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Bitcoin and almost every other cryptocurrency crashed hard today

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Re: Bitcoin and almost every other cryptocurrency crashed hard today

#161

Downvote me all you want, but HN really needs to cure this bitcoin-jealousy. Yes, people who invested early became millionares and billionares with a single mouse click. I know it feels unfair when you spend countless hours creating and innovating and not being rewarded. But some of you here needs to stop hating and being bitter. I have been watching HN and bitcoin related threads for months now. Same pattern.

Who is buying coin? Like if you seriously found 3 BTC you had on an old hard drive from years ago, remembered that password, who would pay you the $30k? You'd have to try different exchanges, try small amounts first, pay the insane transaction fees and wait for confirmation. Anyone who truly had a huge stash of like 400k USD in BTC would need to grab a lawyer, an escrow company and enter into a pretty strict legal contract with a coin exchange to guarantee that money.

Are there really large amounts being traded? I guess you could just look at the block chain ledger and see. But I'm just wondering how much of this is due to people cashing in/out vs market manipulation.

Re: Bitcoin and almost every other cryptocurrency crashed hard today

#162

There's essentially nothing driving the price increase in 2017. Payment processing, remittance, asset-backing, digital identities, micropayments, bitcoin ATMs, VC-backed bitcoin startups, none of these things took off at all in 2017, in fact if anything the exciting years regarding these usecases/infrastructure ventures were 2013-2015. I bet if you ask 100 people why they bought and if they use bitcoin for anything i…

And a big piece of gold's value is that it's been a store of value for longer than recorded history.

Hell, if the world went belly up, Mad Max style, there's a good chance that whatever gold you have would be worth even more.

Re: Bitcoin and almost every other cryptocurrency crashed hard today

#163

Buying on the way down, see you all on the upswing in about a year. I bought after the MtGox crash in 2013 and can't wait to buy this bear market!

I feel like this may have been the last upswing this big. A lot of regular folks are going to get burned, and they're not going to forget. The societal consensus 6 months from now will be that Bitcoin Was A Scam, and that'll depress speculative potential.

Which is a good thing, insofar as Bitcoin may actually have a future as a currency. But a bad thing for HODLers.

Re: Bitcoin and almost every other cryptocurrency crashed hard today

#166

Ha! I needed a good laugh this morning. Thanks internet. What I don't get, is how do these prices actually change? For btc or a stock. The mechanism seems very voodoo.

price is e.g. 1k USD/BTC

Alice has 1 BTC she wants to sell for $1k

Bob has $995 and places an order to buy 1 BTC at $995

Alice could wait around for someone to make a better offer, or maybe she needs $ for christmas presents NOW and lets it go for $995, at which point the price becomes $995

The listed price is the valuation at which the last transaction occured.

Re: Bitcoin and almost every other cryptocurrency crashed hard today

#167

Serious question: who didn't expect this? Did anybody think that the 19K high of last week was going to be the new normal?

One of the infuriating things about Bitcoin is that there's no reason 19K couldn't be the new normal. You don't have to trade in whole Bitcoins, so high prices just mean people trade in smaller fractions and low prices just mean people trade in higher numbers, unlike a stock where you might want to do a split to make it easier for people to invest.

There’s no reason $19 couldn’t be the new normal either.

Re: Bitcoin and almost every other cryptocurrency crashed hard today

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean, like the US dollar ?

U.s. dollar has the value of 20 aircraft carriers and enough nukes to glass the planet behind it. But otherwise exactly the same

As well as the whole concept of the petrodollar.

Re: Bitcoin and almost every other cryptocurrency crashed hard today

#169
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin itself is rare, but cryptocurrency as a whole is not because it's easy to create another blockchain.

This right there is exactly why long term it's doomed and cannot be a reliable store of value. You don't see banks and random geeks inventing new precious metals out of thin air. So you have gold, silver, platinum and palladium and that's about it as far as store of values are concerned.

Same is true about Facebook. Someone could clone the features and create facebook2.com, and everyone would flock to it. That's why Facebook stock is a Ponzi scheme. Anyone who thinks Facebook has a value above $0 is insane.

Re: Bitcoin and almost every other cryptocurrency crashed hard today

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn't know what they were buying; bits in a database. A very poorly implemented database that was - not scalable - not rare - didn't have any government backing or big institutional backing in case the price dropped from 19,000 to 11,000 - easily hackable (tether, fake trades, scam exchanges, etc) - too expensive to do a single transaction this applies to most crytocurrency

>"- not rare" Its not a commodity it's a currency. Why does it need to be "rare"? The US dollar is also not backed by anything "rare" and hasn't been since Nixon abandoned the gold standard in 1973. >"didn't have any government backing or big institutional backing in case the price dropped from 19,000 to 11,000" You realize this is the exact reason it was created right? That's the whole point. It's not coincidence th…

The dollar is essentially backed by oil and the fact that it's needed to trade with the largest economy in the world, not to mention the country with the largest military.
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