Slashdot Mirror
Cryptocurrency Wipeout Deepens To $640 Billion As Ether Leads Declines (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: The cryptocurrency bear market plumbed a fresh 10-month low on Monday as Bitcoin's biggest rival tumbled and U.S. regulators suspended trading in two securities linked to digital assets. Ether, the second-largest virtual currency, slumped 11 percent from its level at 5 p.m. New York time on Friday, according to Bloomberg composite pricing. Bitcoin declined 2.4 percent, while the market capitalization of digital assets tracked by CoinMarketCap.com shrank to about $197 billion -- down almost $640 billion from its January peak. Cryptocurrencies have declined for five of the past six weeks amid concern that a broader adoption of digital assets will take longer than some had anticipated. That worry was underscored over the weekend after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission temporarily suspended trading in two exchange-traded notes linked to cryptocurrencies and Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin told Bloomberg that the days of explosive growth in the blockchain industry have likely come and gone.
I keep silver coins stacked under my bed, right next to unopened Funkopop figurines. My retirement is ensured!
The $640 billion loss that is being reported is against the massive gains late last year. The money appeared out of nowhere when everybody thought a crytocoin was worth something and is disappears to nowhere when everybody realised that they were wrong.
Sure, some people bought in when the market was high and have lost their shirts. Most of the losses though are from people who paid $300 for their coin years ago and now it is only worth $9000 instead of $25000.
You bought a security with no inherent value, based on the idea that someone else would, for some reason, pay more for it than you did. It worked out for some people, didn't for others. But why would you think you had more than a 50/50 chance? (Very skillful traders can beat those odds by trading trends in price action and being extremely disciplined.)
Meanwhile, there are lots of assets and securities with real underlying value to trade. You can understand the value and even learn to anticipate changes in that value. Why not trade those instead?
The tether printer is pumping like Jenny McCarthy in her prime is down there
The good news is that my Ethereum wallet has a virtual bobblehead in it. That's got to be worth something, right? I hope it's enough to pay for bus fare back to my parents' basement.
https://hardware.slashdot.org/...
You are welcome on my lawn.
How much did you lose?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Oh yeah. Cha Ching!
The cost of mining is now a non-trivial percentage of the worlds economy. The miners now have to pay real world money to pay for the electricity and the money they borrowed to buy/build their rigs. This constant selling of crypto currency to finance the mining likely means that we have either seen the last crypto currency rally or maybe there is just one more left.
We have also now seen the limits of what crypto currencies can do and it looks like the existing banking infrastructure does it better...For now. Maybe a highly scalable proof of stake currency will be invented. Maybe one of this existing currencies can already securely do it. It's not going to be bitcoin though.
What are the equations governing crypto-gravity?
If you had of bought/made bitcoin for $1 and next week it went to $2.50.. then the value started sliding back, and you sold for $2: would have you patted yourself on the back for your 100% gain?
It could have been the case that when you sold for $2, it kept going down to zero.
The fact it went to $20k is a once in a generation fluke.
Speculation is a mugs game.
46137
What are the equations governing crypto-gravity?
mv = pq
and
Qd = F(d) + cP
Qs = F(s) + dP
Probably others but those are the main sets.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The idea that this is its height is just nonsense. Maybe in the short term it is, but that is about it. We haven't seen significant roll out of entities accepting crypto currencies yet outside of New Hampshire and Venezuela. We have at best New Hampshire, Venezuela, and the internet to look at in terms of adoption and actual usage. My company accepts a few crypto currencies explicitly because when people pay for high dollar products from us with low margins our profits double. Even when they don't we can still take advantage of the liquidity in the market and save 34% or so thanks to crypto currencies that we wouldn't otherwise be able to do. Which means we can potentially reduce our costs by as much as 40% between transactional costs and liquidity in the market in some cases. Transaction and fraud costs can save us as much as 12% alone over alternative payment options (PayPal, credit cards, and wire transfers). For the stupid who have "invested" in crypto currencies particularly at the height of being over-hyped things might not be looking good (for everybody else who has been invested for a few years or more your probably doing really well now over those who invested in basically anything else- Bitcoin was around $2,000 this time last year and is at $6,300 or so right now). But the future of crypto currencies remain bright. Here in New Hampshire we continue to see more and more businesses coming on board and increasing usage in the real world.
The fundamentals put Bitcoin's intrinsic value quite a bit higher from where it stands today.
Current prices are below mining costs.
I'm buying on the dips.
"The U.S. paper dollar is not backed by anything of value"
So you don't think the US government will collect taxes on US dollars or that the US standing army won' t stand for US's interests starting tomorrow?
US dollar is a fiat currency. US dollar is backed by something of value: USA itself.
Electricity costs for mining? There are proof of stake currencies (lower energy footprint)
Transaction costs? Blocks are now mostly empty.
Transaction friction (too hard to use)? What was the early part of the year about?
So we’re down to those two drivers, which I assert was the proximate cause of this winter (stone cold death?)
1. Taxes on gains for people that didn’t understand that, or plan for it,
2. Downward price pressure as folks with large holdings try to avoid riding the market all the way down (and BTW, see 1 as a consequence also)
Now that's what I call a fitting comparison!
Knowledge is power; knowledge shared is power lost.
IT WILL ONLY GO TO INFINITY!
Negative 137,000%. Wait, that means I won.
The U.S. paper dollar is not backed by anything of value.
The US dollar (paper or otherwise) is backed by something of power, the US state and that state's ability to raise taxes. Think of it as a share in a company with the exclusive monopoly to a business method that consists of legally taking a cut from everyone else's profit ... and then tell me it "is not backed by anything of value."
The U.S. dollar can be used to buy goods because it is accepted as a medium of exchange.
The reason it is accepted as a medium of exchange is precisely because it is backed by the power of the US state. That state compels its usage inter alia in the payment of your tax liability. Important also is that you cannot sue for the satisfaction of a debt (between private persons) in anything other than legal tender. The idea that the value of legal tender rests on some tacit, arbitrary agreement among market participants to employ the currency of state (rather than some other random exchange technology) as a medium of exchange is "nonsense walking upon stilts." The state, (if necessary by means of force), insists upon your using it.
you can't go to grocery store and get groceries with bitcoin; but, it's money
Money you can't go to a grocery store and get groceries with isn't very good at being money really, is it? It's more like a token for a limited selection of goods and services.
The problem with crypto-currencies was that is was created by a bunch of geeks who didn't fully understand what 'money' is ... not that anyone necessarily does. The most signal failure however, has been a design that fitted the supply of coin to time rather than to demand (we all know what happens when the money supply falls too far out of alignment with demand! And this was the problem that ultimately killed the gold standard after all). That's why bitcoin and most well known cryptos (I'll reserve judgement as to future developments) are better thought of as 'collectables' rather than 'money' or 'currency' the best intentions notwithstanding.
Meanwhile, Dogecoin is doing relatively well. It's down since yesterday up 300% form last month!
=Smidge=
Indeed. The thing the cryptocurrency proponent forget (and that those trying to get the scam going conveniently omit) is how and why a fiat currency actually works. There is a large national bank and a national economy tied to it. Of course, it is complicated and market-manipulations in fiat currencies are possible. So are value declines (look at Turkey for a current example) and value increases. But in essence, there is a whole lot of real value tied to it and a whole lot of economic activity depending it being reasonably stable. And that is just what a cryptocurrency lacks: Stability. That is also what makes it unusable as a currency.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Ethereum is not a currency. It is not and never will be intended to be a direct medium for exchange.
These are bargain prices!!!! This is a huge opportunity!!! It can only go up from here!!!! Buy!!!! Buy!!!!! Buyyyyyyyy!!!!!
Exactly.
In fact, many cryptocurrencies are designed to be anything but stable. Bitcoin is a prime example of this: since the total amount of coins that will be created is capped, and since the creation/mining of new coins gets more complex with time as the math required to do the mining gets more difficult, it means the cost of creating a bitcoin (as well as transaction cost) goes up with time, on its own. Bitcoin is deflationary by design, which is a property you absolutely do not want your currency to have.
This also creates a deathstar level weakness in Bitcoin. People like to talk about it being decentralized, but in reality it's not. The current cost of creating one bitcoin is varies highly based on local prices of electricity and equipment from around 530 dollars in Venezuela (the only country that you can mine it at under a thousand bucks, and that's only because energy is one of the few remaining things one can get cheaply in Venezuela as it's heavily subsidized by the government) to over 10 000 in advanced economies, with South Korea taking the first place at over 26 000 dollars a coin..This means that the actual mining and thus the whole core infrastructure that Bitcoin's continued operation relies on is actually heavily centralized to the hands of (mostly) commercial operators in countries with cheaper operational costs, mainly in Asia/China (china used to control about 70 % of all the mining, I don't have recent data on how much that's changed after the government banned Bitcoin exchanges). In other words: Bitcoin is running because people are making money running it, for now.
