Major crypto lender Celsius freezes withdrawals as markets tumble
reuters.com
reuters.com
The whole idea of a "defined benefit" pension seems insane to me. It's essentially a promise that some entity will still exist and be solvent in 40+ years (start teaching around 22, retire around 65...)
People that manage expensive assets are not punished if they make bad decisions
What's absolutely bunkers is that no major Quebec news sites are talking about this news this morning. La Presse, Journal de Montreal, TVA, nothing. (TVA is mentioning that the crypto market is down and casually mention la Caisse investment down in the article, but it's hardly an important news) Radio-Canada did make a major investigation into this investment few weeks ago (how timely!) but has yet to update it https://ici.radio-canada.ca/recit-numerique/4095/caisse-depo...
Pensions are extremely difficult to pitch for any sort of deal, even when it’s safe and makes sense. There is definitely some sort of back-channel relationship that led to this deal. You need to figure out how this happened, because there’s likely to be more of this sort of corrupt junk in your pension’s portfolio.
You should also question how economically benefiting from proof of stake mining has any place in any fund that purports to care about ESG (that applies to everyone!).
But your money is definitely gone.
Now, on the other hand, forcing everyone to invest in that fund 10% of their earnings, considering the huge amount of risk they are taking and the very speculative nature of their investments... that sounds like something else that would be great to challenge in courts.
Canadian pension funds are run more akin to a private equity firm. They invest directly in growth stage deals and therefore take commensurate risks like any other private equity firm.
That means that they make bets with more asymmetric risks and balance their entire portfolio rather than staying at a specific risk band with all of their investments. They pay for professional staff commensurate with that model. A canadian pension fund's employees earn salary and bonuses comparable to a investment bank or private equity firm.
You can't necessarily look at one off investments and have to look at return over time which is generally healthy and their funding ratio, which is generally much healthier than US pension counterparts.
There is a reason the "Canadian Model" is held up as one of the ideal pension management models.
Why would this model be held up as the ideal, and by whom? Why would pensioners be better served by expensive and underperforming active management rather than more cheaply balancing risk through a pension manager picking a balance of index funds and periodically rebalancing?
Perhaps I’m missing a crucial detail unique to pensions, but it just sounds like yet more expensive financial industry snake oil to me.
FTA:
"Canada is home to some of the world’s most admired and successful public pension organizations" and "The core characteristics of the Canadian pension model, articulated in more detail in the next section, have been demonstrated to improve performance. Strong, independent governance is often cited by experts as a driver of outperformance. Inhouse investment management tends to result in improved returns after taking costs into account."
The pension funds all take a much more broadly diversified AND deeper approach than actively managed mutual funds. They are more akin to a Blackstone or Apollo.
Almost all of the top Canadian pension funds have better performance to benchmark over a 3 decade horizon including during the financial crisis, so arguably the proof is in the pudding so to speak.
Bitcoin et al are a Paypal killer, as in a low cost way to transmit currency or whatever, but you can do that in other less wasteful ways.
It's a shame what it turned into is something people place on comprmised mnachines to silently siphon up CPU cycles for profit.
(Especially since often those profits went towards things like Juche nukes.)
You're talking about Proof of Stake or you imagine some other novel way of transferring currency digitally, without centralization and securely?
It takes nearly half of the US budget with their military to secure the USD value by destabilizing poor countries and exploiting them for their crude oil, which is the most traded commodity in the world by fiat. In relation it's trivial to dissociate your identity from crypto you own, making it impossible for someone to prove you have crypto to steal, even with a gun to your head. All secured by harmless nerds using fractions of a percent of the worlds electricity usage, which doesn't even begin to approach the electricity the military utilizes from even a single one of the largest militarized nations.
It's obvious to me that neither of these are honest positions to take in a debate about the benefits and costs of these classes of assets.
The US is a net exporter of oil and has been for years now.
Are you joking or do you not realize that the Onion is satire?
The US spends a little less than 12% of its annual budget on its military
I think one would find it very hard to argue that military spending is discretionary for any major nation in the layman sense of that word, even if the US's military spending is beyond control (on the flip side, the US also gets much less value for its military spending relative to say the value China gets for its military spending).
The value of a national currency is a reflection of the rest of the world's confidence in that nation to meet its obligations. The money is essentially a marker for future goods and services.
The US military's reason for being is to protect the US from other nations, thereby keeping the US's resources available for its own use, its citizens capable of performing services, etc. It is also used to secure US interests abroad. Having its current resources, a populace capable of processing those resources, and the ability to acquire more is the reason the rest of the world is confident in our ability to provide future goods and services. A marker for US resources is a solid bet. That marker is called the US Dollar. Ergo, the military's job is to secure the dollar.
That's the rough train of thought that leads you to claiming that every dollar spent on defense is a dollar spent on defending the dollar.
How would thousands of computers spinning in circles computing useless sha hashes protect your national borders, coasts, and other physical assets, resources and people?
And it's not the defense that's the issue, it's the money spent on the defense that they're comparing. They're saying that while crypto may cost $X to support, it's less than $Y where $Y is the total expenditure of the US Army.
For example, Linux has fewer desktop viruses written to target it than Windows, which is a big part of why it can be a good security decision to use Linux. And genuinely, regardless of the reason, Linux desktop environments do tend to have fewer viruses targettng them.
However, the reason why Linux has fewer desktop viruses is because it's not the OS that most ordinary people use, so it would be incorrect for people to say, "Linux should be the dominant OS for everyone because it has fewer viruses." Because if it was the dominant desktop OS that everyone used, it would have more viruses. Primarily targeting Windows is an effect of malware authors wanting to target as many people as possible. But Windows is not the cause of them writing viruses, they are not writing viruses because they want to target Windows, they want to target people and they use Windows to do so.
And in the same way, in theory yeah, you could look at something like Bitcoin and say that it's not being used in the same ways that the USD to fund certain actions/industries. But to argue that Bitcoin is a better currency because it doesn't get used to fund military spending... The military uses the USD to accomplish its goals. The USD is not itself the goal.
Like you said:
> The value of a national currency is a reflection of the rest of the world's confidence in that nation to meet its obligations.
The US would still want to signal and defend that confidence in a world where it used Bitcoin. So really when we talk about the cost and energy use of Bitcoin, we're assuming that in a world where Bitcoin was the dominant US currency those energy costs would be in addition to all of the existing military spending and energy usage. Because when say that the US military is defending a signal of stability/confidence, it's not the signal itself that the US is defending, it's defending what the signal says.
