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$7.6B in crypto long positions liquidated in 1 hour as Bitcoin plunges to $52k

theblockcrypto.com

71–80 of 111 posts

Re: $7.6B in crypto long positions liquidated in 1 hour as Bitcoin plunges to $52k

#71

What I hate about Bitcoin is that I have absolutely no idea if this is 1) a good dip to buy, or 2) the start of a much bigger crash. Everything I understand about the topic and the world at large tells me it should be #2, but in retrospect it always winds up being #1. Am I passing up free money today? Or am I smart not to gamble in such an obviously rigged game? Will I look back years from now longingly and wish that…

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Re: $7.6B in crypto long positions liquidated in 1 hour as Bitcoin plunges to $52k

#72
post #11

What I hate about Bitcoin is that I have absolutely no idea if this is 1) a good dip to buy, or 2) the start of a much bigger crash. Everything I understand about the topic and the world at large tells me it should be #2, but in retrospect it always winds up being #1. Am I passing up free money today? Or am I smart not to gamble in such an obviously rigged game? Will I look back years from now longingly and wish that…

How is that different from the stock market ? Maybe you have 'more ideas' but that would not prevent you to be wrong. In both case nobody can predict what will happen next

I agree, I think at the end of the day, every asset gets 100% of it's value based on speculation. Though it may not be obvious.

Let's say that a stock has value because of some combination of: 1. The underlying's earnings/cash flow, and 2. Speculation (I want to buy stocks that I think other people will want to buy)

But if you think about it, #1 is also just speculation. Because at the end of the day, you are risking $X to make $Y. You are placing a bet that tomorrow, some other people will come to value this stock (perhaps based on earnings) higher than you do today.

So basically, speculation has always been a thing and there are enduring assets whose price is more or less agreed to be entirely based on speculation and speculation alone (e.g. gold).

Re: $7.6B in crypto long positions liquidated in 1 hour as Bitcoin plunges to $52k

#73
post #37
post #35

I'm waiting for a Tether collapse to create my long position, but I'm starting to feel like Michael Burry in the Big Short: the market can remain irrational for a long time.

They have a deadline in about a month to reveal what exactly their "reserves" are comprised of, could be the moment.

Did anything changed about tether having to reveal anything about their reserves?

This has been going on for years, and it seemed that nobody was able to force them to prove anything.

Re: $7.6B in crypto long positions liquidated in 1 hour as Bitcoin plunges to $52k

#74
post #28
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that different from the stock market ? Maybe you have 'more ideas' but that would not prevent you to be wrong. In both case nobody can predict what will happen next

The difference is that stocks can be "valued" whereas crypto and other assets that lack a revenue stream can only be priced.

Yeah it "can" be valued but we can also see that it doesn't really seem like valuations are connected to actual company value

Re: $7.6B in crypto long positions liquidated in 1 hour as Bitcoin plunges to $52k

#75
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that different from the stock market ? Maybe you have 'more ideas' but that would not prevent you to be wrong. In both case nobody can predict what will happen next

But at least if a stock goes down, there will be some reason you can point to after the fact as a cause. So you can at least make a hypothesis, test it, and see how it turns out. You might be wrong in any number of ways, but there's usually going to be some traceable logical connection between events that happen that you can get information about afterwards (sales go up, sales go down, etc.) and the effect on the pri…

Is that true over short time periods for stocks though? I get the sense that publications / news media can come up for reasoning on why a stock went up or down after it occurred, but I'm not convinced it's truly causation in most cases, but instead just correlation that they came up with.

In general, I think trying to reason about assets over short periods of times typically comes down to emotions rather than fundamentals. Over longer periods of time, fundamentals can start to have some affect.

For crypto, I do think there is a narrative that can be pointed to for the run up over the past year - a mix of defi projects that are actually getting traction, scaling solutions for Ethereum allowing it to catch up to demand, and a general inflation scare that drives interest in fixed supply assets not controlled by a central party.

Re: $7.6B in crypto long positions liquidated in 1 hour as Bitcoin plunges to $52k

#76
post #55

All crypto coins are fundamentally the same thing, easy to create or fork, and not backed by anything permanent like a government, so the value of them should approach zero over time. There's nothing supporting BTC's price, and I'm of the mindset there are shenanigans occurring to keep it afloat.

You can say the same thing with most trading cards but there always seems to be some second hand market that no one understands.

Trading cards have different qualities and actual scarcity though--X number of one card is made, and X is quite low. Crypto is one of thousands of references to imaginary numbers held in a distributed data structure.

Re: $7.6B in crypto long positions liquidated in 1 hour as Bitcoin plunges to $52k

#77
post #11

What I hate about Bitcoin is that I have absolutely no idea if this is 1) a good dip to buy, or 2) the start of a much bigger crash. Everything I understand about the topic and the world at large tells me it should be #2, but in retrospect it always winds up being #1. Am I passing up free money today? Or am I smart not to gamble in such an obviously rigged game? Will I look back years from now longingly and wish that…

How is that different from the stock market ? Maybe you have 'more ideas' but that would not prevent you to be wrong. In both case nobody can predict what will happen next

The stock market is backed by over a century of use and ownership in a profitable company, so we can at least assume it will trend upward. Bitcoin is backed by the idea that it will be more valuable in the future, we have no idea if a permanent crash will occur.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory

Re: $7.6B in crypto long positions liquidated in 1 hour as Bitcoin plunges to $52k

#78
post #73
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have a deadline in about a month to reveal what exactly their "reserves" are comprised of, could be the moment.

Did anything changed about tether having to reveal anything about their reserves? This has been going on for years, and it seemed that nobody was able to force them to prove anything.

It's part of their recent NY settlement:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-23/crypto-ex...

>New York officials, who originally began investigating Bitfinex in 2019, will receive quarterly reports on composition of Tether’s reserves for the next two years. The companies will end all trading activity with New Yorkers.

That starts in about a month

Re: $7.6B in crypto long positions liquidated in 1 hour as Bitcoin plunges to $52k

#79

It’s interesting and a little surprising to me that people selling almost $8 billion in BTC found ready buyers such that the market clearing price only dropped 10%. That’s a lot of money to move, and implies that a lot of other people saw this as a chance to buy a dip.

Or look at it this way, 8 billion gives you a lot of buying power if you're going 10x+ long. How much of this market is propped up by these speculators

Re: $7.6B in crypto long positions liquidated in 1 hour as Bitcoin plunges to $52k

#80

It’s interesting and a little surprising to me that people selling almost $8 billion in BTC found ready buyers such that the market clearing price only dropped 10%. That’s a lot of money to move, and implies that a lot of other people saw this as a chance to buy a dip.

Yes, for someone whose prior has been: “The price will crater and most people will lose interest”, I think that the thousands of hours of developer time and institutional interest is probably starting to pay of in terms of more mature markets. I still have problems with the idea that people are able to pick the correct winners. When the blockchain finally gets its killer mainstream app, why not do a new ICO on a rest…

Because all of the money and users that you hope use your killer mainstream app have to come from somewhere - a brand new blockchain makes your app that much harder to launch.

In addition, your killer mainstream app may only be useful inside of an existing ecosystem. Ex: Uniswap is pretty useless if you don't have any assets that people want to trade.

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