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

$4,999 more to go

[JoeyRox]

And then it'll be time to move on to the next speculative craze. My money is on collectable emojis.

Re:$4,999 more to go

[Anonymous Coward]

Tulips all the way.

Re:$4,999 more to go

[Anonymous Coward]

And then it'll be time to move on to the next speculative craze. My money is on collectable emojis.

It's called Tesla - TSLA. It's STILL way overpriced - unless it becomes as big as Toyota in January 2019.

Re: $4,999 more to go

[LynnwoodRooster]

TSLA has delivered around 150,000 cars this year; Toyota has delivered about 12,000,000 cars this year. There's roughly a few orders of magnitude in there. Tesla has a LONG way to go before it's even 5% of Toyota, let alone larger than Toyota.

Re: $4,999 more to go

[LynnwoodRooster]

Nope. but there is no speculation that they will be larger than Toyota. Speculation that Tesla will be bigger than Toyota is just insane.

Re: $4,999 more to go

[LynnwoodRooster]

80 is a lot closer to 100 than it is to 10. It's roughly 2 orders of magnitude. And good for Toyota, they know that if you want to sell a LOT of cars, you need to offer a lot of LOW COST cars, given that the average for a new car is right around $30,000 (quite a bit below the cheapest Tesla on the road). If Tesla wants to overtake Toyota, not only do they need to up their sales about two orders of magnitude, they'd need to cut their average selling price in half or more.

No intrinsic value

[melted]

Bitcoin had faith and mindshare. With faith evaporating, there's no intrinsic value to it, so it could go down to 0. This realization further spooks the "investors". It's kind of like a bank run against an extremely over-leveraged bank with no FDIC to prop anything up.

Re:No intrinsic value

[melted]

Currently it’s a good way to destroy value

Re: No intrinsic value

[Anonymous Coward]

Except for literally every other cryptocoin, most of which have lower transaction costs and security risks to your wallet.

Or hell, limit order penny stocks. Buy, sell, partner does same. $20 each roundtrip anywhere in the world. Works fine if you aren't trying to launder money.

Re:No intrinsic value

[Waffle Iron]

Bitcoin has utility. It is the only way of digitally transferring value that is not centrally controlled and not a copycat.

You know, human civilization somehow made it through its first 5,000 years without any means to "digitally transfer value without central control". That doesn't seem to be a problem that's been holding back human achievement in any significant way, and certainly not to the extent that it needs to have a big chunk of the world's electricity output thrown at it.

Re:No intrinsic value

[lgw]

Capital flight has alays been a thing, throughout history. It used to be completely physical: when the government went nuts or collapsed, you'd flee the country with your valuables, and if you were a wealthy trader you likely knew how to smuggle yourself across the border.

These days "valuables" are mostly journal entries in a purely digital world, and the governments have the borders locked down tight. It's the new panopitcon that calls for new ways of smuggling valuables across the border. And that's been the #1 use of BitCoin for years now. I suspect the primary driver for the fall in value in BTC is the Chinese government being ever more successful in stopping capital flight.

Re:No intrinsic value

[ron_ivi]

made it through its first 5,000 years without any means to "digitally transfer value without central control".

On the contrary, for 4900 of the first 5000 years all value was transferred without central control.

It wasn't until electronic payments were common that central control was dominant.

Re:No intrinsic value

[Waffle Iron]

That's one reason for what I stated. You can still transfer value without central control, the same way it has always been done. Adding this particular "digital" way doesn't justify the huge consumption of energy resources that it involves.

Re:No intrinsic value

[furry_wookie]

TOO bad it did not have the technology.

The fact that bitcoin is 100% tractable by governments for every single transaction makes it totally useless as cash replacement. No one wants the government tracking them when they make a small transaction over Craigslist for some lawn furniture, or have to calculate their capital gains when they trade pokemon cards at a flea market. That combined with very slow wait times to make a successful transaction and ensure you are not being ripped off, pretty much make bitcoin useless.

The ONLY thing bitcoin has right now is name recognition. Technologically it SUCKS BALLS compared to other more well designed cryptos like Monero that actually have a chance of delivering on the ideas of Bitcoin.

