Bitcoin drops below $9000 on Coinbase
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
...November... I think it was just last November.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.........
When an event like that occurs you should very much expect a correction, and when that correction occurs it should be expected and not a surprise.
What baffles me is that everyone involved in BTC accepted the 50% upward fluctuation. When the obvious correction occurred they were all surprised and started saying just what you did, that currencies aren't suppose to fluctuate by 50% in a month.
How didn't you see this coming and why do you still consider BTC a currency in light of this event?
The reserve cryptocurrency of the internet needs to be fast and offer cheap transactions so that it can easily and cheaply be moved between exchanges.
I think it will take some time before another cryptocurrency takes the place of Bitcoin. Part of the problem is that very few people currently have the skills to evaluate a cryptocurrency based on its technical merits. So exchanges are not currently in a position to agree about what the next reserve cryptocurrency should be.
I think that replacing Bitcoin with Ethereum right now would be a mistake. Ethereum has a lot of big scalability hurdles - I think that technically Ethereum actually has more hurdles to overcome than Bitcoin - Their community does seem a lot more motivated though; but I'm not sure that will be enough. Ethereum still needs to switch to Proof-of-Stake and THEN it needs to implement sharding.
Also, I don't think that pruning will be feasible for Ethereum. It wouldn't make sense to prune the Ethereum blockchain because that would entail pruning out smart contracts. Most no-smart-contract cryptocurrencies are not limited in this way.
Also , i m not sure how often people use BTC to transfer stuff between exchanges, it's just too slow and expensive. i think ppl use LTC or ETH more often for transfers.
I think Bitcoin will be seen like Geocities some day. A hell of an idea that many people have done much better.
Can you explain why, in technical terms?
I don't believe any other cryptocurrency has faced anywhere near the same volume of transactions.It looks to me like Etherium maxed out at around 230k transactions per day while Bitcoin has faced nearly 500k transactions.
Prunability included.
But there are a dozen similar projects now, so why this one?
The only one I can think of is IOTA, but it mainly focuses on IOT or act as underlying technology, not really user friendly.
A network partitioning attack, combined with a double spend that is embedded and sent to the chain of a major economic actor (like an exchange), will result in the blockchain irreversibly forking in perhaps an hour without any way of reconciliation.
"Distribution is complete" - how was the supply created and distributed?
https://raiblocks.net/page/frontiers.php?limit=100
Basically someone created Raiblocks by forking another DAG 'blockchain' database, and allocated themselves millions of coins spread across many addresses. A few thousand coins were given to the public if they clicked captchas.
These people who generated raiblocks / nano are now essentially multi-level marketeers trying to convince you to buy their beanie babies.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=raiblock+captch...
Remember, anytime you buy a cryptocurrency means someone else is trying to cash out.
The core team has been working very hard to try and improve the software, and they are making strides every month. I am constantly impressed with their professionalism and stature.
The reason people sell stuff is usually to optimize their portfolio construction, not because they think the price is going to go down. Just because you think something is going to go up 10x in the next year doesn't mean it's a good idea to hold onto it.
Could you please explain this to me
If you make accusations, please back up your claim.
To be honest, I don't care about them cashing out. Everyone who builds a company that changes the world cashes out.
Nano is solid technology, doing what it promises in practice. So I don't see how this is a scam or a get rich quick scheme. If them make the new bitcoin, they can cash out for all I care, and I hope they do.
Beanie babies? Please explain how their technology is inferior compared to e.g. Bitcoin, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, ... .
Tech wise it's the best cryptocurrency out there for this purpose. If someone else disagrees on a technical level, please explain.
The most important things about any cryptocurrency are decentralization and censorship-resistance. Without those two, you might as well be running a PayPal clone in a datacenter. That way, you get the fastest and cheapest transactions possible.
> so that it can easily and cheaply be moved between exchanges.
Exchanges can set up big payment channels between one another and do instant Bitcoin transfers. However, since they operate in a regulatory environment, this may never happen.
If you don't subscribe to the bitcoin-dev mailing list, then you're missing out on the latest developments toward scalability and privacy, which are really exciting.
