Bitcoin and cryptocurrency prices have fallen sharply over the last few days
forbes.com
forbes.com
Think of Bitcoin and Gold as call options on the entire global monetary system. If Govs become insolvent, Bitcoin and Gold is there. If the masses lose faith in central banks, Bitcoin and Gold is there. If central banks debase currencies too quickly, Bitcoin and Gold is there. That is the staying power of scarcity via well known stock to flow ratios.
I'm glad Bitcoin is not inversely correlated to equities, because that would mean Bitcoin went down in an equities uptrend. Being non-correlated is superior: Bitcoin marches to it's own drum.
All this being said: cash is king in times of uncertainty. Bitcoin is a speculative bet that "money without masters" will become an essential part of the future monetary system. We're a long way from that still.
Advice in good times and bad: maintain a deep safety net and don't get too nuts with debt or leverage.
The whole point of gold is that it is a tangible asset. You can hold gold in your pocket or under your mattress and it costs nothing to store it. You can't prove you have bitcoin if you don't have internet access for example. You can't have bitcoin if miners don't run their nodes. Basically, you are depending on a resource in faraway lands to let you "own" what you have. What kind of asset is that?
Gold can be held, yes. It also is expensive to verify, transport, and protect. This has proved problematic for holders of the past. A paper system had to be built on top of Gold, which severely diluted the value proposition as gold was confiscated and stockpiled centrally. Practically speaking, very few individuals hold gold and the utility of doing so is limited when you consider how liquidity in the gold market functions.
Bitcoin is a different beast. You hold the cryptographic keys (like a password) which let you move Bitcoin to someone else’s address (under their password). You don’t trust anyone: Bitcoin is verified by math, not humans. It is tangible in the same way that owning google.com is tangible (and unarguably valuable). Bits and bytes exist on a global network and only you can move them.
When compared to Gold, Bitcoin is interesting because it is highly transportable, easily divisible, and censorship resistant. Consider this: Bitcoin let’s you store $1T USD of dollars in your head, transport it anywhere in the world, and there’s not a single thing anyone else can do about it.
As of now the $1T can also disappear and nobody will even notice.
As for backups, the Bitcoin ledger is likely the most durable dataset that has ever existed. Backups are made daily at every layer across the world and there is no central point of failure in the network.
Shutting down the Bitcoin network would take a world war, and even then the network would survive through backups and the will of network participants to bring it back.
Which means that it’s just a gamble of some insiders.
Speculation is by definition gambling. Investing is also speculation. You have a thesis, and you make returns if that plays out. You lose capital when you are wrong.
Also, I'm not sure what you mean by "insiders" - most of the world can purchase Bitcoin, the software is OSS, the network inspectable, and the evolving thesis and narrative is fully available online.
Bitcoin is the people's money.
>Abstract. A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.
Bus factor and too many single points of failure. How many lost wallets are out there with a few hundred or thousands of coins from before Bitcoin hit $100?
Lots of Bitcoin has been lost. Good key hygiene should not be taken lightly. What is unfortunate for those losers is fortunate for Bitcoin. As the supply of lost Bitcoin increases the overall scarcity of the asset increases.
With bitcoin the single point of failure is always your key. That's why every random walk down the timeline leads to 100% of keys lost over the full course of time.
Care to elaborate on what my misconception was? I never said that bitcoin is not an interesting concept on its own. Just that is ain't got what most people think or need when they talk about gold or money. Especially not in time of economic distress.
Can you use bitcoin without the internet? Can you use bitcoin without someone else mining and being allowed to connect to these entities?
Full nodes have financial incentives to run and they do so today at a scale that rivals the internet. It’s not a favor to Bitcoin, it’s a business. They would only stop if the financial incentive ceased to exist. I can’t think of a reason node operators would cease to care about their own financial well-being. That’s baked into our species.
Note that your reservations apply equally (and potentially more so) to fiat. USD is a virtual currency. Cash is on the way out. You will not be able to spend your USD offline. USD is based on a network of centralized banks. You cannot spend your fiat without a computer asking permission from these centralized systems.
The world stops if the internet stops. That’s not a Bitcoin problem. Bitcoin actually improves on the state of things by replacing encumbant authorities and centralized computing systems with math and a decentralized network.
I’ll add this. It’s not the current state of the world, but there is a very real chance Bitcoin can be made available off-internet via a satellite network. This would prevent state-level censorship like what we see when authoritarian regimes cut the internet.
https://github.com/Blockstream/satellite/blob/master/README....
