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Bitcoin Value Sinks After Chinese Exchange Move

nytimes.com

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Re: Bitcoin Value Sinks After Chinese Exchange Move

#81

Post by btbuildem »

erdoserdoserdos wrote: post #49

Unregulated capital flight is really not a feature of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is money with the ledger built into it. It's not for hiding wealth, but for tracking it. This is a market correction that had to take place. People get confused right now because the ledger is more or less blank. It won't be. (As a slightly dystopian side note, BTC with very little history may become very very valuable.) In the future, it is going…

> BTC with very little history may become very very valuable

Why would a virgin coin be more valuable than one that has passed through countless wallets? What is the advantage?

Re: Bitcoin Value Sinks After Chinese Exchange Move

#82

Post by ekianjo »

taspeotis wrote: post #11
ekianjo wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, you already have the dec 18 value while the day is far from over. You have a strange way to pick up numbers.

It's down to ~480 so it's lost $100 in 30 minutes. Let's just say that my strange way of picking numbers can be described as "flattering" ... at worst.

No, you should pick numbers on a daily average with an indication of the daily variation on the value if you want to be fair, not at a precise instant, because Bitcoin can have as much as 30% variation in a given day, so I too can make up numbers out of thin air by picking up a very biased time during the day.

Re: Bitcoin Value Sinks After Chinese Exchange Move

#83

Post by mattm »

grey-area wrote: post #34
mattm wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter if it should or not, it is. As is most other currencies. See how George Soros made his fortune.

George Soros made money from speculation (e.g. shorting the pound out of the ERM), not investment (buy and hold as the OP advocates).

It all depends on how you look at it though. For Venezuelans, the US dollar is an investment.

Re: Bitcoin Value Sinks After Chinese Exchange Move

#84

Post by sambeau »

ivanplenty wrote: post #20
master_shake wrote: post #10

In April, I watched the price of bitcoin every day. When it approached $200 I said "f*ck it," took out a student loan and bought in at $225. The VERY NEXT DAY the price collapsed. I watched bitcoin slide to $50 in a state of complete and utter devastation. I felt so stupid. I decided not to sell, and just considered the loan to be a write-off. Point being, you should assess the quality of your investment in years, no…

There's a few things weird about this story. Are you really proud you have a leveraged position in bitcoin? Isn't that among the riskiest positions you can take on a very volatile, illiquid, and possibly illegal asset? That's totally a personal choice, but it's certainly not one I would or a typical retail investor should ever take. Your decision to buy-and-hold during a sell off in the Spring is at best an anecdote…

It's also illegal in the UK to reinvest your student loan.

Update: I can't find a link to back this statement up and at least one UK Bank (Barclays) seems to encourage it. My evidence is therefore purely anecdotal — I remember it being noted in the terms at the time.

Re: Bitcoin Value Sinks After Chinese Exchange Move

#85

Post by 3pt14159 »

Fuxy wrote: post #4

China is afraid. Bit-coin is an unregulated way of moving money out of China and they are known for keeping the movement of money in and out of china under very strict control. The only way of regaining this control is by forcing all major companies to ban bit-coin. You think the companies are happy about this they were making a very nice profit from the transactions.

Bitcoin is spelled without a hyphen.

Re: Bitcoin Value Sinks After Chinese Exchange Move

#86

Post by writtles »

ivanplenty wrote: post #24
SamReidHughes wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Probably a great time to buy. Why?

> Probably a great time to buy. He or others like him may not have sold off all of their coins and need dumb money to keep the price afloat just a little longer... If it were a great time to buy, he would have. Follow the actions and not the words in markets like this.

I've been investing long enough to know that:

1) if a disruptive tech has plenty of personal intrigue and 2) plenty of brilliant people herald it

then buy the crash.

Re: Bitcoin Value Sinks After Chinese Exchange Move

#87

Post by vectorpush »

kordless wrote: post #78
vectorpush wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin fanboys have classic tunnel vision - they're so enamoured of the libertarian ideal of an anonymous crypto-currency that's not controlled by any government, that they ignored all the practical, economic and legal challenges it would need to overcome before it could become a real currency. I am always amazed by the condescending tone of know it all speculators who think they've got it all figured it out. Labeli…

Blaming statements are pretty easy to spot if you know the signposts for them. Indicating a current outcome is 'predictable' because you said it was going to happen is a form of confirmation bias. Making a self referential comment to bolster his opinion sets the tone for the rest of the blaming argument that follows. Also, there the fact he didn't actually publicly call it first: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=…

BTW, making a coy remark about his 'intelligence' and speaking for his future actions are blaming statements in themselves. It isn't helping the conversation much by doing that.

