28 ms·

No End in Sight for Crypto Sell-Off as Bitcoin Breaches $4,250

327 points by ilamont 8y ago

bhaak 8y ago
picture of a bitcoin man on a free falling rollercoaster screaming /weeeeeeeee/ What's the purpose of that article? What can be discussed about Bitcoin and the other crypto currencies that hasn't been discussed here several times already? There is no news besides the price collapsing but that has happened before as well. But this time it's different They are saying that during a bull run and during a bear market. I don't believe that, there's no limit to human greed.
- wycs 8y ago
  Few people have not heard of crypto. If it is a ponzi there are no suckers left.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  > What's the purpose of that article? I stopped watching cryptocurrency prices about a year ago. The novelty wore off. These articles say “hey, that thing you forgot about is doing something interesting—give it a minute.”
seibelj 8y ago
This is good for Bitcoin.
- chx 8y ago
  HODL!
- stjohnswarts 8y ago
  I agree this is the market correction I've been waiting on.
overcast 8y ago
That's what happens when you screw over the general public in a giant pump and dump. There is just no more money left to steal. First time was for the early adopters at $1000, second time was for the late majority at $19,000. You're not going to see that happen again.
- tom_ 8y ago
  What about $35 and $250?
  - overcast 8y ago
    Innovators. No one really heard of Bitcoin prior to the $1000 pump.
    - doubt_me 8y ago
      Reddit heard plenty before 1000$ I was there the week it was released. Lost 100 bitcoins to a hard drive crash and never looked back. They use to literally hand them out like candy. Mt gox happened and I never took it seriously ever again.
      - overcast 8y ago
        If I asked my mother what Reddit is right now, she'd have no idea what I was saying.
        mcbits 8y ago
        If your mother has never heard of Instagram, Netflix, eBay, or Yahoo, that doesn't mean nobody has heard of them. They're still almost as popular as Reddit.
        Max_Mustermann 8y ago
        Instagram, Netflix and Yahoo are world brands. Reddit is mostly anglophone.
aphextron 8y ago
Everything sells off this time of year. Nasdaq is down 7% on the month. It’s end of year profit-taking for tax purposes. As BTC has become completely mainstream now, this makes sense.
- czechdeveloper 8y ago
  Except the amount it's falling is not normal.
  - castis 8y ago
    What would be normal behavior?
    - Uberphallus 8y ago
      Not freefall
      - castis 8y ago
        And how do we know this isn't what this system was bound to do eventually? It's not really been around very long.
        kiriakasis 8y ago
        How is this a relevant question?
        castis 8y ago
        Because I'm curious what the other person thinks? Did I miss the syllabus?
- metalliqaz 8y ago
  No, it is almost certainly related to the network split, as mentioned in the article. There are issues with bitcoin that limit its long term potential. For example, the effective limitations on the number of transactions per second, and the huge energy cost for providing proof of work.
tgtweak 8y ago
Still up 500% since January 2017.
- pc86 8y ago
  Still down 78% since December 2017. What's your point?
  - apexalpha 8y ago
    Just because a bubble pops doesn't mean it's useless or dead. Many bubbles pop in the real world, they always recover.
    - Uberphallus 8y ago
      Ever heard of BitConnect?
      - gsich 8y ago
        Was scam from the beginning.
    - mbreese 8y ago
      They don’t always recover. It’s hard to recover when you are a commodity that doesn’t have any inherent utility other than being a method for completing transactions. Also - Tulips.
      - sodafountan 8y ago
        It's a lot easier to recover when a recovery mechanism is built in - aka the halving. We're a solid year and a half away from that event happening, it'll go lower than this in that time but once the new supply restricts it'll make its slow ascent back up, people will see the opportunity and the demand will skyrocket again. I say this a lot, it's helpful to think of bitcoin as an algorithm, I just see this pattern playing out the same way over and over and over again every four years.
tonyedgecombe 8y ago
Is this below the price where it is economic to mine? Presumably at some point the miners would have to pull the plug to avoid loosing money.
- jeletonskelly 8y ago
  Difficulty adjusts dynamically to ensure there is always an incentive to mine.
  - FabHK 8y ago
    Difficulty adjusts when total hash power changes, so for difficulty to adjust downward some miners will have to take equipment offline, ie "pull the plug".
- EADGBE 8y ago
  The only way this unplugs is if it was loose to begin with.
mavdi 8y ago
Ouch for my crypto investment, makes no difference to my crypto product. And that's the point, price of bitcoin is irrelevant to most crypto products. We're in the business of Fiat > Crypto > Fiat instant money transfers which is immune to what the current market is. Crypto as a technology will keep moving forward.
- kasey_junk 8y ago
  How is it possible that the USD/Bitcoin pair price doesn’t impact currency transfer businesses?
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  > We're in the business of Fiat > Crypto > Fiat instant money transfers Moving in and out of crypto is not instantaneous. You might move cash before confirmations are in, in which case you’re taking on credit risk, but you’ll still be losing money on your collateral’s value falling.
- notyourday 8y ago
  > We're in the business of Fiat > Crypto > Fiat instant money transfers which is immune to what the current market is. You should chat with Pablo, Luiz and Patel. They own a bodega, a bill pay stall and an electronics stall in a rapidly gentrifying part of Brooklyn. All three of them have been providing this service for years, without the need for expensive computer equipment or bitcoin. Some of their customers don't speak English, have a fourth grade level of education and just fill out slips of paper to send/receive money worldwide within a few minutes.
arijun 8y ago
Good. Bitcoin is too wasteful when it’s at a high valuation. The amount of resources in both electricity and gpu hardware that gets locked into mining is too high. It can still do it’s job as a currency with a lower valuation.
- nerdponx 8y ago
  It's interesting that transactions have been steadily increasing since the crash at the end of 2017, even as the price keeps falling: https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactions.html https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactions.ht... That to me is definitely a good sign. Less hoarding, more spending. I do wonder what happens if the network starts to get transaction-bottlenecked again. It's not like all the problems with block size suddenly went away.
- dragontamer 8y ago
  The problem is that all that computing power still exists. If the hashrate drops, then a 51% attack becomes possible. Remember that those mining farms still exist, even if they've temporarily turned off their mining equipment. Someone can turn all that equipment on suddenly to attack the network and start double-spending their coins. In effect: the hashrate MUST remain high if the BTC network is to remain secure. That's just how Bitcoin was designed. A big drop like this where "good" miners start to turn off and sell off their equipment puts BTC in a highly vulnerable spot. The electricity usage will remain high, OR a 51% attack will happen. The electricity usage can never drop without severe risk to the entire system.
  - gregorymichael 8y ago
    That doesn't sound like a good system.
  - _jal 8y ago
    > the hashrate MUST remain high if the BTC network is to remain secure Reminds me of something else that places a continually increasing demand on resources to remain stable... Building the Red Queen problem into currency is insane.
rusk 8y ago
Still nowhere near low enough for me to feel okay about ditching back in 2016 ...
- emerongi 8y ago
  I remember looking at the price of Bitcoin when it was $23, $250 and $400. I didn't have any money, so I couldn't buy, but still fun to think about 10x-ing my current bank account. To be completely honest, even if I did have money, I wouldn't have bought. The price used to go up and down by 10% like daily. At that point it feels like gambling.
  - kevingrahl 8y ago
