Bitcoin drops below $10K after three days of cryptocurrency correction
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
I feel sorry for the huge increase of people who got in post October, but I mean, my winnings had to come from somewhere and it sure isn’t the real world application.
It's going to rise again and these crashes are going to happen a few more times before it crashes for good.
Now is a good time to buy, like every crash before.
edit: Wait, I'm doing it wrong... Everybody should panic. This is the end!!111
Cryptocurrency threads have become so reliably awful that I think we're going to moderate them down for a while.
Anyone wanting to do it will build their own platform for it, like IBM and Maersk. Because why wouldn’t you?
... is a statement you will never hear
"It went up, then it went down, then it went up, then it went way down, so I think it will definitely go up/down now."
... is the entire internet today
This reminds me of the signs that show gamblers past roulette spins, so they can say things like "It was red 5 spins in a row, it's definitely going to be red again!". What else are bitcoin speculators looking at besides past price moves?
Give crypto a few decades and you'll get similar analysis, I doubt stock markets had such data from day one either.
(Disclaimer: I do not trade in or hold crypto, and will not until some regulations kick in, espicially around an exchanges ability to shut down and keep all deposited crypto with it)
However the price does affect energy use, which for BTC is more than many (most?) countries now.
I think there isn't really hate for it anyway, it's just that there is obviously a large amount of downside risk, so it is frustrating to people that see the risk to also see people talking about how Bitcoin is a great and safe investment (and there's nothing unique to Bitcoin about that frustration).
I think you are discounting how fucked some people will be when bitcoin inevitably drops to zero. A lot of people are putting their nestegg into it.
Also, food futures are almost certainly a good thing. It lets farmers hedge risk, which leads to more farming and overall lower prices.
Over that Bitcoin has no intrinsic value, and mining bitcoin is a huge energy drain! To a lot of people this is reminiscent of the gold rush and dotcom bubble of the yesteryears.
A better example of recent history is how TSLA raised a bunch of money through stocks to build the Gigafactory. $5 Billion USD was raised through a combination of debt (aka: old-school banks) + Stock offerings, and now there's a working factory in Nevada churning out batteries and cars.
What does buying BTC do aside from increase the price? When you give USD to a BTC holder, all you did was reward that person for mining.
I think we can confidently say that all of the servers that were given to Google ended up creating something more than a a simple data-center. Google, as an entity, has more value than the sum of all of the servers that it runs.
Can the same be said about BTC mining equipment and BTC? No. Because at the end of the day, the value of BTC doesn't "grow" if you pump it full of USD. We already know the secret of blockchain.
Google's value grew in the 90s because buying more servers in the 90s allowed it to search more web-sites and build a better search algorithm. Putting $1000 into Google Servers made MORE than $1000 of gains later (as services like Google, GMail, Youtube, etc. etc. were all made on top of those servers).
In contrast, investing money into BTC doesn't actually do anything. There's no company that actually benefits, aside from bigger-and-bigger mining centers. The innovation is dead: the BTC community has become too bulky and politicized to accept even minor changes (like Segwitx2).
Besides, Segwitx2 doesn't need us to pump money into BTC miners for it to work or innovate. If BTC crashes tomorrow, the lightning network will STILL be developed and no harm will come to the innovators in the community.
Ethereum, golem, decentraland, storj, ICONOMI,steemit, Basic Attention Token
funded buy bitcoin.
Tell me. If all the money in BTC markets dried up tomorrow, would the cryptocurrency innovation stop?
I argue that innovation would continue, even if BTC crashes to $5 tomorrow. Because cryptocurrencies, as they are currently implemented, don't require money for people to improve them. The entire concept of "equity" and "market cap" is completely, and utterly devoid of meaning in this space.
If you buy up Google or TSLA stock, those companies have more money to actually make factories, data-centers, or buy computers. This happens through a mechanism called stock offerings. Ex: https://www.cnbc.com/2016/05/20/tesla-raises-146b-in-stock-s...
