reason there are usually some thresholds and exceptions to allow some amount of capital gain to be tax free, and/or to tier the tax rate on gains.
Well, a traditional gold mining operation has to pay taxes on the literal gold they take out of the ground and sell on the open market.
They also had to pay taxes on the equipment that they used to mine the gold, and probably taxes on the people they had to pay to manage the operation.
So it could be seen as 'unfair' for someone who mines information to get a pass and only have to pay some of the taxes that a precious metal mining operation pays.
What bothers me about this whole thing is that I never bought it like a stock. I mined it YEARS ago when it was worthless.
Now all of a sudden I have to pay tax on something I already own?
If you're subject to this ruling, aka you've by happy accident suddenly realized $20k in profit- consider that whether or not you like how things are working, you've still got nothing to complain about.
Philadelphia is quickly gentrifying and this has caused massive lines in voting districts in the recently gentrified neighborhoods. Where voting lines used to be 15 minutes long they are now 2+ hours. We've been trying to get them to split the voting district into two here in Northern Liberties for a while but apparently it's falling on deaf ears. These are by the way "well-to-do" young professionals so it's in the interest of both Republicans and Democrats to fix this.
Meanwhile 10 minutes away at Temple University you have 2 hour lines at polling close. If the dems want to win PA they need to get their voting district shit together in the city.
It would not have made much off a difference. The spread in the entire state was about 90k but when I saw the lines at the universities it made me wonder about the entire state.
I used to live in the suburbs of Philadelphia in a new "rich" neighborhood and the lines there are usually 15-30 minutes. Granted the population there doesn't fluctuate much.
