Bitcoin Falls Below $20k for the First Time Since 2020
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Each cycle goes higher was pretty much the only thing that kept the whole thing going. Now that is gone I think the space will dry up.
Tether collapsing in the next couple weeks will likely put Bitcoin under $10,000
This sounds like just another one of those synthetic signposts people create around crypto. It's just a pattern. It has no particular significance; beyond the fact that if enough people believe in it, then it might influence their actions in a way that moves the market.
My favourite was that people were going around saying the cost of mining Bitcoin served as a floor to the market. As though the miners would (somehow) stop the price going down when it became unprofitable for them to mine. More likely, they'd just stop their mining activities and move onto something more lucrative.
Ironically it was also made as a hedge against the existing financial systems, but eventually became just an extension of them. Became "the very thing it swore to destroy".
Bitcoin has no value other than speculation, so it's a hard ask for people to buy in as it's never technically undervalued...
Even those stocks that underwent the SPAC route that also offer no dividends and are beyond loss making to the point at which they will be delisted?
I don't see how SPACs that aren't making any money like $BZFD or $NKLA are any better than Bitcoin.
Let's hope these shady SPACs don't start repeating the ills of other non-SPACs as the tide turns bearish by losing $1B mysteriously like Wirecard or fabricating your financial reports which Luckin Coffee did.
It says: "When stocks tank, one can decide if a company is undervalued and decide whether to buy in."
A medium of exchange is a tool, and tools people use have value.
I grant the majority of the market is speculation but many of us actually regularly use Bitcoin for things like payroll, settling debts, cheap international value transfer, buying coffee, and for cash-like privacy for online purchases.
For those like me that have been continually buying, saving, and spending bitcoin for a decade, vs simply speculating, dollar cost averaging kicks in. Even 300% price swings do not matter all that much in the long run.
Those that go all-in short term looking to gamble get wrecked, but that is often the case in trading. Bitcoin will be healthier when the short term traders are forced out.
No. Visa has contracts, offices, and cash. They have over $81B in assets, over $12B of which is cold hard cash.[1]
Visa also has employees who know what they're doing. Bitcoin has cryptocurrency industry people working on its behalf. It's not the same thing.
Bitcoin has people and companies invested in it (emotionally and financially). Visa has almost a hundred billion dollars in assets, and the market believes they'll be able to make even more (hence the almost $400B market cap).
Visa's market cap is just 4-5x its current assets.[2]
Bitcoin has no assets. It's just speculation. It can't be liquidated even in theory.
[1] https://s1.q4cdn.com/050606653/files/doc_financials/2022/q2/...
[2] ok, so it also has liabilities. But my point stands. Visa has value in a way that Bitcoin doesn't.
Cash just as well "has no assets". You can't just compare bitcoin to a corporation and get something that makes sense.
> You can't just compare bitcoin to a corporation and get something that makes sense.
1) I agree. I was replying to a comment that did.
> Cash just as well "has no assets".
2) USD is backed, ultimately, by the full force of the nuclear armed state and multiple branches of the biggest military the world has ever seen. If you think the US government will allow USD to become irrelevant then you are going to be very disappointed. Bitcoin has no such thing.
Yet, somehow they have never been a prime destination for investment.
Economy matters as well. And loss of faith in the USD cannot be fixed with a few mushroom clouds.
It's just the most obvious backing.
It's enough to send fines, most of the time. Actually just the threat of fines. If foreign then diplomatic carrots and sticks.
I'm commenting on the absurd notion that the USD is backed by nothing, commonly said with "but BTC is backed by math".
You're right. Mushroom clouds won't help the USD. But the implication of it helps.
Actual acts the US does are more subdued. Overthrow democracies and invade smaller countries.
But could the US do it if it had no nukes and a military the size of Mexico's?
The US even buys support, including keeping USD the medium of exchange (thus creating USD demand, thus giving USD value) including be providing military guarantees.
Russia and China have great militaries too, but the US is a league of its own in its ability to apply it anywhere on the globe.
Russia does not.
The reason the US (and USD) has been winning is, as I'm sure you'd agree, a complex and huge topic full of not just strategy but also history. But it doesn't change the fact that without the US military and its ability to project it worldwide it would be MUCH weaker.
