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Bitcoin and cryptocurrency prices have fallen sharply over the last few days

forbes.com

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Re: Bitcoin and cryptocurrency prices have fallen sharply over the last few days

#141

Post by krick »

ErikAugust wrote: post #11

One of the supposed benefits of holding cryptocurrency that has been peddled is that it is a strong hedge against a down turn in traditional securities. Here we have a new, real data point to the contrary.

If you mean the OPEC thing: this really is a wild guess, I'm not convinced in the least. And insane volatility of Bitcoin is old news, anybody who said otherwise obviously never looked at the trading charts in his whole life. In fact, it's volatility is the main real reason it's interesting to the majority of BTC users: they only need it to speculate. Nobody really buys anything for BTC.

And other cryptocurrencies are still very much tied to BTC, so when BTCUSD falls dramatically, they do as well.

Re: Bitcoin and cryptocurrency prices have fallen sharply over the last few days

#142

Post by ggffryuuj »

nonamenoslogan wrote: post #140
chillwaves wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please do not comment as if this were Reddit.

Thank you, I hadn't realized you were appointed the comment police. For the record--I usually reserve comments with detailed technical jargon and buzzwords specifically for Reddit; I just don't follow any magic-internet-money sub-reddits.

Can someone please flag this person?

Re: Bitcoin and cryptocurrency prices have fallen sharply over the last few days

#143

Post by duskwuff »

unhashable wrote: post #115
duskwuff wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moreover, even if centralized banking stops functioning, individual banks can continue operations. This isn't true of Bitcoin -- if the network is partitioned, there is no mechanism for it to be resynchronized without massive rollbacks.

Bitcoin would work similarly, but with far less trust in centralized institutions. Today, central banks acts as a final settlement later upon which the rest of the financial system is built (banks, credit, etc). This makes it impossible for the financial system to “shut off”. In a Bitcoin world, the main ledger would act as a final settlement layer, and local lightning networks act as the layers on top providing paym…

> In a Bitcoin world, the main ledger would act as a final settlement layer

Keeping the "main ledger" functional requires miners to have reliable communications with each other; I believe Lightning nodes need an up-to-date view of the ledger as well.

> All transactions would be batched and only get settled so often (once an hour, globally, for example).

There is no mechanism in Bitcoin which would provide this functionality. It's not clear that it'd even be possible without a major rework of the protocol.

Re: Bitcoin and cryptocurrency prices have fallen sharply over the last few days

#144

Post by sparkie »

dragonwriter wrote: post #117
unhashable wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin would work similarly, but with far less trust in centralized institutions. Today, central banks acts as a final settlement later upon which the rest of the financial system is built (banks, credit, etc). This makes it impossible for the financial system to “shut off”. In a Bitcoin world, the main ledger would act as a final settlement layer, and local lightning networks act as the layers on top providing paym…

> Bitcoin would work similarly, but with far less trust in centralized institutions. And far more trust in anonymous, unaccountable actors, largely foreign from the perspective of any given trusting party. Those centralized actors have, in the case of major states, have well established trust and accountability systems that maintain that trust. Bitcoin not only doesn't have that, it is fundamentally premised on preve…

In Bitcoin, you trust only your own node. You don't place any trust in particular third-parties - you only accept communication from a large number of randomized nodes in hope that at least one of them is honest, which is sufficient to reveal the dishonesty of all others. (ie, you have not been eclipse attacked).

You then need to have confidence that humans will always act in their own self-interest, and that you are not important enough that a sufficiently large portion of participants would act against their own interest in attempt to try and scam you.

Acting against your own interest means deliberately losing money by trying to coerce a large number of economic participants to act against their own self-interest in order to benefit you.

Re: Bitcoin and cryptocurrency prices have fallen sharply over the last few days

#145

Post by companyhen »

gwbas1c wrote: post #126
jaltekruse wrote: post #48

I still assume it is possible and likely that something like cryptocurrency will eventually become incredibly valuable, but I see that happening only when technical and social hurdles are overcome to make it as widespread and scalable as the current credit card system for everyday transactions. Unfortunately for current cryptocurrencies, they just don't have what it takes to compete with decades of trust to get every…

> I still assume it is possible and likely that something like cryptocurrency will eventually become incredibly valuable Probably, but whatever it is, it won't be Bitcoin and some magic software updates won't make your Bitcoins turn into whatever cryptocurrency-ish thing wins. The other thing to remember is that cash doesn't appreciate in value. (In the US, we typically have 4% inflation every year.) If a cryptocurre…

https://grin.mw

https://grinflation.com/

1 Grin per second, forever.

Re: Bitcoin and cryptocurrency prices have fallen sharply over the last few days

#146

Post by shawnz »

d-d wrote: post #128

It will be interesting seeing how cryptocurrency performs during and after worldwide panic surrounding the coronavirus, the fed printing a trillion USD and so forth. I was astonished when Bitcoin rose above $30 so calling it a "crash" at $6,000 might be somewhat accurate short-term, but anything over $0.00 for randomized bits on a hard drive will always seem bananas to me.

