Bitcoin drops 50% overnight as China’s Biggest BTC exchange stops Yuan deposits | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin drops 50% overnight as China’s Biggest BTC exchange stops Yuan deposits

techcrunch.com

78 pointslinux_devil86 comments

The /r/bitcoin subreddit has a suicide hotline disclaimer stickied to the top. Yikes.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1t5ofu/please_stick...

Yowza. I guess it's true that the majority of people investing in Bitcoin saw it as more of an quick-flip play than a long-term value investment.

That sub is about as volatile as the currency itself. Though some people mentioned buying bitcoin on credit and that could put you in a pretty bad situation.

No worse than buying material goods on credit, which a huge number of people do. If anything it's less bad, as at least with a gamble you might get the money back to pay off the credit. Of course, whether you value a TV or a chance of getting rich more is subjective.

edit: I stand corrected, good points below. But it is still very possible to use credit to speculate without it being a huge problem, e.g. if you could afford $x over 3 months but think you need to spend it all now to see the benefits then the slight interest on the credit just becomes part of your risk, but doesn't mean you'd be in trouble if it doesn't work out, other than losing money which is a risk regardless.

Uh... yeah it is worse than material goods. Someone will give you $5 for a TV or you could at least enjoy kicking it down a hill. With a devastated, leveraged position in an illusion, you ain't got squat.

Once the bubble pops, there is 0% chance of rich or break even. You can wait forever, but the lack of diversification means you are 99.9% likely to be holding the thing that never recovers. A broad market recovers. A speculative vehicle is dead. No chances. Hold long :~)

Most material goods are bought with the knowledge that their value will depreciate significantly and quickly. Investments are not seen that way so people will, foolishly, bet money they don't have and a good indicator of that is putting it on plastic.

BTC is just a commodity, so yeah I'd say it's just as bad.

Can we stop treating BTC like it's some kind of magical currency and be realists here? It's a commodity, and it trades like one.

Calm down, where was I treating it like a magical currency?

People mentioned buying BTC with, specifically, credit cards. Maybe I'm not too up on my commodity trading but how many individuals are over-leveraging themselves on their personal AMEX?

Just a small note: the fact that people upvote or sticky that post speaks nothing to how many people are actually in a position to potentially feel suicidal about it, all it means is some people think others may feel that way.

Definitely true, good to keep that in mind. Clicking up-vote doesn't mean you're calling the hotline.

You'd be surprised how many people take on risky investments then contemplate suicide when they inevitably lose a lot of money...

In other news the United States Dollar has almost doubled in value in a single day: http://www.coinion.com/2013/12/07/united-states-dollar-almos...

Ha! The story is of course a jest, but there's no reason why you can't look at it that way. A cup is either half empty or half full.

> A cup is either half empty or two cups.

Fixed

There are as many reasons as there are other things in the world besides bitcoin why you can't look at it that way.

$/yuan, $/euro, $/big mac, $/potted plants, $/dinner at applebees...

No, it's just that those things also doubled in value.

Touche, sir

That's not really true per se. That's the chart of USD/BTC so the inverse of BTC/USD which has dropped significantly in the past few days so of course the inverse has shown an increase.

For a more accurate picture of the dollar I track the UUP ETF which pegs it's value to the dollars exchange rate over a basket of currencies. (Which btw has been on a steady downtrend in the past 6 months, definitely not doubling everyday)

[1]: http://www.invescopowershares.com/products/overview.aspx?tic...

You did read the url right? It's satire.

Andddd... whoops.

The cognitive dissonance is magic. You couldn't fake the tragic similarities to the dotcom crash. People yelling "hold for long!" with people raining down and everybody having a little voice inside their head saying, "I'm smart. I'm sure I knew the risks better than the next guy. I read the forums. I got this computer. This is it. 50% down is nothing."

Then when nearly everything was 95% down and liquidity was drying up because the bulls had all been beat into puddles in the street... everything went back to normal. And we did it all over again.

It doesn't matter if you write the history and they read it. Human nature is to be dragged into these things. Recognize the pattern. Look for the short.

Buy btc when it's low, buy things with btc when it's high :) If you're trying to invest in it like a forex trader without adding liquidity to the market (e.g., buy-n-hold), you're part of what drives these bubbles in the first place..

I treat these bubbles as periodic shopping sprees. I bought a bunch of e-cigarette stuff and a few christmas presents during this bubble. (and I still have more $us worth of btc than what I spent on the original btc).

Buy low and sell high? What a brilliant strategy.