I don't see anyone arguing that. The contrived argument I made was that USD requires a military to be stable. Bitcoin only requires proof of work. It's not a straight forward argument and I don't think it's quite a genuine argument because the US would have a military regardless (I think?) but it does stand to reason that without the US military the USD would not be the reserve currency of the world and therefore would not be nearly as stable.
Do keep in mind the context I proposed the argument was not intended to be a genuine argument, but rather an example of someone making a more all-or-nothing, bad-faith argument.
I'm not sure I agree.
Proof of work requires a functioning Internet, functioning supply lanes for GPUs, low-ish latency, general consumer confidence in the chain, proportional miners to Bitcoin's value so that it's actually secure, etc... Not to mention that Bitcoin itself requires a lot more than proof of work to function as a usable currency.
----
Further, this is kind of begging the question a bit. Saying that the USD requires massive military presence to sustain is not the same as saying that Bitcoin requires massive energy to sustain, for all of the reasons people have talked about.
The fact that the USD military would still be around if the USD went away is the reason why the argument that military energy usage should be counted in Bitcoin's favor is a flawed argument. But if cryptocurrencies went away, we wouldn't need proof of work at all. That energy cost would legitimately vanish. And I just want to kind of jump back to that point, because if feels like there's kind of a weird slight-of-hand happening here.
----
The flow of logic we're following is:
- It's good that Bitcoin proponents otherwise play defense, otherwise we'd start talking about military costs of the USD
- Military costs of the USD are not dependent on the USD and likely wouldn't disappear if the USD went away
- Nevertheless this was just an example of a flawed argument, not a real argument
- ???
- Therefore, the arguments against crypto are similarly flawed.
But that doesn't follow. The fact that you can come up with a flawed argument for trying to use military costs as an argument for crypto, and the fact that we all kind of agree that it's a flawed argument, does not automatically imply that therefore all criticism of crypto is similarly flawed.
Even if the USD vanished completely and Bitcoin took over, there is basically no reason to believe that the US military would go away or that the US would stop interfering in foreign markets. And banking regulation/enforcement would just switch to targeting exchanges/platforms, blocking specific coins, and move on.
Independent of the whole cryptocurrency thing, there are good reasons to want better payment methods that give people more freedom/privacy, but "this will dismantle the military-industrial complex" isn't really one of them. Last I checked, there's nothing in the Bitcoin protocol that says it can't be used for bribes, oil, or guns.
It's just a wild fantasy. Imagine going back to the Cold War and thinking that if the USD wasn't around that the US and the Soviet Union would have stopped building nukes.
Why should we "exert control"? Maybe if folks didn't think they needed to build a bunch of aircraft carriers they'd stop building coal plants.
We should adopt a second strike nuclear policy, decommision our silos, and shift to an array of submarine and other movable launchers for a smaller set of nuclear weapons rather than the old cold war model, now that we live in a multipolar world.
We didn't build nukes because we wanted to protect the USD, it was a fight about ideas like Communism, national control, etc...
Also the lack of standards and the terrible promise of decentralization, yet the reality of centralized markets and brokers. (This is a more modern failure).
I firmly believe crypto is useless. Unlike gold (with metallic and useful properties) or other floated currencies that map back to an economy. Crypto essentially represents spent energy.
If crypto, esp BTC was able to be back converted into the energy used to produce it, that'd be great. But it can't so it's just a net negative IMO.
gold was useless for 99.5% of human history, until the advent of electronics
Even Silver corrodes. Gold never corrodes. It's excessively stable, malleable, and perfect for art pieces.
Since Gold is excessively stable, there are no worries about rashes or itchiness if you wear it all day.
In an age before modern plastics, that is basically miraculous.
If people don't understand stone age economics and why gold was seen as valuable even before modern electronics, oh boy... How do they make sense of more modern concepts? We often discuss a lack of education, especially in terms of science and technology. The situation regarding economics education is so dire most aren't even aware there is an issue.
yeah, so exactly like I said, it was pretty much useless
>In an age before modern plastics, that is basically miraculous.
have you heard about glass?
Have you ever worked with glass vs gold?
Dropped a piece of art(isanal good) made of glass and see it shatter and one made of gold and not much happening to it?
That's just two of dozens of reasons why your comparison makes no sense.
we're in the bi-hourly crypto hate thread. the threshold for being useful is set to "is it necessary for basic survival?". "a store of value with additional attached utility" doesn't make the cut, and must be banned to atone for our carbon sins
>Have you ever worked with glass vs gold?
the post above compares gold to plastics
No one wears glass all day.
My Nylon strap for my watch is pleasant and cheap. But the very material itself didn't exist before the 1930s IIRC.
If we're talking about materials that existed even in 2000BCE, gold is one of those metals that you could wear all the time, and never get a rash, allergic reaction, or otherwise get itchy.
--------
Glass isn't flexible or malleable. Even if we use fiberglass today, its a carcinogen and very bad for the human body. Certainly not a material you want to be wearing all the time.
If that's your worry (and not that you shouldn't), consider that the risk of confiscation of your bank balance or stock accounts is far higher given that those are merely entries in a database held by a third party.
I got a buddy with a bunch of money in Celsius right now, that feels like its been confiscated.
Apparently, cryptocoins can also be "confiscated", and are unable to be sold during these times of duress.
Over say, Iron?
Yes. Because iron rusts. An iron-coin does not last forever. Copper, Silver, and Gold are easier to take care of, but even old copper/silver coins tarnish and corrode away with time.
Gold does not. A gold coin made 100 years ago would be as brilliant today as it was back then... with minimal maintenance.
There's a _REASON_ why gold was chosen, all across the world, from MesoAmerica, to Europe, to Asia, as a unit of currency.
All traded goods and services essentially represent spent energy.
Crypto is only valuable if you can find a bigger fool, and you are not the one holding the proverbial hot potato.
It only gained popularity by people hoping to get rich in regular currency from the value changing. It morphed into being basically another type of security that gets traded and rises and falls with the general stock market.
And that's ignoring all the scam and theft that has happened. I used to feel bad I didn't buy bitcoin when I was younger, but these days I feel good that I stayed away from cryptocurrency in general.
mind if a propose this as an example of a strawman on wikipedia? it doesn't get any better
Btw it's somewhat ironic because Celsius is essentially a bank and not a blockchain company at all. They've simply found this niche where they're largely unregulated because they're dealing with tokens that are not considered legal tender in most countries and have super shady business practice when you look into it deeper. So this is essentially the old model, branded as blockchain and taking money from people who hold cryptocurrency but do not understand it. The likes who buy Dogecoin on Robinhood.
