Novogratz Halts Hedge Fund, Says Bitcoin May Drop to $8,000
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
http://www.businessinsider.com/novogratz-bitcoin-could-be-at...
If you don't want to participate in volatile speculation, that's fine, the average person shouldn't. But there is no other way around it.
You're referring to a pump and dump scheme as "phases". You don't set high values by scamming unsuspecting fools.
Any and all securities go up and down, whether it is justified or not.
It's not exactly a ponzi or pyramid scheme, but the manipulative intent is clear so a new term is needed.
It's a Satoshi scheme.
...hence the "pump" stage of the pump-and-dump scheme being conducted quite extensively, with all forms of scammers publicizing the immense virtues and magically perpetual low value of bitcoin, hoping that the next batch of fools and idiots open their wallets to finance the value pumping.
This happens every day in securities. Those "pumpers" are called "analysts". They sometimes work for investment banks and research firms. You can choose to follow their advice or you can bet against it.
Apple shares were $0.50 (unadjusted) in its early history. By your definition, anyone espousing the future of Apple and computers at that point is a pump and dump scammer.
Apple and stocks also generate value, whereas Bitcoin and PoW software burns electricity/value.
This is specific to crypto currency supply production algorithms.
Coin supplies are created by running the software. Bitcoin and many other cryptocoins use a rule that lets the first users take control of the supply very easily by generating the coins for very low CPU/GPU difficulty. After a few weeks, the work required to produce more coins doubles. This just lets a few users control the supply, wait, and attempt to convince new users the coins are rare because the production/mining has become significantly more expensive.
tl;dr: early miners generate most of the coins inexpensively, and try to sell to greater fools because the software stops creating coins as easily as the first few days
It becomes a ponzi scheme when the only value from early shares comes from investment in later shares. That's what's happening with bitcoin.
Satoshi made a machine that prints money if you do work. He made it so it only required a small amount of work to begin with and as time goes on, someone else with the same machine and the same work gets less. It's made even worse because there were less users battling over the larger easy production near the start, and more and more users fighting over less and less output.
tl;dr it's even more malicious than a ponzi
[1] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2009/04/fortress-group200904...
He is probably just trying to make the price drop more so that he can buy even more Bitcoin.
The end of the year is often a time when people get together... Bitcoin is bound to come up in conversations. So I think that there might actually be a big rise in interest after Christmas.
I think what we’ve just seen is a bit of a forced sell off, to drive the price down before the next big speculative bubble, which will likely mirror the one after thanksgiving.
Disclaimer: I don't know any cryptocurrency.
Who knows, it might still be very optimistic today.
My guess is he's shorting the markets or couldn't raise the capital after all. Or ultimately thought the risk to his reputation if his fund failed was too high.
Options not being written is another factor.
>Getting cold feet ? I bet it's not easy raising money when the asset you are trading falls 40% in two days.
https://www.cnbc.com/video/2017/12/12/the-man-who-called-the...
is really weird. People might disagree with me but I think he comes off as unreliable.
Not uncommon for public equity hedge funds. Makes sense that someone would do it in the wild west of cryptocurrencies.
BTC will make a massive rebound in 2018. I'm sure a lot of BTC bulls have full knowledge of this possibility and are acquiring as many as possible.
...
> I'm sure a lot of BTC bulls have full knowledge of this possibility
Which is correct since the value of it is mostly driven by speculation right now. There’s no telling how much it will swing.
As I understand, its not easy to convert to cash, especially in large volume.
* Internet monopoly money
Bitcoin has no mainstream use right now. It's too expensive to transact in terms of money and time, it's too volatile to be a store of value, it's too technical to be used casually, it's too fragile since it gets hacked every which way, and it's too easily copied to be rare.
Do you want to clarify this? If you meant what I think you meant, you're incorrect.
Nobody would use banks if 4 out of 5 were completely cleaned out by crooks and went out of business.
While a tiny aspect of dealing with Bitcoin is secure (key pairs) [1], actually using Bitcoin has proven to be a mess for almost the majority of users.
This is not a user friendly experience for most users.
The lightning network looks very promising in its ability to scale and reduce fees. It would make transactions nearly instantaneous, have reasonable fees, and help scale the network.
