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Bitcoin's Value Plummeted Overnight and No One Knows Why (slate.com)
Jacob Brogan, writing for Slate: While the Western Hemisphere slept, Bitcoin plummeted. Just after midnight Eastern Time on Friday, the cryptocurrency was valued at a little over $15,000, on the digital currency exchange Coinbase. At that point, it was already well below the $19,783 all-time high it had hit the week before. Over the course of the night, Bitcoin began to decline erratically, occasionally spiking but following a general downward trend. Around 9:22 a.m. Eastern, it hit a temporary floor, valued at a mere $10,400. By that point, it had declined more than $6,000 from its short-term peak the morning before, having lost more than one-third of its value. Bitcoin wasn't the only currency hit by a sharp drop. Tech Crunch's Jon Russell reports that most other prominent cryptocurrencies also fell, including Ethereum, Litecoin, and Bitcoin Cash (which is, confusingly, separate from Bitcoin proper). As Russell notes, it's hard to say why this is happening, "in the same way that nobody knows exactly why bitcoin's price has [shot] up from a touch under $1,000 at the start of the year."
It was overvalued and a bubble. Next question?
Profit taking, I'm sure. That's what often happens when a stock rises quickly; the people who got in earlier sell out to cement their profit.
You're trying to understand why a valuation based on bullshit...plummeted?
Please tell me common fucking sense still has value today...
A couple days ago it was unimaginable that a big whale would announce that it was time to diversify and sell all his coins. Then it just happened and now the idea has been placed in everyones mind.
I have a lot and Iâ(TM)ll give you a once in a lifetime price! Call 1800-Sucker!
what fake money does...
I've heard there's a 4 day backlog of transactions that will probably never be processed because they didn't offer enough bonus to the miners.
This is a typical scheme where millionaires sell a bunch of their coins(or stock) to get everyone to jump out and then they buy the coins back much cheaper. Looks like it has recovered some already
Bitcoin is a scam. May as well invest in tulips. At least those are real.
Coinbase fucking around with the shitcoin Bcash is what happened. Obvious insider shit going on considering the run up on bcash's price just before it went live on the exchange.
With no safeties in place, dark trading, doubtless insider trading, coins concentrated in a few hats who cash out when they want with no warning, no transparency, etc.
The only way to have a healthy market approximating a Free Market is through regulation.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I still have two transactions in limbo, from EIGHT DAYS ago.
Fucking morons
Everyone knows why Bitcoin's value plummeted. It's because Bitcoin doesn't have any value other than the belief of people in Bitcoin. What I said about Bitcoin is generally true for the Dollar too, but in the case of the Dollar at least the U.S. Government will take it for your tax payments. Nobody has to take Bitcoin for anything.
People confuse creation of money with creation of value. Value is food, materials, information, useful work. Dollars/bitcoins are unreliable media for exchange of value, not the value itself. Creation of $300B in bitcoin won't help the world to feed one more mouth.
Speculators jumped on it as a get-rich-quick scheme to make money from other speculators who would - they hoped - not time the market as well as they did. But inherent in this strategy is that all speculators will cash in on their speculation, driving Bitcoin back to low values as they abscond.
Bruce Perens.
When Bitcoin crashes properly it'll lose 90 to 100%+ of it's value.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
There's no "reason" because there's no rational valuation mechanism. Cryptocurrency without a mechanism for value stabilization is a scam. Blockchains are clearly useful for certain kinds of distributed trust problems, but Bitcoin is merely one instance that was always marketed as a cryptocurrency but has zero use as a transaction mechanism. Nobody wants to use a currency that may be worth 20% more, or 20% less the next day.
The only valid use case for Bitcoin I've heard described is as an improved version of the offshore banking system. In other words, a mechanism for rich people to launder and hide money. Of course, a cryptocurrency with value stability would sure as hell be a lot more useful and trusted for even this grey market purpose.
Ultimately, Bitcoin's value is driven by grey and black market activity. Money laundering, cybercrime, etc. Investing in Bitcoin is essentially investing in a residual claim on this underbelly of the economy, in the same way that regular fiat currencies are residual claims on national economies, with a healthy dose of mindless speculation and bubblemania thrown into the mix.
Tulips are pretty.
Bubble + North Korea hacking and theft + loss of confidence probably all play a roll
North Korea Hacking War on Bitcoin Exchanges Is Part of “Biggest Global Sting”
The bankruptcy of a bitcoin exchange has been blamed on North Korean hackers, prompting concerns for the cryptocurrency’s future. Around $72 million worth of bitcoins were stolen from the South Korean exchange Youbit in April, before a second more recent cyber heist forced the exchange to shut down on Tuesday. Cryptocurrency exchanges from neighboring South Korea—which account for 15 to 25 percent of world bitcoin trading—appear to be the main target of the hackers, with the country’s largest exchange platform, Bithumb, hacked in July. Other Seoul-based bitcoin exchanges, including Yapizon and Coinis, have also been the target of cyber thieves suspected of being from North Korea this year.
Bitcoin exchange collapses after second cyber attack in a year
Bitcoin fails its test as a haven in times of global turmoil
North Korea bitcoin WARNING: Kim regime hacking cryptocurrency to fund nuclear weapons
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Bitcoin is not backed by gold or a government. "faith" in what drives the value of currency. People had faith in gold when currencies were backed by gold. Now it is the faith in governments to keep the economy stable. That's called fiat currency. Bitcoins value is based on faith in faith.