If lending business were on-chain, everyone could look at the exact figures and observe the risks. Maker vaults aren't defaulting, are they? Also a smart contract once securely deployed can not be arbitrarily stopped. So there is no chance for anyone freeze your funds like this centralized platform does now. These are exactly the problems blockchains can solve, if people only understood and used them. With traditional banks, we've tackled the problem trying to use government regulation, but we all know it doesn't really work. Contracts that can not easily be gamed are a much better solution, at least for the base layer of financial system.
Of course you could do the same with companies like Celsius and insure and regulate them better, but in the end customers are paying for it, it doesn't come free. Also big banks do still fail, are you aware how much money has been paid for bank bailouts just in the past decades? The thing is many don't notice they're paying for it, because they don't understand where the money comes from.
My argument is that Celsius would never have gotten as big if the customers knew what happens with their money. This business model shouldn't even be legal, same as what many more traditional banks are involved in. In fact, often it isn't legal in the first place even according to current regulation. But once they get to a certain size, laws don't apply to them as they apply to the rest of us. This is a problem, regulation is clearly not working properly in the banking sector.
Account holders shouldn't have lost (haven't checked) but the stock evaporated overnight, so anyone holding any shares lost everything in a blink.
https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/banking-panics-...
I don't see why all countries would outlaw "crypto".
I hate that term for it's semantic shift, but that kind of rebellious tribalism fueled this drum beat.
Each class of cryptocurrency technologies, institutions and securities has an analog in the list above. And each will lead to new protections. Maybe Big Brokerage will invest at most X% in cryptocurrencies but not ones repackaged into NFTs.
Etc.
This isn't a bull market, or a bear. To borrow a perhaps racist or outdated term, it's a Buffalo market, and regulators are at the buffet.
Tether is analogous to the gold standard but without verifying the gold exists in reserves, or ever existed at all. Exchanges are facilitating billions in money laundering and fraud while eating massive fees and paying millions to founders. Transactions can be hidden behind shell wallets/groups and filtered through many exchanges reducing transparency and increasing odds of successful illegal activity.
There is a ton of legitimate criticism just looking at the fraud side of Crypto and how lack of regulation in that space enables a ton of crime. It's often drowned out by PR or the next big blockchain based thing that seems flashy but still comes with all the same problems as regular physical money.
It's like asking your IT group to install spyware on users workstations instead of respecting or enforcing HR policy. It's a people problem, not a tech problem.
We saw this when COVID began. The stock markets were plummeting as people increasingly realized that COVID was not gonna be gone by Easter, and that this would affect us for some time and how impactful it would be.
With crypto, the only thing that the falling prices is tell us that another layer of the onion of scams that crypto is built upon has been peeled, and the only real question is how deep the layers go and whether there even is something of value deep inside.
The answer is nothing. And same applies to 10k. Since there's no measurable intrinsic value, there's zero fundamental factor limiting the downside
Because that's to me what it looks like functionally, while some people I know seem to deny this is what they're doing and telling themselves "it's the future of everything" for no other reason than that's what they want it to be (so they can make bank off of their speculative bet).
If you can't point to any math to justify a given price, there is no intrinsic value. Thus price is only driven by speculative factors.
With stocks there are earnings that can be distributed back to shareholders. This is a measurable and explainable fundamental factor.
Real estate has rents... Bonds have coupon payments. Crypto has nothing. Though some will pay you "yield" by diverting money from newer entrants... Aka pyramid-esque structure
Crypto has none of these. And if it's a good investment, then it's definitely not a good currency
The Bank of England would like a word with you.
As an investment vehicle, it's exactly as you say; there is no fundamental value it represents. As a currency, it has no governmental backing, and while it's possible to trade in currencies, the profit lies in the trade, and the various differing rates of exchange, NOT in the underlying currencies themselves. No one holds currency expecting deflation to make them better off.
It is incredibly hard to predict if such a consensual reality will collapse -- but it can collapse if there is a strong "vibe shift" towards something else that competes effectively with the current "consensus."
It is like fashion. What is considered stylish and not is just a group consensus. And it can shift relatively quickly, but it is hard to predict and certain people in key nexus have a lot more influence than the ramble.
Things that make Lira less mythological and more intrinsicly valuable include:
- It is a more stable store of value
- It holds a more stable relationship to the value of everything else in the Turkish economy
- It is more widely accepted for buying and selling good and services
These three things are real world practical differences.
Traditional state-based currencies mostly exist because the government pays its obligations in that currency and also collects taxes in that currency. The state's population is forced to use that currency as a result for these behaviors.
This is the main difference between a state-backed currency and "private currencies."
This isn't to say that state-backed currencies can be a mess just like "private currencies." But these state-backed currencies fail with the governments based on balance of payments and debt and money printing, etc and it is very infrequent.
At all times in unstable monetary conditions, such as hyperinflation, funny-money issued by occupation authorities, unrecognized governments, fiat currency mismanagement, etc, people have flocked to alternative means of exchange. Usually using foreign currencies or other assets (precious metals, whatever). Now there is more choice here. There are reports from places in such conditions of people actually using digital assets for this. Whether it's better to hold Lira or Dash at this particular moment in time though, is a pretty open question.
[1] https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/key/date/2022/html/ecb.sp220...
I think that most major currencies will have mirror cryptocurrency versions as state-backed entities, replacing USDT and the similar more hand-wavy versions. This is definitely going to happen.
But this isn't "private currency" rather it is just the evolution of state-backed currency.
> At all times in unstable monetary conditions, such as hyperinflation, funny-money issued by occupation authorities, unrecognized governments, fiat currency mismanagement, etc, people have flocked to alternative means of exchange.
Make sense. If your country is in hyperinflation, do not hold its currency.
> There are reports from places in such conditions of people actually using digital assets for this. Whether it's better to hold Lira or Dash at this particular moment in time though, is a pretty open question.
Dash lost most of its value in the last 2 months. I am unsure what your point is. Dash obviously is a speculative asset and it is super hard to predict its future direction.
EDIT: When ECB talks about private money they mean non central bank issued digital assets, among other things. Not their CBDC which would of course be public money.
$DASH meanwhile is a speculative "investment" with no underlying assets that most people has no idea exists.