No, it would help scale "the lightning network" which would not be the same as "the bitcoin network".
So while it may not be technically true that the main network's capabilities have changed, users should see massive improvements.
And you posted that comment while driving your flying car on your way to alpha centauri, right?
Foolosh cargo cult beliefs such as the ones you've illustrated do not serve as any basis to make investment decisions.
Everyone thought Amazon would never make a profit until it revealed the profit monster that is AWS.
No one can predict the future, all you can do is take the information you have available today and come to your own conclusion. If you don't understand the implications of cryptocurrency on society and money, then that's your loss. If you think you do understand it and believe otherwise, then go ahead and short everything and go make some profits against it.
I don't know if the hype/price is justified, I just know cryptocurrencies are going to change the world. It seems to me that something that important is probably worth betting on, and not against.
I've followed bitcoin from the beginning and personally think the only problem it seems to solve is a way for techies to get rich quick.
Crypto is also a stock market 2.0, where bitcoin is an index fund.
BTC is many things and it causes confusion amongst people trying to determine where the value comes from. It took me many years to figure this out, unfortunately.
In casual use with your mobile phone, you are shown a QR code, scan it, tap "OK", and it's done. Not that technical. Billions of people with smartphones could handle that perfectly. You're right about transactions being slow and expensive, and that is certainly a much bigger problem. That and the fact that there are still very few places accepting it.
This is one thing I don’t get. In countries like China and India (to name the two countries I know about) mobile payment apps are ubiquitous. You go in to a shop, scan a QR code, and boom your payment is done. This is what crytocurrencies promised, but instead more closed apps came to fill the market. What happened?
Bitcoin "as app" (once or if it works) will be more like cash payments, privacy wise. That is were I see the main advantage. I find it spooky what Visa and Mastercard now about all of us... at least about me.
One massive caveat is that all Bitcoin transactions are public, traceable, and permanently stored in the Bitcoin network. In most ways it's worse than cash, in some ways it's probably even worse than credit cards.
monereo, zcash, and eventually ethereum
the concept seems to make sense but I'd be curious how to audit such an obfuscated system
1. You don't want to _ever_ wait 45 minutes for a transaction to potentially be confirmed on the blockchain. Even before the recent craziness and high fees this would sometimes happen.
2. The price fluctuates wildly. Pretty hard to reason properly about whether or not you'll be able to pay your employees this week if your "store of value" could drop 20% or more at a moment's notice.
3. The fees charged by exchanges to convert to fiat are exorbitant. Unless all of your suppliers and handymen take Bitcoin, you will get screwed by this on the regular.
The bulls usually scream "Lightning network, scaling, store of value" or some other nonsense, but the truth is, today Bitcoin is garbage as an actual currency.
Bitcoin Core betrayed the original vision of Bitcoin and hotwired it into a high-cost settlement system. The average transaction fee in Bitcoin is something like $38, which is more than the average weekly salary in many countries.
I believe that cryptocurrency will eventually attain mass adoption. The timeline has been pushed back a few years though because the main network has failed.
The system has been in place for years, and it works reasonably well. More competition would still help. And yes, a better network and better systems to cut out the intermediary would help even more.
What do you mean by this?
Proved wrong by 300k transactions per day willing to pay a median fee of $30+.
«too volatile to be a store of value»
Proved wrong on the long term; has shown to be a fantastic store of value over 7 years: http://bitcoin.zorinaq.com/price/
«too technical»
Only gets easier over time.
«too fragile since it gets hacked »
Hardware wallets have pretty much solved hacking (plus can be backed up on paper in case they are lost, etc)
Do some napkin math, this is impossible. The people who hold bitcoin now probably have a combined net worth of over a trillion dollars. They will pump and dump it forever rather than let it go to zero. It's way too much fun to trade alone.
> bitcoin has no mainstream use right now
Maybe not in india yet. Even there, it's only a matter of time. Someone will introduce gbtc to the NSE and BSE, and watch it get bought widely even in india. There is a reason it sells at a 20% premium in india.
I wouldn't be so sure.
> pump and dump it forever
That doesn't work.