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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.
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 :-) )
No sig today...
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.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
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.
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.