It's ridiculous. The price is going to crash when there is a "run to exit". Panic selling will induce more panic selling. I can't wait to see bitcoin back to $5. It will be hilarious.
And no one knows why it increased in value in the first place.
Funny thing this bitcoin.
There was excitement that 2 major mainstream exchanges were going to start trading Bitcoin futures. That suddenly was going to give Bitcoin legitimacy and credibility. Its the best thing since sliced bread. Everyone jumped on board and it rocketed. Now that the futures have started trading, people are looking around and seeing that the world is still the same.
Sell the news.. back down it goes...
There was a little drop after the CBOE started trading futures because of "sell the news" but it was tempered by hope that the CME opening would shoot it back up. Now that both events are past there's nothing to look forward to except organic growth (hopefully).
What did it for me was when that Tea company pivoted to blockchain and went up 2x. If that's not a sign then I don't know what is...
All a company has to do to 2x their value is to >>say they're going blockchain? come on....
The dump part of pump and dump has started. Seems to happen every few years, bitcoin gets hyped up and people buy in. Then the value plummets as the boosters cash out. Rinse, lather, repeat.
that's a pretty sane thought. What gives? ;)
The same thing can be said for day trading in individual shares, options, et cetera. What determines the price of a share, if there isn't any news? Noise. They're trading on noise. And now there's suddenly a trend, and most follow it.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
Of course, it is time travelers from the future, cashing out before the inevitable collapse in 2 weeks. Of course this needs to be done in a careful and coordinated fashion, to avoid the inevitable positive feedback. Now the trick is whether they will be able to return to the future, since the early decline in the price might affect the funding that created their time machines.
- Mike
My ass no one knows why. Everyone smarter than a pet rock or a tulip bulb knows why.
Bitcoin's Value Plummeted Overnight and No One Knows Why
ROFL! Why??? Same reason it went up in the first place!
(That is, no reason.)
Holy Crap! I am going to blockchain my 3D printed autonomous crypto drones with AI in the agile cloud! It will be bigger than web scale!
Clarification: Calling it a 4-day wait-list doesn't mean you should expect it to take 4 days. It means it would take 4 days to process all of the pending transactions if all other transactions were rejected until the wait list was drained.
tl;dr: Those transactions of yours from 8 days ago will NEVER be processed; your coins are lost forever.
Bitcoins take like a week to transfer, right? What price do you get when you sell one, the price at the time the transaction starts, or the time it completes?
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
The only reason it didn't plummet further is because of how long these transactions will take to process. Everyone's waiting to see where it all settles.
except for the trades booed by some Big Daddy. "Of course sir, to the front of the line"
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Actually there's been articles that suggest something like 40% of all bitcoins are held by a small rich crowd of about 1000 users who have more money than common sense and they tend to move simultaneously. So maybe that small rich group is attempting to cash in by selling all at once at the cost of everyone else.
Where is coinbase HQ? And will the bank-run scene from "It's a Wonderful Life" be enacted there?
You don't think they'd use computer hacking to mess with our stock market, do you?
Bitcoin is no different than Pork Bellies.
Except it makes lousy bacon.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
It's my fault! I bought some so it went down.
"in the same way that nobody knows exactly why bitcoin's price has [shot] up from a touch under $1,000 at the start of the year."
He doesn't know, he's ignorant. The reason it's shot up is because wall street banks started marketing bitcoin to their customers, and now every two-bit 'investor' wants a piece of the action. It's entirely because of marketing, that's why the price went up.
It will go up more because there is still so much hype around it, and the hype is growing. If the price drops, people will say, "This is an ideal time to get in."
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I'ts known as a Pump-n-Dump.
a lot like what I did to your mom....
Because fuck you.
One second it's up, the next, it's down. What should we expect from something programmed by humans? That line between genius and crazy is getting fuzzy.
Basically the same reason it went up.
So, it went down and no one knows why, and also they're saying no one knows why it went up. I think that if anyone really wants to know why, it's very easy to solve this.
Find someone who bought Bitcoin, and ask them.
For example, if you want to find out why it went down, find someone who was paying $15,000 per BTC, and ask "why were you longer willing to pay $15k? What new information came to light that made you realize it was worth only $10k (but still a fuck-ton more than $1k)?" and then just see what they say. Listen.
Similarly, if you want to find out why it went up, find someone who was paying $10,000 and ask "Why was 1 BTC worth that much? Would you pay more for a bitcoin? $12.5k? 15k?" and just see what they say.
The people doing this, are the ones who are thinking about how many dollars it's worth and making decisions. Just ask how they make the decision, and you'll have your answers.
(WTF, why is everyone staring at me like I said something utterly naive? I don't get it. ;-)
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
are co-opting the system.
No, the transactions will eventually be processed or rejected, I believe 2 weeks is the limit.
It's only worth, what one is willing to pay for it. It isn't backed by anything, no physical "thing". Until the U.S. government went off the gold standard, ANY money printed, had to be backed by a like amount of gold/silver, or no further money could be printed. Now, it is backed by "the full faith & credit of the United States", so, in other words, it's worthless, per se.
I don't recall Slashdot having a bit coin story yesterday. Bitcoin felt ignored and wanted to do something to get attention again.
*Yawn* this is just Bitcoin being Bitcoin.
Buy what you can afford to lose (Slot Machine/Cigarette/Beer money); then don't look at it for at least a month.
