Bitcoin Tumbles as PBOC Declares Initial Coin Offerings Illegal
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
To me It looked like Bitcoin just bounced off a psychological ceiling at 5000USD. It has done this with various round number levels in the past. It makes a bit of sense if you consider people are inclined to think something like "I'll sell when it reaches $5000"
There also seems to be a tendancy to use evocative language (collapse,tumble,collapse etc.) to describe what has often been a loss of only a few weeks worth of gains. I guess when people have an agenda to push on the other side they call the same thing a correction.
I don't claim to have any special knowledge of how all this works. It just seems to me that many of the authoritative sounding voices are actually as clueless as the rest of us.
China's announcement was probably a trigger that caused people to sell, rather than being directly responsible for people selling.
So you're agreeing with the title - the announcement (directly or indirectly) is what caused the fall in price.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ry6PpRXk0dQ
This is from 2014! (I know the link goes to content not typically found on HN, I'm doing it for the purposes of illustrating that this is such a seemingly common occurrence.)
A graph like that was going to correct, one way or the other. PBOC's decree seems incidental rather than the root cause.
http://www.businessinsider.com/initial-coin-offering-china-b...
Namely:
"However, the wording of the PBoC edict also suggested that trading and usage of all cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin, could now be illegal in China.
The PBoC said that virtual currencies that are "not issued by the monetary authorities... do not have legal status equivalent to money, and can not and should not be circulated as a currency in the market use."
The PBoC added that "any so-called tokens financing trading platform shall not engage in the exchange of legal currency and tokens." It even goes so far as to ban platforms from "provid[ing] pricing, information, [and] intermediary services.""
The concern, that I share, is that this system is very vulnerable to Ponzi scheme. And unlike Bitcoin, the crash of the pyramid is not a feature in this system.
I think people are right to warn and forbid this thing. Pyramid scheme can have large-scale effect in an economy.
I think etherum provides way to do things more responsibly but I understand that authorities moved quickly when they saw anonymous companies with no products receiving a billion USD.
Even that will cause ripples when it collapses. You don't want it to grow more.
ICOs are an Ethereum phenomenon. Ethereum isn't a fork of Bitcoin's codebase and thus isn't an altcoin.
Citation?
Ether is privileged on Ethereum. It's what mining gets you, it's what transaction fees are paid in, if proof-of-stake comes around, it will be what's staked, and any transaction can include some. I don't expect any of these to change.
It's a temporary phenomenon, but the price going down can make the price fall farther, because there are a bunch of amateur traders who think it's a good idea to buy when the price is rising and sell when it's falling.
If you take bitcoin contributions, you need something offchain to track who contributed what, and issue a bunch of minting transactions.
Some ICOs do that, but if it's ERC20 that's generally in addition to automated minting via smart contract, and since the token and ICO are running on the Ethereum blockchain it's predominantly ETH that gets contributed.
Liquidity on exchanges later doesn't have much to do with any of that.
professional traders and asset managers do this exact same thing.
The upshot is: every time margin gets too deep on Bitfinex, another batch of Tethers is created out of thin air, and the price gets a pump. Bitcoin's recapitulated the history of finance, and now it's got to Quantitative Easing.
It's amazingly tangled, I'm trying to put together an explainer blog post, but Bitfinexed has the best coverage of the pieces:
Amateur here, but how is that not a contradiction?
Edit: Although, whether or not they're backed by anything isn't really all that relevant, considering that their terms of service[1] say: "There is no contractual right or other right or legal claim against us to redeem or exchange your Tethers for money. We do not guarantee any right of redemption or exchange of Tethers by us for money."
So backed or not, nobody has any obligation to give you dollars in exchange for your tethers.
The facts are interesting, but the descriptors are largely emotive.
You offered it without any promise and they buy it. You sell it all so the price goes down and those buyers lost the value.
Stock has a lot of regulation based from the many fraud cases. ICO backed by digital currency doesn't have regulation so it's like 15th century when the concept of stock appears without any regulation all over again.
Resulting a lot of abuse and fraud.
What's HN's criteria on the [video] tag, is it appropriate for links which include a large auto-playing video, but also contain article text? Or is it reserved for content which is exclusively in video format?