    Sometimes I nearly shed a tear when I open my wallet that shows me how many coins it held over its lifetime. It even converts it into my local currency as if to mock me. I remember times where those Bitcoin faucets (is that still a thing?) gave you 50BTC every X hours just for entering your wallet address. Of course I spend nearly all of them on stupid stuff later on but before they gained considerable value. I still have an old external HDD with somewhere between 20-50BTC on it that I broke and haven’t had the money to fix it and retrieve them.
    - pault 8y ago
      You can't afford to fix a hard drive with $250,000 on it? Can't you borrow some money against that?
      - kevingrahl 8y ago
        It’s questionable if the data can even be restored. Plus there’s more sensitive data than just Bitcoin private keys on that disk I’m not really that comfortable sending that in to some lab for data recovery. When the disk broke I inquired what it would probably cost to retrieve the data and I was quoted with something around 150-300€ which to me is too much just for the small chance to actually get those coins. I don’t like to gamble.
simias 8y ago
Since the article states "the trigger for the latest sell-off is unclear" I'm really curious if somebody here could venture a guess about the reasons for the sudden drop. The Bitcoin Cash fork seems suspiciously correlated but is it big enough news to cause such a turmoil? Being a cryptocurrency-skeptic I won't pretend that I don't experience a little bit of schadenfreude when I see CC crash, however if I'm trying to be a bit more constructive I suppose that means that we're nearing the "make or break" point: if the huge investment in cryptocurrency-related technologies over the past four years or so manages to produce something actually useful over the next year I have no doubt that this is only a temporary set-back and we'll see BTC (or some other coin) breach $20k again. On the other hand if, like I believe, it's mostly scams, empty promises and poor understanding of technology and/or economy, then this might be the beginning of the end. Hype can only sustain a $100 billion market cap for so long. That being said I wouldn't be the first Pythia to erroneously predict the downfall of cryptocurrencies...
- jeletonskelly 8y ago
  Trading volume has dropped significantly over the last 6 months. Large holders have been patient waiting for new money to enter the market. Eventually, when the only activity is a few automated traders and the exchange liquidity provider, large holders are faced with opportunity costs of investing in something else and the limited liquidity the market can absorb as they exit. It's a domino effect as they see each other wiping the liquidity off the books as they market sell. No one wants to be the last one holding the bag.
  - superkuh 8y ago
    This is also the result of the federal governments of the world, the US in particular, choking off all the fiat<->crypto exchanges with their expanded and draconian know your customer laws. As an anecdote, I didn't buy my monthly bitcoin purchase early this month because I've been (and still am) locked out of my ~5 year old coinbase account I use constantly because they are being required to require new forms of ID and I cannot supply it. Even if the stupid speculation markets and their off chain antics didn't exist this would be a problem.
jeletonskelly 8y ago
Cryptocurrency crash will hopefully bring expectations back in line with reality. Legit blockchain projects will only have to deal with the stigma from being associated with a giant pump and dump when they approach VCs.
- notyourday 8y ago
  You meant to say "Legit distributed public ledger projects". Care to name a few?
  - jeletonskelly 8y ago
    I think there are several projects trying to solve this, but DLT can make an impact in secondary markets for privately held equity. Ownership is difficult to verify, settlement is complicated, and there are many rules that govern the transfer of privately held shares. Nasdaq Private Market has been using (or at least evaluating) DLT/blockchain since 2014 when it was SecondMarket. Harbor, Polymath, Securitize etc are sort-of making an approach to this, but it's heavily token and ICO driven.
    - notyourday 8y ago
      You are describing a ledger. You are not describing a "distributed public ledger".
- Daishiman 8y ago
  I have yet to see a single blockchain project that's actually interesting and worthy of anyone's attention.
  - jeletonskelly 8y ago
    I think secondary markets could benefit from a distributed trusted database with smart contracts. I also think that behind the scenes on wall street there are some interesting things around securities settlement, something that is very time consuming and it's handled with some antiquated technology. If securities trades are settled faster and ownership is more easily verified it could lead to some very interesting shareholder voting behavior. The problem with all of these is that it requires a deep understanding of the process and the nuances of the industry to build a DLT solution that works.
emerongi 8y ago
Bitcoin still has a $77B market cap. This is bigger than many well-known and long-living companies. Let's be real - Bitcoin still has a long way to drop.
- ceejayoz 8y ago
  Market cap is a silly way to look at crypto. A well-known and long-living company that went from $19k/share to $4k/share would be rightly deemed to be struggling, and folks would have concerns about its long-term potential.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - prewett 8y ago
    The thing about a company is that its share price doesn't have to be related to the health of the company. Lots of companies' share prices dropped 50% in 2008, but that didn't mean that the firms were struggling, it meant that people were afraid of the firm struggling, or even merely afraid that they wouldn't get their money out so they sold at a loss to get something. Imagine if Coca Cola (KO) dropped 50% today. Is KO struggling? Not at all. You have cause and effect backwards. The firm deemed to be struggling tends to have its share price decrease. And those that can tell the difference between a company that appears to be struggling and one that actually is struggling make money. Unlike most companies, though, which provide tangible goods and services for which people pay and has factories and stores and real estate you could sell, Bitcoin is just a list of numbers floating around.
- Nursie 8y ago
  > This is bigger than many well-known and long-living companies And not in any way comparable, as it is merely the spot price multiplied by the supply, not any sort of reflection of total value or productivity.
- criddell 8y ago
  > Bitcoin still has a long way to drop. Is there a way to short Bitcoin?
tzfld 8y ago
>the trigger for the latest sell-off is unclear What I think has happened, a stop loss order of a big actor was hit by a random small move and that started a chain reaction. Totally possible.
LMYahooTFY 8y ago
And still, even on HN, the discussion of cryptocurrency is oscillating between totally different axioms? Some of us speak as prophetic market analysts and bring up "nails in coffins" and other crystal ball bull shit, and some of us wonder about the technology itself and understand that the price against the dollar only matters to gamblers.
- na85 8y ago
  Has anyone come up with a use case for blockchains yet, that isn't buying illegal drugs or money laundering? I keep seeing pie in the sky hypotheticals like "supply chain trust" from people who think farmers are etching their cucumbers with serial numbers, but I've yet to see any use case presented for a blockchain that has real utility and isn't better solved by existing processes or systems.
  - mruts 8y ago
    stablecoins seem like a good idea. But, besides, isn’t buying drugs a pretty good application of crypto? I know I have derived value from that.
    - acdha 8y ago
      Ignoring the question of legality for the moment, it sharply limits the potential size and increases the costs. Legitimate businesses are going to be less likely to use a service which is strongly associated with criminal activity, exchanging for useful currency is going to be riskier and more expensive, and transactions are going to be easier to monitor with lower transaction volumes. All of those world-changing pitches are a lot harder to sustain when the volume is that much smaller and most of the players have a strong incentive not to talk about it.
  - wgerard 8y ago
    Personally, and by no means am I a bitcoin-enthusiast, there's a lot of value to be had by something that allows relatively frictionless international money transfer. I realize that's not necessarily a feature of blockchains, though it is a feature of cryptocurrencies (for now, at least). We had a friend who lives in a commonwealth country working for us as a contractor, and figuring out how to pay them was a pretty big PITA. I was really close to just paying them in bitcoin, because it was that much of a hassle. Ultimately I was too afraid of any potential tax/legal implications to follow through on that, and we ended up just using TransferWise instead. Still, it was that much of a pain.
