Actually the cost of mining puts a soft price floor on Bitcoin. When prices touch the cost of mining, they face heavy resistance since miners rage quit at that point
Not really, the supply of bitcoin is, except in the short term (< 2 weeks), independent of the amount of mining effort. And that's all that really matters (especially because there's no single price where all miners stop making a profit, and miners will continue to mine and sell even when they are no longer making a profit just to lessen losses on hardware).
and if miners rage-quit then those who are left will make more bitcoin per unit of energy, thus lowering the cost of mining... rinse and repeat and you can go to 0$$
If you could convert between gold and usd at the same rate that one can convert btc to usdt, gold would be just as volatile. Strangely the energy and human cost of gold is rarely mentioned
other than trying to get the money of suckers, I've never understood the point of bitcoin. no currency, digital or not, can be removed from the world's activities.
why would you ever want something that could plunge 30% in a day? even if it went up 5 billion percent, then what? everyone sells and it goes down? what's the point?
it's like the most zero-sum activity imaginable.
edit: I'm sincerely wondering what the value of bitcoin is, other than things surrounding preserving its value
You'll listen to Bitcoin FUD all day but you don't seem to care about the hydro carbons purged in the process of strip mining the earth for shiny rocks though.
This is pure garbage. The problem bitcoin solves, a distributed ledger, is one that's simply solved with a ledger over a trust network. In otherwords, this is a "solution" that is burning TWh of energy doing something global banks accomplish with kWh of power.
All the power funneled into BTC would be far better spent doing anything useful. From electrolysis to protein folding.
Also, it should be noted that shiny rocks have intrinsic value beyond their aesthetics. BTC is literally just a number with no value.
Central banks don't do fixed supply money.
Investment banks don't do payments and financial products that don't involve a middleman.
Bitcoin is a censorship resistant, neutral money and payment network. Banks don't do that. Banks don't consume "kWh of power" by the way. From the endless wars to protect the US (dollar) hegemony to 50 floor buildings draped in marble. Thats all cost + energy.
Bitcoin couldn't exist without the same endless wars and hegemony. Where do you think the computational power COMES from?
That's why it's a bad faith argument. The only thing bitcoiners want to compare is the power cost of running the mining rigs. Why don't they include the cost to manufacture said rigs? To mine minerals to build the silicon needed to power their currency? Why don't they include the governments needed to make sure the equipment supply chains are properly maintained? Why don't they include the amount of power needed to run the servers and switches needed to power the internet needed to run btc? Why aren't you looking at the construction costs for the buildings housing the mining rigs?
I'll tell you why, because they aren't making a good faith argument. They are trying to come up with ways to make BTC good and banking bad. That's it.
Lots of things cost energy. The question has to be "what are we accomplishing with that spent energy". When two algorithms do the same thing and one burns TWh while the other burns kwh.. guess which one I'm going to favor?
Your arguments are just a whole load of strawmen. You don't address the central point. Bitcoin exists, and banks don't do it what it does. Hence the energy cost comparisons as rough and silly as you make them are not a conclusion to bitcoin's value.
There's your problem, you don't understand that bitcoin is trustless and the worlds first implementation of it's kind. If you can't understand why that's important I don't have the time to convince you.
lol. Oh I understand what bitcoin is, I just think it has no value. You are arguing that bogosort, because it's the first sort of it's kind to use a random number generator, MUST have some value! After all, look at all the watts it burns!
Just because someone does something first, doesn't mean that thing is useful or good.
> Why would you also disparage the millions of people who are happily finding value in it?
Because it's an environmental disaster causing a bunch of modern issues and the defenders are being annoyingly naive about.
BTC uses a ton of power, requires a ton of equipment. They solve a problem with TWh of power that is simply solved globally with kwh of power. It is beyond wasteful.
> Well done creating your amazing straw man.
Nah, BTC is just beyond pointless. You are arguing that it's special, but have a hard time actually articulating WHY it's special "If you can't see this, then I don't have time to explain".
That's the same line cult members use defending their faith. It's a mental shortcut to avoid critically analyzing something you've bought into.
