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Bitcoin Plunges Below $12,000 To Six-Week Low Over Crackdown Fears (cnbc.com)
Bitcoin plunged to a six-week low Tuesday after comments from South Korea's finance minister renewed worries about a crackdown in one of the largest markets for digital currency trading. In a radio program interview, South Korean Finance Minister Kim Dong-yeon said that "the shutdown of virtual currency exchanges is still one of the options" the government has. CNBC reports: Bitcoin dropped more than 17 percent to a low of $11,182.71 on Tuesday, falling below $12,000 for the first time since December 5, according to CoinDesk. CoinDesk's bitcoin price index tracks prices from cryptocurrency exchanges Bitstamp, Coinbase, itBit and Bitfinex. As of 12:13 p.m. ET, bitcoin was trading more than 13 percent lower at $11,759.73 a coin, according to CoinDesk. Trading in South Korean won accounted for about 4 percent of bitcoin trading volume, according to CryptoCompare. U.S. dollar-bitcoin trading had the largest share at 40 percent, the website showed. Other major digital currencies including ethereum and ripple also fell significantly. According to CoinMarketCap data, ethereum was trading at $1,051.83, down more than 20 percent in the last 24 hours, before lifting slightly to $1,117.72. Ripple fell almost 27 percent to $1.33 a token before recovering slightly to $1.36.
What the hell does this have to do with people's political views? The comments on this site are awful, and are getting worse. Do we really need political flamebait in every story?
The issue here is governments don't like having no control over cryptocurrencies. People don't know to what degree the governments will eventually regulate them or ban them, leading to the increased risk being priced in. People aren't willing to gamble as aggressively when there's an imminent threat of a government crackdown.
Not at all. Criminals want a currency that can be traded for real money - and if it cannot be, they'll abandon it too.
The main purpose of bitcoin was stated as 'avoiding government capital controls'.
Pushing it underground will help, no tracing your wallet because you used it to buy coffee. Just a pure 'fuck you' to the government.
They can't keep drugs out of maximum security prisons. They will fail at controlling bitcoin. Yeah, people. Boo, government.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Coinbase shows it's at $10K (as of 15:30 MST on Tuesday). Down 28 percent in one day.
Hope all you speculators have iron nerves!
I should have bought when it was $7 a BC, but I would have sold it at $14
No it is not.
If I were a gambling man, I'd be tempted to invest now. Seems a big overreaction to cause this to make it drop 50% of value.
But I'm not a gambling man. Yes, I was born a rambling man.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
It's somewhat ironic that everything folks cited that was a plus to BitCoin is turning out to be the exact oppose:
1. No government or central body control.
Except when countries decide to ban it causing market crashes.
2. Good currency for goods.
Except when it yo-yos so badly that no sane vendor will use it because they can't predict prices.
3. Good for investing.
Except that it's so unstable it's closer to gambling.
4. Needing control of more than half the bitcoin network to take over means the rich won't be able to get to it.
Except they can and do by putting a lot of money (which I assume they can afford to lose) into the market in a bid to control it. The sad truth is very few people control almost the entire market.
5. Low resource overhead.
Only the computational network that's running bitcoin is blowing more resources than some small thou admittedly "poor" countries.
At the end of the day, it seems if you were there early and out at the peak then you won. But overall the whole system seems worse or more world wrecking than country issued currency. I wouldn't be surprised if bitcoin crashes badly or dies someday leaving a sour taste in crytocurrency.
Bitcoin is a risky investment.
You called it "gambling". But you aren't "a gambling man".
Analysts in the media have stated that Bitcoin's price is largely the result of 4 promoters of the currency. This is another way of saying it is a MLM or a game of musical chairs, last one holding the currency gets burnt.
Congrats to the 4 guys who have managed to skyrocket the currency in the last 12 months --- possibly because it is nice a vehicle for money laundering in Asia (particularly China). Warren Buffett says the currency offers no long term benefits over government currencies, is difficult to sell or conduct transactions in and he doesn't expect it to be around in 5 years.
