10 ms·

Bitcoin drops below $9000 on Coinbase

103 points by empressplay 9y ago

m1sta_ 9y ago
Like a ball bouncing down a stairwell.
- IntronExon 9y ago
  If it looks like a cat, and smells like a corpse... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_cat_bounce https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_cat_bounce Even a dead cat will bounce if it falls from a great height That last step is going to be a doozy too. Hopefully this is happening before too many people lose more than they can afford, because of FOMO and the relentless hype.
  - mikestew 9y ago
    I had considered jumping in if what appears to be support at $9K held. Looks like this cat, though, might not bounce but just drill its way into the earth's crust. Granted, I'm apply analysis that is questionable with stocks, and might be (probably is?) completely inappropriate for cryptocurrency.
  - kristianp 9y ago
    I doubt a dead cat would actually bounce. Has this been scientifically tested, I wonder?
wand3r 9y ago
I remember balking when bitcoin increased from $20 to $30 as too expensive way back in the day. BTC has come so far and appreciated so fast. I find it pretty wild that people are acting like the price has plummeted. While it literally has fallen a non-trivial percentage from its high on the 3 year basis it would be really hard to find anything that had close to this sort of yield.
- everdev 9y ago
  And those who balked at $19k being too expensive are feeling super lucky right now.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- twiceaday 9y ago
  BTC crashed from 19k down to 9k. A lot of people lost a lot of money. Why are you discrediting this? Because BTC was even lower before? How is that related?
  - toolz 9y ago
    In the span of a few months....if you invested into BTC _needing_ to make a profit and only being able to hold for a few months you're just asking for it.
    - thesmallestcat 9y ago
      Another view is that if you're still bag-holding, you're asking for it.
      - mrhappyunhappy 9y ago
        I didn't know bag holding for 3 months is a thing when we are talking about a digital revolution.
    - twiceaday 9y ago
      This is not saying much. Obviously short term positions in a volatile asset are bad. Are you implying that long term positions in BTC are good?
      - wand3r 9y ago
        Yes, that was what I said exactly. The price was $20-30 dollars and if you were long on that with even a small position you would have made significant money over the long term. BTC has always fluctuated a lot but on average if you held the currency for long periods of time; >1 year, you would have more money than you had previously. It is short term speculators that have always driven volatility.
Zaskoda 9y ago
Dear lord, we haven't seen prices this low since... ...November... I think it was just last November.
- mdeeks 9y ago
  That is close to an eternity in the cryptocurrency world right now. November is around when the hockey stick up started. The market cap roughly quadrupled in the next month or two after that. All of that is gone now.
  - tehlike 9y ago
    Hockey stick started in may.
    - clamprecht 9y ago
      If you keep zooming out, the hockey stick is the whole chart.
    - mdeeks 9y ago
      That was one of them, yes. There have been a few. November was roughly when the mainstream craze started and there were everyday people like barbers getting into it and putting their mortgage payments in.
- RKearney 9y ago
  Well it was nearly $20k in December, so I'd say having it fall below $9k less than 2 months later is pretty significant.
  - cptskippy 9y ago
    Not when it was that price 2 months earlier. Why wouldn't you expect a rapid decent immediately following a skyrocket?
    - TylerE 9y ago
poster123 9y ago
At what price would Bitcoin be cheap? I'd be willing to take a flyer with a few $K if I had reason to think there was positive expectancy.
- davidw 9y ago
  When the price is less than expected future returns from the 'investment'...
- lern_too_spel 9y ago
  There is no floor on Bitcoin's value.
  - jjoonathan 9y ago
    Well it probably isn't going to go negative. Probably.
    - everdev 9y ago
      New business idea: BitDump - the easiest place to store your negatively valued bitcoins.
    - IntronExon 9y ago
      Although if you take into account the cost in electricity that has been turned into heat, that does kind of represent s massive negative. That sacrifice of power is only worth it (sort of) if Bitcoin retains more value than the electricity was worth. Of course if cryptocurrency really does become worthwhile as a currency, it could be an acceptable price to pay. How many people think that cryptocurrency has a real future worth that expenditure? I would guess fewer everyday, but I could be very wrong.
    - zerostar07 9y ago
      it can be hacked or compromised. at which point it becomes imaginary
      - 9y ago
KasianFranks 9y ago
Time to buy.
- orthecreedence 9y ago
  Good luck with that. When Tether crashes and takes the market with it, I'm guessing around $2K will be the time to buy.
  - nipponese 9y ago
    I don't ask this rhetorically: why would a Tether collapse negatively affect Bitcoin? If anything, it's proof that fiat-backed financial tools are flawed at inception. If there's a run and people need to dump USDT, it seems they will flood into BTC/ETH, not try to convert to USD/fiat.
    - orthecreedence 9y ago
      The reason being (from my understanding) that the price of BTC has been pumped higher and higher by Buttfinex printing Tethers and using them to buy BTC. Essentially, they create value out of nothing, transfer that value into BTC, rinse and repeat. Therefor the high valuation you see in BTC is actually a lot of paper dollars that have no backing. This has been compounded many, many times. When it's found that Tether is insolvent, all that perceived value that's been pumped into BTC will dissolve, and the market (including all the alts that ride BTC's coat tails) will come crashing down.
      - bb88 9y ago
        I've been trying to figure out how Bitfinex and Tethers manipulate BTC. One way it can go south is if Bitfinex is using the money it gets from Tethers to buy BTC. Effectively not converting the money to paper, but holding onto BTC. In other words, Tether may be backed by BTC. So a run on Tether might affect the price of BTC negatively as Bitfinex would have to sell BTC to dollars to pay for the Tethers people are trying to sell back. But that's only a theory.
tromp 9y ago