EDIT: If you think you've found a sure-fire way to beat the market, you are probably wrong. That or you are doing insider trading or high-frequency trading (arbitrage).

You'd be surprised how many people buy high when caught up in the euphoria, then capitulate and sell low...

when you think they buy high, they might think they buy low. Oh if wed only knew when low is low and high is high.

Ah, except I'm not trading for cash. I'm trading for something that means more to me than cash (which I would have used cash to purchase anyway) :) What the merchant does with it afterwards, on the other hand.

And I'm not in it to make a fast buck. I'm just using it for occasional vanity purchases. I don't like treating a volatile commodity as a forex investment.. just doesn't seem wise. If it crashes to <$1/btc, I'll be out like, a hundred bucks. So what?

What's the difference between what you are doing and selling btc for cash and using that cash to buy stuff?

The only difference is that you are forced to buy things at a certain time rather than keeping it in cash.

The underlying transaction is the same.

> forced

No, not really. It just changes my strategy on which currency to use when I want to buy something.

How do merchants even price things to sell using bitcoin when it has volatility like this?

Do they dynamically change the price of goods based on the bitcoin/$ exchange rate? Or do they actually sell the same goods for 1$ one day, $3 the next and $2 the third?

If they use a service like coinbase, they price in USD and then payout almost immediately. It's a deferred sell, to be sure, but it adds more economic activity than just an exchange transaction.

new reply to reply to the edit :)

I don't think I've found a sure-fire way to beat the market, not one bit. I understand that it's risky-brisky. But I do think that non-investment activity will add more legitimacy to the btc economy itself, which is why I opt to spend instead of sell.

And how do you know when low is low ? sorry but what you says doesnt make sense.

You dont know wether bitcoin will go down to 100$ or go up to 1000$. You cant know for sure, you only can assume it will go up or down.

So the "buy low sell high" doesnt mean anything.It like saying water is wet.

For some people 1000 was low enough to buy, for some it was not high enough to sell.

When the hype gets loud enough that local papers and your tech-unsavvy parents are talking about, it's high. Sell then. For me that would have been mid November - I would have missed the $1000 peak but still would have made out like a bandit.

It rebounded back to almost same level

http://bitcoinity.org/markets/bitstamp/USD

% change 24hrs, -10% at time of this post

Everybody bought for the bounce, thereby causing the bounce.

Thereby perpetuating the illusion of stability - which might all be that's needed to continue with more people adopting it.

I don't know if it'll ever be a stable currency/stock, but at the least, given what you said, it won't become a dead currency/stock (for a long time anyway).

>but at the least, given what you said, it won't become a dead currency/stock (for a long time anyway).

There is no grantee of that with something as volatile as bitcoin. All it takes is the people playing the market getting burned one to many times and saying fuck it. This could happen tomorrow or never.

I really can't think of any investment as risky as bitcoin.

> I really can't think of any investment as risky as bitcoin.

Oh, that's easy. Short-sell some overpriced darling stock like Tesla Motors or Amazon or something and watch the market remain irrational longer than you remain solvent. :)

Exactly. It'll be once investors are done putting money into it. Is there a way to know how much pure investment money has gone into it though? I'm not sure.

The Flash Crash of 2010 was nondissimilar: stocks were available at a ridiculously good price, and as people realized this, they created buy orders driving back up the price.

Bitcoin may be more vulnerable to these crashes than other currencies, commodities, stocks, or similar instruments. It's got a smaller size, lower volume, generally high volatility, and no sophisticated market instruments or automated high-frequency trading algorithms operate to make the market more efficient.

(oblig. disclaimer. this post is not a bitcoin advocacy post or a bitcoin hate post, but rather is meant to explore interesting properties of markets.)

From my brief observation of bitcoin this seems to be the defining characteristic for bitcoin, crashes followed by rebounds, pretty much since it was created, making me believe that most of bitcoin usage is speculation (is that already confirmed?).

Anyway, the question that keeps me from investing a dime into bitcoin is "What if it doesn't rebound?". If it really is being used as an investment vehicle and not a currency, than the answer to that, in my opinion, is eventually it will drop and continue to drop to the point where it's worth pennies on that dollar. With the boom and bust nature, I suspect many people will eventually just give up on it as a currency which would be close to a death sentence for bitcoin.

I am heavily biased towards index funds with the lowest fees so I'm rather pessimistic about bitcoin in general, just like I am about playing the stock market. It would be interesting to see what would happen if banks started to care about bitcoin. The market needs to grow many times over but I would expect them to be the only people making consistent money (and not even sometimes) just like they do on the stock market.