$DASH could go to 0 tomorrow and it would probably not be reported on outside of crypto sites. Neither of those things is true for the Lira
Ultimately through threat of violence or depriving of liberty. That is, it is the state's monopoly on violence which makes a currency. Bitcoin, being state-less, has no such monopoly and must ultimately fail.
Although Venezula seems to have been making a first pass at it.
The reason is simple: The Turkish Lira has a government (complete with courts, military, bureaucrats, police, banks, etc) that has committed to enforcing transactions in the Lira.
Does that mean the speculative market for Lira must be bigger than bitcoin? No, of course not. But it does mean there's fundamental utility to the Lira that absolutely does not exist for bitcoin.
In that long conversation, the most compelling 'use' was it's 'non use'. That it is intrinsically rare and so as long as it's achieved a sufficient momentum to continue to exist (aside from transactions, we went over various uses for the blockchain that I was struggling to understand), just having some is itself a diversification and thus valuable for that. Diversification like having some precious metal is too. 'Having' being an important point. Another friend was a gold nut (I mean that in a non-pejorative sense, a term he used) that wouldn't touch gold futures or any form of 'contractual gold' and wasn't that keen even on security boxes.
In this, Bitcoin did make some sense. Just hanging on to some. Not for investment purposes, and not for speculative purposes, but for, depending on your perception, the value you may find in something 'rare' in your (somewhat) physical possession. This may be for a time of turmoil when 'rare' assets are extremely valuable, especially divisible ones (sufficiently 'rare' cash, for example, is well documented to be valuable at these times). 'How much' depending on your appetite: appetite for an asset _held for this purpose_ (a purpose that isn't investment or from-time-to-time speculation), and this 'how much' (price*quantity) re-balanced not based on a Bitcoin's price (nor gold's price per ounce) - from this perspective the day-to-day 'price' of Bitcoin becomes less relevant, re-balancing better smoothed than marked-to-market daily given it's volatility.
[A small aside, but on this 'rarity': I remember clearly the first time I held a gold bar, by no means a common occurrence in my life. It was beautiful. Shaped more like a house brick than something stacked in Fort Knox, it had the portrait a family embossed on it, two parents, three children, the family dog, the chateau in which they lived, and their signatures. It was cast at the time of the French Revolution, and sits, certainly when I handled it and I imagine still today, unclaimed, in London, where it was sent for safe keeping. Sad.]
Bitcoin certainly has value as a medium of exchange because it can be (and is) exchanged between people. A government that accepts bitcoin for payment of taxes adds to the exchange-value of the currency, certainly.
Bitcoin also has some merit as a store of value, in that people observably hold bitcoin with the expectation that it will remain valuable. Ultimately, however, this role of currency is speculative: it requires belief that people will want the currency in the future at a reasonable price. This is also where crypto bulls and bears most disagree.
Bitcoin has a much more ephemeral status as a medium of account, however. Stores aren't pricing their wares primarily in bitcoin; when they accept the currency they price primarily in local currency and perform a spot conversion. This is also what I was referring to above with jurisdictions not assessing taxes in bitcoin even if they accept it.
The medium of account is the least flashy but perhaps most fundamental role of a currency; it provides a backstop of price stability. Repricing goods and services is hard. It obsoletes marketing campaigns, it confuses contractual expectations, and it can require literal printing costs re: price tags and the like. That stability, however, lets people think of one currency-unit as worth something real, not just some amount of another, more important currency.
Bitcoin does not yet have this status, and this is where lack of tax assessment in bitcoin matters. I can't say that (e.g.) 0.1BTC will definitely pay my property taxes for a year, no matter what else happens to the currency in the meantime.
But sadly the price increases also attract a different kind of demand, much more volatile (80% crashes now and then).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Strategic_Comman...
If you own land in the United States, you pay property tax in USD. That's just one of myriad ways that the dollar is backed by the physical assets of the nation.
Now that velocity is picking back up, we are seeing astronomical inflation.
Just because a govenrnment controls the currency doesn't mean it's in your interest to save long-term in it.
* supply
* demand
The supply is well-known in advance, and is an advantage to Bitcoin. US M2 money supply grew 8.04% in the past year [0], while Bitcoin's grew ~1.75% [1].
Demand is very volatile, and suffers from the bandwagon effect (price increase -> buy, price decrease -> sell).
If anything, the ETH blockchain might have more value in the real world, since it's used to transact stupid monkey pictures and stuff like that.
Plus failed central banks, failed paper currencies, etc
It seems like as time goes on crypto becomes less useful rather than more as a general utility for buying stuff. Most crypto "currencies" are also a not a great store of value currently.
Just for context, the Ukrainian Hryvnia has lost less value since the Russian invasion than bitcoin has lost today. A financial system more volatile than the economy of a country outmatched in a war with a superpower, is perhaps, not a system you want doing things that require stability.
I said: Bitcoin. Not crypto.
(The longer I’m in this space, the more I realize that scammy crypto is one of the biggest enemies of bitcoin adoption.)
It may seem this way to you but you’re clearly not paying enough attention. Adoption curve is up. Many advancements have been and continue to be made on the front of consumer products. Let’s face it, companies like Square will drive mainstream usage. Consumer products will only get better and better and over time will be on par with products that use the dollar under the hood.
So let me amend my argument: It seems like as time goes on, bitcoin specifically, has seen decreased general use as anything but a speculative greater-fool investment. As far as I can tell, the only people that use bitcoin as a currency are 1. trying to prove a point, or 2. doing illegal shit. That used to be less true 5 years ago.
Why would square drive mainstream usage? Square needs people on both sides of the transaction to have already adopted in order to drive business.
I suspect that Apple, Google, visa, MC, and PayPal will continue to build bitcoin into their product.
Bitcoin does not compete at all with these companies. Just like the US dollar is not a competitor to Apple, visa, etc. these are products that incorporate currencies.
ApplePay is not a currency.
I suspect it’s going to be a domino effect that gets much much worse..
That it's a safeguard (not hedge) against tyrannical money.
This will play out over the next few years as governments will introduce digital currencies (CBDCs) to replace their own failing currencies (simultaneously robbing citizens of their savings). The bait-and-switch of this is that they will give out free money (it costs them nothing to do so) to entice people but not tell them that their money can expire, have its purchases limited to "approved" vendors, and be taken from them instantly without recourse.
Bitcoin is a safeguard against this if you hold it in your custody. This is its ultimate value: it cannot be manipulated or stolen by the state. Something that's never existed in the history of humanity.
