Bitcoin Loses 32% of Its Value This Week, Falls Below $4,000 (usatoday.com)

An anonymous reader quotes USA Today: Last year at this time, bitcoin was in the middle of a 217-percent rally that saw its value peak in December near $20,000. Now the largest cryptocurrency can't stay above $4,000 -- losing almost 32 percent in value this week and briefly hitting its lowest level since September 2007 at $3,477.58 on Sunday, according to data from CoinDesk... Other cryptocurrencies also languished. XRP fell 10.4 percent from its 24-hour open, while Ethereum was down 7.5 percent. Litecoin lost 6.7 percent, according to CoinDesk. This week's sell-off marked the largest one-week decline since April 2013 when bitcoin lost over 44 percent of its value, according to CoinDesk...

Year to date in 2018, bitcoin has declined more than 71 percent... The cryptocurrency jumped from $6,088.35 in mid-November 2017 to $19,326.49 on Dec. 17, 2017... Citing three unnamed sources, Bloomberg News also reported last week that the U.S. Justice Department is investigating if market manipulation caused bitcoin's 2017 rally.
Earlier this week, one financial advisory firm's CEO told CNN that they were still bullish on bitcoin. "Savvy investors understand that digital currencies are the future of money and, as such, they will be capitalizing on the lower prices in order to build their portfolios and shore-up their positions."

But not everyone seems convinced. "I bought $10 of bitcoin a year ago. Just to see how it goes," posted Austin-based technology reporter Mike Melanson on Twitter, adding "It's worth $3.45 now. Quite the investment!"

Comments

$10 once does not seem like "investment"

[SuperKendall]

If $10 spent one time is an investment, there are a lot of lottery players "investing" as well.

If you are really treating it as an investment, you might spend only $10 - but every month. When it's way up? $10. When it's super low? $10 more, adding to the slowly growing stash of bitcoins you never sell...

There are a lot of other investment strategies as well, but it seems like all of them have in common that you are doing something over time.

Re:$10 once does not seem like "investment"

[Zocalo]

If you're putting money into an investment every month then you sure as hell shouldn't be going with something as volatile as Bitcoin. Regardless of what you are investing in/gambling with, volatile commodities are something you need to monitor continually and really play the market, ideally buying low and selling high with each and every significant rise and fall. If you're titheing a given amount to your commodity of choice on a regular basis then you want something that's going to have a pretty good chance of a return no matter what - blue chips, government bonds, and so on - and even then, keep an eye on it and be mindful of opportunities to sell of exchange for another commodity.

There's also a lot of desperation amongst the institutional BTC bagholders at this point, especially those who were dumb enough to make significant purchases when it was already over $10k, so there's no way I'm going to be taking the financial advise of this Nigel Green of deVere Group unless he makes it perfectly clear what their BTC position is at the same time. Without that information it's kind of hard to tell whether he genuinely believes it's going to rally or he's just another desperate bagholder hoping to cut his losses.

Re: $10 once does not seem like "investment"

[110010001000]

Why do you doubt that Bitcoin will go under $1000? Is there some magical underlying value, or did you just choose a nice round number? I a sure last week you thought it would never drop below $4000.

Re: $10 once does not seem like "investment"

[PopeRatzo]

Bitcoin is scarce; I doubt, it will go under $1000.

That is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Why would "scarcity" matter to something that has no practical non-virtual value?

I would love some of these BroCoin boys to join our weekly poker game, but I doubt any of them still afford the buy-in.

Re: $10 once does not seem like "investment"

[gravewax]

Indeed Bitcoin will recover in a few years.

Really? Why? This is a simple question that no one has been able to provide a robust answer too. Bitcoin doesn't provide anything that other crypto coins don't and lacks many of the features they do, it also doesn't provide any of the stability of "most" fiat currencies and doesn't seem to solve any problems. So why would it recover?

Good for the environment

[enriquevagu]

There are studies showing that bitcoin's power consumption is (theoretically) proportional to its value. This will significantly reduce its (huge) carbon footprint, higher than many countries.

Re:The fact that...

[phantomfive]

The fact that it's taking this long to finally reflect its true value... is the only reason this is even news.