There faster, more efficient ways to cause your hair to turn gray and fall out than watching BTC's waxing and waning on an hourly basis.

Personally I suggest looking at the 52-week moving average -- it's a lot more comforting and a lot less stressful.

Not all bitcoin usage is speculation but you are right, most of it's current value is probably reflected through speculation.

Now there are two things that give bitcoin it's value:

1. Usage / Adoption

2. Speculation

Right now, China seems to have trouble speculating in bitcoin. There is no question of China ever having any usage in the near future given their government's stance on bitcoin.

Adoption of bitcoin has been on a steady rise over the past few months. No, apple or amazon are not yet accepting bitcoin but there are a growing number of people who are starting to see why they should accept it and why it's a viable payment method.

It's impossible to say what it's value should be based on current adoption. The value right now could be $1 or $1000.

My personal investment style is also biased towards low cost index funds.. I'm a Boglehead. However, Bitcoin is the only exception I have made so far. It's one of those rare moments that I personally see value in what the technology brings and can achieve.

I'm invested, more in terms of building tools/startups around bitcoin than in just buying and speculating, though I'm guilty of the latter too. It's even more fun because I truly believe in it's potential. (gambling by comparison, is less fun ;))

No matter what you invest in you always worry about the rebound or lack thereof. This is not exclusive only to Bitcoin.

If you're not keen on assessing a general idea of the risk involved then hedging on magical internet money futures is not for you.

Bitcoin is undergoing a difficult price discovery process, and no one (even die hard bitcoiners like myself) will deny that the valuation is heavily driven by speculators.

Sticking with index funds is very, very smart... I doubt I'd even own any btc myself if I didn't buy some at a buck a piece back in 2011 (well, I also make some from my bitcoin business, but that isn't a speculative decision)

Bitcoin is a much different investment than stock in established companies or national currencies. It is much similar to high risk / high reward investments in uncertain technology ventures, like angel and VC investing. What it also has in common with those types of investments is the potential for very high returns that make taking on a high level of risk completely justified.

This type of risk profile lends itself to volatility. We don't get to see this with startup investments because their stock is rarely traded, and when it is it is done privately. The public doesn't get to see stock fluctuations in high tech companies until after the IPO, at which point the companies are clearly established and much of the volatility has been eliminated.

10% drop in a day is considered a big drop.

This:

> It rebounded back to almost same level

contradicts this:

> % change 24hrs, -10% at time of this post

-10% change over 24 hrs in a commodity price isn't "almost the same level".

It is when that's on par for daily fluctuation.

If that's the typical daily fluctuation, it is still not "about the same level", it just means that the commodity has an extremely unstable value.

Then it has "Rebounded to within its normal trading range."

Where are all the cynics making 2009-era "even a dead cat bounces" comments?

Even a dead cat bounces? Then it tumbles? Then it inevitably disintegrates?

I wonder how many Finance professors just opened up their Investment 101 lecture deck and added a new case study under the Risk/Return slide. I think a lot of investors and speculators just got reminded of regulatory risk.

That said, the MBA professors are updating their case studies for Regulatory Arbitrage...outcome tbd:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_arbitrage#Regulatory...

At least it shows where the bitcoins are used

I'm still in it for the long haul. I'm sure it will go back up at some point.

The reaction to all of this is completely ridiculous, because it lacks good context.

Bitcoin is still up around 444% if you look at the chart from six months ago: http://bitcoinity.org/markets/bitstamp/USD. It's still one of the best investments of the year, if you compare it to pretty much everything else (the stock market, gold price, options, housing, oil, you-name-it). When the fed tapering program begins, I think we are going to see a similar (though probably not as drastic) drop in the stock market as well, which I also believe to be overinflated. That hits a lot of people too, most of whom have their retirement funds built on it. It's just the nature of investing, which I have a lot of trouble at times isolating from the idea of gambling.

The real lesson here is that if you're just trying to get into Bitcoin to make easy money, you're going to be disappointed. People should be hesitant of get rich quick schemes in general, and in altcoins in particular. When friends and family ask if they should buy Bitcoin, I immediately warn them that getting into Bitcoin solely on price increase speculation is akin to gambling or stock investing and should be treated as such. As Roger Ver said, Bitcoin's price is the least interesting thing about it. What excites me about Bitcoin is the ability to control your own purchasing power, and not require a central system (bank, payment processor) to manage and send it. Bitcoin is still at an incredibly early stage in its development, and like anything, there is a lot of uncertainty now, and to come.

