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Bitcoin Is Crashing (businessinsider.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Bitcoin is getting smashed. The cryptocurrency was down 18% to about $892 per coin as of 8:17 a.m. ET on Thursday. It is the biggest drop in two years. Earlier this week, on its first trading day of the new year, Bitcoin crossed above the $1,000 mark for the first time since 2013, but it has now tumbled below that level.
https://news.slashdot.org/stor...
Probably a lot of people took the news of a 1000$ high as a chance to sell now?
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
Now it's at 954
So what?
Bitcoin is a great way to make a lot of money or lose a lot of money if you don't mind taking a gamble or being very patient. It will inevitably rise and fall like crazy.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
$950 as of this comment. These articles are always out of date.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
I really think that a lot of folks had just said "oh 1k maybe time to "cash in"...
I bet it rebounds and will go through some oscillations every time it crosses 1k until folks get used to the idea that it can go to /higher than 1k then it will creep up and probably take a dip at 1.5k and/or 2k
The Digital Sorceress
Nerd goes, "Wait, my Bitcoin is worth what?!?!"
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
But if you look at bitcoin historically, it ALWAYS does this after a 200 dollar surge. It ramps up as hype rises for whatever reason, then crashes back to 20-50 dollars above the previous average mark.
Personally I think we are seeing long term market manipulation at work here, but as long as it had long periods of stability between rises and crashes it is still overall as good a medium of exchange (not savings!) as any other currency, physical (as in minted coinage) or imaginary (as in both fiat and virtual currencies, since neither is in practice backed by anything more tangible than belief in their superiority.)
Number of instances of word "bitcoin" in your comment about a Bitcoin article: 0.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
This is it...Bitoin is dead!! It's up 300% over the last 12 months but down 18% over the last 24 hours. It's fucked! Bitcoin is dead!! What idiots use this crap??
This is not news. If I wanted to know what the BTC value is I'd not check on /.
Buy it to speculate (ie gamble).
You might want to at least make a reference as to how other currencies are doing against the dollar, as well as state what time period the 18% drop was over...a day...a month...a year???
Just another day in Paradise
How do you short it?
Yet it's risen another $100 since this article was posted. Is the same source reporting on that? The author seems to be gleefully reporting the dips but ignoring the rises. You would have made a big profit if you bought it when it was "being smashed" and sold it today.
He isn't selling, he's BUYING!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
At work I get dollars for labor, which can be used to procure goods and services. I could also use my computer sitting at home to do nothing and save electricity, fold proteins for the good of mankind, or generate numbers that for some reason can be used to procure goods and services? Usually when you get value for no reason it is part of a Ponzi scheme. Does Bitcoin hold any value because it also seems to be a decent way to launder money?
I understand that BC is not a "widely accepted" currency and odds are that you have to cash-in eventually, but the point of Bitcoin is to become an alternate way to ease the trade of goods and services, and it should be used like that. Trying to convert it into "real" money misses the point completely. I think that if people have bitcoins, they should use them only to replace conventional currency in their transactions, not to try to convert them.
Open Source Network Inventory for the masses! Kuwaiba
Since when is bitcoin's instability news?
It was at $230 just 15 months ago. That's one mighty crash.
You know what traditional currency like the Dollar was really missing? All the excitement of the random wild value fluctuations inherent in a dot-com stock! I for one find it tedious and boring to walk up to the checkout line in a retailer or grocery store already knowing that I have sufficient funds to pay for my purchase. Yawn.
I've always seen bitcoin as I've seen Pirate Bay. Bitcoins biggest selling point afaik was that you could pay anonymously, and anonymous pay is good for the black/dark marked. For the same reason, I can't just walk down to my local bank and say "1$ bitcoin, please!".
The dilemma starts when you're selling something, and want the money into normal money you can actually pay your utility bills with.
Also, the bitcoin to me also seem like the "poor man's fake gold reserve", if you believe it is worth something, then it is worth what you pay, so essentially the value of the bitcoin could go fictively up and down all the time, and if you sell it at the right time (if anyone is willing to buy when the value is high), then what do you do with the money? In Sweden you'd have to prove where the money comes from if it is a sum over 10K SEK. Otherwise the bank wont heed it and say no to your money because it doesn't come from any known source to them. They claim this is to prevent drug trafficing, but we (the citizens) know all too well that this is a plot from the gov. to control all the money and tax even already taxed second-hand sales, whatever you sell - we want a cut.
