Bitcoin Plunges to $3,738; Whole Crypto Scam Melts Down, Hedge Funds Stuck
wolfstreet.com
wolfstreet.com
-George Soros
It's a pretty complex topic. Math, Programming, Economics, practical application of Cryptography and applied Financial processes and it would be tough for anyone to really grasp the whole thing.
After a talk I gave I had a highschool kid mention "you should try a blockchain" in response to a security issue I had discussed... I nodded and smiled. When a family friend tried to get us to invest in his shared mining operation he explained a similarly vague description of the mathy database - I didn't smile as much.
Coinbase used to offer just btc then it upped to btc,ltc,and eth. Then it offered btc cash and now there's literally 20 or more cryptos available on coinbase.
To the average 'normie' who uses coinbase they used to just pick btc and call it a day. But they have way too many options nowdays which probably scares them and also dilutes the value.
It might just be coinbase and the crypto casuals who inflated the price.
False, there are exactly eight.
Oh boy. Oh boy. The cryptocoin ecosystem is still existing. There are thousands of people working on the next generation of decentralised payments. The bubble bursting doesn't change the fact that people are working on making BTC, Eth, and so many other great coins scale. We already saw the bubble burst once before. It may take a year, maybe longer but someday people will be able to use Crypto for day to day payments. And that day another bubble will burst, it's called fiat and it's the original Scam. The kind of scam Wall Street tries to protect by lobbying against decentralisation, by smearing it but they can't kill it.
I can buy something from China and pay without any problems. I can send money to my friend using my phone. I can transfer money quickly to a trading platform and buy some stock.
Sending money around and paying for things is easy today and Bitcoin does not make that easier for me. And while I guess a total collapse of the world could happen I feel that it is more likely Bitcoin collapses than Mastercard and my 200 year old bank (that is somewhat backed by my government).
I guess the thing Bitcoin has going for it for some people is buying drugs online but even there I've read that there is considerable resources thrown at monitoring the blockchain to identify buyers and sellers.
I think you've identified one of the advantages of bitcoin. There's no counterparty risk, ie bail-ins. This is the commodity gold replacement use case where the carry on Bitcoin is lower and paid by others.
I feel that that scenario is much more likely than the collapse of my country and bank.
Those are interesting times. We trust government more than we trust ourselves.
You may be able to buy from China on credit but you can't just move cash around willy nilly. Even debit card transactions take a day or two to clear.
But good luck opening a $25K stock trading account (from cash) in less than 7 days.
"On the bitcointalk forums, some users were less interested in the owners’ identity and more impressed by the infrastructure that allowed such an amount to be transferred without any regulatory hindrance, lawyers, or fees (the user paid no transaction fee at all). Even handing over that amount in hard cash would be a logistical challenge."
[1] https://www.coindesk.com/194993-btc-transaction-147m-mystery...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/24/billionaire-ea...
1. "Direct deposit", all largest banks in Sweden support it and that means that the money is transferred real time. That service is open between 7am and 11pm at Avanza.
2. Normal bank transfer and that takes one day in Sweden.
Source in Swedish but you could translate it: https://www.avanza.se/kundservice.html/281/vad-ar-direktinsa...
Avanza does not have a limit on how much money you can transfer but your bank might have, in that case you might have to rise that limit if you want to transfer a lot.
I don't know if it takes a day or two or clear (or more) if I buy from China but from my perspective it is usually an incredibly smooth checkout and I will get my stuff x amount of weeks later if I'm cheap with transport costs.
Also, how are fees in sweden ? bank transfer/currency exchange fees are just an absurd abuse of power imho.
Ohh, I don't think you would eat any better by only packing bitcoin.
I used regular money and went through a fairly well-known fintech company who specializes in this type of thing, and I think the whole process only took around 6 hours.
From memory it cost around 0.5% of the transfer value, and gave me the true mid-market rate.
We're not truly living in a world where it's Bitcoin or we stay completely at the mercy of the banks (w.r.t sending money across borders, at least), and the banks will catch up to where the fintech is - much like Travel Agents, they're just still successfully arbitraging their incumbency against the knowledge (w.r.t technology and the other options available) level of the general population.
While international development hopefully isn't a complete lost cause (on long enough timescales), I can definitely see how cryptocurrency could be seen as a viable shortcut around poor government in this respect.
