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Bitcoin has surpassed $15k for the first time since January 2018
- jgalt212 6y agoBitcoin and Fed Balance Sheet are pretty well correlated.
- iso8859-1 6y agoWhat's the Pearson correlation coefficient?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- conanbatt 6y agoI think that's what bitcoin maximalists want to believe, but surely not true.
- johndevor 6y agoBitcoin maximalists have been right about quite a bit the past few years...
- dylkil 6y agoexcept the most important thing, how to scale bitcoin.
- sunshinerag 6y agohttps://lightning.engineering https://lightning.engineering
- dylkil 6y agovaporware
- sunshinerag 6y ago? Did you try downloading and using the wallets. It exists. You are misinformed.
- throwaway-sf 6y agoThe total market cap of all crypto assets is less than the market cap of Tesla right now. If they are remotely right that bitcoin is a liquid inflation protected asset then the demand for such an asset should increase in a world of more and more QE from central banks.
- conanbatt 6y agoThe value of money is not linear compared to its quantity. I remember the calls for high inflation in 2009 with the banks bailout, but it didn't happen.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- akvadrako 6y agoDon't pretend people know what bitcoin maximalist means.
- throwaway-sf 6y agoIt's the anticipation of more monetary action...the Fed Balance Sheet peaked in June but yes has been rising slowly lately. Assets have been rallying across the board after Biden looked like he was going to win. The theory is that because it appears the Republicans will still hold on to the Senate, the government will effectively be gridlocked and the Fed will have no choice but to increase asset buying in absence of big fiscal stimulus. You can see that in rates crashing Tuesday/Wednesday after rising in anticipation of a "Blue Wave" that never happened and risk assets increasing across the board.
- microtherion 6y agoIf by "pretty well" you mean "not at all"... https://ibb.co/z7vgwSd https://ibb.co/z7vgwSd https://ibb.co/Zhqzdxk https://ibb.co/Zhqzdxk
- rmrfstar 6y agoTo my eye, it looks like there is a plausible argument that BTC price innovations have a positive loading on Fed balance sheet growth. Can you link raw data? At this point, the marginal buyer is a leveraged investment firm. So, the hypothesis is not a crazy one.
- microtherion 6y agoI'm afraid I don't have the raw data.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- rmrfstar 6y agoBoth are FRED series (CBBTCUSD and WALCL). Rolling one year correlations of one week deltas: 0.3 +-+----+------+------+------+------+-----+------+------+------+----+-+ + + + + + A + + + + + | A AA | 0.2 +-+ AA AAAAAAA+ | AAA AA AAA AA | 0.1 +-+ AAAAA AA AA A A +-+ | AAAAA AAA A AA | | AA A | 0 +-+ A AA AA AAA +-+ | A AA A | | A AA AAA A | -0.1 +A+ AAA AA A A +-+ |AAA A AAAAA AAAA | |A A A | -0.2 A-+ AAAAA A AAA AA +-+ A AA AA AAAAA | -0.3 +-+ AA +-+ | A | + + + + + + + + + + + -0.4 +-+----+------+------+------+------+-----+------+------+------+----+-+ 2017/1/1 2018/11/25 2020/10/11
- paulpauper 6y agoso two things that have gone up are corrected. fantastic insight.
- seibelj 6y agoIt's interesting to see what HN said about things in the past. Here is a post from December 2018 during an extended bear market https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18640755 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18640755
- paulpauper 6y agoIt will probably fall. Unlick stocks, Bitcoin is purely a function of supply an demand, with no intrinsic value. It is not like Amazon stock gains, which hold. Commodities always have a tendency of giving up gains and lagging stocks, because no shareholder equity can be generated and the supply is always increasing.
- kordlessagain 6y agoSomeone has been licking stocks again. If I had a staoshi for each person that said it would go down! It will probably go down. It will probably go back up. It will always go back up, as long as there is a general belief in the population that the tech is worth the cost of running it. Bitcoin is valuable because it represents an immutable data store which is difficult to change - much like "stocks". The value an immutable-like data stores presents to some business models is more valuable than the idea of publicly traded stock to others. For example, I could hook up a Bitcoin transaction to this POST, and do it without any authentication or credit card number, yet it would still be paid and secure. That is available to everyone today in the form of Lightning. Once more business models, such as those backed by ML adopt these types of micropayments, there will be no stopping Bitcoin, whether you lick stocks or not.
- avalys 6y agoWhat’s a business model backed by ML?
- kordlessagain 6y agoImage segmentation via machine learning. Zero reason to carry an "account" to do "queries" to the models, every reason to pay for it.
- paulpauper 6y agobut how does this translate into bitcoin being worth hundreds of billions of dollars? PHP and Javascript are free and used way more than bitcoin, but is it worth hundreds of billions?
- wcarss 6y agoWild market manipulation / tinfoil hat thoughts: I wonder if that billion dollar wallet movement in the last few days could have any relation to this? A lot of retrospective analysis of the 2018 run found price painting and similar shady tactics by just a few actors drove the prices up substantially, used as an undergirding to the news hype cycle. If you had a billion dollars in today's bitcoin value to move, how much could you increase your take for say, $50 million 'invested' in paying price-painting experts to generate bitcoin hype news?
- paulpauper 6y agothe $1 billion moving should j have been bad for bitcoin because the assumption was those coins were either lost for good or forgotten. now the supply has increased by $1 billion.
- vmception 6y ago> If you had a billion dollars in today's bitcoin value to move, how much could you increase your take for say, $50 million 'invested' in paying price-painting experts to generate bitcoin hype news? The shady tactic being the Department of Justice doing it for free? DOJ has flagged the billion dollar wallet for seizure, effectively tainting a large supply of bitcoin until it is magically washed by the US Marshalls when they collect it and auction it off again.