Russia lost 50 million people in the war, at a time when the US was sitting as pretty the only major country not blown to bits, and it was holding the IOUs.
No. Bitcoin has utility. Screws have utility also, they just don't have very much value.
Suppose bitcoin gave the equivalent utility as visa but for negligible fees. In this world, you would have the same utility for a lower cost, and the equity value of Visa would conceivably go to zero. My point is that converting utility to value depends on the ability to monetize something. If there was somehow a screw monopoly, I'm guessing the "value" of screws would go way up even with fixed utility. This of course was also true when the cost of producing a screw was much higher in the past. Technology is deflationary.
I don't know what the value of bitcoin should be (nor do I think it has comparable utility to visa), but we are undoubtedly in world where too much value is extracted from financial services relative to the utility that they provide. I think that will be disrupted, but have no idea what, if anything, will be valuable after it is disrupted.
But the card itself has no value other than said black market. It has loads of utility though.
Maybe you can use it to scrape off the ice on your car windows in a cold winter day... so that would be maybe a nickel?
Further I can call citibank to get a free replacement visa card. So the value of the credit card seems to be close to zero.
Except if course, if you buy a piece of visa, you get a dividend and legal rights, while owning a Bitcoin gets you the privilege of paying miners to extract that value. So really, that 7/1700*442e9 $ is the value of those who own the network (the miners), not the users.
Please define "many" when it comes to settling payroll to employees.
Unlike paying in company stock you do not deal with nonsense like AMT or blackout periods.
I for one am thankful for the regular clients that pay me in crypto-assets, and wish all would. It saves me having to buy from exchanges. Makes for an easy dollar-cost-averaging strategy too.
> avoid hires that do not have an interest in the space
> saves me having to buy from exchanges
> Unlike paying in company stock you do not deal with nonsense like AMT or blackout periods.
Nice religion you got there.
And again back in reality, measures (interest rate increases) to counteract inflation in the fiat currency also make Bitcoin an unattractive "investment":
"The higher [interest] rates go, the more cost to hold an asset that does not produce anything." - Jamie Dimon, CEO JP Morgan
Bitcoin for a while was an unproductive but speculatively "profitable" (for non-greater fools) place to shove money when interest rates were low. Now that money is moving out.
It doesn’t work. Other things do the job much cheaper and faster… and without burning a small country worth of energy.
I disagree, Visa has value because it is a company that earns profits, ~$10B in FY 2021 ($5.xx per share, 2B shares outstanding)
Bitcoin is not a company that earns profits, so any value ascribed to BTC cannot be for the same reasons Visa has value. In fact, BTC has zero intrinsic value.
Visa is not a medium of exchange any more than a local bank is.
There are 8 billion of us on this planet.
There are maybe a hundred thousand bitcoin holders.
A fraction of them actively use bitcoin.
By any metric, “many of us” is an grossly incorrect statement.
I work in a weird field credit card providers don't like to work with. The only real international solution is Crypto, everything else are more local solutions with their own issues.
Even thought I am losing money every day, I don't see any other solution to my, and some others, businesses.
Central bank digital currency seems inevitable. I imagine in the far future there will be central bank digital currency and illegal crypto currency that facilitates black market transactions. Crypto holders will be smeared in narratives as drug traffickers and criminals. At some point there will be risk outside of volatility with holding crypto. I just can't see how things evolve any other way.
The digital Yuan is going to be incredibly tough competition for the West that I don't see how a renegade non-central bank digital currency does not eventually come to be seen as counterfeit.
In Switzerland you have banking privacy, no or high cash limits, you can privately buy a new car in cash without anyone raising an eye brow. Crypto isn't actually a real danger when your whole society is based on monetary freedom.
I think some billionaires may still be able to bail it out, I'm about 50-50 it dies.
> Tether collapsing in the next couple weeks will likely put Bitcoin under $10,000
I kind of doubt this happens, I think Tether is fundamentally structured differently than Terra/Luna and is all debt-based and won't face a run on the bank until crypto is basically a smoking hole in the ground. Everyone wants Tether to implode to take out crypto, but I think it is the other way around.