Not currently. Have a look at the Nano cryptocurrency (renamed from RaiBlocks): it has instant and free transactions, and should be scalable (but this last part is not proven in practice yet). The instant and free is definitely true in practice already.
Recently a redditor calculated a single wind turbine could power 7000 transactions per second (https://www.reddit.com/r/nanocurrency/comments/7ucw1a/the_en...)
The new generation of cryptocurrencies is here to compete with the previous ones, and with the established financial services.
Exciting times.
Disclosure: I own a few of those coins
I think you are seriously underestimating the complexity of a decent payment system.
Is there a cryptocurrency that is? A linear scaling factor like larger block sizes or faster block times doesn't count.
Nothing beats instant (=few seconds), free transactions.
Current problem is that Nano is not yet available on a wide range of exchanges.
Disclosure: I own a few of the mentioned coins
Segwit addresses the "fast and cheap" transactions bit and has been seeing more widespread use. Do you have an opinion on it?
just because it performed in the past doesn't mean it will in the future but the same reasons I liked it still exist and are getting stronger. the market will lag behind lightning because people don't realize what it is yet and it might take a year or two but it will be back even stronger than $20k (the first time it's bought by a countries reserve bank it's game over cryotos will beat fiat then)
My impression was that it was still not very user friendly(not saying much in crypto world) nor widespread.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_cat_bounce
Even a dead cat will bounce if it falls from a great height
That last step is going to be a doozy too. Hopefully this is happening before too many people lose more than they can afford, because of FOMO and the relentless hype.
How many people think that cryptocurrency has a real future worth that expenditure? I would guess fewer everyday, but I could be very wrong.
The ecosystem has some serious issues to solve for it to be ready for an everyday user.
Every bit of computer power beyond the minimum threshold of efficiency needed to operate the transactions and database is a net loss.
Peak efficiency of the Bitcoin mining network would be about 3-10 basic desktop computers. Instead Satoshi Nakomoto's Proof of Work will waste more and more energy with nothing to show as time goes on.
I personally don't believe it can go to zero (at this point that means blocks stop being mined and exchanges shut down).
I think a fallacy many make is that this is open source, not corporate-created software. That changes a lot of the context. For years, people compared Linux to Windows and Mac and I can't count the number of times Linux was dead. I can probably actually count the times that Bitcoin was dead, but it's still a lot.
If you watch other crypto prices, many are tightly bound to BTC. I expect to see Bitcoin has a core part of the cryptocurrency network of the future. Maybe BTC won't be the ultra high-speed payment provider we had hoped for, but it's really difficult for me to accept that it will die off.
Ultimately, we're all speculating. I love that this is such uncharted territory.
With that out of the way, the major problems seem to be scalability, pseudonymity instead of anonymity, missing regulatory oversight, mining centralization, adoption and as already mentioned proof of work and its energy inefficiency. I am probably missing things, I went from really excited about Bitcoin to a more rational and pragmatic view about the time it reached dollar parity and haven't followed the development too closely ever since because in my opinion everything in existence is really far away from prime time and it will take some more new ideas on the level of Bitcoin itself to get there, i.e. some tweaks here and there alone will not be good enough.
Also note that I mentioned such general things like adoption as problems but what I really mean there is in the interaction, for example between regulatory oversight and adoption. But I don't want to flesh those arguments out in a comment, it would just be very time consuming and I don't think I would have to add much if anything new, many others have discussed all kinds of problems again and again. Some will follow those arguments, some will dismiss them and repeating them once again won't change that.
So applying this logic, the bottom of this bubble should be around $2-4k. For a couple of reasons however this bubble is different - lots of finance guys participating. Because they are experienced they will buy ahead of that to make sure they don't miss the bottom. So I see this bubble bottoming at $5k. This has the nice property that most of the "dumb money" who entered in Nov-Dec without any idea about trading or cryptos will lose money (markets tend to make sure that people who entered during a frenzy lose).