Bitcoin will never do it, and anyone with a clue is done with Bitcoin.

Re:No intrinsic value

[Antique Geekmeister]

Perhaps in the first 4900 years of culture, there was no central authority. In every tribe and every family that I knew of, in most families and tribes, the leader limited the size of exchanges, exchange rates, and in many cases whether the the transaction would occur at all.

Re:No intrinsic value

[Prien715]

You know, human civilization somehow made it through its first 5,000 years without any means to "digitally transfer value without central control". That doesn't seem to be a problem that's been holding back human achievement in any significant way

Money laundering is a $2 trillion industry and it's excellent for that. Or maybe you're in North Korea and you want to carry out a ransomware attack. How will you possibly get paid with all those sanctions? Wanna sell drugs on the dark web and are looking for a currency? Bitcoin certainly solves all of these problems for criminal enterprises and pariah states.

Re:No intrinsic value

[Waffle Iron]

Except that

- among digitally transferred currencies.... *without* central control is in fact a necessity towards progress away from immoral war, murder, theft via taxation... and toward self enablement and charity for all human beings

- electricity consumption by cryptocurrency *absolutely unequivocally FAILS* to even come close the that consumed by all the systems supporting the worlds Fiats.... their politicians salaries healt retirement, their buildings construction maintenanace heating cooling, all their cars and fuel and environmental impacts etc.

Cryptocurrency takes only highly optimized, narrow silos of
- Silicon sand
- Electricity of any source
- Internet (sand + electricity)

You forgot the fourth, fat, silo:
-Kool-Aid

You'll need plenty more of that, given your current levels of consumption.

Re:No intrinsic value

[Joce640k]

You mean like when it dropped from $20,000 to $8000?

You might notice it never went back to $20,000. Just saying.

Apart from that one, no it hasn't dropped this much before.

Re: No intrinsic value

[houghi]

So it is basically like anything else on the stockmarket these days.

Re:No intrinsic value

[Joce640k]

Should happen this week...

Re:No intrinsic value

[jeremyp]

"not a copycat" doesn't confer utility.

  "not centrally controlled" might confer some advantage, but there's nothing in the Bitcoin technology that can prevent it from being centrally controlled. If one person controls 51% of the mining capability, Bitcoin is then centrally controlled. In any case, not being centrally controlled does not, of itself confer utility. My credit card is centrally controlled and it is a more effective means of transferring value than bitcoin, at least for legal transactions.

"digitally transferring value" is utility, but, if Bitcoin is tanking for any other reason, it loses its utility for digitally transferring value.

Thus Bitcoin absolutely can drop to zero and at some point in the future, it will. The only question is will it be in the near future or the distant future.

Re:No intrinsic value

[jythie]

The problem with all that infrastructure is it is expensive to operate, so as soon as fees made from transactions drop below the power costs, the stakeholders will rapidly drop out. Arms races only work when there is something worth racing over. Just look at Easter Island.

Re:No intrinsic value

[jythie]

*nod * both 'not copycat' and 'not centralized' are ideological merics, their utility is purely emotional.

Re:No intrinsic value

[jythie]

Fiat currency has the same basic value gold and silver did when they became common : you can pay your taxes in it and the state pays all of its bills using it.

bf

[blackomegax]

This is the black friday discount before going to the moon. get in while you can or be poor.

Re:bf

[willaien]

Or don't speculate on such a volatile commodity. Sure, it might see some corrections, but, I see no reason to believe it will not just continue going down over time.

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:More seriously - there are better currencies.

[melted]

The problem is, dollar is better than all of them combined. It's literally too big to fail.

Re:More seriously - there are better currencies.

[OneHundredAndTen]

It may be better, but it remains a vehicle for speculators and money laundering, and little (if anything) else.

Re:More seriously - there are better currencies.

[NicknameUnavailable]

There's no post-quantum cryptocurrency, the storage costs to make a post-quantum cryptocurrency are untenable for any transaction load approaching Bitcoin's, and quantum computers are developing at a pace which following the last decade's trends linearly places them at 2023 at the latest before pre-quantum algorithms become worthless. There's no way to make the post-quantum cutover without centralization due to storage requirements, thereby killing the only selling point of cryptocurrencies. Everyone with knowledge of cryptography knows this, so everyone hyping cryptocurrencies is either ignorant of the technologies involved or outright spewing manipulative hype.