But it's really doubtful they can prevent bitcoin from transfering money out of China altogether (unless they ban bitcoin)
So use RMB to purchase electricity for mining bitcoin, convert mined bitcoin to currency outside of China (or sell for RMB to someone that wants to do that and use RMB to buy electricity to mine more bitcoin).
China does have cheaper electricity than the west, especially since most of it still comes from cheap dirty coal.
No bitcoin and ICO's are a mechanism to get money out of China. Shady HK pawn shops, "family" vacations with strangers (the limit on money moved is per person) and straight up smuggling in bodily crevices are still far more popular. Right now China makes more on bitcoin than it loses because 70% of mining happens in China. So long as this remains true China will not ban bitcoin. Everything else is just noise and FUD.
"Exchanges", though, are iffy. Those are financial institutions, and the PBOC can regulate them if they want. They've done a little regulation, clamping down on margin and accepting credit cards to buy Bitcoin.
Bitcoin used to be down in the noise as a way to get money out of China, and was tolerated in the way that putting all your relatives on the train to Hong Kong loaded up with 20,000 RMB each is tolerated. The numbers for Bitcoin are getting bigger, though, making PBOC action more likely.
A few years ago, it looked like yuan convertibility was on the horizon, but that didn't happen.
My dad has started sending me Bitcoin news. I'm so proud. I was proud at first when he was able to find Bitcoin news in his regular news sources. I'm even more proud now that he's sending me news with relevant, quality information that I hadn't already heard!
It is not that strange though, when you consider the market cap of Bitcoin today is $71B and the cap of Ethereum is $28B (and is measured in bitcoin, at least on the first Google result that I was able to find.) Is a 30% drop in ETH prices really bigger news than a 20% drop in Bitcoin prices?
Bitcoin was the first mover, basically made the market, and has all of the mindshare. It's basically the USD of cryptocurrencies.
P.S. I sold the 10 bitcoins I mined at $5 (got a $50 amazon gift card). Woulda, coulda, shoulda, e.g., "I should have bought AAPL at $XX".. etc. I don't lose any sleep over those type of situations anymore.
While this may make the ride bumpier, I'm happy that China has decided to setup some regulation around ICOs, mostly impacting scammers and fraudsters. My only concern is this regulation takes a while to figure out and this kills some momentum.
Long-term, however, such attempts at regulating cryptocurrency simply make it even MORE decentralized / antifragile as people stop using traditional exchanges (which can be easily regulated) and start using decentralized options such as LocalBitcoins.com (which is all but impossible to regulate).
EDIT: website link
For there to be a move above 5500 you'll need a new wave of buying pressure. This puppy is now owned by your rent seeking masters. It's up to the big players to govern how price is to move and that's largely a function of how much buying interest really remains.
It doesn't take much to realize BTC itself has dubious value; better tech will emerge in our generation. This was merely a first step. That has nothing to do with the short term price or where it finally tops if it hasn't already, though.
Goldman came out on public radio to state the price will be a buy below 2k. Wise to heed their advice here. Trick is to know which of their info they release is reliable, which requires a system in and of itself.
Hah!
You are very wrong. First, volatility used to be much worse: https://mobile.twitter.com/lsukernik/status/8649208737189519... Secondly, the importance of a bubble is measured relatively not absolutely: BTC may be near the all-time high but it has seen only a ~2x increase in the last 30 days, while the Nov 2013, Feb 2013, and Jun 2012 bubbles all saw 10x...
The short 5k-5.5k idea could be a bust anyway; maybe we do rally to 6k from here. I am concerned with managing risk, less so with any particular idea itself. That's why I thought it was funny that another posted how I was "very wrong" about how I described volatility. Who cares who is right or wrong? It doesn't matter. Just be safe, that's all that matters. Protect capital.
Considering sorry a state of major financial systems on a brink -
It's a buying opportunity.
The current environment looks good for trading.
Eliminating ways to export value without controls by the government, in retrospect, seems like one of the more obvious reasons to control the flow of information. There's suppression of nationally embarrassing facts, but only recently have things actually gotten more serious than providing a high (but climbable) wall.