As predicted in [1] we now have reversed the meme: https://i.imgur.com/cjnwruL.jpg https://i.imgur.com/cjnwruL.jpg [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15987623 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15987623
- starpilot 9y ago
  Predictions without a specific timeframe aren't very useful. For a random variable on an infinite domain, all outcomes will eventually be true.
pramodzion 9y ago
why is it "on Coinbase" ?
- beefsack 9y ago
  Because it's only worth what people are willing to pay, and that's how much Coinbase are paying at the moment.
  - foobar2020 9y ago
    Well there are more people that are willing to pay than just Coinbase. A more comprehensive answer would be that arbitrage is not that up to speed in the Bitcoin world, especially in KRW and JPY markets: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/#markets https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/#markets Used to be that crypto is massively overpriced there, now it looks like Korea and Japan are leading this price fall.
    - ceejayoz 9y ago
      > A more comprehensive answer would be that arbitrage is not that up to speed in the Bitcoin world... Or that folks trust their ability to get money out of Coinbase more than the other exchanges.
  - pbreit 9y ago
    I assume Coinbase prices come from GDAX. Anyone know for sure?
    - snuxoll 9y ago
      Yes, every time you buy or sell on Coinbase it’s transacted through their GDAX platform.
- dismal2 9y ago
  Because prices differ between exchange quite a bit, and Coinbase is considered one of the more legitimate ones.
jondubois 9y ago
Bitcoin is currently the world's reserve cryptocurrency - All cryptocurrencies can be exchanged for Bitcoin. But unfortunately in technical terms, it's not fit for this purpose. The reserve cryptocurrency of the internet needs to be fast and offer cheap transactions so that it can easily and cheaply be moved between exchanges. I think it will take some time before another cryptocurrency takes the place of Bitcoin. Part of the problem is that very few people currently have the skills to evaluate a cryptocurrency based on its technical merits. So exchanges are not currently in a position to agree about what the next reserve cryptocurrency should be. I think that replacing Bitcoin with Ethereum right now would be a mistake. Ethereum has a lot of big scalability hurdles - I think that technically Ethereum actually has more hurdles to overcome than Bitcoin - Their community does seem a lot more motivated though; but I'm not sure that will be enough. Ethereum still needs to switch to Proof-of-Stake and THEN it needs to implement sharding. Also, I don't think that pruning will be feasible for Ethereum. It wouldn't make sense to prune the Ethereum blockchain because that would entail pruning out smart contracts. Most no-smart-contract cryptocurrencies are not limited in this way.
- zerostar07 9y ago
  ETH is up 17% this week over BTC. it might already be becoming the new reserve currency: https://coinzaa.com/tools?limit=200&base=BTC https://coinzaa.com/tools?limit=200&base=BTC Also , i m not sure how often people use BTC to transfer stuff between exchanges, it's just too slow and expensive. i think ppl use LTC or ETH more often for transfers.
  - wmeredith 9y ago
    Absolutely. The day traders switched to Eth as a reserve back in December when Bitcoin shit the bed under the load of main stream media attention. It's not perfect, but it's an order of magnitude faster and cheaper than Bitcoin. I think Bitcoin will be seen like Geocities some day. A hell of an idea that many people have done much better.
    - xiphias 9y ago
CryptoPunk 9y ago
Ethereum has the most trading pairs after Bitcoin, and a pretty comprehensive multi-pronged scaling plan. It's the most likely successor to Bitcoin as the reserve cryptocurrency.
- siruncledrew 9y ago
  Why is a reserve cryptocurrency needed?
  - CryptoPunk 9y ago
    It is just what emerges, because people need a stable high-liquidity currency, for things like an intermediary for trading between lower liquidity currencies, and as a lower-volatility store of value.
solotronics 9y ago
scalability is being solved by lightning network which is already seeing alpha testing on the Bitcoin main net (production) I am doing what I have done every big drop in Bitcoin and buying a little each week just because it performed in the past doesn't mean it will in the future but the same reasons I liked it still exist and are getting stronger. the market will lag behind lightning because people don't realize what it is yet and it might take a year or two but it will be back even stronger than $20k (the first time it's bought by a countries reserve bank it's game over cryotos will beat fiat then)
- lern_too_spel 9y ago
  Alternatively, people realize what it is and understand why it doesn't solve any meaningful problems with Bitcoin.
  - solotronics 9y ago
    people are already using lightning to pay for VPN service instantly with less transaction fee than $0.01 USD, from my perspective this solves the problem of Bitcoin transactions being too expensive to pay for everyday items
    - sireat 9y ago
      A link to HowTo for buying with lightning? My impression was that it was still not very user friendly(not saying much in crypto world) nor widespread.
    - lern_too_spel 9y ago
      In order to do that, you had to pay a large transaction fee to set up a Lightning channel in the first place. Since all transactions between you and TorGuard are one-way, you will have to do this repeatedly, paying large transaction fees each time.
perseusprime11 9y ago
Hodl? Or Fodl?
- thesmallestcat 9y ago
  foldl?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - quickthrower2 9y ago
    foldl' is better
- quickthrower2 9y ago
  Rofl?
Taniwha 9y ago
oooh .... a race to the door ...
amriksohata 9y ago
Patience, hold onto it for another few days lol
mkbkn 9y ago
$9000 is nothing. During the Indian Budget yesterday, bitcoin price was close to $4000 on Zebpay. https://www.cryptoground.com/article/btc-price-4000-usd-indian-exchange-zebpay https://www.cryptoground.com/article/btc-price-4000-usd-indi...
themigeo 9y ago
Bitcoin Benny: Crypto Outlook for 2018 https://www.tokens24.com/exclusive/bitcoin-benny-crypto-outlook-2018/ https://www.tokens24.com/exclusive/bitcoin-benny-crypto-outl...
yashksagar 9y ago
Don't worry keep HODLing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rg2oukQZ6dg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rg2oukQZ6dg

