I don’t have any kids to feed, just young dumb and tired of market crashes.
HN is only a step above CNN when it comes to trustworthiness on this specific topic.
Irrespective of your attitude to an unheard-of coin, the situation rather epitomises the problem many have with crypto. They start off as penny stocks, but people expect them all to rocket to Fortune 500 levels for no good reason other than all the other gullible idiots pumping their savings into them, forgetting in their greed that it's quite as easy to start a run if you have enough.
Before you know it —and I very much mean you there— they're trading at $120 with a cap of $32bn before the floor drops out. I know a cap isn't tangible value but none of this stuff is. That didn't stop this being a top 10 crypto currency at one point.
It's all Monopoly money. You can get rich trading it, but you can also lose everything. A lot of people are getting fractions of a penny on their dollar investment. All because, what? It stinks of pump and dump. It all stinks of pump and dump.
Pile on the environmental disaster that is proof of work, and you should be able to see why people hate crypto. It's weirder that more people don't but on investigation that's usually because they have skin in the game.
https://mobile.twitter.com/patdennis/status/1518637225789042...
Sick of people calling everything in crypto a Ponzi scheme. Some crypto projects are pump and dump schemes, while others are pyramid schemes. Others are just standard issue fraud. Others are just middlemen skimming of the top. Stop glossing over the diversity in the industry.That's not what I'm saying. I consider myself fairly active in the space, and I hadn't heard a peep about this coin until it blew up. I doubt most on HN had either, but that won't stop the doomers.
Isn't it a problem with "the space" that any old Gigachad and his drawful of sockpuppets can jump on a nobody-coin that's been doing nothing for three years, and in 12 months of frothing, pump it up to a top-10 coin, and dump out their holding for a few billion dollars and "active in the space" people like you don't even notice?
Thousands more of these things are being minted every week. Thousands more opportunities to suck in "investors at the ground floor".
I don't think it's fair to label critics as doomers. We just don't see the value you do, or at least, our accounting puts the very visible and very recurrent harms of crypto above their potential benefits.
Luna something like the 15th
They were absolutely major players and not a "random shitcoin"
Safety is dangerous.
Which is as much as an unfounded absolutism as stating the opposite. While there's not fundamental limit to what you're saying, there might be qualitative differences though going forward: I can still go into a store these days and buy tulip bulbs, it just doesn't cost me two salaries...
The service seems to have been making it possible for people to sell their coins directly to one another. (Crypto exchanges hold your crypto and don't do an actual transaction through the block chain until you withdraw what you have. Though they could still guarantee not losing your coins if they go bankrupt...)
This is what they said about it:
> Are my funds safe?
> We don’t hold customer funds – at the time of the trade, we send the cryptocurrency directly to your wallet. If you need to execute a trade at this time, other platforms can facilitate this.
Crypto can go to zero and the world will continue on.
I don't think it will affect markets much. There are only a few companies involved. Most of the money is from the retail investors, and that money is already gone. The crypto exchange balances going to zero won't change things much as those are mostly imaginary numbers anyway.
That’s roughly the entire GDP of France. If France’s economy poofed out of existence or halved in value, that’d be a huge shake up.
The market cap of a stock (shares outstanding x share price) makes sense because each share represents a piece of the profits of the company and an ownership stake. If you took away half of the shares, the price per share would ~double and the market cap would remain the same since it's based on current cash + projections about the future profitability of the company, and the share price reflects those expectations. None of that is true for crypto.
Financially illiterate crypto people started multiplying the coin price x number of coins outstanding and calling that a "market cap" but there's nothing underlying the crypto world. Owning a bitcoin doesn't represent a percentage profit of some underlying economic activity that's being independently valued, coins are zero coupon bearer instruments, the value is in the coin itself. It's like talking about the "market cap" of pesos, just incoherent and easily gameable.
https://www.ft.com/content/eac0e56c-f30b-4591-b603-f971e60dc...
He’s the CEO of one of the largest and most established crypto exchanges. The interview is stunning.
I remember a guy on HN a year or two ago who was very proud of the ICO he ran in 2017. The token was useless, investors lost their money, and he was fined something around a million dollars by the SEC. But to him that was a mark of pride, like he fought The Man and won. His excuse for scamming investors was basically “startups fail too, I’m a founder.”
The toxic startup hustle exemplified by Uber and some other companies ten years ago directly led to the utter moral collapse in crypto.
And like, if you're a crypto true-believer, any crash that may or may not happen this year probably doesn't mean too much: the surge in prices wasn't because of any particularly groundbreaking developments in terms of the main long-term pitches (e.g. "new financial infrastructure for the world"), even NFTs seemed to really follow the price run-up, not lead to it. It really looks more just like a lot of people gambling with cash to burn in a situation where a lot of traditional entertainment was less attractive if not outright restrictive. So keep your head down and keep building...
But building a trading platform then talking shit about stuff that as far as I can tell you are making money off of trading (e.g. Luna, https://help.ftx.com/hc/en-us/articles/4491807784852-FTX-wil... )... that just seems begging for trouble.