It's not my intention to gloat, but I want to give you a positive story against all this. I sold enough of my ownership of Bitcoin at about $950/BTC to pay my usual salary in USD for an entire year, which will allow me to work on Coinpunk and Neocities full-time, and have some extra funds to pay people that help me work on it. I have never had this opportunity in my life, and I'm really excited about it. It's like getting angel investment without the investor, and it gave me complete autonomy to do for the project what I feel is right. For me (and for people that were sensible about it), it's been a very good year.

My prediction is that the China situation is going to get sorted out eventually. But sure, until that happens, the value of Bitcoin has fallen because of concerns about liquidity. If the US banned the ability to exchange dollars, I imagine you would see a similar drop in its value as well. And it's looking like most countries are invariably going to not ban Bitcoin. The US hearings in particular were quite positive. If China's government decides it's done with Bitcoin, it just means that other countries will have the opportunity to become the leader in Bitcoin startups. And that's also a positive thing for me ultimately, but sadly, not as much for future entrepreneurs in China. As someone that works on startups for a living, I would always rather have a level playing field than be given an opportunity due to a punitive effect.

I love the idea of Coinpunk.

And I wish I could contribute, but I'm so jaded and scarred by Javascript at this point it's not even funny. (For context, I spent a lot of time debugging JS on Internet Exploiter in the early 2000's long before anything cool and JS-related existed, and I do Ruby now.)

Can you do me a huge favor, though (and I'd be happy to toss you an entire bitcoin if you simply promise to do this): You NEED a better test suite. You're writing software that deals with money (or "a money," whatever), it absolutely needs a robust test suite. Primarily unit tests, but also a few functional tests. For both the server-side AND client-side code. Bitcoin itself has a reasonably good test suite, yours should too. I REALLY doubt Blockchain.info has a good one. You could distinguish yourself this way while also covering your own ass in the event you need to refactor things without breaking things :)

I didn't think tests were fun to write until I realized how much time they were saving me in debugging and headaches after the fact. Do it now, before your code size gets much bigger.

I highly recommend this book http://www.amazon.com/Growing-Object-Oriented-Software-Guide...

Again, happy to order it for you (it's not cheap) or just toss in some more BTC if you promise to order it and read it.

I don't know what cred I can give you other than to tell you I'm "GSpotAssassin", a well-known big tipper on /r/bitcoin. (I got into bitcoin very early, and I'm an open-source developer.)

Anyway, congrats on your self-funded expedition, that is pretty fucking rad and I expect big things. :)

Thank you for the feedback! I agree, improving the testing suite is definitely a high priority and high on my list.

Kyle, this is going to sound very random, but I found out from a Facebook posting by your mom of the Wired article about Coinpunk[1] the other day that your mom and I grew up just down the block from each other. So I have to be glad to see someone with roots (the generation before) in my hometown posting here on Hacker News.

That said, I wonder if it isn't possible for people on both sides of the issues around Bitcoin to lose perspective once in a while. Just three weeks ago, you wrote here on HN[2]

The congressional hearings were very upbeat about Bitcoin. Once the word got out that there wasn't any intention to ban it, a lot more people got interested.

And China.

The China part isn't working out quite so well now. The United States part of Bitcoin regulation will, I suspect as someone trained in the law, depend a lot on what trade-offs are perceived in different patterns of regulating Bitcoin by the most influential interest groups in Congress who care about Bitcoin. I wouldn't predict today that Bitcoin will never face an unfavorable regulatory environment in the United States, despite the hearings three weeks or so ago.

So, yes, I think your most responsible advice I fully agree with: When friends and family ask if they should buy Bitcoin, I immediately warn them that getting into Bitcoin solely on price increase speculation is akin to gambling or stock investing and should be treated as such. That's about where I am with Bitcoin. It has some interesting ideas behind it, and I'm glad that creative people are exploring those ideas and seeing what Bitcoin might be good for in today's and tomorrow's economy. But you are correct that Bitcoin is not a sure-fire way to get rich soon.

[1] http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/12/coinpunk/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6808450

Can we finally stop listening to the Winklevoss twins now?

Dogecoin 50% gain only alt coin to post gains in 24 hours.

>reddit and 4chan

Well looks like the internet has decided what coin they want to use.

Buttcoins are deprecated.

I'm still shocked how a dumb meme-based altcoin gained so much popularity, where all other just as boring and generic Bitcoin forks died down or are completely insignificant.

To their credit though, they based it off of Litecoin... making it a fork of a fork.