There's a reason the genesis block contained this: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/File:Jonny1000thetimes.png
So what benefit is it? Everyone has only traded one form of vendor lock in to another (that is deserving of vastly less trust, as evidended by the Wild West of scams, rug pulls and outright frauds)
Money works because I can hand $10 to a 5 or a 95 year old and they know what to do with it. Very few people do anything other than speculate in crypto, and even fewer hold it in their own wallets as opposed to on exchanges. If the friction of getting started in the future of money requires IT support, then it isn’t going to work
It doesn't need to be universal. The need for personal computers wasn't universal when Steve Jobs was running around Silicon Valley selling the Apple I in the 70s. They didn't even understand email in the 90s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlJku_CSyNg.
Look at us now.
> The vast majority of the general population is nowhere near this level of technical proficiency.
Right. Just like all technology, that's our responsibility as "the nerds." We take something that's complex and distill it down into something that's easily digested by people with limited or no technical aptitude.
---
I find it deeply alarming that the supposed technical elite that wander this site are so averse to something that can liberate and help so many people, worldwide. Even if they have the capacity to understand it, it's clear that many here haven't done their homework and are relying on second or third-hand knowledge (or at best, outdated information) to form their opinions.
Despite their hubris and narcissism, they're no better than "the general population" on understanding this.
Then why isn't BTC and other cryptocurrencies skyrocketing right now and seeing widespread adoption by Russian oligarchs looking to move around their money?
After all, if you're on the losing end of it sanctions are "tyrannical money".
There's also an argument to be made that it is precisely the tyranny behind fiat currency to ultimately gives it its value. The United States has a vast array of coercive means (from locking you in prison for forgery to trade weapons that can destroy your economy) to ensure that the USD has value.
There is never a technical solution to realpolitik. We'll increasingly see this in the coming months with crypto as powerful people will get their piece of the pie from the crypto boom, while most average players will be left with nothing.
Because people are and have always been foolish and ego/pride driven.
> The United States has a vast array of coercive means (from locking you in prison for forgery to trade weapons that can destroy your economy) to ensure that the USD has value.
Do you view that as a positive? I sure don't. That's a really depressing reality when you have something like Bitcoin which doesn't necessitate any of that.
> We'll increasingly see this in the coming months with crypto as powerful people will get their piece of the pie from the crypto boom, while most average players will be left with nothing.
"Crypto" isn't Bitcoin. The conflation of the two is, in part, why the market fluctuates as violently as it does.
The implementation works fine, the people are flawed (and this will always be true).
How's that different from the paper notes in a Monopoly game box? The Fed can't steal it or debase its value either. I still need a large group of people that also hold monopoly money and are willing to transact goods and services for it, with the understanding that the monopoly notes have zero fiat cash value.
This is literally what money printing does.
--
If you view it as Monopoly money, then don't use it. I don't know what to tell you; Bitcoin's transaction volume clearly shows that people use it. I've been paid with it and I've paid others with it.
> the monopoly notes have zero fiat cash value
Bitcoin is currently trading at $23,678. That's quite a bit of fiat cash value. Like I've said elsewhere in this thread, if that number goes down, I'll just acquire more of it because the properties I care about remain intact irrespective of USD price. Your opinion of what I do or do not view as money is, frankly, irrelevant.
The USA has an elected legislature, independent courts, multiple levels of appeals in the judicial system, a strong system of civil rights, the right to trial for anyone accused of a crime, the right to an attorney, an independent press, and an active civil society made up of tens of thousands of organizations; all of which shapes the political environment which in turn shapes monetary policy. In what sense is the USD tyrannical?
Edit: this is a more long-form articulation of what I'm getting at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtX6AKEO8ok
> as governments will introduce digital currencies
Governments generally don't create money, central banks do. Famously, some central banks are actually private entities, not government (public ones)
> own failing currencies
What exactly currency is failing, and which are the indicators ? USD and EUR are roaring successes in facilitating value exchanges on a global scale.
> simultaneously robbing citizens of their savings
If that's the intention, banks can do that right now by printing money. Oh wait, they do.
> will give out free money (it costs them nothing to do so)
Yes, printing money has a small marginal cost.
> not tell them that their money can expire
Why somebody would expire money when they try to prop the economy on which they base their own support ?
> have its purchases limited to "approved" vendors
Again, why anybody would shoot themselves in the foot by killing the economy that keeps them alive ?
> it cannot be manipulated or stolen by the state
I'm sorry all your post reads some like crypto-prepper thing. If you feel that the state is out to steal you, you'd better start arming too, because if the state is out to get you, they'll not do it via obscure economic means, they will send the state-sponsored-thugs to violence it out - see Russia.
> Something that's never existed in the history of humanity.
Gold?
The USD's value has declined 90+% over the last 100 years. As Charlie Munger suggests, "My [the] working thesis is that the currency goes to zero."
> If that's the intention, banks can do that right now by printing money. Oh wait, they do.
Correct. That's a bad thing. They can't do that on a Bitcoin standard.
> Why somebody would expire money when they try to prop the economy on which they base their own support ?
Because it forces participation in the economy. If it's going to expire, you're forced to spend it, thus boosting the economy. Also, you're guaranteed to keep working because you can't save your money and exit the system so you can repeat this cycle ad nausea.
> Again, why anybody would shoot themselves in the foot by killing the economy that keeps them alive ?
Because the goal is to limit the number of people "kept alive." As for an individual case: fear of the sword. https://twitter.com/PezntJournalist/status/15095444990133739...
> I'm sorry all your post reads some like crypto-prepper thing. If you feel that the state is out to steal you, you'd better start arming too
The floor of my bedroom closet is a small arsenal and yes, I've mentally prepared to die in a shoot out (if it comes to that) with the powers that be. Being prepared does not mean being ignorant/stupid/foolish. I lose nothing by thinking ahead while those who foolishly buy into what they're told—despite persistent evidence to the contrary—potentially lose everything.
> Gold?
That can be confiscated.
And that's a good thing. As currency goes to 0, we'll have an economy of abundance, a Star Trek utopia where you can get anything for free (because currency is 0) from a friendly replicator.
> That's a bad thing.
That's a good thing - as the economy grows the supply of money that represents the value of the economy needs to grow. You can buy together things that would've been utopia 100 years ago (iPhones - the knowledge of the world in your pocket; travel anywhere in the world in under a day) for next to nothing (in the developed world). The value of these new things needs to be represented.
