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The Cryptocurrency Industry Is 'On the Brink of an Implosion', Research Says

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Re: The Cryptocurrency Industry Is 'On the Brink of an Implosion', Research Says

#131

Post by CyberDildonics »

jessriedel wrote: post #124

I'm uninformed and bearish on bitcoins, but I find it helpful to look at the historic bitcoin price on a log scale. https://bitcoincharts.com/charts/bitstampUSD#tgSzm1g10zm2g25... Bitcoin has had relative declines this big and lasting this long (late 2013 to mid 2015) only to bounce back later.

That's a very simplistic way to look at it. Before the latest huge price increase, bitcoin had very little real competition. Now it has proved that its artificially crippled capacity of 1MB is an enormous problem and that the limited throughput couldn't even come close to handling the last bubble smoothly.

Re: The Cryptocurrency Industry Is 'On the Brink of an Implosion', Research Says

#132

Post by lozaning »

Scoundreller wrote: post #11
fullshark wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So illegal transactions and money laundering it is.

Iunno, if i were a billionaire, the idea of having $50m under nobody’s control but my own that I can take anywhere, anytime, doesn’t exist anywhere else. I can’t do that with gold. Bank deposits are always available until they aren’t. But Coinbase can’t do this either.

I smirk whenever I walk past the poster in the international jetways at SFO regarding it being a no no to leave the country with more than $10K.

Re: The Cryptocurrency Industry Is 'On the Brink of an Implosion', Research Says

#133

Post by starbugs »

epicide wrote: post #127
starbugs wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is: it boils down to someone putting power into something which then conserves that power (and can be exchanged for something else). Another example of this is gold. To extract it out of the ground, you need to invest energy. That energy is then "stored" in the gold. You can release it by selling it for USD, then purchasing service from someone and so on. I think it's hard to argue that the energy you put in…

I never said the energy is lost. I'm saying I, the owner, cannot extract it back out. This is also true for gold-backed currency, but USD, among others, hasn't been backed by gold for some time now. My understanding is that a currency needs to be backed by something intrinsically (seen as) valuable as it goes through the bootstrapping process. Once it is generally accepted, it can stand on its own (at least for a whi…

Well, I think the comparison to gold holds to a high degree. Let's take alts out of the equation for now. Bitcoin requires energy to be mined and transferred. Same is true for gold. I'd say Bitcoin's and gold's intrinsic value hence is energy. The parallels only break down at the point where you could get more gold after you've mined all of it on earth (e.g. by mining an asteroid) while for Bitcoin there's a hard limit which cannot be exceeded by design.

Maybe I misunderstand your issue about getting the energy back out. For me it's quite clear that you can get it out, simply by exchanging it for something else that provides you with that energy.

Fiat currencies tend to devalue to a point where there's literally nothing left of the energy that it originally represented. E.g. the USD devalued by more than 96% since 1913. In my point of view, this really is the currency which you can't extract the energy back out of — with a government guarantee.

Re: The Cryptocurrency Industry Is 'On the Brink of an Implosion', Research Says

#134

Post by roywiggins »

vkou wrote: post #114
decentralised wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw a couple of comments today about the price of USDT so I think it's worth while explaining how it works just in case anyone is interested in knowing more. USDT is a pegged-currency. It's often described as a stablecoin but that's not correct because it doesn't have an inbuilt stabilisation mechanism unlike Maker's DAI for instance. The way it works is purely based on well known legal mechanisms that have no cryp…

> The token itself is used to facilitate trading and many investors 'park' their gains in USDT while waiting for the market to reach a certain point or just in between trades, but that means that the token's FX value is set by the open market itself so if there are more buy orders than available USDT the price goes up and if there are more sell orders than demand the price goes down. If the USDT to USD ratio fluctuat…

In theory you could just redeem your money from the Tether issuer, if it's actually backed by USD and they deign to let you redeem them.

