Bitcoin slides as China's central bank launches checks on exchanges
reuters.com
reuters.com
1) It's a mostly unregulated market full of scammers and pump and dump schemes artificially manipulating the price.
2) All the news and rumors about bitcoin and any other crypto currency should be assumed to a lie propagated by someone to move the price in one direction or another.
3) Nobody on the internet who claims to know why the price of bitcoin goes up or down on a given day has any fucking idea what they're talking about, and if they didn't they wouldn't be posting about it online.
4) As long as bitcoin is useful for buying drugs or another criminal activity, it's going to be worth something.
5) When you suddenly start paying attention to bitcoin because the price has gone up a bunch recently, don't buy it, because it's about to crash.
I'm not one of these people or know any of them, so you might very well be right.
In general, though, there are usually a (small) number of people observing any field who should be doing professional analysis work, but who don't "think they could do that sort of thing" or think it "takes someone way smarter than them." They have too low an opinion of their own knowledge to think it has value. So, instead, they go on giving away extremely high-value market analysis for free in the comments section of some blog.
This is a good hypothesis, but it is far from obvious.
I remember, years ago, unwinding a portfolio of correlation trades. The trades consisted of bets on how assets would correlate, e.g. Apple might be expected to correlate with Microsoft more than with Société Générale, a French bank. We were under a time crunch to unwind the massive portfolio. Given the structure of the trades, unwinding them meant reversing their implied correlations. Thus, for one week, the market's largest names anti-correlated with reference to how a few traders had previously thought they should have correlated. The moves were noticeable; the attribution far from obvious. Nevertheless, talking heads proceeded to breathlessly blame political crises in Spain.
To properly attribute this Bitcoin activity to the People's Bank of China, one would want to examine country-level Bitcoin flows of funds around the time of the PBoC announcement, paying attention to hourly data around when the Chinese- and English-language announcements were made/leaked.
As one example, we can look at the forecast Burry is best known for, from The Big Short (and the corollary film depiction), and I found myself identifying much more with Michael Burry's investors than those who praised him at the end of the story. Scion Capital was hemorrhaging its investors' money, and for a nontrivial amount of time even after it became widespread knowledge among the institutional elite, the market failed to crash and vindicate Burry's short. From Burry's perspective, everyone around him thought he was wrong, but this misses a lot of the nuance. His fund's investors weren't necessarily concerned with him being right or wrong per se, they were concerned with the ridiculously inane risk he decided to take with the entirety of the firm's capital. It's great that his bet turned out so well for him, but calling it genius (as many do) is so charitable as to be almost literally incredible. Michael Burry could have easily been right but unlucky, and simply run out of capital before he could make a return on the short. This is why the saying, "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent" is so important.
Look at this from the perspective of Burry's investors, not the retrospective story of Burry's victory. If you were an investor in a hedge fund, and one day out of the blue the CEO emailed to inform you that the entirety of the fund's capital would be liquified to leverage a single market position, and that you would not be allowed to withdraw any of your capital, would you react with approval, lukewarm disinterest or abject horror? Even if you bought fully into Burry and his strategy, would you have the requisite nerve to be comfortable with such an astronomically risky and contrarian position?
That said, one of the things that impressed me most about Burry is that he could withstand such intense and prolonged pressure from both investors (harassing, suing and ostracizing him) and significant financial loss (albeit ultimately unrealized). It takes incredible fortitude to be able to lose that much capital in the pursuit of a positive return.
People can make correct predictions, but there are tons of nuances around them. You could have predicted the Note 7 disaster, but Samsung's stock is up 27% from its pre-incident price. Maybe you knew about VW's problems years ago. Oh, too bad, their stock is up over 50% since 2011. Oh, you knew about the Toyota mat problems? That entire incident amounted to a nearly invisible blip on the stock price.
Betting nearly a billion dollars of other peoples' money on one single thing is absolutely insane. There are a million ways to be completely right and still lose everything.
Not disagreeing with your points about the million ways you can be right (and be unable to execute on it), though. Just that there are about a billion ways to be wrong, and a lot of those come from not taking a broad enough perspective about the impact. Burry did the research, saw the systemic complexity and dominoes that would fall, which perhaps gave him a little more confidence than a CNBC blowhard just looking at some new high in home buying and calling a market top. But he absolutely could have been wrong if he executed poorly.