103 points by empressplay 9y ago

m1sta_ 9y ago

Like a ball bouncing down a stairwell.

IntronExon 9y ago
If it looks like a cat, and smells like a corpse... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_cat_bounce https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_cat_bounce Even a dead cat will bounce if it falls from a great height That last step is going to be a doozy too. Hopefully this is happening before too many people lose more than they can afford, because of FOMO and the relentless hype.
- mikestew 9y ago
  I had considered jumping in if what appears to be support at $9K held. Looks like this cat, though, might not bounce but just drill its way into the earth's crust. Granted, I'm apply analysis that is questionable with stocks, and might be (probably is?) completely inappropriate for cryptocurrency.
- kristianp 9y ago
  I doubt a dead cat would actually bounce. Has this been scientifically tested, I wonder?

wand3r 9y ago

I remember balking when bitcoin increased from $20 to $30 as too expensive way back in the day. BTC has come so far and appreciated so fast. I find it pretty wild that people are acting like the price has plummeted. While it literally has fallen a non-trivial percentage from its high on the 3 year basis it would be really hard to find anything that had close to this sort of yield.

everdev 9y ago
And those who balked at $19k being too expensive are feeling super lucky right now.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
twiceaday 9y ago
BTC crashed from 19k down to 9k. A lot of people lost a lot of money. Why are you discrediting this? Because BTC was even lower before? How is that related?
- toolz 9y ago
  In the span of a few months....if you invested into BTC _needing_ to make a profit and only being able to hold for a few months you're just asking for it.
  - thesmallestcat 9y ago
    Another view is that if you're still bag-holding, you're asking for it.
    - mrhappyunhappy 9y ago
      I didn't know bag holding for 3 months is a thing when we are talking about a digital revolution.
  - twiceaday 9y ago
    This is not saying much. Obviously short term positions in a volatile asset are bad. Are you implying that long term positions in BTC are good?
    - wand3r 9y ago
      Yes, that was what I said exactly. The price was $20-30 dollars and if you were long on that with even a small position you would have made significant money over the long term. BTC has always fluctuated a lot but on average if you held the currency for long periods of time; >1 year, you would have more money than you had previously. It is short term speculators that have always driven volatility.

