Live data from Hacker News

Bitcoin’s plunge intensifies, tanks 30% to $30k in single day

cnbc.com

131–140 of 211 posts

Re: Bitcoin’s plunge intensifies, tanks 30% to $30k in single day

#131
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everyone in the world lives in an economy that has 4% YoY inflation. And not everyone has access to financial services or a developed banking sector

If you don't have a financial service / developed banking sector, how do you get your local currency into BTC and back? Mt. Gox proved that you can't just trust random exchanges. Even in the best of times, the exchange can get hacked and all the holdings disappear.

It is not that easy to do even in many countries with a developed banking sector. Bitcoin is very impractical as a currency.

Re: Bitcoin’s plunge intensifies, tanks 30% to $30k in single day

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He also cares about Tesla stock price though, and that is significantly down today since they have so much Bitcoin holdings.

i get that Tesla is revolutionary in the car industry but it's stock pretty much goes up and down like a cryptocurrency. I have a strong feeling that people who love tesla stock also own crypto.

Is it revolutionary?

What is the innovation behind it?

Re: Bitcoin’s plunge intensifies, tanks 30% to $30k in single day

#133
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Bitcoing drives renewable energy" is one of the most nonsensical arguments I've ever heard. It's not like the components for solar panels and windmills grow on trees, and bitcoin miners aren't going to just stop expanding wherever there is cheap power, so it won't get used for anything besides mining more bitcoins. It's like saying that we should deliberately cause more pandemics to drive interest in vaccine researc…

Wait until you hear all the energy it takes to run the current financial system, or the energy it takes to run the worlds gaming consoles, or any other stuff that you have personally found to be more useful than crypto currency. If bitcoin frees us from financial tyranny it's all worth it.

> Wait until you hear all the energy it takes to run the current financial system

Every Bitcoin defender repeats this line, but I never see any numbers. Whatever the energy use is, it's provably less than Bitcoin by any metric like transaction volume or market cap, by the simple fact that if you were to scale up Bitcoin's energy use for comparison to the world financial system, it would use magnitudes more energy than humans produce.

Re: Bitcoin’s plunge intensifies, tanks 30% to $30k in single day

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is pure garbage. The problem bitcoin solves, a distributed ledger, is one that's simply solved with a ledger over a trust network. In otherwords, this is a "solution" that is burning TWh of energy doing something global banks accomplish with kWh of power. All the power funneled into BTC would be far better spent doing anything useful. From electrolysis to protein folding. Also, it should be noted that shiny rock…

>over a trust network There's your problem, you don't understand that bitcoin is trustless and the worlds first implementation of it's kind. If you can't understand why that's important I don't have the time to convince you.

lol. Oh I understand what bitcoin is, I just think it has no value. You are arguing that bogosort, because it's the first sort of it's kind to use a random number generator, MUST have some value! After all, look at all the watts it burns!

Just because someone does something first, doesn't mean that thing is useful or good.

Re: Bitcoin’s plunge intensifies, tanks 30% to $30k in single day

#135
post #2

Any evidence for why or how this is happening? Who are the sellers?

According to [0] Tether has to file their first report today disclosing the composition of their reserves as a condition of their settlement. I haven't verified that, but if true the sell-off could be driven by insiders and/or smart money. [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/nfv8vg/the_te...

Tether has already admitted that their reserves consist of under 3% cash.

Re: Bitcoin’s plunge intensifies, tanks 30% to $30k in single day

#136
post #129

other than trying to get the money of suckers, I've never understood the point of bitcoin. no currency, digital or not, can be removed from the world's activities. why would you ever want something that could plunge 30% in a day? even if it went up 5 billion percent, then what? everyone sells and it goes down? what's the point? it's like the most zero-sum activity imaginable. edit: I'm sincerely wondering what the va…

Zoom out. Look at the performance on a larger scale. Are you making the same claims about stock options? They can plunge much more than 30% in a day, but is there no value in them? Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are still in their infancy. Compare to other assets in their infancy. This might not be a great comparison but think about real estate. In it's infancy raiders or militaries could wipe out the value of your rea…

It sounds like you’re arguing crypto is a commodity and not a currency.

I think OP is saying “why would you want a currency that could lose 30% of its value in a day”

Which I agree with wholeheartedly.

Re: Bitcoin’s plunge intensifies, tanks 30% to $30k in single day

#138
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Bitcoing drives renewable energy" is one of the most nonsensical arguments I've ever heard. It's not like the components for solar panels and windmills grow on trees, and bitcoin miners aren't going to just stop expanding wherever there is cheap power, so it won't get used for anything besides mining more bitcoins. It's like saying that we should deliberately cause more pandemics to drive interest in vaccine researc…

Wait until you hear all the energy it takes to run the current financial system, or the energy it takes to run the worlds gaming consoles, or any other stuff that you have personally found to be more useful than crypto currency. If bitcoin frees us from financial tyranny it's all worth it.

Fiat money is trusted in good part because there are backed by institutions, mainly governments in turn are backed by armies (real soldiers and policemen). All this uses a fair amount of energy, and there is no other way. "Cryptos" are in their infancy and there are already ways for them to dissipate less energy.

Re: Bitcoin’s plunge intensifies, tanks 30% to $30k in single day

#139
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait until you hear all the energy it takes to run the current financial system, or the energy it takes to run the worlds gaming consoles, or any other stuff that you have personally found to be more useful than crypto currency. If bitcoin frees us from financial tyranny it's all worth it.

> Wait until you hear all the energy it takes to run the current financial system Every Bitcoin defender repeats this line, but I never see any numbers. Whatever the energy use is, it's provably less than Bitcoin by any metric like transaction volume or market cap, by the simple fact that if you were to scale up Bitcoin's energy use for comparison to the world financial system, it would use magnitudes more energy tha…

The key to your misunderstand here is that the proof of work hashing is decoupled from transaction volume or market cap.

Re: Bitcoin’s plunge intensifies, tanks 30% to $30k in single day

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>over a trust network There's your problem, you don't understand that bitcoin is trustless and the worlds first implementation of it's kind. If you can't understand why that's important I don't have the time to convince you.

lol. Oh I understand what bitcoin is, I just think it has no value. You are arguing that bogosort, because it's the first sort of it's kind to use a random number generator, MUST have some value! After all, look at all the watts it burns! Just because someone does something first, doesn't mean that thing is useful or good.

>I just think it has no value.

Don't use it then, but why would you also disparage the millions of people who are happily finding value in it?

>Just because someone does something first, doesn't mean that thing is useful or good.

Well done creating your amazing straw man.

Post reply on HN