> you're guaranteed to keep working
What makes you think it's fair for you to stop working when other people are working their asses off to feed you, give you shelter, etc ? We all need to contribute to the society, unless you have a leach mentality.
> the goal is to limit the number of people "kept alive." ... my bedroom closet is a small arsenal
I'm not going to discuss conspiracy theory-driven paranoia, except to mention that if the state is "out to get you", unless you have tons of like minded friends, and you all have your own airforce, "they" WILL get you, because you can't fight an F-16 bombing you.
Oh, and bitcoin can be seized, exactly as gold https://www.dlapiper.com/en/us/insights/publications/2022/02....
You don't understand economics.
> as the economy grows the supply of money that represents the value of the economy needs to grow
You really don't understand economics.
> What makes you think it's fair for you to stop working when other people are working their asses off to feed you, give you shelter, etc ?
Where did I say that? If I save money—the result of my labor—and then live off of that, it's not a crime (this is literally the basis for the concept of retirement) or a threat to anyone (they get compensated for their current labor with the proceeds of my past labor). Assuming that it is a threat in some esoteric way, to be honest, is a bit disturbing.
> I'm not going to discuss conspiracy theory-driven paranoia
It's not paranoia, it's awareness. Paranoia implies I think it's going to happen, while awareness implies that I think it could. I don't think the government is actively out to get me—I'm relatively harmless—but I can certainly foresee people like me being sought out if the circumstances necessitate it (in the eyes of the authority).
> Oh, and bitcoin can be seized, exactly as gold
The headline of what you shared proves me right, not wrong: "Aided by cryptocurrency exchanges."
> The answer is nothing. Since there's no measurable intrinsic value, there's zero fundamental factor limiting the downside
It doesn't have intrinsic value, but it certainly has value by fiat/authority
We accept the fed and central banks and money printing. We accept the rigged point system.
And how long is this sustainable before people have had enough? We now have an alternative. There is no bitcoin print button to bail out Washington at the expense of the regular people.
I suppose if a vast majority of Americans demanded a switch to BTC it could be done but if that was a real possibility it would be much easier to demand laws to stop the Fed instead of switching to a new currency.
But the government won't switch to BTC and the people will never demand it because a limited currency would hurt the economy by limiting growth.
Stopping the fed would certainly be a great start. But we still need to switch currencies to one that cannot be created or controlled by the government.
Whether bitcoin or something else, currency creation schedule should be damn near immutable, predictable, and the protocol should be ossified.
A currency that is unpredictable and can be created whenever the government pleases is unacceptable.
The answer is the same: nothing.
Except that that's not true for gold and it's not true for Bitcoin. Something has value if people want it.
That's it.
People want Bitcoin, therefore it has value.
Your search for fundamentals is simply inappropriately applied. It's like asking what color is a smell, it's simply the wrong question.
Companies buy gold for use in electronics manufacturing, believe it or not.
But a portion of gold's market value is driven by a speculative spread over the intrinsic value, similar to BTC. Except for BTC the intrinsic portion is close to 0.
Price is a function of both supply/demand, with intrinsic value creating the rationale for the demand. I bet air would sell for a lot more out in Space or at the bottom of the ocean
There is no rationale to the demand for Bitcoin beyond a greater fool, or edge use cases like illicit transactions. It's obvious that 95%+ of people buying Bitcoin are doing it to make USD returns.
If .com is culturally considered higher quality and thus will drive more business to you, then it carries a higher value than .net
But perceptions of value can change over time. This is not my belief system by the way, this is how the intrinsic value of something is determined.
> But a portion of gold's market value is driven by a speculative spread over the intrinsic value, similar to BTC.
What is the definition of intrinsic value that allows both of these interpretations to be true?
Buying gold and storing it in your basement is just speculation. It doesn't provide any value on its own. You aren't using the gold for any immediate purpose, but just hoping that value increases beyond the market value in use for production.
Gold could have some intrinsic value as a signaling tool via jewelry etc, and this could conceivably drive value.
But you can't wear bitcoin
It's also true that intrinsic value can be different for different people, depending on how subjective it is. Gas may be worth up to $10/gallon for me, because without it I can't make any money. If I work from home, I may only be willing to pay $1/gallon for gas. Thus intrinsic value is usually a function rather than a static property, and inputs change over time. A consumer who is a billionaire may also be willing to pay a far higher amount for a good than somebody who's middle class. This could push market price higher, despite the core value of the good being unchanged. The value function is always there though, and it likely has millions or more parameters with different weightings.
So TLDR; price is a market determined value, intrinsic value provides justification for demand, which feeds into price.
A bubble is usually a result of price running far ahead of any justifiable intrinsic value. When price is far ahead of intrinsic value, it usually means it's being driven by "speculative value". Pokemon Cards, Fine Art, Wine, Beanie Babies. The actual use value of these is minimal, but people buy on the expectation that people in the future will value it even higher. You can make a lot of money via speculation on things like this, but there's also nothing supporting the price.
For an alternative example, if I buy a stock that yields a safe 10% dividend, then I can easily quantify the worth. I put $1m into it, and I get $100k a year forever. Can it fall 50% in value to a 20% yield? It's pretty much impossible, assuming the market believes the yield is safe. This is why fundamentals and intrinsic value matters a lot in investing
What justifies oil being $130 dollars a barrel vs $100? The answer is also nothing.
The fact that it is used in daily productive activity might be an argument that oil should in theory have a > 0 price, however the actual price is still made up by a market! There is still not a way to say that the intrinsic value of oil must be X dollars.
I actually never considered that!
If I can make $10/hour running a generator, then I'm willing to pay up to $10 in fuel to operate it
Note: I completely agree with you on the concept of an equilibrium price being a real thing, I just don't think equilibrium is determined by intrinsic value.
In practice the bottom will probably be about $10k as people will start thinking that used to be $65k, maybe it'll go back, and buy some.
It's all human psychology but so is the value of a lot of things.
> bitcoin price / number of bitcoins
$23,304 / 19,066,500 BTC = $0.001 /BTC
If there is one human into bitcoin, then they invested $0.001 ? If there are more people into bitcoin then they invested even less on average?
It doesn't make any sense.
When you buy crypto with USD that's a one time transaction that has no bearing on future price.
E.g. the ARKK etf has had massive net dollar inflows YTD despite falling over 50% in the same timeframe
https://twitter.com/SilvermanJacob/status/153617697375127961...
