A lot of emotion with LTC. People are downloading Coinbase and buying LTC simply because it is the cheapest on Coinbase. This is definitely a bubble, really cant deny that anymore. All emotional, non-rational behavior.
Have fun, but don't bet your life on it.
Mabye in the future it can be more than a speculation, but right now it's a game.
Even better, I should sell just a paper (well, an electronic one) stating you own some thin air. Hey, geeks, how cool can this get?
I am sure I could find buyers in the same market as cryptocurrencies.
PS: This is not directed at you, but you expressed the level of pointlessness and... void that reigns in this 'market', so I picked your message to place my joke/rant.
Of course, this just shows how bad the air pollution is in China. Then again, water bottle brands like Nestlé's Poland Spring Water are just using "Poland Spring" as a gimmick and a ad-bait. So you definitely can sell thin air at different price based on "where the air was collected."
That reminds me of "Perri-Air" from the movie Spaceballs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzbIrb7LUJA
In the performance piece, Zone de Sensibilité Picturale Immatérielle (Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility) 1959–62, he offered empty spaces in the city in exchange for gold. He wanted his buyers to experience The Void by selling them empty space. In his view this experience could only be paid for in the purest material: gold. In exchange, he gave a certificate of ownership to the buyer. As the second part of the piece, performed on the Seine with an Art critic in attendance, if the buyer agreed to set fire to the certificate, Klein would throw half the gold into the river, in order to restore the "natural order" that he had unbalanced by selling the empty space (that was now not "empty" anymore). [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yves_Klein
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_de_Sensibilit%C3%A9_Pictu...
It's already sold in France. "Air de Montcuq" -> air de mon cul ( air from my ass )
It'll be able to handle 8x as much air transfer as yours and have a minority following that will always bite at your heels
That idea has been around for hundreds of years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indulgence
That's basically what this is:
You just have to make sure not to be one of those idiotic idiots left holding the idiot bag like an idiot.
They received a significant sum in offers…
Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20050831124638/http://www.iex.nl...
In concept, it's obviously not the joke you're making. In practicality, it's exactly the content of your joke.
You could be right.
But I don't understand everyone's certainty that cryptocurrencies are a fraud-bubble-scam-Ponzi-mania.
The growth curve fits both exponential and logistic (S-curve) functions.
Exponential growth is unsustainable, while logistic growth describes most technology adoption. Halfway through the cycle they're indistinguishable.
When there's 98% agreement this is a bubble about to burst, my instinct is that the conventional wisdom is wrong.
When it blows up, you won't understand why the SEC didn't protect you. By then, you'll realize it was a mirage all along, and you'll want someone to blame for letting it get so out of hand. Every piece of news you interpret will tell you that losing money was not your fault, because that's what you'll want to believe.
On the flip side, the current price action is causing the same sort of confirmation bias--just in the opposite direction.
Anecdotal: but in the last month I have come across 6-8 people who have taken or know someone who has taken 2nd mortgages, maxed out their lines of credits, and credit cards to "invest" in crypto.
I'm generally a-ok with investment loans (not from credit cards), they are a good resource to reduce portfolio risk - if the loan remain tax deductible. But what is currently transpiring is insanity.
Someone will definitely get bailed out (hint: it will likely be the banks that's unknowingly provided the leverage).
This is exactly my point.
Why are you so certain?
How can you tell the difference between this and any other technology adoption logistic curve?
People make statements like you do with 100% confidence, and you could very well be right! But where do you get your certainty?
And were you equally certain about the inevitable demise of cryptocurrencies when the market was 1% or 10% of its current size?
Because the fundamentals of Bitcoin and The Blockchain are complete garbage. Both are solutions in search of problems. Neither solve any real world problems outside of how to conduct shady, illegal business (murder for hire, crypto-ransomware, mail-order bath-salt delivery) and both do a pretty piss-poor job of even that.
This is why bitcoin will ultimately fail. It is a useless product. Full stop.
By way of an understanding of human nature. From the book Bull! A history of boom and bust:
“...A bubble, Galbraith observed, is always supported by the belief that there is something new in the world. The history of past cycles is dismissed as irrelevant.“
That’s it in a nutshell. It is a time-tested part of who we are, and it’s almost like you’re either born with the ability to see that or you’re not. I don’t know why.
I don’t know how much the price will go up, but it going up, even to a million dollars a coin, means little. It will eventually go down and violently so, and some people will be badly hurt. Just people being people.
Assets need to be productive in order to be true investments. Like farmland or businesses. Otherwise, you’re speculating on price appreciation. Look at gold over the last 100 years and overlay its price graph over the Dow Jones during the same period. They’re not even close.
http://www.macrotrends.net/1333/historical-gold-prices-100-y...
http://stockcharts.com/freecharts/historical/marketindexes.h...
That’s the difference between speculation and investment.
Counterpoint: Galbraith confidently called the US stock market a "classic bubble" in April, 1999. At that time, the Dow Jones was at 10,494. Today it's at 24,504.