So all regular citizens really can do - is to lean back and watch the online show called "Bitcoin raises/loses value/dives/jumps" whatever....
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
I get a little board of "Bitcoin is rocketing" or "Bitcoin is crashing" headlines. Niether is true, and never was. Bitcoin is in effect a (virtual) commodity, but with a much lower cap than others such as gold. This means that small things, like Brexit, or the fall of the Chinese Yuan, or the discontinuation of Indian cash bank notes and such will effect the price in a major way, with the inevitable exageration of the market by speculators, followed by the resulting corrections when these minor bubbles burst. This means Bitcoin value in effect goes up and down like a yo-yo. However, bitcoin is sound. The commodity aspect is there and is secure, so it will never go back to zero or anything. The general movement of Bitcoin is up at a gradual pace with a few whooshes in either direction as described above. It is not, nor ever has been, a guaranteed wealth creator nor a crashing pudsey/pyramid scheme.
Web Sig: Eddy Currents
FUD.
18% down? That's still 82% short of what I would like to see.
The vast majority of purposes bitcoin is used for are not just illegal, but utterly undesirable. Release payments for ransomware, rental for botnets, and the likes.
It can't go down soon enough.
To be expected.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
The Dukes were trying to corner the Bitcoin market, but Winthorp and Billy Ray beat them at their own game.
Slashdot, the Fox News of the tech world.
Sensationalist. Useless.
So the imaginary product that isn't worth anything is worth less than it was. Hi, I'm a Nigerian Prince, and I have this box of numbers... would you like to buy them? I'll sell them with all my interest in this bridge over San Francisco Bay...
A useful currency is stable for the time you hold it.
If you are a merchant that takes bitcoin but sells it for local currency by the end of the day, you need intra-day stability.
If you are holding it as a currency for days or weeks at a time, you need short-term stability.
If you are holding it as a currency for longer, you need medium- or long-term stability.
On the other hand, if you are buying it as an investment, like a stock, or as a speculative "investment" (aka "gambling") then in addition to a long-term upward trend, you want instability so you can benefit from dollar-cost averaging as you buy and "dollar cost averaging in reverse" - selling a fixed amount of BC every day - when you eventually sell.
Of course, if you are a day trader who depends on intra-day changes in value, you want short-term instability and either a knack for timing the market right or a dose of good luck to keep from coming out in the red that day.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
World's lowest volume currency has high volatility. Who'd a thunk it?
That is all.
BTW - How is this different from a trip to the local casino?
I have been waiting to pay my ransomware at just such a moment! I just need to hurry an
e.g. Ethereum.
The shady exchanges are the problem with all of the cryptocurrencies. The biggest asset would be a very easy way to facilitate a micropayment via bitcoin; the current exchange mechanisms make this hard or impossible for average folks.
Ultimately a blockchain (and the resulting currency) will need to be backed by a nation state to have validity. Political notions aside, that's when things will get interesting. If Bitcoin ever gained any traction it will be put down by force.
Other blockchains provide easier ability to develop applications and thus provide real utility, and the concept of putting a value on distributed hash calculation to actually do interesting things is a neat one.
One thing has been validated by Bitcoin, however - the concept works.
..don't panic
Gold is the GUARANTEED investment option to PROTECT YOUR MONEY! That's right, GOLD! The original non-fiat currency!
Buy your Bitcoins now, before it crashes further!
Bitcoin is mined its an exchange of computing cycles for a token of work.
Juxtapose:
A currency is taxed, can be made scarce/abundant by a score keeper (government) changing its fiscal stance. A currency can be exchanged for currency bearing the issuers interest (Treasury bonds). It comes with a banking system with ONE set rate of interest from which all other entities can create deposits greater than or equal to that rate.
How many times does this have to happen before people get the message.
Its a commodity backed by a great transaction verification system (Blockchain) but whats a commodity's intrinsic worth when its just used CPU/GPU cycles.
