Live data from Hacker News

Bitcoin tumbles below $70k, wiping out gains since Trump 2024 win

reuters.com

11–20 of 67 posts

Re: Bitcoin tumbles below $70k, wiping out gains since Trump 2024 win

#11
Russia-Ukraine war is being wound down and Russian sanctions will be lifted probably in the next 1-2 months. Crypto is the financial tissue that connects sanctioned entities to non-sanctioned Western banks. What you are seeing is Russians and other sanctioned entities dumping their coins since they won't be needed soon.

Re: Bitcoin tumbles below $70k, wiping out gains since Trump 2024 win

#15
post #8
post #5

The Bitcoin ecosystem, folks looking at it as an investment / get rich pathway, all the scam / poorly run companies, straight up crime ... really seems to fly in the face of the whitepaper and presumed ethos.

To a first approximation ~nobody who "invests" in crypto has read a whitepaper or considered the ethos. It's one of the bugs/features of crypto.

I don't doubt it, but the sort of "I'm escaping the financial systems that is stacked against me" attitudes are prevalent among folks, the ethos lives on in a weird sort of way ... but really individuals are going to a worse place more often than not.

Re: Bitcoin tumbles below $70k, wiping out gains since Trump 2024 win

#16
post #5

The Bitcoin ecosystem, folks looking at it as an investment / get rich pathway, all the scam / poorly run companies, straight up crime ... really seems to fly in the face of the whitepaper and presumed ethos.

The ethos assumes a world in which Bitcoin has become widely accepted as a currency and reached a stable exchange rate.

That world wasn't necessarily impossible. Imagine that the US reconceived the dollar as a coin, and everybody simply accepted it as a replacement currency. Potentially, a very large bank or credit card company could have done that with a stablecoin pegged to the dollar.

But that's not what happened. Bitcoin was never adopted as a currency so there was no way to anchor its value. Infinite shitcoins popped up, making cryptocurrency as a whole the most inflationary system in the universe (because anybody can mint their own coins). The whitepaper never considered that possibility.

It's still possible that the US government could decide to start taking BTC for payment of taxes, at some fixed exchange rate. That would anchor the price of BTC, and the whitepaper ethos could find a foothold.

Re: Bitcoin tumbles below $70k, wiping out gains since Trump 2024 win

#17

Bitcoin goes up, bitcoin goes down, you can't explain that. Seriously though, bitcoin has always been highly volatile, is this really a story?

You can kind of explain it in four year halving/hype cycles. A downturn around now is what you'd expect if it keeps that up so not much of a story really.

Re: Bitcoin tumbles below $70k, wiping out gains since Trump 2024 win

#18
post #16
post #5

The Bitcoin ecosystem, folks looking at it as an investment / get rich pathway, all the scam / poorly run companies, straight up crime ... really seems to fly in the face of the whitepaper and presumed ethos.

The ethos assumes a world in which Bitcoin has become widely accepted as a currency and reached a stable exchange rate. That world wasn't necessarily impossible. Imagine that the US reconceived the dollar as a coin, and everybody simply accepted it as a replacement currency. Potentially, a very large bank or credit card company could have done that with a stablecoin pegged to the dollar. But that's not what happened.…

Good point. It's strange as it seems like using Bitcoin to buy things is structurally difficult anyway. If that should have held the price stable ... it isn't very good at doing that thing.

Re: Bitcoin tumbles below $70k, wiping out gains since Trump 2024 win

#19
post #15
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To a first approximation ~nobody who "invests" in crypto has read a whitepaper or considered the ethos. It's one of the bugs/features of crypto.

I don't doubt it, but the sort of "I'm escaping the financial systems that is stacked against me" attitudes are prevalent among folks, the ethos lives on in a weird sort of way ... but really individuals are going to a worse place more often than not.

You're right, but the people that say they're pilled/sticking it to the man/breaking out of the matrix -- they're just parroting things they saw on X or tiktok. And then shuffling their money based on that.

They haven't researched or thought about any of this, otherwise they wouldn't be reducing finance to repeating someone else's soundbytes.

There's no ethos there, it's just reposts. Yes, it is weird.

Re: Bitcoin tumbles below $70k, wiping out gains since Trump 2024 win

#20
post #17

Bitcoin goes up, bitcoin goes down, you can't explain that. Seriously though, bitcoin has always been highly volatile, is this really a story?

You can kind of explain it in four year halving/hype cycles. A downturn around now is what you'd expect if it keeps that up so not much of a story really.

It's a reference to the Bill O'Reilly line about tides
Post reply on HN