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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."
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.
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.
Using bitcoin as currency is about the same as using traditional stocks as currency.
I really think bitcoin has no real value outside of providing temporary peaks and valleys to trade between. Using an unstable commodity as a measure of trade-worth is far more complex for businesses to adopt at scale, which pretty much relegates it to the small guy looking to move small amounts of currency discreetly.
I can't imagine this will ever go mainstream at scale unless the value can be made consistent.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
Middle of the night??? You do understand that bitcoin trades 24/7 across 24 different time zones and that the world stretches beyond your backyard, right?
Spend only what you can afford to lose. Up until now, the trend has been increasing value, and it will likely continue for a while. At some point, it will crash, and it will be difficult to cash out then.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes