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.

Comments

Re:"Loss"

[DRJlaw]

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.

CItation needed. Especially since literally everyone would sell you their coin for $9000 at this point.

Greater fool theory

[Kohath]

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?

Re:Greater fool theory

[sacrilicious]

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.

People can't stop thinking about cryptocurrency in terms of get-rich-quick, or even get-rich-period. Cryptocurrency is NOT ABOUT INVESTING, no more than Euros are about investing. Cryptocurrency is a transaction facilitator, the novel thing about it being that said transactions are beyond the control of the banking industry. Ah well; in the same way that lotteries are taxes on people who are bad at math, crypto has the apparent side effect of being a tax on people who are bad at finance. Having been harassed for being a nerd in middle school, I'm feeling a certain sanguinity about it all.

Re:"Loss"

[DRJlaw]

Not me, and I only have half a Bitcoin.

Yep. It'll come back up. Just like Cabbage Patch dolls and Beanie Babies did!

Wanna buy half a bitcoin for $4500?

Re:"Loss"

[Anonymous Coward]

It's disingenuous to suggest there hasn't be a lot of actual loss.

I'd say the loss of planetary health due to the waste of energy, some portion of which was provided by fossil fuels, is significant.

Mining costs are the difference

[FeelGood314]

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.

Re:I have a much better store of value

[Archfeld]

Hard to eat silver, and it makes a lousy medium to a blacksmith. You're better off with pennies and a book on how to make penicillin, gunpowder, and alcohol.

Re:Well, duh

[SigmundFloyd]

You can't stop crypto-currencies any more than you can stop gravity from working.

Now that's what I call a fitting comparison!