Calling it currency is inadequate its volatile because its a risky commodity and that will be volatile on markets which are by their mathematical nature inefficient and unstable.
www.ft.com/content/b5d66ed8-d1b3-11e6-b06b-680c49b4b4c0
While there are currency speculators, "investing" in a currency is generally not a sensible thing to do. You don't keep wealth in cash, which produces nothing, you invest it in something productive that yields a return.
Bitcoin, like money, is a short term means for conducting business transactions, nothing more.
Thats not true either, it will go to zero once quantum computing makes current crypto algorithms obsolete. By then new quantum crypto currency will replace it.
Give it some decades and always pay attention to the development of quantum computing to take a good guess when to leave. For the short/middle term it should be fine tho.
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
Have gnu, will travel.
My bet is that someone decided to cash out a lot of bitcoins (up to tens of thousands) which swayed the market however it's already recovering - as of this moment bitcoin is trading at $985 at BitMex (the largest USD bitcoin exchange).
As for the Chinese yuan getting stronger - I call it BS. It hasn't become 10% more valuable, more like 1% at the most, yet bitcoin has suddenly lost ~30% (~1100->~880) of its value in a matter of a an hour(!). Nope. These two events seem to be related but one didn't cause the other one.
It is volatile. Just checked coindesk.com, and Bitcoin is going back and forth. - $990.87 at 11:00 am (EST) 1/5/2017.
yawn. ;-)
It just occurred to me that /. just got used in a pump & dump scheme. Penny market emails that go out all the time --- "this stock is a big mover"... blah blah.
"hey look BTC is down" Was that supposed to evoke sells or buys - I'll never know. But advertising on /. is now free !!!
RIght now the main things fueling BitCoin's value is India's deflation currency correction and worries about Trump's administration. Within the year I look for both issues to stabilize. BitCoin will drop down around $350 / coin.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
I don't expect quantum computing to make an impact in the next 20 years, even with a gigantic breakthrough. I could be wrong, and I hope I am, but the world record for (proper) quantum factoring is still 21=3*7, right? And that was 2012. The previous record of 15=3*5 had been standing since the 2001. And the interval between advances doesn't seem, to me, to be getting any shorter. To put it another way, the difficulties in scaling the systems to more qubits seem to be increasing at least as fast as we are improving our techniques for building coherent devices.
At any rate, it is pretty much trivial to replace the signature algorithm with a quantum-hard one when the time comes. Under some circumstances, it can even be done without allocating any of the reserved opcodes.
We can do the same thing with the work function (hashing) too, but my read is that even with a giant breakthrough in factoring, hashing faces absolutely no danger from quantum attacks within my lifetime, probably the lifetime of my grandchildren. I know it sounds arrogant to say that today, but some discussions of hashing and quantum computing led me to read the literature, and that really opened my eyes to the difficulties. I can elaborate if desired.
Oh, and even a successful quantum attack on ECDSA only works against the current system if it can be done within a few minutes, at least when people are protecting their keys properly by not re-using them. A quantum attack on hashing would strip that protection, of course.
See that "Preview" button?
Did you not read the comment's subject, you fucking imbecile?
Subject and comment aren't synonyms you clueless brat.
As long as Satoshi still controls the first million bitcoins I fear it cannot be taken seriously as the creator has the power to single handily effect the market. No bank or government is going to back something where 1 individual has set themselves up with such disruptive power.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
And /. contributed to the scam with its last article on BitCoin. Stupid.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Are you new, here? That is the slashdot way.
And he did
I suggest you to read this book:
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/7341.html
If I wanted currency that had its value constantly change I would invest in Pecos... Plus anything that enables ransomware authors is no bueno...
of course they're not. a subject is a part of a comment, not a synonym for comment. just like a title is a part of an article, not the synonym for article. just like head is a part of a body, not a synonym for body. you sir are the best kind of stupid. one that will never realize he is stupid, but does live in a virtual world where he is smarter. this provides hours of entertainment for everyone around them. thank you clown.
I ordered a coffee and popped a lactaid pill before adding some milk to it. this little kid who had a bit of melted chocolate right under his decided to educate me. He said he knows what I took, and it's because milk makes me gassy. His mom used to take those pills. Then she stopped, and started asking the starbucks guy for different milk. You see, there are several types of grass. Regular grass and soy grass. If you feed the cow soy grass, it makes this thing called Soy Milk.
