Live data from Hacker News

$130B wiped off crypto markets in 24 hours

cnbc.com

341–350 of 382 posts

Re: $130B wiped off crypto markets in 24 hours

#341
post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what sense can it ever go on "sale" in the context you keep using? It has no RRP.

Sale in the context I am referring to is comparing to previous prices and future (expected) prices.

You're clearly really into this planet destroying ponzi scheme. You keep referring to something as a "sale". You have no way to compare the current price to the future price. Perhaps you portfolio is still tulip/beanie baby heavy too.

Bitcoin last year required something in the region of 134TWhs to maintain, for 4 transaction per second (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29769892). Some nuclear pose stations generate over that in 20 years of production. The world is burning, but so long as you get more people to join the ponzi scheme, who cares, right, it's a "sale".

Re: $130B wiped off crypto markets in 24 hours

#342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everything is on sale. Such meaningless phrasing. If something wasn't on sale, nobody could buy it. The crypto meme of dips in the price being 'a sale' is key to hooking the uniformed new fish into the great ponzi scheme.

"on sale" and "for sale" have different meanings.

Since bitcoin has no RRP, what is the context in which a retail "sale" makes sense?

Re: $130B wiped off crypto markets in 24 hours

#344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe there isn’t inherent value in currencies, which crypto is not. In assets there is can of course be inherent value (food, a sturdy house, land, etc.).

Its more complicated than that. If you already have some maybe having more of that specific thing is more a hassle than a benefit. Or maybe you don't value that thing at all. What value has a premium steak to a vegan? If your house is on 0.5 acre of land and you add another acre it might great but if you had 500 acres of land and added another one you wound't even notice. Why people tend to value diamonds more than w…

Inherent value is real. Market value of the thing is dependent on a million things but an axe has inherent value in the same way a feeble banknote hasn’t.

The steak has calories and nutrients, regardless of who holds it (until it goes bad). Those are inherently valuable to any human being.

Your secondary point is about the law of diminishing returns, it’s a non-sequitur.

Water is inherently valuable for obvious reasons. Diamonds have inherent value in their hardness although that has little to do with their market value, that isn’t based on inherent value.

The magazine isn't inherently valuable. The information in it could be if one can decipher it. But additional copies of information don't make new information, so one or a hundred magazines, it makes no difference in inherent value.

Re: $130B wiped off crypto markets in 24 hours

#345
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have ~zero inherent value, due to their non-speculation use-cases like payment being very limited or still early development (smart contracts). Unless you count BTC in black market I guess. USD has inherent value, it's the only currency where you can pay taxes in, and if you want to do business with government or government employees - who are ever only paid in USD - you must accept…

Bitcoin’s inherent value is 1. Immutability 2. Limited supply 3. Censorship-resistance 4. Independence of governments, nations, banks, institutions, corporations 5. Accessibility You can also pay your taxes in crypto in many countries. The dollar’s inherent value is very weak and not really tangible. It’s 2022 and people still don’t get that.

> 4. Independence of governments, nations, banks, institutions, corporations

Here is a very direct question:

How does BTC or any other currency protect itself from a goverment?

Imagine that a very big government decides to mine BTCs, will not they control the BTC if they have enough miners? And when I say a government controls imagine: slowing down mining, making it illegal, or limiting it in general population, forcing people to declare thei cryptocurrencies, putting a cap on how much one person can hold personally and forcing you to keep them in an official wallet ...

So how can a crypto currency be independent from a government. The government makes laws and as a citizen you are forced to follow them. Crypto cannot escape this, no matter the technology as the control is not technological, is legal, political and social. It is a social contract that I agree a technology can make it harder to discover some nasty business a citizen is doing, but that does not mean it cannot be control.

Don't get me started on corporations. Imagine Google or AWS decides to use his computing power to mine BTCs or whatever crypto. They will in fact control de market.

Please hypothetically prove me wrong with arguments.

Re: $130B wiped off crypto markets in 24 hours

#346
post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sentiment is exactly why it hasn’t worked yet. Yes bitcoin is a currency hence the “coin” in its name but a lot of crypto is not. This is a failure in education in the community and also a failure by the US government to correctly classify the different types of crypto, and essentially label every blockchain as securities when only a few even approach being securities. In their desire to collect tax, they have c…

I don't see how any of that is relevant. Bitcoin has failed as a currency because owners are hoarding instead of spending. But the fundamental elements of all crypto, namely anonymous transactions over decentralized Blockchain, is the only element that is giving regulators heartburn.