These moves are mostly retrenchment and speculative/sentimental response to China messaging though. Consider -- if there was real, imminent concern that Chinese exchanges might be shut down and funds frozen, would the price at these exchanges fall or rise?
It would rise, because getting BTC out is going to be far safer than fiat.
In particular, knowing that it's going to crash is just a standard observation about markets in general: If you buy because it's going up, you're already too late, and you're likely to lose your shirt.
I knew the housing market was going to crash, but I had no clue when. That's enough not to buy into a bubble, but not enough to make money from a bubble.
Then a week later they're on suicide watch because the price went down 5-10% and they lost everything.
On some level, it's just common sense. A bitcoin is a bitcoin. If bitcoins didn't suddenly become more valuable for some obvious reason, then if the price has doubled in a few weeks, then that makes it a worse time to buy, not a better one.
I will never understand why people suddenly want to buy something after the price has gone up a bunch, because the price has gone up. You want to buy it before. Obviously if the price went up because the reward halved or, i dunno, citibank started taking bitcoin deposits, that's a different story, but just jumping in because of FOMO is stupid. (I saw the same thing with Nvidia, and warned people out of buying it and sold most of mine to lock in profits after the hype train started getting out of control in the past few weeks.)
Or, in other words, #5 is a recurring pattern on financial markets. If you rely on it alone for investing your money, you are crazy.
Where can someone learn about this stuff?
It's effectively shorting selling, except you know in advance how much you stand to lose (what you paid for the option), as opposed to borrowing bitcoins and selling them, and then having to buy them back at some unknown price in the future.
How does that turn around?
If the Bitcoin market consisted solely of drug trade, it would constitute drug sellers selling bitcoins to drug consumers on exchanges, only to again receive the same bitcoins shortly thereafter, as payment for drugs.
We can argue that the market price of something is already reflective this risk from regulation (or lack thereof) but that would require everyone in the market to be perfectly informed.
As this person said, there is plenty misinformation being spread by rational actors who stand to benefit from Bitcoin price manipulation. In other financial markets there are at least some restrictions on this type of behavior, like insider trading, etc.
Look at what happened with pirateat40, the "bitcoin savings and trust" ponzi scheme king who couldn't pay out one time and decided to try to try his hand at market manipulation instead.
People like to throw around the talking point that "markets need to be regulated", but the analysis stops there. Don't be so quick to regulate without an idea of why/if it's necessary, or what the true effects of the regulation would be. A regulation should be a response to a well-defined problem (defined as an encroachment of someone's liberty, whether specific or the public at large) with a known cause, such that the regulation maximizes overall freedom. At least, in a fair system.
You can counter by saying, "It's not designed that way" but Bitcoin is designed to accept whatever forks a concensus of miners accept, so it is possible.
Please elaborate/provide evidence. I have never heard of such a link or economic property that would demonstrate that volatility is impacted by the sign of the inflation rate.
And of course, miners already influence the money supply by choosing to sell or hold their supply, so they act as a decentralized form of the ECB/Fed/etc. Their less influential 'monetary policy' is probably much less harmful as well.
And it's important to understand what deflation is -- Bitcoin only appreciates when people assign more value to it. All things being equal, Bitcoin is NOT deflationary, whereas the USD is inflationary, because even with 100% adoption the USD supply is artificially increased, and the value eroded.
Then you must have been asleep during economics class when they covered the great depression.
Most modern currencies are inflationary and have taken steps to remove deflationary properties like the gold standard, because it exasperates volatility and economic bubbles. It promotes hoarding, which decreases liquidity and increases volatility.
It's exactly why quantitative easing is used to increase supply of money in order to maintain a specific range on inflation.
Personal attacks are no substitute for content and explanation; I'm trying to help you by giving a chance to better expound your original point.
For your own understanding, I would recommend reading the Monetarist explanation of the Great Depression: https://fee.org/articles/money-in-the-1920s-and-1930s/. There is also the Austrian Economics approach which is built around the fact that inflation was promoted to keep commodity values constant -- in reality, I think both Monetarist and Austrian economic factors played a role.
Most likely, I would guess the issue is that you don't understand the definition of volatility: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volatility_(finance)#Mathemati...
Please review these materials and explain how price volatility is related to the sign of inflation, or whether you meant something else. My assumption is that it is not, and I have seen no evidence to suggest otherwise. You can look at the most volatile years of US exchange rates and they were during the Jimmy Carter "stagflationary" era. You may be conflating volatility of a currency with volatility of other measures in an economy.
