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Bitcoin drops below $10K after three days of cryptocurrency correction
- amelius 9y agoSigh. Those figures, why doesn't the Y-axis start at zero?
- OzzyB 9y agoMaybe because not everyone got in at 10¢ and the drop is extremely significant for those that got in recently?
- amenod 9y agoThat doesn't matter. Most people are (well, should be) interested in relative corrections, which these charts don't depict. It makes volatility look even bigger than it is.
- qubex 9y agoEither because the infographic designers haven’t read what The Visual Display of Quantitative Information about accurately depicting time-series, or because they have read The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and are abusing its dicta to make graphs that are as dramatic as possible.
- philipodonnell 9y agoI was at a visualization meetup last night and one of the attendees said something about blowing a sparkline up really large on the page and adding numbers to see it better and I quipped about Tufte rolling in his grave. People don't read these days. :-(
- qubex 9y agoApart from any other consideration, as far as I know Edward Tufte is alive and well.
- philipodonnell 9y agoI know, but no one got that joke either.
- qubex 9y agoWell played.
- philipodonnell 9y agoHa, sorry, unintentionally in your case. My humor does not always translate to the written word. :-)
- qubex 9y agoThe most hilarious aspect of this is that some irritable ignoramus has down-voted my “well played” comment. I'm beside myself with laughter.
- philipodonnell 9y agoI upvoted your back. And well played right back at ya.
- learnstats2 9y agoYou seem to have understood close to the opposite of the author's intent: "In general, in a time-series, use a baseline that shows the data not the zero point." - Edward Tufte.
- qubex 9y agoI'm delighted to see you're well-acquainted with the source. I'm absolutely certain he advocates having some kind of evident glyph in the Y axis to indicate discontinuity and the nonzero baseline, I think it was the classic // mark or something akin to it. Am I wrong? That's what I meant by abusing its dicta to make dramatic graphs.
- take4 9y agoYou want a 1 day chart to start Y axis at zero?
- LandoCalrissian 9y agoWhat other financial investments do this? If the the stock market crashed tomorrow your not going to see people saying "We'll if you invested in '29 you would have been rich!"
- oreo81 9y agoThey said it in 2008...
- amenod 9y agoThis! It seems all of the charts start Y axis at lowest value in timeframe, which is simply deceptive. For investors there is no difference if some currency rises from $10.000 to $11.000 or from $1000 to $1100. But there is huge difference between rising from $1000 to $1100 and $1000 to $1001 - which looks the same on these charts. </rant>
- Retric 9y agoFor a general audience starting at zero is almost always the correct choice, but many exceptions exist such as temperature ignoring 0 kelvin. It's a detail trade-off. Starting at zero helps the uninformed, but will obscure details.
- philbarr 9y ago> Starting at zero helps the uniformed, but would obscure the bonce back above 10,000 Starting at zero helps the well dressed, but would obscure the person's head back above 10,000?
- philipodonnell 9y agoThe chart does include 'zero' for its intended audience, just not the zero that you are used to looking at. Financial types are only concerned with the % change. 'Zero' in the financial world means 0% change, i.e., the same price as it started with. A chart with a flexible axis will look identical when evaluated as a % change or as an absolute value, giving it a tremendous amount of utility when looking at the price action relative to various other things, indexes, pairs, sectors, etc...
- amelius 9y ago> Financial types are only concerned with the % change. Yes, that's the point. If you let the Y-axis begin at zero, then you can intuitively read the change-percentages right from the graph! Let's say something is worth $10, and tomorrow it's $11. That's a 10% increase in a day. Now suppose you let the graph start at $10 instead of at $0. You only see the $1 increase, and you have no clue about the change in percentage.
- philipodonnell 9y agoThat's because no one looks at a chart with only two data points. Once you have a few hundred, you are less trying to determine individual percentage moves and more trying to determine the percentage change _relative to the other percentage changes on the chart_, which are obscured at best, and constantly changing as you compare with different things at worst. You don't have to take my word for it. Every candlestick chart you will ever see uses a flexible axis unless the time series is expanded to include a period of time when it was at zero. And its not because they never read Tufte. :-)
- amelius 9y agoIf you read the text of the article, you see ALL the percentages referring to the total, not to the changes. For example: > Yesterday, Bitcoin was just a few dollars away from dropping below $10,000, but it bounced back around $11k, a 15% drop from two days before. That 15% refers to the total of around $10,000 and not to some change! The text is full of these examples. (The fact that those candle-stick diagrams don't start at zero is because traders use technical analysis which indeed doesn't care about absolute values, but imho this shows how crazy it all is.)
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- eksemplar 9y agoThank god I cashed out everything in eth at $1410. Was only a matter of times with those insane climbs in December. I feel sorry for the huge increase of people who got in post October, but I mean, my winnings had to come from somewhere and it sure isn’t the real world application.
- econner 9y agoPretty spot on. Investing in cryptocurrencies at this stage was just about taking money from the ones who got in after you.
