Bitcoin Sinks Below $6,000 as Almost Everything Crypto Tumbles (bloomberg.com)

Several readers have shared a report: Bitcoin touched below $6,000 and dozens of smaller digital tokens including Ether retreated as this month's sell-off in cryptocurrencies showed few signs of letting up. The largest digital currency fell as much as 6.2 percent to $5,887, the lowest level since June, before paring some of the drop, according to Bloomberg composite pricing. Ether sank as much as 13 percent, while all but one of the 100 biggest cryptocurrencies tracked by Coinmarketcap.com recorded declines over the past 24 hours. The total market capitalization of virtual currencies dropped to $193 billion. Thatâ(TM)s down from a peak of about $835 billion in January.

Comments

Rebound due?

[Oswald McWeany]

OK speculators... now the time to buy? A rebound due? Or are we seeing the death throes of Crypto coin as an investment option and a return to just being used in the underground.

Re:Rebound due?

[Applehu Akbar]

Oops - there goes the money they were hoping to pyramid by shorting Tesla.

Re: Rebound due?

[Joce640k]

I see what you did there. ^

Re:Rebound due?

[Joce640k]

It's over, and has been for a long time.

All the "rebounds" since last January are mostly just the Chinese bitcoin miners manipulating the market to get money from the idiots.

All we need is for the idiots to stop believing and it's going to be a total trainwreck.

(Remember: Only about 6 Bitcoin transactions per second are possible in the entire world - nobody will be able to sell :-) )

Re:Rebound due?

[burtosis]

That's the whole problem, crypto currencies were "supposed" to be currencies and not an investment vehicle. Sure, people invest in the dollar, but the primary purpose for individuals is currency used to easily exchange for services and goods. The problem with many crypto currencies are the currency part - the difficulty, delay, and uncertainty (in value) of actually paying with them has held them back. Secure distributed ledgers sure seem like a likely future of currency but at this point it seems to me like it's a crap shoot which one, or even which type of structure will be dominant and a good 'investment'.

Re: Rebound due?

[reanjr]

I think it's actually 12, but the really important thing is that Lightning Network (built on top of BTC) can actually perform hundreds of thousands of off-chain transactions for each of those limited on-chain transactions.

The important thing to watch is where the fees get during the next bubble. Lightning and Segwit should both have a significant impact by then.

Re: Rebound due?

[luis_a_espinal]

All currencies fluctuate and Bitcoin isn't going anywhere. When you grow up and stop relying on mommy and daddy, you might learn how economies work.

^^^ Projection

Re: Rebound due?

[DarkOx]

The important thing is the entire point of bitcoin was it was supposed to be free of middle men. Lighting is a middle man. Basically bitcoin does not work as designed. There is nothing stopping some big banks from essentially taking over lighting and making settlement feeds just about equivalent to CC rates now. Basically anyone betting on BitCoin being a primary currency or exchange mechanism of the future is a nuts.

Which is not say some blockchain based solution won't emerge just that it won't be bitcoin.

Re: Rebound due?

[reanjr]

Use dollar cost averaging. Whatever you are comfortable buying on a weekly or monthly basis; the important thing is to buy on a regular schedule.

It's unlikely to rebound anytime soon, if you go by historical bubbles. Now is the time for long term investment.

Re: Rebound due?

[Joce640k]

If it's based on a public, signed ledger then it HAS to be be Bitcoin. The only way to keep the ledger secure is by requiring vast amounts of work to add an entry to it.

It it isn't based on a public, signed ledger then it's not free, it has to be controlled by a trusted party. Who's that going to be? Banks? A government? We already have that, it's called "money".

Re:Rebound due?

[timholman]

(Remember: Only about 6 Bitcoin transactions per second are possible in the entire world - nobody will be able to sell :-) )

The average BTC transaction fee is still under $1 USD, so the panic selling hasn't started yet. The fun part will be when BTC starts to plummet while the transaction fee skyrockets. The really fun part will happen if the transaction fee climbs to the point where people realize their remaining BTC balance will cost them more money to liquidate than if they simply deleted their wallet.

Re:Rebound due?

[Bohnanza]

It was never "an investment option", it became a way for speculators to scam cash out of those who believed it was. The problem with "crypto" is that there is NOTHING behind it. Since it can be "mined" from nowhere, it does not even represent a debt, as all other currency types do.

Re:Rebound due?

[Mouldy]

It's a gamble. However, from what I've read; this drop isn't a result of fatal or bad news. Nobody has outlawed cryptocurrencies - nobody has broken their technical implementations. Nothing particularly exciting has happened recently in cryptocurrency news.

So, given that nothing happened to kill cryptocurrencies - I'd say the price will rebound. I could only speculate what the timeframe for that might be though - it could be days, months, weeks or years. It may also go down more before it goes up.

My personal gamble is; the price will probably go down a bit more, but by the end of the year, it will probably be up more than a traditional bank's savings account will be.

If you're looking to make a quick buck...it's very high risk. If you're looking to make a buck in the longer term, it's still high risk - but less so.

Re:Rebound due?

[Sniper98G]

If reporters are telling you it's dead, wait a bit and buy it. If reporters are telling you it's the future of the world, wait a bit and sell it.

Tech reporters are manipulating the price of bitcoin by writing articles about it and laughing all the way to the bank.

Re: Rebound due?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah! Quit listening to mommy and daddy and buy into our pyramid scheme! All currencies fluctuate, but losing 70% of its value in less than 12mo can't be ignored. I don't think Bitcoin will just vanish tomorrow, but I expect it will continue its steady decline as investors jump ship looking for the next big thing.

Re: Rebound due?

[DarkOx]

If it's based on a public, signed ledger then it HAS to be be Bitcoin.

Based on what? What exactly stops a technically similar but better architected solution - say with larger more usable at scale block sizes from being widely adopted? Widely adopted by say they entrenched financials most of whom missed the boat on the early Btc speculation but already have all the merchant relationships etc in place to take a new offering packaged in a consumer friendly way to market easily.

What is stop the Federal reserve from issuing its own cryptocurrency, and using dollar monetary policy to highly encourage its adoption.

Face it Btc is a dead end and everyone holding is going be left with worthless pseudo random bit stings once the existing players decide to move. Just ask which is more likely: Joe Sixpack learns how to use a bitcoin wallet and what a bitcoin address is ? or Joe's mega bank packages a nice little easy to use system based on their government sanctioned and back currency packeged in something that looks like the debit card he has today with easy and automatic exchanges for Dollars, Euros, Pounds, CAN, etc they way most major credit cards work now....

Re:Rebound due?

[bobbied]

OK speculators... now the time to buy? A rebound due?

Yes, a rebound is defiantly DUE... The issue is will it arrive...

Re:Rebound due?

[houghi]

At this moment people see Bitcoin still as an investment. As long as that is the case it is over. If and when it will get a restart is left to be seen and requires just as much speculation as the people who use it as an inevstment.