To be perfectly honest, your rhetoric just seems to spread FUD, when the real truth is there are simply a lot of unknowns, and a lot of people who claim to know them, and you need to use your best research and judgment to sift through the noise.
That's my favorite time to sell. Glad I sold at $900 when everyone was raving about it just a few weeks back.
That's a tautology, isn't it? People found the German Papiermark useful for criminal and non-criminal activity, which meant that it was worth something. Until it wasn't.
An old billionaire who has been around long enough to see fly-by-night scams come and go, Charlie Munger, called Bitcoins "rat poison". The only problem with that is the commodity of rat poison has some actual value.
In the past 20 years we have seen various things with inflated values. Homes with sub-prime mortgages in 2007, stocks like Webvan and Pets.com in 1999. Bitcoin, which is trading for $775 now, and was worth $1020 last week, is one with those things, as well as with Dutch tulip bulbs and the like.
Comparing a Bitcoin to any other commodity, I have to ask, what use value does it have? It has none. Gold is useful because it can fill teeth, conduct electricity etc., I can also easily use it to trade as a currency as it is durable, portable, divisible and uniform. Bitcoin is traded, but has no underlying usefulness like other commodities.
Sometimes people fish around for a comparison to something with worth and are hard up for one until in desperation they point to the only thing they can - the dollar. True, the piece of paper dollar never had intrinsic value. Until August 1971, it was convertible to gold. The US did and does store thousands of tons of gold at Fort Knox and in other places. In 1971, it temporarily (with exceptions for some people) stopped that convertibility. So the dollar now is doubly abstracted, it was an abstraction of the gold, then with the window closed it became an abstraction of that abstraction. The US pays a lot to guard those tons of gold that still implicitly (instead of explicitly) backs its currency. Bitcoin does not have tons of gold implicitly backing it. It is inherently worthless.
Lots of perfectly reasonable and useful modern 'paper' currencies are not backed by any commodity nor have been since their most recent introduction. Money is useful as money, that's generally good enough.
In any case, I find it kind of amusing how much incensed criticism Bitcoin gets simply for being a currency that exists. It's like, imagine people wrote thousands of angry, scathing articles and comments all over the internet about the Azerbaijani manat or something.
I don't think vkou was claiming that you yourself need to pay taxes in the currency yourself. Just that the fact that there's workers out there in another country who needs to pay their taxes in their local currency and will therefore need to charge for their work in that currency or trade for it. Either option will lead to some predictable demand that you can depend on whether you pay taxes in the country in question or not.
1. Can buy drugs with it
And
2. Can avoid capital controls imposed by your socialist country
> don't buy it, because it's about to crash.
This seems rather contradictory.
Pay attention to the "bitcoin " Google trends graph and overlay it onto your bitcoin price chart of choice.
2) True about USD and Fed too or almost every other things that are publicly traded. The reason Musk makes all those news headlines is because he wants his company look attractive too investors.
3) True about stock market and all other financial instruments too. We have plenty of analyst giving after the fact analysis. They have no clue.
4) Agreed.
5) Generally true about stock market too. One should always buy low and sell high. Not other way around.
You mean "deflation". Inflation is when your currency is worth less than it was before.
Also, I'd be careful of claiming anything is "mathematically guaranteed", which is a much stronger claim than anything you encounter speculating in a market. There's no axiom or theorem demonstrating that Bitcoin is worth anything.
How can you "artifically manipulate" the price of Bitcoin? By buying lots of it then selling? How can that be bad?
Other scams are probably more like MtGox where the coins don't exist or are routinely stolen.
You can spread false news that could bump it in either direction. For example a government is planning legislation around bitcoin or (like in this case) a bank is looking closer at money flowing to/from exchanges. These could drive down the price. On the other hand stories about governments embracing it, a company starting to accept it, or more "positive" bitcoin stories could drive up the price.
As relevant as ever
Nation states have the most to lose, since they draw so much of their power from the ability to manipulate currency, so we should expect to see a lot of attacks on Bitcoin by them.
The point of Bitcoin is that your cousin Lenny can act as your bank.
The reality is that many of the foreign-owned homes here are owned by shadow offshores which are very hard to track.
Btw, tech workers from venture backed startups generally make less than those working for the profitable tech giants, so it's a bit disingenuous to call them overpaid.