Smart money manipulating Bitcoin so it can buy in.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Inhabitants of many Latin American countries have clear memories of the country's currency plummetting overnight to ~60% of its previous value. In my lifetime, it has happened at least three times (and losing 10% overnight? Oh, too many to count).
Of course, nobody wants to save in national currencies then... But it's not like we have much of a choice!
Coins are not lost if the transaction isn't processed. The sender still owns the coins until the public distributed ledger says otherwise, which it won't until the transaction is confirmed and included in the block chain. The protocol has a "replace-by-fee" (RBF) where you can just re-create a new transaction with a higher fee than the old unconfirmed transaction and the new transaction, once confirmed, becomes the fate of the sender's coin, and the old transaction, if it ever gets processed, will be rejected as that coin has already been spent.
Previously: Bitcoin's Value Rocketing Higher Overnight and No One Knows Why
who are now trying to capitalize on Bitcoin when it has attained sufficient value. Do you think the pump-and-dump seen earlier was a problem? You have no idea, wait until you see what the greedy corrupt American bankers will do.
Bitcoin is no longer safe to invest in.
...please invest $ 22.95 for this book.
It is well worth the cost, and - if you understand the logic behind financial bubbles - you will spare plenty of your money in the future.
Bitcoin, like everything else, is worth whatever someone will pay for it. Since the recent nuttiness surrounding it means that it's effectively ONLY useful for speculation, what did people EXPECT was going to happen?
The Greater Fool theory only goes so far - eventually you run out of Greater Fools and the price goes back down.
It's REALLY not complicated, folks. Trying to ascribe meaning to this kind of shit is no more sensible than planning your year based on goat entrails.
A thousand pounds of wood moving at 300 feet per minute. Don't get in the way.
There is something you guys should understand about Wall Street (particularly Goldman Sachs a.k.a. The Vampire Squid) getting into the cryptocurrency futures market. You would think on the surface, if you write (or go short) a Gold, or Oil, or even Cattle contract, that you have to come up with the goods when the futures contract matures. However, there is the little discussed option of "Cash Settlement". If you can't meet the obligations of the futures contract, you can simply pay the owner of the contract what those goods are worth in US Dollars. The markets tout this as good thing for all market participants, but in reality, it is a gross perversion of the market in general. It effectively turns your Cattle, or Oil, or Gold market into a US Dollar market.
And now they're doing the very same thing to the BTC market. When people are short BTC futures and have to come up with the goods, they don't have to worry about spiking the spot market looking for BTC. They just have to shell out USD. And the Powers That Be have LOTS of USD to spend on either side of that trade.
Bingo !
aaaaaaa
Great. So I'm a local electronics store. I sell someone a laptop for .1 BTC. Fair deal. That transaction is queued for a few days. He wants to walk out of the store with the laptop today. Either the store takes a huge risk of fraud (or even mistake), or the user can't get what he buys for days. Which is why anyone who thinks this is a workable currency is a fucking idiot.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Bitcoin is backed directly by the hacking, fraud, exchange failures, and general lack of protection or insurance or basic computer security. Sit back, wait for news of another major exchange getting hacked by criminals or raided by the feds and losing everything, or bitcoin address generator that produced a lot of easily predictable private keys, or yet another ransomware campaign which merely demands bitcoin, or another government decides to ban it and start raiding any person or group believed to be in possession - one or more such events and bitcoin will then perk right back up. And, sooner or later, a single mining operation will take over the network, start double-spending and causing a lot of trouble, then bitcoin will go exponential!
For those not familiar with either the term or the practice, here's a primer:-
Imagine you think that Bitcoin is in a bubble and hugely over-priced. All it would take would be a sharp pin to burst the bubble and the price will plummet... Well, good for you if you don't have any in your portfolio, but how can you use that to make a shed-load of money?
You sell short in the hope of starting a run. Here's how it works. You go to the market and you sell say, $100,000,000 of Bitcoin that you don't actually possess... Markets will allow you to do this, as long as you settle all your accounts by the end of the current trading period [i.e. by market close on the day]. So what happens is this:
You have no cash to buy, and no Bitcoins, but you "sell", $100,000,000 of coins in to the market at say 20% below the currently trading price. Let's keep the numbers simple - imagine the prevailing price was $20,000/coin and you sell for, ooh... $16,000, which is the 20% drop point. The sheer size of your transaction - perhaps done because you've seen a couple of other big sales do the same thing - spooks the market. Suddenly all the traders who have been buying in to the currency are worried and they want out as quickly as possible. They start to offer their holdings for sale at steep discounts, each sale taking place way below the buying price.
In no time the price of Bitcoins falls through the floor... Everyone wants to sell, nobody wants to buy. Except, perhaps, the suckers who had "buy orders" programmed into their trading platforms if ever the price was "foolish" enough to dip below their target price. Suddenly all those folk with automated buy positions get their trades executed, even while the price continues to tank.
You watch the price plummet. $19,000, $18,000, $17,000, $16,000, $15,000. Eventually it hits $14,000 and the "dead cat bounce" starts - the price starts to look soooo stupidly attractive that more nuanced traders begin to buy back in. The price rallies. You buy enough coins to cover the "sale" you made at the beginning of the day. Except that you "sold" for $16,000, but you bought back in at $14,500...
Now let's do the math and figure out how much you made [before transaction fees]. You "sold" $10,000,000 at $16,000 each, which means that you sold 625 coins. Then the price dropped to $14,500 and you bought 625 coins to cover your earlier sale. But because you only had to pay $14,500 for them, you actually pay out $90,625,000. So you've made $9,375,000 with "Other People's Money" - all in a single day.
