Bitcoin, Bitcoin cash, ethereum and litecoin crash on Friday December 22
uk.businessinsider.com
uk.businessinsider.com
That said, look back next year and perhaps things won't be as gloomy as they are today.
Edit: I can't believe I'm saying this, but you might want to look at refinancing that debt using a credit card. Their APR tends to be around 10 to 13% per annum. Might as well limit the damage done.
But on the brighter side, there are far too many people involved for this to go full bust, the tech is solid, there's more and more exchanges launching associated products(bitcoin futures), Goldman is launching a full trading desk.
It's a thing now, just don't sell it yet and HODL. I hope you at least get your money back.
Of course this ignores how hamstrung the technology is by the IRS treating it as property subject to capital gains tax. If I have to worry about paying tax anytime it is converted to fiat or exchanged for goods and services of real value, the less motivated I am to do so.
For Bitcoin to die out, every single person needs to decide that doesn't want it.
Since people want bitcoin primarily because they believe other people want bitcoin, if 90% of the userbase shift to monero or ether or some other coin, there's really no reason for the 10% to hang around. Zero is a very plausible price for bitcoin.
I agree that it can happen, like the exodus from Digg to reddit, but the brand is strong and it will have serious financial implications making it significantly harder than creating an account on the competitors product and continue as is.
Disclaimer: I own zero cryptocurrencies, but have a decent knowledge of the space
Here's why I think Bitcoin will never go bust entirely, regardless of the day to day price: it's the area under the curve of POW energy expenditure. At this point, so much energy has been expended mining bitcoin that that in itself creates value. Even if the price crashes 100x it will always be worth something. And whatever that "something" is, no one can say yet. But I would wager that it's much higher than whatever the initial players bought in for (in terms of cash or energy spent mining). Sure plenty of other altcoins can come along in the future, but catching up with the level of work that has been done on the Bitcoin blockchain at this point seems impossible to ever do. It's simply a matter of compute power that is physically available.
But consider this... if the price were to go back to where it was just a year ago before the current mania (which is a common thing to happen when a financial bubble pops, after overcompensating to the downside) then it would be a 95% retracement from the highs (where, almost self-evidently, many people were buyers). And BTW a 95% retracement requires 20,000% gains to break even.
If you gave me a $1000 and I gave you $50 back, I think most people would say that I took all their money, even though technically they could still buy a couple pizzas or something.
So, again, it just depends on your definition of "full bust"
Bitcoins security relies on current hashing power and is completely indepent from past computations. If bitcoin falls to let's say $100 then major mining pools can do a 51% attack and make all the expended energy worthless.
Where is the money coming from when I sell? What percent of it is from someone else making a very poor financial decision in a desperate move to elevate their financial position?
I believe most people would answer "who cares" as long as they are getting theirs. But if you are someone who believes those with money have a responsibility to help elevate those without, it's real hard to not feel dirty when you are one of the people seeing profits.
One piece of long term advice would be to keep greed in check. It's better to make small profits and be calm, than make large profits and be nervous.
Another advice is, before entering a trade, have a clearcut plan of where you will take profit in case the trade goes your way, and where you will leave if it goes against you.
I know the emotional trip can be tough. I added my email to my user page, so get in touch if you need any kind of support, technical or otherwise.
Meanwhile, there's a lot of people putting their faith in opaque corporations and unelected central bankers. With the markets sitting at all time highs by every historical measure and debt loads higher than ever it'll be interested to see how that works out for them.
Bitfinex and Coinbase, for example.
I'll take US corporations backed by the US government over Chinese ones any day.
I might as well wire them the money it'd be cheaper...
The tech is good, but BTC itself not so much... My money is on Ardor. I'm putting all my money on their tech... so far I'm up 10x over what I started with.
edit: You also have to trust btc companies, miners, exchanges, developers, etc to all cooperate and move things in a positive way.. one bad fork, or 51% attack and it screws everything.
Anyways, it's still higher than it was 3 weeks ago and appears to have found supports. Nothing goes straight up forever.