Live data from Hacker News

Bitcoin and almost every other cryptocurrency crashed hard today

techcrunch.com

181–190 of 426 posts

Re: Bitcoin and almost every other cryptocurrency crashed hard today

#181

As someone who owns and believes in cryptocurrency, I'm actually glad this happened. I was getting sick of all the get rich quick people who've been driving the price lately, even for the coins that shouldn't be pumping. It was almost as if the entire cryptocurrency space had turned into a huge unregulated casino. I was at a couple of Bitcoin meetups recently and was surprised to find that most attendees were proudly…

I would argue that by holding cryptocurrency you’re de facto playing a game with rules you don’t understand (investing).

Re: Bitcoin and almost every other cryptocurrency crashed hard today

#182
post #169
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nope. People use Facebook. People simply don't use Bitcoin for payments or any other use that benefits from its "network effect".

Re: Bitcoin and almost every other cryptocurrency crashed hard today

#183
post #51

I do mobile software consulting. To give you an idea of the level of crypto currency mania: Every single one of my clients in San Francisco have some kind of slack or group chat devoted to crypto trading. I was waiting at the front desk of a client who has a floor in a fancy building downtown. Whilst waiting I overheard the end of a conversation between the door guy talking to the maintanence man: “I put in a bunch o…

And Paul Krugman's barber's brother-in-law is in too:

https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/943938735846166529

Re: Bitcoin and almost every other cryptocurrency crashed hard today

#184

I used to ask others in last few months, at what point would you be comfortable buying? Is it 20K, 15K, 10K, 5K, 1K, 500$, 100$, or 50$? or less? See, the story changes, what was nice months ago now is an extremely high risk. Myself, I probably woudln't buy unless it's under 100$. Even that is questionable. Reason being, blockchain is a pipedream and BTC is a dinosaur within that dream. What future BTC has but specul…

I think sub $5k is a reasonable reentry though I still expect it to go down from there. My theory is this:

I think the last time bitcoin had reasonable organic growth was when it was around $300-500 post Gox.

The reward halved so you’d naturally expect the price to increase from there, so let’s say $800-$1200 is reasonable to be generous.

Now you’ve got a bunch more infrastructure around it and more awareness, so double it or triple it from there— so $1500-$6000 or so seems like a plausible range. I suspect the price in the near future is going to be on the low end of that and stay there for a while.

Re: Bitcoin and almost every other cryptocurrency crashed hard today

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there are hundreds of crytocurrencies. what makes one of them rare?

There are hundreds of elements, what makes some of them rare?

there could be thousands of crytocurrency next month.

Re: Bitcoin and almost every other cryptocurrency crashed hard today

#187
post #4

It's almost like everyone was trying to get rich quick and sold when they saw some profit.

Agreed, it's almost like the asset has no fundamental value, and is driven completely by speculation.

Why can't it be both? If you educate yourself about how cryptocurrencies work, you will see there is a lot of fundamental value. There is also obviously a bubble on top of it.

Re: Bitcoin and almost every other cryptocurrency crashed hard today

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like all dollars, yen, pounds, euros, silver, metal and gold? None of these things, paper or earth metals, really have any intrinsic value. You can't eat gold. You can't put euros in your car. I guess you can burn money to keep warm, which is what happened to German Marks once people lost confidence in their currency prior to WW2. The value of money is based off belief systems. When a very large scale economic or sta…

> When a very large scale economic or state collapse happens, the most important thing to have are a community of people around you who believe in each other. But isn't that one of the hopes of cryptocurrency -- that it can survive a state collapse, because the relatively normal currency manipulation leading up to said collapse would be less (or not at all) viable? I feel like that was the spirit of OP's tongue in ch…

> But isn't that one of the hopes of cryptocurrency -- that it can survive a state collapse, because the relatively normal currency manipulation leading up to said collapse would be less (or not at all) viable?

I've always wondered about this argument. It seems to me that a state collapse would be accompanied by the collapse of things that make bitcoin possible: electrical grid, Internet, mobile networks, and so on.

Re: Bitcoin and almost every other cryptocurrency crashed hard today

#190

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 Interesting. Don't really know how crytos work, but isn't rarity is guaranteed by the BitCoin algorithm itself?

The algorithm is just a convention. The algorithm can be easily forked or modified by law / regulation / consensus among a few key market participants (mostly large miners).

Also Bitcoin is just one blockchain. Even with the same algorithm I can create an infinity of other bitcoin blockchains. Why would one have more value than the others? It's like if you generated an RSA key and then said, this RSA key is special, it has lots of value, you can't replicate it because you don't have the private key. No one else can recreate this key, it is enforced by cryptography. Well yes. But it's just a key. I can create a million others with an average laptop.

Post reply on HN