Crypto’s 80% Plunge Is Now Worse Than the Dot-Com Crash | Hacker News Reader

Crypto’s 80% Plunge Is Now Worse Than the Dot-Com Crash

bloomberg.com

13 pointseverdev21 comments

I think one of the interesting things is the lack of reason why. There are plenty of theories and many people yelling for the end of crypto, but it seems despite of what people say or predict the crypto market has a mind of it's own. There has been speculation of market manipulation, but it seems odd for there to be a crash now.

You don't even need fowl play to get here. The reasons don't have to be economic, they can be psychological.

People sometimes just ride the wave and everything around them might convince them it's the way to go, keep going. But there is a point when the realization that it's unsustainable can creep in. That moment where you go from "infallible" to "hmm... can this keep going?" is when the bubble starts to burst. Panic can spread just as quickly or faster than the euphoria of a quick win.

Investors chickening out qualifies as fowl play in my book.

Chicken-fowl, I see what you did there :). But no, chickening out will never fall under any definition of fowl play. This involves cheating, malice, breaking the rules, all premeditated perhaps. Playing it safe with your money? Definitely not.

*foul

Heh, I thought you're semi-yanking my chain for typing it wrong the first time :D. Well, too late to edit.

I invested quite a bit, now I have egg on my face.

My conspiracy theory: Criminals have laundered all the money they needed to last christmas when the boom happened. Jobs done, time to go home. They bought a bunch of bitcoins from clueless techies using dirty money, the blogsphere amplified the news to the world, and the mob sold the bitcoins to a bunch of blue collar Joes who thought they'd get in on the next gold rush.

I'm not sure that job is ever "done".

I think a more likely story is a pump and dump by some large investors.

Stop comparing percentage. Look at absolute value - no where near the dotcom crash. Re money laundering having finished: ridiculous. The banks do that job just fine,at significantly bigger amounts.

Non-AMP link please. It's terrible on desktop.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-12/crypto-s-...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/amp2html/

Does this mean graphics cards are falling back to a more reasonable level again?

They already are. You can go and buy an AMD RX 580 with 8GB VRAM for 250€ in Germany. The RX 580, 570, 470, and 470 were the most efficient cards for mining Ethereum in terms of power usage, hashrate, and cost.

1080Tis can be found under 400 in NYC

I'm also curious what happened to all that custom FPGA and ASIC hardware that miners were using for a while.

Surely it's sitting unused somewhere, right?

There weren't many FPGAs AFAIK. I wish there were and the cheap big used FPGA boards are all over the market though.

Can only hide from fundamental issues for so long I suppose...

Here's a compelling and fun to watch lecture that James Mickens (Harvard SEAS) recently gave about the problems with Blockchain - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15RTC22Z2xI

Hard to take this seriously when Bitcoin is up over 6x from less than 1.5 years ago..

I don't understand your logic. A crash is still a crash. Consider all the people didn't buy 1.5 years ago, and bought recently. They have lost money. And judging by historical volume, a lot of people are losing money.

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