The chances are 50/50. Eiter it will or it won't.

Re: Rebound due?

[Mouldy]

There is nothing stopping some big banks from essentially taking over lighting and making settlement feeds just about equivalent to CC rates now

Big banks are free to participant in the lightning network just as much as everyone else is. That is, free as in speech - not as in beer.

Big banks (or you and I) are also free to set whatever settlement fees they want. That is also still free as in speech.

But let me tell you why that won't be bad for consumers...

Big bank charges $1000 to settle a fee? I can undercut them at $900. Someone else undercuts me. Someone undercuts them etc. It's a race to $0 fees and is good for consumers.

Unlike the traditional banking model - the banks won't have exclusive control to set fees. Instead, they would have fair competition with anyone and everyone.

The only way that would change is if, someone up-ended lightning network and made it less free-as-in-speech. Eg, government regulation saying that only registered financial entities confirming to KYC/AML etc may use it. They'd have a hard time enforcing that, but they could just plain outlaw free competition and that is how you hurt consumers.

Re: Rebound due?

[DarkOx]

Yes and to put a little finer point on it..

What will the banks do.. Will they

  A) Pay enormous sums of money to a the current crop of nerds and Chinese nations that hold bitcoins to acquire the liquidity they need to effect settlements? All so they can have access to a vanishingly small part of the population that has ever transacted a bitcoin and work with almost nonexistent pool of legitimate commercial vendors that already deal in bit coin?

-or-

B) Call their CEO buddies form an industry group create their own currency with SEC and other federal agency approval do all the early mining themselves to set themselves up the initial liquidity required at no cost.

This isn't a tough one people...

Re: Rebound due?

[AuMatar]

No, now is the time to stay the fuck away. Dollar cost averaging doesn't help you on a declining asset. Its a mathematical trick to smooth out bumps on an asset you believe will have a long term gain. Unless you plan on holding for years, and are sure the crypto will be around, and are sure it will be these coins, then buying is idiocy.

Re:Rebound due?

[bluefoxlucid]

Currencies need to have some form of stability. When population expands, you need more currency. When productivity increases, you need more currency (imagine your dollar income falling as prices fall, but your bank loan doesn't get any smaller, and your house becomes worth less, so now you're underwater and your mortgage payment is a larger percentage of your income).

This is why we have things like fiat currencies, which always represent the amount of goods and services produced and sold (income). Currency doesn't become scarce (like bitcoin or gold) or suddenly flood (like gold); it's managed to stabilize inflation as market changes create demands on currency supply.

Re: Rebound due?

[bluefoxlucid]

Don't tell him that. How is anyone going to make any money if there aren't fools from which to part it?

Re: Rebound due?

[jythie]

Thing is, the banks are not going to start with $1000 fees, they are going to be able to undercut everyone through sheer resources, then wait till small time players can not survive. Then poof, they are the only ones left.

Re:Rebound due?

[jythie]

The problem with that problem is that it was by design. One of the big things early proponents of BTC loved was that it was deflationary, so it would increase in value the longer you held onto. The thing was basically BUILT for investment and speculation, with a built in mechanism to eventually doom small transactions by drowning them in fees that encourage moving large amounts around private exchanges.

Re:Rebound due?

[jythie]

Ahm.. the only difference between a debt and an asset is which side of the contract you are on.

Re: Rebound due?

[omnichad]

Bitcoin is still valued higher than its worth as a currency. That could change, but most of its current value is tied to the gamblers' bubble on it.

Re:Rebound due?

[burtosis]

This is why we have things like fiat currencies, which always represent the amount of goods and services produced and sold (income).

It is possible to structure a currency based on goods and/or services through a distributed secure ledger, many are already based on oil.

Re: Rebound due?

[omnichad]

You can't sell off your BTC if no sucker is around to buy it.

Re:Rebound due?

[bluefoxlucid]

No, that's a commodity-based currency or such.

The United States had $18 trillion of gross national income in 2016. Do you know how that happens? A bunch of people do work (not necessarily useful work: traders may put in the effort of decision-making to move your money to their pockets, which is work, but produces nothing except the outcome of your money going into their pockets) and they derive income (are paid) for that work.

That's all the corporate profits, all the wages, all the capital gains. Every time someone performed some labor and derived some form of income thereof, that income was accounted in the GNI. (There are some complex considerations there, such as how revenue meets laborers through organizations and supply chains and so corporate profit after expenses are income, wages are income, but corporate revenue that passes on to another hand is not income. Savings covering losses shifts income over time, too, so you kind of spread some of this across time; and losses by producing things not useful or saleable are a cost of producing, and are still represented in the whole of "we paid this much for all the stuff we consumed".)

That's what the US Dollar is: $18 trillion in 2016 of US dollars is just a funny number. It could be $2 trillion, or $5,000 trillion. That income would have been earned, in any case, by purchasing these same goods and services--by the same labor, its results, and the cost borne by the activity of the economy to purchase it.

There might be additional US dollars sitting around somewhere unspent. Those are effectively "unprinted"--they're removed from the economy--and the people who own them essentially have the power to "print" new money at a later date. The Fed issues $1 and $12 show up because of fractional reserve; the idle cash in bank accounts is still part of the monetary basis, and spending it doesn't allow the banks to issue additional, so the spending of what was $1 of idle cash is only introducing $1 and not $12 of newly-available money supply. Same concept, though.

A fiat currency can't be anything else. What is spent is what is bought. Oil, on the other hand, is a basic material resource (a fuel or a plastic stock), and so carries its own marginal utility.

Re: Rebound due?

[Mouldy]

I haven't done much research, but a quick google finds this article that says the current average fee is about 1 satoshi per hop (fractions of a cent) and "the costs of spinning up a node and routing payments via the lightning network are not that high".

Presumably those running nodes that take 1 satoshi aren't doing so at a loss - so I think banks would really struggle to undercut the super-cheap nodes. Maybe a bank can run at a loss for longer than everyone else - but after the banks have killed competition and hike up their fees - the competition will come right on back.

Re: Rebound due?

[fedos]

Bitcoin isn't a currency; it's a ponzi scheme. Sounds like you're the one in need on an education economics.

Re:Rebound due?

[xtal]

Buy some every week or two and average in.

Altcoins are all garbage and lots of folks have predicted BTC dominance emerging.

Lightning network, distributed exchanges, all sorts of things are coming.

Bitcoin + LN solves a problem that the beloved Cmdr Taco used to rant about - micropayments. It lets you send $0.0001 to someone, with no middlemen. That's incredible, and it's going to change a lot of things.

Everyone should have a little BTC. I have no intention of converting any of it back to $.

Buy it with money you'd otherwise waste, and even if it goes to zero, you'll have a funny story. But mark my words, BTC will go one way - to zero, or to the moon.

Re: Rebound due?

[Joce640k]

If it's based on a public, signed ledger then it HAS to be be Bitcoin.

