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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.
Oops - there goes the money they were hoping to pyramid by shorting Tesla.
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 :-) )
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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'.
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
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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.
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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.
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.
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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".
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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.
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....
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
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.
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...
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Alex Jones should be deplatformed for the slander he committed against the Sandy Hook parents.
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?
Do you have ESP?
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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Sure it is. It's just a really shitty one.