Looking back with 20/20 hindsight, it now looks like Galbraith was wrong.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/business/1999/apr/18/observerbus...
> Assets need to be productive in order to be true investments
Counterpoint: Maybe assets need to be useful to have value. Land, copper, the balance on a Walmart gift card and my World of Warcraft gold don't produce anything, but they're useful, so they have value.
> Counterpoint: Galbraith confidently called the US stock market a "classic bubble" in April, 1999. At that time, the Dow Jones was at 10,494. Today it's at 24,504.
No! Current day valuation versus 1999 valuation has nothing to do with each other. In 1999 the market was over valued and the bubble soon popped.
> > Assets need to be productive in order to be true investments
> Counterpoint: Maybe assets need to be useful to have value. Land, copper, the balance on a Walmart gift card and my World of Warcraft gold don't produce anything, but they're useful, so they have value.
The key difference between an asset and investment is that investments produce returns.
Here's a chart of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Please identify this bubble popping that you speak of.
After 18 years we can say that Galbraith was objectively wrong.
When assets appear overvalued, sometimes they are, and sometimes people just don't see their potential at the time.
Right, but an asset can go up in price and stay there if demand increases and/or the currency the price is denominated in is losing value over time. Especially true if supply is limited.
I don't expect BTC to stay at $17000 - it could go down or up, and I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if it's currently in a bubble that pops. It might then go to near-$0, or it might proceed to regain those levels and continue even higher over time, depending on how demand evolves against the ultimately fixed supply. I remember $500 for 1 BTC seemed insanely high at the time. $675 must have seemed crazy for gold in 2006, but I don't expect it to return there again despite the intervening ups and downs.
Even in Africa, the possibility of phone-based money allows people to do this.
Bitcoin's risks don't balance its benefits for most users of currency and basically, it's a currency or a "technology", it's simply a unique commodity akin to art or Tulips. I mean, if the bubble was tulips today, I could sell them as "unique biotechnological value-preservation technologies". But that wouldn't change the well known financial/psychological/social dynamics involved.
Litecoin is another animal. I think we'll continue to see a lot of what we're seeing now. People seeing a low price (compared to btc), sad they missed out on cheap BTC and dreaming this one is going to $15k.
I have a high tolerance for risk, so I don't mind going in big (big for me) - if it works out great, if not, it's been a helluva ride.
Of course, that's assuming that don't end 2017 (or 2018) with a massive crypto bubble burst!
Except to inflation ;). But adjust for inflation and selling enough to cover that gets you back the initial investment and also you don't lose money.
You most likely need to wait until it's close to 3 X the value you bought it because you'll need to pay short-term taxes after you sell it.
And once that happens, why sell half of it, vs all of it? 3 times the current value is a LOT of money and that usually takes at least 8-10 years in the equity market. Now that it happens, you're cashing out just to recoup your costs? Cash out everything, or cash out nothing and let it all ride until it's an even larger amount.
Agreed
> And once that happens, why sell half of it, vs all of it? 3 times the current value is a LOT of money and that usually takes at least 8-10 years in the equity market. Now that it happens, you're cashing out just to recoup your costs? Cash out everything, or cash out nothing and let it all ride until it's an even larger amount.
I agree "just recouping your costs" is not really exciting by itself. The idea is that you think it might go much higher, but - crucially - you're not sure. It's just about reducing your exposure to risk at the cost of some upside potential. It all depends on your risk appetite.
The net cost is 0 - cash in = cash out. And taxation is zero because your profit is (at the time) 0.
It also means you can do something else with your original investment.
If it goes up 100x - cash out whenever. If it goes down to 0 - you have lost nothing at all apart from some time.
you buy 2 at $5k it goes up to 10k and sell 1.
profit is current value - cost basis
10k - 5k = 5k profit that will be taxed
Because the 5k in the market is not a realized gain
This is a little fallacious because it assumes that the value of your money (Dollars or something?) won't continue to lose value against until it becomes worthless paper. This has happened in recent history e.g. Weimar Germany and is happening right now e.g. Venezuela.
At the end of the day, the rationality comes from a comparison of one currency against another. Just converting back from the currency you started with doesn't mean you "can't lose".
I think the part that's hard is that there is a stickiness to hype. Hype starts as baseless hype, but the belief and interest of others is frequently enough to sustain a company or project that has nothing of actual benefit to offer. This makes it hard to dismiss hype-fueled bubbles entirely. There's a circular effect somewhere here that converts the initial baseline hype into value just by the sheer force of will of "true believers".
This applies not only to bitcoin/litecoin, but also companies, software, and all sorts of other things. Generating hype, goodwill, and other mostly-positive forms of human attention is inarguably more valuable to a project or venture's long-term lifecycle than providing actual objective value. Get enough attention or interest on something and any objective value that may potentially exist is liable to materialize, at least in part.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_feedback#In_economics
I say that without sarcasm. A legitimate request.