Slashdot Mirror
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.
And then it'll be time to move on to the next speculative craze. My money is on collectable emojis.
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.
This is the black friday discount before going to the moon. get in while you can or be poor.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wait until the bottom falls out of Tether.
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.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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.
The problem is, dollar is better than all of them combined. It's literally too big to fail.
Magic beans no longer worth a cow.
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
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.
Here's a nice read about BitcoinSV and Mr. Craig Wright who desperately wants to be Satoshi Nakamoto but keeps blundering while doing so.
It may be better, but it remains a vehicle for speculators and money laundering, and little (if anything) else.
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.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
For every dollar gained in bitcoin, someone else lost it.
The unknown is how much of that volume are fake trades at fictitious prices between left and right pocket of some miner.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Failing? According to who? Relative to Bitcoin, the dollar is incredibly stable. It's never lost 30% of its value in a week.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
Or high frequency trading, engaging in arbitrage.
I love how the most prosperous and free time in human history is a 'mess', and somehow returning to failed historical norms is prefered.
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.