Either I have no sense of humor, or we aren't going to be seeing October 1993 any time soon. Can't wait for "Latvian Potato Coin" to appear in the future.

      wow

                   such cynic

   very not-with-the-times

If I wanted these kinds of comments I'd go to reddit.. Keep memes off this site please, it's one of the last public forums on the internet without them.

This is one of the very rare HN contexts in which a comment like that is spot-on.

Your shocked because your old and have no sense of humor and think money is serious business.

Dogecoin has the fastest rate of adoption, of any crypto-currency. Ever, period. It makes every coin, even bitcoin look like an absolute failure.

Because it's fun, and kids think it's cool. You guys missed the boat, because you were too busy being serious.

> Because it's fun, and kids think it's cool.

Well, that's a good way to drive fast adoption -- and equally fast abandonment.

Money isn't serious?!

I knew crypto-currencies were popular in the higher social strata but COME ON.. how is money not serious?

Can I buy Snapchat shares using Dogecoin? Then I could hedge on which one will collapse first.

Cut it out. You are trolling. Your reference to "buttcoins" is a good indicator you're from /g/ and this isn't /g/.

Edit: FYI, http://rbt.asia/g/?task=search2&ghost=yes&search_text=dogeco....

it's fuelled entirely by reddit as a joke.

Reddit has a way of tipping people with bitcoins for posts

    /u/bitcoinbot 0.015BTC verify

people saw these public tips, kind of an alternative to reddit gold, so it entered the consciousness of the community. dogechain was born because, more or less, it was pretty funny to drop this on someone:

    /u/dogecoinbot 3000 doge verify

    dogecoinbot:
    Verified.

Sort of playing on the hopes of redditors to get rewarded for a post (ala reddit silver)

It's a pretty cute joke. Lots of people started following the leader and bang. Demand.

> I'm still shocked how a dumb meme-based altcoin gained so much popularity

Clearly you are unfamiliar with the basic properties of Internet memes. :P

Obviously they spread. I guess my use of "meme" was a bit too broad, I meant image macro, specifically. They used to be humorous, but they're now so overdone and generic that they simply hurt to look at. It's like a fast food five second dose of "comedy", which I guess is fitting for our present fast food society.

Now that I think about it, that statement was asinine. I'm quite familiar with 4chan, Something Awful and Reddit. Never underestimate the stupidity of a general community. But sometimes, I just wish people would take the time to watch a 64k demo instead of a YouTube celebrity video.

It's actually a fork of a fork of a fork, it's a fork of Luckycoin, which is a fork of Litecoin, which is a fork of Bitcoin.

Dogecoin is about 10 days old. The currency is based on the popular doge meme and will have max 100 billion units. It uses scrypt and has a random block reward.

http://dogecoin.com/

Price history on CoinedUp: http://doge.yottabyte.nu/

Dogecoin has a surprising momentum to it. I'm curious what role it will play once the initial novelty wears off. There are many more Doge than Bitcoin or Litecoin, so a single Doge will never be unattainable. It has a long way to go to even reach parity with the penny.

The amount of currency doesn't really matter. We can always trade in kilodoges or something.

It's interesting though, how it's pretty much an exact clone of bitcoin yet has such a different value. The value doesn't come from the thing itself, it's how many people are using it.

Dogecoins do have some minor value though as there is a subreddit of people willing to perform petty tasks in exchange for them.

who cares? Nobody owns it anyway.. This is what I don't get. They say only 1000 ppl own Bitcoin. So why the popularity? I mean who cares if those 1000 ppl get rich or lose all their money?

1000?! Where did you get that number from? Coinbase has 650.000 users alone...

users or owners?

There was some headline about a week ago that said roughly 1000 people own half of all bitcoins.

Bitcoin is deflationary, a very non-trivial amounts of bitcoins are lost forever.

True, but the total amount of bitcoin owners are in the millions. AznHisoka stated that only 1000 people own bitcoins, which is simply not true.

I am not an expert in markets or finance, but this is my observation: a lot of inexperienced people owning BTC will sell when they see these sudden drops; experienced investors will be there, reaping the benefits and buying BTC at a "discount". It wouldn't surprise me if BTC will go back to 1,000 US$ and beyond just in a matter of weeks.

This is NOT an investment advice, but I would buy some BTC now that the price is at approx. 600 US$, and keep it for a few months at least.

You are not an expert, that is not advice, but you advise people to buy it at some arbitrary value? Thats one of the many things wrong with bitcoin, all the stupid people talking shit. Classic bubble signs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com