Re:More seriously - there are better currencies.

[sheramil]

I would tentatively confine discussion of post-quantum problems until we have actually had quantum problems.

Re:More seriously - there are better currencies.

[Anonymous Coward]

Contrary... it is the biggest behemoth ready to topple over of its own gluttony.
All it will take is a little coordinated push... faster, harder.
Global p2p private cryptocurrency is the only way out of the centuries of mess created by Fiat Governments Bankers and Corporations upon you the sheeple.
You are the ones who must charitably educate and lift the masses from the grasp of Fiat control.
You must help not only yourselves, but them, help humanity.

Grow up... become free, independant, responsible, charitable human beings for once, instead of remaining greedy sheeple dependant upon State Propaganda teaching you to conform, to accept force and tax theft over you, to spy surveill control lock and censor your every move, to harken for murder war jail, to chill your speech, to program your children with their faulty software in government madrasas known as "childhood public education".
Cryptocurrency is not about that... it is the path to freedom.

You need to free your minds and think heavily about that.
When you do, you will know that Cryptocurrency must be adopted.
And you will spend your days fulfilled making sure it happens.

Re:More seriously - there are better currencies.

[Anonymous Coward]

PQC algorithms are readily available, and don't take up that much more space.

More importantly, it is NOT necessary to store entire blockchains forever!!!
The only thing needed is confirmation of, and reference to, the UTXO set.
There are a few ways to do that.
Seek them out.

Re: More seriously - there are better currencies.

[cshark]

Failing? According to who? Relative to Bitcoin, the dollar is incredibly stable. It's never lost 30% of its value in a week.

Re:More seriously - there are better currencies.

[bangular]

You are completely correct. I can't get in the head of Satoshi Nakamoto, but it seems like he envisioned bitcoin as a currency and many modern bitcoin owners see it as an investment. Bitcoin network changes are slow and there just doesn't seem to be a lot of interest in scaling to millions of transactions per second.

OTOH, there are several cryptocurrencies that aim to be less volatile and some can scale to a million transactions per second (or at least claim to). Who knows which will succeed, but that seems way more interesting to me. I'd rather invest in those companies the same way one might have invested in Red Hat for open source software.

Ethereum is interesting to me because distributed apps are possible. The current implementation is incredibly wasteful. However, the Ethereum community seems way more interested in scaling than the bitcoin community.

Re:More seriously - there are better currencies.

[Antique Geekmeister]

Oh, my. Please excuse my cynicism, but I saw precisely what we heard as the dotcom bubble topped out.

Re: More seriously - there are better currencies.

[Anonymous Coward]

Putting tribalism aside, is Borrow and Spend really a more fiscally reaponsible tactic than Tax and Spend?

Re: More seriously - there are better currencies.

[Anonymous Coward]

It is? For the last year, it's been amazingly stable against the EUR, GBP, CHF, JPY, and HKD. It's appreciated against the RMB. I guess that's failing?

Re:More seriously - there are better currencies.

[NicknameUnavailable]

You could theoretically daisy chain transactions together, but you'd kill the value provided by a blockchain in the process.

Re:More seriously - there are better currencies.

[Joce640k]

Before SOME pre-quantum cryptographic algorithms are crackable in trivial timeframes.

FTFY.

Re:More seriously - there are better currencies.

[NicknameUnavailable]

Nope, it's not a "some" thing, if it's not a post-quantum algorithm it's crackable by 2023 (at the latest.)

Re: More seriously - there are better currencies.

[novakyu]

Yes. Because it's the "spend" part that necessitate the tax (explicit and implicit). As long as you do the "spend" part, how you exactly fund it is irrelevant.

P.S. I guess to be pedantically correct, "Borrow and Spend" is more or equally fiscally responsible (or irresponsible) than "Tax and Spend".

Re:More seriously - there are better currencies.

[Anduril1986]

I'm just going to leave this here:
The case against quantum computing

Re:More seriously - there are better currencies.