Based on what? What exactly stops a technically similar but better architected solution - say with larger more usable at scale block sizes from being widely adopted?

It seems you don't understand blockchain: The only way a publicly owned ledger can be tamper-proof is by requiring an unfeasible amount of work for a malicious party to alter it.

That's what Bitcoin miners do - sign the pages of the ledger in return for rewards (bitcoins). To falsify the ledger you need as much computing power as all the bitcoin miners in the world put together.

What is stop the Federal reserve from issuing its own cryptocurrency

Why would they? They already have a working currency with matching electronic and anonymous (ie cash) payment methods.

Re: Rebound due?

[Joce640k]

No, absolutely nothing like a real bank.

A real bank owns the ledger. When you own a ledger there's no requirement of making it very difficult to add new transactions to it.

Re:Rebound due?

[timholman]

The problem with many crypto currencies are the currency part - the difficulty, delay, and uncertainty (in value) of actually paying with them has held them back.

In my opinion, what has held back all of them has been the inherent "early adopters get rich" architecture. The concentration of wealth in the BTC community makes the concentration of USD by the upper 1% look like a socialist paradise by comparison, and every major cryptocurrency since then has copied it ... because of course, everyone wants to be the "new" 1%.

Think about it: someone invents a new currency for which he just happens to own 20% or 30% of the total worldwide supply, and wants everyone to adopt it as "money". How deluded does he have to be to think that the people holding the actual wealth in this world will just hand over their power and assets to a guy holding some digital tokens that he personally created?

The BTC community is dominated by this mindset of adopters hoping to become the "new" wealthy class. It drives the speculative frenzy and the irrational behavior. And ultimately, that mindset is exactly what will bring the BTC experiment to an end, even if one could solve the problems of transaction throughput and ease of use.

Re: Rebound due?

[doom]

It seems you don't understand blockchain

At this point, the moment someone says this I tune out.

It may very well be that the speaker understands blockchains better than I do, but it's guaranteed that there are many more things they don't understand.

Re:Rebound due?

[doom]

Or are we seeing the death throes of Crypto coin as an investment option

We can only hope... last I heard, bitcoin mining was burning as much power as Austrailia.

Re: Rebound due?

[Joce640k]

We were only discussing blockchains, but ... feel free to stay ignorant.

Re: Rebound due?

[Joce640k]

I think it's actually 12

No, it's actually around 5 or 6 at the moment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:Rebound due?

[lgw]

Currency doesn't become scarce (like bitcoin or gold) or suddenly flood (like gold); it's managed to stabilize inflation as market changes create demands on currency supply.

Unlike gold, BTC is easily divisible into smaller pieces still useful as currency. You'll get an economic crisis when there's not enough physical currency to mediate trade -- a scarce currency stops being a currency -- but BTC doesn't have that problem. It also can't suddenly flood the market, which is nice, though not as nice as advocates seem to think (the BTC supply is not capped, if E=BTC-denominated svings accounts are ever a thing).

BTC is all over the place precisely because people don't use it as a currency. Its use for bulk money transfers and speculation swamps its use to actually mediate trade, so there's no natural stabilizing force at play. And I don't think it can get there from here, as people won't use it as currency because it fluctuates too much.

Re:Rebound due?

[lgw]

it became a way for speculators to scam cash out of those who believed it was

Speculators scam cash out of other speculators, almost entirely. It's con-men scamming con-men all the way down, like any speculative bubble.

Re:Rebound due?

[JoeDuncan]

>(Remember: Only about 6 Bitcoin transactions per second are possible in the entire world - nobody will be able to sell :-) )

This is the biggest problem with Bitcoin, and I haven't seen many people point it out. VISA does like millions of transactions a second.

The whole point of buying Bitcoin as a speculative commodity is dependent on that commodity (Bitcoin) having some intrinsic value that people will buy/consume it for. For Bitcoin, that value only derives from it's utility as a currency, which, to be blunt, it's basically useless at.

So all these Bitcoin speculators are just buying from each other and blindly hoping no one notices the things itself is useless.

Re: Rebound due?

[Joce640k]

If you mean "why can't the size of the pages in the ledger be increased?" then the TLDR answer is that Bitcoin is stuck in a rut.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Blo...

If you mean "Why can't we create yet another cryptocoin with a bigger page size?" then:

a) It's unlikely to happen in practice. The world's reaction to Yet Another Cryptocoin isn't going to be "Yes, please!".
b) No page size will be big enough for a cryptocoin to be used as a general-purpose payment system at a worldwide level that needs tens of millions of transactions per second.

There's also the problem of what happens when all the Bitcoins have been found and the miners aren't interested in signing any more pages of the ledger. The amount of work needed to falsify the ledger will drop dramatically and the miners will be sitting there with a whole lot of mining hardware sat there doing nothing.

Re:Rebound due?

[Joce640k]

Before the Xmas rush, right?

PS: What "years" of bitcoins...?

Re:Rebound due?

[bluefoxlucid]

Unlike gold, BTC is easily divisible into smaller pieces still useful as currency.

That is the problem.

Oh, we divided the currency, so your $10,000/year is now $8,000/year.

By the by, if the bank had kept that $25,000 you borrowed instead of loaning it to you, it would be worth more today. Oh, the interest rate is low, sure; but here's the thing: we're not going to discount you and end with less money. It's still $275/month.

What? You're not happy your mortgage moved from 33% of your monthly income to 41%? It's harder to make payments every year? Your wage keeps going down but your debts are still there? Boo hoo. Find a way to pay it or we take your house, dork.

Re:Rebound due?

[Joce640k]

Yep. All Bitcoin really does at the moment of move people's money around.

It can't create any money: If one person made a million bucks with Bitcoin then that means a thousand other people lost a thousand bucks each.

It's very basic math and it's not infinite, it's limited by:
a) Belief/gullibility
b) The amount of money people can physically scrape together to "invest".

You can argue that Apple shares are basically the same at this point and I won't disagree. Apple has real products and a real-world presence though, Bitcoin doesn't.

Re:Rebound due?

[lgw]

Oh, we divided the currency, so your $10,000/year is now $8,000/year.

I don't follow. Are you talking about inflation, and purchasing power? Hypothetical reduction in salary due to deflation? Deflation sucks for debtors, to be sure. However, if we had savings accounts and mortgages in BTC, we'd also have inflation as the money supply increased.

Re:Rebound due?

[bluefoxlucid]

Deflation, due to having not physically enough money to go around to compensate all the labor.

Bitcoin was designed to produce fewer bitcoins over time due to exponentially-increasing work required to mine each coin, like a gold mine. It eventually falls behind the inflation curve, which is why bitcoins are mostly traded in fractions now instead of in whole parts.

If your mortgage was in BTC, you'd owe 10 BTC but this year there are 1BTC per person, next year there are 0.95BTC per person, the year after 0.9BTC, and so forth. Productivity is increasing, purchasing power in total is increasing, but the amount of BTC is not increasing as fast. The capacity for population is increasing because the demand for labor is increasing as people can buy more, and salaries are decreasing because cost-of-living is going down in terms of number of BTC.