Zaskoda 9y ago

Dear lord, we haven't seen prices this low since... ...November... I think it was just last November.

mdeeks 9y ago
That is close to an eternity in the cryptocurrency world right now. November is around when the hockey stick up started. The market cap roughly quadrupled in the next month or two after that. All of that is gone now.
- tehlike 9y ago
  Hockey stick started in may.
  - clamprecht 9y ago
    If you keep zooming out, the hockey stick is the whole chart.
  - mdeeks 9y ago
    That was one of them, yes. There have been a few. November was roughly when the mainstream craze started and there were everyday people like barbers getting into it and putting their mortgage payments in.
RKearney 9y ago
Well it was nearly $20k in December, so I'd say having it fall below $9k less than 2 months later is pretty significant.
- cptskippy 9y ago
  Not when it was that price 2 months earlier. Why wouldn't you expect a rapid decent immediately following a skyrocket?
  - TylerE 9y ago

poster123 9y ago

At what price would Bitcoin be cheap? I'd be willing to take a flyer with a few $K if I had reason to think there was positive expectancy.

davidw 9y ago
When the price is less than expected future returns from the 'investment'...
lern_too_spel 9y ago
There is no floor on Bitcoin's value.
- jjoonathan 9y ago
  Well it probably isn't going to go negative. Probably.
  - everdev 9y ago
    New business idea: BitDump - the easiest place to store your negatively valued bitcoins.
  - IntronExon 9y ago
    Although if you take into account the cost in electricity that has been turned into heat, that does kind of represent s massive negative. That sacrifice of power is only worth it (sort of) if Bitcoin retains more value than the electricity was worth. Of course if cryptocurrency really does become worthwhile as a currency, it could be an acceptable price to pay. How many people think that cryptocurrency has a real future worth that expenditure? I would guess fewer everyday, but I could be very wrong.
  - zerostar07 9y ago
    it can be hacked or compromised. at which point it becomes imaginary
    - 9y ago

KasianFranks 9y ago

Time to buy.

orthecreedence 9y ago
Good luck with that. When Tether crashes and takes the market with it, I'm guessing around $2K will be the time to buy.
- nipponese 9y ago
  I don't ask this rhetorically: why would a Tether collapse negatively affect Bitcoin? If anything, it's proof that fiat-backed financial tools are flawed at inception. If there's a run and people need to dump USDT, it seems they will flood into BTC/ETH, not try to convert to USD/fiat.
  - orthecreedence 9y ago
    The reason being (from my understanding) that the price of BTC has been pumped higher and higher by Buttfinex printing Tethers and using them to buy BTC. Essentially, they create value out of nothing, transfer that value into BTC, rinse and repeat. Therefor the high valuation you see in BTC is actually a lot of paper dollars that have no backing. This has been compounded many, many times. When it's found that Tether is insolvent, all that perceived value that's been pumped into BTC will dissolve, and the market (including all the alts that ride BTC's coat tails) will come crashing down.
    - bb88 9y ago
      I've been trying to figure out how Bitfinex and Tethers manipulate BTC. One way it can go south is if Bitfinex is using the money it gets from Tethers to buy BTC. Effectively not converting the money to paper, but holding onto BTC. In other words, Tether may be backed by BTC. So a run on Tether might affect the price of BTC negatively as Bitfinex would have to sell BTC to dollars to pay for the Tethers people are trying to sell back. But that's only a theory.

tromp 9y ago

As predicted in [1] we now have reversed the meme: https://i.imgur.com/cjnwruL.jpg https://i.imgur.com/cjnwruL.jpg [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15987623 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15987623

starpilot 9y ago
Predictions without a specific timeframe aren't very useful. For a random variable on an infinite domain, all outcomes will eventually be true.

pramodzion 9y ago

why is it "on Coinbase" ?

beefsack 9y ago
Because it's only worth what people are willing to pay, and that's how much Coinbase are paying at the moment.
- foobar2020 9y ago
  Well there are more people that are willing to pay than just Coinbase. A more comprehensive answer would be that arbitrage is not that up to speed in the Bitcoin world, especially in KRW and JPY markets: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/#markets https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/#markets Used to be that crypto is massively overpriced there, now it looks like Korea and Japan are leading this price fall.
  - ceejayoz 9y ago
    > A more comprehensive answer would be that arbitrage is not that up to speed in the Bitcoin world... Or that folks trust their ability to get money out of Coinbase more than the other exchanges.
- pbreit 9y ago
  I assume Coinbase prices come from GDAX. Anyone know for sure?
  - snuxoll 9y ago
    Yes, every time you buy or sell on Coinbase it’s transacted through their GDAX platform.
dismal2 9y ago
Because prices differ between exchange quite a bit, and Coinbase is considered one of the more legitimate ones.