I admit, that part of my response was intentionally provocative, though, just to clarify, I wasn't being sarcastic when I regarded him as intelligent, my intent was to highlight the fact that intelligent individuals like the GP who are convinced they can conclude the definitive future of bitcoin will continue to do so because their intelligence drives a hubris that less confident (i.e. intellectually honest) individuals lack. The people who are used to telling everyone how finance really works can't help but bash all the fanboys over the head with their intelligent conventional wisdom.

Re: Bitcoin Value Sinks After Chinese Exchange Move

#88

Post by gamblor956 »

ekianjo wrote: post #8
taspeotis wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wait for a week, 10 days before making conclusions on the price of Bitcoin My conclusion is that it's pretty fucked up [1]. Nov 15 $US430 Nov 22 US$843 Nov 29 US$1137 Dec 6 US$552 Dec 13 US$869 Dec 18 US$584 Pick one of those dates before today and imagine saying "wait for a week ... before making conclusions on the price of Bitcoin". [1] https://coinbase.com/charts

Interesting, you already have the dec 18 value while the day is far from over. You have a strange way to pick up numbers.

It doesn't matter what dates or time taspeotis picks; his point is that at any date and time Bitcoin is too volatile to meaningfully function as a currency.

No major currency suffers from 30% intra-day volatility against other currencies. It would make pricing goods and services essentially impossible. Who would care about saving up to 5% on credit card fees if they're suffering 30% arbitrage losses because they set/update their prices at the wrong time of day?

Re: Bitcoin Value Sinks After Chinese Exchange Move

#89

Post by gamblor956 »

erdoserdoserdos wrote: post #49

Unregulated capital flight is really not a feature of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is money with the ledger built into it. It's not for hiding wealth, but for tracking it. This is a market correction that had to take place. People get confused right now because the ledger is more or less blank. It won't be. (As a slightly dystopian side note, BTC with very little history may become very very valuable.) In the future, it is going…

We currently live in a world where banks try to foreclose on homes that aren't even mortgaged. Bitcoin and the like will end that.

No, it won't. The problem was never proof of payment. The problem in almost all cases was proving ownership (by the foreclosing bank) of the ownership of the mortgage/loan, which Bitcoin can't and won't solve because it's not something that can be put into the Bitcoin protocol or software. (The bank you take out a mortgage from is rarely the bank that you end up making payments to; the original bank usually sells your mortgage to another financial institution willing to accept the credit risk.)

But even more importantly, Bitcoin is about wealth protection. The average Joe will have very little of the deflationary income. But large banking institutions will.

Why is this a good thing? You've basically just said that the rich will just get richer and the average Joe will, in relative terms, will become even poorer (as prices increase to keep pace with the increasing wealth of the rich).

Re: Bitcoin Value Sinks After Chinese Exchange Move

#90

Post by Eleopteryx »

jackgavigan wrote: post #56

Predictable outcome is predictable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6818821 Anyone who thought the Chinese government were going to ignore a mechanism that allowed people to bypass capital controls with impunity was pretty naive. Bitcoin fanboys have classic tunnel vision - they're so enamoured of the libertarian ideal of an anonymous crypto-currency that's not controlled by any government, that they ignored all…

I feel that the moon bases analogy is incredibly unfair. Bitcoin's utility has already been demonstrated, and, through that, the utility of decentralized digital currency in general. The remaining question isn't so much the long-term viability of this model as much as it is how far can it go?

Comparing it to the notion of a "moon base" is extreme on multiple levels, I guess one of them being that the actual demand for such is clearly minimal where as Bitcoin's adoption continues.

Bitcoin being banned by someone somewhere was a wholly inevitable and arguably necessary outcome. The positive spin on this news is that Bitcoin is on the radar at all to even be banned by anyone to begin with.

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