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Bitcoin Drops Back Below $6,000 as 2018 Loss Approaches 60%
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- panoply 8y agoJust for a second give thought to those who purchased bitcoin when it was at 18k.
- everdev 8y agoPast success unfortunately does not guarantee or even predict future success.
- mkempe 8y agoAnd then also think of those who purchased below $1.
- weregiraffe 8y agoOkay. The thought is "bloody morons".
- coderdude 8y agoThat's cold blooded. I'm sure a lot of good people were financially devastated by that poor decision. A hopelessly bleak existence can do a lot to your capacity for rational thought. A few people I know asked me if I thought they should invest in Bitcoin at the time. I'm thankful my answer was consistently 'nope'!
- phs318u 8y ago> That’s cold blooded. Maybe, maybe not. For those that have never experienced a financial “lesson in violence” before, investing in Bitcoin is the equivalent of touching some strange shiny object that fell from the sky only to find out that the reason it’s glowing is because it’s bloody hot. Sometimes it takes the burnt flesh hanging off a bloodied stump to learn that maybe strange new objects that fall from the sky are to be avoided in the first instance, no matter how shiny they look. To be honest, given the world we live in, and the knowledge that exists around basic investing principles I’m surprised that some people are surprised at how much they’ve lost. For me, this just proves (yet again) that the human desire to get rich quickly is incredibly powerful and easily trumps logic and rational thought. For the record, and just so people don’t think I’m heartless, I lost $20K of savings back in 1989 In an institution whose interest rates were (on hindsight) obviously too good to be true. I was 23. The company was called Pyramid (yes, really. Australian)
- cup-of-tea 8y agoThe only person I know who bought bitcoin at that price inherited a load of wealth and has no real concept of money. I even told them they shouldn't at the time.
- finebalance 8y agoThere was this story on bitcoin, maybe on Ars, in which they interviewed a cleaning lady who'd put just about her entire life savings into the coin when it was near, what we now realize, its peak. Since then, bitcoin's fallen precipitously and I've personally felt plenty of schadenfreude about it, but... as with nearly every financial scam, it is rarely those who deserve it who suffer the worst consequences.
- sacado2 8y agoPutting your entire life savings into one asset is always a bad idea, I thought this was a well-known fact nowadays.
- jjkk0101 8y agowhile it is a well-known fact it is not always possible to diversify effectively due to external factors like transaction costs, legislation (e.g.: managed pension plans), not enough principal, etc.
- biql 8y agoSome just expanded their investment horizon and now wait 100k by the end of 2019.
- dpc_pw 8y agoDon't buy Bitcoin. It's going to crash: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbZ8zDpX2Mg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbZ8zDpX2Mg
- Biba89 8y agoI don't always buy bitcoin but when I buy it crashes
- ninedays 8y agoI bought BTC when it was 15$. I bought again at 17k and bought at 6k and really don't care what the price of btc is today tomorrow or next week. I understand how easy it can be to call someone an idiot in restrospect when everything is down, but you have to know too that some people don't really care where it is _now_ and is just interested in where it go few years from now. It is like calling people idiot because they bought btc @ 1000$ and then it dropped @ 360$. I really don't think those who bought at 1k are idiots but that's just my opinion and it's OK if other people have different opinion than mine. Warm vibes.
- jjeaff 8y agoYou left out those that might say that buying Bitcoin at any price is idiotic.
- Blackstone4 8y agoHow do you value BTC? What is a fair price? $1m? $2m? $5bn? $10tn? Do you have a valuation methodology? My biggest issue with BTC is that it's subject to how the market feels about it. There's no cash flow. When I buy USD, I can by 2yr treasuries yielding ~2.5%.
- Blackstone4 8y agoOuch - I was downvoted when i felt like I made some reasonable arguments without attacking anyone. Why was I downvoted?
- Sjenk 8y agoI guess since you posted a comment twice. Not that familiair with HN unspoken rules. But I guess HN just like other forums don't appreciate double posts
- nathanaldensr 8y agoYou're challenging the conventional wisdom about how valuable Bitcoin is. The way I see it, cryptocurrency gets a lot of its "value" from emotion--it signifies what people want to be true. Cryptocurrency is, in some ways, a dream incarnate. It's backed by nothing except the dreams of those who believe in it--and energy expenditure (if one believes that). It's like a religion: Challenge the faith and you will be burned as a heretic, so-to-speak. I think that has a lot to do with why rational comments are down-voted so much on HN. You're assuming the discourse is rational when it is actually quite emotional. Cognitive dissonance abounds.
- tonyedgecombe 8y agoIf I'm honest I'm a surprised it hasn't fallen further, the only practical use seems to be buying drugs and it's not ideal for that.
- herbst 8y agoThis is a very one sided view on things. I regularly use BTC as alternative for international payments. It's cheaper, faster, more secure and honestly it feels nice to not pay into the hands of visa and master. Namecheap and FastTech.com being 2 big examples, as well as 2 of 3 of the hosting companies I use accept it. Not to mention that alternative chains like Eth very well have a practical real world use outside if monetary value. Edit:// I also order pizza and Chinese with Bitcoin like once a week. Saved me plenty of fees compared to other prepayment methods.
- azag0 8y agoVisa and MC don’t get almost anything, most of the fee goes to your bank.
- ulfw 8y agoWith that much fluctuation I disagree that BTC would be cheaper. Especially as it keeps losing in value. I'd rather pay $10 and know $9.80 goes to the company I am buying from (rest to VISA) than paying some random amount of Bitcoin for the $10 purchase which may be worth $11 or $9 or $20 on the day I purchase.