I mean by that definition anything past barter economies are virtual, so sure if that's your definition then your statement stands. It's completely incorrect by any meaningful definition of virtual though.
Yes, I can, as long as I have it as physical currency, and regularly do. Admittedly, this relies on confidence of all participants that eventually systems (banking, etc.) which are as you describe will work or be replaced/retooled without he online dependency (and there is plenty of historical precedent of systems working with fiat without digital backup which could be reverted to in extreme need), but there is no real-time dependency on online systems for use of physical currency, and as long as systems are up and working it's easy for fiat users to adjust their risk profile regarding potential future system failures by moving funds into or out of physical currency.
You will not be able to get a hair cut unless you are an outstanding citizen and have your governments blessing.
I wish this were a joke.
Maybe, especially in some places, but even if that is the direction of digital financial transformation, the US is decades behind on most levels of that transformation and has cultural issues that that even if it was caught up on other aspects would make retirement of physical currency harder than it might be in other places.
I will be surprised if central banks don’t use the ushering in of the next monetary system as an excuse to go full-stop 100% digital.
I get the sense you think this is a far off and unlikely event. I think it’s much more likely and impending than that.
Today, central banks acts as a final settlement later upon which the rest of the financial system is built (banks, credit, etc). This makes it impossible for the financial system to “shut off”.
In a Bitcoin world, the main ledger would act as a final settlement layer, and local lightning networks act as the layers on top providing payments, loans, and credit. All transactions would be batched and only get settled so often (once an hour, globally, for example).
This gives you similar local-affinity that today’s financial system offers without relying on governments to award permission to engage in commerce.
And far more trust in anonymous, unaccountable actors, largely foreign from the perspective of any given trusting party.
Those centralized actors have, in the case of major states, have well established trust and accountability systems that maintain that trust. Bitcoin not only doesn't have that, it is fundamentally premised on preventing it.
There is a certain ideological phyle to which this is appealing, but I'm not convinced that generally it hard an advantage over centralized institutions in establishing user confidence.
You then need to have confidence that humans will always act in their own self-interest, and that you are not important enough that a sufficiently large portion of participants would act against their own interest in attempt to try and scam you.
Acting against your own interest means deliberately losing money by trying to coerce a large number of economic participants to act against their own self-interest in order to benefit you.
Keeping the "main ledger" functional requires miners to have reliable communications with each other; I believe Lightning nodes need an up-to-date view of the ledger as well.
> All transactions would be batched and only get settled so often (once an hour, globally, for example).
There is no mechanism in Bitcoin which would provide this functionality. It's not clear that it'd even be possible without a major rework of the protocol.
You are underestimating degree of our reliance on banking. Stores, restaurants and repair shops don't have enormous vaults with cash — they store money in bank accounts. If banks make cash transactions infeasible, businesses will suck it up. If your local coffee shop stops accepting cash, you will have to find another one, possibly located in different district (or even different country...). Many countries enforce mandatory use of bank accounts for business — companies are literally not allowed to operate in pure cash. When banks conspire to make cash undesirable (via high cash collector fees, shunning low-denomination bills etc.), local entrepreneurs begin go "cashless", a trend already seen in many places.
Never mind that, — even if your local legislators force shops to accept bills, who cares about them? Brick and mortar stores are deteriorating all around the world. A lot of things already can't be bought offline, unless you take an international flight each time you want to purchase. When your local electrical parts shop closes down, will you open your own? Or just order parts online and pay with VISA like everyone already does?
In not-so-distant future you will be able to spend your cash on bread and not much else. Until the backer becomes unable to spend his.
The answer to both is, simply, "no".
All cryptocurrencies (not just Bitcoin) are incredibly reliant on the availability of unrestricted communications between all participating parties, including miners. Where those communications break down, the cryptocurrency is likely to become unreliable or entirely unusable.
(As such, Bitcoin is an incredibly poor choice if you're planning for some sort of apocalyptic scenario -- it's likely to be one of the first things to stop working.)
Bitcoin is more of bet that Keynesian monetary policy fails. It doesn’t hedge for Armageddon.
Planning for a collapse of world order involves small coins, farmland, prepping pantries, home schooling, and firearms.
Hey, I’m all for individual sovereignty!
Nothing you said addressed this.
We must not go silently into that dark night.
for you it seems that must equate the end of the world where it doesn't matter anyway.
If Bitcoin is forced to go split-brain temporarily, the network could coordinate to rejoin after the fact. Or, it could stay split in two.
Regardless, infighting over which network was “the real Bitcoin” would ensue. See Bitcoin Cash and friends.
