Bitcoin Drops Below $6,000, An 8-Month Low (reuters.com)

An anonymous reader quotes Reuters: Bitcoin's value slid to its lowest level since November on Friday, as waning investor interest and recent negative headlines from global regulators weakened demand for the cryptocurrency and most of its rivals. Virtual currencies, including the best-known and biggest, bitcoin, have been stuck in a downward trend for most of 2018 after last year's frenzied interest fizzled. Recent hacks and the "cyber intrusion" of cryptocurrency exchanges in key Asian markets has also encouraged investors to exit.

Bitcoin fell to as low as $5,774 on the Bitstamp exchange, the lowest since November 12... So far in 2018, bitcoin has tumbled almost 60 percent after soaring more than 1,300 percent last year. It is now down 70 percent from its December peak... The total market capitalization of cryptocurrencies has fallen to around $230 billion from a peak of around $800 billion in January.
Will Hobbs, Head of Investment Strategy at Barclays Smart Investor, now tells Reuters that "None of the crypto currencies currently fulfill any of the criteria that we would look for in an investible asset, and we would continue to advise extreme caution. The rout in crypto currencies is still not finished."

Comments

Just wish...

[Ronin Developer]

I was the pizza guy who received the first BTC (assuming I didnâ(TM)t lose them).

There is still too much corruption and non-hardened exchanges for me to take BTC seriously.

However, the tech is cool and some people made a lot of money.

Re: Going further down soon

[Anonymous Coward]

God I hope not, I need it to hit at least $10k soon or my wife will find out I refinanced our house to buy more bitcoin.

Re:It's actually up 8%

[arth1]

It's actually up 8% since yesterday. That's an awesome return for 1 day. This is more proof of why investment analysts do worse the the market as a whole.... They are either lying or don't know what they are talking about. I'll assume the later.

And the last time I played Black Jack, I got a 100% payout. Now that's an even more awesome return for 1 day.

If you don't understand statistics and stochastics, don't come crying once you've lost.

Bag Hodlers

[DatbeDank]

Time to call them what they are.

Re:Bag Hodlers

[NicknameUnavailable]

Bitcoin has a hard limit of 2022-2024 after which the protocol can't be hacked to be safe vs quantum computers. The issue is that post-quantum signature schemes require a switch to them BEFORE the first quantum computer capable of Shor's algorithm comes out around that time. That switch has to be initiated by every wallet holder with any coins - and the smallest sizes for public key and signature combinations for that first transaction come in around 35KB combined. There are currently just under 25 million Bitcoin wallets in use and that number has grown exponentially year-over-year (in part as the necessity to do so to maintain some semblance of anonymity, so that's likely not going to change.) That means just that initial change without adjustment for the numbers of wallets in the next few years (just what currently exists) will be a blockchain 875 GB in size - just for the cutover, no actual transactions. Now add in the next 4 years of wallet count growth (on the low end,) and you get a hair under 13.5 TB for the actual cutover. Now consider that public key is the SMALL PART in every post-quantum signature scheme - every single signature requires about 30KB in addition to the data you're signing, which is trivial in comparison, so let's just call it 30KB/transaction. We're at about 150k transactions/DAY right now (after the introduction of the lightning network, before that it was about 350k/day and due to limitations of post-quantum protocols you can't make it fit a similar scheme to the lightning network - but Hell, let's be super liberal and pretend some miracles happen to keep the transaction count no higher than 150k/day and counting at that minimal growth rate previously defined.) That means by 2022 we're looking at an additional 72 GB/DAY in transactional data at the baseline - or an additional 26.3 TB/year of added transactions that first year post-cutover. That means every single user who wants to verify a transaction is secure requires at a bare minimum needs 39.8 TB to make it through the first year in addition to the current measly 173 GB size. Now take in a more realistic account by dropping the lightning network functionality and you're looking at 168 GB/DAY or 61.4 TB/year additional data.

The short of all this: Bitcoin has 4 years left before it is entirely worthless, 7 at the outset.

Re:Bag Hodlers

[NicknameUnavailable]

Given the rate of quantum computing development we have 4-7 years (at most) before Shor's algorithm can be used to break any pre-quantum cryptographic algorithm. I outlined the reasons why post-quantum algorithms are unsuitable for use in a blockchain like Bitcoin very clearly. But go on, show the solution if you insist on pumping your fake money.

And today it's above $6,300...

[EvilSS]

...and up 5.36% (at 2pm EDT) for the week so can we stop spamming click-bait stories every time BTC wobbles? It's erratic and unstable, we all know that. It goes up, it goes down, it goes round and round.

Re:And today it's above $6,300...

[Joce640k]

...and up 5.36% (at 2pm EDT) for the week.

Only because there was another mini-crash exactly 7 days ago.

If you look at 8 or 6 days, it's down.

If you look at 30 days, it's down... a LOT.

Re:And today it's above $6,300...

[Tjp($)pjT]

If you look over a year, it’s up. A lot.

Re:old news

[Joce640k]

The Chinese gang who own most Bitcoins can afford to buy back a few at inflated prices to make you think it's "recovering", yes.

Re:Going further down soon

[Joce640k]

Wasn't it supposed to be over a million by now? I haven't been paying much attention.

Re: Going further down soon

[Joce640k]

Sell now and switch to Ethereum, that's a sure thing.

Re:This is good news for Bitcoin

[ISayWeOnlyToBePolite]

Actually it possibly is. If Bitcoin is slowly inflating, rather than violently oscillating between extremes, it might start to be possible to take it seriously as a "currency".

Your hypothesis might be correct, but for the fact that bitcoin by no reasonable definition is "slowly" inflating.

Re: Going further down soon

[LynnwoodRooster]

Hey, do you know how many Dogecoin you could buy for $500K? He could corner the Dogecoin market and do a 51% attack on himself and essentially become a trillionaire overnight!

Re:$20K to $5K matches previous BTC corrections

[PopeRatzo]

Not when its gone up 1300%.

Oh, especially when it's gone up %1300. Because that means most of the money invested in Bitcoin was done when it was above $10,000. Those people got slaughtered. And since many of the people who got in early added to their portfolios as it went up, they got hurt, too.

Right now, the only think keeping it afloat is that the Wall Street guys are doing the reverse of the "pump and dump", trying to get out of bitcoin. Once they do, you won't be able to buy a Beanie Baby with a bitcoin.