It matters because if it is just a currency then you shouldn’t be taxed on its appreciation. Right now if you say sold $100 in product and now have $100 worth of bitcoin, but then the price of bitcoin doubles and you have $200 in USD of bitcoin, then you have to pay taxes on the $100 appreciation if it is a security. The way it gets taxed will make it a currency or not.

Re: $130B wiped off crypto markets in 24 hours

#347
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could be wrong about this, but I don't know if the energy requirements have anything to do with the price (I.e. demand) for the coin, does it? I was under the impression that the problems that you have to solve get predictably more difficult, and they're more of a function of time than price. But yes, with your point overall I agree, like in 10 years or something it doesn't seem workable without major changes. Wasn…

I guess if the price of BTC goes up, then it makes it more "worth it" to throw more energy at mounting a double-spend attack, and therefore the energy needed to protect the network against such an attack also goes up?

> I guess if the price of BTC goes up, then it makes it more "worth it" to throw more energy at mounting a double-spend attack

Close, but not correct. As the price of BTC goes up, so does the expected reward for mining any given block, making it profitable to spend more electricity in pursuit of the rewards. This results in a net increase in electricity usage as everyone spends more in an attempt to capture the rising value of mining a block successfully.

In practice each miner is incentivized to spend an equal amount in electricity per block (at local rates) as the expected reward per block will net them. This results in a 51% attack being inordinately expensive, which was the point of the original design.

Re: $130B wiped off crypto markets in 24 hours

#348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could be wrong about this, but I don't know if the energy requirements have anything to do with the price (I.e. demand) for the coin, does it? I was under the impression that the problems that you have to solve get predictably more difficult, and they're more of a function of time than price. But yes, with your point overall I agree, like in 10 years or something it doesn't seem workable without major changes. Wasn…

Ah ok, I just looked it up on Wikipedia and understand why I was confused and where the corrections are coming from as well. > Every 2,016 blocks (approximately 14 days given roughly 10 minutes per block), nodes deterministically adjust the difficulty target based on the recent rate of block generation, with the aim of keeping the average time between new blocks at ten minutes. So the changes are made at somewhat pre…

> but the difficulty is adjusted based on demand

Only indirectly. More precisely the difficulty is based on supply of hashing power. If more people hash, the blocks will be minted faster and the difficulty will be adjusted higher at the next re-adjustment. It doesn't really matter if those blocks are actually full or empty, and in fact the system would continue to work if most of the blocks were empty and the trading happened off the chain in exchanges.

I say indirectly because the amount of hashing power on the chain at any given moment is driven by the expected reward per block minted. Nobody wants to run thirsty machines if the cost of electricity exceeds the expected rewards for successfully minting a block. So the number of machines online and is directly proportional to the value of bitcoin, which is driven by consumer demand.

Re: $130B wiped off crypto markets in 24 hours

#349
post #109
post #12

That's all the point of crypto-currencies, they need to go up and down to enable speculation. Pump and make it go up. Dump and it goes down. Someone is cashing the difference. A stable crypto-currency will not attract so much speculative investment.

That isn't the point. They're supposed to be stable to be usable as currency. Using them as an investment class is a very off-label use that has emerged.

It might not be what the inventor imagined, but this is hardly an unexpected outcome. BTC in particular was doomed to either be a forgotten novelty, or the wild speculation instrument we see today. It doesn't really have a good mix of features for a usable currency, and its appeal as a currency is largely limited to those ideologically pre-disposed to value anti-inflation over other limitations.

The limited throughput of the blockchain was always going to be a particularly bad problem.

Re: $130B wiped off crypto markets in 24 hours

#350
post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sentiment is exactly why it hasn’t worked yet. Yes bitcoin is a currency hence the “coin” in its name but a lot of crypto is not. This is a failure in education in the community and also a failure by the US government to correctly classify the different types of crypto, and essentially label every blockchain as securities when only a few even approach being securities. In their desire to collect tax, they have c…

I don't see how any of that is relevant. Bitcoin has failed as a currency because owners are hoarding instead of spending. But the fundamental elements of all crypto, namely anonymous transactions over decentralized Blockchain, is the only element that is giving regulators heartburn.

> But the fundamental elements of all crypto, namely anonymous transactions over decentralized Blockchain, is the only element that is giving regulators heartburn.

No, it's not. See wave after wave of stories about people thinking that crypto was anonymous only to be arrested for drug crimes and tax evasion.

I think the thing that's giving the regulators heartburn is the fear that this is looking like a massive bubble.

Post reply on HN