Live data from Hacker News

Litecoin and Ethereum buys and sells are temporarily disabled

status.coinbase.com

461–470 of 566 posts

Re: Litecoin and Ethereum buys and sells are temporarily disabled

#461
post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With amounts this large they could meet in person to trade.

Easy enough to rob someone for this amount of money too. As Eric Schmidt said (in the context of a hostile government, but it works here too): no passcode in the world is going to protect you from a man holding a gun to your head and demanding said passcode.

Split your loot into 100 pieces and convert to BC one by one. So you get robbed five time out of a hundred, no big deal. Eventually find a reliable trader and take your business to him.

You don’t have to make it totally safe, just safer compared to other methods of evading control.

Re: Litecoin and Ethereum buys and sells are temporarily disabled

#462

Watching this whole thing really has me scratching my head. Honestly - the value of BTC in a decade is anyone’s guess. For me, I have a modest holding (in terms of its USD value today as compared to my other investments). After much wrestling, I’ve decided to just let it sit and be done with it. If it crashes back to pennies, oh well. If it goes to the moon, I’m glad I had a piece of the action. As much fun as it see…

Define "the moon"?

Re: Litecoin and Ethereum buys and sells are temporarily disabled

#463
post #75
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having purchased several cryptocurrencies recently, I can attest that I am certainly not acting rationally. But at least I'm having fun!

I should start a business selling thin air. Thin air from France, thin air from Japan, thin air from Mexico, and so on, you can collect them all, it is super fun. Then I could introduce cold captured thin air, warm captured thin air, etc. Wet thin air, dry thin air for year 3. More fun every year. Even better, I should sell just a paper (well, an electronic one) stating you own some thin air. Hey, geeks, how cool can…

No offense taken, but how can I purchase some of your foreign air bonds? I hope cash is OK!

Re: Litecoin and Ethereum buys and sells are temporarily disabled

#464

This means that people are investing small amounts and going for the cheaper coins using coinbase. which means that cryptocurrencies may be having their facebook moment at this time , and their network effect is about to get a LOT bigger over the next months. While people may only invest small amounts (and coinbase can and should make sure they do), cryptocurrencies will come out of this extremely strengthened if a s…

That seems absurdly optimistic. It's like Facebook--if all anyone did was sign up for an account and not bother to populate it with friends or info. A vanishingly small number of people are using these coins for anything they couldn't otherwise do.

Re: Litecoin and Ethereum buys and sells are temporarily disabled

#465

I've made about $110k profit this year in crypto on a $21k investment earlier this year, and I think this is all a giant bubble. I was at my parents' house for Thanksgiving and a commercial with Ron Paul talking about Bitcoin came on, which coincided with around the time it went to $10k, and it hit me really hard that this isn't going to last forever (and probably will hurt sooner rather than later). I liquidated eve…

> I don't hodl anymore.

I've just been told that hodl means "hold on for dear life".

LOL

Re: Litecoin and Ethereum buys and sells are temporarily disabled

#466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to physically control your own coins to speculate. I suspect many people are just keeping their stash on exchanges or online wallets.

The vast majority of novice speculators are using Coinbase. They at least attempt to maintain the appearance of compliance; but I suspect a large market run would wipe them out of USD fairly quickly. The fact that “experienced” Bitcoin speculators are getting nervous is a sign the bubble is about to pop. Tether volumes are hockey-sticking up as a result. There has been enough technical analysis to show that USDT volu…

I’d be interested in seeing evidence that USDT “drives” the USD-BTC exchange rate. I do think it’s a good indicator of sentiment about the exchange rate. Typically it’s within $0.02 of its supposed $1.00 value, but today it reached at least $1.08 and is still at $1.06. That means people are willing to pay a 6% premium just to be able to cash out of BTC today.

Re: Litecoin and Ethereum buys and sells are temporarily disabled

#467
post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how bitcoin can facilitate currency control evasion. The government can simply shut down all local exchanges, and some already did.

With amounts this large they could meet in person to trade.

If you have to do that, it doesn't seem particularly advantageous over existing methods. You're meeting in person, exchanging cash illicitly, etc. If someone is willing to do that, why not just buy USD in a foreign bank account directly? (That's my understanding of the current system; people with clean histories open accounts with varying amounts of money in USD / EUR / JPY jurisdictions, then transfer control of those accounts to someone else, for a small profit margin, who then transfers them again, in exchange for cash at a significant margin, in, say, China.)

Either way, someone ends up with cash CNY and the other person ends up with electronic USD or EUR or whatever.

The immediate limiting factor is the vulnerability of any in-person transaction to traditional law enforcement mechanisms, and the eventual limiting factor is that the exchange rate is going to be impacted by the demand for cash CNY. Eventually nobody is going to want to sell you USD (or whatever) for your cash-in-a-bag CNY, or will only do it at exorbitant rates.

Re: Litecoin and Ethereum buys and sells are temporarily disabled

#468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my belief too. I think if you can buy and hold for the next 5 years or so, massive volatility doesn't affect you. Volatility affects the day traders and the like. To draw a parallel to the stock market is not appropriate, but those who bought into MSFT or AMZN even during the peak of the dot com bubble have nothing to regret today.

What about people who bought pets.com or webvan stock, or any number of countless stocks which soon became worthless?

Most coins will become close to worthless, but many will survive and support whole new industries. And this time it looks like it wont be an ad supported future, thank $DIETY.

Re: Litecoin and Ethereum buys and sells are temporarily disabled

#469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my belief too. I think if you can buy and hold for the next 5 years or so, massive volatility doesn't affect you. Volatility affects the day traders and the like. To draw a parallel to the stock market is not appropriate, but those who bought into MSFT or AMZN even during the peak of the dot com bubble have nothing to regret today.

What about people who bought pets.com or webvan stock, or any number of countless stocks which soon became worthless?

That’s a risk on any day of any calendar year. We can find points and counterpoints to prove any scenario.

Re: Litecoin and Ethereum buys and sells are temporarily disabled

#470
post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I moved $1800 worth of LTC (Litecoin, one of the subjects of this thread) last night. The Tx fee was $0.01 and the funds were received in less than 1 minute. No more processing, no waiting for the next business day (or 3)... For 1 cent and 1 minute later the receiver can do whatever they want with it immediately. That is cheaper than CC, faster than Venmo, or whatever.

Why are Litecoin's transaction fees multiple orders of magnitude smaller than Bitcoin's? Is this a result of genuinely better technical decisions than in Litecoin (mining is cheaper because it's less hardware-friendly, blocks are generated more quickly) or just lower transaction volume / demand for transactions because it's less well-known? That is, if Bitcoin somehow implodes tomorrow and everyone moves to Litecoin,…

> Why are Litecoin's transaction fees multiple orders of magnitude smaller than Bitcoin's?

Supply and demand. People pay more to transact in bitcoin, because it is more secure, because it is more decentralized.

Post reply on HN