- yAnonymous 9y agoI feel sorry for the people who still haven't learned that electronic currency will recover. It's going to rise again and these crashes are going to happen a few more times before it crashes for good. Now is a good time to buy, like every crash before. edit: Wait, I'm doing it wrong... Everybody should panic. This is the end!!111
- eksemplar 9y agoOh I’m sure it’ll recover eventually. I’ll be putting 10-20% of my winnings back in once it stabilizes, but the other 80% is going somewhere safe.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- dang 9y agoWould you please stop posting unsubstantive comments here? Cryptocurrency threads have become so reliably awful that I think we're going to moderate them down for a while.
- olalonde 9y agoWell, one positive thing about this drop is that it will hopefully get rid of the "get rich quick" crowd (no offence).
- qubex 9y agoHow could this surprise anybody? Even back in November, just by analysing the time-series, there was ample evidence of what was to come: https://mynabla.com/2017/11/30/bubble-trouble-exploring-an-lppl-model-for-bitcoin/ https://mynabla.com/2017/11/30/bubble-trouble-exploring-an-l... https://mynabla.com/2017/11/09/a-monte-carlo-simulation-of-bitcoin-price-modeled-as-a-fractional-brownian-motion/ https://mynabla.com/2017/11/09/a-monte-carlo-simulation-of-b...
- sethgecko 9y agoOf course, you didn't short it by any chance did you? Since it was so obvious.
- take4 9y agoDo you know how shorting works? The only way to limit margin requirements of a short would be to buy puts, which would open you up to theta decay, and I don’t think there is anywhere that would even trade BTC options since the IV would be crazy.
- skgoa 9y agoThat's not a good argument. Shorting into a bubble is super dangerous, because while you can be highly certain that the bubble will pop, you can't predict how high it will go before it pops. The optimal way to trade a bubble is to be long for as long as your risk tolerance allows and then you stay flat. You only short once the bubble has popped.
- dipppy 9y agoNot even the seemingly-infinite pumping of Tethers (now $1.6 billion and counting) can keep the price afloat. We're going to see further correction before the end of the month.
- empath75 9y agoI’m pretty sure we’re going to find out that tether/bitfinex are insolvent fairly soon as people run for the exits and try to withdraw dollars.
- FLUX-YOU 9y agoI'm still trying to figure out if Tether is actually affecting the price - Can you buy/sell bitcoin for tether? - Has tether ever released an audit?
- rhino369 9y agoYes you can, one of the bigger bitcoin US exchanges ONLY sells in tether. So if tether really did just print 1 billion fake dollars, that inflated the price of bitcoin substantially. The had a CPA sign an affidavit swearing they had enough cash to match their tether tokens. The CPA firm seems legit. But he never looked at tether's books. The tether tokens are only one of many possible liabilities. If tether borrowed a bunch of money (from banks, users, etc), they could be easily insolvent while still having enough cash to only pay out tokens. There is no legal mechanism to put tether token holders at the front of a bankruptcy creditor line. And that was months ago. They printed 200 million tether yesterday. That amount seems unrealistically high.
- sharemywin 9y agoBittrex allows you to buy/sell tether. https://www.coinhills.com/market/-usdt/bittrex/ https://www.coinhills.com/market/-usdt/bittrex/
- Zpalmtree 9y agoYou can buy and sell bitcoin for tether, but you can't exchange tether for dollars. I believe they claimed they had been audited but didn't release any information on it, unsure.
- donkeyd 9y ago50% down from its high in December. People are comparing it to previous 20-30% corrections, but 50% is very different. This reminds me of the Mt. Gox crash, but there doesn't seem to be a clear indicator of what's driving this.
- piker 9y agoFundamentals?
- FLUX-YOU 9y agoFundamentals of a market really controlled by a few, which would be different than a large correction in the stock market over 2 days.
- philipodonnell 9y agoI don't mean this in a flippant way, but I don't think there are fundamentals that support BTC at any objective price, since so much of the value is in speculation, both good (excited about the future utility) and bad (got 2 git dose mad gainz). Unless you were being cheeky and saying its going to zero, in which case... I think its probably worth more than zero.
- gr3yh47 9y agoearly on bitcoin was, for a long time, regularly crashing to ~50% then rising to ~200% 2 - 10 - 5 - 20 - 10 - 40 - 25 - 100 - 50 when it crashed to 50 from 100 in 2013? 2012? i really wanted to buy 10 of them as i had observed the pattern for a long time. wish i had. oh well. so clearly now it's going to rise to ~40k (kidding)
- brandall10 9y agoMaybe I'm remembering it wrong, but I recall a point in time where it first rallied up to about $33 then crashed down to something like $2.
- Beltiras 9y ago
- aviv 9y ago"Store of value"
- dominotw 9y agoCan't wait for "I told you so" gloating.
- donkeyd 9y ago"1 BTC is still 1 BTC" seems to be a popular saying in the Bitcoin forums.
- heifetz 9y agoand BTC is becoming less useful in the real world (unless you convert it to a real world currency)
- donkeyd 9y agoYea, it's a shame. I couple of years ago, I ordered a pizza in BTC. It was odd, because the price of the pizza in BTC would swing up and down while in the payment time window. It was also cool. Now it's no longer cool, it's become a money grab for some and a huge bummer for a lot of people who got in in December with they end of year bonuses. The innocent fun has disappeared and transaction fees an times have gone way beyond buying a pizza.
