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Can someone explain the true story behind Bitcoin and the price? I can't help but shake the feeling that someone is playing an exquisitely long game.

davidgerard 9y ago
I actually thought it was Bitfinex and the magicked-into-existence Tethers. (wherein Bitcoin's recapitulation of the history of finance gets to quantitative easing)
paulmd 9y ago
Money laundering and drug trade. China has export controls to prevent USD from fleeing the country and weakening RMB. Instead, people buy mining equipment and export their wealth as Bitcoin. Many of the institutions within the cryptocurrency world are also transparent money-laundering schemes. For example Nicehash is a system that lets people "earn money mining cryptocurrency" by "renting their hardware to bidders", but from a high-level perspective this is essentially miners getting paid in dirty money and giving bidders "clean" coins generated on their hardware. The darknet drug trade needs no explanation, of course. I tend to think the darknet trade would be sustainable on its own (at a much lower price), but the capital flight is where most of the runup is coming from. They're moving it to real-estate in places like BC and Australia.
- fragsworth 9y ago
  You're totally ignoring legitimate purchasers who are using it for financial reasons, the same reason someone might buy gold - mostly as a hedge against economic disasters that would cause stock market and currency crashes. It's objectively better than gold for this - more secure, easier to transfer, and guaranteed to be deflationary.
- TooSmugToFail 9y ago
  You're forgetting that all those supposedly "clean" coins need to come back into fiat without tripping any alarms somehow, which is the central challenge in any laundering operation. Plus, it makes absolutely no sense that this supposed money laundering scheme is the price driver, because if the intention is to launder money by buying/renting CPU power, then the fiat coming in would not have any upward pressure on the price (as it goes into hardware to mine coins) while at the same time the coins mined in such operation would actually push the price of BTC down. Finally, I really can't see the connection behind Asians moving assets into real-estate in Canada and Australia and cryptocurrencies, unless such transaction are being paid for in crypto. I haven't heard/read of such cases. My 2 cents: it's a classic bubble. Bunch of people made incredible nominal returns (think 100x or 1.000x) by having bought really early, and then price being driven up on relatively small volumes by new people increasingly piling in. This created an impressive social proof, and the masses started to pile in. I'm sure we're in a bubble right now, and that it's going to burst/deflate. The question is when, and what's going to be the trigger. Judging from the recent events, heavy-handed regulation is a possible candidate for a trigger. There's so much bullshit ICO's, and that may be a red rag that sets the regulators on a crackdown. That being said, I'm long term bullish on BTC and ETH, but there's likely going to be a massive extinction among the altcoins during the next bear period.

davidgerard 9y ago

I actually thought it was Bitfinex and the magicked-into-existence Tethers. (wherein Bitcoin's recapitulation of the history of finance gets to quantitative easing)

paulmd 9y ago

Money laundering and drug trade. China has export controls to prevent USD from fleeing the country and weakening RMB. Instead, people buy mining equipment and export their wealth as Bitcoin. Many of the institutions within the cryptocurrency world are also transparent money-laundering schemes. For example Nicehash is a system that lets people "earn money mining cryptocurrency" by "renting their hardware to bidders", but from a high-level perspective this is essentially miners getting paid in dirty money and giving bidders "clean" coins generated on their hardware. The darknet drug trade needs no explanation, of course. I tend to think the darknet trade would be sustainable on its own (at a much lower price), but the capital flight is where most of the runup is coming from. They're moving it to real-estate in places like BC and Australia.

fragsworth 9y ago
You're totally ignoring legitimate purchasers who are using it for financial reasons, the same reason someone might buy gold - mostly as a hedge against economic disasters that would cause stock market and currency crashes. It's objectively better than gold for this - more secure, easier to transfer, and guaranteed to be deflationary.
TooSmugToFail 9y ago
You're forgetting that all those supposedly "clean" coins need to come back into fiat without tripping any alarms somehow, which is the central challenge in any laundering operation. Plus, it makes absolutely no sense that this supposed money laundering scheme is the price driver, because if the intention is to launder money by buying/renting CPU power, then the fiat coming in would not have any upward pressure on the price (as it goes into hardware to mine coins) while at the same time the coins mined in such operation would actually push the price of BTC down. Finally, I really can't see the connection behind Asians moving assets into real-estate in Canada and Australia and cryptocurrencies, unless such transaction are being paid for in crypto. I haven't heard/read of such cases. My 2 cents: it's a classic bubble. Bunch of people made incredible nominal returns (think 100x or 1.000x) by having bought really early, and then price being driven up on relatively small volumes by new people increasingly piling in. This created an impressive social proof, and the masses started to pile in. I'm sure we're in a bubble right now, and that it's going to burst/deflate. The question is when, and what's going to be the trigger. Judging from the recent events, heavy-handed regulation is a possible candidate for a trigger. There's so much bullshit ICO's, and that may be a red rag that sets the regulators on a crackdown. That being said, I'm long term bullish on BTC and ETH, but there's likely going to be a massive extinction among the altcoins during the next bear period.