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More Wall Street Pundits Caution Against Investing In Bitcoins (cnbc.com)

Peter Boockvar is the Chief Investment Officer of Bleakley Financial Group, a $3.5B wealth management firm -- and he predicts "an epic crash will hit the cryptocurrency market," according to CNBC. "He isn't sure if it'll come to a grinding halt or be a slow and steady drop -- but he says it's coming." "When something goes parabolic like this has, it typically ends up to where that parabola began," he said on CNBC's "Futures Now." Boockvar, a CNBC contributor, contends bitcoin is in danger of dropping 90 percent from current levels. He calls it a classic bubble. "I wouldn't be surprised if over the next year it's down to $1,000 to $3,000," he added. That's where bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency player, was trading less than 12 months ago. Friday afternoon it was trading above $11,000.
Meanwhile, today the International Business Times chronicled the predictions of tech billionaire Mark Cuban. In June of last year as bitcoin was climbing toward the $3,000 threshold, Cuban cautioned potential investors about jumping in on the bandwagon... "[C]rypto is like gold. More religion than asset. Except of course gold makes nice jewelry." He told his followers at the time that he wasn't questioning the value of Bitcoin but was questioning the "valuation" and said , "I think it's in a bubble. I just don't know when or how much it corrects." Cuban suggested that when everyone is "bragging about how easy they are making [money]," that indicates there is a bubble happening...

Still, the Dallas Mavericks owner was open to the idea of using cryptocurrencies as a volatile investment vehicle. "If you're a true adventurer and you really want to throw the Hail Mary, you might take 10 percent and put it in Bitcoin or Ethereum," he said. Cuban also cautioned, "If you do that, you've got to pretend you've already lost your money"... Showing just have far Cuban has come on bitcoin and cryptocurrency, he announced earlier this week that his Dallas Mavericks will accept bitcoin and Ethereum as a method to pay for tickets starting next season. Even if the tech investor doesn't fully believe in cryptocurrency, he's clearly willing to try to profit off it...

6 of 177 comments (clear)

  1. Uses of gold by theweatherelectric · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Except of course gold makes nice jewelry.

    And gold also has uses in electronics, medicine, and aerospace applications.

    1. Re:Uses of gold by religionofpeas · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Industrial use of gold only account for 10% of the mined gold. The rest is hoarded in the form of coins, jewelry and bullion bars. The small amount of industrial use does not explain why it's being sold at such a large premium over production cost.

  2. Re:Its dangerous: Speculators + Deviation from Des by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Any tech created by the alt coins can always be adopted by Bitcoin. As we see happening now.

    Except when inertia, politics and greed stop it from happening. You think those folks with the huge ASIC mining farms are going to support switching to a GPU friendly algorithm?

  3. Re:Its dangerous: Speculators + Deviation from Des by NicknameUnavailable · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It actually does. The Bitcoin network (and all secure distributed networks) depend upon consensus, whomever controls 51% of the mining effort controls the transactions and in turn dictates how things happen. The bigger issue is the politics-heavy update side of the actual protocols which don't change the minting process at all. The new lightning network they've been trying to roll out has some pretty serious security flaws nobody seems to be discussing but to say they don't want to use it (since a hint of insecurity could itself spoil the fun, especially when it's already been technically implemented and it's just that nobody is using it.)

  4. Re:Bitcoin is now useless as a currency by mentil · · Score: 4, Interesting

    As much as I'd love Lightning to be a panacea, I don't see how it'll work out. It's too easy to anonymously bring your competitors to financial ruin by challenging the off-blockchain ledger, forcing the ledger to be posted to blockchain, costing your competitor a huge transaction fee every time you do this. Now, say you have a bot challenging the ledger every 5 seconds, or 5 milliseconds; those savings become a huge liability very fast. This just brings us back to the real problem: posting to blockchain is way too expensive. If Lightning fails to work as advertised, Bitcoin will be out of magic bullets.

    --
    Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
  5. Re:Of course they do... by c120plus · · Score: 3, Interesting

    How long does the memory on a USB stick last?

    It's not safe. However, you can also burn it on a couple of blurays, print it and transfer it to microfilm. All these storage methods should easily outlast your lifetime... if you speak German, here's how to get your coins on a vinyl record https://www.heise.de/security/...