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Crypto crash deepens, stocks slip

reuters.com

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Re: Crypto crash deepens, stocks slip

#451

Post by pilingual »

Nursie wrote: post #243
pilingual wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for the disinterested take! It's refreshing to see this as a top comment when so often I see "Crypto makes me sick" which offers zero information and doesn't belong on HN. A few points to the repetitive comments I keep seeing: 1. Bitcoin is not a Ponzi scheme. Various cryptocurrencies operate in such a manner, but Bitcoin and Ethereum have value propositions: settlement and programmable money respectively.…

> I do not understand how every time cryptocurrency comes up armchair HN users come along and comment when they, very apparently, have almost no understanding of the topic This in itself is a meme - "All criticism is ignorance!" Bitcoin is not a ponzi or a pyramid scheme, that's true, but it has aspects of both, with its declining emission and stacked rewards for early adopters. And Bitcoin is for settlement now is i…

> This in itself is a meme - "All criticism is ignorance!"

No, as I pointed out to the OP I was appreciative of his reasoned criticism because for years the top comments say things like, "Bitcoin is a ponzi; bitcoin is used only for illegal activity; Bitcoin failed." All wrong, and the only way I learned those were wrong was by understanding it and learning from smart people who are involved in the industry.

> The truth is that bitcoin is an instrument of speculation.

Public companies have no business speculating except for R&D. By claiming it is an "instrument of speculation" you are claiming they are not living up to their fiduciary duties? And what sort of speculation has gone on for 11 years?

> And Bitcoin is for settlement now is it?

Yep. That's where it is currently headed. Could change, never know (edit: what I mean here is Bitcoin devs/miners could change/adopt the software so it works more like a currency). Brian Chesky, CEO of AirBnB, insisted breakfast be served at all AirBnBs. He was wrong. Didn't matter. Some original Bitcoin adopters, particularly Hal Finney, noted early on that Bitcoin could end up being more of a store of value than currency. Even if buying a coffee with Bitcoin directly doesn't make sense, the spirit of the original paper in wake of the 2008 crisis is still alive and well.

Re: Crypto crash deepens, stocks slip

#452

Post by symlinkk »

tubbyjr wrote: post #428

So much nocoiner butthurt in here lmao. Yes, it's down 50%, yet I'm still a multi-millionaire thanks to holding, from a small mining stint a couple years back, $0 invested directly aside from mining machines (GPUs I would have bought anyways for gaming). With how it's progressed, I never have to sell. My employment income is zero, and I can't get any mortgages cuz of this... no problem, I can literally use crypto to…

A lot of people here can’t separate emotion from logic. They love Element / Matrix because it’s decentralized. They love Apple because of their focus on privacy. But they hate Bitcoin: a private, decentralized currency.

They say it’s because of “volatility” or “power consumption”, but when these problems are fixed they move the goalposts (see the ETH proof of stake thread).

The truth is, they missed out on the bull run, and whether they consciously realize it or not they’re letting their emotions cloud their judgement.

Re: Crypto crash deepens, stocks slip

#453

Post by ncallaway »

allendoerfer wrote: post #409
boringg wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human population growths, mosquito populations growths. Sustainable for a certain amount of time. You need to time bound your question. Nothing is sustainability on an endless time scales - the stars burn out and collapse on themselves.

The universe is pretty big. It also has 3 useful dimensions. Earth has basically only two and one very narrow one. I think we can keep going for quite some time.

These last two comments and replies really have a strong The Last Question vibe.

https://templatetraining.princeton.edu/sites/training/files/...

Really great short story

Re: Crypto crash deepens, stocks slip

#454

Post by divs1210 »

pradn wrote: post #292
kllrnohj wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin & Ether are both down -40% from a week to a month ago. Both of those are, in theory, large enough that investors "letting off some steam" shouldn't move them that much. If $SPY dropped 40% we'd all call it a crash. This isn't that different. Also unlike the stock market, crypto is under the delusion of being a viable currency. If USD or Euro dropped even 20% we'd start questioning if it's a recession, much le…

It doesn't seem like anyone believes cryptos are supposed to be currencies any more. All the talk around them is around them being a new, exciting, and potentially very lucrative investment class. If you go to Coinbase's front page, you see that you can buy and sell them, like you can with Robinhood. It's not trying to be a PayPal. The currency-ness does serve an important purpose. It helps bring in investment for th…

I have used crypto (LTC, BUSD, XLM, XMR) to pay internet strangers so many times I've lost count. Looks like you just haven't tried it yet.