Also, you're giving yourself away as an outsider because VC-backed firms significantly underpay compared with the profitable tech giants.
...
In San Francisco Bay-area locations such as Palo Alto and Woodside, home prices have risen by double digits in the past three years, while the number of buyers from China has nearly doubled since 2012, says Penelope Huang, a broker with Re/Max Distinctive Properties. The increased demand is making the area one of the toughest for younger buyers, she says.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/realestate/wealthy-chinese-bu...
What % of the total home sales are to foreign residents in the bay area, and what % of those are Chinese?
I think you'll find it's very likely less than 5% - not nearly enough (imo) to move a market enough for it to "crash" if they were to pull out.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/realestate/wealthy-chinese-bu...
This is affecting the entire market because housing is a fixed supply. Buyers who are getting outbid on one price point move to outbid people at a lower price point, and so on.
This is fixed supply, with foreign entrants, which means new home buyers that invested into planning, saving, and starting the process aren't going to just keep blowing money on renting because their first home is a townhome.
>Buyers who become frustrated tend to shift from looking in popular urban core neighborhoods to suburbs where competition is less intense, or from single-family homes to condos
When I was doing this, I made ~ 15 offers. In all but one I was outbid by a cash-only no-inspections no-conditions offer from china, with the buyer not even present in the country - represented by agent only.
I keep on hearing the same thing that Chinese are buying property in Melbourne(Aus) as well. Do I have any hard numbers, no but what I have observed that many "For Sale" boards also have the information written in Chinese Script.
Make your own conclusions.
Imagine if we only allowed American car companies to build 1 million cars per year, and them complained about the damn Chinese buying up all the cars.
They already have an annual limit of $50,000 that can be transferred out of the country, they also ask foreign countries for help in identifying corrupt officials and individuals transferring large amounts out of the country, rich Chinese have strategies to avoid the law.
In my own country i've seen that request largely ignored. The benefits are simply too high, the Govt here is well aware that sizable portions of this money is likely dirty money, but the bottom line for the economy eases that discomfort.
The push to crack down on foreign housing investment in cities across the world lately has been driven by angry locals and soaring house prices, despite the Chinese govt asking for something to that effect for over a decade.
The money isn't 'dirty'. It might be breaking the Chinese government law against transferring more than $50,000 worth of currency out, but that doesn't qualify it as dirty. The law is an infringement of their citizens' right to control their own money. Just because the Western democracies have similarly authoritarian laws these days doesn't make them just and people breaking said laws the equivalent of a corrupt official moving the proceeds of bribes overseas.
Given that China warned the miners of their intent in advance of the public disclosure, there's reason to speculate they did this to partner with them to control Bitcoin.
How so? The worst they can do is mine empty blocks. This doesn't constitute controlling Bitcoin, but rather executing a continuous denial-of-service attack against it.
They'd never get 100% of the blocks, so all they'd be doing is slowing down the flow of transactions and increasing the fees (because people would be paying for fewer spots in the non-DoS blocks, which would incentivize other miners.
Bitcoin scales fees, instead of scaling transactions/second, so for a while it wouldn't be economical to use it for small purchases where the fees would be almost as much as the price, but for larger purposes, and as a store of value, it'd work just as well.
However, it's a costly attack to maintain in electricity alone -- with a dwindling income, since your income is denominated in the currency you're attacking -- and it wouldn't take that long for bitcoiners to get sufficiently pissed and change the hashing algorithm, thereby disarming this attacker completely.
The miners would keep mining but Bitcoin users wouldn't be able to get a transaction through unless they paid a large transaction fee.
I did the math above, and if you wanted to save money on attacking the network with your own mining, you could spend up to $71 per transaction on every transaction.
At 7 transactions a second, it would take 54 million transactions to flood the network over a 3 month time period, meaning you could spend $71 on each transaction fee.
If you wanted to stop the bitcoin network and wanted to save money on the attack of mining, you could force everyone to make a "minimal" fee of up to $71 to make one Bitcoin transaction.
As the costs of mining increase, this is only going to increase as well.
You'd just make Bitcoin a reserve currency.
Ethereum & Monero have become popular enough that most people would just switch to that rather than go to lightning. Then the whack-a-mole begins.