What is the true value of bitcoin? If you can actually answer that, you can make a ton of money by buying when it goes below the true value, and selling when it goes above. =

If your answer is that bitcoin is worth $0, you are wrong.....at a minimum it has value as a money laundering and malware ransoming exchange medium.

Re:Lol

[plopez]

currency arbitrage does happen.

Cryptocurrency != Bitcoin

[Fencepost]

Whoever it was that's still bullish on cryptocurrencies is correct in one thing - long-term it's likely that some form of cryptocurrency or at least a non-tamperable blockchain is going to become widely used. That does not mean that it's going to be Bitcoin, and in fact it probably won't be Bitcoin.

Re:Almost Time To Buy!

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty sure he means GPU prices are finally going to return to sane levels now that the shine on dunning-krugerrands is wearing off.

Re:The fact that...

[timholman]

If your answer is that bitcoin is worth $0, you are wrong.....at a minimum it has value as a money laundering and malware ransoming exchange medium.

The "true" value is probably a lot closer to $4 than $4000. After all, it isn't as if alternate cryptocurrencies couldn't substitute for BTC. For that matter, gift cards and Western Union money transfers remain very popular with criminals. BTC isn't a requirement for anonymous currency transfers.

The drop in BTC is hardly a surprise. BTC only rose in price while more money was flowing into the ecosystem than out of it. When BTC was a "thing", lots of suckers lined up with their money. But now its reputation is in the toilet. The general public sees it as nothing but the domain of criminals and scammers.

BTC simply isn't news anymore. If you think 2018 was a bad year, wait until 2019.

Re:The fact that...

[Kjella]

If your answer is that bitcoin is worth $0, you are wrong.....at a minimum it has value as a money laundering and malware ransoming exchange medium.

It's a reason why users could put up with fees but it doesn't give one Bitcoin any particular value. If you're only converting back and forth to dollars it doesn't matter if it's 100 BTC or 0.01 BTC in the middle, only if you put $100 in does it come out as $99, $95 or $90 on the other side. And there's no inherent reason to use Bitcoin over any other crypto-currency, as long as someone will put a dollar value to it.

Isn't it funny how

[mark_reh]

when the price is crazy high, you see ads all over TV about "investing" in gold, and when the price goes down, the ads disappear. BTC is the same way- when it was high people were talking it up to get the dumb money into it, and now that it's down, no one's saying you should "invest" in it, except maybe the "investors" who bought in at the high and are still holding on, hoping for a turn-around.

"Investing" in BTC is like "investing" in casino chips or lottery tickets. Every once in a while someone wins, but the vast majority of the suckers lose their money. It is in the interest of the folks who stand to make money that we hear about the winners far more than we hear about the losers, even though there are many thousands or even millions of losers for every one winner.

Ethereum took an even harder it

[rsilvergun]

it's at about 1/10 it's peak.

I'm guessing somebody is done propping up the market. This is a bit too much of a drop off for it to just be a course correction.

32% of PRICE

[Anonymous Coward]

Bitcoin lost 32% of its price, not its value.

Its value is identically zero.

Re:It is a hedge not an investment

[Actually, I do RTFA]

. Example: Venezuela could sell oil at fixed price in bitcoin. Iran could do the same. Both countries have strong incentives to do this (if they were not blind to the reasons why).

There's zero reason for them to do so. Venezuela launched it's own petro-based cryptocurrency. They can take all the value of a cryptocurrency backed by oil, and all the value of generating the genesis blocks.

it is possible that all dollar denominated investments could become nearly worthless.

You never say if what happens, but pretty much all investments are dollar denominated. If you're worried about massive inflation, you can just buy stock, gold or real estate. Any of those are better options.

the summary smells

[gravewax]

"Earlier this week, one financial advisory firm's CEO told CNN that they were still bullish on bitcoin."

So why change it to "one advisory firm's CEO" instead of Devere Group's CEO.... Ohhhhh right it is because then people would know it is someone that has sunk a lot of money into crypto currencies and them failing would also mean they fucked up. That is like asking the con man selling you the bridge whether there is any future value in owning the bridge.

Days of Black

[mentil]

Bitcoin: making Black Friday look like Black Tuesday!