jondubois 9y ago

Bitcoin is currently the world's reserve cryptocurrency - All cryptocurrencies can be exchanged for Bitcoin. But unfortunately in technical terms, it's not fit for this purpose. The reserve cryptocurrency of the internet needs to be fast and offer cheap transactions so that it can easily and cheaply be moved between exchanges. I think it will take some time before another cryptocurrency takes the place of Bitcoin. Part of the problem is that very few people currently have the skills to evaluate a cryptocurrency based on its technical merits. So exchanges are not currently in a position to agree about what the next reserve cryptocurrency should be. I think that replacing Bitcoin with Ethereum right now would be a mistake. Ethereum has a lot of big scalability hurdles - I think that technically Ethereum actually has more hurdles to overcome than Bitcoin - Their community does seem a lot more motivated though; but I'm not sure that will be enough. Ethereum still needs to switch to Proof-of-Stake and THEN it needs to implement sharding. Also, I don't think that pruning will be feasible for Ethereum. It wouldn't make sense to prune the Ethereum blockchain because that would entail pruning out smart contracts. Most no-smart-contract cryptocurrencies are not limited in this way.

zerostar07 9y ago
ETH is up 17% this week over BTC. it might already be becoming the new reserve currency: https://coinzaa.com/tools?limit=200&base=BTC https://coinzaa.com/tools?limit=200&base=BTC Also , i m not sure how often people use BTC to transfer stuff between exchanges, it's just too slow and expensive. i think ppl use LTC or ETH more often for transfers.
- wmeredith 9y ago
  Absolutely. The day traders switched to Eth as a reserve back in December when Bitcoin shit the bed under the load of main stream media attention. It's not perfect, but it's an order of magnitude faster and cheaper than Bitcoin. I think Bitcoin will be seen like Geocities some day. A hell of an idea that many people have done much better.
  - xiphias 9y ago

CryptoPunk 9y ago

Ethereum has the most trading pairs after Bitcoin, and a pretty comprehensive multi-pronged scaling plan. It's the most likely successor to Bitcoin as the reserve cryptocurrency.

siruncledrew 9y ago
Why is a reserve cryptocurrency needed?
- CryptoPunk 9y ago
  It is just what emerges, because people need a stable high-liquidity currency, for things like an intermediary for trading between lower liquidity currencies, and as a lower-volatility store of value.

solotronics 9y ago

scalability is being solved by lightning network which is already seeing alpha testing on the Bitcoin main net (production) I am doing what I have done every big drop in Bitcoin and buying a little each week just because it performed in the past doesn't mean it will in the future but the same reasons I liked it still exist and are getting stronger. the market will lag behind lightning because people don't realize what it is yet and it might take a year or two but it will be back even stronger than $20k (the first time it's bought by a countries reserve bank it's game over cryotos will beat fiat then)

lern_too_spel 9y ago
Alternatively, people realize what it is and understand why it doesn't solve any meaningful problems with Bitcoin.
- solotronics 9y ago
  people are already using lightning to pay for VPN service instantly with less transaction fee than $0.01 USD, from my perspective this solves the problem of Bitcoin transactions being too expensive to pay for everyday items
  - sireat 9y ago
    A link to HowTo for buying with lightning? My impression was that it was still not very user friendly(not saying much in crypto world) nor widespread.
  - lern_too_spel 9y ago
    In order to do that, you had to pay a large transaction fee to set up a Lightning channel in the first place. Since all transactions between you and TorGuard are one-way, you will have to do this repeatedly, paying large transaction fees each time.

perseusprime11 9y ago

Hodl? Or Fodl?

thesmallestcat 9y ago
foldl?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- quickthrower2 9y ago
  foldl' is better
quickthrower2 9y ago
Rofl?

Taniwha 9y ago

oooh .... a race to the door ...

amriksohata 9y ago

Patience, hold onto it for another few days lol

mkbkn 9y ago

$9000 is nothing. During the Indian Budget yesterday, bitcoin price was close to $4000 on Zebpay. https://www.cryptoground.com/article/btc-price-4000-usd-indian-exchange-zebpay https://www.cryptoground.com/article/btc-price-4000-usd-indi...

themigeo 9y ago

Bitcoin Benny: Crypto Outlook for 2018 https://www.tokens24.com/exclusive/bitcoin-benny-crypto-outlook-2018/ https://www.tokens24.com/exclusive/bitcoin-benny-crypto-outl...

yashksagar 9y ago

Don't worry keep HODLing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rg2oukQZ6dg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rg2oukQZ6dg