Your mortgage payment isn't going down, so you owe 1/3 of 1BTC per year, and ten years in you make 0.7 BTC per year instead of 0.1BTC.

Alternately, everybody could rent. Everybody could save and buy a house in cash, too, which means the number of BTC moving around would shrink dramatically--you'd have fewer BTC available to spend--and you'd suffer severe deflation. This happened in 2008 with money in what is called a "credit crunch"; the effect would be the same, except it would happen constantly, until your civilization became a smoking crater and a few adventurous refugees from poverty-stricken developing nations showed up on a boat with rocks and pointy sticks and took over your lands, then created a real central bank with fiat currency and raised a great nation over the remnants of your corpses.

Re: Rebound due?

[viperidaenz]

Bitcoin isn't a currency.

Re: Rebound due?

[r1348]

Currencies fluctuate this much only in Venezuela, Zimbabwe and 20's Germany. If Bitcoin was a national currency, we would soon see the rise to power of a CryptoHitler.

Re:Rebound due?

[lgw]

Deflation, due to having not physically enough money to go around to compensate all the labor.

OK, but don't confuse that with the problems with specie-based currency where lack of physical coins causes a crisis (separate from value of those coins). You can have deflation problems with fiat currencies too, of course, as Japan well knows.

If your mortgage was in BTC, you'd owe 10 BTC but this year there are 1BTC per person, next year there are 0.95BTC per person, the year after 0.9BTC, and so forth.

Sure, except for one key thing: if there actually were savings accounts and mortgages in BTC, there would be inflation as the money supply grew directly with the value of said mortgages. It's a self-solving problem. Doesn't matter how many BTC there are in the blockchain, any more than it matters how many $20 bills there are.

Alternately, everybody could rent. Everybody could save and buy a house in cash, too, which means the number of BTC moving around would shrink dramatically

Money velocity is, I think, higher if you pay rent to a gut who pays a mortgage than if you just pay a mortgage. Anyhow, a monthly payment is a monthly payment, as far as "the number of BTC moving around".

There was not a deflation problem in 2008, there was a problem with bad loans, and "creative" finance instruments backed by bad loans. But bubbles will suck regardless of the currency.

Re: Rebound due?

[ceoyoyo]

Sure it is. It's just a really shitty one.

Re: Rebound due?

[ceoyoyo]

The proof of stake blockchains would like to disagree with you.

Re: Rebound due?

[ceoyoyo]

Blockchains aren't particularly difficult to understand. The BS "explanations" made up by people who don't really understand them are.

Re:Rebound due?

[ayesnymous]

The bottom will probably be around $2000, which is the point prior to the crazy run-up last year.

Re:Rebound due?

[ayesnymous]

It's funny how the top came right around the time that Bitcoin futures started trading. Wall Street took control and destroyed the thing.

Re:Rebound due?

[bluefoxlucid]

You can have deflation problems with fiat currencies too, of course, as Japan well knows.

Yes, and you create loose monetary policy and take other action to drive up wages and create inflation as a response.

Sure, except for one key thing: if there actually were savings accounts and mortgages in BTC, there would be inflation as the money supply grew directly with the value of said mortgages. It's a self-solving problem. Doesn't matter how many BTC there are in the blockchain, any more than it matters how many $20 bills there are.

I'm thinking about all money being BTC. I'm thinking your savings account is BTC and your mortgage is BTC. That IS the problem I described.

Let's try this again. I'm going to show you that you're wrong about the "self-solving problem" and that it matters how many BTC there are, so don't come back and say "oh that only happens if your mortgage is dollars and savings account is BTC" again.

There are, for example, twenty million bitcoins in the world. At this point, it takes an enormous amount of time to generate an additional bitcoin, so the number of bitcoins expands slowly. Technical progress is faster: the capacity to produce more goods in the same time increases, and so the labor force expands.

This means that at some time in the future, there may be 1% more BTC in the world and 10% more income earners. In this example, then, there is enough BTC for each worker to earn 100 BTC per year today, and then in the future there is enough BTC for each worker to earn 91.8 BTC.

Do you see it?

Your mortgage was 30BTC/year, 30% of your income. Ten years into your 30-year mortgage, your mortgage is still 30BTC/year; however, only enough BTC exist to pay everyone 91.8BTC/year. That means, on average, your mortgage is now 33% of your income.

That's if wages are BTC, mortgages are BTC, savings accounts are BTC, and the world has never even considered another alternate currency because it was created as a seed colony on a planet where we didn't tell anybody about fiat or gold standard, and so they believe BTC was given to them by God at the Creation.

If the only money in existence is BTC, a mortgage payment becomes a larger percentage of the average income every year. It's either increasing relative to the payer's income or the payer's income is increasing while somebody else is getting poorer.

There was not a deflation problem in 2008, there was a problem with bad loans, and "creative" finance instruments backed by bad loans.

A credit crunch. The money supply effectively sank. Inflation has been kind of stagnant since.

Re:Rebound due?

[lgw]

You can have deflation problems with fiat currencies too, of course, as Japan well knows.

Yes, and you create loose monetary policy and take other action to drive up wages and create inflation as a response.

Japan tried that for 10 years without success. Theory falsified, hard. You can't push on a rope. It's now well understood that monetary policy can curtail an economy, but can't stimulate one (beyond the cessation of any restriction).

There are, for example, twenty million bitcoins in the world.

Sure thing. Lets say 10 million are in savings accounts. Then loaned out as mortgages. Now there are 30 million BTC in the money supply. But of course those home builders spend that money building houses, so now the banks have more to loan, which they do. The money supply will grow to maybe 10x the number of BTC created through the algorithm.

Do you understand that the number of $20 bills printed has little to do with the money supply? Do you understand the difference between the M1 and the M2? Fractional reserve banking ring a bell? I blame the schools.

A credit crunch. The money supply effectively sank. Inflation has been kind of stagnant since.

Sure, a credit crunch. But no deflation - deflation is worse. Inflation has been stagnant since because the economy was at the worst point since the 30s. As the economic recovery continues, we'll see inflation that's more historically normal, I expect.

Re:Rebound due?

[bluefoxlucid]

Sure thing. Lets say 10 million are in savings accounts. Then loaned out as mortgages. Now there are 30 million BTC in the money supply.

That's fractional reserve banking and it's a type of fiat currency--a method by which you issue new currency into the money supply. It's no different than paper dollars, and that practice would make bitcoin cease to be bitcoin, in effect.

In the case of Bitcoin specifically, you can't loan out and spend an additional bitcoin because you can only move the bitcoins you have. Every spending of a Bitcoin isn't the spending of a Bitcoin; it's the spending of a specific Bitcoin or fraction thereof. When someone comes to get their Bitcoin, there has to be a Bitcoin physically available for them: you can only loan out what's on hand.