BTC encourages figuring out the price of power which is an environmental goal because if that power produces greenhouse gases a carbon tax should apply. The loophole is the same loophole that allows some nations to keep pumping gas house gases without paying for the environmental cost.
BTC isn't bad for the environment carbon poluting energy is. Energy from non-carbon freeing sources makes bitcoin a greencoin. We need to fix where we get energy from and price it accordingly. BTC exposes this.
Nothing the previous poster says implies that they are okay with wasting energy in other ways and it in no way diminishes the fact that Bitcoin (and other PoW cryptocurrencies) use a _lot_ of energy.
Why is energy usage that important? Isn't the issue that society allows energy creation through fossil fuels? Like the sun 'uses' 384.6 septillion watts.
"Bitcoing drives renewable energy" is one of the most nonsensical arguments I've ever heard. It's not like the components for solar panels and windmills grow on trees, and bitcoin miners aren't going to just stop expanding wherever there is cheap power, so it won't get used for anything besides mining more bitcoins. It's like saying that we should deliberately cause more pandemics to drive interest in vaccine research.
Wait until you hear all the energy it takes to run the current financial system, or the energy it takes to run the worlds gaming consoles, or any other stuff that you have personally found to be more useful than crypto currency. If bitcoin frees us from financial tyranny it's all worth it.
> Wait until you hear all the energy it takes to run the current financial system
Every Bitcoin defender repeats this line, but I never see any numbers. Whatever the energy use is, it's provably less than Bitcoin by any metric like transaction volume or market cap, by the simple fact that if you were to scale up Bitcoin's energy use for comparison to the world financial system, it would use magnitudes more energy than humans produce.
Essentially, they wrap up everything that isn't involved with ledger maintenance (ATM power, data center power for running the website, Air conditioning at branches power usage) and compare that to Bitcoin, which is only doing ledger maintenance. They do that, because if you had a true apples to apples comparison, you'd end up with kwh of power usage. That's because a ledger is computationally cheap to maintain over a trust network. We were able to do that in the 70s with servers that had no more power than today's raspberry pis.
And how do we know it's garbage? Because if banks stopped doing their own ledgers and instead did everything through bitcoin, would their power usage drop? Absolutely not. They'd still have branches, ATMs, and data centers running their websites. In fact, some banks do manage BTC. Do those banks have lower power footprints compared to like banks without BTC? Absolutely not.
>We were able to do that in the 70s with servers that had no more power than today's raspberry pis.
You weren't able to send value from one part of the world to another in minutes without an intermediary for a tiny fraction of the transaction amount in the 70's and you still can't do it today without crypto.
It's not. If the market cap goes up, it's because the price of bitcoin goes up. If the price of bitcoin goes up, the mining reward goes up. If the mining reward goes up, the block reward that incentivizes mining goes up. The mining market is in equilibrium when miners expenses approach the block reward, so mining uses more energy as the market cap goes up.
How would cryptocurrency free us from financial tyranny? At some scale finance becomes a state affair, and regulated by law backed by a monopoly on violence. Or, otherwise, you end up with crypto-warlords with private military companies. In neither sense would the average user be meaningfully "free"; it seems like you're replacing democratic checks-and-balances with harder-to-regulate digital capital, which is "freedom" only to the super-rich.
It's like somebody at the bottom of the Ponzi scheme defending it to death because someday, maybe, just maybe, he'll rise to the top...
You only need to look around for a moment to find an example.
There are people living under governments that don't allow their citizens access to the global financial system (i.e. capital controls) and are often living in high inflation environments. Storing their wealth in an unseizable asset, even $100 worth, means that they are decoupled from their government financially and can escape their hell hole with their wealth in tact.
Yes. It's in price discovery phase. Volatility is expected until it reaches a sufficient market cap to not be affected by single events. It's pretty silly to think what it's like now is what it will be like when the market cap hits that of gold.
Fiat money is trusted in good part because there are backed by institutions, mainly governments in turn are backed by armies (real soldiers and policemen). All this uses a fair amount of energy, and there is no other way. "Cryptos" are in their infancy and there are already ways for them to dissipate less energy.