nerdponx 8y ago
What I wonder is why BTC is still the main "entry point" for acquiring crypto with fiat. Having so few ways to trade crypto for fiat, and so few ways to spend crypto, means that the various cryptocurrency markets are highly correlated. It's a bad situation for cryptocurrency as a whole.
throwaway487548 8y ago
The legacy of Bitcoin should be studied to understand better how memes or semantic viruses are spreading through social groups and affects our inner representations or models of the world, trained by endless screaming streams of bullshit^W information we are forced to process. There is nothing more fascinating than this - how a global Ponzi Scheme based on a few memes about poorly understood abstract concepts unfolds.
- cconroy 8y ago
  s/Bitcoin/Central Banking/g
throwaway487548 8y ago
What is interesting, the losses of those who got in after $10k could be approximated by analyzing daily trading volumes, and the sum of loses is about to exceed by far the .com loses. Such a huge loss of real, usually borrowed, money must affect the economy, at least in US and Asia.
- awakeasleep 8y ago
  Now this is the article i want to read
Danieru 8y ago
The price has been bouncing off the 6k magic "resistence" for ages now. Each bounce reaching lower and lower highs. It was only a matter of time before the that energy disapated. Technical analysis of stocks and efficient markets is a fool's tool, but BTC is fool's money so TA is an efficient tool. Yes, I did explain this prediction half a year back to my BTC holding friends. As you can imagine; they ignored the advice. It has taken 10 months for the trail off in public interest to feed into the pricing model. In those 10 months a great many tricks and scams have been played to prop up the price, we'll see more news about those tricks unwinding soon.
- dragontamer 8y ago
  > The price has been bouncing off the 6k magic "resistence" for ages now "Resistance" is from above, "support" is from below. Last week, the 6k USD / BTC price looked solid. Every time 6k was tested, the community would buy up BTC and the price would go back up. Today, we have blown through the 6k USD / BTC "Support" and selling has continued down, beyond the 5k mark. Its hard to say what the next support mark is. If you asked me yesterday, I would have thought that 5k was the next support. But now that's been pushed out now. So 4.5k is my assumed support area for now. There's no "resistance" on the upper-end of the BTC market depth charts until ~7k USD/BTC. Someone really wants to sell at 7k USD/BTC, where there is ~300,000 BTC waiting to be sold (if the price ever got back to that height). The community as a whole would have to spend over $2.1 Billion to grow from $6.9k to $7.1k (wiping out the 300k BTC available at 7k). Such a huge-sum of money is why that point is called a "resistance", because it will "resist" efforts to bring the price above 7k Just an FYI.
  - jeletonskelly 8y ago
    Don't let the order book fool you. Big players spoof the market all the time with these massive orders.
- wickoff 8y ago
  TA works well in traditional markets too. Good crypto traders who have never owned a stock in their entire life have no issues transitioning. https://twitter.com/CryptoDonAlt/status/1064585203237167106 https://twitter.com/CryptoDonAlt/status/1064585203237167106
tgb29 8y ago
Investing in crypto currencies because you believe in blockchain technology doesn’t make sense. Any good use case I’ve thought of doesn’t require public chain. So why invest in a specific crypto? How is Bitcoin fundamentally more valuable than Ethereum? How are either fundamentally more valuable than EOS? As a currency or store or value, each have essentially the same properties. Leaks in the ecosystem, like scam ICO and products like Tether only siphon money from the market. At least gold or silver doesn’t have this problem.
- 5trokerac3 8y ago
  Shhh! You'll spook the suckers... I mean new investors, with that talk.
- ahartmetz 8y ago
  Ctrl-F gold... This movement may answer the question whether Bitcoin will react to a bear market like gold or like oil. There are good arguments for both and no past behavior to analyze because Bitcoin appeared after the 2008 crash.
- acjohnson55 8y ago
  I also continue to believe that true value will be in firms and products, not tokens. Token prices reflect an assumption that people will actually need to own these tokens at some point in the future, which is extremely far fetched to me.
- 52-6F-62 8y ago
  I'm generally with you— but the value in a public chain is probably just not having to set up the larger infrastructure yourself, and rather just tie into the existing network. Couldn't you say, why invest in companies that support the internet backbone rather than Cisco? Definitely couldn't answer why one is more valuable in dollars over another. There does seem to be more practical use and development of Ethereum out there than the others (at least from where I've stood). But that more or less would support your point—I've definitely seen more groups just creating their own private fork or networks rather than directly tying into the public chain— JP Morgan, Microsoft, etc... Disclaimer: I do own a few Eth, I bought some time ago and have just been sitting on. It was never to be a serious investment, just wanted to play along. Never bought into the ICO madness. All that said, I always thought this was interesting as a use case (also further supporting your point): https://qz.com/1118743/world-food-programmes-ethereum-based-blockchain-for-syrian-refugees-in-jordan/ https://qz.com/1118743/world-food-programmes-ethereum-based-... > Building Blocks replaced the payment part with a ledger that records the transactions on a private version of ethereum that it developed.
kamaal 8y ago
Only a few months back, I happened to talk to a person associated bitcoin trading. You instantly get that feeling of talking to a person deep in a pyramid scheme. He talked endlessly about how he plans to buy a luxury villa with all fancy facilities worth crores, and an expensive car, and it would all happen, and he would defy the world and rub it in their face. All with bitcoin money. He continued to justify his actions, decisions with unimaginable zeal. The closest I've seen this kind of conviction is among high religious people. It almost felt the same way. The general feeling among this crowd is their heaven is only steps away, and will come to pass sooner. Other people will left watching, and will come to be envy of their success. And he can do all that by just investing in some coins and watch it become very big. I was tempted to debate, but given how deep he was in fantasy, I thought it best that he be left alone, at least the guy can have fun in his thoughts while he can. But the larger problem is with people, so many people want to do so much with one life. Many people go into wrong academic tracks, end up being accountants, or real estate brokers or whatever. And they see no bailing or escape from low paying jobs, and living working through a mediocre career, under achieving all the way. Its easy to lure such people into any thing that mildly looks to pay disproportionately with little effort. What follows next is religious conviction in such pursuits, even if they can proved totally irrational. People do like to believe miracles can happen in the face of every day mediocrity. And when ponzi schemes come along, they helpless fall for them.
sct202 8y ago
Is there something useful that all the custom built bitcoin mining rigs can do now that it probably is less economical to use them to mine?
- pault 8y ago
  Nope. GPUs can be repurposed but the asics that are used for Bitcoin mining are expensive paperweights without demand for BTC.
  - jonknee 8y ago
    Well they are relatively good space heaters at least...
- zanny 8y ago
  Bitcoin mining has been custom ASIC dominated for years now. Almost all miners (in terms of hash power) are custom purpose built machines. So no, they really can only do sha256 hashing on payloads of comparable size to bitcoin blocks.
  - JulianMorrison 8y ago
    Which might make them harshly powerful password crackers for anyone daft enough to use SHA256 as a password.
    - LeonM 8y ago
      Except that BTC does a double hash, so it won't work on any 'regular' single hashed password.
theandrewbailey 8y ago
