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Lone Bitcoin Whale Likely Fueled 2017 Price Surge, Study Says

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Re: Lone Bitcoin Whale Likely Fueled 2017 Price Surge, Study Says

#241

Post by robocat »

ppf wrote: post #234
robocat wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You appear to be very rude to me; you asked: > And how is [DAI] pegged? Someone asked the various exchanges very nicely if they could only trade it for $1? This is a forum and people have given you pointers to answers and you are expected to do the work to study on your own. This happens a lot in life.

So far, I have a 20-minute video that is clearly mostly not about the Dai peg, and a link to a very wordy "paper". I skimmed both, and the answer is apparently "oracles", or a price feed from several crypto exchanges. That's a really simple answer, that doesn't need burying in layers of cryptobabble and an attitude that I can only describe as condescending.

It is very good to be critical about the value of information others provide.

But I find your commenting style abrasive; I wouldn't be surprised to see you flagged if you continue with it (especially with multiple examples in a single thread). Occasional outbursts seem to be tolerated here, although frowned upon as unconstructive. I myself personally tend towards abrasive confrontation of facts; but I really value the rules here since they create good discourse and avoid discord.

Re: Lone Bitcoin Whale Likely Fueled 2017 Price Surge, Study Says

#242

Post by briatx »

papreclip wrote: post #184
auiya wrote: post #51

Cryptocurrency is just penny stocks (before regulation). Same pump-and-dump manipulation occurs. Why is this surprising?

Unlike penny stocks, bitcoin won't perform a 100:1 reverse-split and print new coins. Many penny stock gamblers have been burned this way, which is why they're moving into crypto

No, instead Bitcoin forks: https://www.forks.net/list/Bitcoin/

Re: Lone Bitcoin Whale Likely Fueled 2017 Price Surge, Study Says

#243

Post by dTal »

shadowgovt wrote: post #225
marcosdumay wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying that money isn't useful as a storage of value. What I am saying is that there is very little social benefit from that usage. To decide whether a currency is successful, one should look exclusively at its use as a means of exchange, ignoring any use as a storage of value or speculation target.

The social benefit to storing value is de-risking against the future (2). I keep some money in my bank account so that if I need to buy food for a month with no source of income I can(1). If the money in my bank account buys a third as much food tomorrow because it lacks stable value as a store, that's bad for society, because if I'm going to starve to death, I might as well use the remaining energy I have to burn so…

Yes, storing value is useful, but not storing value doesn't make a currency useless. You can always store value in other ways, by purchasing assets - such as food, or another currency.

It's worth noting that people tend to like to do this anyway, even when the currency is already pretty stable - because a house you can rap your knuckles against feels like a more secure store of value than numbers in a bank.

Re: Lone Bitcoin Whale Likely Fueled 2017 Price Surge, Study Says

#244

Post by neiman »

donkeyd wrote: post #227
neiman wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also find it hard to believe that the whole cryptoboom of 2017 can be narrowed down to one dimensional Tether-Bitcoin analysis.

It's probably a combination of manipulation on an incredible scale and the media attention this surge caused. We all know multiple people who FOMO'ed into crypto and lost most of their money. So that surge definitely wasn't all manipulation, but I'm not at all surprised that manipulation was what triggered that madness.

That's probably true, but hardly unique for Bitcoin imo.

Re: Lone Bitcoin Whale Likely Fueled 2017 Price Surge, Study Says

#245

Post by papln »

this_user wrote: post #145
clarkmoody wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All money has value because people demand to hold it. In a hyperinflation scenario, people are dumping the currency for goods as fast as they can. They are using the money as a transactional medium only: get paid -> rush to buy goods to capture the value of your labor in something that won't be worthless tomorrow. Dumping worthless paper currency is a form of speculation that the value won't unexpectedly rise before…

> The "store of value" proposition of Bitcoin is that it can't be printed by a central bank, so you can be sure that your holdings relative to the size of the money supply cannot be diluted. Except that's not true. The block reward consists of newly created coins of which there are 1800 per day. Currently, that is a 3.7% annual inflation rate in supply, which is far more than the 2% target most central banks from dev…

You have to also consider the (hard to measure) rate at which Bitcoin is accidentally lost or intentionally destroyed, which is a deflationary pressure.