> you don't seem to care about the hydro carbons purged in the process of strip mining the earth for shiny rocks though
This persistent idea that people who care about the carbon footprint of Bitcoin somehow single it out is silly. I dislike unnecessarily large SUVs, cruise ships, American suburb culture, and diamond mining too. Bitcoin just happens to be the topic of this thread.
It is an expensive way to send money around without involving PayPal or a bank etc. If you're buying something illegal or forbidden by them it would be handy for that.
It could plausibly be used for things that should be legitimate but are banned by an oppressive establishment. For instance, a writer could become blacklisted by VISA and Mastercard effectively impoverishing him. Crypto could get around that ban. Of course, envelopes with 20 dollar bills can also get around that, but it seems like governments are moving away from cash. So, maybe in the future crypto will be very useful to non-criminals.
If it were actually used as a medium of exchange, it would likely be more stable and it would provide value by facilitating trade. That was basically the original intention behind the design. Unfortunately most people are buying it to hoard and sell later, not to use as a payment mechanism, in part because it hasn't scaled to a higher transaction rate, causing large transaction fees whenever anyone attempts to use it.
Zoom out. Look at the performance on a larger scale. Are you making the same claims about stock options? They can plunge much more than 30% in a day, but is there no value in them? Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are still in their infancy. Compare to other assets in their infancy. This might not be a great comparison but think about real estate. In it's infancy raiders or militaries could wipe out the value of your real estate overnight. Now it's relatively very stable. Why? Because we made it that way over time. Just because an asset is currently volatile does not mean it has no value.
I think the idea is that eventually this won't happen, and there are currencies issued by governments where this happens too, and certainly you wouldn't want that either.
Cryptocurrency will simply have to compete with currency issued by sovereign governments, similar to how government-issued currencies compete with each other now.
I think an issue for many people is that crypto is looked at categorically as a currency, but it could be much more. It could be a crappy currency, but a good store of value (a better version of gold in most respects, though gold retains an intrinsic value), it could also be a great currency - transiting government borders with impunity and anonymity, which may be very valuable to some.
Historically, we've used gold, up until the last 150 years or so (don't quote me on exact timeline here) and even then the U.S. finally went off the gold standard in the 1970s. For most people, cash was still thought of as a store of value - they'd throw it in the bank or under a mattress. Or they thought gold was, but since it's heavy they just trade cash instead that's backed by gold. It'll take a while for the global paradigm shift to occur that pits currencies (sovereign issued and otherwise) against each other as a separate theory to assets in general. Cryptocurrency (which is now a bad name IMO) straddles the borders here, so it tends to be confusing.
Personally I view cash as good for liquidity, but that's mostly it. I want the cash I receive to be turned into productive assets, so I hold a much smaller amount compared to assets.
It can hold value while your country's fiat currency doesn't. Or while you move out of that country and they would seize your assets as you leave. Or you can buy the reopening of your pipeline.
you can also use fiat to pay for things. what's the benefit of bitcoin compared to say, USD for paying for things? is it cheaper or faster to buy $1 trinket using bitcoin vs. paypal?
The typical argument (not one I necessarily agree with or am making) is that there is a limited supply of Bitcoin, whereas the supply of USD is controlled by US monetary policy. On the other hand, it is "decentralized", i.e. backed by the blockchain and not a political body.
Again, not my arguments, but arguments I have heard.
The supply is only kinda limited though; most of it is controlled by a few accounts, and they could release more supply if they wanted to in order to do things like US monetary policy
They'd run out eventually, but you'd still have lost out
Well so far it’s anything but zero sum. From nothing to tens of thousands of dollars in 10yrs is not zero sum.
It’s highly volatile yes, and has lost >= 80% of its value four times in those ten years (so this little 30% dip is nothing by comparison). But not zero sum.
It originally mainly appealed to two factions: techies who like disrupting big things from first principles, and people who were long concerned with the mechanics of government fiat money and central banks [1]. There was some overlap between those two groups, and they were the innovators and early adopters.
Interest has since expanded to investors of all kinds due to its, so far, non-zero-sum aspect.
But if you’re not interested in the mechanics of how money works, it’s not surprising Bitcoin or cryptocurrency won’t be of interest to you.