Ultimately, one chain will come to dominate the other, and the ones who fight hardest for it to be their chain will probably find they're on the wrong one. That's because people on the right chain will not need to fight about it. They'll just be running their software as they've been doing till now, and it will pick the correct chain for them. The ones screaming "you need to download a new client" will proceed in destroying their own reputations.
Fed is printing $4T this week!
Welcome to the new normal.
https://twitter.com/apompliano/status/1238463895095869440?s=...
That may be attempted, but then no technology company is going to start a business in the locations where this happens. The nations which attempt this will probably do more damage to their economies by enacting it than any damage that Bitcoin could possibly do. It will only take a couple of nations to declare themselves open for bitcoin business, to have economic success, for the rest of the world to realize that fighting against Bitcoin is a losing game.
Debasement of the USD will probably happen, but who knows when. My guess is it that it won't be a sudden event but will happen gradually over a few decades. You might measure USD to lose half of its value over a decade, but if you attempt to do the same for bitcoin, you might find that it has barely changed because "inflation" in bitcoin is negligible - ~7/8 of the total bitcoin supply has already been released, and the amount of "inflation" is decreasing over time.
It's not that simple. Transactions can, and will be, replayed on both chains. There would however be many opportunities for attacks such as double spends for a short window of time.
> The two forks could exist for a long time after the split simultaneously,
That's not realistic. As soon as there is some communications between the chains, the system will reconcile. It's sort of the whole reason why this proof-of-work thing exists. Without the need to reconcile chain splits it would be sufficient with some sort of voting of proof-of-stake scheme.
My point was that a merchant who accepts a payment for some good or service, and later finds out that they were partitioned from the network after they have already released the goods, may find that they don't have any money on the other (main) chain because it was already spent. The merchant has no recourse to get back their money.
> That's not realistic. As soon as there is some communications between the chains, the system will reconcile. It's sort of the whole reason why this proof-of-work thing exists. Without the need to reconcile chain splits it would be sufficient with some sort of voting of proof-of-stake scheme.
This is what I was alluding to in the last paragraph. The majority of participants who do nothing will simply continue to operate on the main chain, but those who were partitioned (which may include miners) may resist operating on the main chain by forking their software. If enough people are affected by a partition, they would have the incentive to follow the partitioned chain and promote the forked software because their money doesn't exist on the main chain. They would probably operate both chains in attempt to spend the money they received whilst the partition occurred, but eventually the dominant main chain would account for most of their economic activity and the partitioned chain will become obscure, like Bitcoin Cash.
Right, the double spend attack. It's feasible under certain circumstances, such as a chain split. That doesn't mean the system breaks down completely, but that it has to be mitigated. In the event of a multi hour long network partition, some participants are likely to take action.
> they would have the incentive to follow the partitioned chain and promote the forked software because their money doesn't exist on the main chain
My point was that their money do exist on both chains as long as transactions are replayed. That may be more or less hard depending on the nature of the split (say, a whole country falls on the Internet completely). Economic participants do have an incentive to replay transactions (for example by following the satellite feed, or a number of other ways).
It is enough that one participant does this to at least give everyone else the possibility to mitigate themselves. Not a good situation to be in, of course, but still. It doesn't require nodes to follow both chains, and certainly not promote minority chains. There is simply no economic incentive to do that should transactions be guaranteed on both chains.
If you think that is possible then you must not have paid attention to how blockchains work. By definition there is only one chain and it is always the longest chain in the network. The shorter chain will always be discarded and all the data within it is lost. Now we have a problem. Can't everyone just create their own chain with garbage data and then win by being the biggest spammer? (also known as 51% attack). This is why proof of work is necessary. It is basically a cryptographic lottery that ensures that there will only be one winner every 10 minutes. Since there will never be more than 1 winner there will also never be more than one longest chain. If you decide to disconnect from the network and solve the POW offline your chain will always be much shorter than the main chain. Only if you possess 51% of the miners can you do this offline attack and control which chain becomes the new one. It is possible to rewrite past transactions as well. Just start mining 3 blocks ago and remove transactions or add new ones. However, this becomes harder and harder the older the transaction is. Finding e.g. 10 blocks takes such a huge amount of mining resources that it is infeasible if don't control at least a super majority.
Maybe you mean that bitcoin doesn’t have value outside of its ostensive monetary value. Bitcoin has that too. It can back up data to thousands of locations and be censorship resistant and have a verifiable timestamp.
Also, left out of this discussion is the fact that gold is actually tangible, divorced from some weird semantic backflips. You can build useful things with it.