If you buy up BTC, the innovators do NOT get money. Only the miners do. Its way better to just Paypal the money directly to BTC foundation or directly to Etherium developers if you actually care about "funding" those projects.
------------
As it stands right now, the Winklevoss Twins are getting more BTC money than the BTC core developers. The "investment" scheme of the BTC world is broken. BTC "market cap" does NOT benefit the devs.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/winklevoss-twins-become-first...
The value is in the network. Not the code. Should devs get paid? yes.
why should a dev get any premium over any other early adopter that contributed value to a network?
In my opinion the work(dev, qa, docs etc) of a network should be put out for bid with a minimal as possible funded by trx fees.
Bitcoin already served it's purpose to get money into the crypto ecosystem.
Stock can be worthless, but the resulting company can still provide a useful service and job to many.
Still, high stock prices provide a benefit to the company. Everyone knows TSLA's stock is overpriced, but that's basically a good thing for TSLA.
BTC is the opposite. At $20,000 per BTC, it was impossible to transact BTC for less than $30 per transaction. The network grew less and less valuable as the price of BTC goes up (and as BTC Transaction Fees are typically paid in... BTC... higher USD/BTC means higher transaction fees).
A high-stock price is beneficial to the company. A high BTC price is detrimental to the BTC community.
BTC will survive this crash. Cryptocurrencies will survive. AND they will become more useful when the prices drops down to something reasonable (Watch as transaction fees are dropping with these lower prices). It sure sucks for the "investors" who were suckered into believing otherwise. But seriously, there's very little value in attracting "dumb money" investors who would have lost their money in the next dumb penny-stock herd-mentality scheme anyway.
Google wasn’t even founded until 1998, and didn’t IPO until 2004. It wasn’t part of the dot-com bubble. Amazon would have been a better example (1994, IPOed in 1997).
Otherwise, good post.
But, of course, the internet bubble allowed all the fiber to be laid that formed the backbone of the internet & that gave rise to the great internet companies.
I'm long cryptocurrencies and I believe the technology is going to persist. It would be nice though to be able to do it without a whole bunch of people losing their life savings in a bubble, but perhaps that's wishful thinking.
In short, real estate speculation benefits the greater economy far more than coin speculation. That being said there are definitely downsides, such as vacancy, but that's more of a symptom of capitalism in general than real estate speculation in particular.
TLDR: Real estate speculation helps the surrounding local economy more than bitcoin, however both are unideal.
There is certainly some VR hype, but its relatively tame compared to anything blockchain related and there are also multiple companies (Samsung, FB, Valve, Sony) that have produced successful (though, not blockbuster level) VR products.
AI is certainly considerably hype-driven and there are definitely some far-fetched prognosticators in the AI camp (e.g. AI singularity evangelists), however, the technology that is commonly referred to as "AI" has been integrated into and greatly enhanced the function of many software products with crosscutting effects on multiple industries. We also don't see AI enthusiasts trying to drive hype among the masses and encouraging them to get in early and put money into AI.
Blockchain tokens have demonstrated unique and interesting properties and have been an ideal tool for facilitating darknet commerce, but that is where the usefulness has ended. On the other hand, the blockchain proselytizers spread all sorts of nonsense about blockchains completely reshaping the entire political landscape, liberating the people from the tyranny of government, ending all wars blah blah blah. This is a stark contrast to what blockchains have actually been shown to be good at doing, which is pretty much just being a bitcoin. With most technologies, development continues over time and people get excited about the technology as it becomes more and more capable over the years, with blockchains the opposite is true where the enthusiasts are constantly trying to exclaim why everyone should BUY BUY BUY, come on, don't get left behind, are you some kind of luddite? If you don't love blockchain tokens its likely that you're just feeling threatened by the blockchain revolution and how it is disrupting existing power structures, sorry you're bitter that you didn't get in on the ground floor, these negative reactions to the blockchain are clearly the results of jealousy surrounding the 3000% ROI that crypto-investors were smart enough to take advantage of.. blah blah blah
Alot of these technologies have 10-20 or more years on most blockchain projects.
To me the usefulness blockchains is moving the power from the network owner to the network nodes.