I thanked the little boy for the information with a wide smile and gave him a random business card I had in my pocket. I said to give it to his dad - his dad should give me a call. The kid asked why. I pointed out to the kid that while he is sound asleep at night, his father often comes into the room quietly and puts his weewee in the kid's mouth - while sitting on his face backwards. Last night daddy had a lot of food and took a big big poop before he went to visit the sleeping boy. Daddy's shit is under your nose son. Sweet dreams tonight.
Welcome to currency trading. The reason your grandparents did not bet the farm on currency is because of the wild swings. Somebody gains big and somebody loses big here. These sort of swings in currency are exactly how George Soros made his fortunes. I do not think the current swing indicates good or bad days ahead for BitCoin. It only indicates that it is being used for huge profits by some.
Here is a little explanation of what just happened:
One of the biggest emerging Bitcoin markets is in China. China's Yuan has been weak and even a small percentage of investors moving their Yuan investments in and out of Bitcoin can cause the market to fluctuate greatly. China's Yuan is much bigger than Bitcoin, so relatively small waves in China really rock the boats in the Bitcoin world. There was a spike in Yuan value, and some investors assumed better days ahead for China and cashed out bitcoins for Yuan. As you can see from the current charts, investors now saw cheap Bitcoin and are buying those again.
Perhaps the crash has something to do with Ransomware suddenly becoming illegal in California?
I mean, it's not like people would use bitcoin for *illegal* activities, right?
Show me on the 1st Amendment bobblehead where the moderator touched you...
It's for drugs. The supply is mostly controlled by drug cartels. The demand is mostly from people who want to party.
New Year's passes. Everyone is partied out and thinking holy thoughts about getting a promotion. No one buys bitcoin.
Summer comes. Price wobbles around here and there, but mostly the demand for drugs is constant. Price is low.
Fall approaches. Main harvest time. Shelves appear frequently in the price graphs as cartels parcel out payments to producers of drugs and they foolishly cash all their coins in at once.
Every year this happens.
Every year the hotshots who watch wall street movies think they figured it out, and every year they totally mess up their estimations for demand.
TL;DR buy bitcoin in spring and summer, sell bitcoin before christmas, roll around in 10-50%
I expect so much more from this crowd. Did you honestly not know that Bitcoin (and the general crypto market) was slowly trending higher during the end of 2016 and that, even after this latest price spike and correction, it has still gained compared to as little as a week ago? Seriously, you guys, if you can't manages a tiny little bit more journalistic integrity than that, go fuck yourselves.
Bitcoin crossed above the $1,000 mark for the first time since 2013, but it has now tumbled below that level.
I just checked and it's $965. Last time I checked (which was a few months ago) it was ~$600.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/la...
People are stupid. I've not lost any money with BitCoin and I've been accepting it because my business lends itself to it for years and BitCoins has real value is saving my 3% over credit cards as well as eliminates any concern over charge backs.
In the short term its stable enough for long enough periods of time not to really matter. I know roughly what I have at any given time. In the long term I've made a bit more because BitCoin goes up even if it can fluctuate downward at times. hmm reminds be of holding any hard currencies including AUD and CAN $$$ and even USD. My "losses" are less than the gains overall and it would be unlikely anybody who ignores its value and uses it regularly would see any different.
BitCoin is a terrible investment, but it works fine for transferring value, even to the extent it open up new markets for us and saves us money relative to taking credit cards. At the same time I'm not investing in any currency either. I invest in things I know will make me money. I want my investments to reliably double in value.
The pointless article is still on the front page and Bitcoin is already back over $1000.
Bitcoin has died 119 times so far.
https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoin...
yup
Bitcoin is totally controlled by criminal elements as a pump and dump scam. You have just been fleeced again. Time to get more so you can be robbed again. You are sooo clever.
I feel almost prescient in the fact that I converted most of my BTC into goods by making purchases just before 4 AM EST. I made a bit of positive cash flow and didn't end up involved in the crash. It worked out for me.
You think a comment and a subject title are the same thing, and you're calling someone else an imbecile. Heheh.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.