Congratulations, you've just passed "Banking 101"....
Oh, and for those who read this and think, "That's all well and good in theory, but it would never happen in practice..." I'd remind you that roughly 20 years ago, "Black Wednesday" happened, which absolutely devastated the value of UK Sterling on international exchange rates - and in the process made George Soros, who bet "against" the Pound in *exactly* the way I've just described here, a billionaire.
Until the practice of "short selling" - what I've just described in this post - is made illegal, there is *nothing* to stop this happening with Bitcoin, or with any other traded commodity. Bitcoin is no longer operating like a currency [if it ever truly did], but is now operating exactly like a "bubble" commodity, just like the dot-com boom, like antique cars, like works of art, like vintage wine.
It's difficult to know for sure, but this event has all the hall-marks of someone attempting to burst the bubble and make a killing. I reckon if there was some short selling in this window that someone might have made a noteworthy profit, but unlikely what we saw George Soros make. Whoever it was, they'll get it right next time...
... sold high and parked their shit in cash.
When BTC went to $12,000 the cash-holders started buying back.
That's how it's done.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Selling a lot of BTC, quickly, and more importantly reliably, needs the cooperation of bitcoin miners to process your transaction quickly, ahead of others, instead of waiting until... whenever.
So, look who processed all those BTC sale transactions and how they are connected with the sellers.
Clearly, BTC trading benefits from insiders because it is so illiquid.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Have you ever consider that maybe Full Block, Replace by fee, Segwit and LN are new things that got added and create the problem? Bitcoin Cash is not a new idea, it's not a new concept, it's the same old thing as described in the original white paper. That's why the name is the same. Bitcoin Cash IS Bitcoin. Bitcoin core is trying new stuff that don't work. We see it right now! More reading: https://www.bitcoin.com/info/w...
So now it's back up to 14,777 as I type this comment. Does that mean this story should be updated?
Four things happened starting on Tuesday. Coinbase added BCH, margin accounts and interest became unsustainable, margin calls, exit strategies.
Coinbase added support for Bitcoin Cash on Tuesday. They also gave everyone 1 BCH for each BTC you had at the time of the split. This should have flooded the market with BCH and driven the price of BCH down. Also the sellers of BCH should have invested in other currencies and pushed those prices up. The opposite happened. News that coinbase was accepting BCH actually pushed BCH's price up and the shift to BCH caused other currencies to fall.
Most of the trading is now automated trading. You can also buy on margin. However the margin has a 1.5% interest per day. Then funny things happen. If someone borrows 1 BTC and shorts it, and then buys an equivalent amount of 10 other more volatile coins using that money they could cover the interest. For the past 2 months this worked really well. Most smaller cap currencies have gone up more than BTC by more than 1.5%. It seemed like low risk investing. People treat crypto like the stock markets treat stocks assuming that having 100 different stocks has less variability than 1. Unfortunately like the stock market, there is a high level of correlation in price change.
Now after Tuesday, people who had margin accounts had to top up their margins. This caused a slow sell but the interest rates made borrowing for more than 3 days difficult so starting late last night a lot of people had no choice but to sell.
Exit strategies - eventually everyone has to actually use their money. I know a lot of people who have made 10x their investment. Their exit has been if it falls 30%, I sell 50%. So if they put in 100K, they had 1M yesterday, 700K this morning and then sold to have 350K in fiat and 350K still in crypto. You can automate that sell.
The weird part. There are no natural sellers in crypto currencies. They aren't backed in any meaningful way anymore. After this crash all the remaining people who own crypto are non-sellers. They are greedy and will hold indefinitely. The margin people who had to sell are gone, my friends with exit strategies are out. The only sellers left are people who are moving money between crypto currencies. The prices of most currencies not in the top 10 market cap are going to jump 15% before the day is done. In a week the money will be poring back in and zero money will be being pulled out.
Coinbase effectively stopped trading Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Ethereum, and a couple others. They suspect insider trading has happened. This is the most likely reason for the drop, trust in exchanges has been damaged.
If it turns out to be insider trading, ouch for Coinbase, and the market. Maybe good for future investors as they can get a lower price now than what they've seen recently. If it doesn't turn out to be insider trading, then faith in the market will resume and the irrational bubble will inflate again.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
"No one goes there, it's too crowded"
There are enough transactions to fill the blockchain, obviously someone is using it.
My last post predicted most coins would jump 15% from this morning (EST morning). With all the sellers gone I have no idea what the gains will be but looking at the charts most are already up over 20%
Kim needs cash?
Currency cross rates don't move like that
I murder people and bury their bodies in my grandmother's garden and nobody knows why either. I'm thinking this might be different though.
Sounds like a classic Pump & Dump stock scam.
Someone bought a lot to drive up the price and then bought "Puts" on the stock and sold it all at once, price drops, and they profit both from the sale and the precipitous drop in price.
In only two weeks.
The whales are cashing in.
Whoever bought them in the past months is screwed.
We told you so.
It's Christmas and smart folks are cashing in so they can buy their kids GI Joe with the Kung Fu grips.
It wasn't shorting. You would be a fool to short bitcoin. It has no real valuation, it's price is between zero and infinity. Shorting it and not buying something with a strong correlation in value is opening yourself up to unlimited liability. No one will currently let you borrow without a very large margin and your borrowing costs are over 1% per day.