[Joce640k]

I think you'll find it's mostly the algorithms related to number factoring that will fall.

AES256? Not so much.

Re:More seriously - there are better currencies.

[jythie]

I love how the most prosperous and free time in human history is a 'mess', and somehow returning to failed historical norms is prefered.

Re:More seriously - there are better currencies.

[jythie]

That is one of the major weaknesses of creating a deflationary system, the currency becomes an investment since there is an incentive to NOT use it since its value is intended to always be going up.

Re:More seriously - there are better currencies.

[NicknameUnavailable]

AES is safe, but that's not what cryptocurrencies rely upon. The issue is the signatures, not the symmetric algorithms (those are almost universally post-quantum.) It's the asymmetric algorithms we use today (RSA, in the case of Bitcoin ECDSA, and a couple of others) which are the issue. The asymmetric post-quantum algorithms (SPHINCS+ and other hash-based variants, the lattice stuff has some slightly better potential but it's currently unknown if it's even safe against pre-quantum computers or if it's just really obtuse to work with) have the issue of really big signature sizes (SPHINCS+ is currently the best one known to be post-quantum, and it has signatures of about 31KB each on top of a relatively trivial ~2KB public key.) 31KB per signature is no laughing matter, that translates to per-transaction-on-blockchain (you can't aggregate that piece simply because it's the only thing which actually says "this person authorizes sending this.") As of this writing there are 550846 Bitcoin blocks with an average of 650.3498 transactions-per-block, that equates to 358,242,586 transactions or ~11.1TB of signatures (not including public keys or actual transaction data.) This might not seem like a lot, it's absolutely manageable if you have a server and eventually a datacenter as it grows, but then you get into centralization and it defeats the only selling point of cryptocurrencies: decentralization.

Re: More seriously - there are better currencies.

[cshark]

How is it fair for your money to lose 30% or more of it's value every few years? It happened with Gox, it just happened again. There is no parallel in history with the dollar. That would be like the US losing 30% of it's GDP inasmuch as a couple of days. It's never happened. Generally, if the US loses 2% of GDP, it takes years to recover. We just got out of a decade long recession from losing 1.5% of GDP on growth figures. If you were living on bitcoin right now, you would be dead. I'm not dissuading your from the idea that bitcoin is awesome, or that bitcoin is the revolutionary future and whatnot, but any sober observer would look at this and have to comment on the volatility problem that bitcoin has, and the one it's always had. Even the community is talking about it again.

Re: More seriously - there are better currencies.

[s4080326]

Yes. Because it's the "spend" part that necessitate the tax (explicit and implicit). As long as you do the "spend" part, how you exactly fund it is irrelevant.

P.S. I guess to be pedantically correct, "Borrow and Spend" is more or equally fiscally responsible (or irresponsible) than "Tax and Spend".

"Borrow and Spend" Creates inflation which is essentially tax on wealth, if done within a stable range it will encourage investment as cash not invested will decrease in value over time.

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

[Luckyo]

Bitcoin investors are not a monolithic entity. There are many different investors with diametrically opposed preferences and interests. Speculators for example want volatile and erratic, while institutional investors want dull and stable.

Being both is the worst of all possible options, as that means it's unattractive to both speculators and institutional investors.

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.

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

[Luthair]

I'm not sure how losing 75% of its value in less than a year is stable. Heck, its lost 17% in the last week.

Re:LOL Bitcoin can't win

[Balial]

These aren't lies.

Low trading volume in the stable period means a lack of interest in anything except the speculation:

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

That's not healthy for any security.

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.

Re:Intrinsic value

[bkmoore]

Knife, Apple, Gun & Ammo, Wagon, Rope, Bitcoin...

I accuse Col. Mustard who used a poison apple in the wagon AND he was paid in BitCoin.

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

[ranton]

Dull and stable == bitcoin bad

I never saw that sentiment in the article or summary. They simply said it was dull and stable with no indication that is a bad thing.

You think this is something?

[Draconi]

Wait until the bottom falls out of Tether.

Cryptocurreny has ruined too many lives

[xack]

From buying drugs and child abuse to wrecking the planet. Satoshi disappeared because he knew he would be sentenced for crimes against humanity eventually. I’d say cryptocurrencies and Wikipedia are two worst inventions this century. The price coming down will not be enough because even hyperinflation curencies get novelty value among collectors.