Nvidia stocks are dropping like a rock, too: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=nvda https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=nvda
spork12 8y ago
Funny that the top in bitcoin was the day futures started trading on it
ladybro 8y ago
Miners in China supposedly throwing out their rigs after this latest crash made them too expensive to keep running. https://twitter.com/DoveyWan/status/1064878600594305025 https://twitter.com/DoveyWan/status/1064878600594305025
- pavel_lishin 8y ago
  It's difficult for me to accept that it's cheaper to wheelbarrow out a bunch of machinery, than it is to just cut power to a warehouse for a month.
- all2 8y ago
  Does this mean GPUs will be flooding the market? I've been looking to buy something for gaming... https://us.bidvoy.net/gtx_1070/27386 https://us.bidvoy.net/gtx_1070/27386 Guess not. I suppose if most of the miners are on BTC, they'll be using custom ASICs.
  - prolikewh0a 8y ago
    The price of other crypto's reliant on GPU's will also fall with the price of Bitcoin, likely making them unprofitable. GPU prices are fairly cheap right now to be honest. I just picked up a GTX 1060 6GB for $139.
- Symbiote 8y ago
  As replies point out, the man is dressed in summer clothes. Many replies say it clean-up from a flood earlier this year.
- tshannon 8y ago
  Is any of that hardware useful or anything other than mining? Or is all of that hardware investment a loss? If it the latter, then what an incredible waste.
sea_sftwrngnr 8y ago
These discussions are interesting as a distilled, pure exhibition of cognitive biases. Nobody has any way to accurately value BTC. Yet when it goes up everyone discussing knew it and was right all along, and when it goes down everyone discussing knew it and was right all along. Logical arguments are applied to observed history & present conditions and used to forecast the future of something fundamentally impossible to predict. You know the future price of bitcoin about as well as you can predict my next coin flip. Afterward, if you've guessed correctly, you might believe supreme intuition or reasoning led you well. And if you believe you've done something well, you're more likely to say so on some public channel such as this one.
buildbuildbuild 8y ago
My suspicion is that insider trading is rampant in the crypto world and that someone might have been tipped off as to what the outcome might be in the Tether investigation. At risk of a downvote party I will express my opinion that, since many other interesting cryptocurrencies still closely track Bitcoin’s price, this “black friday sale” is a buy opportunity for some great other concepts.
gruglife 8y ago
Wonder how this will affect coinbase. Didn't they just raise a ton of money?
softawre 8y ago
Just curious, do you guys throw a bit of your retirement portfolio into BTC just to diversify? I do, I keep maybe 3% of mine in BTC just in case.
- airstrike 8y ago
  Just curious, do you guys throw a bit of your retirement portfolio into roulettes at the casino just to diversify? I do, I gamble away maybe 3% of mine just in case.
  - softawre 8y ago
    BTC is an asset according to G20 and many others. It's obviously highly speculative which is why I picked a low percent. I was just curious if others were doing the same, and was hoping I could ask that without getting this sort of snark. Oh well.
  - dplavery92 8y ago
    I get the gag here, but it's not a very apt comparison. The expected return from a roulette spin is really well understood: a loss of about 5% of your bet, albeit with high variance. The future of these investments is less understood. Again the variance is high, but its performance over time is also really good. Perhaps you have plenty of reasons to doubt the future performance of BTC, but it's not like it's a known bad bet.
    - airstrike 8y ago
      The point is it's the same as gambling. Pure luck, no proven way to project future demand, does not generate cash flows. It's also hyped AF so you can't even tell what's real vs. speculative demand.
nanna 8y ago
Assuming mass adoption and use is not going to happen without a turn of events, what's on the crypto horizon, medium or long term, that could reverse this trend? Eg, proof of stake?
singularity2001 8y ago
"No End in Sight" stupid title for a chart which has nearly recovered (thanks to manipulators but still).
replies_to_all 8y ago
HN loves to hate bitcoin! (Idiots)
coding123 8y ago
One of the people that decide the price of Bitcoin lost upward control so they are doing the next best thing. They will then re buy at the bottom which is a number only they know, then artificially Jack it up to 5k and sell off again and probably get out permanently.
cobookman 8y ago
Here's a rumor. https://twitter.com/GeoStar79705164/status/1058510037126021120 https://twitter.com/GeoStar79705164/status/10585100371260211...
tobyhinloopen 8y ago
HODL, buy low!
angel_j 8y ago
What would a "pump and dump" for short sellers look like?
jf22 8y ago
I hope we start to realize the power consumption from crypto will contribute to global warming and take appropriate measures.
mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
No utility = no value. Tell me, how much utility is there one ethereum? Currently close to none. Why in the world would anyone pay anything over transaction value for eth? I think the answer is clearly hype and irrational behavior we saw in 2017 crypto rush. What we are seeing is natural return to real value, which for most crypto is next to nothing. Bitcoin is a bit different as you know and my bet with that one is someone or multiple someones with hefty bags are liquidating to save their asses.
apo 8y ago
Having seen four of these major wipeouts over the years, here's the pattern for this highly cyclical spectacle: 1. Nobody cares about Bitcoin. If you tell anyone you bought it, they either shrug or laugh. 2. Bitcoin refuses to die. The long-predicted technology show-stoppers never happen and the network keeps chugging. A small but dedicated group of users continues using it on a regular basis. 3. Speculators who had written Bitcoin off as a fad take a second look. 4. Defying any explanation, the USD/BTC exchange rate begins a modest rally. 5. The financial press starts running stories about that crazy Bitcoin idea, and how it's not dead and the modest gains made by those crazy enough to buy in. 6. Seeing this coverage, people without much technical or financial savvy begin getting interested in Bitcoin. 7. Stage 6 continues relentlessly, producing jaw-dropping gains. 8. The financial press gives Bitcoin a bear-hug, dedicating special attention to it with special segments and even dedicated shows. 9. A full-blown speculative mania is now in progress. Gains of 3-8% per day, for days on end are not uncommon. Everyone, it seems, is an expert on Bitcoin. 10. An event takes place. Most likely, the collapse of a major Bitcoin exchange, although it could be something else. Regardless, a sharp decline takes place. 11. A prolonged period of USD/BTC declines unfolds. Initially, the press is all over the story, telling the tales of woe from those who bought in at the peak of the mania and lost it all. 12. Occasionally, BTC/USD shows signs of life, either rallying sharply or falling precipitously. These short-term changes are usually reversed quickly. 13. After months or years of flat to downward USD/BTC motion, the only people left holding bitcoin are those who understood it and wouldn't sell at any price. 14. GOTO 1
- projektfu 8y ago
  "13. After months or years of flat to downward USD/BTC motion, the only people left holding bitcoin are those who understood it and wouldn't sell at any price." Lol
  - oliv__ 8y ago
    Quite the paradoxical statement.
  - alexvoda 8y ago
    Aparently Bitcoin is emo now.
wlesieutre 8y ago
Ethereum’s dropping too, maybe I can afford a new GPU next year!
eruci 8y ago
Crypto coins are all worthless. Just my 0.0000^-11 Bitcents
mancerayder 8y ago
Well, what's interesting or perhaps not-so-interesting to those that understand the underlying mechanics is: there's 'crypto sell-off' but only Bitcoin is mentioned in the headlines. In other words, the implication is BTC crashing leads or is concomitant with ETH and LTC and others crashing, and no one is surprised or curious by this. I really makes one laugh at all the "diversify your portfolio" advice of yesteryear's crypto shills.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
XalvinX 8y ago
i think people are just losing interest since nothing has happened in the crypto space in ages....yawwnnnn
lee101 8y ago
keep a close eye around any volatile times (potentially related to scares of manipulation) :) for checking up on trends and ai forecasts of the next few hours checkout https://bitbank.nz https://bitbank.nz