Classic run on the bank scenario. And the bank behind all of this is not secured or even worse, so it makes sense.
https://twitter.com/davthewave/status/1535760979333873665?s=...
"#Bitcoin lows around these levels lining up with previous lows as time-relative to previous halvings.
Previous halving cycle shows a mini parabolic breakout from the lows.
Chart shows a regularity and logic for the ongoing macro bull."
The amount of pseudo-science bullshit is mind boggling.
Data shows that the address used 17,919 wrapped Bitcoin, a version of Bitcoin that can be used in decentralized finance, as collateral for a loan worth $278,490,419 in the decentralized stablecoin DAI. While the blockchain explorer Etherescan didn’t labeled the wallet as Celsius, a wallet from Celsius sent additional 2,000 wrapped Bitcoin to support the position. Celsius did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the wallets.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-13/bitcoin-s...
https://nitter.net/DU09BTC/status/1536353233156902914#m
Seems to have managed to push it to 18k. Quite the gamble.
So, am I reading this right that 403 M$ are used to secure 278 M$?
Or maybe are they accounting for market impact (by way of thin order book) for when the position is liquidated?
Could be an interesting week.
bitcoin falls 56% - 2012
bitcoin falls 83% to $50 - 2013
bitcoin falls 84% to 12k - 2017
bitcoin falls ~50% to ~30k - 2021
"crypto is not looking good long term" - numerous people on hacker news every single time crypto is down.
You should welcome all the nay saying here if you think Bitcoin is bound to go up again.
I'd much rather see a stabilized crypto that could act as an amazing tool for people in poor countries to lift themselves out of poverty than I would see it be a vehicle to take me from top 1% wealth in the world to a higher tier of top 1% wealth in the world.
Step 2) ???
Step 3) Person's village experiences famine due to severe draught exacerbated by climate change driven by, among many other things, Bitcoin.
Step 4) ???
Help, I can't find the step where they lift themselves out of poverty.
If cryptos were stable, no-one would be making any money "investing" in them.
(Genuine) Q: How exactly would that lift anyone out of poverty?
Think about it this way, how much trade would the US have if our currency changed every 10-20 years and all of our old debt was effectively thrown out? How would people save to build a business? How secure would they feel investing in their own future?
The devil's in the detail: "stable" but vs what, exactly? Local prices? Local incomes? Gold? USD? SDRs[0]?
[0] https://www.imf.org/en/About/Factsheets/Sheets/2016/08/01/14...
I'm not familiar with SDRs.
Umm, I'm not sure I can agree with that[0]
To be fair, it was fairly stable until about 2006. However the whole point of "being stable" is also to be stable in times of external stress. USD/Gold fails that one quite spectacularly.
Get off your high horse. Literally the entire stock market is based on trying guess better than other people and make money off of other people's poor decisions.
Would you mind explaining to me, or linking to some resource you find convincing, how crypto would succeed in this goal? (or even which organisation or coin has this as a goal)
but the point is still very self evident even with that data point.
So either way you're making the same argument as the "crypto is not looking good long term" people
Just to put it in perspective, everything is falling today.
For the record, I don't disagree with some of the criticisms, but the knee-jerk reaction to anything crypto is just odd.
minor edit: I have minor stake in crypto, but nothing that would make me retire/commit suicide over losses.
I think it has to do with how new the field is. People reacted to the internet in the same way when it was new. No, I'm not saying cryptocurrencies are as useful as the internet is. But when the internet first appeared, people who didn't like the internet, grouped everything on the internet together. I was called porn-addicted because someone had heard there was porn on the internet and that I worked with the internet, so obviously I must be doing something related to porn.
Similarly people hear "cryptocurrency" and they immediately think of scams, although there is currencies that obviously aren't scams (Bitcoin, for one). But they've seen a scam using Bitcoin, so everything related to Bitcoin must be a scam too.
I have nothing to gain/lose by cryptocurrencies going up/down, so I don't really care. But it makes me slightly scared to see how for example many HN users react to cryptocurrencies, when this audience usually seems pretty calm and collected to me.
Makes me wonder what other subjects gets treated the same way as cryptocurrencies, but I don't realize it yet.
If it turned out the USG had a significant amount of its funds stored in Robinhood, yes.
Seems like it is.
> oddly rabid opponent base
> anything crypto is just odd
Well if nothing else it has unnecessarily huge carbon footprint. Probably not all, I haven't checked recently, maybe ETH is already PoS.
Also, it looks even worse because these are not even "extreme market conditions" by crypto standards.
Because it's a relatively small eco system and everything is tied together. As soon as one domino is falling the whole eco system follows.
And look at the graph of the top 20 cryptos, they all follow the exact same graph as BTC. Anything bad happening at a relatively large scale to BTC = BTC goes down = the whole crypto world panics = they all go down
I would question the characterization of small. Even today, total crypto market cap is just shy of 1T. Even relative to more established plays it is nothing to sneeze at.
But note that the same could be argued about USD system("Look at this market today. Everything is falling. Everything is tied together. One bad inflation reading and domino is falling down and the whole ecosystem follows."). I am exaggerating for effect, but not that much.
That doesn't mean there's that much money in it.
I bought a glass jar of sand on vacation, for $5. That doesn't make the beach worth trillions based on how many $5 jars it could be made into, but that's how crypto market caps are calculated.
"Market cap—or market capitalization—refers to the total value of all a company's shares of stock. It is calculated by multiplying the price of a stock by its total number of outstanding shares. For example, a company with 20 million shares selling at $50 a share would have a market cap of $1 billion."[1]
That's the same thing as Bitcoin's market cap being calculated at $438 billion right now, because there's 19.06 million coins multiplied by the current going price of $23k.
[1]: https://www.fidelity.com/learning-center/trading-investing/f...
There are protections in the stock market against me selling a stock back and forth between accounts I control to pump up its value. It's a common tactic in the crypto marketplace. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S15446...
You will find not argument from me saying that crypto has tons of scams going, but.. quite honestly, same is true in regular finance. Traditional finance is just more regulated. And, before we get to that point in other posts, it seems like crypto regulation was just hatched the other day.
Actually, probably even more relevant (though more difficult to measure) than the absolute number of people invested in the market is some kind of measure of the "distribution" or "spread" of such people—something like distinct groups of people without direct connections to each other, since (positive) interest in cryptocurrency seems to cluster somewhat based on word of mouth networks.