That means there aren't 30 million BTC in the money supply. There are 20 million BTC, of which 10 million are in savings accounts and thus are being loaned around. 20 million BTC, minus 10 million BTC idle in savings, = 10 million BTC in the money supply. That 10 million BTC, plus 10 million BTC being loaned from those savings reserves, = 20 million BTC in the money supply.

Do you understand now why you cannot have a money supply larger than the physical number of bitcoins available?

It's like gold. You can loan paper money that says it represents gold and then do fraction on that (loan out 100 pounds of imaginary gold when you only have 50 pounds); but if you're actually giving people physical chunks of gold, you can only loan the gold physically on hand.

Re:Rebound due?

[lgw]

That's fractional reserve banking and it's a type of fiat currency--a method by which you issue new currency into the money supply. It's no different than paper dollars, and that practice would make bitcoin cease to be bitcoin, in effect.

Yes. That was indeed my point. Except it's definitely not "fiat currency", by definition. The same thing would happen, and did happen, with gold-based currency.

In the case of Bitcoin specifically, you can't loan out and spend an additional bitcoin because you can only move the bitcoins you have. Every spending of a Bitcoin isn't the spending of a Bitcoin; it's the spending of a specific Bitcoin or fraction thereof.

You do realize that if you put $200 in a savings account, then later withdraw that $200, the bills won't have the same serial numbers?

When someone comes to get their Bitcoin, there has to be a Bitcoin physically available for them: you can only loan out what's on hand.

That's a nice thought, but it's not how savings accounts work. In the US, the bank can loan out 100% of what you deposit (yes, we're technically a zero-reserve banking system). Checking accounts have a reserve requirement, but it's only 5% IIRC. In practice banks keep enough cash around for statistically likely withdrawals, and enough liquid assets around for statistically likely transfers . If you want to withdraw and transfer all the money in your savings account, the bank can technically take 90 days to give it do you, and the only guarantee you'll get it is provided by the FDIC, not the bank. (In practice, a bank that did that would go out of business, but it's legal.)

There are 20 million BTC, of which 10 million are in savings accounts and thus are being loaned around. 20 million BTC, minus 10 million BTC idle in savings, = 10 million BTC in the money supply.

That's just not how banks work, sorry. There will be 0 idle in savings. They will loan all of it out (well, 99%).

It's like gold. You can loan paper money that says it represents gold and then do fraction on that (loan out 100 pounds of imaginary gold when you only have 50 pounds); but if you're actually giving people physical chunks of gold, you can only loan the gold physically on hand.

You can loan (almost) all the gold that was deposited, physical or otherwise. Most of which will be deposited in another bank, where again it will be loaned out. This happened historically, and the awkwardness of doing this with chunks of gold is what led to the invention of paper money, which started as notes between the bank doing the lending, and the bank getting the deposit, to be settled later.

Re: Rebound due?

[viperidaenz]

It's no more a currency than baseball cards.
Sure, people may sometimes trade them for other goods or services, but mostly their value is overhyped by collectors.

Re: Rebound due?

[minstrelmike]

Bitcoin isn't a currency.

Neither is the stock market, real estate, or gold. They are investments.

Re: Rebound due?

[viperidaenz]

I never said they were.
Real estate and gold are more than just investments. People buy houses to live in and gold is a metal with some very good physical properties.

Re: Rebound due?

[si618]

Aren't there alternatives which don't need mining, such as https://www.hederahashgraph.co...

Re:Rebound due?

[bluefoxlucid]

You do realize that if you put $200 in a savings account, then later withdraw that $200, the bills won't have the same serial numbers?

Yes. You do realize if you put $200 in savings, the bank can loan out $2,000, right? They don't have to find $2,000 on-hand.

With BTC, the bank can't loan out 2,000 BTC if they have 200. Every fractional BTC spent essentially traces back to a specific serial number. You can't loan more into existence.

That's just not how banks work, sorry. There will be 0 idle in savings. They will loan all of it out (well, 99%).

So you're saying if $1,000 is spent and $1,000 is kept in savings, and then the bank loans out that $1,000 from savings which then gets spent, $3,000 are spent?

Let me help you examine that question: There are physically $2,000. $1,000 are used to purchase goods; $1,000 are put in savings and not spent (idle in savings). The bank loans that $1,000 to someone who spends it.

I'm saying that's $1,000 spent plus $1,000 spent, out of a total $2,000 in existence. You're saying that doesn't work that way, because that $1,000 isn't idle in savings--so you suggest $3,000 has been spent.

How did you add 1 + 1 = 3?

You can loan (almost) all the gold that was deposited, physical or otherwise. Most of which will be deposited in another bank, where again it will be loaned out.

The loan has to be paid back. It's time-sensitive. You can't hop from institution to institution and invent money out of nowhere; there has to be income. With hard currency like gold or bitcoin, where you can't just magically make more, it becomes impossible to pay all of the wages that are earning the income to pay back loans.

Alice deposits money in a bank, which loans the money to Bob. Bob now works to get income to pay the loan back; however, Alice also works, and must receive income for her work. Well, that one chunk of gold can't both go to Alice and Bob. There are only 1,000 chunks of gold to give out, and half of them are in Eve's account--who Bob paid with Alice's gold.

With fiat, we just print more money and pretend there are 1,500 chunks of gold, and nobody ever gets all their gold. With BTC, the block chain tells you where BTC come from, and BTC only come from NP-hard proof, so you can't do fractional reserve banking or otherwise issue more BTC into circulation. That's the whole point of BTC.

the awkwardness of doing this with chunks of gold is what led to the invention of paper money

Yes, and paper money eventually broke from gold so we could add money when we have more people making the same goods or the same work producing more goods. We adjust the money supply to the labor supply and the productivity rate. That's mathematically-impossible with BTC.

Re:Rebound due?

[lgw]

. You do realize if you put $200 in savings, the bank can loan out $2,000, right? They don't have to find $2,000 on-hand.

Banks can't print money these days. The bank must first have $2000 in deposits before it can loan out $2000. (As an aside, the bank can write an insurance policy for $2000 without the full amount on hand, but we don't need to consider that form of increasing the money supply to see that it increases.)

I'm saying that's $1,000 spent plus $1,000 spent, out of a total $2,000 in existence. You're saying that doesn't work that way, because that $1,000 isn't idle in savings--so you suggest $3,000 has been spent.

Consider this example. Banks A and B have chunks of gold in their vaults, thanks to savings accounts. I want to buy a car, so I borrow 10 chunks of gold from Bank A, and give it to the car dealer, who deposits it in Bank B. Except, to deter mishap, what Bank A really gives me is a note that says "Bank A owes Bank B 10 gold".

Meanwhile, you want to add a room to your house, and on the same day you borrow 10 chunks of gold from Bank B. You give it to your contractor, who deposits at Bank A a note that says "Bank B owes Bank A 10 gold".