Also, Bitcoin has aspects of both currency and commodity (and possibly security, though the US SEC has said they don’t consider it that). It’s impossible to categorize based on previous definitions for this reason. Try not to get caught up in debating whether it’s one of these things, because it’s a mix of both (or maybe all three). So many people drive themselves crazy trying to define it as a currency, or arguing against it as a currency, but that’s just a mental tar pit.
What's the definition you're using for zero-sum? Usually the definition is about the amount of value being conserved, rather than having to do with the total amount of value passing through
However, it will have transferred a lot of money from people who are bad at predicting the future to people who are good at predicting the future. This is good for the economy, because more capital is in the hands of people who are likely to invest in things that work.
Well we know the people who lose significant money will be a strict subset of people who are greedy. Maybe that's a good thing?
More seriously, study after study has shown that unless you take the fundamentals into consideration there is no way reliably to make money on the stock market, and certainly that will be the case for Bitcoin for which there are, amazingly, no fundamentals.
The exception would be if you were, say, a person who can manipulate the market with tweets and with large purchases through a publicly owned company that you control.
Not everyone in the world lives in an economy that has 4% YoY inflation. And not everyone has access to financial services or a developed banking sector
As long as you can wait long enough it should always go up, because there's 3 built in methods of deflation. Which also means you should never sell bitcoin.
If you're interested in a long-term hedge, and all the 30% down-days are eventually offset by a soild long-term up-trend: yes, sure, why not?
If asset A reliably loses 4% of its value per year, in a totally-predictable straight-line, and asset B has wild up- and down-swings, but over years reliably delivers 25% appreciation per year - asset B is better, unless you'll be forced to urgently sell at unpredictable times. (And if you can find a basket of uncorrelated B-like assets, all the better!)
Bitcoin is frequently compared to gold because in both cases their value is mainly based on speculative trading. They do both have practical functions - gold is used in small amounts in industry and jewellery while Bitcoin can be used as a currency - but these have little or no relation to their traded value.
The stock market has plunged 30% in a short period of time. Sure, it might be over a few weeks as opposed to days, but that's just a quantitative difference, not qualitative.
The main value propositions behind bitcoin are:
- stable store of value in its end state (minimal inflation)(note: you'll see wild fluctuations during the interim period where its future is uncertain)
- not under the control of any government or central authority (no risk of hyperinflation)
- easy to store in large quantities (you don't need to buy a large vault just to store all your bitcoin)
- easy to trade in large quantities (you don't need to hire trucks to transport your bitcoin)
- easy to hide from a predatory tax regime (ie, communist takeovers)
- may one day be accepted as a common currency for the above reasons, just like gold 100 years ago
Investing in bitcoin is like investing in a startup. There are no guarantees, its value proposition is contentious, and it requires a leap of faith. I personally refuse to speculate on its success. But I don't see anything innately nonsensical or zero-sum about it
You're right, it is not a good currency today. In the interim period, BTC is extremely risky, volatile, and not a stable store of value. The value proposition is that:
- People will want to adopt BTC as a mainstream currency in future, for all the reasons I listed earlier
- When BTC is adopted as a mainstream currency, the value of each BTC will be X (in relation to raw materials, manufactured goods, etc)
- Because today's price of BTC is much smaller than X, you stand to make a huge profit if you buy BTC, and it later becomes a mainstream currency
Ie, BTC is a startup that if successful, everyone will want to use in the future. And that makes it a very valuable investment for angels/VCs today
> - People will want to adopt BTC as a mainstream currency in future, for all the reasons I listed earlier
How can this happen if the price never stabilizes (because no one wants to spend what they have)?
> - When BTC is adopted as a mainstream currency
How can this happen if the transaction costs are $10+? To pay for a Starbucks coffee, it would cost $5 for the drink and $15 for the transaction fee.
> - Because today's price of BTC is much smaller than X, you stand to make a huge profit if you buy BTC, and it later becomes a mainstream currency
How can it become a mainstream currency if everyone treats it like a speculative investment and the transaction costs prevent it from used in "micro" transactions?
The entire system disincentivises use as a "mainstream currency"
I left the US a few years ago. Occasionally, I sent a few thousands to my US bank account via bitcoin + coinbase. I was then able to wire my money to a seller in Singapore for a lovely set of Go (the board game) problem books that I have been looking for.