Also: gold can easily be confiscated and it has been before - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102.
How much gold do you think you can travel with? Think the TSA would allow even $100k of gold to be carried on your person?
Given golds limited supply, why has the price been relatively stable in dollars (which are unlimited)? Because the gold market can easily be manipulated because central banks and Govs hold most of the supply and they can, and do, suppress with targeted market supply flooding.
No, we don't, which is exactly why gold is considered superior.
Holders of gold maintain custody at risk of physical confiscation.
Holders of Bitcoin maintain custody (of the password that allows spending said Bitcoin) and are cannot he compelled one way or another. The bitcoin moves when they say so.
There's four things in play in this discussion, and they each fit those ideas differently. Paper dollars in the hand, digital dollars in a wallet, gold in the hand, and bitcoin. This discussion would be over if better definitions of 'ownership' were used.
A vanishingly small percent of gold's value is attributable to its industrial use. Of all the gold ever mined in history, only something like 1% has been used in an industrial or construction context.
Maybe if you extend "useful things" to jewelry you might have a point. But almost assuredly jewelry is made out of gold because gold is expensive and valuable. Not the other way around.
If everyone on Earth tomorrow forgot about gold's historical role as a store of value, it might be worth $50 an ounce at most.
https://medium.com/coinmonks/bitcoin-has-no-intrinsic-value-...
>Bitcoin let’s you store $1T USD of dollars in your head, transport it anywhere in the world, and there’s not a single thing anyone else can do about it.
It's amazing how easy gray matter cryptography can be broken using a cheap $5 wrench.
So true too. At the end of the day, digital security must be reinforced with physical security and good opsec.
I'm also sure trying to cash that out is going to be as easy as taking money out of an ATM
Unless you "cash out" in USDT (tether) or something similarly fake
$500M transferred for less than $400 on 7/29/19 - https://twitter.com/whale_alert/status/1155808847908544512?s...
There are many of these, and they are increasing.
Cashing out large sums is done over the counter, not through regular on/off ramps (as in your ATM example). Bitcoin is legal in the US, so I'm not sure how suspicion plays into it.
The rich play by different rules than you and I.
Also, it's $250M now due to the 50% drop in the last half hour, so in a way, they paid $250M for that transfer.
The 'transportability' of the asset is really a secondary feature when talking of 'stores of wealth'.
Gold is obviously terribly difficult to move around, but that's fine, it's stored in large vaults and we make agreements as to 'who owns it'. Just as BTC implies a kind of 'contract' so does Gold ownership, they just take different forms.
The value of Gold and BTC will be a function of their perception as a credible long-term source of value. BTC will not achieve the status of Gold for a very long time, and it's unlikely it ever will. I wouldn't write it off entirely, but it's basically not a relevant instrument at this time.
As a currency BTC is probably dead for a variety of reasons, but it could come back in those terms, in which case, we'll view it differently.
But the world is not going to value BTC materially differently due to how it's 'transported'. We can trade Gold in mostly the same way.
"Bitcoin let’s you store $1T USD of dollars in your head, transport it anywhere in the world, and there’s not a single thing anyone else can do about it"
Yes, there is 'something' we can do about it, and that's to collectively not care a single bit about the magic number in said BTC holder's 'head'.
That's going to be pretty hard to do when all bitcoins have a combined "worth" of 92B.
Bitcoin has no intrinsic value in that it only exists due to artificial demand, e.g. if someone invented a better digital currency, Bitcoin's demand would evaporate and all BTC's would be worthless. It's nothing like Gold which is one of the most useful precious metals with usages beyond a storage of value.
How much of that 1T dollars would you keep after you try to pump it into bitcoin and then try to pump it out?
They reflect different threat models. If you believe that governments will get swept away by the global market-state, Bitcoin is your asset. If you believe that society will crumble and we'll be back to trading with other villages, gold is your asset.
But why would a modern apocalypse look identical to the 1600's? I think some tidbits of technologies we've gained since then would be scrapped together by industrious survivors.
What was used for "currency" in prior dark ages before the 1600's? I'm guessing it didn't pan out well for the guy who stockpiled cowrie shells in between.
Populations tend to the hardest money. Bitcoin cannot be undiscovered.
But you're right that Bitcoin cannot be undiscovered. It wouldn't surprise me if the dominant currency would be some other cryptocurrency with built-in inflation (maybe ETH, maybe XLM) that remained outside of the ability of some single entity to cause runaway inflation.
