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It can all go to zero

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Re: It can all go to zero

#241

Post by raiyu »

saas_co_de wrote: post #143
hbosch wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trend of 15-20% swings is well documented in Bitcoin history, no doubts about that. Crypto is a young economy in general, and it's been thrilling for me (on the outside, as I don't speculate or hold) to watch. But I don't know. If you play with the zoom levels on price tracking sites, the $20k peak onward has been a pretty steady downward trend. BTC is down 20% over three days, down nearly 23% over a week. Is tha…

The interesting thing is that this is what a real free market looks like. This is what any market would look like without being rigged by governments and government backed institutions. Bitcoin may be the best proof yet of how deeply flawed the libertarian free market ideology really is.

A corollary is to say that this is what free markets look like when driven by greed.

We can't just blanket say that any government interaction with a market is negative. Sure many aspects are. But there are positives as well.

If you look at the housing crisis that occurred that was because the market was becoming unregulated over time and because fraud was allowed to flourish. That was then coupled with human greed and it wasn't entirely the government or the banks faults either, because if regular people weren't going out to buy houses to make money doing nothing, then there wouldn't be such a huge collapse.

At the end of the day it's all the same. People want to get rich doing nothing and any opportunity to do so brings out the greed in individuals. If there weren't some winners in this equation, especially winners that you can relate to, then people wouldn't join in. But when an everyday person makes money this way then everyone starts thinking, well that person isn't special, why can't I do the same?

More often than not the early investors are the ones that reap the profits and hope to exit on time, while those entering the game late are the ones most likely to incur losses.

Re: It can all go to zero

#243

Post by Lewton »

rsuelzer wrote: post #152

There are so many glaring issues with BitCoin that it's insane that there are people who are dumb enough to buy it at these prices. 1) 96% of it is controlled by 4% of people. That means if it were to become a currency 96% of the wealth in the world would have to be given to 4% of people either through goods or a fiat currency. 2) It's just a matter of time before enough people lose their private keys that the total…

There are many glaring issues with bitcoin but what you wrote is nonsense

No 94% is not owned by 4% of people. The cold wallets behind major exchanges completely skew those number

And no, 30% of coins are not “lost”. Realistically it’s closer to 5%

Re: It can all go to zero

#244

Post by byproxy »

stanleydrew wrote: post #239
api wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who see and call out bubbles are always wrong N-1 times where N is the number of times a prediction is made. Look at the fundamentals. What we have here is a bad currency (volatile and deflationary) whose utility is diminishing as its price increases. There aren't a lot of value investors in cryptocurrency at this point. The vast majority of the people who hold it are holding it on the theory that it will cont…

> Most people look at price charts in linear not logarithmic mode Do you have any tools you recommend that make it easy to see these logarithmic charts?

Coinmarketcap has a log scale button underneath their charts : https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/#charts

Re: It can all go to zero

#245

Post by adamnemecek »

softawre wrote: post #237
adamnemecek wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me preface this story by saying that your parents did a shit thing and I'm glad they were duly punished. Fuck ivory. But I'm getting distracted. Bitcoin is unlike your situation as with ivory you have to have physical contact with the shady person. With BTC you don't. People online don't care as much about dealing with shady people. It's also kinda hard to tell who's a shady person online.

Bitcoin is so divisive you've managed to shit on his parents to win an argument. An argument that you then concede, saying that it doesn't matter whether BTC is legal or not because you can always sell it online. If it's illegal, doesn't it's value go way down? If you literally risk jailtime to sell it (or more accurate, to convert it to fiat eventually)

> Bitcoin is so divisive you've managed to shit on his parents to win an argument.

Not really, I dislike the fact that he volunteers this information. Replace ivory with child pornography (ethically they aren't that different). Would you still defend op's parents? Also note, it was a side note, I didn't say it to win an argument.

> If it's illegal, doesn't it's value go way down? If you literally risk jailtime to sell it (or more accurate, to convert it to fiat eventually)

So like all governments at once will outlaw doing anything with crypto? Like not regulate it, even if heavily, they'll just basically make owning crypto as illegal as owning idk, child porn (pardon for the repeat analogy). Like you aren't realizing the impossibility of making something like crypto illegal.