Re: The Cryptocurrency Industry Is 'On the Brink of an Implosion', Research Says

#135

Post by ramblerouser »

pretendscholar wrote: post #115
ramblerouser wrote: post #35

>Echoing sentiments of mainstream economists Yea, Paul Krugman has been saying "Bitcoin is doomed" since 2012. He'll always be wrong because this is all politically motivated. The banking and political establishment are scared shitless by alternative currencies, crypto or otherwise. Google the "Liberty Dollar". Mouth pieces for the financial industry like Bloomberg will attack alternatives to the petrodollar no matte…

You have to be joking if you think banks are afraid of any new technology.

Did you google the "Liberty Dollar"? They arent afraid of new technology they are afraid of losing public trust. Competitors that provide a usable alternative to them are bullied out of existance. Fortunately, Bitcoin's technology and public support has made that difficult, but they are still trying.

Re: The Cryptocurrency Industry Is 'On the Brink of an Implosion', Research Says

#136

Post by root_axis »

Xylakant wrote: post #113
root_axis wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like an idea for an idle game.

If you enjoy that, I can totally recommend cookie clicker. http://orteil.dashnet.org/cookieclicker/

Yes, a great game. If you like cookieclicker, I think you'll enjoy universal paperclips even more.

http://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html

Re: The Cryptocurrency Industry Is 'On the Brink of an Implosion', Research Says

#137

Post by ramblerouser »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #90
ramblerouser wrote: post #35

>Echoing sentiments of mainstream economists Yea, Paul Krugman has been saying "Bitcoin is doomed" since 2012. He'll always be wrong because this is all politically motivated. The banking and political establishment are scared shitless by alternative currencies, crypto or otherwise. Google the "Liberty Dollar". Mouth pieces for the financial industry like Bloomberg will attack alternatives to the petrodollar no matte…

Not until you can pay your taxes in crypto (or live in a 0% tax world) will they really be afraid. Failure to pay taxes is punishable by prison, so there will be demand for dollars.

If that were the only thing backing the dollar, it would be worth a lot less than it is.

Re: The Cryptocurrency Industry Is 'On the Brink of an Implosion', Research Says

#138

Post by sneak »

moduspol wrote: post #75
School-Cotton wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edit: I calculated this wrong, please ignore this comment

Let us know how you get it through airport security.

I have carried several kilograms of gold through TSA screening checkpoints a half dozen times. I know that GP pre-edit was talking about $50mm but it is practically quite straightforward and entirely legal to fly domestically in the US with $0.5-1mm in gold. The risk of civil asset forfeiture is another matter but in 6-8 times I have never personally felt at risk from such.

Re: The Cryptocurrency Industry Is 'On the Brink of an Implosion', Research Says

#139

Post by beager »

fastball wrote: post #28
coliveira wrote: post #24

Bitcoin and similars are the biggest waste of computing power and energy in the history of the planet. It will be nice for the environment when this is all over.

Quite the claim. Obviously you haven't heard of the NSA or the US Military.

I'll bite.

The Department of Defense has a much larger purview than propping up the value of currency. Cryptocurrency doesn't fight terrorism (at best, it's agnostic to terrorism, at worst, it aids it). It won't fight back against the next Pearl Harbor or 9/11. And if your reasoning reduces everything about society to the economic output/currency value of that society, it might be time to get some fresh air.

Additionally, regardless of whether the DoD and all governments of all nations spend more energy or warm the planet faster than global cryptocurrency, cryptocurrency is superfluous—the global financial system was working without it, and could work without it again. Everything cryptocurrency "fixes" about the global financial system could be fixed more surgically, and without a system that exerts so much stress on the planet.

Re: The Cryptocurrency Industry Is 'On the Brink of an Implosion', Research Says

#140

Post by lawn »

roywiggins wrote: post #134
vkou wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The token itself is used to facilitate trading and many investors 'park' their gains in USDT while waiting for the market to reach a certain point or just in between trades, but that means that the token's FX value is set by the open market itself so if there are more buy orders than available USDT the price goes up and if there are more sell orders than demand the price goes down. If the USDT to USD ratio fluctuat…

In theory you could just redeem your money from the Tether issuer, if it's actually backed by USD and they deign to let you redeem them.

AFAIK nobody has ever redeemed any Tether.
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