Re:Cryptocurreny has ruined too many lives

[CoolCash]

What about the USD? Its been used for all of that an more. It ruins lives every day.

Re:Cryptocurreny has ruined too many lives

[HornWumpus]

Suckers were lucky to get together with their money in the first place. Fuck em.

Re:LOL Bitcoin can't win

[HornWumpus]

It's basically a 'penny stock'.

One million $/day trading volume is easily manipulated by any of the big Chinese miners.

That chart shows 200 bitcoin (including alts)/day as total trading volume. That seems low, for such a popular penny stock.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

I got in about 8 days ago. The exact wrong time. The lure of fast cars and exotic women (or was it fast women and exotic cars? It all seems so long ago, now) roped me in and now I've taken a 20% haircut. I want to sell to keep the remaining 80% safe; however then I will have to explain to my wife what happened to that money. At this point I'm considering doubling-down to try to come out ahead if we have a reversion to the mean and the levels that have been the norm up until this point, at least recently. Honestly I'm afraid this could cost me my marriage and potentially much, much more money during the divorce if she finds out there's been another woman for the past 1.5 years (and the lawyers likely will find out). What a fucking disaster.

BUY, Mortimer, BUY!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a bargain price. The only way is UP, UP UP!!!!

Magic Beans

[martinX]

Magic beans no longer worth a cow.

"Best"!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

How is a currency that's created by wasting energy at all valuable? If it stored energy, or stored some valuable work output, then you'd have a point. However, bitcoin is inherently turning coal into hashes that can't be used for anything else. It's the best of Ponzi schemes.

NB

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

Here's a nice read about BitcoinSV and Mr. Craig Wright who desperately wants to be Satoshi Nakamoto but keeps blundering while doing so.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, you should definitely invest more. All of the technical analysts (who are also bitcoin holders) agree that purchasing new coins with the soon to be defunct US dollar is the right thing to do. They may even sell you some of theirs.

Not sure who is ripping off whom :)

[MerlinTheWizard]

This constant stream of insipid blabber about Bitcoin and how it's going to crash soon, that has been going on for years through self-proclaimed experts, is certainly doing much more in terms of money and exposure for those fuckers than they'd get actually investing in cryptocurrencies or in anything else for that matter. I'm inviting anyone to take a look at just how many Youtube channels, just as an example, deal with Bitcoin analysis an predict its crashing, and how many views they get. :)

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.

Re:Satoshi Nakamoto = NSA?

[yarbo]

Bitcoin uses SHA-256(SHA-256(nonce+data)) < target value. They don't actually look for collisions.

Re:Satoshi Nakamoto = NSA?

[swillden]

Bitcoin uses SHA-256(SHA-256(nonce+data)) < target value. They don't actually look for collisions.

And if they did look for collisions, at the peak hash rate thus far achieved (about 2^69 hashes per second) it would still take about 2^161 years to reach a 50% probability of finding one. This would make BTC transactions a bit slower than they are now.

Re:Satoshi Nakamoto = NSA?

[AmiMoJo]

Seems like an immensely risky scheme for a problem they could solve with a few billion dollars. In fact it would be odd if they hadn't spent a few billion on supercomputers that are able to brute force hashes and do massive dictionary attacks against AES etc.

Aside from anything else they couldn't really use it to brute force anything really interesting, because the public nature of the system would mean that other intelligence agencies would immediately know what they were doing. Plus the way Bitcoin works the amount of computing power this would generate is so small and so slow to muster it would be impractical.

Re:How low does it have to go

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd guess until it costs more to heat an apartment in St. Petersburg (Russia, not Florida) in February by mining bitcoin than by paying for the regular heat.

Editors, DO YOUR JOB

[turbotalon]

FTFA: "At its peak, in November 2017, it (Bitcoin Cash) briefly hit $19,783 - which means the price has fallen by about 75%." The author of the story is inconsistently referring to BTC and BCH. BCH has NEVER gotten anywhere close to $19k, BTC has. There are other places in the short summary where I had to stop and think if the author was referring to BTC or BCH. EDITORS TAKE NOTE: YOUR JOB IS TO FIX THIS SHIT.