Let's do the math.
You have 50M in BitCoin, you borrow another 50M. You sell all of it for 80M, and later spend 30M to buy back enough to return the 50M you borrowed. You now have 50M in cash. So for unlimited risk you came out even.
Oh and 100M would be the very least you could use to start a short. The trading volume in the last 24h was 22 billion.
make money. Pigs go to slaughter.
Anyone with any brains has pulled half their money and will let the rest run.
The reason has been known for hundreds of years.
But we will never learn that a bubble is a bubble is a bubble.
Bitcoin is a bit of technology/algorithms that would be useful if it weren't so cumbersome. There are better, more recent, solutions for the same problem, and Bitcoin will fall by the wayside.
In the meantime, none of these things are actual currencies. It's just people playing chicken pretending there's something to back the "currency" and passing the hot-potato along until somebody gets stuck with it.
Some day, governments or others that can act as a store of wealth may use similar technology.
Its price is notoriously volatile.... why are you surprised that it's Down a small amount after being Up a large amount?
The market is cooling down a bit, especially at the close of the year, and when its price was up there on the precipice it takes only a small push to result into some regression towards the mean.
In this case, the Litecoin founder being bullied into selling his coins -- the media playing Roger Ver's statements, the BCASH appearing on Coinbase, and some other recent events add up to a fairly significant Push, THEN the push gets even stronger with some initial price motion as some people react to a small dip by selling even more until it reaches a critical selling-off mass, and we have a minor price correction on our hands.
not editing this post... I know it'll seem rambling and hard to decipher and idc
There are literally dozens of reasons for why there began panic selling. There was so much FUD right before and so much instability due to the addition of Bitcoin Cash on CB too (not really, bitcoin, just a fork with what is likely a band aid solution to scaling). This launch was also mishandled by CB and should have been announced with a specific launch date before the fact (lots of drama there too for good reason). The solution proposed by the fork (increasing block size) is great right now but ultimately leads to more centralization and still doesn't scale to the extent needed for a global economy (and they say it shouldn't just be a store of value). Roger Ver and others supporting the fork tried everything possible to attack the network (including massive amounts of transaction spam to raise fees even higher) and what really happened was a large negative market reaction response in the entire valuation of the space. No one wants drama in their investments when hundreds of billions of dollars are at stake. The suggestion that NK may have stolen something like 70 million from Youbit and made it file for bankruptcy also doesn't help matters. Bitcoin is incredibly secure as a technology - the entire computing power of the network ensures it but exchanges are frequently not up to the task of stopping the innumerable hackers targetting them. CB and Gemini are likely the most secure exchanges but few others can rise to that level of security.
Moreover, Bitcoin's price rose more in a month than even Bitcoin evangelists predicted so this was bound to happen at some point (especially as people reevaluate their portfolio now and cement wins).
all. This thing is going to drop like a rock when all the smart money gets out.
A bunch of fools showed up with money, and somebody took it away from them.
It has no REAL value. You are Tulip speculators waiting for the flower to fade and die.
.
In a computer driven fast moving market like we have today, and with completely unpredictable governments turning on a dime, its hard to feel at ease with whatever things of value they are currently holding. The more uncertain the market is, then the more certain some people are going to be of its eventual devaluation, and will then be fearing that the market may soon tank, and that starts a downward trend. When others see the value declining, they too begin to think it is worth less. Once you cash out, others will follow. Its a self reinforcing feedback loop. The bad thing is that computers can algorithmically panic trade much faster, and even more completely, than their human counterparts, if not specifically coded to stop trading.
The bottom line is you are gambling against what other people will think tomorrow. You can't control what other people think, unless you own the media, or can do so by adjusting a commoditys scarcity.
Everyone knows this was a bubble caused by mere speculators, not anything of real value to everyone else.
Is it really any surprise that something that gets it's value from a volatile marketplace tanks just before Christmas? People aren't buying right now, obviously, because they have better things to do with their time and money. Some was also money-taking before the end of the year. Combine the two and it's no surprise that the price is going to shift down. The real question is what is going to happen at the start of next year. If the money flows back in, it'll shoot to record highs yet again, setting it up for another boom/bust cycle.
Next time don't buy tulips, k?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
When people sell, it losses value.
Most people under 35 really don't know what the fall is like in a recession. We're getting close to teaching a whole new herd of sheep what it is like.. Get ready to fleece some sheep !!
What do you mean no one knows why? Everyone who sold their coins knows why they did it.
We're out and YOU are holding the bag.
"I still have two transactions in limbo, from EIGHT DAYS ago."
Now there's an incentive to use blockchain for real currencies. "The check's in the mail" will be replaced by "The payment's in the queue" (Which is currently 14 weeks, 3 days and 33 minutes long)
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Holy christ how hilarious it is to watch computer nerds learn the hard way that knowing how to install Chrome on your Macbook doesn't also make you an expert on investing. We now find ourselves in a situation where a huge portion of the population has become enamored with the idea of cryptocurrency, while simultaneously being completely ignorant of both history and basic economics. I've often compared bitcoin to the tulip craze that swept the world a few hundred years ago but the parallels are uncanny and the inevitable repercussions similarly spectacular.
the FUD is strong
BCH leads to centralization of nodes and isn't a long-term solution
yeah, drug dealers tumbling their money
Yes, speculators and criminal organizations looking to funnel money without having official bank transactions that can be traced. Nobody is using it to buy anything other than illegal drugs.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Show of hands, who here is not surprised?