Re: It can all go to zero

#246

Post by adamnemecek »

twblalock wrote: post #234
adamnemecek wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok. Would you say the same thing about Google stock? If people stop using Google tomorrow, the stock will plunge right?

Only because the value of the underlying company would plunge as well, due to loss of revenue. But it wouldn't hit zero. Google would still have other products than search, a lot of valuable IP and patents, real estate, etc.

I meant google as a company. Very little of Google's value is in real estate. Do they even own all of their offices?

Re: It can all go to zero

#247

Post by Jtsummers »

adamnemecek wrote: post #178
teraflop wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a possibility. Maybe they'll still be here, maybe they'll be totally gone; maybe they'll exist, but only in certain niches, or in a form that's unrecognizably different than what they look like now. By analogy: two decades ago, US consumers were buying almost a billion dollars' worth of photographic film a year [1]. Photography hasn't gone anywhere -- people are taking orders of magnitude more photos than they u…

Ok so we disagree on whether Bitcoin has peaked or not. Do you feel like crypto has peaked? There's this half trilion just waiting to be multiplied. Like people just bought in, they wont be selling. In some sense, I wonder if the fact that beginner investors bought in means that it's more resistant to a price dump as they wont have stop losses. If they bought for 1000, they wont sell for 500 thereby keeping the price…

Someone buying for $1000 and not selling for $500 will not keep the price afloat. It just means they're stuck with something they refuse to sell and no one else wants to buy. Other people will sell at the lower price (to get out and write off their losses rather than incur more) and the price will drop anyways.

Re: It can all go to zero

#248

Post by stanleydrew »

Retric wrote: post #157
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the mining ceases then you could always just mine your own transaction to buy all of it. But so could everyone else!

Depends on how you do it, you could fork the protocol and start mining from the beginning. Otherwise you would need to convince everyone to actually sell before you could mine those transactions. Often what happens after a massive price drop is people stop trading instead of a larger nominal price drop. AKA, you still get some high value beanie baby transactions, but the market is not large enough to really liquidate…

If all mining stops except for you, my understanding is that you would own all the hash power and you wouldn't need to convince anyone to sell since you could write any transaction you want to the blockchain.

It seems like the harder problem is convincing anyone else to pickup mining again on the other side of your "I own all the coin" transaction block.

Re: It can all go to zero

#249

Post by acdha »

adamnemecek wrote: post #207
acdha wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at the BP chart: yes, it dipped but having a real business meant that it didn’t go anywhere near zero and came back up. Something based on faith can drop all the way to zero and stay there because e.g. everyone bailed to something else and there was no reason to come back.

Do we have to have a discussion about the value of non-physical things? "If everyone stopped using google tomorrow, their stock would go to zero. Investing in google is based entirely on faith." Do you agree with this statement?

That's overly simplified: Google's stock value is based on a history of successfully competing in advertising and receiving billions of dollars, based on their ability to deliver products which billions of people use and many are willing to sign contracts or make ongoing payments for.

Yes, there's some faith involved in assuming that the advertising market won't change overnight or that Google won't suddenly stop being able to compete effectively but that's orders of magnitude less than the level of faith needed to justify the current valuations, especially when the argument is not just that despite being unproven cryptocurrencies are certain to become mainstream but going further to say that a specific unproven implementation is going to win.

Re: It can all go to zero

#250

Post by baq »

danhak wrote: post #198
aitrean wrote: post #33

Time for the monthly cryptocurrency panic thread. While I fully agree that most cryptocurrencies are grossly overvalued, these articles always pretend a 20% selloff is the beginning of the end, when, in crypto land, 20% selloffs are a pretty standard bad day for the market.

> While I fully agree that most cryptocurrencies are grossly overvalued... Could you please explain what “overvalued” even means in this context, and how one might go about determining fair value for cryptocurrency? I’ve yet to receive a straight answer on this.

i'll bite: they're selling for more than $0.
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