I'm not against cryptocurrencies, they are a nice concept, but I am against bubbles and scams. When bitcoin was around $400 to $800 it was probably priced appropriately.
If I were a gambling man, I'd be tempted to invest now. Seems a big overreaction to cause this to make it drop 50% of value.
The whales are driving the price down because the first of the futures contracts come due tomorrow. They'll drive it back up when they want to take profits.
Remember, 2.5% of all addresses hold 97% of all BTC/Blockstream Core bitcoins. Go add up the numbers yourself from a Bitcoin Rich List.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Here's a rather interesting and relevant hypothesis about a contributing cause to the recent downturn: https://www.reddit.com/r/Crypt...
?The TL;DR from the post: The cause of today's chaos is likely large hedge funds using expiring BTC futures contracts as safety nets to exploit the only sure-thing in this market: a large amount of new/overextended investors who are easily moved to panic sell during a flash-crash.
I think anyone who has a enough sound understanding of the technology and actually took the time to understand Bitcoin could see the flashing red lights. I think everybody else just buys the propaganda perpetuated by the media. One day they say BTC is good, the next its bad. This created a market based on the speculation and not on merit. Bitcoin needs to function on merit not what people "might" think it's worth in the future.
But when we live in an era where seemlessness is all people want and then you sell them on a concept which has significant technical limitations then add the odd exchange crash and print stories about Bitcoin getting stolen then it takes the wind out of the sails a little bit.
But moving back to the red lights I mentioned before.
First was the concept of decentralization and hard forking. I read about these concepts well before the Bitcoin Cash fiasco and I felt bank then that it was not a good demonstration of decentrailization as all it showed to me was a calis from of centralization. Bitcoin Cash just proved me right. Think about it logically, just because Bitcoin is run by a bunch of servers then all you really need is the popular voted strategy. All the hard fork does is push those who didn't play ball out. The overall cost to people running Bitcoin is just redepoly a bunch of new servers and move on, not a big cost at all if you think about it.
Then we take the Blockchain technology itself. So what? I didn't see this anything "special" about a lightweight databasing tool there literally are dozens possible solutions. Databasing transactionally and securely didn't need to be reinvented, it just needed to be done properly. But the transaction delays when it came up was just confirmation of this.
Last but not least, the mining. Stupid. That's all that needs to be said here. Moore's law and Stupid.
Can we please move on from crypto, please???
If I were a gambling man, I'd be tempted to invest now. Seems a big overreaction to cause this to make it drop 50% of value.
If I remember a recent Ars Technica article correctly, bitcoin has had 4 hyperbolic spikes in prices similar to the current one. After each there was about a 75% drop in price. The last one was in 2014, up to $1,100, then down to $250-300 and staying there for years until the current spike to $19,000 occurred.
But now we have a new variable. Those past spikes were when bitcoin owners were largely geek speculators who were also true believers in bitcoin. This current spike coincided with wall street speculators getting involved and soon followed by speculators from the general public. These "newcomers" may not be as forgiving as the preceding "true believers".
A suggestion to those new to all this. Don't conflate blockchain and bitcoin. Blockchain technology is likely to be part of our future. Bitcoin is just one user of blockchain technology, it may or may not be part of our future. "Not" is a serious possibility given that bitcoin has deviated from its design and its assumptions about its blockchain security are no longer valid. Its security required a global distributed community of miners who are regular individuals using their own computers and this has not been true for years. Bitcoin is plausibly vulnerable to mining cartels and government intervention due to the current state of affairs where we have a relatively small number of miners using expensive specialized ASIC hardware that is geographically located in a single country and reliant upon inexpensive government supplied electricity. Are cartels or the government likely to subvert the bitcoin blockchain? Probably not, but it remains plausible, and bitcoin security is based on the assumption that such things are not even remotely plausible.
Bitcoin is entirely replaceable by a another coin with better security, new features and/or better performance. Before anyone makes a "network effect" argument, keep in mind that a network effect needs high switching costs to be effective. There is little to no switching cost to move from bitcoin to a different coin. Before anyone makes
I know people who receiver 100% of there pay check in crypto.
Well then, you have morons for friends.