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Bitcoin Fall Extends to 25% as Fears of Crackdown Linger

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141–150 of 371 posts

Re: Bitcoin Fall Extends to 25% as Fears of Crackdown Linger

#141

Time to buy. Down from what price since January? Cryptocurrency is a long term play from a software and financial engineering vantage. It also continues to irritate the hell out of banks (bank accounts are being closed and restricted from exchange transfers, including coinbase) and general investors. It's not liquid enough yet, creates no need for middle men and Bitcoin itself is now being manipulated by futures cont…

Yes, but what? Ripple's seen maybe the biggest loss, but it's not clear that part of its loss isn't due to decreasing confidence in the underlying, which is bad if you want to BTFD. Same can be said for many others. Though if you look at todays charts e.g. in ETH, it's clear someone's probably made good money intraday buying dips.

Ripple will bounce back up (maybe not back up to $3 anytime soon, but I'm pretty sure it will go back up). A lot of people that got out are just trying to time the bottom as well as they can. I'm tempted to buy more myself. Part of me wants to wait to see if it drops more, part of me thinks I should just get in instead of trying to time the market and missing the opportunity.

Re: Bitcoin Fall Extends to 25% as Fears of Crackdown Linger

#142

Time to buy. Down from what price since January? Cryptocurrency is a long term play from a software and financial engineering vantage. It also continues to irritate the hell out of banks (bank accounts are being closed and restricted from exchange transfers, including coinbase) and general investors. It's not liquid enough yet, creates no need for middle men and Bitcoin itself is now being manipulated by futures cont…

I'd wait few months. Bitcoin tends to stabilize for few months before next ride up.

Re: Bitcoin Fall Extends to 25% as Fears of Crackdown Linger

#143
post #3

Animal spirits Even apart from the instability due to speculation, there is the instability due to the characteristic of human nature that a large proportion of our positive activities depend on spontaneous optimism rather than mathematical expectations, whether moral or hedonistic or economic. Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days t…

or in other words the "exploration" part of the "exploration vs. exploitation"

Re: Bitcoin Fall Extends to 25% as Fears of Crackdown Linger

#144
post #7

The last time China explicitly banned Bitcoin, it dropped by around 45% to around $6000. It went on to $20K from there. But what's different this time is that there are first time investors in millions who joined in the last 2 months. They didn't read the white paper, they didn't invest in technology, they invested for the monster returns. So I think there will be a more sell off this time before it rebounds back to…

Just like with dot com burst, it doesnt mean someone will turn the lights off forever. Just like the internet eventually got mainstream and websites are being bought and sold for billions these days, same way BitCoin will never be at 0,001 cent with nobody touch it with a long stick.

Bitcoin isn't the Internet in that example. Blockchain is. Bitcoin may be DrKoop.com or it may be AOL or Cisco, of the dotcom bubble.

Wealth is created primarily from productivity gains. Bitcoin generates very little in the way of productivity gains. Services built on top of blockchain or similar tech, will be where most of the wealth will be generated, because those services / products will or might spur productivity gains.

Re: Bitcoin Fall Extends to 25% as Fears of Crackdown Linger

#145
post #88
post #67

I always think there will only ever be 21 million bitcoins in existence ever. Ever. So what do you think is a fair price for that?

You know miners can just make one software update and change that right?

And convince >51% of other miners to run that update

Re: Bitcoin Fall Extends to 25% as Fears of Crackdown Linger

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would call it an investment, if the USD-YEN prices are so volatile and give you 1000X profit in 6 months. Again, this all goes back to whether Bitcoin is a store of value or a medium of exchange. By now it's very clear, it can't be medium of exchange.

People keep saying that, but the lightning network is in testing at the moment and when it gets widely deployed we should start seeing near zero transaction fees on the bitcoin network. You can say what you want about the philosophy of that - the lightning network will add yet another group of people who collectively have an outsized control over the network. But if the scaling issues get addressed I don't see any re…

Any successful Lightning Network (at scale) would require a dramatic block size increase. The last (Lightning Network tech) I saw suggested it would need a 133MB blocksize.

Blockstream struck down a modest increase to 2MB in November. They have devs who want to reduce the blocksize. I'm not sure where you're finding hope in LN.

Bitcoin Cash forked off to get back to scaling, and it's doing great. Check out how well the mempool stress test went this past week.

Re: Bitcoin Fall Extends to 25% as Fears of Crackdown Linger

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Naive speculators are buying cryptocurrencies on their credit cards without understanding the volatility https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-11/bitcoin-b...

> Naive speculators The problem with this characterization is when enough people lose their shirts on leveraged crypto purchases, a problem of individual finances becomes one of collective policy. I'd be careful with dismissing the problem as one contained to the stupid. There was a thread on the front page, earlier, where multiple commentators were equated the odds of a massive and permanent Bitcoin crash with that…

I'd be careful with dismissing the problem as one contained to the stupid.

The subtle genius of the truly stupid, is their unstoppable penchant for making their problems yours as well!

Re: Bitcoin Fall Extends to 25% as Fears of Crackdown Linger

#148
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Korea may already be at the point where a 50% sustained drawdown plunges a significant fraction of the population into hardship. That, in turn, could trigger a recession. That seems unlikely. Something like 2M of 51M people have any crypto there, and only a small fraction would be overextended significantly. Anyone buying a couple months ago would still be up.

> Something like 2M of 51M people have any crypto there, and only a small fraction would be overextended significantly How do you know that? For traditional securities, we have margin and prudential lending rules. These systems aren't perfect. But they incorporate lessons from crises past. One of those lessons is about how system risk can grow exponentially unexpectedly quickly.

> How do you know that?

I don't have the hard data of course. It's a guess based on crypto still being up over a 2 month period. I also assume people are roughly the same in Korea as everywhere else so only a fraction are being crazy reckless in their investment.

That's not to say that the losses aren't enormous for the largest margin speculators, but the vast majority can't be hurting too badly.

Re: Bitcoin Fall Extends to 25% as Fears of Crackdown Linger

#149
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the blockchain grows ever larger the thing gets more and more useless as a currency. Just look at how long it takes a transaction to confirm.* It's digital Beanie Babies. * https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-confirmation-time?timespa...

Yep, these comparisons between Bitcoin and other successful technologies are like a new type of fallacy (techno-fallacy?) where people assume that because it's technically-complex it is somehow destined to succeed like other technically-complex successes. It's a form of survivor bias because you never see or think about the technically-complex failures, or "not-successes", like the Tamagatchi, Laser disc, WebTV, Webv…

The self balancing technology in the Segway, revolutionary at the time, paved the way for hoverboards. The forms are changed but the underlying technology is the same.

In the same way, Eth and Monero are further iterations of Bitcoin.

Re: Bitcoin Fall Extends to 25% as Fears of Crackdown Linger

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but what? Ripple's seen maybe the biggest loss, but it's not clear that part of its loss isn't due to decreasing confidence in the underlying, which is bad if you want to BTFD. Same can be said for many others. Though if you look at todays charts e.g. in ETH, it's clear someone's probably made good money intraday buying dips.

Ripple will bounce back up (maybe not back up to $3 anytime soon, but I'm pretty sure it will go back up). A lot of people that got out are just trying to time the bottom as well as they can. I'm tempted to buy more myself. Part of me wants to wait to see if it drops more, part of me thinks I should just get in instead of trying to time the market and missing the opportunity.

Why so sure? It seems to have gone up based on the news that Japanese banks were getting involved, but then it turns out they likely won't use the actual coins, just the tech?
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