Would actually be an interesting kind of study to do, finding the most useful ways to measure the "size" of a market of this nature. I would guess that there are probably at least 2-3 different measures of "size" that would be relevant to different kinds of effects on the market, but I'm afraid that's about where my understanding of all this ends.
Or digital tokens?
A friend of mine loves his freedoms and avoiding the terrible big banks who he thinks might steal his money / do things he doesn’t like …
- Billboards all over Austin, TX right now
This is the one time I'll accept the fallacy of the undistributed middle without question.
What an odd way to welcome people to Ohio, surely they already know where they are? /s
When financial instruments get named after vulgarities, it shows the kind of people who are running this space.
The social movement is bananas but gets defended with arguments for the technology.
It was no secret that the banks could run. Not being on-board with the vices of the social movement is decried as FUD.
This is what I call a significant bear case.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/microstrategy-shares-slump...
So this is a way to short bitcoin?
Edit: Sorry, maybe just to short Celsius' own tokens, although maybe it's indirectly shorting other currencies
This video has not aged well. It's full of so many buzzwords that my mind can't keep up. Also, the idea of anonymity and privacy...clearly they gave up on that as everybody is using their real names, addresses, etc so sign up for exchanges.
Again, I don't know enough about it, but since I've looked it back in 2017, until today, I'm still as confused, which is why I've stayed away from it.
Soft landing talk was always talk, I think a recession is in the cards and they know it.
So people are facing higher prices from all fronts. What are the first things to get sold off to afford all the various "real life" necessities? high-risk investments. Or any kind of investment, as most people simply do not have any investments.
crypto does not generate revenue
crypto does not generate dividends
crypto is only something you try to sell to a bigger fool
if crypto even just goes sideways....then its just a cash-equivalent with no real-world utility
these pyramid schemes have a long way to fall still...crypto will be the greatest ponzi scheme of the last 100 years
if you like exotic cars, the crypto kids will be liquidating soon...keep your eyes open
Humorously, if they're investing in your company that mines gold, that seems fairly equivalent to paying you to buy shovels and hire diggers.
Storj, Filecoin, Sia; Golem, Akash, iExec; Livepeer, Helium, Orchid (the last one being mine)
Like, some cryptocurrency projects are working on "big business". I keep hearing that Helium has been getting carrier partners for its LTE hotspot rollout, and its IoT hotspot product is not inherently any more stupid than Amazon Sidewalk ;P.
https://twitter.com/MessariCrypto/status/1514694855070556170
Otherwise I'd agree with you, if there is no guarantee that data is stored correctly, there is no point, might as well use S3.
I wonder if that has ever been tested by bad actors. For Bitcoin, the proof of how the network is resilient against sub-50% attacks is simple enough.
Practically that's impossible, since the network would need to swap the whole datastore once every payment cycle.
Say each block is stored on three nodes, then these nodes could each generate a nonce, compute a hash of the stored block (using all nonces as IV) and then vote on whether they still have the original file or not. This is much more feasible, as only nonces and hashes are transferred (a few dozen bytes instead of e.g. 64MB blocks). In that case they can store nothing and instead cooperate to generate spoofed hashes, so you probably want some auditor nodes.
I am not sure why any of these would strictly need blockchain to solve the problem of safely storing data in a pool of untrusted, unreliable nodes.
It sure is a neat hack if they have changed to PoW to Proof-of-Storage, but whether is it actually usable for real-world applications of storing data at scale?
Honestly, if you pay me money for, I'd sell you "something something blockchain" if that's what you want me to do. Though shutting up about telling you my opinion ("fuck blockchain") will cost extra.
I used to have a spare PC with a 13TB HDD mining Storj for a couple of years and it worked fine, but converting the tokens to currency I could use was a major hassle.
Cheaper storage alone is enough to lure some people away. There are also people that simply hate AWS for reasons of their own and choose a startup provider for ideological reasons. Finally there is the obvious application of encrypted storage, to store material that is illegal in your jurisdiction.
And even then, go with Blackblaze or Wasabi or R2 or whatever S3 competitor that is cheaper.
A great example is OpenSea. Their trading volume crashed at the same time ETH prices crashed. A sale of 100 ETH in January earned them $7,500 (@$3k ETH).
The same sale now will earn them $3,000 (@$1.2k ETH).
Reports notional as in the hundreds of trillions and market value over ten trillion.
Unless I'm misreading you and you're talking about defi swaps? Though surely the analagous tradfi market shows the potential there.
Trading physical property as NFTs would create a lot of possible applications. I always thought that trading-property-as-NFTs and the insurance market would be the most interesting applications for DeFi.
The only real value I saw with crypto was for anonymous transactions a la Silk Road. Turns out immutable ledgers aren't the privacy boon we thought they'd be.
I hate crypto.
[Of course an immutable ledger might allow people to use a gun on you in the future, but it pushes the experience into an uncertain and hazy future. Safe to ignore in the present.]
i'm glad i've been able to convince those suckers over at Mullvad to continually sell me hours for this not-money btc.
They're really going to have egg on their face once they realize how I pulled the wool over their eyes.
Fiats actually a flawed manipulated system, look over time at how much value the dollar loses in a generation and to countries that have been destroyed by inflation.
Most transfers still happen off-network, so it's back to the double entry. Not that BTC is triple entry in any way - there's still two parties on each spend entry.
Inflation would be a nice problem to have for Bitcoin: it would mean that it is de facto money, anchored to the real world by meaningful prices and conversions, and following the trends of actual economy and finance.
Even if we were to come up with a way to produce a synthetic gold, the price of gold would only fall as far the cost of synthetic gold.
But, it can’t be stable. If it goes sideways long enough to demonstrate utility as a currency, then more people would want it, which would drive up the price and hurt that underlying value.
The game is over. Dump your crypto and buy real assets. Anything – stocks, real estate, lambos, is better than holding worthless digital coins.
It's not until you sell it, that you actually lose anything. Let it go down to $0, you shouldn't care, because you're only playing with money you know you could lose.
What do you stand to gain by others selling their cryptocurrencies by the way? Seems to be an odd position to hold.
Some are rubbish and will end up worthless, others won't be.
Not saying I believe in cryptocurrencies, at all, but I've been active in the space for 9 years now and after every bubble it was the same again: it just went back up to new record highs for absolutely no rational reason at all.
Crypto has had multiple crashes, dropping even harder that now. Every time people claiming the bubble popped, it's over, etc.
It's silly claiming with such certainty the future of crypto.