Elsewhere in the thread a lot of people say that gold has real tangible value. Sort of. It's tangible in that you can hold it in your hand and have physical possession of it. But "value" is always in the eye of the beholder - currencies are valuable if other people think they are valuable. With today's world, there's no guarantee that'd be gold - it could be silver, or cowrie shells, or bullets, or cigarettes, or Juul pods, or USB sticks, or n95 masks.
A digital one.
The idea that gold gets its value because it's a tangible asset is wrong. Gold, as a lot of other things, gets most of its value from speculation. The real difference between gold and Bitcoin is the market size, maturity and general trust in gold that people have.
Also, if someone handed you a shiny yellow object saying it's gold, you'd still need to verify it with a chemical or physical test requiring a bunch of paraphernalia, much like the cryptographic proof required for bitcoin (requiring, in turn, the internet, a computer etc).
Not saying that bitcoin is a great asset, but it shares common problems with gold, albeit in a more "virtual" domain.
I fail to see how. I know a number of people who trade gold online and it is definitely not a tangible asset to them.
Even if it was, so what? I really don't get this point. Scarcity is what gives value to gold, if it wasn't then anything tangible would have value.
If there's less miners the mining difficulty goes down. If there's _really_ no miners left, you can mine alone on an old laptop AFAIK. For mining to completely stop bitcoins price would effectively need to be 0.
If it's living space, that's rental value right there. If it's production hardware, depends on what you produce, from which sources and how easy it is to reconfigure. Farming assets can become extremely valuable. If the asset is a stockpile of a good, again, some goods can become very valuable.
Owned land, depends, unless it's somehow prepared it's likely not useful.
Assets such as office space, hardware and supplies, not so valuable.
(But being good to your family, having low or no debt and some prudent food storage are also wise, among other things our church has counseled us for a long time). (Edit: and savings "for a rainy day".)
(Edit: This is considering the definition of "cash" to be not just paper in your hand, but as a regulated currency whether paper or in a bank. Further clarification in another reply just below.)
More generally, in times where people would rather have useful things like food, tools, and gas than pieces of paper you'll be screwed if cash is all you have - because there's going to be one hell of a price hike. Even more so because economic output is likely to go down.
Then in case the crisis gets really bad it'll turn out you can't eat cash. Nobody is going to hand over food or other useful things in exchange for a few bits of paper with questionable value.
This may be happening in some limited fashion even in the current crisis. My country still has its own currency within EU, and is undergoing unprecedented levels of lockdown over the last few days. The currency is already tanking compared to Euro (lost 4% over a few days), as people stockpile stuff.
Not that I think that a liquidity crunch is happening right now anyways since liquidity is readily available if we judge by the Fed rates and how commited towards supporting the repo markets they seem to be. And even just the psychological effect of that strong Fed support make everyone feel safer about their liquidity levels, which makes a run for cash even less likely! Liquidity is probably the biggest self-fulfilling prophecy in Finance.
Cash is filthy bacteria rags that are pure liquidity. Contactless and Cashless solutions are the future.
You're missing an important piece of the puzzle. People want to trade for something that they perceive to have more value than the thing they are trading. This can't work if you have an infinite dollar printer (or magic numbers somewhere on the internet) because the money will be perceived as worthless (or will become worthless in the not so distant future).
The future is being able to trade something which is perceived as holding (or accruing) value which can't be arbitrarily reduced by policy-makers, and also is highly liquid, difficult to forge, easy to verify, low-cost to transact, and can be used as payment for most services. Any guesses as to what this might be?
The Fed has been very active in repo markets since last fall and has aggressively ramped up operations. As an armchair fake-economist, that sort of thing signals that banks are reducing loans between themselves because they don't want to be low on cash when stuff hits the fan. Reducing in available loans -> pretty high interest rates -> Fed stepping in to float the cash and buy some bonds.
Perhaps someone closer to the money will chime in here with corrections/details but this smells like the big banks expect unpleasant times ahead (remember this started before Covid19)
And if anything, the Fed interventionist policies are a good sign. You could argue that it is bad for the Fed to intervene in the economy during bull markets and periods of economic growth, but for situations like these the Fed can be a huge factor in avoiding a collapse of credit and liquidity. If credit stays available there is little reason to believe the economy will be affected by anything more than what the virus directly causes. So structural collapse of the financial system/job market like that of 2008 is unlikely as long as credit is readily available to corporations and banks.
Could you please explain this sentence? What is a stock to flow ratio? How/why is the well-knownness of it matters? How scarcity builds on top of this?