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
Why the heck did you not just use the national currency of whatever country your store is in?
Bitcoin is not a currency. It's a payment network, and its properties make it best for transactions between two distant people, i.e. online shopping. If you can meet in person then just use cash.
Try linking to something that is not on bitcoin.com. That site is nothing but propaganda pushing that shitcoin. Too bad the bitcoin core devs didn't have the foresight to trademark the bitcoin name to protect it from BS like this.
The nodes are centralized because no one wants anything to do with this shitcoin. Roger Ver and Co. had to spin up all the nodes themselves. If this is such a good coin, why aren't others spinning up full nodes for it?
The kind of drama being pulled by that whole group is what is leading to the instability of crypto currencies as a whole
I remember exactly when the tech bubble was popped back in March 2000.
1) Back on March 6, 2000, Nasdaq reached it's high, 5048.
2) Watershed event: MafiaBoy had taken down major sites like Yahoo, Amazon, ETrade, Ebay back on February 6, 2000, a month earlier.
3) Dawning realization: If these magic sites could be taken down like that, and then later discovered by a teenager, could they really be worth the 10s of billions at which they were valued?
With crypto's:
1) Watershed event: Litecoin founder cashes out.
2) Dawning realization: If one of you gentle readers buys something, it's got to be recorded on the crypto database/ledger on my computer. And every other crypto holder's computer. Not so efficient. Plus a host of other shortcomings vis a vis other physical or financial assets.
All asic mined coins will consolidate to centralized control.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
...the passing of Trump's tax plan? This is not so much about BC value falling as it is about the value of the Federal Reserve notes in your pocket rising, amirite?
When the king heard the words of the Book of the Law he tore his robes.2Kings22:11
I remember one of my old econ profs stating that in a stable government - ultimately - the fact that taxes have to paid using some said standard currency is what gives it *some* value. Okay troll me. It puts pressure on the demand. The CRA or IRS - pick a country. Yes the jackboots will come and get you if you don't. Put you in jail. That's $$$. Assets paid with what? We will take those thank you. We want dollars yo. We will turn them to $$$ if you can't.
Great. So I'm a local electronics store. I sell someone a laptop for .1 BTC. Fair deal. That transaction is queued for a few days. He wants to walk out of the store with the laptop today. Either the store takes a huge risk of fraud (or even mistake), or the user can't get what he buys for days. Which is why anyone who thinks this is a workable currency is a fucking idiot.
Which is why bitcoin isn't a real currency - it's like Gold, with the added liability that it is intrinsically worthless. But the same problem would occur if you tried to buy say, a million dollar house with a million dollars worth of gold. On what day.
This is just the money freaks finding the latest way to screw things up.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
1. The fiasco at coinbase has led a lot of people to distrust centralized exchanges
2. Bitcoin had hit it's predicted $20,000 high and was already in a correction as it usually does at psychological highs.
3. The new tax plan signed into law has clear implications for cryptocurrency trading, set to take effect on January 1st, 2018. Many people wanted out now to avoid a larger tax bill later. They will be back.
4. CBOE and CME are already live, so the institutional money that was supposedly coming in is all in until January.
5. Bitcoin has been showing many of it's problems lately with slow transactions and high fees, and will take a while before the Lightning Network is mainstream, or Bitcoin will be replaced with a currency like Stellar Lumens that is not susceptible to the same problems.
For me, it was primarily 3 things. 1. LiteCoin was already declining throughout the past couple days. It started to lose a lot more value yesterday around noon PST. We all know they are overvalued and everyone is looking for the spark to sell. I was on edge and didn't want to lose the last 3 outstanding month's profits. 2. The adoption of BitcoinCash by Coinbase - this is like just another alt coin being placed on coinbase, so why not add ripple and doge to coinbase? When will it end? What happens with the next bitcoin fork? The money from the 3 coins on coinbase from the last year that had been doing so well because of their exclusivityu (etherium/litecoin/bitcoin) were essentially washed out and diluted by the mad rush of everyone to dump ether/LiteCoin/bitcoin for the FOMO of bccash. 3. The investigation of insider trading by coinbase. This left a lot of distrust with people about coinbase's motives.
Namaste
[soap box]
Everyone likes to chat up "Tulip Mania" because they remember a brief blurb about it from their high school economics class. There are big differences.
1. A tulip is an actual physical item that you can do something with. Bitcoin is vapor. That doesn't mean you can't pay too much for a tulip, or even WAY too much with a tulip but even if the entire tulip economy crashes you still have a tulip bulb you can plant and get a tulip from. ... well it depends who you talk to.
2. There was precedent for new flowers being introduced into the market and commanding high prices, so the speculation was based on verifiable past data. It was still speculation and it was wrong but bitcoins speculative value is based on
3. The biggest, and most important difference, is that the crash was preceded by rumors that the Guild of Florists were proposing a legal change to tulip contracts that effectively converted contracts to options with a 3.5% penalty. So all of a sudden your contract that you thought was worth $100 could be broken for $3.50. When word of this got out, people started trying to dump their contracts before the regulation was passed (and it was on Feb 24th 1637).
No one can be sure if the market would have tanked as much as it did or at all if the legislation wasn't passed. It probably would have at least taken a big hit, if the guild didn't think the market was too hot they wouldn't have discussed the legislation to begin with. But the point is, the crash was affected by that legislation. There's nothing comparable driving Bitcoin prices. Yes, there's vague talk of some legislation and some countries have even banned trading but there's nothing anywhere near the idea what you could loose 96.5% of your investment if you don't sell RIGHT NOW.
