Upto about 20500 atm. Had a drop off to high 16k last week.

49k and change now

Financial witchcraft.

This is from Barron's this morning. There is a graph in the article that I can't get to copy/paste


How Much Is Bitcoin Really Worth? A New Pricing Model Is Bad News for Bulls.

Mark Hulbert
Dec. 16, 2020 7:00 am ET


Bitcoin’s price is more than 50% higher than its fair value of about $12,000.

That’s one of the implications I draw from a new analysis of the various valuation frameworks for determining the cryptocurrency’s fair price. Entitled “Bitcoin Is Exactly Like Gold Except When It Isn’t,” the analysis was conducted by Claude Erb, a former commodities portfolio manager at TCW Group.

I first wrote about Erb’s analysis of precious metals in a February 2013 column for Barron’s. His conclusion at the time, reached jointly with Campbell Harvey, a finance professor at Duke University, was that gold’s fair value was less than half its then-current price.

Gold fell by $600 an ounce over the subsequent 2½ years. That alone inclines me to pay close attention to what he is now saying about Bitcoin.

This cryptocurrency has been on a tear of late, with a year-to-date gain of 170%. In recent days, in fact, Bitcoin has risen to new all-time highs, eclipsing its prior high set in late 2017.

The valuation framework that concludes Bitcoin’s fair price is about $12,000 is based on the thesis that its value derives from what’s known as a “network effect.” That is, a network’s value grows faster than the number of connected users. (This framework is related to what’s known as Metcalfe’s Law, which holds that a network’s value grows according to the square of the number of users.)



To test the explanatory power of this network-effect framework, Erb made the simplifying assumption that each Bitcoin that has been mined represents one user in a Bitcoin network. He then calculated the way that the price of Bitcoin has traded relative to the number of Bitcoins that have been mined up to that point. As you can see from the accompanying chart, his model does a good job of capturing Bitcoin’s price rise over the past decade.

According to this model, Erb said in an interview, Bitcoin’s fair price as of Dec. 14 is $12,315. Bitcoin’s actual Dec. 14 price of $19,201 is 56% higher.


Of course, a social-network framework is not the only way in which analysts have proposed calculating Bitcoin’s fair price. Erb nevertheless suggests we give it serious consideration because no other relative valuation approach is empirically more plausible—and the predictions of the social-network framework are impressively correlated with the trajectory of Bitcoin’s price history.

Using the social-network framework to value Bitcoin also allows us to forecast how much it will rise in the future. That’s because its underlying code stipulates both the maximum number of Bitcoins that will ever exist (21 million) as well as how quickly they can be mined (this limit isn’t likely to be reached until 2140). According to Erb’s econometric model, a 21-million-user network translates to a Bitcoin price of $74,000. Relative to its current price, that represents a 1.2% annualized return over the next 120 years.
Hedging Inflation

Some other approaches for valuing Bitcoin contend that it’s a good inflation hedge. But Erb says those approaches are less empirically plausible than the network effect framework.

He points out that a key precondition for something being a good inflation hedge is that its real, or inflation-adjusted, price is relatively stable. But Bitcoin doesn’t satisfy this precondition, at least if we use the consumer-price index as a proxy for inflation. Over the past decade, the ratio of Bitcoin to the CPI has ranged from a low of near zero to a high of over 73.

Bitcoin is even less of a good inflation hedge than gold. That’s relevant because many of Bitcoin’s supporters argue that it is “Gold 2.0.” The gold/CPI ratio over the past decade has ranged between a low of around 3 to a high of around 8, and while that’s wider than what it should be if gold were a good inflation hedge, it’s far narrower than the comparable ratio for Bitcoin.

The bottom line? Erb’s analysis offers something useful for Bitcoin’s devotees: a valuation model that can be used to estimate the cryptocurrency’s fair value. It’s entirely possible that there is another model that does an even better job than his of explaining Bitcoin’s price history. Meanwhile, Erb’s social-network framework introduces a quantitative discipline into an arena that heretofore has been characterized largely by marketing slogans.


https://www.barrons.com/articles/why-bitcoin-is-overpriced-by-more-than-50-51608120001?mod=hp_LEAD_3

Open interest in Bitcoin derivatives hit new highs this week
by MK Manoylov
December 15, 2020, 5:39PM EST · 1 min read
This week saw open interest in bitcoin options and futures surge to new highs, according to data collected by The Block Research.

On Sunday, open interest for bitcoin options reached $4.81 billion. Open interest refers to the total amount of contracts that have yet to be settled at a given time.

Eighty-one percent of bitcoin options open interest was on market leader Deribit, followed by Bit.com (6%) and CME (5.4%).





Open interest on Bitcoin futures reached $7.38 billion, a new high, the following day, per the data. OKEx led the way at 18.9%. Binance and CME were nearly tied at 15.6% and 14%, respectively.



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The Bit coin is latest Beanie Baby Investment. Watch out. MD

.... or possibly the greatest savings technology to ever exist.

I bet social-networks don't even fit Barron's social-network model. Haha.

I wouldn't go to my butcher for carpentry advice just like i wouldn't go to a 100 yr old dying institution for technology advice.

Bitcoin reminds me of the California fire situation, it's tremendously terrible one day or week, then it jumps to a record , then in a week lose's it all and wanders around some more for more fuel !

You mean like a debt backed currency?

This is the same as the grain markets are normally.

Both.

I friend of mine just had over $20K of Bitcoin stolen out of his account; absolutely no recourse.
He said he should have not have had any of the account information on his computer, I guess phones are somewhat better but not really the answer. He told me how it account information should be stored but I wasn't really paying attention since I don't plan to buy any.
Apparently over a billion dollars of Bitcoin has been stolen recently.

You should have 2-step authentication on any kind of bank account.

Couple of questions:


1. If you bought $10,000 in Bitcoins when it first hit the market, What would that original $10,000 in Bitcoins be worth now?


2. How do you covert Bitcoins into real cash???

1. in the millions as it was pretty cheap in the beginning, talking about pennies or fractions of
2. through paypal. the exchanges, depending on what you use make it pretty easy. in the early days there was no such thing

If I have the amount right, it was selling for $0.0008 a Bitcoin x $10.000

That would be $252,000,000,000.

That's $252 Billion Dollars !!!

This is what I do not understand. A bitcoin is a number. and everyone is different. As long as that number is registered to you, how can it be stolen? There are only so many bitcoins unless you mine one yourself. I don't know, the entire thing is hokum in my book.

account security. if someone gets through your password and authentification, youre in trouble

23k now.