Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Litecoin and Ethereum buys and sells are temporarily disabled

status.coinbase.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

531–540 of 566 posts

Re: Litecoin and Ethereum buys and sells are temporarily disabled

#531

Post by bocklund »

AznHisoka wrote: post #389
lysp wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a standard share trade strategy. The net cost is 0 - cash in = cash out. And taxation is zero because your profit is (at the time) 0. It also means you can do something else with your original investment. If it goes up 100x - cash out whenever. If it goes down to 0 - you have lost nothing at all apart from some time.

why is your profit 0? you buy 2 at $5k it goes up to 10k and sell 1. profit is current value - cost basis 10k - 5k = 5k profit that will be taxed

> why is your profit 0?

Because the 5k in the market is not a realized gain

Re: Litecoin and Ethereum buys and sells are temporarily disabled

#532

Post by tripzilch »

zMiller wrote: post #150

This thread's audience is obviously a 'developed nations' one. From our perspective yes, Crytpo's use case as currency make absolutely no sense (yet), we tap our Visa card to pay instantly with no fees and no fraud liability, hard to beat. As a store of value however there is a very strong use case in the western world. Of the top my head, it is estimated that 10% of our GDP is in off shore havens, think about that i…

> think about that infamous 1% moving just half of that 10% into Bitcoin ..

Please remember "that infamous 1%" is actually the 0.001% or much less. The top 1% income actually includes dentists, successful software engineers, etc. Normal successful people. An amount of wealth that can actually be attained regardless where you came from, given luck, talent, luck and in some cases, hard work[0].

The phrase "the 1%" was originally introduced to draw a line between people with such a ridiculous amount of wealth that it doesn't make sense and is really only attainable by being born in it, or being born with very rich family and learning the shibboleth over your lifetime. Becoming insanely wealthy by an insane stroke of luck is possibly but it only gets you in contact with this elite, not "in", but if you play your cards right your children might.

[0] don't be mistaken that "hard work" is any kind of predictor for wealth. just look around you. hard work may be considered virtuous, but that's it. it's not like "being a good person" gets you rich, either.

Re: Litecoin and Ethereum buys and sells are temporarily disabled

#533

Post by matte_black »

Frogolocalypse wrote: post #525
matte_black wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that would put a price target of Litecoin at somewhere around $4000-$5000. Not bad considering it's current price today.

Until people actually run nodes to the same distribution of bitcoin, it will always be a reduced security option, and therefore won't command the same price.

The price commanded is whatever the maximum you can get away with selling it to a fool would be, distribution be damned.

Re: Litecoin and Ethereum buys and sells are temporarily disabled

#534

Post by amalag »

anonymous24 wrote: post #194

As i thought, money is backup by a government. It is represented for a country's power. But for Crypto currency, there is no country backup it. It's kind of scary though.

Bitcoin has succeeded in creating a scarce resource backed by computing power. That's about all.

Re: Litecoin and Ethereum buys and sells are temporarily disabled

#535

Post by crystaln »

petre wrote: post #491
crystaln wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BTC will supplement gold for value storage and will hit a $5T market cap in a few years IMO. It certainly has utility for storing and moving value. Don't underestimate that.

Gold doesn't have 30% volatility over 24h.

BTC will not once it gets into multitrillion dollars. It's a young asset with no derivatives that the market isn't sure how to value. Also there are ways to hedge volatility.

Re: Litecoin and Ethereum buys and sells are temporarily disabled

#536

Post by TaylorGood »

cm2187 wrote: post #510
DenisM wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re forgetting currency control evasion. If a businessman from a country with tight controls wants to move money out of the country he would buy bitcoin and then sell it the other side of the border. This sort of activity is going on all the time, and it creates demand for crypto currencies.

What I don’t get is that you can’t buy a car with bitcoin. So surely this should also create a selling pressure, unless they just buy bitcoins with the intent to transfer money at a later stage.

Yes you can: https://i.redd.it/d5wrulv2ndjz.png

Re: Litecoin and Ethereum buys and sells are temporarily disabled

#537

Post by smokeyj »

exelius wrote: post #449
School-Cotton wrote: post #422

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…

The price of one bitcoin is arbitrary. $1 is no more crazy than $1 million. It's all crazy. But the question is, what's the supply and what's the demand.

At some point there will be a correction. This velocity can't be maintained forever. But this is also a technology that heavily relies on going viral to become functional (payments/contracts) - and based on real world interactions I think crypto is heading towards an adoption curve that justifies its price.

Re: Litecoin and Ethereum buys and sells are temporarily disabled

#538

Post by mikefallen »

Frogolocalypse wrote: post #522
mikefallen wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

150k full nodes source?

http://luke.dashjr.org/programs/bitcoin/files/charts/softwar...

Ahh thanks frogo always enjoy your input on these crypto threads you really helped me have a deeper understanding of the consensus and game theory aspect of bitcoin that i never caught onto from the white paper.

Thanks!!

Re: Litecoin and Ethereum buys and sells are temporarily disabled

#539

Post by davidgh »

acjohnson55 wrote: post #462
davidgh wrote: post #362

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"?

The “moon” is the value required to have the jaw of your doctor / lawyer neighbor hit the ground when you tell them “I own one bitcoin”.

Re: Litecoin and Ethereum buys and sells are temporarily disabled

#540

Post by TFortunato »

charlesdm wrote: post #383
amscanne wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, pension funds should not be doing currency speculation. That's bad. The problem with crypto-_currency_ is that it's not a productive asset. A share of a business pays dividends over time and thus has intrinsic value (and _some_ speculative value), while a currency does not. A currency transaction is a zero-sum game, which is good because it minimizes friction. Buying cryptocurrency with the expectation of increa…

Crypto has been one of the better performing asset classes in the last 5 years. That is just a fact -- if looking in percentage terms. Pension funds generally allocate up to 5% of their portfolio to alternatives, which could be smaller funds investing in art, watches, music royalty rights, farmland, wine, and the likes. This also includes crypto. If you're an investment manager, it isn't necessarily crazy to allocate…

Absolutely -- To the parent: think of it this way. If you had $200 in your fund last year to invest last year, and put $1 into crypto, then at worst, you lose that entire $1, and your portfolio is down to $199 (notwithstanding what you did with the other money), a loss of 0.5%. If you happened to pick Litecoin, and bought 0.25 LTC when they were at a stable price of $4 a piece, today that 0.25 LTC would be worth $80, giving you $280 in your fund, or a gain of 40% in your total portfolio value. You can look at ETH, Bitcoin as well and also see large gains.

Even without perfect timing of the market, it's a pretty easy decision for a portfolio manager to look at this and say: "While, like any other asset, past performance isn't an indicator of future performance, given the price history and increasing trading volume over time, the risk/reward balance skews heavily in favor of putting at least some tiny bit of money into crypto for all but the most risk-averse."

Post reply on HN