The Tether redemptions though are signs that the underlying value of the collateral (crypto) has gone below thresholds, and the redemptions withdraw liquidity that was causing inflation in the price.
Something else is likely to pop though, and eventually one of the really big exchanges is going to go under. Coinbase going full MtGox or something like that.
How do you propose to replace the $100bn online drug market?
If everyone runs for the exits then crypto suffers an old fashioned bank run, and it doesn't matter if it has any intrinsic value. A bank suffering a run still has loans on the books that are being paid back, but it has a cash crisis and people can't withdraw. A systemic failure starts knocking over institutions one by one as they each hit a liquidity crunch and don't have cash. Once the music stops playing everyone tries to grab some of the remaining chairs and get out. If all the cash is removed from the system and there's still billions in demand trying to exit while there's only a trickle of people trying to catch a falling knife, then it is going to overshoot and unwind to very nearly zero.
The reason why we have things like FDIC, is to prevent things like this, but crypto decided that was all old fashioned thinking. As a result, crypto is buttressed only by some billionaires who are true-believers in it, and if it only takes a few billion here or there then they may produce a bailout package for the system. If not, then the system will fail.
Any half decent exchange in a western country that holds them to account has over 100% of customer assets, they don't get special rules like banks who only need a few % of customer deposits.
Bank runs aren't really possible unless there is corporate fraud happening.
The origin of “hodl” was a drunk guy languishing that he couldnt trade well
> Yeah you good traders can spot the highs and the lows pit pat piffy wing wong wang just like that and make a millino bucks sure no problem bro. Likewise the weak hands are like OH NO IT'S GOING DOWN I'M GONNA SELL he he he and then they're like OH GOD MY ASSHOLE when the SMART traders who KNOW WHAT THE FUCK THEY'RE DOING buy back in but you know what? I'm not part of that group.
Just trade my guy. Nobody has to ever make an opinion on the asset class’ utility, only liquidity. Know your risk and accept the consequences. I’m very keen on this shakeout, the money is barely exiting the market its still in the stablecoins ($200bn+) and ready to pounce into any other crypto in the matter of any single block. Even if those implode too, good! Shake it out! I love 1,000% swings that dont have an expiration date, I still dont know another market to do that, especially randomly on a weekend. That was happening before hedge funds with LPs that are QE beneficiaries got into this space, and will happen after.
I mean. You could, like, sell them on a forum or in person. With your wallet which is supposed to enable you to do just that.
I admire the success of crypto-exchanges' marketing in making them out to be the only way to conduct transactions on a friggin transaction management system. But then you'd have to deal with the fact that next to no one wants to organically trade <random myriad of altcoins/tokens>. I for one rejoice about the upcoming altcoin extinction event.
I don't agree with the other comment that the USDT/Altcoin pair is such a big deal. If USDT became even less desired, other stablecoins pair would appear and surpass USDT pairs in volume.
I don't know how to say this without sounding snide but I am genuinely curious: you need to back every single part of that sentence up with some serious citations.
Specifically can you challenge my perception that you're advocating for option B of the following: Option A: find someone to trade <thing you have> for <thing you want>, haggle, transact. Option B: trust some tentacled bio-monstrosity to perform sophisticated transaction chains with a ton of misaligned incentives at each layer.
You can check binance and other sites that offer P2P listings and you'll find that most of the listings nowadays trade stablecoins. I can't easily cite that for F2F (face to face) but I have done F2F trades many times and it's always with stablecoins
> Specifically can you challenge my perception that you're advocating for option B of the following: Option A: find someone to trade <thing you have> for <thing you want>, haggle, transact. Option B: trust some tentacled bio-monstrosity to perform sophisticated transaction chains with a ton of misaligned incentives at each layer.
Option A isn't viable. That's basically barter economy, and the same reasons why people use money instead of barter in the real world apply. You have a thousand+ of different coins/tokens/etc. So that's 1000^2 pairs if you wanted a pair for each combination. Obviously impossible.
So before stablecoins existed, BTC was the crypto that everything had a pair with. You would buy BTC and then trade that to something else. But with stablecoins most people moved to that because you don't have the volatility that BTC has.
> Option B: trust some tentacled bio-monstrosity to perform sophisticated transaction chains with a ton of misaligned incentives at each layer.