I am a Vietnamese living in Vietnam, and I would have absolutely no way to wire $2000 to a bank in Singapore (I tried). I do wish bitcoin stay alive (along with the US financial system too)
I'm not an expert on this, but your position that bitcoin has no value is likely shortsighted and misguided. The big one that I see is decentralization. Bitcoin itself might not make it into the future of cryptocurrencies, but the possibility to democratize money and finance is huge. Take away the banks, money printers, middlemen, and give that power to the individual. It's not obvious now what the value of crypto will be but I would not discount the huge potential. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gipL_CEw-fk
The point of Bitcoin is that the world's governments have weaponized money. If all you pay attention to is the ups and downs of the exchange rate, then it all probably seems pretty pointless.
But if you look at it against the backdrop of sanctions, civil asset forfeiture, erosion of civil liberties, and monetary debasement, things look different.
> But if you look at it against the backdrop of sanctions, civil asset forfeiture, erosion of civil liberties, and monetary debasement, things look different.
People forget about this. Bitcoin came up in the context of crypto-anarchism, and was meant to serve the needs of that community.
These are some heavy assertions here. How would Bitcoin protect against any of that?
The government already tracks who buys Bitcoin by having all points of purchase of USD<->Bitcoin require proof of identity, and they can obviously look at the blockchain to get all the transaction made by each individual.
Let's be realistic for a second. All it would take for the government to forfeit your bitcoins is a $5 wrench [1]. I don't like that it's that way, and I don't know what the solution is, but I know it's not as simple as "make Bitcoin happen".
For a long time, you could achieve that through localbitcoins or similar (not sure what the situation looks like now). You have tools to achieve some degree of anonymity, and there's other currencies that deal with that aspect of things better.
Well-regulated exchanges are part of an effort by (usually VC-backed) startups to legitimise making money off of cryptocurrencies, rather than a core part of the original ethos behind Bitcoin.
Cash is already anonymous - the act of transferring cash from one person to the other is anonymous. While bills have serial numbers, it is impossible to see who owns all the bills at any moment in time. One can only trace specific bills if they've been marked and then found.
Bitcoin transactions are not only recorded, but linked to each other uniquely. It's a government's dream to be able to track all your payments everywhere. It's the opposite of anonymity. Even if you manage to buy bitcoins from someone anonymously, if you _ever_ make a transaction that identifies you (such as paying with Bitcoin at Starbucks where a security camera can run facial recognition) they can trace where your bitcoins came from and then look at all other transactions you've ever made.
That situation is not better than fiat. It's an objectively worse situation for preserving your anonymity.
When (if) speculation settles down, even if the governments know who owns bitcoins, they won't be able to "print" more of it and that's a big advantage over any other fiat currency.
Can somebody please explain me what is the big deal for me if the government cannot print more currency? I remember old readings saying that inflation was a useful tool - is this not an argument anymore?
Inflation ultimately means that the money that you own now could buy you way less than it used to or that it will buy you products of a lesser quality than it used to. And I think that we are very much seeing the effects of that.
I would not be able to afford as much as I can today if I were only able to buy goods produced in my region (EU). We live under the impression that everything is fine because the decrease in purchasing power has been hidden by the fact that we buy mostly from goods produced very cheaply in the East.
> The point of Bitcoin is that the world's governments have weaponized money.
This. I like to think it as a monopoly game where a player has a cheat code to practically print infinite amount of money.
Bitcoin solves this problem; unfortunately the volatility (due to massive speculation game), transaction bottleneck, energy costs, etc. affects its function as a currency.
There are other cryptocurrencies trying to tackle these problems (e.g. eth2), but I believe the ultimate goal is that it replaces government controlled currencies.
We'll be back here in four years when bitcoin is well above 100k being used happily as a store of value by millions of people and someone like you will say the exact same thing again. How long will it take you to realise that it's already a success?
None. It's not meant to be an investment, it just happens to be used like one currently.
It's ironic, the same thing that makes these coins valuable to people (volatility, and mostly in the upwards direction) is a major reason why they are hard to use for mass transactions.