Re: Crypto crash deepens, stocks slip

#455

Post by 908087 »

asjdflakjsdf wrote: post #439
pradn wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't seem like anyone believes cryptos are supposed to be currencies any more. All the talk around them is around them being a new, exciting, and potentially very lucrative investment class. If you go to Coinbase's front page, you see that you can buy and sell them, like you can with Robinhood. It's not trying to be a PayPal. The currency-ness does serve an important purpose. It helps bring in investment for th…

Doge is picking up steam in that regard. It has so many problems though

Yes. The core problem being that it's a combination of an MLM and pump and dump scheme built on top of a joke.

Re: Crypto crash deepens, stocks slip

#456

Post by shakezula »

woeirua wrote: post #386
Avalaxy wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a noob who owns some bitcoin and ethereum (both stored on an exchange), how does tether being a scam (which I do believe in) affect me? I don't hold any tether myself.

It affects you directly because: 1 - many exchanges hold Tether as a reserve and use it extensively for various transactions between the exchanges, which means that if Tether collapses they could have huge holes in their balance sheets. Some exchanges (Binance especially) could become insolvent overnight. No money in, no money out. Read up on Mt. Gox if you want to see what happened the last time an exchange went bel…

As someone who lost a LOT of bitcoin in the Gox hack, please for the love of god, don't store your coins on an exchange.

Re: Crypto crash deepens, stocks slip

#457

Post by allendoerfer »

gruez wrote: post #406
singularity2001 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The supply is infinite if you take the whole crypto space: You can create as many BTC#3 EGold-plus ... as you wish, and future generations will.

That's like saying uber shares are infinite because you can start your own ridesharing startup and issue more shares.

Except you cannot just start your own global ridesharing service, can you?

Re: Crypto crash deepens, stocks slip

#458

Post by usrusr »

gruez wrote: post #374
usrusr wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which effectively make the total amount of live tokens (the rough equivalent of share count or money supply in stocks or currencies) more deflatory than useful for any application outside of pyramid games. All projections of market cap that include the dead tokens are even more worthless than other market cap projections. Problem is: there's no way to tell the dead from the merely sleeping. The bigger the share of da…

But surely most of the coins were lost when they were cheap rather than now? If that's the case most of the deflation stemming from lost coins already happened and isn't going to happen in the future, so it's not really a big issue.

Unless they were only presumed lost. Imagine someone had the power to suddenly activate whatever fraction of the contemporary USD supply their family had in 1800, proportionally scaled to the amount of USD circulating now. And in the deflatory bitcoin world, the amount of tokens in circulation might eventually end up being merely a tiny fraction of what some presumably dead addresses hold. An address like that lightning up would be as if the Fed suddenly announced that they just issued a multitude of the USD previously in circulation. Not to banks, as credit, but to some guy (unnamed). "Nice currency you have there, world economy, I have the other half of it. Let's be friends shall we?"

Of course these are more hypothetical end game states than immediate threats (I think, I have no idea what fraction could currently be considered dark), but we can't just ignore theoreticals like that.

Re: Crypto crash deepens, stocks slip

#459

Post by jasonlaramburu »

imtringued wrote: post #377
jasonlaramburu wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the price crashes money disappears.

>When the price crashes money disappears. Thought experiment. I buy 1 BTC and pay you $50k. The current market price is $35k. Where did the $15k go?

Aaand it's gone (the $15k). My point is that the Fed effectively devalued the world's reserve currency in order to stimulate the American economy. But some, perhaps significant, percentage of people instead blew that stimulus on a risky, volatile investment that does nothing to boost our productivity. And now the gains have been erased.

Re: Crypto crash deepens, stocks slip

#460

Post by Animats »

jmacd wrote: post #11

As an outside observer, who has no crypto holdings at all, but is very deeply invested in the public stock market with a heavy weight on technology stocks... this doesn't look like a crash to me at all. It just looks like some steam being let off and old investors cash out and new investors get more comfortable with how much and where to invest. I consider crypto currency as it is to be an elaborate Ponzi scheme (per…

This doesn't look like a crash to me at all.

Yes, this just looks like normal volatility. The price of Bitcoin is still 4x what it was a year ago.

The DJIA is down to where it was last month. Big deal. That's more driven by macroeconomic policy and the real world.

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