So, 20 gold in savings, and we've spent 20 gold today. At the end of the day the banks settle up and no physical gold actually changes hands. Both banks have the same gold in their vaults they had yesterday. Tomorrow this happens again, with 2 new people. Now there are 20 gold in savings, and 40 has been spent. The next day there are 20 gold in savings, and 60 has been spent. At that point there are 80 chunks of gold on ledgers in the banks, but only 20 actual chunks of gold.

If everyone wants their gold on the same day, you get economic collapse, in what is known as a "run on the banks". But that only happens if there's a panic, and the reason the FDIC exists is to prevent that panic. In practice, banks keep a small amount around based on statistics, and it all works out. If everyone actually wanted to withdraw into physical currency, maybe 5% what would be needed actually exists.

Also, if there is a mass default on these loans, the banks are in real trouble, because they need that inflow to replenish that small amount as people withdraw it. That's sort of what happened in 2008, in a very hand-wavy way.

With fiat, we just print more money and pretend there are 1,500 chunks of gold

Historically, the US has done very little of that. Even in WW2 we sold war bonds like crazy, to limit money creation. There wasn't even really a mechanism for it - actually printing money doesn't accomplish much at this scale (though enough that we abandoned the gold standard ~20 years before we officially did). For the past 30 years we've looted the social security trust fund dry instead, but that ran out. Post 2008, for the first time really, the Fed found a clever way to generate trillions from nothing. Time will tell how clever they actually were.

But my point is, the government can do plenty to manipulate the money supply without printing money, through regulation of bank lending practices. And that's the norm in the US, until recently. And the trick the Fed came up with to "print money" would work fine with BTC too, sadly.

Re:Rebound due?

[bluefoxlucid]

Banks can't print money these days. The bank must first have $2000 in deposits before it can loan out $2000. (As an aside, the bank can write an insurance policy for $2000 without the full amount on hand, but we don't need to consider that form of increasing the money supply to see that it increases.)

In the US, the monetary basis is something like 11:1, which means a bank with $1,000 can loan out $11,000. It's a bit more complex than that, with 33:1 in the low-reserve-ratio range and 10:1 in the larger range. Small banks with minimal bail-out costs can loan a lot more than they have on hand.

Historically, the US has done very little of that.

Actually, that is exactly what the US does. We alter treasury bond rates to create a difference between the amount borrowed and the amount owed, and then print up the difference. If the labor applied expands by 1%, we issue more currency in this manner to raise the monetary basis. The fractional reserve system handles the rest: banks have a billion more dollars on hand (newly-minted) and can loan out $10 billion on top of that.

The same goes for inflation: if there is a sort of labor glut or productivity gain leading to falling prices, we issue more currency and run looser monetary policy to cause more purchasing, more income, and more inflation.

For the past 30 years we've looted the social security trust fund dry instead, but that ran out.

When the Social Security program was established, we created a new Treasury debt object for the Social Security Trust fund. The debt object can only be held by Social Security and cannot be sold. It has fixed maturity.

For every surplus dollar, retaining that dollar (not spending it) is equivalent to un-issuing currency (un-printing money). This reduces spending and slows the economy down. To correct for this, the Trust buys Treasury Debt Objects and holds them until there is a deficit. During Social Security deficit, the Trust calls the Treasury on those debts. This derives the payouts from economic growth.

Social Security is insolvent when it runs out of debts to call. Every penny paid into the program either has been paid out or is still available to Social Security--it hasn't been looted, raided, or whatever.

The Social Security old-age, survivors, and disability insurance pensions program collects its premium as a tax on wages up to a certain cap. Should that pool of taxable money not represent the same portion of all income, Social Security's capacity to pay shrinks as a proportion of per-beneficiary gross national income. That means our capacity to pay is dependent not simply on raising the Social Security cap with cost-of-living, but rather on raising it and adjusting the tax rate based on cost-of-living and the distribution of income and the number of program recipients.

Imagine what would happen if we didn't adjust the program cap and tax rates correctly.

my point is, the government can do plenty to manipulate the money supply without printing money, through regulation of bank lending practices. And that's the norm in the US, until recently.

You said those lending practices don't exist when you claimed banks can only lend out exactly the cash they have on hand and no more.

the trick the Fed came up with to "print money" would work fine with BTC too, sadly.

Only if you can put on the blockchain that multiple people are holding the same BTC, or create more BTC. BTC is designed specifically to make that impossible, or else you could mine a hell of a lot of BTC right now.

Re:Rebound due?

[lgw]

I don't see how you keep missing my point. It works like this.

Monday:
Dan deposits 10 BTC in Bank A, lets call them B00 through B09. Eve deposits 10 BTC in Bank B, lets call them B10 through B19.

Monday EOD:
Bank A has B00-B09
Bank B has B10-B19

Tuesday:
I borrow 10 BTC from Bank A (B00-B09) and buy a car. The dealer deposits the day's receipts in Bank B. Bank B now has B00-B09. Meanwhile, You borrow 10 BTC from Bank B (B10-B19) and remodel your house, The contractor deposits the money with Bank A

Tuesday EOD:
Bank A has B10-B19
Bank B has B00-B09

Wednesday:
Fred borrows 10 BTC from Bank A, and does some commerce. B10-B19 Move to Bank B. George 10 BTC from Bank b, and does some commerce. B00-B09 Move to Bank A.

Wednesday EOD:
Bank A has B00-B09
Bank B has B10-B19

So, we're back where we started, and we've had 40 BTC of economic activity from 20 BTC in deposits that have never been withdrawn. 6 people or companies now have a balance of 10 BTC, so 60 BTC total on account ledgers. And the banks still have the BTC loan out.

I don't get why that is confusing? And the government still gets its share of monetary expansion by strongly suggesting to those banks that they should lend it 20 BTC, then spending it (where it still eventually ends up back in the banks), in addition to spending all its taxes.

Re:Rebound due?

[bluefoxlucid]

I don't see how you keep missing my point. It works like this

Okay, let's show how this works in the current fractional reserve system, at 10:1 reserve ratio.

Tuesday:

I borrow 10 BTC from Bank A (B00-B09) and buy a car. The dealer deposits the day's receipts in Bank B. Bank B now has B00-B09. Meanwhile, You borrow 10 BTC from Bank B (B10-B19) and remodel your house, The contractor deposits the money with Bank A

Tuesday EOD:
Bank A has B10-B19
Bank B has B00-B09

In today's fractional reserve, it looks like this:

You deposit 10 BTC in Bank A.

Alice borrows 10BTC from Bank A for a car. Bob borrows 10BTC from Bank A for a car. Jim borrows 10BTC from Bank A for a car. Joe borrows 10BTC from bank A for a car. Robyn borrows 10BTC from Bank A for a car. Chuck borrows 10BTC from Bank A for a car. Cindy borrows 10BTC from Bank A for a car. Lauren borrows 10BTC from Bank A for a car. Dave borrows 10BTC from Bank A for a car. Jack borrows 10BTC from Bank A for a car.