I don't know why you are getting downvoted :(
Also, why would the price go up in May after the halving? Why would people just start to buy BTC? Okay, sure the graph say it will, and negative interest rates and so on. But gold seems to hold better. ( https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=qlDu ) Maybe it's just because BTC is not hundreds of years old and this shock led people to cater to their primal instincts and hoard papers about shiny things.
We shall see.
Yes, in a liquidity crisis, cash is king, but Gold will usually retain its value through hard times.
Bitcoin is a meme compared to Gold. There are very few people who would consider it a meaningful asset, it's really a 'good economy speculation'. In a few hundred years and several massive crises if BTC is still around, then maybe.
BTC is not Gold, they are not in the same category.
:)
:)
For example, see fixed income and dividend paying companies.
The section on how Angola Penitentiary's underground economy changed overnight from Cigarettes to Ramen/Mackerel and Bitcoin-like-cyphers is amazing stuff.
https://www.econtalk.org/richard-davies-on-extreme-economies...
To me it seems much more likely the large exchanges just dumped in order to make a killing off the leveraged longs.
So in short people did actually believe in it as a shore of wealth and exchanges manipulated this belief in order to selfishly profit.
This isn’t something that was easy to predict, my comment is obviously a reflection of what happened today but I think it’s the most logical explanation.
And other cryptocurrencies are still very much tied to BTC, so when BTCUSD falls dramatically, they do as well.
I haven't seen anyone with strong reason to believe that companies are gonna be that much worse off a year from now than they were a month ago, or for the four years after that, so I don't see a reason to sell stocks based on expected company performance anymore than to sell crypto - but in the short term, everyone's stockpiling immediate goods.
Crypto is more purely speculative, with no real underlying value aside from the hope that it will some day become the fiat currency of some nation. (Fiat currencies have a "value" in that they are the only thing a government will accept.)
So it's possible that people are seeing bargains in another market. They need to move through fiat currency in order to buy it, but they don't hold it long enough for inflationary measures by central banks to affect it.
The simple answer is that the quoted text isn't even a concern in your average investors head. Also why gold isn't doing great, and why the US dollar is doing just fine.
People are escaping equities specifically, not the dollar.
edit: If i had to guess, people are probably looking to maximize cash on hand with the goal of "buying the dip" when it looks like the market is going to bottom out.
Also, you may think everyone else is going to be "irrational" in this way, and wish to get out before they do. Sort of like buying toilet paper because you're worried about everybody else hoarding toilet paper.
Also, there is a clear difference in underlying value. Bitcoins value is entirely speculative. The US dollars value is guaranteed by the US government, which in turn is underpinned by real economic assets of the American economy and its firms and so on. Which are very much real and not imaginary.
Money has different functions, where store of value, unit of account and medium of exchange are the popular ones. And they have different properties, such as acceptable, fungible, durable and divisible and others (properties also differ.)
The big point is that these are subjective, and exists on a scale, and they vary from community to community. Cigarettes can be considered a currency in some prisons for example.
> Bitcoin is not really a means of transaction except for illegal ones where people are willing to accept the high fees.
I never mentioned Bitcoin. There are many other cryptocurrencies with low fees.
And I've bought VPNs, VPS, domains and computers with them, purchases that are completely legal.
> The US dollars value is guaranteed by the US government
The dollar will only hold value as people believe that the government can manage the dollar correctly, so my statement still holds. There's nothing intrinsically valuable with a dollar note.
No, it doesn't because not every form of belief is equally justified. If you believe your currency has value because the Aztec god of fertility has bestowed value upon it then you'll have a problem when you figure it that not everyone agrees.
The American government and the American economy underpinning the dollar however represent vital goods and services as well as security provided and have an army to back it up so the chance that it magically loses all its value is just about nil.
A mistaken assumption, common among crypto folks for very obvious reasons is that just because a system is the result of social consensus, all such systems are of equal status and equally risky. This is not so.
That there are different confidence levels in our beliefs doesn't refute my point that it's fundamentally about collective beliefs.
I do agree that the chance that the dollar loses all it's value is about nil.
It doesn't need to lose all of its value at once. It just needs to lose some value frequently enough that some people decide "hold on a minute, this is an unjust tax I'm facing on my savings," and will look for an alternative where they are not taxed so heavily.
As far as the dollar value is concerned you care if the milk and the orange juice cost roughly as much this month as they do next month, there is this weird crypto and gold obsession with long sterm steady value that's not relevant at all for fiat currency.