- dgrin91 6y agoDevils advocate against the tinfoil hat: If you weren't trying to do market manipulation, when would you make the move? It seems that waiting for the price to go up would be the time. As they say, playing the stock market is easy - just buy low and sell high. Edit: Now we know its actually US gov that moved it, so not market manipulation: https://www.vice.com/en/article/akdgz8/us-feds-seize-1-billion-in-bitcoin-from-wallet-linked-to-silk-road https://www.vice.com/en/article/akdgz8/us-feds-seize-1-billi...
- jron 6y agoIt is somewhat disturbing to watch the confusion around bitcoin's price swings when the formula is baked into the code. We're basically talking about two constants here; human nature and the halving of the reward subsidy every four years. Once again, the market has failed to price it in. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19454827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19454827
- bufferoverflow 6y agoBut it all depends on the demand. Which is not baked in. So your insight is not very insightful.
- jron 6y agoIf you want a third data point, add the trend. Obviously demand is greater than supply and it has been for over 10 years now.
- bufferoverflow 6y agoThat's not true. The demand depends on the liquidity (available supply for trading) and the price, among other things. There have been many cases in the last 10 years when the demand went down.
- aent 6y ago15000 usdT not usd, as most exchanges trade in tether, not actual dollars. Such price increase is probably related to Tether printing almost 7 billion dollars of (almost definitely) unbacked "USDT" in less than 3 months https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tether/ https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tether/
- monoideism 6y agoNo, it's over $15,000 in USD (not USDT) on highly liquid exchanges like Coinbase and Kraken.
- aent 6y agoWhich all compose only a small percentage of the overall volume. You can't deny there's almost 17 billion "totally fully backed 1:1 by US dollars" tether floating around and almost all crypto trading happens against USDT, not USD
- monoideism 6y agoI haven't really been following Bitcoin much recently, but I don't disagree that Tether can have a huge effect. But that's not what you said. You said $15,000 usdT, which is incorrect.
- aent 6y agoIt's 90%+ correct. Almost all trading volume is in Tether, which is erroneously assumed to be 1:1 with usd. Once the "bank run" on tether happens it'll be revealed that most of their billions are not backed by anything and the actual btc:usd price will become clear
- mr_woozy 6y agoyou're original statement was wrong, so you were wrong. Admit it and move on because changing topics midstream doesn't fool anyone and just exposes how flimsy your reasoning was to begin with.
- cs702 6y ago...contradicting many, many, many smart people who have predicted Bitcoin's imminent demise since day one: https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoin-obituaries/ https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoin-obituaries/
- jamoes 6y agoAnd likewise, BTC fees are also at a local maximum[1]. Unfortunately, nothing has been done to actually scale the BTC blockchain since the last bull run. Onchain transactional capacity is the same as it was 2 years ago (limited to ~400k tx/day globally). Major n^2 transaction validation bottlenecks still remain within the Bitcoin Core software. With no plans to address these bottlenecks and increase onchain capacity, the fundamentals of BTC scaling haven't changed at all since the last time the market went boom and then bust. [1] https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees.html https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees...
- vmception 6y agoPlenty of criticisms to be had about bitcoin's scalability but what you said isn't true. Quite a bit has changed with the prevalance of Segwit transactions, some-to-many Lightning transactions, a lot of Liquid transactions, and transaction bundling. Specifically in reaction to how the network convulsed last bull market and correction. Yeah it still sucks and is hardly competitive especially on the layer-2 front, but lets at least be accurate about why it sucks lol. Wrapped Bitcoin offerings are better than native Bitcoin. There is a lot of money being made in helping people wrap and unwrap their Bitcoin for use and trade (not for custody though). It will be very prevalent this cycle. There are a lot of options for people to be unburdened by Bitcoin's layer-1 while being able to manage risk and capture alpha with the market gyrations, in unlimited amounts. All comes down to if people want to learn, this time, but the landscape is extremely different. The honest reality is that you will want to watch is if Ethereum's capacity can keep up fast enough. If mentioning the Ethereum Network caused a convulsion, then you really need to re-evaluate what is going on. It is acting as a trading portal and center that has almost nothing to do with the Ether cryptocurrency. It has robust Layer-1 trading systems, 10 competing Layer-2 offerings that already work right now which the Layer-1 systems will very quickly upgrade to (bitcoin has 1 Layer-2 system called Lightning, in incremental progress for 5 years and it doesn't work very well), while also being in the process of updating its own Layer-1 consensus layer to increase throughput by two-three orders of magnitude.
- lawn 6y ago
- chubot 6y agoThe funny thing to me is that BTC crashed to $5K from $10K when the pandemic hit. And then it recovered like the stock market. So it's basically an asset class correlated with stocks? Gold had a bit of dip too even, but not as severe ...
- pavlov 6y agoAny article about Bitcoin price should mention Tether and how $7B worth of these supposedly USD-backed tokens have been printed recently. There's no evidence that Tether is backed by anything, yet these newly minted cryptodollars are used to buy Bitcoin and thus pump up the price. It's not that different from Fed stimulus creating money that ends up being used to buy stocks and inflating prices across the market. Fed does it in the open, Tether is doing it surreptitiously. Caveat emptor.
- aent 6y agoIt's mind boggling, few guys in some offshore company claim to be holding almost 17 billion dollars in cash somewhere when it was revealed they were kicked out of all the banks they attempted to use, and they keep printing money in the billions with no consequences
- tim333 6y agoIt is quite striking. If you look at the graph way more were printed recently than in the last boom https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tether/ https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tether/ I wonder if the end game has a Tether collapse?