- perseusprime11 9y agoOnly true if there is no way to convert a bitcoin to USD.
- aviv 9y agoWhich is why the exchangers are the weakest link, and why world governments are bound to attack cryptocurrencies from that angle.
- franklinrizzo 9y agoGreat. Maybe now I can buy a 1080 TI.
- amenod 9y agoOn the cheap too, if you're buying used. :)
- sharemywin 9y agoStill > $900 https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_sacat=0&LH_Auction=1&_nkw=1080+ti&_sop=1 https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_sacat=0&LH_Auctio...
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- MulliMulli 9y agoI don't understand all the hate on this site for Bitcoin. Yes it is speculation, but I rather have people speculate on something like a digital currency than on things like food prices or real estate. In my building 40% of all apartments are vacant because they where bought to store money, on the other hand there are 50 people showing up for every rental with a decent price. So, even if Bitcoin goes up to $250,000 it will not have the negative side effects of other forms of speculation.
- Nursie 9y agoIt's true that it doesn't affect housing. However the price does affect energy use, which for BTC is more than many (most?) countries now.
- ckastner 9y agoHow would you characterize the side effects if Bitcoin went down to $1,000. Or even lower?
- MulliMulli 9y agoSome people will loose, some will gain, but both parties are actively involved in the speculation.
- aviv 9y agoYour example proved why those vacant apartments are a great place to park your money.
- JTon 9y agoI agree with you. Just chiming in to say BTC speculation isn't a free lunch. The global energy consumed due to mining operations is staggering. Not linking any numbers because we've seen articles hit the front page of HN in the the recently past. So I assume this is common knowledge.
- yAnonymous 9y ago+++ Bitcoin technology pushes alternative energy +++ BUY NOW +++
- mrb 9y agoA crash had been expected for a while. It was going up way too fast too quickly. However in the big picture, this crash from $19k to $9k is just a blip on the radar. Even if it crashed further down to $6k we would still be at the all-time-high of 2½ months ago: http://bitcoin.zorinaq.com/price/ http://bitcoin.zorinaq.com/price/
- donkeyd 9y agoDon't forget the big picture that lots of people lost lots of money in the last couple of weeks. People blow this off by saying that people shouldn't have invested money they couldn't miss, but those are the same people who kept telling everybody to 'hodl' and that it'll go to 100k. It may still, buy the people who need it the most can't wait for it to crawl back to 20k.
- lunchables 9y agoIf anyone "needs" it to crawl back to 20k in a period of a couple months, they've made some terrible investment decisions.
- twiceaday 9y agoIt seems to me like the reason for your comment was to signal confidence in the future of Bitcoin, even though what you explicitly said can be summarized as "Bitcoin is worth more than $0 so some buyers are still up." What you said explicitly is rather obvious but your implication is a much more interesting discussion.
- olfactory 9y agoIt's not clear that this is a correction.
- m3kw9 9y agoThe underrated scary thing is that this stuff is so new, no one has a good theory on how to properly price any given crypto. The price is purely changed as they change hands at the exchanges
- perseusprime11 9y ago$400B wiped out in the last few days. I wonder whose money it is and how much of it is real money from investors.
- fanzhang 9y agoI'm of the opinion that while this is not an unusual move for bitcoin in its history, holders from the start who now have way too much of their wealth in coins should definitely cash out to a more reasonable amount. There are lots of bitcoin millionaires out there who really need to think about what having >30% of their money in bitcoins really does to the volatility of their portfolio. It's still the same bitcoin from 2013, but do you really want it to be that much of your portfolio?
- tuna-piano 9y ago"As someone who has spent a good amount of time trying to value Bitcoin, I believe that the total value of Bitcoin has the potential to be worth $180-$220B within the next 12 months. Given that Bitcoin now has a market cap of ~$166B, I believe Bitcoin is undervalued and would be a smart value buy." ... is a statement you will never hear "It went up, then it went down, then it went up, then it went way down, so I think it will definitely go up/down now." ... is the entire internet today This reminds me of the signs that show gamblers past roulette spins, so they can say things like "It was red 5 spins in a row, it's definitely going to be red again!". What else are bitcoin speculators looking at besides past price moves?
- friedButter 9y agoThats most cause there arent any underlying fundamentals to measure.. even in the stock market, yes there is an underlying company, but metrics such as P/E ratio's for specific industries are fairly arbitrary.. Similarly the stock market kind of operates on the principle that some day someone else might want to buy a share and guesses what price they might want to buy it for. Else the PE multiple would always be one.. Give crypto a few decades and you'll get similar analysis, I doubt stock markets had such data from day one either. (Disclaimer: I do not trade in or hold crypto, and will not until some regulations kick in, espicially around an exchanges ability to shut down and keep all deposited crypto with it)
- liberte82 9y agoPretty much. All this talk about "technical analysis" is nothing but tea-leaf reading. You're spot on with your roulette example.