327 points by ilamont 8y ago

picture of a bitcoin man on a free falling rollercoaster screaming /weeeeeeeee/ What's the purpose of that article? What can be discussed about Bitcoin and the other crypto currencies that hasn't been discussed here several times already? There is no news besides the price collapsing but that has happened before as well. But this time it's different They are saying that during a bull run and during a bear market. I don't believe that, there's no limit to human greed.

wycs 8y ago
Few people have not heard of crypto. If it is a ponzi there are no suckers left.
JumpCrisscross 8y ago
> What's the purpose of that article? I stopped watching cryptocurrency prices about a year ago. The novelty wore off. These articles say “hey, that thing you forgot about is doing something interesting—give it a minute.”

seibelj 8y ago

This is good for Bitcoin.

chx 8y ago
HODL!
stjohnswarts 8y ago
I agree this is the market correction I've been waiting on.

overcast 8y ago

That's what happens when you screw over the general public in a giant pump and dump. There is just no more money left to steal. First time was for the early adopters at $1000, second time was for the late majority at $19,000. You're not going to see that happen again.

tom_ 8y ago
What about $35 and $250?
- overcast 8y ago
  Innovators. No one really heard of Bitcoin prior to the $1000 pump.
  - doubt_me 8y ago
    Reddit heard plenty before 1000$ I was there the week it was released. Lost 100 bitcoins to a hard drive crash and never looked back. They use to literally hand them out like candy. Mt gox happened and I never took it seriously ever again.
    - overcast 8y ago
      If I asked my mother what Reddit is right now, she'd have no idea what I was saying.
      - mcbits 8y ago
        If your mother has never heard of Instagram, Netflix, eBay, or Yahoo, that doesn't mean nobody has heard of them. They're still almost as popular as Reddit.
        Max_Mustermann 8y ago
        Instagram, Netflix and Yahoo are world brands. Reddit is mostly anglophone.

aphextron 8y ago

Everything sells off this time of year. Nasdaq is down 7% on the month. It’s end of year profit-taking for tax purposes. As BTC has become completely mainstream now, this makes sense.

czechdeveloper 8y ago
Except the amount it's falling is not normal.
- castis 8y ago
  What would be normal behavior?
  - Uberphallus 8y ago
    Not freefall
    - castis 8y ago
      And how do we know this isn't what this system was bound to do eventually? It's not really been around very long.
      - kiriakasis 8y ago
        How is this a relevant question?
        castis 8y ago
        Because I'm curious what the other person thinks? Did I miss the syllabus?
metalliqaz 8y ago
No, it is almost certainly related to the network split, as mentioned in the article. There are issues with bitcoin that limit its long term potential. For example, the effective limitations on the number of transactions per second, and the huge energy cost for providing proof of work.

tgtweak 8y ago

Still up 500% since January 2017.

pc86 8y ago
Still down 78% since December 2017. What's your point?
- apexalpha 8y ago
  Just because a bubble pops doesn't mean it's useless or dead. Many bubbles pop in the real world, they always recover.
  - Uberphallus 8y ago
    Ever heard of BitConnect?
    - gsich 8y ago
      Was scam from the beginning.
  - mbreese 8y ago
    They don’t always recover. It’s hard to recover when you are a commodity that doesn’t have any inherent utility other than being a method for completing transactions. Also - Tulips.
    - sodafountan 8y ago
      It's a lot easier to recover when a recovery mechanism is built in - aka the halving. We're a solid year and a half away from that event happening, it'll go lower than this in that time but once the new supply restricts it'll make its slow ascent back up, people will see the opportunity and the demand will skyrocket again. I say this a lot, it's helpful to think of bitcoin as an algorithm, I just see this pattern playing out the same way over and over and over again every four years.

tonyedgecombe 8y ago

Is this below the price where it is economic to mine? Presumably at some point the miners would have to pull the plug to avoid loosing money.

jeletonskelly 8y ago
Difficulty adjusts dynamically to ensure there is always an incentive to mine.
- FabHK 8y ago
  Difficulty adjusts when total hash power changes, so for difficulty to adjust downward some miners will have to take equipment offline, ie "pull the plug".
EADGBE 8y ago
The only way this unplugs is if it was loose to begin with.

mavdi 8y ago

Ouch for my crypto investment, makes no difference to my crypto product. And that's the point, price of bitcoin is irrelevant to most crypto products. We're in the business of Fiat > Crypto > Fiat instant money transfers which is immune to what the current market is. Crypto as a technology will keep moving forward.

kasey_junk 8y ago
How is it possible that the USD/Bitcoin pair price doesn’t impact currency transfer businesses?
JumpCrisscross 8y ago
> We're in the business of Fiat > Crypto > Fiat instant money transfers Moving in and out of crypto is not instantaneous. You might move cash before confirmations are in, in which case you’re taking on credit risk, but you’ll still be losing money on your collateral’s value falling.
notyourday 8y ago
> We're in the business of Fiat > Crypto > Fiat instant money transfers which is immune to what the current market is. You should chat with Pablo, Luiz and Patel. They own a bodega, a bill pay stall and an electronics stall in a rapidly gentrifying part of Brooklyn. All three of them have been providing this service for years, without the need for expensive computer equipment or bitcoin. Some of their customers don't speak English, have a fourth grade level of education and just fill out slips of paper to send/receive money worldwide within a few minutes.

arijun 8y ago

Good. Bitcoin is too wasteful when it’s at a high valuation. The amount of resources in both electricity and gpu hardware that gets locked into mining is too high. It can still do it’s job as a currency with a lower valuation.

nerdponx 8y ago
It's interesting that transactions have been steadily increasing since the crash at the end of 2017, even as the price keeps falling: https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactions.html https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactions.ht... That to me is definitely a good sign. Less hoarding, more spending. I do wonder what happens if the network starts to get transaction-bottlenecked again. It's not like all the problems with block size suddenly went away.
dragontamer 8y ago
The problem is that all that computing power still exists. If the hashrate drops, then a 51% attack becomes possible. Remember that those mining farms still exist, even if they've temporarily turned off their mining equipment. Someone can turn all that equipment on suddenly to attack the network and start double-spending their coins. In effect: the hashrate MUST remain high if the BTC network is to remain secure. That's just how Bitcoin was designed. A big drop like this where "good" miners start to turn off and sell off their equipment puts BTC in a highly vulnerable spot. The electricity usage will remain high, OR a 51% attack will happen. The electricity usage can never drop without severe risk to the entire system.
- gregorymichael 8y ago
  That doesn't sound like a good system.
- _jal 8y ago
  > the hashrate MUST remain high if the BTC network is to remain secure Reminds me of something else that places a continually increasing demand on resources to remain stable... Building the Red Queen problem into currency is insane.

rusk 8y ago

Still nowhere near low enough for me to feel okay about ditching back in 2016 ...