> anything over $0.00 for randomized bits on a hard drive will always seem bananas to me.

I'll happily buy the randomized bits making up your debit card number and PIN for $0.00

Re: Bitcoin and cryptocurrency prices have fallen sharply over the last few days

#147

Post by nonamenoslogan »

ggffryuuj wrote: post #142
nonamenoslogan wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you, I hadn't realized you were appointed the comment police. For the record--I usually reserve comments with detailed technical jargon and buzzwords specifically for Reddit; I just don't follow any magic-internet-money sub-reddits.

Can someone please flag this person?

Ahh, zero sense of humor. Sorry to step on your -6 karma and bitcoin-lust with my pithy comments.

Re: Bitcoin and cryptocurrency prices have fallen sharply over the last few days

#148

Post by Barrin92 »

sparkie wrote: post #139
Barrin92 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>so my statement still holds. No, it doesn't because not every form of belief is equally justified. If you believe your currency has value because the Aztec god of fertility has bestowed value upon it then you'll have a problem when you figure it that not everyone agrees. The American government and the American economy underpinning the dollar however represent vital goods and services as well as security provided an…

> The American government and the American economy underpinning the dollar however represent vital goods and services as well as security provided and have an army to back it up so the chance that it magically loses all its value is just about nil. It doesn't need to lose all of its value at once. It just needs to lose some value frequently enough that some people decide "hold on a minute, this is an unjust tax I'm f…

everybody already understands that the dollar is subject to long term inflation which is why people put their money into stocks or pension funds and don't put cash under the mattress for 80 years. The predictable change in the value of the dollar is priced in and desirable for many macro-economic reasons and irrelevant to consumers.

As far as the dollar value is concerned you care if the milk and the orange juice cost roughly as much this month as they do next month, there is this weird crypto and gold obsession with long sterm steady value that's not relevant at all for fiat currency.

Re: Bitcoin and cryptocurrency prices have fallen sharply over the last few days

#149

Post by shiado »

sparkie wrote: post #129
shiado wrote: post #43

I have made a large amount of money trading cryptocurrency over the years. This correlation is spurious at best. These stories are so wrong it is hilarious. The price action of crypto is unlike any other market. What we have seen over the last month is massive legs down caused by whales flooding the market at specific times. These bart patterns are so obvious I can't believe people can't draw these incredibly easy to…

Ok, this is completely silly. No miners have the luxury of the price dropping, as it could make all of them insolvent. They depend on Bitcoin's exchange rate increasing so that the revenue generated from the block reward exceeds the cost of electricity to run the miners. They're not working large enough profit margins to take such risks. It's non-workable anyway. If any miner has to drop out of the race, they still h…

Long term large scale miners with massive reserves of BTC (you could literally get 50BTC for ten minutes of CPU mining on your laptop when BTC started) can crash the price on a whim with a small percentage of their reserves due to the lack of volume in the BTC market in combination with the liquidations from ridiculous amounts of leverage people are using in crypto (binance and bitmex are >100x to unqualified investors) which causes accelerated declines when the price drops even slightly. They can use this as a short term strategy to force miners with less profitable operations (higher electricity costs, worse equipment) to liquidate their coins at a lower price and cease mining temporarily allowing the more profitable miners to enjoy less competition and the ability to buy the coins at a reduced price. Even if the operation starts up again after the market pumps the superior miner has increased their proportion of coins allowing them to swing the market even greater, and sell coins to get better equipment (the newest bitmain miners), and the bagholders who bought the worse equipment or have more expensive electricity naively set themselves up for failure. The entire crypto space relies on long term pumping and dumping as well as short term "barting" to liquidate leveraged traders. I didn't even mention bitmain patent fuckery and the likely collusion of key players with the BTC devs to purposely not scale BTC to increase transaction fees which benefits miners. The whole thing is a disgusting mess and I don't touch it anymore. Do not fuck with cryptocurrency. It is entirely bought and paid for.

Re: Bitcoin and cryptocurrency prices have fallen sharply over the last few days

#150

Post by unhashable »

Ididntdothis wrote: post #123
unhashable wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally. Bitcoin is not a medium of exchange (cash). It’s not useful for payments. Bitcoin is currently a bet that digital scarcity will bring back the concept of saving (SoV) so that people don’t have to invest in equities just to protect their purchasing power. Only the people making this bet will be affected if Bitcoin fails. The monetary system will keep moving forward unaffected. If Bitcoin succeeds, eventually…

“Only the people making this bet will be affected if Bitcoin fails” Which means that it’s just a gamble of some insiders.

Does it feel like I’m arguing that point? I’m not.

Speculation is by definition gambling. Investing is also speculation. You have a thesis, and you make returns if that plays out. You lose capital when you are wrong.

Also, I'm not sure what you mean by "insiders" - most of the world can purchase Bitcoin, the software is OSS, the network inspectable, and the evolving thesis and narrative is fully available online.

Bitcoin is the people's money.

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