Anchoring a sidechain just increases the resources needed to tamper with it, as if it itself had a higher proof of work. It doesn't need to happen every ten blocks or any set number. As often as possible is good enough. Sidechains can even have sidechains. If the $72 was too expensive that chain can support hundreds of other chains anchoring into it, spreading the costs.
But most people would still just use exchanges and as long as the exchanges settle often enough that their government-mandated floats cover the difference, what do they care if the underlying network itself is slow?
On a side chain, 10,000,000 transactions between 2 people costs $72 and takes ten minutes, but 2 transactions between 10,000,000 people costs $72,000,000 and takes over a month.
"Most People" in the market for cryptocurrencies will just switch to ethereum or monero.
That's fallacy one - assuming nobody notices the attack and realizes that if one coin falls, the next could too. You can't assume an unaware population. This isn't politics, people are paying attention because their money is on the line.
Also, in this scenario you're dumping a ton of money into the coin to make it die ... that provides a tremendous pressure to make it live.
> Again, side chains do _not_ scale with users.
This is a blanket statement that may apply to one or more pathological sidechains, but does not generalize.
The scaling of sidechains depends on the structure of the chain, trust requirements, and other usage decisions. This is utterly independent of what it's linked to, and only partly related to how often you link to the upstream chain.
> On a side chain, 10,000,000 transactions between 2 people costs $72 and takes ten minutes, but 2 transactions between 10,000,000 people costs $72,000,000 and takes over a month.
lmftfy - "On X sidechain design ...."
Burden of proof is on you at this point. Maybe in your haste to cry fallacy you just forgot to mention an actual Bitcoin side chain that would be competitive with Ethereum or Montero in that situation?
That your opponents won't notice this happening to the first currency. You're trying to starve the system with billions of dollars of transactions!
You're discussing taking on the coins in order, but you only get one element of surprise.
> Maybe in your haste to cry fallacy you just forgot to mention an actual Bitcoin side chain that would be competitive with Ethereum or Montero in that situation?
No, I did but you didn't notice. The off-network exchanges. They're already what 90% of coin holders think of bitcoin as, so they wouldn't notice or care that big transactions between exchanges took a long time to settle. Like I don't care where or when my physical bank trucks the paper money.
Also, the $1B / month you're injecting would fund a lot of work on the ecosystem.
> Burden of proof is on you at this point.
No, it doesn't swap back and forth every post. When I discount your vampire-bats plan by pointing out the sun, I don't suddenly have to prove the existence of the sun.
Again, off-network exchanges still require the network to verify, which means they don't solve the scalability with users (same as side chains).
You do need to prove that pink unicorns exist by giving examples, rather than describing it.
I'm referring to totally off-network exchanges. Most people (sadly) are happy to own bitcoin via an intermediary. They wouldn't notice this attack at all.
And the exchanges, settling 10,000+ bitcoins at once, could easily pay any plausible transaction fees, so nothing would even grind to a halt.
The attack would prevent me using the local Bitcoin vending machines for $4 purchases, but wouldn't impact the overall settlement of large amounts.
> I'm really not sure what you're getting at with "elements of surprise".
You say people would migrate off Bitcoin because of the attacks. But really, people would detect and analyze the attack and recognize the intent. They'd make informed decisions in how to respond, given that an adversary of this class wouldn't be likely to give up with only one currency destroyed.
> You do need to prove that pink unicorns exist by giving examples, rather than describing it.
The only reason to believe that all sidechains must scale badly is one unsourced claim of yours, based presumably on your examination of a subset of the ones that exist. If you care to present a broad proof that the entire concept is impossible, go for it.
I'm sure they can prevent the open use of Bitcoin in China, if that's what they want. But it seems to me that if people really are using it to avoid capital controls and/or Yuan depreciation, preventing consumer-to-merchant transactions isn't going to change that.
The big question for the last few years has been whether China would loosen capital controls, or tighten them. The decision seems to have been "tighten". Bitcoin is now a big enough leak that the People's Bank of China is starting to do something about it.
China deliberately allows some leaks. You can take about $50,000 to Hong Kong in cash per person once a month. Sending all your relatives to Hong Kong every month, loaded up with cash to exchange, has been popular for years. But that only works if you have relatives near the border. Bitcoin was tolerated as a leak, as long as it didn't get too big. That may be changing.
I don't at all agree that this is evident.