Perhaps it's excessive pattern matching, but it's hard not to see a civic relationship between the (correct) perception of startups as underhanded and the rise of an entire industry of scammers who will do and say anything to get ahead.
So the view from the inside, like what a VC sees, is that everybody is piling up and it's so so easy to say "I've got hot shit" and you have to be like "yeah maybe." A lot of the time "don't pitch me bro." And set it up like a nightclub, realistically none of the founders will have real tech without getting it from real researchers, so they have to impress you with how well they work the club. Now that I say that I'm figuring out my own strat too, treat it like a club.
So the second secret, don't tell anybody, don't link to this comment, close the doors, unplug the ethernet, turn on the wifi jammers, put your smartphones in the faraday cage, the secret is: everybody wants you to lose. Everybody wants you to lose. Just like in a club. When you accept that, it's so much easier! The entire club wants you to prove you're a lesser man, like sit next to the bar waste your money on drinks (never on a hotel), parade in circles concentrically around the women dancing with their clique of girlfriends in the middle, asking like once or twice and feeling bad for months about being rejected, that's what the club wants the men to do. And there is violence at the club, it's not like "the worst that can happen is she says no" that's a load of shit, it depends on a lot of things.
So it's the same adversarial environment, everything going against you. Realize that, and it's suddenly much easier.
"Market cap" estimates assume that everyone could sell without the price moving. It's going to be far more sensitive to price changes than an actual country's GDP, it's based on what current trading prices are.
And Bitcoin, unlike a company with a huge market cap, isn't providing goods or services. E.g. if Apple disappeared into thin air, everyone hoping to buy new Apple phones or computers would be dramatically affected and that would have a ton of ripple effects. But if Apple's sales dropped to 0 and then they went out of business, their valuation would be down to 0 but a lot of people would've recouped some of their investment on the way down - the people selling earlier being better off than the ones later. This is a crazy scenario, though, since they're sales wouldn't go to 0 overnight.
So who's actually relying on Bitcoin? Some companies in the space, sure. Probably a bunch of individuals who did stuff like use bitcoin as part of their wealth portfolio when taking out loans. But if those people had those holdings wiped out, will the ramifications be huge? My guess is probably not but I don't actually know how many people would, for instance, be unable to pay their mortgage if their crypto holdings imploded.
(This will be interesting to see if a crash does happen: in a world where you believe prices always go up, the "clever" move is to not sell your bitcoin, but to borrow against it, so it appreciates in the background still. But in a world where there's a crash, this could leave you worse off than before, the debt won't go away just because the price fell.)
~$7500 (Dec 2019) to ~$35000 (May 2022)
You can even see it on your chart.
How is the late-2019 starting point relevant?
I guess it was about 10 % at some point not too long ago?
So you won't see much effect in the real economy.
There is absurd amounts of Crypto lending that's probably causing a lot of margin calls forcing a negative feedback loop in Crypto prices.
Everytime this happened before - the Central Bank of Tether came to the rescue and printed 10% of the entire Crypto market cap in ~2 days to pump up the market ~30%.
Time will tell if they have the balls to do this now - when they're already under investigation in many jurisdictions.
If you are big into an altcoin, prepare for that to go up in smoke the next few months.
If you hold a lot of Bitcoin, make peace with it losing over 75% of value in the next few months. It’s going back to pre-covid levels at best.
It looks exactly like Robinhood (a liquidity issue), but without the faceless an unaccountable entity sitting behind them telling them to suspend trading.
These guys appear to be acting as middlemen between their New Zealand customers and several exchanges. Bank transfers take days to finalize (and weeks to settle), so their business appears to be built around capitalizing on that time opportunity and allowing their customers to lock-in quotes without having to wait for their funds to appear in their exchange account if they dealt directly with an exchange.
While the crypto markets are stable and the volume is predictable, everything is fine and they can maintain a balance on their exchanges and in their bank account. A sudden surge in volume (due to a massive price swing) means having to close shop and suspend trading while the transfer from exchange to bank account (or the other way) finalizes.
yes, this is absolutely in context indicative of the speculative circus ending.
Everyone knows the coyote has been running in air, waiting for various planks of a putative bridge to somewhere to materialize; those who put money into this vision who do not have it out now, will not get it back in a meaningful time frame, modulo dead cat bounce.
IMO "hodling" anything other than the most conservative (sic) of "coins" means taking a total loss. Bitcoin and Ethereum and a few others may crawl back over a few years; whether there is appetitive for another bubble with them is TBD.
It is not rational to believe their putative utility will emerge in that time; any future run up will merely be another round of speculation..
When Fed interest rates are low and credit is cheap, money supply increases and more of it flows into higher risk/return assets like crypto and drives their prices up.
When Fed interest rates go up and credit becomes more expensive, money supply decreases and funds flow out of high risk assets like crypto, driving their price down.
The current bear market will last as long as the Fed continues raising interest rates, then turn back into a bull market when that reverses. Unless there's a war going on, in which case all bets are off.
Of course, I didn't move my money into crypto so that might be the reason.
You can buy the dip! /s