However, there is some good here. People are getting familiar with crypto by participating in this investment strategy. A relatively stable coin capable of high transaction throughput and low fees - one that can actually be used as a currency instead of an investment - will benefit from this in the future.
Given the decentralized nature of cryptos, won't they always be used for what the richest people want them used for? They will always want to form an oligopoly
I'm far from a Bitcoin maxi, but I own a small % in my portfolio. Here's my take:
We are entering a world of abundant cyber-terrorism. If my bank and/or brokerage gets hacked, why do I own? I have nothing except that entry in their book keeping. And if you think, "It's backed up, they'll have you up and running in no time", I'm skeptical. I think anything like this would be chaotic.
This is much harder to do to whatever wealth I have tied up in Bitcoin. As long as the internet is running, there's a permanent record of what I own.
So bizarre that he would tweet this after coming out against Bitcoin for environmental reasons. The higher the price goes, the greater the incentive to spend more electricity on mining; for anyone who cares about the environment this crash is great news.
Could be that he has separate money pools, and his "toy with markets for amusement" money is kept apart from his "get to Mars" money. It isn't "not smart" if he's just viewing it as a game and he has the means to do so.
Lots of people have messed around with various systems for no reason other than to see if they can.
I don't think he has "get to Mars" money. It's just fun idea to sell and think about it. Like hyper loop, boring company, solar roof and so on... He got traction and now he just keeps throwing things at the wall...
If Tesla actually did not sell its BTC holdings, then today's plunge could have seriously affected its quarterly earnings (I'm not 100% sure how the accounting works, but they may have had to revalue their BTC holdings which would show as a loss on their P&L).
Tesla's addition to the S&P500 has gone a long way to propping up that share price and while one quarter in the red wouldn't be enough to boot them from the index, they're still in a precarious position when it comes to profitability. I don't think Musk is stupid enough to risk the share price on a Bitcoin bet.
So this is a roundabout way of saying "Musk probably has a considerable vested interest in keeping the price of BTC above $40k".
But I also believe - without proof, mind you - that they have sold at least 50% of their holdings at a profit anyway, so their downside is capped.
i get that Tesla is revolutionary in the car industry but it's stock pretty much goes up and down like a cryptocurrency. I have a strong feeling that people who love tesla stock also own crypto.
Tesla is the preeminent electric vehicle and is pushing the entire industry forward as every manufacturer races towards producing their own luxury electric vehicle to compete with Tesla. It's a very similar dynamic to how the iPhone revolutionized mobile phones.
With that stated, I don't attribute this success to Elon Musk beyond his ability to lie his way into sustaining the company's valuation so that the engineers could do the hard work.
As someone with a substantial (for me) amount of money in crypto, I'm happy Bitcoin is tanking. For many, crypto === bitcoin, and "the rest" is grouped together as "shitcoins". I totally get this sentiment, as 99% of coins ARE scams / snake oil salesmen promising the world with over-engineered uselessness trying to solve problems that don't exist.
But I do believe in a digital de-centralized currency. Not smart contracts, not DEFI, not all the latest buzzwords: just a fully decentralized medium of exchange that actually works as a currency that no sovereign nation can control. That's why I have invested in a project that is the most promising in that respect (not going to say it here, as I don't want to shill). For that project to be truly successful, the world needs to move beyond Bitcoin, its clones/equivalents and PoW in general.
I don’t care to debate the merits of crypto, I am more interested how come the major US exchanges and players (Coinbase, BlockFi) all go down and then all come back up at the same time after bottoms were reached and the rebound. That’s incredibly suspect and warrants investigation. I’ve never not been able to access my ETrade account and trade (don’t bring up Game Stop) that didn’t affect ETrade and was debunked why they had to limit buying.
It’s not sketchy at all that price movements on exchanges are seemingly simultaneous. it’s because of automated arbitrage. Another factor (the prevalence of which is hard to measure) is that those who want to buy or sell large amounts (is whales) will chunk their orders and split them up across exchanges.
These, especially the former, are signs of markets maturing.
Effective arbitrage is nothing special, but that the platforms go down and prevent trading is. On reasonable market people should be allowed to make money with price going either direction.
