Bitcoin plunges below $24,000, Celsius Network temporarily halts all withdrawals | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin plunges below $24,000, Celsius Network temporarily halts all withdrawals

cnn.com

And that's exactly why you don't own it if you don't hold it, digitally or physically.

Technically you can own and hold gold and its value can still plummet.

The point is that if you actually hold something like gold, you can't be be as easily stopped from transacting. Celsius put a halt on withdrawals.

This halting of withdrawals is definitely not going to drive everyone to attempt to withdraw.

Bitcoin seems to quantify the American economy’s animal spirits [1], its historically immeasurable irrational exuberance [2]. The tie to U.S. interest rate futures is uncanny.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/animal-spirits.asp

[2] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/i/irrationalexuberance.as...

(You know how that skinny dipping quote goes?) The tide is going out on crypto.

In Dec. 2017 it went up to 19k USD and then crashed down to 3k USD. This article states that the this run had highest at 69k USD. So, according to math that means the lowest point would be (3 / 19) * 69 ~= 11k USD. Well, when I'll see 11k USD I'll buy the dip.

So much hedge against market instability.

Technology cannot and never will correct for human behavior. This is 100% "Mr. Market" behavior just applied to a new technology.

To me it seems to be amplified here. Additionally, I've been noticing that market fluctuations in cryptocoins seem to actually be a leading indicator of market instability.

> To me it seems to be amplified here.

Because it's a smaller scale market compared to traditional markets and it involves technology that takes time to understand which most people won't do.

> fluctuations in cryptocoins seem to actually be a leading indicator of market instability.

Not terribly surprising when the majority are gambling with it as opposed to looking at it (Bitcoin) for what it is: an escape hatch from tyrannical money. If gamblers need to cover losses in traditional markets, they're more likely to pull that money from the thing they understand the least (because they value it less). Factor in that a lot of people are buying foolishly on leverage they can't cover and kaboom.

The riskier the investment the more attractive it is to risk takers, who take more risk (by using leverage) and then are more pressured when it fails.

There is going to be a big wave of margin calls over the next 24hrs...

Was BTC ever 'more stable' on a monthly basis compared to other financial instruments? Do people usually hedge against "market instability" in 6 month increments? This seems like a spurious argument.

If you have hedged against USD inflation or stock bubbles or whatever for 5 years in BTC, you are currently up 808%.

The original case for Bitcoin was made after the 2008 market crash to allow for a tool that could act as a hedge against the market instabilities that led up to the crash. So yeah, it is a spurious argument. It's a spurious argument that was made for bitcoin.

That is a confused, post-facto revisionist account of history.

The Satoshi whitepaper says the motivations are for "a system for electronic transactions without relying upon trust" and mention nothing about macro-economic forces.

For the first few years of Bitcoin, us users had no expectations about the price movement of the coin, let alone value stability. If we had any such delusions at the time, no one would have bought pizza for 10K bitcoins. I wouldn't have bought a Bitcoin t-shirt for 6 Bitcoin.

https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

_All_ withdrawals are halted, or only for those not on the inside?

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