I don't know what you mean exactly by that loaded statement. But CeX are extremely simple in the way they operate. Of course the problem is if they are doing something not legit. DeX such as uniswap are a bit more complex but not that complex really.
To put things into perspective, what do people do? A) Buy AAPL through NASDAQ (with a broker as an intermediary) using dollars B) Trade AAPL for WMT over the counter
Of course A. B would be not only extremely situational, but also impossible unless you are really big investor.
Even in a hypothetical world without any stablecoins at all (which is different from a world without Tether), fiat-less exchanges could still exist: just exchange fiat for btc or eth, and then btc or eth for altcoins. Altcoins existed long before stablecoins.
Tether isn't the only stablecoin out there. Tether collapsing is basically the end of Tether and will send BTC below 10K and will take the others with them.
It won't be the end of crypto due to this as there are other coins (not tokens) out there that are compliant (ISO 20020), have a use case and will survive this crash, but I expect the majority of useless memecoins, tokens, etc to be wiped out.
The end of Tether will be the end of stablecoins, just like ICOs ended completely at some point.
There is no way that will break Bitcoin; the network will keep running. And if bitcoin's fiat-price was too high because Tether existed, better to resolve that now as well.
A year ago the internet was non-stop jokes about how much it outperformed the S&P 500 year over year.
It’s now underperformed it by 75% since the previous peak. The myth has been completely shattered.
If it hits $1, I will just stock up. Traders getting out is good for me.
I am in Bitcoin, or any really viable replacement that emerges, long term for reasons fickle speculators do not care about. I fundamentally believe a healthy society needs a reasonably private, international, censorship resistant, and open source financial system that works over the internet. I see such a thing as having more -real- value than the US dollar that a small number of people can print more of at any time for political reasons.
99% of crypto users sell, or abandon their wallets
Remaining users are HODL, and even have some cash left
Demand falls, prices falls, mining difficulty adjusts, HODLs keep buying
As difficulty falls, there is a real risk of something-something-51% attack
So HODLs (acting rationally) need to spend more $$ to boost prices just to protect their existing coins
So now, we have a finite asset (coins), which do not generate income, but require non trivial constant $ cost just to protect it?
Say everyone gets out except you. You own all the bitcoins in the world. Now what?
There is a price at which Bitcoin is no longer secure from the entity willing to spend the most money to 51% attack it. But there's no good way to know how big that threat is. Most likely Bitcoin has a significant safety margin there (I'd take a rough guess at >100x).
That’s a red hot used market that Lovelace still needs to sell into. The drops aren’t done yet.
I did like the comment someone made on twitter the Elon's raving causing crypto to crash had done more for the planet than all the teslas ....
Of course, any used GPU could be defective, so you need to be careful buying one no matter what.
At it's peak, annoyed, I tried to find my old computer with my wallet. I gave it an honest try, but then looked up the amount the doge was worth. Somewhere around $20 at it's peak. I would have really been bummed if it'd been worth anything.
I hadn't realized google was falling hard, that's great news to me, and I wish it had been on the front page.
Could be google hiding from bad press here as they are wont to do.
The market needs a wipe out of the speculators, VCs, scammers and retail investors to drain out the billions of dumb money to cause these prices to go down again to around November 2020. This is why once Tether collapses, we will see Bitcoin at $10K again, lower than we have seen since March 2020.
As for the stock market, It isn't done and can still drop further as soon as the Fed increases rates again in July and the layoffs will accelerate when the VCs continue to deny more funding for the vast majority of useless unprofitable startups that will also be wiped out.
Either way, Just like 90% of startups fail. 90% of these cryptocurrency / blockchain projects won't survive this bear market or even the first foot of regulations. The remaining 10% will continue to survive once again.
(Not that I care much, I sold all my GSUs after I quit in January, and lucked out and hit it at its peak)
[0] https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2021Q4_alphabet_earnings...
Perhaps you will be laughed at again if the price goes back toward $100_000.
The point is, you can be right some of the time, but it's a purely speculative market, and no-one really knows where it's going. Is bitcoin 'worth' nothing? Yes. Is it worth whatever people are prepared to pay for it, which could be millions? Also Yes.
