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Bitcoin Starts a New Year by Tumbling, First Time Since 2015 (bloomberg.com)

Posted by msmash on from the closer-look dept.

Bitcoin is already having a bad year. From a report: For the first time since 2015, the cryptocurrency began a new year by tumbling, extending its slide from a record $19,511 reached on Dec. 18. The virtual coin traded at $13,440 as of 3:55 p.m. in New York, down 6.1 percent from Friday, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That's also a fall from the $14,156 it hit Sunday, according to coinmarketcap.com, which tracks daily prices. Bitcoin got off to a much stronger start last year, and then kept that momentum going, eventually creating a global frenzy for cryptocurrencies. In a sign of its phenomenal price gain in 2017, it rose 3.6 percent on the first day of 2017 to $998, data from coinmarketcap.com show. It ended the year up more than 1,300 percent.

8 of 267 comments (clear)

  1. back to value by iggymanz · · Score: 5, Insightful

    returning to its pre-bubble value in a hurry

    that was a good pump n' dump for 2017, big players can prep for more suckers taking the next joyride

    1. Re:back to value by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Most people saw this coming, there was money to be made but some people got this confused with investing in something that had utility.

      It's little more than a decentralized store of value and that value is really based on the hype around it. It doesn't have the transaction speed/cost to replace mainstream currencies nor some of the features of other blockchain technologies, some more dubious than others.

      The question often comes up "what do you do with it", well sure you could use it like diamonds, you could trade it for a house or a car or something but you're not going to do your grocery shopping or pay your bills with it. It's just a relatively unstable store of value.

    2. Re:back to value by Nikkos · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "It's little more than a decentralized store of value and that value is really based on the hype around it"

      There is little of the internet that has any value besides social value. Bitcoin - particularly the technology behind it - had utility as a way to store and transfer value securely and quickly across the world. It's still cheaper other cryptocurrencies to send 'money' to the other side of the world than it is to use a bank or Western Union. Not to mention that the increased competition has forced Western Union and moneygram to lower their fees, which are now half of what they were just a couple years ago.

      Now btc's first mover advantage has placed it as the 'gold standard' of which an entire ecosystem of digital currencies valued at $600 Billion (of which BTC itself is less than half that) are traded against.

      Remember that the USD is backed by the 'faith and credit' of the government, as every other world currency is backed by the faith and credit that their respective goverments won't fuck up their economy so much that their currency becomes worthless.

      Bitcoin sidesteps all of that 'faith' by having a limited supply, decentralized management and markets, and the inability for any one organization or actor to fuck it all up (China tried, and failed) That has very clear utility for financial markets and economic systems.

    3. Re: back to value by iggymanz · · Score: 4, Insightful

      No Bitcoin is a failure, with a bottlenecked architecture that prevents liquidity, high transaction fees far in excess of bank wiring fee, high percentage of use for black market begging for government intervention, and extreme volatility making it useless as store of value

  2. Re:Meaningless noise by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Put your chart to "all data" it sure starts to look a lot like a dotcom bubble chart!

    https://bitcoincharts.com/charts/bitstampUSD#tgSzm1g10zm2g25

  3. Re:1300 pct by gravewax · · Score: 3, Insightful

    why would the stock market go with it? BC even at current price is little more than a hiccup compared to most stock markets. would a single company collapsing cause the entire stock market to crash?

  4. Re:How do you define failure? by iggymanz · · Score: 2, Insightful

    False, not in widespread use at all, compared to say dollars or euros, too illiquid. waiting days for a transaction cripples it.

    Bringing up Twitter, you are funny. Yes Twitter is losing money, not making it. Failure as a business.

  5. Re:Is there an actual practical use for blockchain by geekpowa · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The coin ecosystems currently is reminiscent of the wildcat banking era

    Proponents of coins say this is a feature, not a bug.

    Bitcoin is singled out because it is the oldest, most established, and if you naively believe that true value of all coins in circulation = spot price * number of coins, also the most valuable.

    Sure other coins solve (or alleviate) some of the more glaring problems with bitcoin, yet other significant structural problems remain with the whole concept. One example: sometimes mediation is actually needed to resolve real disputes becasue we are afterall only human and bad actors are out there. The only way, by design, crypto coins do this is forking blockchains, a la The Dao and ETH/ETC split. Again proponents see this is a feature, not a bug.

    Alot of wheel reinventing going on, done in ignorance of what has happened in the past WRT banking and finance. IT innovation in banking and finance is wild west stuff and an honest appraisal of things would be that noone knows what the fuck they are doing