emerongi 8y ago
I remember looking at the price of Bitcoin when it was $23, $250 and $400. I didn't have any money, so I couldn't buy, but still fun to think about 10x-ing my current bank account. To be completely honest, even if I did have money, I wouldn't have bought. The price used to go up and down by 10% like daily. At that point it feels like gambling.
- kevingrahl 8y ago
  Sometimes I nearly shed a tear when I open my wallet that shows me how many coins it held over its lifetime. It even converts it into my local currency as if to mock me. I remember times where those Bitcoin faucets (is that still a thing?) gave you 50BTC every X hours just for entering your wallet address. Of course I spend nearly all of them on stupid stuff later on but before they gained considerable value. I still have an old external HDD with somewhere between 20-50BTC on it that I broke and haven’t had the money to fix it and retrieve them.
  - pault 8y ago
    You can't afford to fix a hard drive with $250,000 on it? Can't you borrow some money against that?
    - kevingrahl 8y ago
      It’s questionable if the data can even be restored. Plus there’s more sensitive data than just Bitcoin private keys on that disk I’m not really that comfortable sending that in to some lab for data recovery. When the disk broke I inquired what it would probably cost to retrieve the data and I was quoted with something around 150-300€ which to me is too much just for the small chance to actually get those coins. I don’t like to gamble.

simias 8y ago

Since the article states "the trigger for the latest sell-off is unclear" I'm really curious if somebody here could venture a guess about the reasons for the sudden drop. The Bitcoin Cash fork seems suspiciously correlated but is it big enough news to cause such a turmoil? Being a cryptocurrency-skeptic I won't pretend that I don't experience a little bit of schadenfreude when I see CC crash, however if I'm trying to be a bit more constructive I suppose that means that we're nearing the "make or break" point: if the huge investment in cryptocurrency-related technologies over the past four years or so manages to produce something actually useful over the next year I have no doubt that this is only a temporary set-back and we'll see BTC (or some other coin) breach $20k again. On the other hand if, like I believe, it's mostly scams, empty promises and poor understanding of technology and/or economy, then this might be the beginning of the end. Hype can only sustain a $100 billion market cap for so long. That being said I wouldn't be the first Pythia to erroneously predict the downfall of cryptocurrencies...

jeletonskelly 8y ago
Trading volume has dropped significantly over the last 6 months. Large holders have been patient waiting for new money to enter the market. Eventually, when the only activity is a few automated traders and the exchange liquidity provider, large holders are faced with opportunity costs of investing in something else and the limited liquidity the market can absorb as they exit. It's a domino effect as they see each other wiping the liquidity off the books as they market sell. No one wants to be the last one holding the bag.
- superkuh 8y ago
  This is also the result of the federal governments of the world, the US in particular, choking off all the fiat<->crypto exchanges with their expanded and draconian know your customer laws. As an anecdote, I didn't buy my monthly bitcoin purchase early this month because I've been (and still am) locked out of my ~5 year old coinbase account I use constantly because they are being required to require new forms of ID and I cannot supply it. Even if the stupid speculation markets and their off chain antics didn't exist this would be a problem.

jeletonskelly 8y ago

Cryptocurrency crash will hopefully bring expectations back in line with reality. Legit blockchain projects will only have to deal with the stigma from being associated with a giant pump and dump when they approach VCs.

notyourday 8y ago
You meant to say "Legit distributed public ledger projects". Care to name a few?
- jeletonskelly 8y ago
  I think there are several projects trying to solve this, but DLT can make an impact in secondary markets for privately held equity. Ownership is difficult to verify, settlement is complicated, and there are many rules that govern the transfer of privately held shares. Nasdaq Private Market has been using (or at least evaluating) DLT/blockchain since 2014 when it was SecondMarket. Harbor, Polymath, Securitize etc are sort-of making an approach to this, but it's heavily token and ICO driven.
  - notyourday 8y ago
    You are describing a ledger. You are not describing a "distributed public ledger".
Daishiman 8y ago
I have yet to see a single blockchain project that's actually interesting and worthy of anyone's attention.
- jeletonskelly 8y ago
  I think secondary markets could benefit from a distributed trusted database with smart contracts. I also think that behind the scenes on wall street there are some interesting things around securities settlement, something that is very time consuming and it's handled with some antiquated technology. If securities trades are settled faster and ownership is more easily verified it could lead to some very interesting shareholder voting behavior. The problem with all of these is that it requires a deep understanding of the process and the nuances of the industry to build a DLT solution that works.

emerongi 8y ago

Bitcoin still has a $77B market cap. This is bigger than many well-known and long-living companies. Let's be real - Bitcoin still has a long way to drop.

ceejayoz 8y ago
Market cap is a silly way to look at crypto. A well-known and long-living company that went from $19k/share to $4k/share would be rightly deemed to be struggling, and folks would have concerns about its long-term potential.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- prewett 8y ago
  The thing about a company is that its share price doesn't have to be related to the health of the company. Lots of companies' share prices dropped 50% in 2008, but that didn't mean that the firms were struggling, it meant that people were afraid of the firm struggling, or even merely afraid that they wouldn't get their money out so they sold at a loss to get something. Imagine if Coca Cola (KO) dropped 50% today. Is KO struggling? Not at all. You have cause and effect backwards. The firm deemed to be struggling tends to have its share price decrease. And those that can tell the difference between a company that appears to be struggling and one that actually is struggling make money. Unlike most companies, though, which provide tangible goods and services for which people pay and has factories and stores and real estate you could sell, Bitcoin is just a list of numbers floating around.
Nursie 8y ago
> This is bigger than many well-known and long-living companies And not in any way comparable, as it is merely the spot price multiplied by the supply, not any sort of reflection of total value or productivity.
criddell 8y ago
> Bitcoin still has a long way to drop. Is there a way to short Bitcoin?

tzfld 8y ago

>the trigger for the latest sell-off is unclear What I think has happened, a stop loss order of a big actor was hit by a random small move and that started a chain reaction. Totally possible.

LMYahooTFY 8y ago

And still, even on HN, the discussion of cryptocurrency is oscillating between totally different axioms? Some of us speak as prophetic market analysts and bring up "nails in coffins" and other crystal ball bull shit, and some of us wonder about the technology itself and understand that the price against the dollar only matters to gamblers.

na85 8y ago
Has anyone come up with a use case for blockchains yet, that isn't buying illegal drugs or money laundering? I keep seeing pie in the sky hypotheticals like "supply chain trust" from people who think farmers are etching their cucumbers with serial numbers, but I've yet to see any use case presented for a blockchain that has real utility and isn't better solved by existing processes or systems.
- mruts 8y ago
  stablecoins seem like a good idea. But, besides, isn’t buying drugs a pretty good application of crypto? I know I have derived value from that.
  - acdha 8y ago
    Ignoring the question of legality for the moment, it sharply limits the potential size and increases the costs. Legitimate businesses are going to be less likely to use a service which is strongly associated with criminal activity, exchanging for useful currency is going to be riskier and more expensive, and transactions are going to be easier to monitor with lower transaction volumes. All of those world-changing pitches are a lot harder to sustain when the volume is that much smaller and most of the players have a strong incentive not to talk about it.
- wgerard 8y ago
  Personally, and by no means am I a bitcoin-enthusiast, there's a lot of value to be had by something that allows relatively frictionless international money transfer. I realize that's not necessarily a feature of blockchains, though it is a feature of cryptocurrencies (for now, at least). We had a friend who lives in a commonwealth country working for us as a contractor, and figuring out how to pay them was a pretty big PITA. I was really close to just paying them in bitcoin, because it was that much of a hassle. Ultimately I was too afraid of any potential tax/legal implications to follow through on that, and we ended up just using TransferWise instead. Still, it was that much of a pain.