The thermal exhaust port of this death star is here: The moment the cost of mining rises above the the price of the coin, mining will be stop. It's safe to say for example that no-one in their right mind is doing Bitcoin mining in South Korea, because at the current prices you're losing about 20 grand per coin mined. If the price of a coin drops below the cheapest possible mining cost (currently the 530 bucks in Venezuela) it will become unprofitable for anyone to be running bitcoin mining, at which point the entire 'decentralized' network will collapse, and the value will plummet to zero, as no means of transacting the coins will exist, and the currency will become useless.
Combining the fact that the design of BC makes the continued rise of the mining costs an unavoidable fact (meaning that the point of failure will keep creeping up in dollar terms) with the market price of a Bitcoin being highly volatile and affected by a whole host of things including regulation of exchanges and other cryptocurrencies and their popularity, the whole BC infrastructure is definitely a game of chairs where you can make money as a miner or an investor up to a point but when the music stops you better hope you're not left with several coins that are now suddenly worth nothing.
So a potentially good investment? Sure. A safe and secure store of value or a functional currency? Absolutely not.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
During Q2 2018, the price of electricity in South Korea was 126.089 South-Korean Won which was equivalent to 0.117 USD at the exchange rate at the time of collecting the data. During the same time, the world average price was 0.115 USD per kWh of electricity used.
From: https://www.globalenergyprices...
So? Mining a coin in South Korea does not cost $20k ... with a little bit of thinking that would have been obvious to you.
if you want to mine cheap, get a solar panel, mine in north africa or in asia or australia, or Nevada if you are in the US, there are certainly more places.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
This judgement day for the shitcoins as been both predicted and expected for some time.
The interesting thing to watch is the relative performance of BTC and it's market dominance.
I continue to acquire BTC, and we'll see what the future brings.
..don't panic
Cryptocurrency Wipeout Deepens To $640 Billion As Ether Leads Declines
Imaginary thing without tangible value continues to not be worth shit. Film at 11.
Seriously... shit, the gold standard, if you'll pardon the metaphor, in worthlessness, is ironically, pretty valuable, especially compared to cryptocurrency. I think of this as like someone standing on a street corner with a battered paper bag, inflated and seemingly holding something, then with the top folded over and stapled. He tells passers-by that the bag could maybe contain something that at some unspecified point in the future, could be very valuable, and asks if any of them would you like to buy it from him.
Then someone with FAR more money than sense, somehow, says, "SURE!" and buys the empty bag. When he complains, the seller says, first, he never guaranteed the bag had any specific thing in it, nor what its future value would be. Incidentally, the bag WAS full of air, and damnit, that could be really valuable. Just ask anyone who's choking, for example. Then the poor deluded fool who bought the bag turns around and starts, after publicly complaining that the previous asshole sold him a worthless empty bag full of air, MAYBE, trying to sell someone ELSE the bag. Eventually another dumbass comes along, and the process repeats.
How to do really well in the cryptocurrency marketplace: Don't. Buy. The. Empty. Fucking. Bag.
Ever.
You're welcome.
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
From your very own link:
I was going with the numbers used in the report (here) which they claim to have gotten from governmental sources.
Wiki uses numbers from 2016, so they're outdated now, but back then using more than 1001 kWh a month caused the price to hike up to 24 cents, or as much as 64 cents during peak demand times in the year (summer and midwinter). At those kinds of prices you're talking about more than 20 grand a coin.
It looks like they may have calculated the value by using the peak demand price for the whole of the year, so the entire number maybe off a bit still, but the general point made still stands.
Again, I know there are places where mining is cheaper, I said so out right. It doesn't change the nature of the problem with BC's design as a 'currency'.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
I lost about minus $15K so far. Damn you, crypto-currencies! /shakefist
#DeleteFacebook
Let us assume that you are based in a location where the cost of energy makes mining cryptocurrencies unprofitable. Let us further assume that you have the capital to setup solar power generation. Would it not then be more profitable to sell the power at the going rate in that location, rather than using it to mine cryptocurrency? If I'm producing something worth X per unit, it makes no sense to use it in the production of something else, unless that something else is worth more than X per unit of my input.