It's the easiest financial instrument in the world to short? Far easier than going short on stocks.
You can go long and short on 6 month futures for a tiny fee.
I’m sure crypto exchanges offer ways to short BTC as well, but the exchange itself probably handles settlement, so there is counterparty risk involved (among other risks inherent in unregulated exchanges).
I also wouldn't take your bet as I think bitcoin likely will go above 30k in the next 4 years. What is also likely is that the price will remain volatile - unless there's a major game changer I think this volatility will keep putting a lot of people off (with an impact on price).
I have no idea what the price will be in 4 years time. My guess says under 50k. But I wouldn't be surprised if it hit 200k.
There is no cash upfront. It’s perfect.
There’s no reliable way to short it.
(Unless the exchanges let you withdraw the fiat for your positions while they’re open?)
It regularly moves wildly faster than any other commonly traded asset. There is no possible way that any margin requirement could cover it, because no-one is going to stake 90% down for 10% margin, which is what you'd need to guarantee against a crash - especially if you're putting up USD for collateral.
Exchanges make huge amounts of money in bear and bull markets.
Yes. If it's provenance is unverifiable (it is), and there's no evidence that the money being pumped into it exists (there isn't), then anything even adjacent to it is implicitly exposed to counter-party risk and therefore untrustworthy.
This is without even considering the fact that there's substantial evidence to suggest that most of the money being pumped in does not exist (cough tether cough).
Exchanges make money while the plates are spinning, and they make significantly less in bear markets, none of which guarantees your exit.
If a bank fails it's dissolved and guaranteed deposits get first preference when administrators sift through the wreckage. If a crypto exchange even looks like it might fai.. oops boating accident.
What's hilarious to me is that Saylor still gets asked on live television if he's worried about a margin call. He laughs it off and says something like "oh no, we're not close to that and very liquid" which really means "lol no I'll just say oopsie doopsie some intern lost the key". The people that lent to him are beyond belief stupid.
How are you all still drinking the koolaid?
It never gets old.
> 'I hope you didn't buy BTC at >$60K.' [0]
Michael Saylor and Nayib Bukele (El Salvador's President), etc are all HODLing in drawdown again after buying in at >$40K.
They and many others have bought in during the peak mania and the crypto hype of last year which in the case for Bitcoin it really is the wrong time to buy in and is actually the best time to sell.
Still has a long way down to go, especially even when regulations will soon come along and the full unveiling of the Tether scam.
You may consider multiplying that by a factor to add some conservatism (though my estimates themselves may actually be conservative given that a lot of mining happens in country with low energy and labour prices), but it still seems like it's more profitable to keep the ASICs running than to switch them off, which is attested to by the fact the hashrate hasn't been significantly affected by the recent fluctuations in price.
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
[1] https://blockworks.co/crashing-prices-expose-bitcoin-mining-...
And I agree with that.
The miners already have their rigs, so the initial investment wouldn't be relevant to the decision to keep mining or not. Though, you might expect the hash rate to decay over time as miners stop buying new machines.
Why? Well, imagine you have the capital to buy 3 rigs outright. You can use this to make a profit of $X / day on your outright owned rigs. Well, maybe it’s smarter to buy 30 rigs on credit, pay interest, make $10X/day in profit (before your loan payment).
At some profit $X you should go the credit route because you’ll earn more, in fact a lot more. However if you buy assuming $X and the profit craters you could be in deep trouble
Therefore, it'd make more sense to keep it running for so long as the machine hadn't been repossessed and the profits from mining outweigh variable costs such as electricity.
Repossession and liquidation can be a slow and costly process and the initial cost of the machine is also a sunk cost from the perspective of the lender and a mass wave of defaults could put their liquidity at risk. So, they have an incentive to make accommodations to the borrowers in order to ensure at least some payments keep flowing.
I’ve certainly got my popcorn for the next year or so.
Edit: never mind I misread the candlesticks
Constantly surprised how out of the loop HN is on this.
what a lovely day.
This is all standard speculative mania stuff right now though. The bubble burst, next the scams are uncovered and wiped out, regulation comes in then to "protect" investors from being scammed in the same fashion in the future.
I'll be back when the bitcoin show is back in town. The lower, the better.