The car dealer keeps their money in Bank B.

Monday's EOD:
Bank A has B00-B09.
Bank B has 100BTC which are loaned from the basis of B00-B09.

Notice that Bank A possesses the 10BTC you deposited, and no other BTC. Bank A made loans of 100BTC. Those 100BTC are deposited in Bank B.

Now: how did 90 BTC which were not mined and did not exist at the time get into Bank B?

Re: Rebound due?

[ceoyoyo]

"Sure, people may sometimes trade them for other goods or services."

Yes. A currency. Possibly a shitty one.

There's a Pacific island where they used large rocks for currency. They had to be brought from other islands. The rocks were so big that nobody actually wanted to move them much, so they just kept records about who owned which rock. One day a boat carrying a new rock from far away sank just off the island. Even though nobody could see the rock, everyone knew it was there. Still counts, decided the islanders.

The bar to be a currency is pretty low. Bitcoin is definitely a currency. Not a very good one.

Re: Rebound due?

[reanjr]

BTC is up over 50% for the year. Please explain how it's a declining asset.

Re: Rebound due?

[reanjr]

Nothing forces you to use LN, so I don't understand your argument. Pay the higher fees and send BTC on-chain; that's your prerogative. You'll still benefit from the LN if the majority of other people's transactions happen off-chain.

Re: Rebound due?

[reanjr]

"Why can't the size of the pages in the ledger be increased?"

They can be, but anyone with half a brain realizes that providing linear solutions to geometric scaling problems is dumb.

Re: Rebound due?

[reanjr]

If it were truly easy to understand, you could explain it to a typical software developer and expect them to be able to program a decent blockchain protocol.

It's only easy to understand the way a car is easy to understand: by ignoring a bunch of shit you'll never understand.

Re: Rebound due?

[reanjr]

The thing is, the result of B might just be the littered corpses of failed blockchain projects. Banks can't just magic up a network of users big enough to hit critical mass. That's where BTC has a huge leg up. Not only is the network larger and more secure than anything the banks can come up with, networks tend towards natural monopolies and the advantage for the first big player is huge.

Re: Rebound due?

[ceoyoyo]

Blockchain is like having a github account where you change the password after every login and give the new password to whoever first guesses the answer to a riddle.

Re:Rebound due?

[lgw]

Okay, let's show how this works in the current fractional reserve system, at 10:1 reserve ratio.

Ah, I see the source of the confusion. No, banks don't work that way today. Their loans cannot exceed their deposits. It's just that every loans results in a deposit somewhere else in the banking system, so whereever it lands, a bank can turn around and loan it out again. That's why the money supply multiplies.

Re:Rebound due?

[bluefoxlucid]

Ah, I see the source of the confusion. No, banks don't work that way today. Their loans cannot exceed their deposits.

When a bank makes a loan, the loan is accounted as an asset to the bank (an Accounts Receivable) and as a liability to its deposits. In other words: if a bank makes a $10,000 loan, it has +$10,000 (A/R) and -$10,000 (liability to depositors). Each loan is a deposit.

In essence, a bank can have $100k of deposits and then immediately create $200k of money by loaning out a bunch of money to be spent. It's ... weird, and annoying to get your head around. In theory it works the way you describe; in practice there is a lot of handwaving.

Either way, one dollar goes in and four people can simultaneously spend that dollar.

Re:Rebound due?

[lgw]

Yes, the money gets spent 4 times, but there are a total of 4 deposits along the way - loans match deposits. After all "spent" just means "deposited elsewhere". It would still work that way with BTC.

A bank can't loan out $200k on $100k deposits - it's assets would be double its liabilities. That's not allowed. But the first $100k loaned out gets deposited somewhere, and now that receiving bank has a new $100k it can loan out. It can keep going around forever, though in practice it's just over 10x.

Re: Yet another passing fad...

[Anonymous Coward]

It makes sense as you don't own a cellphone.

Re: So someone got out of crypto currencies

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone with any common sense is the answer

there is only so much you can do with fake money

[FudRucker]

cant pay your utility bills with it, cant go buy groceries at your local brick & mortar with it, cant fill your gas tank with it, i dont see how it took off like it did but since it did i can see why it is crashing, eventually it will be gone like any other passing fad

All but one recorded declines?

[DontBeAMoran]

Care to name which one, you bunch of morons?

Or is it a joke about how Dogecoin kept its 1:1 trading ratio of One-Dogecoin-for-One-Dogecoin?

Re:All but one recorded declines?

[iggymanz]

tether has stayed the say.

WHAT??!!! You never heard of it!!!? neither had I, I used coinmarketcap.com chart

of course if you look at the whole year graph of that, it's tanked like a lead balloon....haha!

Re:All but one recorded declines?

[LynnwoodRooster]

Hey, this is all part of my Master Evil Plan to bring back Dogecoin! I'm soon going to get it up to a point of a 1.02:1 ratio and then I'm going to be rich!

Re:So someone got out of crypto currencies

[Joce640k]

About half of Bitcoin is owned by a handful of Chinese miners in a little cartel of their own.

Maybe they had an argument over how much longer they should spend their own money to keep the price propped up.

Buy then buy again

[reanjr]

Dollar cost averaging is looking pretty attractive now. If it follows historical patterns, it should be entering a long, (relatively) stable lull before the next bubble, which should hit $25k minimum, and could get as high as $90k.

Re:Buy then buy again

[iggymanz]

LOLZ!

let me put the perfect little touch on the end of your statement:

"...if you want to be a bag holder"

Re:Buy then buy again

[Trailer Trash]

Dollar cost averaging is looking pretty attractive now. If it follows historical patterns, it should be entering a long, (relatively) stable lull before the next bubble, which should hit $25k minimum, and could get as high as $90k.

Yeah, definitely. How much are you trying to dump?

Re:Buy then buy again

[Kjella]

Yeah, definitely. How much are you trying to dump?

I think we had this same discussion when BTC slumped from $1000 to $230, okay the fad is over everybody go home. Then it rebounded and went up, up and away to $20k. I'm not saying the GP is right, but we've already had crazier rallies than that. The person who'd go short in BTC is even crazier than the person who'd invest in BTC...

Re: Buy then buy again

[reanjr]

Most of my BTC I've been holding for a while. My actively traded coin was sold at prces about $10k higher than its current. I have none left that I'm willing to part with, and in fact, I've been buying more during the dips.

Re: Buy then buy again

[reanjr]

If you are holding bag number 25, and the first 24 bags were sold at massive profit, then I'll be a bag holder any day.