Moving funds between banks in the EURO area is virtually instantenous and practically free.[1]
And good luck opening any stock trading account with crypto currencies.
Simple. It enables payments, to be more precise: Online Payments. Now you could do those using your credit card (like most people in the US do, or basically all of Scandinavia). That is, if you are able to open an account with a bank, and being issued a CC. However, this is not possible for many people. Outside the western world banking isn't available to the same extent as it is there.
In a world where more and more commerce moves online - thus enabling whole new businesses and economies - we can't afford to just let people behind. Speaking for Ethereum now, banking the Unbanked is a centrepiece of the project.
Also, wire-transfer isn't free in some places of the world, some projects seek to eliminate those fees entirely or reduce them to peanuts effectively.
It's basically democratising online payments and giving people access. Also some projects (like ZCash and Monero) seek to bake in privacy into payments, which is nice given that all Credit Card payments are recorded by private companies. I don't know about you but I already dislike online advertising, I don't want some company to know about everything about my payments.
Lol
Of course that's not completely anonymous and can't necessarily be used for dodgy stuff (there are certain KYC requirements) but it seems to server the developing world a whole lot better than crypto currencies.
To pay for something without cash, you have to use a service: whether it's a credit card, Paypal, Square, Stripe, Google Wallet, Apple Pay, etc. (if you're not using cryptocurrency). At minimum, there's a bank involved. That means every transaction goes through a payment processor who collects their share of the transaction value, whether it's taken from the end-customer or the merchant. Generally the merchant "eats" the cost which is then in turn reflected in higher prices.
Cryptocurrency is decentralized, meaning that there is no middleman company that profits off of every transaction, and that's better for consumers and business. It's more efficient. And I dislike bank and credit card executives. They're pretty scummy.
The problem with cryptocurrency is that many early adopters hoarded their coin collections rather than spend them, thereby creating artificial scarcity, which in turn raised the price beyond any semblance of reason.
The market determines the value of the coin, and investors don't have a good sense of what the real value should be - assuming that we aren't witnessing the demise of Bitcoin et al. right now.
[1] https://coincentral.com/how-long-do-bitcoin-transfers-take/
There was someone on hacker news some months back who collected donations to proof-of-concept abuse one or more.
So a safer alternative would be a token coin on Ethereum, since you're not actually switching to a microscopic, unknown and thus abusable blockchain.
Not really. There's a settlement period, and if the transaction can be reversed, it's really not complete in the sense of a Bitcoin transaction with 6 confirmations.
I do not want to nitpick but credit cards validate, that is to say they verify the parts in a transaction and resolve instantly if it can or cannot take place, and then it does take place instantly. That you can "take it back" is a feature independent of the actual operation. The settlement period is not a technological imposition but a human one; it is in place because humans are not trustworthy.
On Bitcoin on the other hand, the limitation is inherently technical. The protocol verification methods are slow by design.
BTC is actually instant. You don't even need internet access! But to make sure it can't be taken back, we wait an hour.
the scary part is that every embarassing little transaction has to go through multiple such processors, wiith most of them taking a cut basically because they are rent-collectors.
Except for the miners, who get a transaction fee on every transaction.
Perhaps that is not a problem you have to deal with in your life, and that would make you fortunate.
But there are literally billions of people in the world who live under authoritarian regimes.
And so far, we have yet to see any successful attempt by any government to engage in market wide censorship of these financial transactions.
Someone will inevitably claim that shutting all this down is easy, and yet it hasn't happened yet, so the real life facts prove them wrong.
Many people in repressed countries like China and Venezuela are already able to aquire crypto. People in China are among the largest holders of crypto, actually.
This is not some hypothetical question. We can observe the answer to your question, right now, through the people that are using it.
apart from solving some of today's problems, bitcoin (OK, not bitcoin, some better cryptocoin) is creating new markets and opportunities
also, tbh , visa launching a microtransaction framework as easy to use as cryptos would be great news
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How would you facilitate the extremely simplistic example I listed above with USD?
At the end of the day, BTC is a zero-sum game. If you "make money" by selling it ahead of a crash, you're just grabbing money from the future sucker who's holding it ahead of you. This is a casino, not an investment.
The only players holding BTC are speculating.
Given this usage pattern, are we really going to argue that all this walking and quacking doesn't make it a duck?