Slashdot Mirror
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.
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 These articles are always out of date.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
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?
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?
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
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.
Aaaand.... it's gone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
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.
It's not a usable currency because one of the points of currency is a value store - a way of 'keeping score'. To do that it must have a relatively stable value, which is demonstrably doesn't. Bitcoin is a gambling mechanism, and a way of hiding transactions, but it is not a usable currency.
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.
Almost like people have never seen speculative corrections before...
It's too unstable. I'm not going to accept bitcoins for goods I sell when their value could be half by the end of the day.
Name one time it has done this for more then one day. (There is only one in the entire history, and it took a few years to get all the value back)
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
You usually get free drinks at the casino when you are gamling. :-)
If you look at currency markets, neither does the Dollar. But since all of the goods we use are measured in dollars, we do not see it. (Unless you buy from AliBaba a lot)
Buy your Bitcoins now, before it crashes further!
Better not use Dollars then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
you must be new here...
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.
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 !!!
If you dislike the instability in the USD, you would hate Bitcoin for being vastly worst. But most Bitcoin supporters have their ideological blinkers screwed on too tight to see the topic honestly.
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?
It's a payment network. It wasn't designed as a replacement to the dollar but rather as a replacement to Paypal. As such it shouldn't be too surprising that it doesn't make a good currency; it's just not designed for that.
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.
It's a payment network. It wasn't designed as a replacement to the dollar but rather as a replacement to Paypal. As such it shouldn't be too surprising that it doesn't make a good currency; it's just not designed for that.
It's a shame that it's not that good at that either, transaction confirmation times often are faaar to long.
And he did
He sold all his bitcoins to cause a crash?
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Sorry forgot the obligatory:
Thanks Obama!
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
No, I am saying that currency exchange, ANY currency exchange, has large fluctuations. Most people do not see it, however, because they never exchange currency.
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...
Depends on what you're doing. Buying a coffee on your morning commute... yeah. Buying something online that'll get delivered from China? It's no problem for that.
At least complaints about the confirmation speed are relevant complaints, unlike most of what I see on Slashdot...
It's not a usable currency because one of the points of currency is a value store - a way of 'keeping score'.
Except money pretty much universally sucks as a value store. If you don't want to lose money because of inflation you have to invest them. Even putting them in the bank is investing them so the bank can lend it out to others, the risk has just been insured out of it. We keep money because of the overhead, risk and capital binding of doing anything else. If you want a savings account somebody should probably set up a BTC to index fund bridge or to gold or some other easily traded valuable. If you have money to spare, you buy shares and if you need money you sell shares and in your BTC wallet is just your spending cash. Then it doesn't matter so much if it's just your spending cash fluctuating wildly and effectively you're not dealing with any other currency. For really big trades like buying a house you could first do a swap for shares or gold then sell those off slowly so you don't get hit with a huge one day swing.
I think it's important to realize that most currencies that have gone to hell have done so because the government was printing tons of money causing hyperinflation. Bitcoin is all over the place, it'll soar and crash and soar and crash and if it'll do more or less of one or the other is anyone's guess. But just volatility is fairly easily beaten by statistics, maybe it's unusual that sometimes you end up paying $90 or $110 instead of $100 but if they both happen then 10 times down the road you've probably paid $1000 +/- $30. It's worse for stability if you lose every time like with hyperinflation, then everybody wants to spend their cash as soon as humanly possible. If you're holding Bitcoins you're a speculator, if you hold cash during hyperinflation you're an idiot.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
Looking good Lewis !!!
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...
Yeah - it's gone back over $1000. Bitchiz.
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.
It is especially useful for people in parts of the world where access to traditional banks and payment systems is poor. Much like the Hawala system in Muslim countries, BTC is a quick, reliable way for people working or living abroad to send money home to family members.
Example: you're Somali, working abroad for a construction company. You would have a hard time opening a bank account in many foreign countries, but you can visit a hawala broker and have money in your wife's hands in a couple of days. BTC works for that, too, and lots of people use it that way, whether on their own or indirectly. Converting it to other currencies is not missing anything, as it is well suited to transferring money internationally. Not sure why you think people should only use certain currencies in certain ways.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
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...
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.
no no no. This a speculative correction 'of an internet something'
It's TOTALLY BRAND NEW!
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
"I like turtles."
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Lol!
And I am saying, for all practical purposes, you are wrong.
Not seeing the fluctuations is a significant practical positive because it makes a theoretical problem a non-problem, but it is a price that Bitcoin users cannot avoid.
Furthermore, Bitcoin has fluctuation that are very large when compared to major currencies. Whether we want to say the USD has small fluctuations and Bitcoin has large fluctuations, or we want to say the USD has large fluctuations and Bitcoin has immense fluctuations, it boils down to the same thing.
Cash is not a good investment strategy, but I usually have less than 1% of my liquid assets in cash or the equivalent. I know how much goes into my checking account a month, as a general rule, and I know how much comes out. If I didn't know to within 20% what my account balance was going to be, my financial life would be more complicated.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
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.