- rsynnott 8y agoSo, current average fee is about a dollar. Plus you have to pay probably at least 1% to buy it, and the vendor has to pay similar to sell it again, and accept significant exchange risk. I struggle to see how this works out cheaper than, say, paying namecheap with a credit card...
- dublidu 8y agoHow are you saving on fees when you buy things with bitcoin? The seller pays credit card processing fees, and I don’t see them giving you a discount for paying bitcoin.
- Blackstone4 8y agoHow do you value BTC? What is a fair price? $1m? $2m? $5bn? $10tn? Do you have a valuation methodology? My biggest issue with BTC is that it's subject to how the market feels about it. There's no cash flow. When I buy USD, I can by 2yr treasuries yielding ~2.5%.
- charlesdm 8y agoIt's been said many times before, but as digital gold. Gold is worth about $8tn. That puts it at about an 80x multiple from where it is today. But let's be "conservative" and put a 20 to 40x estimate on it, from where it is. It's obviously an assumption, not a sure thing. But the only thing that needs to happen is people sharing the belief that it is and/or can become digital gold, which is quite peculiar. If large stable investors buy in (pension funds, endowments, etc) that will help massively to support price levels, after a period of value growth.
- Blackstone4 8y agoThe same arguments I used above can also be applied to gold. Gold is intrinsically hard to value. So pricing BTC off gold feels tenuous to me. Gold also has non-monetary use (i.e. jewellery) which I imagine is a substantial portion of demand. 5+ years ago, I used to be really into gold when I used to read Zerohedge. I feel like I'm hearing similar arguments for crypto currencies vs. fiat as back then when I read up on gold vs. fiat. People were fanatical about gold (me included) and weren't objective. I owned shares in gold miners. I got burnt and lost a whole bunch of money. So personally I'm sticking to investments which produce cash flow. As they say, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." I had better learn from my mistakes.
- krageon 8y agoIf you owned shares in gold mines and got burned, it had nothing to do with the value of the gold itself. The price of gold has seen a steady upward trend over the past ~17 years at least (that's how long I've been looking at it, anyway).
- lucidlive 8y agoSo everyone thinks that cause Bitcoin is down from its high that it was a bad investment? The top has been reached and it's all downhill from here? Nobody who invested 1+ years ago is down so save your judgements for the future.
- sunir 8y agoThat’s bubble investing. Watching the face value only. Is the face value of Bitcoin higher or lower than its economic utility value? What is the economic utility of Bitcoin? I think that is the real underlying unresolved question that creates volatility. The market is unclear and so can’t set a price objectively.
- prepend 8y agoIt depends on your perspective. A lot of people bought in 3 or 6 months ago and aren’t happy. Of course people who did that weren’t used to speculating and so are unhappy now that they lost substantial sums. It’s significant news, but not really changing any of the fundamentals that I see. Bitcoin will become a useful currency when it is stable for long periods of time. It doesn’t matter if that consistency is at 6k or 20k or 10.
- tapoxi 8y agoI just don't understand what the purpose of Bitcoin is. Everyone seems to be treating it as an investment, but its use as a currency doesn't seem to have obvious advantages over cash. Its value fluctuates wildly, transaction processing takes forever, every purchase you make is public record, the price is easily manipulated, and it takes a ton of electricity to operate. What's the end goal of Bitcoin? What makes it worth investing in?
- rsynnott 8y agoGreater fool theory; "I'm buying this thing early, so that when it hits the mainstream a load of naive people will buy it and boost my value". That has probably largely passed now, though; I see train station ads to buy bitcoin all the time. I'd be somewhat surprised if it ever goes back to its beginning-of-year heights.
- nikolay 8y agoBitcoin is a pathetic way to boost Global Warming so that a bunch of Chinese miners can separate Westerners from their wealth!
- Finnucane 8y agoMarkets for speculative assets and commodities are generally down, and the dollar is up. So what do you expect?
- toss1 8y agoThe BTC chart since last year looks very much like a classic bubble / burst sequence. Build up, running up to a hyperbolic frenzy, then precipitous drop, followed by long decline of lower highs and lower lows. This seems to be only punctuated by significant buys just around psychologically important 'support levels', which correspond with the several credible articles I've read about Tether coin being used to manipulate the currency. The chatter is always about the next 'support level', and it always gets broken. I'm expecting it to slide down well into three digits (<= USD$ 999) before any real recovery, if there is one. The real use cases are materializing much slower than expected as the scaling issues and transaction times increase. Edit: (& BTW, I'm a generally enthusiastic supporter of the cryptocoin concepts, just noticing that it is apparently much harder to really get there than originally thought)
- m-i-l 8y agoThere's fairly strong evidence that the rise from $6K to $18K was primarily the result of market manipulation [0], so in some senses it isn't a crash more like returning to normality. Although there is so much market manipulation going on it is hard to tell what normality is, e.g. the rise from $150 to $1K between Sep to Nov 2013 was due to the markus and willy bots [1]. That's one of the problems with a completely unregulated market where almost all the wealth has become concentrated in the hands of a few largely anonymous players. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17302054 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17302054 [1] http://uk.businessinsider.com/one-or-two-traders-may-have-caused-the-price-of-bitcoin-to-rise-700-2018-1 http://uk.businessinsider.com/one-or-two-traders-may-have-ca...