"2%" is target for the growth in the ratio of money supply to product supply, not the money supply itself.

BTC could be wildly above or below 3.7% (+/- deflation due to destruction) based on the growth of the GDP of the BTC-financed economy.

In short, those two metrics are just not comparable types. BTC has no "target" inflation. At best, you could measure BTC's observed inflation.

Re: Lone Bitcoin Whale Likely Fueled 2017 Price Surge, Study Says

#246

Post by damon_c »

maeln wrote: post #160
kobasa wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thankfully your circle of acquaintances isn't even remotely close to representing the wider world out there and the plethora of legitimate use cases that it presents for all sorts of people in this world. Just last week a friend of mine from another country was suppose to send me a few hundred bucks. He could have sent it 'traditionally' but he would have been harassed about why he was sending money abroad and wasted…

Yes but you don't end up with the few hundred bucks, you end up with Ethereum. If you need to pay for something using euro, dollar, ... you going to need to convert it which will include fees. Plus, I don't want to defend the banking industry, but there is often two reason why transferring money is a bit cumbersome with banks: Scam and terrorism/money laundring. The first thing is, the average Joe cannot help himself…

>Yes but you don't end up with the few hundred bucks, you end up with Ethereum. If you need to pay for something using euro, dollar, ... you going to need to convert it which will include fees.

I one has dollars and wants to pay for something using Euro or anything else, one will need to convert it which will include fees.

Re: Lone Bitcoin Whale Likely Fueled 2017 Price Surge, Study Says

#247

Post by papln »

shadowgovt wrote: post #225
marcosdumay wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying that money isn't useful as a storage of value. What I am saying is that there is very little social benefit from that usage. To decide whether a currency is successful, one should look exclusively at its use as a means of exchange, ignoring any use as a storage of value or speculation target.

The social benefit to storing value is de-risking against the future (2). I keep some money in my bank account so that if I need to buy food for a month with no source of income I can(1). If the money in my bank account buys a third as much food tomorrow because it lacks stable value as a store, that's bad for society, because if I'm going to starve to death, I might as well use the remaining energy I have to burn so…

Money should have a predictable value, not a stable vale. That's why most economies target 2% inflation. If money had a stable value, then saving would be riskless, until the accumulation of saved money increased would put increased pressure on the expected GDP until that "stability" collapsed catastrophically (as in the Great Depression)

Re: Lone Bitcoin Whale Likely Fueled 2017 Price Surge, Study Says

#248

Post by arcticbull »

iagovar wrote: post #2

The more I know about cryptos, the more I remain skeptical. The only people I know that uses cryptos seriously are acquaintancies from latin america, and none of them for storing value, with the exception of Venezuelans. Not even argentinians, that just buy as many dollars they can. IMO this is a thread worth reading on this topic: https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/dj2jro/the_large...

A single transaction costs 2 weeks average wages in Venezuela so it's highly unlikely they're using it.

Re: Lone Bitcoin Whale Likely Fueled 2017 Price Surge, Study Says

#249

Post by arcticbull »

jacquesm wrote: post #31
iagovar wrote: post #2

The more I know about cryptos, the more I remain skeptical. The only people I know that uses cryptos seriously are acquaintancies from latin america, and none of them for storing value, with the exception of Venezuelans. Not even argentinians, that just buy as many dollars they can. IMO this is a thread worth reading on this topic: https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/dj2jro/the_large...

I've used it seriously. Paying people in countries without a functional banking system is a real problem and bitcoin nicely helped with that. I also collected some donations for reocities.com which helped to keep it alive. I never bought any, just mined a bit and I never sold any either.

It's not a real problem that Bitcoin solves. A single transaction costs multiple weeks wages in one of these less-functional countries (and wastes as much power as it takes to run an average American home for 20 days). They have social problems that need social solutions, not magic beans that live in their computers.
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