Personally I think bitcoin is overpriced fairy dust (if that wasn't clear from above) and that it will crash, but if you're trying to figure out future movement by comparing it to something that's happened in the past you need to make sure it's actually analogous.
[/soap box]
..from the mainpage.
Youre such whores /. mods.
SHAME.
Bitcoin and all the others have about as much intrinsic value as gold in WoW. People are playing the exchanges much the same as playing the auction house.
Which, interestingly enough, does seem to lend it some actual 'value'.
As long as people are willing to play the game, that is.
Right around this time last year, bitcoin was $1300 USD and it fell all the way to $700 USD. People ( probably the same who are yelling now ) all said bubble bubble bubble. Well we all know what happened next! Don't listen to them, remember fool me once, shame on you :)
I already did ask someone who bought in around 9k (and fully expected 100k soon when i spoke with him a few weeks ago)
and followed that up with
Translation: get in now fool! (it was at 15k at the time). But my friend also has enough money and security that he can play around with it, and didnt buy more than a handful of coins. For entertainment i think mostly.
The order books were thin, several coins had risen with a feverish influx of cash, and the CME launch didn't signal wildly optimistic expectations.
After a couple of days of mild ups and downs, things looked poised to slide down hard enough to run into everyone's stop-loss orders. The buyer side if the LTC book looked especially thin.
I converted everything back to USD about two hours before the shit hit the fan. I did not, sadly, play much in the run back up, but I'm doing family stuff around Christmas.
Plenty of people knew. It was overheated and ready for a correction. The bounce back has been impressive, though. I'd pegged $260 as LTC's pull out, and it's been dancing around $275. I'll live with not maxing out.
What happened is that BC is now traded by the financial industry (or parts of it), and thus has turned into the same casino as the financial markets.
I predict that fluctuations will continue as regular folks, who read all those magazine and newspaper articles, are fleeced by the professional traders who already know this game from all their other markets.
I used to work at a broker house for a short time. Here is one life lesson I learnt: Traders make the fastest money on the down. Whenever you see a stock price crashing, someone just made a killing. The media makes it sound like a disaster and a loss - notice how literally every word that journalists use to describe a market going down fast has negative connotations? But for pros, that is a goldmine. They go home rich that day. Going up is boring, going down is where you can earn your new car, or house.
Someone wanted a new car. That's why BC is crashing. It needed to crash to get all that sweet money that normal folks invested in the past days out of the market and into trader pockets. That's how the casino works.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
This will still not be scalable.
Bitcoin was a nice proof of concept, but it does not really scale.
Governments have been manipulating their fiat currencies so hard that BitCoin serves as an important and viable alternative. People simply do not want to be shafted by GS and their friends at the Federal Reserve.
Plus you can easily make international payments with BC. Try to do a 50k dollar payment over Western Union.
Of course the incumbents do not like BC, but it serves a useful purpose and is here to stay. It will be taxed like other valuable stuff like foreign currencies or company shares.
You feel that your invention and object of manipulation, the USD, might be at risk by crypto currencies. So you badmouth it. "only criminals will use it" etc etc.
In the real world it serves a lot of legitimate purposes such as paying software engineers in a different nation than the user of said software.
It also helps nations such as Iran, Russia and China to evade the mostly unfair US sanctions against them.
For the 400 million people (or more) of Latin America, BC is a real PROBLEM SOLVER. Also, remittances are no problem, just pay the $20 tx fee.
It is always highly funny to see the naysayers of cyber money on a computer science discussion site. How concrete-headed these supposedly "scientifically educated" people are...
Uuuh?
People cashed out to buy Christmas presents.. mystery solved.
I predicted this over 2 months ago.
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency will keep increasing in value in the coming year.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYLxVF9IitI
You do know VPN's aren't bitcoins right?
How stupid could you possibly be?
You were shown link after link that bitcoin isn't banned in China buy you still don't get it do you. Must be a Republican listening to too much AM radio.
Show us this magical HongKong passport that doesn't also show to everyone that you are a Chinese citizen... I'll wait.
You're probably one of those idiots who think Puerto Ricans aren't Americans too right?
I made my masters thesis on bitcoin, so i can say i have done some research on it (although it is bit dated info now). Personally i think bitcoin is horrible on what it tries to accomplish, which is being currency. I doubt it will ever stabilize and even if it does problem is that transactions compete to get to block generated every ten minutes, but if there are always more transactions than there is space for them in the block it creates competition on who gets to make payment which i don't see as a good thing. Miners should of course be rewarded, but i would go with FIFO model at least partly and make algorithm to calculate appropriate transaction fee that is same for all. Not saying there shouldn't be faster pay method but at least some part of the block should be reserved for standard fee. Reward would then fluctuate more (transactions are not competing and there are times when there are more transactions), but does that really matter? Wouldn't it be better if compute capacity would scale on amount of transactions are actually being made (if miners stopped mining when transaction reward part is low). I admit i haven checked deeply how lightning actually works, but seems like bad idea to include transaction information off the block to some external server and frankly i think BCH solution to problem was better, although not that good either (increase number of transactions that can be handled by in block). I can honestly say i don't get why Bitcoin is worth as much as it is. Have these investors tried to use it? I can honestly say i wouldn't want to use bitcoin.It was first attempt for cryptocurrency lets move to something better.
problem is that they might not be in said electronic store. They could even be filling your competitors pockets. I totally agree this is huge problem for bitcoin. We have to consider that it is still relatively unused currency. Think how bad it would be if every internet service accepted bitcoins.