I recently opened a stock trading account. Before being allowed to make a single trade, I had to complete a survey about my knowledge of the markets I'd be trading in. To start trading Crypto, you just need an account (often in shady markets, because it's easier to create an account) and money. And you only need like $100 in stead of 200k to speculate on the price of an apartment.
But I want as few broke people as possible in the society I'm part of. Each one adds a bit of stress to every social system.
Envy and regret probably explains a lot of it. I wish Bitcoin would join politics in HN's off-topic list... the threads are generally crap and emotionally charged.
People blow this off by saying that people shouldn't have invested money they couldn't miss, but those are the same people who kept telling everybody to 'hodl' and that it'll go to 100k. It may still, buy the people who need it the most can't wait for it to crawl back to 20k.
https://mynabla.com/2017/11/30/bubble-trouble-exploring-an-l...
https://mynabla.com/2017/11/09/a-monte-carlo-simulation-of-b...
Please stop using the word "bubble." It tells you absolutely nothing useful about the price of Bitcoin tomorrow.
I could’ve saw that the NASDAQ was in a bubble in January 2000 and shorted it.
My timing of the top would’ve obviously been off, and I could’ve gotten margin called and forcibly liquidated (with realized losses) by the time it was at peak in March 2000. That does not mean there was no dot-com bubble, just that you could lose hard shorting at the wrong time.
There are ways to avoid margin calls with options, but time would still be working against you with theta decay, so you could still lose money if your timing is off.
Shorts as a concept are designed around legally binding contracts. If you fail to pay out on a short you sell, they'll sue you and you'll be suspended in the markets. How would that work on something like Bitcoin?
I wonder how people trading those futures see the bitcoin market (my assumption is that many of them will be much more sophisticated than the typical "crypto" trader).
1/ Use the CBOE or CME futures for this. Just need to signup with a broker and sell a contract. 2/ Borrow BTC frome a holder. Agree to pay some interest. Then sell that BTC.
With the rate at which Bitcoin was going up, shorting it would be practically begging your broker to shower you with margin calls. That is assuming you'd be able to get a broker willing to help you take on that risk in the first place.
How is this 'evidence on what was to come'?
Unless you were being cheeky and saying its going to zero, in which case... I think its probably worth more than zero.
2 - 10 - 5 - 20 - 10 - 40 - 25 - 100 - 50
when it crashed to 50 from 100 in 2013? 2012? i really wanted to buy 10 of them as i had observed the pattern for a long time. wish i had. oh well.
so clearly now it's going to rise to ~40k (kidding)
You will transfer a hell of a lot less wealth today than last week - what a great method of transferring wealth!
The difference here is that it doesn't appear to be driven by any big event such as a major exchange collapsing. Possibly the Bitconnect crash is to blame, but who knows.
For me, it feels like Bitcoin has reached peak awareness so it's going to be more and more difficult to bring new people in, especially as a lot of people get burned on this crash.
It makes me kind of sad that /r/Bitcoin is all religious HODLers posting pictures of lamborghinis. Would be nice if there was actual interest in or use of the technology.
- Can you buy/sell bitcoin for tether?
- Has tether ever released an audit?
The had a CPA sign an affidavit swearing they had enough cash to match their tether tokens. The CPA firm seems legit. But he never looked at tether's books. The tether tokens are only one of many possible liabilities. If tether borrowed a bunch of money (from banks, users, etc), they could be easily insolvent while still having enough cash to only pay out tokens.
There is no legal mechanism to put tether token holders at the front of a bankruptcy creditor line.
And that was months ago. They printed 200 million tether yesterday. That amount seems unrealistically high.
People don't read these days. :-(
"In general, in a time-series, use a baseline that shows the data not the zero point." - Edward Tufte.
It's a detail trade-off. Starting at zero helps the uninformed, but will obscure details.
Starting at zero helps the well dressed, but would obscure the person's head back above 10,000?