Re:Editors, DO YOUR JOB

[Luthair]

No one cares about the cryptocurrency circle-jerk. Back into the closet.

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

[Luckyo]

Their laugher early on was much better than yours. There are quite a few who made a killing on it, and are in the game only for small portions of their early bitcoin-based fortunes. If it completely folded tomorrow, they ultimately still made out with massive profits.

"below $87 billion"

[iMadeGhostzilla]

I don't disagree, just curious where the estimate of the value of electricity spent to mine the current bitcoin so far is, so it can be compared to the $87B.

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

[Lanthanide]

For every dollar gained in bitcoin, someone else lost it.

Re:LOL Bitcoin can't win

[Kjella]

It's basically a 'penny stock'. One million $/day trading volume is easily manipulated by any of the big Chinese miners.

Yeah, except in this case I'm not so sure even they are in control.... cause a big drop, does it crash and burn instead of letting you buy cheap? Start a big price hike, are people buying into it again or are they glad to recover their losses and bail? With a penny stock they know who's playing and being played, here it's more like a herd that can at any moment set off on a crazy stampede.

Re:LOL Bitcoin can't win

[HornWumpus]

The unknown is how much of that volume are fake trades at fictitious prices between left and right pocket of some miner.

Re:LOL Bitcoin can't win

[Antique Geekmeister]

Or high frequency trading, engaging in arbitrage.

BTC is really forked now

[Applehu Akbar]

The speculative value of BTC was based in its limited supply. Forking the coin doubles the mineable money supply, so the speculative value has to drop by half to adjust for this, besides kicking off a whole new race to waste energy mining the new coin.

Then we have people touting this or that better new coin. "Investing" in each of these jumps the money supply for each one, further reducing the scarcity value.

Re:There's no intrinsic value in any Fiat

[melted]

But there is value in a fiat currency. Currency is much like shares in a company, except the company is the country that issues the currency. Now granted, the country can issue more currency, and your share can get smaller, but fiat currencies very much do have intrinsic value. Unless you think the US economy is worth nothing, of course, which is pretty self-evident that it's not the case.

Bitcoin (and other "cash" cryptocurrencies not tied to an asset or a fiat currency), on the other hand, is a share in literally nothing. ICOs are de-facto shares in the respective companies, but the market is so poorly regulated you'd have to be a total idiot to invest in one.

Re:Crypto currencies tend to be stable for periods

[Pinky's Brain]

It relies on market cap for security of transfer, so if it drops enough it becomes useless.

This is what happens ...

[johnlcallaway]

... when pyramid schemes reach their saturation point.

Congratulations to all that made money.

To those that lost ... suckers! Go try Amway, at least they sell something material instead of pipe dreams.

We don't need a play-by-play

[mysidia]

Geez, so what... it fell below $5000? There's nothing special about that... its not notable news --- Slashdot already covered that price was decreasing significantly 6 days ago, And didn't even bring up more important news within the Crypto ecosystem such as the BCH Chain forks and how those are doing; this is basically a duplicate headline within 10 days with 6000 changed to 5000.. A link to the exchange prices is good enough.

Are we going to get a big writeup again when it falls below $4000 within the week, and possibly below $3000 in 2 weeks, then $2000 ?

Again.... not interesting stuff for an article, when there are so many other things happening with the technology other than boring fiat exchange prices

Transaction fees are holding

[reanjr]

What's most interesting here is that while the number of transactions during this crash has risen to levels not seen since January, the transaction fees never went above $0.65. That's strong evidence that improvements like Lightning and SegWit have largely addressed the scaling concerns everyone had around the BTC/BCH split.

Re: How low does it have to go

[reanjr]

When that happens, people turn off their miners, the hash rate goes down, the difficulty lowers, and it's profitable again. Whatever price it hits is an amount that will price SOMEONE out of the market. It's meaningless.

Re:LOL Bitcoin can't win

[HornWumpus]

Arbitrage in that thin a market? Danger Will Robinson!

HFT doesn't really work when it takes an hour to clear a trade.