nerdponx 8y ago

What I wonder is why BTC is still the main "entry point" for acquiring crypto with fiat. Having so few ways to trade crypto for fiat, and so few ways to spend crypto, means that the various cryptocurrency markets are highly correlated. It's a bad situation for cryptocurrency as a whole.

throwaway487548 8y ago

The legacy of Bitcoin should be studied to understand better how memes or semantic viruses are spreading through social groups and affects our inner representations or models of the world, trained by endless screaming streams of bullshit^W information we are forced to process. There is nothing more fascinating than this - how a global Ponzi Scheme based on a few memes about poorly understood abstract concepts unfolds.

cconroy 8y ago
s/Bitcoin/Central Banking/g

throwaway487548 8y ago

What is interesting, the losses of those who got in after $10k could be approximated by analyzing daily trading volumes, and the sum of loses is about to exceed by far the .com loses. Such a huge loss of real, usually borrowed, money must affect the economy, at least in US and Asia.

awakeasleep 8y ago
Now this is the article i want to read

Danieru 8y ago

The price has been bouncing off the 6k magic "resistence" for ages now. Each bounce reaching lower and lower highs. It was only a matter of time before the that energy disapated. Technical analysis of stocks and efficient markets is a fool's tool, but BTC is fool's money so TA is an efficient tool. Yes, I did explain this prediction half a year back to my BTC holding friends. As you can imagine; they ignored the advice. It has taken 10 months for the trail off in public interest to feed into the pricing model. In those 10 months a great many tricks and scams have been played to prop up the price, we'll see more news about those tricks unwinding soon.

dragontamer 8y ago
> The price has been bouncing off the 6k magic "resistence" for ages now "Resistance" is from above, "support" is from below. Last week, the 6k USD / BTC price looked solid. Every time 6k was tested, the community would buy up BTC and the price would go back up. Today, we have blown through the 6k USD / BTC "Support" and selling has continued down, beyond the 5k mark. Its hard to say what the next support mark is. If you asked me yesterday, I would have thought that 5k was the next support. But now that's been pushed out now. So 4.5k is my assumed support area for now. There's no "resistance" on the upper-end of the BTC market depth charts until ~7k USD/BTC. Someone really wants to sell at 7k USD/BTC, where there is ~300,000 BTC waiting to be sold (if the price ever got back to that height). The community as a whole would have to spend over $2.1 Billion to grow from $6.9k to $7.1k (wiping out the 300k BTC available at 7k). Such a huge-sum of money is why that point is called a "resistance", because it will "resist" efforts to bring the price above 7k Just an FYI.
- jeletonskelly 8y ago
  Don't let the order book fool you. Big players spoof the market all the time with these massive orders.
wickoff 8y ago
TA works well in traditional markets too. Good crypto traders who have never owned a stock in their entire life have no issues transitioning. https://twitter.com/CryptoDonAlt/status/1064585203237167106 https://twitter.com/CryptoDonAlt/status/1064585203237167106

tgb29 8y ago

Investing in crypto currencies because you believe in blockchain technology doesn’t make sense. Any good use case I’ve thought of doesn’t require public chain. So why invest in a specific crypto? How is Bitcoin fundamentally more valuable than Ethereum? How are either fundamentally more valuable than EOS? As a currency or store or value, each have essentially the same properties. Leaks in the ecosystem, like scam ICO and products like Tether only siphon money from the market. At least gold or silver doesn’t have this problem.

5trokerac3 8y ago
Shhh! You'll spook the suckers... I mean new investors, with that talk.
ahartmetz 8y ago
Ctrl-F gold... This movement may answer the question whether Bitcoin will react to a bear market like gold or like oil. There are good arguments for both and no past behavior to analyze because Bitcoin appeared after the 2008 crash.
acjohnson55 8y ago
I also continue to believe that true value will be in firms and products, not tokens. Token prices reflect an assumption that people will actually need to own these tokens at some point in the future, which is extremely far fetched to me.
52-6F-62 8y ago
I'm generally with you— but the value in a public chain is probably just not having to set up the larger infrastructure yourself, and rather just tie into the existing network. Couldn't you say, why invest in companies that support the internet backbone rather than Cisco? Definitely couldn't answer why one is more valuable in dollars over another. There does seem to be more practical use and development of Ethereum out there than the others (at least from where I've stood). But that more or less would support your point—I've definitely seen more groups just creating their own private fork or networks rather than directly tying into the public chain— JP Morgan, Microsoft, etc... Disclaimer: I do own a few Eth, I bought some time ago and have just been sitting on. It was never to be a serious investment, just wanted to play along. Never bought into the ICO madness. All that said, I always thought this was interesting as a use case (also further supporting your point): https://qz.com/1118743/world-food-programmes-ethereum-based-blockchain-for-syrian-refugees-in-jordan/ https://qz.com/1118743/world-food-programmes-ethereum-based-... > Building Blocks replaced the payment part with a ledger that records the transactions on a private version of ethereum that it developed.

kamaal 8y ago

Only a few months back, I happened to talk to a person associated bitcoin trading. You instantly get that feeling of talking to a person deep in a pyramid scheme. He talked endlessly about how he plans to buy a luxury villa with all fancy facilities worth crores, and an expensive car, and it would all happen, and he would defy the world and rub it in their face. All with bitcoin money. He continued to justify his actions, decisions with unimaginable zeal. The closest I've seen this kind of conviction is among high religious people. It almost felt the same way. The general feeling among this crowd is their heaven is only steps away, and will come to pass sooner. Other people will left watching, and will come to be envy of their success. And he can do all that by just investing in some coins and watch it become very big. I was tempted to debate, but given how deep he was in fantasy, I thought it best that he be left alone, at least the guy can have fun in his thoughts while he can. But the larger problem is with people, so many people want to do so much with one life. Many people go into wrong academic tracks, end up being accountants, or real estate brokers or whatever. And they see no bailing or escape from low paying jobs, and living working through a mediocre career, under achieving all the way. Its easy to lure such people into any thing that mildly looks to pay disproportionately with little effort. What follows next is religious conviction in such pursuits, even if they can proved totally irrational. People do like to believe miracles can happen in the face of every day mediocrity. And when ponzi schemes come along, they helpless fall for them.

sct202 8y ago

Is there something useful that all the custom built bitcoin mining rigs can do now that it probably is less economical to use them to mine?

pault 8y ago
Nope. GPUs can be repurposed but the asics that are used for Bitcoin mining are expensive paperweights without demand for BTC.
- jonknee 8y ago
  Well they are relatively good space heaters at least...
zanny 8y ago
Bitcoin mining has been custom ASIC dominated for years now. Almost all miners (in terms of hash power) are custom purpose built machines. So no, they really can only do sha256 hashing on payloads of comparable size to bitcoin blocks.
- JulianMorrison 8y ago
  Which might make them harshly powerful password crackers for anyone daft enough to use SHA256 as a password.
  - LeonM 8y ago
    Except that BTC does a double hash, so it won't work on any 'regular' single hashed password.

