Live data from Hacker News

Lone Bitcoin Whale Likely Fueled 2017 Price Surge, Study Says

bloomberg.com

271–280 of 377 posts

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

#271
post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the most I could send without network liquidity issues?

I don't know the answers to this strange question. What's the most you can send to another bank account without compliance issues?

What do you mean by "compliance" issues? If you meant that the sum of money you send cannot trigger someone, somewhere to check to make sure the transaction is legit, and we're assuming a transfer from a "normal" bank to another, then I would guess on the order of $10,000. But companies and organizations routinely transfer millions and billions between normal banks. Yes, the transactions may cause someone or many someones to investigate, but the transfers still succeed.

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

#272
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.

I’ve also used bitcoin as a faster and cheaper than banks/western union means of transferring funds between my brother in Australia and myself in Europe.

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

#273
post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody said that back then, no. They said there had been an over-exuberant market with people throwing stupid money at any old idea, but nobody was saying "the internet is a bust" or even "we don't know the use-cases" because there were a ton of other useful, successful things going on with it. You said it yourself - you're too young to actually know a lot about that, but you use it to bolster your arguments anyway.

> but nobody was saying "the internet is a bust" Many people were saying this, Paul Krugman (one of the leading economists) went as far as comparing the internet to the fax machine: "The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in 'Metcalfe's law'–which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants–becomes apparent: most peopl…

> Many people were saying this, Paul Krugman (one of the leading economists) went as far as comparing the internet to the fax machine:

And he caught a bunch of shit for it, even at the time. You keep trying to conflate critics of Bitcoin, many of whom have technical & finance backgrounds, with the largely non-technical crowd that didn't understand the web back in the 90s.

> I'm too young to live through it, but luckily I studied it in university :-)

What's the name of this "history of the internet" course(s) you took? The most historical context I ever got consisted of maybe a few intro paragraphs on Arpanet in my networking 101 class.

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

#274
post #268
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the flash crash of stock market by a single individual? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Flash_Crash

Your source says that the cause of the flash crash is unknown and not shown to be caused by a single individual.

Thanks for pointing that out. I missed that part. Anyway in one report it says that "high-frequency traders did not cause the Flash Crash, but contributed to it by demanding immediacy ahead of other market participants."

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

#275
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the flash crash of stock market by a single individual? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Flash_Crash

Yes, what about it?

Just pointing out that market manipulation might also happen in heavy regulated and established markets with much more stability and trust than cryptocurrency exchanges.

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

#276
post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have an adversarial mindset (which is absolutely healthy) and want to understand it well enough to not immediately come up with counterarguments whose only valid reply is "RTFM", yes, it takes at least 20 minutes. But regardless, I'll bite. DAI has a couple of intended use-cases. I will focus here on the "stable coin" asset, meaning you should be able to expect it's value to not go up or down over time. It is…

So in short, a price feed from several crypto exchanges. Thanks!

No, did you even read what he wrote? Price feeds are used in the system, but the whole system does not boil down to "price feeds". I am not even sure what that could mean.

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

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe not Bitcoin, but there are other cryptocurrencies that actually prioritize low transaction fees. For example the next block fees on Bitcoin Cash is currently $0.0014.[0]

[0]: https://bitcoinfees.cash/

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

#278
post #16

BitCoin was mentioned at nearly every party at the end of 2017. Google Trends showed massive growth in the search term. Many unsophisticated investors poured money in solely based on past performance. It was not a single whale. It had all the hallmarks of bubble like tulip mania or Internet stocks in 1999.

That attention was generated by the skyrocketing price, though. No one in the general public or news media really cared until it had already shot up substantially.

The study in question is alleging the runup from around 10k-20k was because of one guy. The media had definitely caught on beforehand.

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

#279
post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Which doesn't in any way alter the supply of Bitcoin.

It's like saying I would dilute the value of the US dollar by printing billions of my own "fork dollar".

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

#280
post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are companies offering completely useless software 'solutions' that don't even do their useless task well and many of them have stock prices that have grown 100% + since the bailouts, even if they haven't updated their technology since before then. How is the value of BTC more fake than that?

The difference is that if management of the average publicly traded stock shopped it around, they could probably find a buyer for 50% or more of current market cap. Maybe not for the biggest companies like Amazon and Apple. If a substantial fraction of BTC owners tried to exit, they'd have more trouble getting close to nominal value.

For something like this a metric known as enterprise value is used. Assets - cash + debt AKA the takeover price. You can find these numbers on the company's balance sheet. The average company is traded at something like 3.5x their book value (Assets - debt). The market value of a company is likewise some multiple of their EV.
Post reply on HN