Bitcoin Falls Below $5,000 For First Time Since October 2017 (bbc.com)

The value of Bitcoin has hit a new low of $4,951, bringing the total value of all Bitcoin in existence to below $87 billion. Much of the turmoil can be attributed to the split of Bitcoin Cash on November 15th. The Bitcoin offshoot has been split into two different cryptocurrencies, which are now in competition with each other. The BBC reports: Bitcoin exchange Kraken said in a blog post that it regarded one of the two new Bitcoin Cash crypto-currencies -- Bitcoin SV -- as "an extremely risky investment." At its peak, in November 2017, it briefly hit $19,783 - which means the price has fallen by about 75%. After the excitements of last year when the price soared to nearly $20,000 and then tumbled, Bitcoin has been rather dull and stable for much of 2018, settling between $6,000 and $7,000.

Comments

More seriously - there are better currencies.

[ron_ivi]

Bitcoin was the (technologically) best currency at the time it launched.

These days there are better.

For example, Monero's better in some ways.

People shouldn't stay married to the old technology when the better comes around. These currencies (with no actual value) aren't long-term investments. They're payment vehicles. And with better ones around (more private, cheaper transactions, etc) it's no surprise people leave bitcoin.

Re:Bitcoin has been rather dull and stable...

[Balial]

I read this as "dull" referring to, very little trading volume:

https://data.bitcoinity.org/ma...

ie. nobody cares unless it's going up. If there was a decent trading volume when it was stable, that would be an excellent thing for bitcoin. That's not what's been going on.

Intrinsic value

[Anonymous Coward]

Knife - Can be used for dozens or hundreds of useful situations especially in survival scenarios.

Apple - Can be eaten as a nutritious snack.

Gun & Ammo - Can be used to kill enemies or food to feed oneself.

Wagon - Can be used to haul cargo and various goods around in.

Rope - Can be used for all sorts of useful purposes.

Bitcoin - A useless waste of energy and disk space that relies entirely on the greater fool syndrome with no official backing.

Satoshi Nakamoto = NSA?

[Misagon]

I have wondered now and then, if not Bitcoin isn't actually a secret distributed Chinese Lottery.

With all these machines out there dedicated to brute-forcing SHA-256 collissions â" which is also the world's most used cryptographic hash algorithm, whenever NSA (or whichever agency created Bitcoin) wants a SHA-256 hash collision it just injects some requests to a bunch of bitcoin nodes, exploiting some vulnerability in the code and protocol.
And then the suckers will do the work for them.

It has been done before with Javascript in web pages, the same as "other" crypto-mining in Javascript on shadier sites more recently.
But this time the users would be none the wiser because the nodes are just doing whatever they were supposed to in the first place.