MUH TULI^C^C^ BUTTCOINS!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
This times million. I made $25,000 just last week using cryotocurrency. Ot is unbeatable amazing investment guaranteed to return big cash to anyone who buys in. Just look at how many stories on slashdot.org there are about it, thats how you knw is safe investment for amazing future full of houses, cars and women.
Price for a commodity (and bitcoin is one) rise only if somebody buy and there is an exchange. Price are not "set" by an external person which decide magically bitcoin demand is rising. it rises because people were willing to buy at an icnreased price. If there were not the price would have stayed stable. So yes, you are wrong, people and a lot of them lost a lot of money, because they bought at an higher price and sold at a lower. It is nearly never a zero sum game as some values are lost (e.g. A buy BT at 11$ price rise to 12$ B buy BT it rise to 13$ but when A or B sell it will almost certainly sell at 11$50 rather than 12$ because nobody is willing to buy anymore, result : loss of money to the market).
All of the income earned in the United States--all those US Dollars--comes from selling services to consumers buying services. That means the annual GNI is equal to the amount of stuff produced and sold: it's backed by actual productivity.
People have some magical fantasy about a paper currency being backed by a fickle commodity which can explosively inflate or deflate as people corner the market or find a new gold mine. One day, your half-gram of gold is worth what last year's tenth-gram was worth, and your bank account just collapsed; another, the Hunt Brothers start hoarding all the gold, and you have to take a steep pay cut.
With fiat money, we manipulate monetary policy to hold a 2% inflation rate. This works because all the money spent is logistically and mathematically tied to all the stuff sold: the purchasing power of the currency is the purchasing power of the currency, a reflexive mathematical tautology.
That we all agree to use it helps, but doesn't set its buying power.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
And it gets closer to 0 every day. A few more months and your losses will be positive. Unless you've already sold everything off that is.
Or men let's be fair
...as always, is "Is it more a Pyramid or a Ponzi?"
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
lol turdcoin cryptards lol
lol, a currency that fluctuates 4% a DAY as a way around the 3% fees :)
I see no problems there
> If the price of a coin drops below the cheapest possible mining cost it will become unprofitable for anyone to be running bitcoin mining, at which point the entire 'decentralized' network will collapse, and the value will plummet to zero, as no means of transacting the coins will exist, and the currency will become useless.
You are aware that all PoS blockchains will simply adjust difficulty? Lower amount of mining rigs = lower difficulty = higher profit per node. On the other hand BTC "halvings" will move main source of profit from block reward- that is random but has constant expected value - to transaction fees that:
- will fluctuate wildly during day/week/year
- are going to be reduced by Lightning network
So now we have currency where cost of double-spending attack might suddenly become very cheap. It already happens with alt-coin where difficulty adjustment is faster and miners are much more opportunistic, constantly switching between crypto or even stopping completely if rates and difficulty are unprofitable.
Does anyone else find it interesting that not one single person has ever lost money on cryptocurrencies? I mean, basic logic will tell you that there is someone out there who bought bitcoin at $16,000 thinking that it was going to $20,000, right? Not long ago, it went UP to $7k before going DOWN to $6k. Somebody's got to be taking a bath in there somewhere.
You are welcome on my lawn.
1849. Relive The Dream. Again. Ignore History. Make 'murka Greedy Again.
Yeah back in 2011 when silver was at it's all time high I'm sure people who were invested were pretty pleased with themselves that week.
You however weren't one of them since you just repeat shit you hear on the radio and conspiracy websites.
Gamblers have a peculiar type of self-delusion. I saw this in my Uncle who liked betting on horses.
They will talk about their "winnings", but not their table stakes. It's always "I won $20,000 one night", but they fail to mention that it cost them $1,000 in bets to make that $20,000, so their net was actually $19,000. Still, a $19,000 payoff is fantastic, right?
Nope. They are also obsessed with their best days, their high water marks as a gambler. They never talk about that losing streak where they lost every day for a month and it cost them thousands. They don't like to spend any time on the losses, only the winnings.