theandrewbailey 8y ago

Nvidia stocks are dropping like a rock, too: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=nvda https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=nvda

spork12 8y ago

Funny that the top in bitcoin was the day futures started trading on it

ladybro 8y ago

Miners in China supposedly throwing out their rigs after this latest crash made them too expensive to keep running. https://twitter.com/DoveyWan/status/1064878600594305025 https://twitter.com/DoveyWan/status/1064878600594305025

pavel_lishin 8y ago
It's difficult for me to accept that it's cheaper to wheelbarrow out a bunch of machinery, than it is to just cut power to a warehouse for a month.
all2 8y ago
Does this mean GPUs will be flooding the market? I've been looking to buy something for gaming... https://us.bidvoy.net/gtx_1070/27386 https://us.bidvoy.net/gtx_1070/27386 Guess not. I suppose if most of the miners are on BTC, they'll be using custom ASICs.
- prolikewh0a 8y ago
  The price of other crypto's reliant on GPU's will also fall with the price of Bitcoin, likely making them unprofitable. GPU prices are fairly cheap right now to be honest. I just picked up a GTX 1060 6GB for $139.
Symbiote 8y ago
As replies point out, the man is dressed in summer clothes. Many replies say it clean-up from a flood earlier this year.
tshannon 8y ago
Is any of that hardware useful or anything other than mining? Or is all of that hardware investment a loss? If it the latter, then what an incredible waste.

sea_sftwrngnr 8y ago

These discussions are interesting as a distilled, pure exhibition of cognitive biases. Nobody has any way to accurately value BTC. Yet when it goes up everyone discussing knew it and was right all along, and when it goes down everyone discussing knew it and was right all along. Logical arguments are applied to observed history & present conditions and used to forecast the future of something fundamentally impossible to predict. You know the future price of bitcoin about as well as you can predict my next coin flip. Afterward, if you've guessed correctly, you might believe supreme intuition or reasoning led you well. And if you believe you've done something well, you're more likely to say so on some public channel such as this one.

buildbuildbuild 8y ago

My suspicion is that insider trading is rampant in the crypto world and that someone might have been tipped off as to what the outcome might be in the Tether investigation. At risk of a downvote party I will express my opinion that, since many other interesting cryptocurrencies still closely track Bitcoin’s price, this “black friday sale” is a buy opportunity for some great other concepts.

gruglife 8y ago

Wonder how this will affect coinbase. Didn't they just raise a ton of money?

softawre 8y ago

Just curious, do you guys throw a bit of your retirement portfolio into BTC just to diversify? I do, I keep maybe 3% of mine in BTC just in case.

airstrike 8y ago
Just curious, do you guys throw a bit of your retirement portfolio into roulettes at the casino just to diversify? I do, I gamble away maybe 3% of mine just in case.
- softawre 8y ago
  BTC is an asset according to G20 and many others. It's obviously highly speculative which is why I picked a low percent. I was just curious if others were doing the same, and was hoping I could ask that without getting this sort of snark. Oh well.
- dplavery92 8y ago
  I get the gag here, but it's not a very apt comparison. The expected return from a roulette spin is really well understood: a loss of about 5% of your bet, albeit with high variance. The future of these investments is less understood. Again the variance is high, but its performance over time is also really good. Perhaps you have plenty of reasons to doubt the future performance of BTC, but it's not like it's a known bad bet.
  - airstrike 8y ago
    The point is it's the same as gambling. Pure luck, no proven way to project future demand, does not generate cash flows. It's also hyped AF so you can't even tell what's real vs. speculative demand.

nanna 8y ago

Assuming mass adoption and use is not going to happen without a turn of events, what's on the crypto horizon, medium or long term, that could reverse this trend? Eg, proof of stake?

singularity2001 8y ago

"No End in Sight" stupid title for a chart which has nearly recovered (thanks to manipulators but still).

replies_to_all 8y ago

HN loves to hate bitcoin! (Idiots)

coding123 8y ago

One of the people that decide the price of Bitcoin lost upward control so they are doing the next best thing. They will then re buy at the bottom which is a number only they know, then artificially Jack it up to 5k and sell off again and probably get out permanently.

cobookman 8y ago

Here's a rumor. https://twitter.com/GeoStar79705164/status/1058510037126021120 https://twitter.com/GeoStar79705164/status/10585100371260211...

tobyhinloopen 8y ago

HODL, buy low!

angel_j 8y ago

What would a "pump and dump" for short sellers look like?

jf22 8y ago

I hope we start to realize the power consumption from crypto will contribute to global warming and take appropriate measures.

mrhappyunhappy 8y ago

No utility = no value. Tell me, how much utility is there one ethereum? Currently close to none. Why in the world would anyone pay anything over transaction value for eth? I think the answer is clearly hype and irrational behavior we saw in 2017 crypto rush. What we are seeing is natural return to real value, which for most crypto is next to nothing. Bitcoin is a bit different as you know and my bet with that one is someone or multiple someones with hefty bags are liquidating to save their asses.

apo 8y ago

Having seen four of these major wipeouts over the years, here's the pattern for this highly cyclical spectacle: 1. Nobody cares about Bitcoin. If you tell anyone you bought it, they either shrug or laugh. 2. Bitcoin refuses to die. The long-predicted technology show-stoppers never happen and the network keeps chugging. A small but dedicated group of users continues using it on a regular basis. 3. Speculators who had written Bitcoin off as a fad take a second look. 4. Defying any explanation, the USD/BTC exchange rate begins a modest rally. 5. The financial press starts running stories about that crazy Bitcoin idea, and how it's not dead and the modest gains made by those crazy enough to buy in. 6. Seeing this coverage, people without much technical or financial savvy begin getting interested in Bitcoin. 7. Stage 6 continues relentlessly, producing jaw-dropping gains. 8. The financial press gives Bitcoin a bear-hug, dedicating special attention to it with special segments and even dedicated shows. 9. A full-blown speculative mania is now in progress. Gains of 3-8% per day, for days on end are not uncommon. Everyone, it seems, is an expert on Bitcoin. 10. An event takes place. Most likely, the collapse of a major Bitcoin exchange, although it could be something else. Regardless, a sharp decline takes place. 11. A prolonged period of USD/BTC declines unfolds. Initially, the press is all over the story, telling the tales of woe from those who bought in at the peak of the mania and lost it all. 12. Occasionally, BTC/USD shows signs of life, either rallying sharply or falling precipitously. These short-term changes are usually reversed quickly. 13. After months or years of flat to downward USD/BTC motion, the only people left holding bitcoin are those who understood it and wouldn't sell at any price. 14. GOTO 1

projektfu 8y ago
"13. After months or years of flat to downward USD/BTC motion, the only people left holding bitcoin are those who understood it and wouldn't sell at any price." Lol
- oliv__ 8y ago
  Quite the paradoxical statement.
- alexvoda 8y ago
  Aparently Bitcoin is emo now.

wlesieutre 8y ago

Ethereum’s dropping too, maybe I can afford a new GPU next year!

eruci 8y ago

Crypto coins are all worthless. Just my 0.0000^-11 Bitcents

mancerayder 8y ago

Well, what's interesting or perhaps not-so-interesting to those that understand the underlying mechanics is: there's 'crypto sell-off' but only Bitcoin is mentioned in the headlines. In other words, the implication is BTC crashing leads or is concomitant with ETH and LTC and others crashing, and no one is surprised or curious by this. I really makes one laugh at all the "diversify your portfolio" advice of yesteryear's crypto shills.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

XalvinX 8y ago

i think people are just losing interest since nothing has happened in the crypto space in ages....yawwnnnn

lee101 8y ago

keep a close eye around any volatile times (potentially related to scares of manipulation) :) for checking up on trends and ai forecasts of the next few hours checkout https://bitbank.nz https://bitbank.nz