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So many people love to parrot the 'It'll go down to zero!' line, especially if they don't have skin in the game, but there's pretty much no way. Specific crypto

So many people love to parrot the 'It'll go down to zero!' line, especially if they don't have skin in the game, but there's pretty much no way. Specific cryptocurrencies, sure they could potentially go to zero. I'm watching one right now that's looking pretty darn close. But this entire industry? I don't think so. It's too late for that. Too many players, too much ease of access, too much of the potential has been demonstrated at this point. Could it go down 50% or more still? Yeah possibly. I sat through 2013-2015 when Bitcoin had fallen from $1200 and got stuck in the $180-$300 range for two straight years. I don't think that's going to happen again, not least of which because there will be people like me that would be happy to buy and hold until whenever it goes back up again at that price, but sure, it's possible. But zero, or close to zero? No. Even this guy's example of his company was only one company, not the entire stock market.

frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
But that's the point, you're not invested in cryptocurrencies in general as much as most people are invested in 1 or 2 or maybe a small handful. When tech crashed did the tech sector basket go to $0? Of course not and no one contends that it would, but did a lot of people lose their shirts on Pets.com? You bet.
- cableshaft 9y ago
  Well that's why it's common knowledge in the stock market to diversify your portfolio, and they call it a portfolio, not a single stock, and why so many people invest in mutuals. There's not an equivalent to mutuals in the cryptoverse yet, but there will be. I've made quite a few small bets on various alts. I'm taking the black swan approach to them. Quite a few could drop to zero in a couple years but I'm betting at least one of them will make enough of a profit to eclipse my losses in the others. If one of them had been Raiblocks, that already would have been the case ($0.10 cents to $34 in 3 months...crazy). It missed my radar because the aggregate site I check didn't include it.
  - tessierashpool 9y ago
    There's not an equivalent to mutuals in the cryptoverse yet, but there will be. Working equivalents already exist.
    - starlust2 9y ago
      At this point crypto mutual funds don't really make sense. They all fall and rise together for the most part.
      - cableshaft 9y ago
        That's a good point, and I think part of that is in order to get most alts you have to first get either bitcoin, ethereum or litecoin (or a couple others) first. Hopefully that either won't be true forever, or we'll get to the point where we stop using USD as the basis of comparison for all the currencies.
  - zer00eyz 9y ago
    Stocks are an investment, currency is a medium of exchange and hopefully a stable one. Something that you want me to use to buy things with should not be so volatile that it goes from pizza to luxury home in less than ten years years. If I had some bitcoin "lost in the cushions of my couch"from that era I would be a rich man today. Crypto currency has become a massive misnomer. To that end I'm not sure WHAT it is any more because if it isn't stable as a currency and it doesn't have intrinsic value then what good is it?
    - cableshaft 9y ago
      Crypto is being treated as an asset, not a currency, by most major governments that have weighed in on the matter. Assets can be invested in, bought and sold, and traded for other assets. And assets are worth whatever other people are willing to pay for it. My friend sold a digital-only World of Warcraft character to someone for over $2000 once, and for the longest time there was a sub-industry based around buildings of employees playing the game to get and sell World of Warcraft gold, so much so that it got its own term of 'goldfarming'. Crypto has value because other people are willing to pay the asking price for it. If that ever becomes not the case, then it's no longer an asset. Could that ever happen? Possibly, and I'd say definitely for certain coins. But now that this idea exists in the world of programmable tokens that can be exchanged quickly and cheaply and decentralized public ledgers, I don't think it's ever going away, not totally.