BTC China has zero trading fees. All speculators go there to cheaply trade bitcoins. Volume is no indicator of anything, except the speed of their order matching engine. Bitcoins bidding on Yuan, and vice versa, is the important metric, and judging by it, the Chinese market is insignificant compared to the USD market (bitcoincharts.com/markets has order book depth by exchange).
that's when this recent spike started.
Using bitcoin to evade capital control doesn't push the bitcoin price up, because you BUY bitcoin in China, but then you SELL it outside China. So the net effect is pretty much 0.
Only by HOLDING bitcoin can the price go up.
So be the first one to write such a bot, you'll make millions...
The volume you are talking about is from "Wash trading", where you buy and sell back and forth between two exchanges at 0% commission to maintain your position as a high-volume trader.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-30/china-sai...
Bitcoin is a way around this. If you are Chinese and can afford big clusters of bitcoin miners, you can mine bitcoin and exchange it for people's Yuan at a higher and higher price, driven by demand to pull money out of china.
Meh. This is the classic story that mainstream articles about Bitcoin almost always repeat over and over. However on multiple occasions CEOs of Chinese Bitcoin exchanges have said they don't believe it to be true, based on how their users use their exchanges. In reality the Chinese just appear to like to invest/gamble/make quick returns more than Western markets. That and a combination of other factors (somewhat more lax domestic financial regulations + large market of 1.4 billion people + due to competitive reasons Chinese exchanges offer 0% trading fees + ...) leads to a bigger and more active Bitcoin trading environment in China.
Anyone can create an account on BTC China and trade with zero fees. It's a gambler's paradise, regardless of nationality.
The Chinese economy is $11 trillion. I don't think Bitcoin mining really shows up on their radar.
Now, Bitcoin trading... that can make a dent. A single block of a few thousand Bitcoins can circulate a hundred times a year and move many billions of value out of a country. It's also far harder to detect than a mining facility.
Some people interpret this as Chinese people buying bitcoins, but if you look at the order depth of the Chinese exchanges, it's clear that the USD Bitcoin market is much more liquid (by at least an order of magnitude), and the Chinese exchanges may just be used primarily for cheap speculation/day trading.
Personally, I think the Chinese market is insignificant compared to the USD, and that the PBOC shouldn't have any effect on the USD price, so I've been buying call options throughout the crash.
I guess I'm saying that I don't buy this narrative. "Chinese volume" is people from all around the world trading on BTC China. Anyone can open an account there, not just Chinese people.
It's not uncommon to see news where normal traffic accident turns into corruption investigation whey police discovers that lorry involved in the accident was full of cash being transferred. It's permissible to have only ~$50,000 in cash in China.
Bitcoin is still small potatoes in China and elsewhere. Hong Kong banks, underground banks (shadow-bank uses checks drawn on overseas accounts) are still the main gateway to launder money offshore. They move hundreds of billions per year.
The really rich people use overseas mortgages. Buy a house in LA, use yuan deposits and other assets on the mainland as collateral.
This might increase the speculation that Yuan will devalue even further this year. Bitcoin is currently harder to regulate and could be use a way to send money oversea, bypassing the 50k quota. But honestly, I don't think there are a lot of them though. Maybe someone just tries to ride the trend.
>Why are you glad about that?
Well, I don't expect it to raise back to USD$1000+ any time soon (it's ~$740 now).
I really should have had it all figured out so i could take advantage of this run, but I didn't. Now I'm kicking myself. I wasn't ready the last time it shot up over $1k/coin either.
http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/4203/how-can-i-ex...
If you end up getting rich, feel free to transfer some btc to 1P471RQS4Ga2xgakQWgbDL8WLajwPEdfMH as a thank you :)
And I won't be rich, unfortunately. I only left it on for only a week and mined a single block, back when you could actually do so from your home computer. If only I had left it on for a couple of months back then I would be rich, though. This will only help me dig out of debt and maybe make a downpayment on a house.
Anyway, one block is still pretty good as far as getting free money goes! Best of luck recovering them.
Given that bitcoin origins and management is completely nebulous and its proponents deceptively promoted and continue to promote it as some freedom libertarian thing when its closely controlled and in the end simply a way for early adopters to cash out.
Early and greed fuelled adopters incessantly moan about a flawed banking and monetary system. Even if we accept their criticisms at face value how is it reasonable to then turn around and promote a 'solution' that has zero accountability to anyone and based on a inefficient system that shamelessly wastes electricity? This seems disingenious and self serving.