Personally i also think bitcoin core developers are idiots saying no to transaction quota per block increase (transactions per ~10 minutes), but are willing to implement lightning which to my understanding is going to break bitcoin horribly (if transactions are no longer stored in block but some external server that can disappear). Bitcoin cash did kinda lazy improvement by just increasing transaction amount, while i think this issue should be addressed with bit more thought than that so that solution is scale-able and we don't have to increase the size ever again. Like something that checks that checks amount of unconfirmed transactions and calculates how much current block is allowed to take in. That could be written value on previous block which would be checked in validation by others.
Golly, I don't give a shit.
Quite simple really... :)
Up there at the all time high, while CNBC was touting btc day and night, lots of people who were scared to buy btc over the last year or two decided they werent going to miss out. Lots of them used credit and leverage to load up for the right to 25-50k. Then the market started to drift against them. First a little, then a little more. Slowly all of these people decided they were no longer long term investors, and they began to head for the exits. First slowly, but finally in a mad dash trample over the top of each other... creating a nice discount for those with patience.
Thanks nubs
You realize that stocks would do the same thing if the market wasn't manipulated, right?
You may want to have a closer look at the blue one :)
Read all the words this time...
"Nobody knows why" is inaccurate and poor journalism. Also, in crypto-currency, there is no overnight, it's traded around the world 24/7.
What part of different rules did you not understand? I tried typing it really slowly for you. Maybe go back and read it again, very, very slowly this time. Get your wife to help you if you need, she sounds smart.
Everything you just mentioned is different rules. I already told you that they have different rules. It's literally the first thing I said to you. Everyone knows this. Even you!!
Hong Kong is a part of China. If you are born in Hong Kong you are a Chinese citizen, your passport will say as much.
Are you really going to claim 'Republic of Korea' prints 'The Democratic People's Republic of Korea' on the front of their passports and lists the owners nationality as that as well? Or is it the other way around? Because that is absurd and easily checked.
Why doesn't HK just put HK on their passport and HK as the nationality? Hint HK isn't a country, there are no HK citizens...
It will rise again.
Only boring people are ever bored.
Price is a function of supply & demand. Simples. There is always some pundit prepared to tell you why, like many here. But even in more regular markets, usually nobody knows why. Currencies fluctuate against one another in some seemingly random walk, and usually nobody really knows why. And it all depends on one's perspective. When gold crashes against the reference USD does not instead USD rise against gold? Given the puffed up amount of fiat currency is not the rise in the bitcoin price this last year merely a reflection of an inevitable price inflation the fear of which drives the wise into bitcoin? Well, I'm not sure I believe that myself, but my once modest holding of bitcoin was made because of despair of anywhere safe to park a little surplus wealth. And that collapse in bitcoin price of which we write here? Already recovered, almost. Bitcoin might be a bubble but the hot air bubble here, this topic, is something you cannot sell before it collapses.
Paul Beardsell
You say: "And no one knows why". I will tell you why. It is called "Profit Taking." The smart people are cashing in at the top of the market bubble.
There is no such thing as a Hong Kong citizen.
Facts and evidence just wash over you and you continue to believe whatever nonsense you want.
Keep mentioning irrelevant things, it wont change the facts. Hong Kong is part of China. You haven't show anywhere that it's even a country, just that different rules apply. Everyone already knew that. I told you that at the start.
If you do ever go to China or Hong Kong, with whatever visa you choose, make sure you don't go the wrong way and fall off your flat Earth.
Price dropped because people needed money for Christmas shopping. ... really? As people now warming up to "hey I can send you money by scanning your QR code from your screen to pay you" realize bitcoin ain't gonna cut it ... yet they are confused which "cryptocurrency" will become mainstream and see the futile use of bitcoin at the moment.
Second reason is purchasing bitcoin is very difficult, go ahead see if you can purchase it in 30 minutes or less...not easy unless you have a seasoned coinbase account.
Third reason, 11 Transactions per second worldwide
That is interesting, you keep mentioning Hong Kong residents. Why don't you mention Hong Kong citizens?
Could it possibly be because they don't exist?
Is that because Hong Kong isn't a country?
If they are not Chinese what country do you think they are from? And why do they put Chinese citizen on their passports?
Bullshit.
If you want mine your own crypto currency, you need a motherboard with 19 PCIe 1X slots to plug in 19 GPUs and a couple of 1200W PSUs.
losing value because it is becoming mainstream, and i don't mean you can use it to pay everywhere.
not only everybody knows about bitcoin now (xmas dinner was fun answering all those bitcoin questions, right?), but also governments and 'real' banks are joining the discussion. just last week it was announced that the government is now taking a 33% (!) tax on earnings made with bitcoin ( https://tweakers.net/nieuws/13... - article in dutch), chinese government is also starting to meddle on bitcoins and let us not forget about the banks who now want to cash in on it.
too much regulation, too much involvement of higher powers, means bitcoin is losing its advantage and appeal.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
Lastly, look up the exchange rates between the HKD, RMB, and USD, If HK and China are the same, then why are their currency exchange rates always varying?
Because the HK dollar is basically pegged to the $US, but the Yuan mostly floats.
I believe its as aresult of the holiday season. It wil boom up in mid January https://www.makemoney2000.com/...