If I'm investing in a company, the first thing I do is read the quarterly and year end reports. I take a look at how the money is being used. I look for things that might be fishy. You need to be careful, even with blue chip stocks -- often the numbers don't add up. I look at how well the company is executing. What kind of margin are they getting? How are they using that money? If for growth, then what are the investing in and how well is it paying off? If for profit, how much profit are they making and what are they doing with the profits? That kind of thing. I look at the products they make. I read reviews. I look at the competition. After I've done all that, I decide how fairly the company is valued. Often they are over valued. Sometimes they have about the right value. Rarely they are undervalued. I try to buy the latter stocks and hold them for a long time.
Just because of how I do my job (I am a internationally remote contractor), I am forced to speculate on currency. Note the subtle change in vocabulary. I am not investing in currency. I don't expect a rate of return over time on currency. Instead, I look at geo-political situations and I guess how it might affect the price of a currency against another currency. At the moment, I live off the Japanese yen (I'm in Japan), but I get paid in Great British pounds. I need to have some insurance that my revenue stream is relatively constant, so when GBP is very low (it was down to just over 120 JPY last year!) I try to hold it. When it is very high, I try to sell it. Sometimes it makes sense for me to even buy it when it is low. When I am looking at this, I look at both the British and Japanese economic policies. I look at elections that might change that policy. I look at the (complete lack of) progress wrt Brexit, etc, etc. But this is not an investment. My goal is to hedge against the changes as much as I can, because otherwise sometimes I'm working for 60% of the wage that I normally make (and it's hard to ask your clients to double their payments just because something like Brexit happens).
Now, let's look at Bitcoin. What economic factors influence Bitcoin? It would be tempting to say "none", but this is not strictly true. First, we have to look at the likelihood that bitcoin will become viable as a general currency. It's pretty unlikely, but the chance is not actually 0 (Much to my surprise, I can actually buy things with Bitcoin from mainstream shops in Japan -- even a local pizza restaurant takes them). However, it's clear that changes to the protocol need to happen for it to scale. To understand the implications, you have to understand the chances for various proposals to succeed (both technically and politically).
When you look at trading currencies, often you look at indicators like interest rates because the change of interest rates encourages (and sometimes outright forces) trading of the currency. With bitcoin there are precious few outside influences like that. There are things like "tethers", but since they are a complete scam you have to figure out what it's likely to do to the price (will it force people to buy BTC, or will it tank the price).
Having said all that, I hope you can see a kind of gradation in the "investment" type. When I buy stock, I can reason about the performance of the company by looking at their past performance, their execution, their product, the oppositions performance, etc. When I engage in FOREX (which I try to avoid, but alas am unable to), I am stuck with the politics and economic policies. I have to kind of guess what countries are going to do and how that will result in changes to the price. I try my best to stick to hedging strategies, because otherwise you might as well be laying bets at the bookie wrt economic policy. With Bitcoin, it's just gambling. The price swings are generally due to hype, scams, and bad actors -- with only a little bit related to potential viability. And I would say the the long term viability of BTC as a whole is pretty long odds (remember, this is not advice -- decide for yourself).
So if you want to gamble, then gamble. I'm not going to stop you. But I don't think you will get any useful advice on "investment" in Bitcoin. It's just not that kind of vehicle.
That pretty much sums up why I've stayed away thus far. I've done well with equities over the years, but FOREX kicked my ass (a lesson I could thankfully afford). As you point out, there's at least some semblance of sense in FOREX, which I obviously have yet to grock. I don't even play games in Vegas unless I can figure out the odds ("how are you going to fuck me?"), and I fully cop to that as gambling. Cryptocurrencies, phhhht, I haven't the first clue as to what drives the price, or how I'm going to get taken. To me, it's even worse than gambling, because though I might know the odds at the craps table, try as I might I can't get a grasp on the drivers of cryptocurrencies other than hype.
https://www.cryptoground.com/article/btc-price-4000-usd-indi...
Used to be that crypto is massively overpriced there, now it looks like Korea and Japan are leading this price fall.
Or that folks trust their ability to get money out of Coinbase more than the other exchanges.