Understanding and accepting are different things. I might know that the dollar is going to inflate by 1-2% every year, but I don't agree that this should be the case. There exists no avenue for me to opt-out of this either, because it is the policy of both parties, but not the policy of either party - it is instituted by an unelected chamber by which I have no say as to who makes the decisions. Hence, an unjust tax - it is taxation without representation.
This unjust tax also benefits the early receivers of newly printed money at the expense of the later receivers who bear the additional costs. (The Cantillon Effect).
The predictable rate of inflation is also only predictable during periods of economic success. If the economy begins to tank, we can see that the inflation becomes very unpredictable. There are countless cases of hyperinflation in the last century alone which we can take as evidence that centrally controlled supply of money isn't particularly stable.
The dollar is perhaps an exception due to it being the global reserve, but this also means it is potentially of much greater risk if this MMT experiment turns out to be a massive failure, which to me appears inevitable, and is more of a question of when than if.
> As far as the dollar value is concerned you care if the milk and the orange juice cost roughly as much this month as they do next month, there is this weird crypto and gold obsession with long sterm steady value that's not relevant at all for fiat currency.
You're making the implicit assumption that the price of milk and orange juice won't change by much month to month, but this is absolutely not the case in places where hyperinflation has hit. The price can change week to week, day to day, but you can be almost certain that your wage isn't going to follow the price hikes. It isn't a "weird obsession" to consider that the dollar may face the same fate as dozens of other currencies. In fact, the historical evidence of currencies not hyper-inflating is the one we should bring into question - and the dollar as we know it has been around for less than half a century. It is no less of an experiment than Bitcoin.
yes it is when my alternative is cryptocurrencies traded by nerds who want to buy lambos while I don't even know if its value is up 50% or down 50% week to week and every transaction costs me dollars.
The US dollar is one of the most stable and predictable currencies that we have and it has been for decades, as are most other major currencies or baskets of assets or what have you. There is no worry for hyper-inflation and even if there was, don't hold your entire assets in dollars and you're fine
A slowdown in money laundering activity (as would be expected during an extended period of restriction of goods and services) would lead to a rapid drop in crypto prices.
Also it’s highly unlikely a bank could hold vast BTC reserves without the regulators finding out about it. Anyway BTC is used for money laundering, but that doesn’t require holding reserves. Most money laundering transactions transit into and out of BTC very quickly. The only reason to keep BTC for very long is speculation.
The reason was that people needed to sell their "winners" in order to cover their "losers". Stocks were down, they sold gold which was way up at that point to cover some of the losses and get cash.
Let's say you want a 1:1 cash value ratio between stocks and gold. If stocks go up and gold goes down: sell stocks, buy gold. If stocks crash and gold spikes: sell gold, buy stocks. It's an easy way to buy high and sell low without going to extremes.
I’m not one to get involved in any type of trading personally, as I don’t trust myself, so this is outside of my space. Please excuse and correct me if I misused any terminology or don’t understand stuff. Some of my family is heavily invested in crypto, so I like to know what is going on.
Anyway, does my assessment sound accurate to you? I would love to see you expand on this.
Given that Futures now have the most open interest, I'd say the long/short ratio is practically equal these days in Bitcoin land.
> Do you believe it’s likely that the crash was intentional with the large exchanges pushing the price down on various exchanges to make money off the leveraged longs?
No. Only bad traders will say that! I don't think there is any kind of price meddling from the exchanges themselves. Any exchange that does that will end up burning to the ground eventually (and there were exchanges that did that). The reason is, a single exchange will unlikely be able to move the price to the sought after direction. Given that trading is distributed through multiple exchanges that are in different jurisdiction, I can hardly see them colluding to manipulate the price.
> Some of my family is heavily invested in crypto, so I like to know what is going on.
God help them.
Imagine if someone started a stock exchange and listed a single stock, their own, the stock for the exchange itself, and no one else's. While you can buy some things with bitcoin or ethereum, it's nowhere near widespread, so that really seems to be effectively what it functions as for now, which looks very bizarre on its face. Unfortunately for the people who do want to get rich, if there is an eventual winner in crypto, their rise will probably look something like what we see now, limited buy in from speculators followed by some inflection point, so it's entirely possible buying this dip of ethereum or some other coin might be the right thing, but I'm just not sure any of them are ready yet. Even with SegWit and other stuff happening in bitcoin, it just isn't clear to me that becoming a cash or credit card replacement system is even the goal anymore, which seems like they are just riding on their first mover advantage to prop up the value more than anything at this point.
Note: reposting this from the stock trading halt discussion after its parent appears to have been deleted.
Probably, but whatever it is, it won't be Bitcoin and some magic software updates won't make your Bitcoins turn into whatever cryptocurrency-ish thing wins.