In short, it's like a pathological case of optimism, where only the good parts matter and the bad parts don't exist at all. And they always think that a new high water mark is "just around the corner" too. There's no room in this psychology for the fact that the house always wins in the end. It's a delusion and it's useless to try to talk them out of it.
So many of the current e-currency speculators are little more than gamblers in this regard and they think that e-coinage "can only go up". Yeah, right.
"The U.S. paper dollar is not backed by anything of value"
So you don't think the US government will collect taxes on US dollars or that the US standing army won' t stand for US's interests starting tomorrow?
US dollar is a fiat currency. US dollar is backed by something of value: USA itself.
How does the US army standing for the US's interests help me and my dollars stand for my interests? Can I use my dollar to compel a single US soldier to serve my interests? The problem with fiat that crypto was trying to solve was precisely the power backing the US dollar. If the US decides to print 5x the money supply tomorrow then the law of supply and demand will devalue my US dollar 5x. This is a real problem people faced in 2008 (not to 5x amount as used in my example). Crypto was developed on the idea that a medium of exchange that was valued and controlled by the people who used it removed the possibility of catastrophic loss on the governments whim. Unfortunately for Bitcoin the whims of the marketplace may turn out to be more catastrophic. This does not change the idea that decentralization of the global populations store of wealth and medium of exchange may be good if implemented correctly.
What is actually going to happen is that the coins become so cheap that nobody cares anymore for the fixed costs of mining. Then the respective coin will be dead.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Looks like cryptocurrency continues to be just a useless scam, as I've been saying for years. Feels good to be right.
This is just the Chinese again, using their crypto-coins to buy presents and moon cakes for the big Mid-Autumn Festival in two weeks.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
"How does the US army standing for the US's interests help me and my dollars stand for my interests?"
Isn't it obvious? By insuring (for their own interests) that US dollar stay "real money". That is, a store of value, a medium of exchange and, because of the previous two, a unit of account.
"Can I use my dollar to compel a single US soldier to serve my interests?"
Paraphrasing Microsoft, what do you want to buy today? Surely you'll want to eat, maybe pay the rent or a ticket for a show... not a single US soldier but its entire army and, in fact, the whole of USA society are *already* working on serving your interests... by serving their shared goals.
I consider capitalism far from being a panacea but the part that works, I know it works when it manages to align individuals' private interests and common ones. That's what makes USA dollar (and other sovereign currencies) work.
"Crypto was developed on the idea that a medium of exchange that was valued and controlled by the people who used it removed the possibility of catastrophic loss on the governments whim. Unfortunately for Bitcoin the whims of the marketplace may turn out to be more catastrophic."
And then, the path to hell is paved with good intentions. As you say, you put currency on the whims of people, and then people use the currency to their whims ("markets" is not a monster in a cave, it is me, and you, and you, and you... it's the people).
I don't know if you are American, but let's pretend you are for the sake of the argument: do not forget that Government *is* the people and instead of having that fixation that Government is good for nothing (which, in the end, is admitting people is good for nothing, so we better let an elite of "wiser ones", the big fortunes, that is, to direct the destiny of the country) work hard for the Government to be what it is meant to be and then, let it take control of the critical aspects of social well-being: education, healthcare, food and shelter at the very least because you can be sure that, otherwise, it will be the big fortunes what will dictate the outcomes and, if you think you have reasons to be worried about "governments' whim" (and you certainly have), then think of the alternative: what makes you think that Bezos, Ellison or Buffet have your own interests in higher regard than Government and, more importantly, what makes you think that you can change in your favour the collective interests of the Bezos, Ellisons and Buffets of this world than your government's?
As far as I know a BTC is worth the amount of power you put into mining it.
After all it is sold for thousand times that money on a BTC exchange.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Wiki [wikipedia.org] uses numbers from 2016, so they're outdated now, but back then using more than 1001 kWh a month caused the price to hike up to 24 cents, or as much as 64 cents during peak demand times in the year (summer and midwinter). At those kinds of prices you're talking about more than 20 grand a coin.
A household where a guy is running a mining rack is not paying peak prices. It has a flat rate price like any other household.
So if you talk about industrial mining, haha, interesting word, that might be different.
Anyway, mining a BTC does not cost more than a few bucks.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Only the government will tolerate their own fiat currency backed by nothing. Gangsters hate competition.