- adventured 9y ago
  It was a lot worse than that. Most of the financial drop did not occur in the junk dotcom stocks, that's a myth. Cisco went from ~$550 billion to ~$50 billion. That was a real business with billions in profit. That single drop is nearly greater than the value loss in all the junk dotcom stocks combined. There were dozens of real businesses that were massively over-inflated, from Intel to Microsoft. Oracle went from ~$200 billion to ~$35 billion. Again, another very serious business with substantial profits. So how about Bitcoin goes to $3,000 to $6,000 and stays there for ten years? Impossible! everyone will cry.
overhang 9y ago
Were you around a few years back to see real estate values drop from $300K to $25K? I saw that. And we are talking about a physical property. $25K is not zero, but it would be hard to distinguish the effective difference if you're leveraged $250K. So, as with any investment, if you're spending monopoly money on cryptocurrencies, scoff away. But if your retirement depends on it...
- charlesdm 9y ago
  $300k to $25K? That seems awfully cheap. Where did prices drop so much?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - adventured 9y ago
    Condo towers in Miami that were being put up and finished as the crash arrived, were often entirely empty and couldn't find any buyers. You could buy cheaper units for $30k to $50k. It was common to see 50%-70% haircuts, drops from $180k to $90k etc. Over six years (2003-2009), Miami added 23,000 condo units for a city of 400k. In Dec 2008, nearly half of those remained unsold. Las Vegas saw some similar action. It suffered the worst overall top to bottom crash of any major city in the US.
    - kingnothing 9y ago
      Atlanta, and the surrounding suburbs and exurbs, saw significant drops like this as well in many neighborhoods and cities. Same with the Jacksonville, FL area.
  - nwatson 9y ago
    Detroit. And they haven't yet recovered. Real estate has negative worth in some places because the legal obligations to raze the site imply costs greater than what the lot and "improvements" are worth.
- erentz 9y ago
matt_s 9y ago
Comparing cryptocurrencies to actual companies isn't fair. A lot of companies that went bankrupt (aka worth $0) had assets. Those assets were worth something and were probably sold off and used to pay debtors. What assets does a cryptocurrency have? What value is actually there?
- blhack 9y ago
  It's also not fair because a company can actually "go away" as in they sell the building and stop operating. You can't really do this with bitcoin. It's never going to "shut down".
  - matt_s 9y ago
    True - it's society's value on the exchange of bitcoin to $USD that could go to $0. The ledger of all those transactions would still be out there.
  - Retric 9y ago
    If nobody mines it then it really can go away.
  - inyourtenement 9y ago
    If everybody woke up at once, came to their senses, and realized bitcoin was all just a waste of time and literal energy, and turned off their machines, bitcoin would be "shut down".
    - fastball 9y ago
      Nope, because then the next day someone would start mining again in the hope that people would want BTC someday.
      - inyourtenement 9y ago
        That is a wild assumption.
    - 9y ago
jules 9y ago
What would the price be if all the speculators pulled out, and only the people who genuinely use bitcoin for transactions remained? Why couldn't this happen to all the major cryptocurrencies at the same time? In fact, if it happens, isn't it likely to happen to all at the same time?
JackFr 9y ago
> But this entire industry? What industry is that? Don't confuse a handful of exchanges, speculators, con-men and marks with an 'industry'.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago

But that's the point, you're not invested in cryptocurrencies in general as much as most people are invested in 1 or 2 or maybe a small handful. When tech crashed did the tech sector basket go to $0? Of course not and no one contends that it would, but did a lot of people lose their shirts on Pets.com? You bet.

cableshaft 9y ago
Well that's why it's common knowledge in the stock market to diversify your portfolio, and they call it a portfolio, not a single stock, and why so many people invest in mutuals. There's not an equivalent to mutuals in the cryptoverse yet, but there will be. I've made quite a few small bets on various alts. I'm taking the black swan approach to them. Quite a few could drop to zero in a couple years but I'm betting at least one of them will make enough of a profit to eclipse my losses in the others. If one of them had been Raiblocks, that already would have been the case ($0.10 cents to $34 in 3 months...crazy). It missed my radar because the aggregate site I check didn't include it.
- tessierashpool 9y ago
  There's not an equivalent to mutuals in the cryptoverse yet, but there will be. Working equivalents already exist.
  - starlust2 9y ago
    At this point crypto mutual funds don't really make sense. They all fall and rise together for the most part.
    - cableshaft 9y ago
      That's a good point, and I think part of that is in order to get most alts you have to first get either bitcoin, ethereum or litecoin (or a couple others) first. Hopefully that either won't be true forever, or we'll get to the point where we stop using USD as the basis of comparison for all the currencies.
- zer00eyz 9y ago
  Stocks are an investment, currency is a medium of exchange and hopefully a stable one. Something that you want me to use to buy things with should not be so volatile that it goes from pizza to luxury home in less than ten years years. If I had some bitcoin "lost in the cushions of my couch"from that era I would be a rich man today. Crypto currency has become a massive misnomer. To that end I'm not sure WHAT it is any more because if it isn't stable as a currency and it doesn't have intrinsic value then what good is it?
  - cableshaft 9y ago
    Crypto is being treated as an asset, not a currency, by most major governments that have weighed in on the matter. Assets can be invested in, bought and sold, and traded for other assets. And assets are worth whatever other people are willing to pay for it. My friend sold a digital-only World of Warcraft character to someone for over $2000 once, and for the longest time there was a sub-industry based around buildings of employees playing the game to get and sell World of Warcraft gold, so much so that it got its own term of 'goldfarming'. Crypto has value because other people are willing to pay the asking price for it. If that ever becomes not the case, then it's no longer an asset. Could that ever happen? Possibly, and I'd say definitely for certain coins. But now that this idea exists in the world of programmable tokens that can be exchanged quickly and cheaply and decentralized public ledgers, I don't think it's ever going away, not totally.
adventured 9y ago
It was a lot worse than that. Most of the financial drop did not occur in the junk dotcom stocks, that's a myth. Cisco went from ~$550 billion to ~$50 billion. That was a real business with billions in profit. That single drop is nearly greater than the value loss in all the junk dotcom stocks combined. There were dozens of real businesses that were massively over-inflated, from Intel to Microsoft. Oracle went from ~$200 billion to ~$35 billion. Again, another very serious business with substantial profits. So how about Bitcoin goes to $3,000 to $6,000 and stays there for ten years? Impossible! everyone will cry.

overhang 9y ago

Were you around a few years back to see real estate values drop from $300K to $25K? I saw that. And we are talking about a physical property. $25K is not zero, but it would be hard to distinguish the effective difference if you're leveraged $250K. So, as with any investment, if you're spending monopoly money on cryptocurrencies, scoff away. But if your retirement depends on it...

charlesdm 9y ago
$300k to $25K? That seems awfully cheap. Where did prices drop so much?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- adventured 9y ago
  Condo towers in Miami that were being put up and finished as the crash arrived, were often entirely empty and couldn't find any buyers. You could buy cheaper units for $30k to $50k. It was common to see 50%-70% haircuts, drops from $180k to $90k etc. Over six years (2003-2009), Miami added 23,000 condo units for a city of 400k. In Dec 2008, nearly half of those remained unsold. Las Vegas saw some similar action. It suffered the worst overall top to bottom crash of any major city in the US.
  - kingnothing 9y ago
    Atlanta, and the surrounding suburbs and exurbs, saw significant drops like this as well in many neighborhoods and cities. Same with the Jacksonville, FL area.
- nwatson 9y ago
  Detroit. And they haven't yet recovered. Real estate has negative worth in some places because the legal obligations to raze the site imply costs greater than what the lot and "improvements" are worth.
erentz 9y ago

matt_s 9y ago

Comparing cryptocurrencies to actual companies isn't fair. A lot of companies that went bankrupt (aka worth $0) had assets. Those assets were worth something and were probably sold off and used to pay debtors. What assets does a cryptocurrency have? What value is actually there?

blhack 9y ago
It's also not fair because a company can actually "go away" as in they sell the building and stop operating. You can't really do this with bitcoin. It's never going to "shut down".
- matt_s 9y ago
  True - it's society's value on the exchange of bitcoin to $USD that could go to $0. The ledger of all those transactions would still be out there.
- Retric 9y ago
  If nobody mines it then it really can go away.
- inyourtenement 9y ago
  If everybody woke up at once, came to their senses, and realized bitcoin was all just a waste of time and literal energy, and turned off their machines, bitcoin would be "shut down".
  - fastball 9y ago
    Nope, because then the next day someone would start mining again in the hope that people would want BTC someday.
    - inyourtenement 9y ago
      That is a wild assumption.
  - 9y ago

jules 9y ago

What would the price be if all the speculators pulled out, and only the people who genuinely use bitcoin for transactions remained? Why couldn't this happen to all the major cryptocurrencies at the same time? In fact, if it happens, isn't it likely to happen to all at the same time?

JackFr 9y ago

> But this entire industry? What industry is that? Don't confuse a handful of exchanges, speculators, con-men and marks with an 'industry'.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]