The other thing to remember is that cash doesn't appreciate in value. (In the US, we typically have 4% inflation every year.) If a cryptocurrency is going to work for day-to-day commerce, its value needs to be rather steady. (Either low inflation or low deflation.) This means you can't just stick a bunch of cryptocurrency in your wallet and expect it to make you rich overnight.
(Note: We don't have a lot of experience with deflation as "normal" in modern economies, so if crypocurrency comes with low deflation, like we have low inflation, we'll all have to adjust our expectations with money.)
Crypto usually rallies when the Fed undergoes extensive QE for a long period of time but the current popular crypto’s have flaws.
> The fraudsters may have then sold off the bitcoins, causing prices to fall as supply flooded the market, according to Singhal.
May have? Is this anything more than pure speculation? I mean, I am a very, very big fan of using time to correlate events ("what changed"), so the mixing is certainly a signal, but how good of a signal? Why highlight PlusToken vs bitcoin holders en masse wanting to get cash out thanks to the market downturn?
No it's not. The Bitcoin market is the exact opposite: it's unnecessary and of little consequential tangible value to the real economy. The regular equity markets have a large share of the productive output of nations behind them, including the employment and taxation that goes with that. Companies that actually produce goods and services. In many cases goods and services that people and other businesses have to purchase or otherwise heavily depend on.
None of that is true about Bitcoin. It could disappear tomorrow and other than the lost capital trapped in it, it wouldn't matter in a meaningful way; and it wouldn't matter at all to the average person. The masses of people do not need it, they do not depend on it. Government revenue does not depend on it. The lives of billions of people do not depend on it.
Now, for comparison, shut down the top five farm tractor manufacturing companies. Shut down Airbus and Boeing. Shut down Walmart, Costco, Target, and Amazon. Shut down every dental office. Shut down every auto manufacturing company and witness the industrial effects including unemployment. Close every power plant. Shut down the telecom companies and every media company. Shut down every publicly traded energy company. Close every publicly traded bank and financial firm. Close every publicly traded agricultural company including the major food producers.
Compare that to Bitcoin vanishing tomorrow. By comparison, it would have zero consequence, it would not matter at all in any grand scheme of things.
That's because Bitcoin is a zero-sum game. No value is created or lost, it's basically just a big game of poker.
I was astonished when Bitcoin rose above $30 so calling it a "crash" at $6,000 might be somewhat accurate short-term, but anything over $0.00 for randomized bits on a hard drive will always seem bananas to me.
I'll happily buy the randomized bits making up your debit card number and PIN for $0.00
My wife's boss has been spending a good bit of his workdays lately tracking and buying gold. But not buying physical gold. Just buying a promise from some agent that he owns some gold. Of course, that's not going to do him any good in a crisis; you can't eat gold, you can't drink it, pretty sure you can't wipe your ass with it. You can only trade it. And when resources become scarce, utility becomes far more important than value. And gold certificates, or whatever, will become even less desirable.
The Postman, while it was resoundingly mocked as a movie, was a really chilling book that dealt with what happens when you get to that point.
A crisis can just destroy regulated banking.
...
You should be.
Turns out humans are selfish and emotional, who would have thought?
Besides selling at market the handful of coins they mine, by what mechanism can miners control the price?
It's non-workable anyway. If any miner has to drop out of the race, they still have an inventory of mining equipment to auction off. The highest bidder is simply going to put that equipment to reuse immediately, so there will be no meaningful reduction in overall hash rate. Any miner who attempted to cause the price of bitcoin to slump has simply shot themselves in the foot.
If the dollar cost of Bitcoin does not continue to increase sufficiently over time, Bitcoin is dead and every businessman who took out loans to buy mining equipment is going to default.
The large majority of the liquidity was on longs today.
If it can't go up during a global crisis or EVEN be resilient.. then it's proven it's just a house of cards.
Crypto technology itself has value, but not in most of it's current forms as some magical gambling currency/asset.
When everything gets locked down cash is what you need
GPU prices goes down...
As China is shut down and can't make mew GPUs.
Linus Tech Tips has a good video what the shutdown affects: it suppliers of suppliers are slowed down due to quarantine, then they're in trouble too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPoPwrQwm_g
Well here we are. certified 100% organic Unfolding Global Pandemic and the cute bonus of teetering on the brink of a global recession. And what does Bitcoin do with all the rest of its cousins?...... It simply shits the bed.
This was your shining moment crypto, and so far you've turned out even worse than the stock market.