Was it also suspect that Walmart, Target, and Amazon sold out of PS5s at the same time? Large price movements create high trade volume on all exchanges which overload all the exchanges. AFAIK the real stock market is large and mature enough to not have crazy swings in volume.
People have been using the tulip comparison for over ten years and yet bitcoin is still worth over 30k euro today, a price never reached until last January. When will you eventually get tired of saying the same repetitive trope?
My - surely far fetched and with no evidence to back up - take is that Musk didn't go long on BTC when he announced TSLA would buy BTC for 1.5$bn, but actually went short. Musk wanted to take TSLA off the public trading market but failed due to lack of money/investors for a buy back. Buying large amounts of BTC with TSLA money, ties the TSLA price to the BTC price. And Musk is a very smart person, he definetely knows that a couple of tweets of him can sway the BTC courses. Question is whether Musk will come up with private investors or own money now to take TSLA off the stock exchance (doubt it as it is still too highly valued).
Yes, if that would be done on purpose, this would be very illegal. But I have a hard time believing Musk goes all-in into Bitcoin with 1.5$bn investment, just to suddenly realize 3 weeks later that the environmental impact due to high energy consumption is a bad thing and backs out of it again.
It happens like clockwork after every next step up. We don’t have a lot of history, so who knows how long the pattern will hold, but this was fairly predictable. If past trends are predictive, it’ll bottom in the mid 20s to low 30s, consolidate for a while, then hit 100k. Rinse and repeat.
To be clear, I own some cryptos, but treat it purely as the speculative gamble that it is.
that's purely speculation - it might or might not. It depends on the chaotic forces of the market participants, because there's no underlying intrinsic value for crypto.
They're pointing out the hypocrisy of your speculation as you're speculating about speculative market trends as past trends can very well not be predictive.
Yeah, I wonder if they'll do the same thing for the miners who are turning Yuan --> BTC via graphics cards and electricity instead of through an exchange.
According to [0] Tether has to file their first report today disclosing the composition of their reserves as a condition of their settlement. I haven't verified that, but if true the sell-off could be driven by insiders and/or smart money.
As I understand it, when China banned crypto transactions - "Beijing on Tuesday banned financial institutions and payment companies from providing services related to cryptocurrency transactions."(1) and suggested not to use crypto "The slump for bitcoin comes after the People’s Bank of China was seen warning against using digital coins as payment."(2), people started to dump certain currencies and take their profits...perhaps to put in to other things. This resulted in drops that triggered floor price alerts and bigger players dumped, which cascaded around to the various currencies.
I think a lot of the exchanges do. Kucoin for sure (I offer USDT for lending), haven't seen any losses due to margin calls not being fulfilled yet. Binance, Coinbase, etc. all offer margin trading
dydx is the first that comes to mind. There are also lots of collateralized loan providers (aave, ruler, alphahomora etc) that are probably seeing billions of dollars of liquidations.
As the article shows, all of these factors are present now.
Those celebrating "the crash" either have short memories, or haven't been paying attention. This has all happened before. Several times. The only difference today is the scale.
Dropping X% in 24h sounds bad, but without putting it in the context of the asset's historical volatility, sharpe ratio, overall portfolio construction, etc; it looks like a very superficial reading (perhaps just good enough for a headline)
It probably just means that it's not actually liquid at the values that btc people are crowing about. The real question is how much trade volume it took to drop it 30%.
Being at $60K just means that a handful of suckers bought for $60K.
It's not something I'd care to speculate over. There's a public ledger, we can find out exactly how many people bought it at every price. I don't have the inclination, but it's something that's precisely knowable.
No, you can’t. Given a transaction on the btc blockchain, how would you determine if actually changed hands (as opposed to internal/self-transfer), and if so, at what valuation?
Trades on sidechains or on centralized exchanges also don’t register.
> we can find out exactly how many people bought it at every price.
None of them afaik will tell you how many people. Trade data tends to be anonymous and only give you price, amount, and side for each trade. There’s no way to differentiate between 2 people trading back and forth 1 million times vs 2 million people trading once each.
You can always construct an arbitrary timeline where the charts are green in order to support that argument. The issue with the huge drop is the insane volatility, there are a lot of people who are freaking out because they bought at 40k+.