Financial types are only concerned with the % change. 'Zero' in the financial world means 0% change, i.e., the same price as it started with. A chart with a flexible axis will look identical when evaluated as a % change or as an absolute value, giving it a tremendous amount of utility when looking at the price action relative to various other things, indexes, pairs, sectors, etc...
Yes, that's the point. If you let the Y-axis begin at zero, then you can intuitively read the change-percentages right from the graph!
Let's say something is worth $10, and tomorrow it's $11. That's a 10% increase in a day. Now suppose you let the graph start at $10 instead of at $0. You only see the $1 increase, and you have no clue about the change in percentage.
You don't have to take my word for it. Every candlestick chart you will ever see uses a flexible axis unless the time series is expanded to include a period of time when it was at zero.
And its not because they never read Tufte. :-)
For example:
> Yesterday, Bitcoin was just a few dollars away from dropping below $10,000, but it bounced back around $11k, a 15% drop from two days before.
That 15% refers to the total of around $10,000 and not to some change!
The text is full of these examples.
(The fact that those candle-stick diagrams don't start at zero is because traders use technical analysis which indeed doesn't care about absolute values, but imho this shows how crazy it all is.)
A metaphor might be if you listen in on a conversation between two experts and they are using jargon that you know is technically imprecise. If you say "that's not really what that means" then the response is usually "bugger off because we know what it means and there's a good reason we say it like that and we're not changing it just because you are listening."
But could you explain that in this particular case?
For instance, let's say bitcoin is at $10,000 and it moves a few cents up and down, giving big swings in your non-zero-based graph. Why are those big swings saying anything meaningful to a financial type?
In my graph, the line would be almost flat, and clearly indicates that nothing is really happening (low volatility).
Sure, its helps me to think through these things too. :-)
In your graph, you probably don't mind that its almost flat, but if I am someone who makes money by trading every day, I'm interested in very small moves, a couple of pennies, maybe 0.5% over the course of a day. And that's _all_ I'm interested in. Where is the price over the last few days and how does that compare to the price of some other thing?
Knowing the relationship of the current price to zero is really not important because it a) has never been at zero, b) is not going to go to zero, and c) zero is meaningless in pricing anyway.
That last one is kind of unintuitive. You can't buy or sell a share at a $0 price. A $0 price implies that there are no buyers or sellers. No buyers or sellers means means the price is undefined, not $0. No matter how low the price gets, it can never be assumed to trade at $0. No stock has traded at a $0 price (even in bankruptcy there are always some value to the shares right up until they are liquidated and cease to exist). No stock has ever opened at $0, they IPO in the $20-30 range (or somewhere non-zero anyway).
So if zero doesn't mean anything, then you have to say, what should the minimum be? Well, you can say $0.01, but that's just as arbitrary. Assets are infinitely divisible in theory, and lots of trades are made at lower denomination that the currency, take the $0.000000008 / share SEC fee.
If any choice is going to be arbitrary, then you have to go back to the intention, which is to compare current price movements to recent price movements to understand what's happening, so just make sure your chart has all the recent price movements and then add +/- something like 10% on either side to give some padding and emphasize breakouts... a.k.a a flexible axis.
In this particular case, I suppose it is the author's intention. If they wanted to emphasize the volatility of recent movements, a flexible axis is right for that. If they wanted to minimize the volatility, a fixed axis starting at $0 is better.
But, objectively, there is no reason to _insist_ on starting at $0.
But how does the trader know it's (on the order of) 0.5% by looking at the graph, if it doesn't start at zero? Now they have to look at the absolute value on the Y-axis, estimate the fluctuation in the graph and divide.
PS: appreciate your lengthy reply.
Plus, most professionals aren't going to ever look at one particular stock, like an Apple trader will have Apple, a tech sector ETF and the S&P500. As soon as you add a second series the y-axis _has_ to revert to a percentage change. They'll all start at the same point, which will be labeled 0%, and then diverge.
There are lots of bitcoin millionaires out there who really need to think about what having >30% of their money in bitcoins really does to the volatility of their portfolio. It's still the same bitcoin from 2013, but do you really want it to be that much of your portfolio?