The use of the term "crypto" worries me

[tepples]

Or are we seeing the death throes of Crypto coin

It could be. But we could also be seeing a scare tactic to discredit cryptography by causing non-technical users to confuse cryptography with cryptocurrency. It would fit in well with an effort to require communication operators to break end-to-end functionality under the guise of providing assistance to law enforcement, as Australia is doing lately

Re:Catching a falling knife

[Aaden42]

"What can I buy with it?" more than "What is the next sucker willing to pay me for it?".

The difference between "currency" and "security".

This is good news for Bitcoin

[squiggleslash]

N/T.

Re:And nothing of value was lost

[bobbied]

Well maybe some electricity

And.. (don't forget)... The profits of video card makers..

Tulip Bulbs

[Tulsa_Time]

Worse .... Bitcoins can't even grow a flower.

Re:Slashdot is a terrible rag

[OwP_Fabricated]

Alex Jones should be deplatformed for the slander he committed against the Sandy Hook parents.

Crypto currencies are a ponzi scheme

[aristotle-dude]

Sorry for all of those who lost their shirts. I never touched the stuff.

Re:Slashdot is a terrible rag

[drinkypoo]

but when Alex Jones gets deplatformed, we can't talk about the implications for free speech in our society?

Okay, let's talk about it. Deplatforming means that Alex Jones has been denied the use of some very tall soapboxes built by others. But Alex Jones doesn't believe in the "you didn't build that" argument.

I've had several experiences with accounts where I never have a post go -1 and some how I have negative karma.

All you need is for them to go to 0.

Re:there is only so much you can do with fake mone

[Anonymous Coward]

dude, fiat money is fake money

that can be used to pay bills, pay paychecks, purchase basic commodities at 100% of locations around the world. Something that gets left off when hodlers rail against "fiat" currency. You're 100% it's fiat currency but I can actually use it anywhere in the world vs. BTC and other crypto currencies.

Re:there is only so much you can do with fake mone

[Anonymous Coward]

try doing all the above with gold

Re:Slashdot is a terrible rag

[sinij]

Alex Jones should be deplatformed for the slander he committed against the Sandy Hook parents.

Alex Jones should be made responsible for his vile words, but censoring him is not a way to do it. All deplatforming will do is lend his claims of persecution some credibility. It won't, however, stop his falsehoods from spreading.

Nobody knows

[sjbe]

OK speculators... now the time to buy?

Anyone who pretends they know the answer to this is a liar and/or a fraud. Go ahead and gamble your money if it amuses you but no one knows what the value of bitcoin or any other crypto currency will be tomorrow, next week, or next year. It's an almost pure game of Who's the Greater Fool?.

Or are we seeing the death throes of Crypto coin as an investment option and a return to just being used in the underground.

It doesn't matter. It's never been an investment - just gambling and arguably a pyramid scheme. It provides no cost advantage over existing currencies outside of a few rare corner cases but it is a wet dream for criminals and scam artists hoping to sucker credulous fools.

BTC isn't going anywhere.

[xtal]

Banks can get involved, sure. But so can you. It's decentralized and there's no problem with all these things co-existing. It's also far from static, and being actively developed.

"People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it." ...and right now, if you want to play, you need some Satoshis.

Middlemen

[sjbe]

The important thing is the entire point of bitcoin was it was supposed to be free of middle men.

Being free of a middle man isn't always a good thing for the parties involved. While they should be removed whenever practical, sometimes they actually serve valuable purposes. For example some companies I deal with literally cannot make a profit unless you do a substantial amount of business with them. If you don't meet their minimum volumes they force you to use distributors (middle me) who are better organized to deal with smaller product volumes. In some sense virtually all businesses are middle men to some degree or another and that's not always a bad thing.

1 MB block size limit

[tepples]

That's what Bitcoin miners do - sign the pages of the ledger in return for rewards (bitcoins).

So why can't the pages be made larger to fit more transactions in one page? That's what the second half of SegWit2x was supposed to do, but it was canceled.

Re: 1 MB block size limit

[reanjr]

Because proposing linear solutions to geometric scaling problems is dumb.

Re:Slashdot is a terrible rag

[OwP_Fabricated]

Deplatforming doesn't give him credibility with anyone but dumbshits who already agree with him.

Deplatforming takes away a platform he can use to continue to slander people for profit.

Re:Slashdot is a terrible rag

[OwP_Fabricated]

Last time I checked Twitter, Youtube, etc. are private entities who can decide to host or not host anyone they want because hey, we're a capitalist society.

If you're saying the government should nationalize Youtube, Twitter, and Facebook so it actually become a free speech issue, well...

Re:Slashdot is a terrible rag

[lgw]

Alex Jones is sued regularly. That's appropriate - and he doesn't always lose. (Don't tell his fans, but he sometimes uses the defense pioneered by the Weekly World News: "our content is so absurd no reasonable person could believe it").

De-platforming him is not appropriate. The right answer to speech you disagree with is more speech. The Stalin-esque unpersoning of him --
de-platforming him from everwhere all on the same day -- was even less appropriate. He was just the test; never doubt it. He won't be the last, and the excuses will get weaker over time.

"When they came for Alex Jones, I didn't speak out, because I didn't care if the government was putting chemicals in the water to turn our frogs gay."

Re:Slashdot is a terrible rag

[lgw]

Wait, so you're defending the right of a huge corporation to refuse service to anyone it dislikes? I think not. Seems to me you're saying "protected classes should include only people politically aligned with me".

Be honest here. There was a recent story about a black woman being chased out of a restaurant by a bunch of white guys in hoods. Your reaction to that will depend on what her politics were, and theirs. Don't deny it - I know your posting history.

Good!

[thedarb]

About time these get rich quick skeevy pyramid scams tumble.

Re:Yet another passing fad...

[OneHundredAndTen]

After all these years, Linux still can't get past 2% market share.

In the desktop alone. Everywhere else, Linux is king.

Arbitrage opportunities ahoy

[themusicgod1]

The BUY might be at 6000$ but the SELL price is much much higher. There's a huge spread. Who would have thought that a currency designed to get rid of middlemen would be *so utterly profitable* for middlemen?
In general though? This news is misleading. Coinmarketcap has had the incorrect price for bitcoin for quite a few months now. If you're considering selling at 6k$, consider selling on a market where the price is higher. Buy low, sell high.

Massively Overvalued

[StormReaver]

Bitcoin will reach an appropriate value when it falls to zero.

Re:Slashdot is a terrible rag

[lgw]

Odd that someone arguing for censorship is posting as AC. Do you or don't you want to face consequences for speech?

Re:Slashdot is a terrible rag

[lgw]

Which is a fine opinion to hold, just don't at the same time make pro-censorship arguments.

Re:Slashdot is a terrible rag

[zidium]

The point is that 4 or 5 people got together one day and unpersoned Alex Jones, just because they didn't like him.

That's collusion.

Re:Slashdot is a terrible rag

[OwP_Fabricated]

There is no precedent behind it. Twitter, Google, etc. are all private corporate entities and you are not entitled to have a platform there. They can ban you for whatever reason they please.

~That's Capitalism!~