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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

What event made XRP increase by a factor of 50 since March 2017, after years of going nowhere?

I'm a fan of "there is no rational explanation." The other answers seem plausible, but my theory is that if a coin has any kind of value proposition and doesn't completely fail, eventually some speculators will notice that it's a solid investment. The calculus goes like this: When it's a bull market, if you buy $X million of a coin that hasn't had much volume, everyone else will simultaneously see that this coin is suddenly popular. That will trigger them to buy, since it's going up.

Why doesn't it go back down? Well, once you've invested, there isn't much reason to sell. Your investment went up by some N multiplier, and as long as most people feel the same way, your multiplier is safe.

This explanation sounds too simplistic to be true, but whenever you look at the chart, the data seems to suggest it's plausible:

http://i.imgur.com/OU6me1N.png

Notice the volume was completely flatlined up until a huge purchase in March 2017. That massive purchase kickstarted that 50x factor.

These dynamics are independent of any particular coin. So yes, it's true that CoinDuJour might offer some benefits and unique features. But that value proposition is secondary to the overall investment dynamics at play here. It almost doesn't matter what the coin does. As long as it does something different and it's stable, it becomes an attractive target for speculation.

There are a massive number of people with spare ETH and BTC to throw around. They all want to park it somewhere that earns them money. See Pinkapp for a strange phenomenon:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15153586

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15151292

After they posted that comment, I've been lurking their slack channel. A bunch of people have come in trying to invest in them. So if even pinkapp can generate a >$1M "series A" when it's straight-up illegal, it's clear there's a lot of investment energy floating around.

> When it's a bull market, if you buy $X million of a coin that hasn't had much volume, everyone else will simultaneously see that this coin is suddenly popular. That will trigger them to buy, since it's going up. Why doesn't it go back down? Well, once you've invested, there isn't much reason to sell. Your investment went up by some N multiplier, and as long as most people feel the same way, your multiplier is safe.

That's basically definition of a bubble. 'as long as most people feel the same way, your multiplier is safe'? So basically your multiplier might go away at any point.

> So basically your multiplier might go away at any point.

Hedging, hedging, hedging. There are enough derivatives in the coin world to have a pretty decent portfolio growth, if you're willing to manage it and deal with the tx/transfer fees

But if there is a bubble, hedging coins against each other is probably the worst thing you can do, right?

If you've cashed out your initial investment plus a healthy return, anything left in that portfolio is gravy though, right?

The problem is that they do not hold any value compared to for example a baseball card.

A baseball card has a sentimental value that makes it more valuable then the actual paper it's printed on. Virtual goods can also have sentimental value, like a cool hat in team fortress. Stock shares has a value because of future dividend. A house have value because you can live in it or rent it out. Now think about a crypto currency, it only holds value because someone is willing to buy it, so think about why you want to buy it and what will happen when people want to liquidate their "investment".

Your argument makes sense and I'm not advocating for people to replicate the experience, especially not with the current prices.

My argument merely goes: if you threw away some marginal amount of initial (real) cash at something, and for some reason that something paid you back in full, with bonus and interest, then the price can tank as much as it wants since I'm cashed out.

From there I don't care if 90% of the unit price is pure speculative pressure, as long as I find a counterparty for my trades.

Does this make sense to you, if not why?

I guess you can "day trade" and only own them for a short amount of time. Any suggestion on exchange/marketplaces ? My experience (Bitcoin) is that it's too slow with small volumes. Then there's a lot of risk, like the exchange getting hacked.

Honestly exchanges are a shit show. There used to be a small scene where people traded directly via forums/voice comms but like all good things that's over because of bad actors.

The main issue IMO isn't settlement speed but the ludicrous exchange fees. If you're willing to put some work in I reckon you should be able to "manually" find counterparties for the major altcoins, but to my knowledge there are no decentralised exchanges that offer reasonable liquidity.

It doesn't matter how much you started with, and how much you already took out. As long as you have stuff invested into the coin, you're not cached out - you have value that you could take out of the system that's exposed to the fluctuations.

You're technically correct, but I fail to see how being exposed to the fluctuations on a fraction of disposable income is a bad thing.

One big reason is that even though the "market cap" is very high, the vast majority of that "market cap" is locked away and isn't being traded on the market.

The amount of liquid ripple is much smaller than the theoretical amount.

Proven track record of unproven hype.

It is a crypto bull market. Many alt-crypto did x50-100 in the last couple years.

Getting added on exchanges, and announcing partnerships with banks mostly

Bitcoin made a new all-time-high, finally crossing over the top from 2013.

They're the only altcoin out there with a real company doing real work to solve a real problem for other real companies.

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