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Bitcoin & Ether are both down -40% from a week to a month ago. Both of those are, in theory, large enough that investors "letting off some steam" shouldn't move
by kllrnohj 5y ago
Bitcoin & Ether are both down -40% from a week to a month ago. Both of those are, in theory, large enough that investors "letting off some steam" shouldn't move them that much.
If $SPY dropped 40% we'd all call it a crash. This isn't that different.
Also unlike the stock market, crypto is under the delusion of being a viable currency. If USD or Euro dropped even 20% we'd start questioning if it's a recession, much less 40%.
- tadzik_ 5y ago> If $SPY dropped 40% we'd all call it a crash. This isn't that different If $SPY was 40% up since last month, would that be normal? ETH is still currently higher than its value from April 19th. Cryptocurrency market is extremely volatile. This isn't that far from normal.
- cromka 5y ago> Cryptocurrency market is extremely volatile. This isn't that far from normal. I think you inadvertently confirm OPs point. Cryptocurrencies with their volatility cannot replace regular currencies.
- intotheabyss 5y agoCryptocurrency is a misnomer. Most cryptos aren't trying to be currencies in the traditional sense. For example, RAI is a stablecoin on Ethereum that's not pegged to any fiat currencies. You can think of RAI as a stable form of ETH.
- echelon 5y agoWhat does that even mean?
- intotheabyss 5y agoIt means that ETH which is a decentralized cryptocurrency can be used as a collateral for an algorithmic stablecoin called RAI that adjusts its price based on the price of ETH from a Uniswap price feed and a PID controller and arbitrage. To mint RAI you need to deposit ETH. The goal of RAI is to create a stablecoin which dampens the price movements of ETH over long periods of time.
- jakeva 5y agoThe fact the community felt the need to invent a "stablecoin" isn't terribly reassuring
- diabeticApe 5y agoWhy not? Its a new asset, what is wrong with improvement? I mean using that logic does it also disturb you that somebody invented the seat belt? Would you prefer they didnt invent seat belts? Would that have been more reassuring of the relative safety of the vehicle if they never admitted that you could die in a car crash? The point of stable coins is really only apparent if you're trading crypto just like the importance of seat belts might make more sense to somebody that drives daily.
- miracle2k 5y agoOn the contrary, decentralized stablecoins are some of the most exciting things in the space. The MakerDAO system, which issues the DAI stablecoin, is earning 2.5 million every year, distributed to token holders. It has survived multiple market crashes. Algorithmic stablecoins attempt the same thing w/o collateral, and seem to have done well in this drawdown as well.
- bhk 5y agoAre you talking about the RAI that traded at $0.0186 a few days ago and that you can now sell for $0.00022 ? That's a "stablecoin"? https://atomars.com/trading/RAIUSDT https://atomars.com/trading/RAIUSDT
- intotheabyss 5y ago
- inter_netuser 5y ago650B is a small market cap for a global currency. Gold is 12T. Once Bitcoin gets to 10T, volatility should drop.
- Mc_Big_G 5y agoThis makes no sense. 1 BTC still equals 1 BTC.
- randomsearch 5y agoCurrencies are used to purchase things. If the purchasing power of 1 BTC changes dramatically, it matters.
- Mc_Big_G 5y agoYou're assuming I care how much something costs in dollars.
- klyrs 5y agoThis makes me wonder how you pay for basic living expenses like rent/mortgage, food, clothes, etc
- imtringued 5y agoIf you are a US citizen you will have to pay taxes in dollars.
- ric2b 5y agoDollars are one of the easiest things to buy with Bitcoin, so how is that a problem? I also need water to live my life, but that doesn't make me feel the need to price everything in gallons of water.
- prepend 5y agoFluctuating prices suck for paying taxes. Buy bitcoin at $1 on Jan 1, sell at $10 on dec 31. I now owe taxes on $9 in gains, so I’ll need USD$3 on April 15. If on Jan 2, I buy more Bitcoin at $10 and it drops to $6 on April 15 that will suck because then I’ll need to sell half my Bitcoin to pay taxes.
- 5y ago
- scsilver 5y agoThats the thing, they arent currencies, they are assets that can act like currencies when convenient.
- not_jd_salinger 5y ago> hey arent currencies, they are assets The irony here of course is that the only way that Crypto currencies would meet any standard definition of an asset would be if they were functioning currencies. Going with Investopedia's straightforward definition "An asset is a resource with economic value", how is a non-currency crypto coin in any way a resource or possess economic value?
- thecrash 5y agoPresumably your complaint is that cryptocurrencies don't have "economic value", but what theory of value are you using to decide that? Exchange theory of value says that a commodity has two values: a use value (what it can do for you outside of the market) and an exchange value (what others will give you for it in the market). I think it'd be correct to say that cryptocurrency has no use value, but it obviously does have economic value. And it's far from the only asset with these characteristics.
- diabeticApe 5y agoSimple. Gold is an asset that is not used as currency but provides the holder with certain desired benefits and the asset can be liquidated if needed. Crypto is similar in that it prodives a financial vehicle that posesses certain properties. Im not saying they should all be thought of as digital gold but that lile gold, they provide value not only in thier price tag but in some inherent property that provides value to the user (this property varies wildly from crypto to crypto and is what makes each project distinct and unique.
- sashimi-houdini 5y agoLet's shift this one level up: Simple. Bitcoin is an asset that is not used as currency but provides the holder with certain desired benefits and the asset can be liquidated if needed. Skepticoin is similar in that it provides a financial vehicle that possesses certain properties. I'm not saying it should be thought of as digital bitcoin but that it's like bitcoin, it provides value not only in its price tag but in some inherent property that provides value to the user.
- SavantIdiot 5y agoSPY is up 50% since 2019 (pre covid crash). As someone partially invested in index ETFs, this worries me. Index funds aren't supposed to be nitro, they are supposed to be slow and plodding, and 10% annual is supposed to be huge. I think major indices should be nice, slow, inertial gains from ~6-7% annual, tops. Why? When at any point as an engineer or a scientist have you observed large exponential growth to be sustainable in any context??? EDIT: Ooops It is ~50% (258 in Jan 2019 * 1.50 = 380)
- SilasX 5y ago>SPY is up 100% since 2019 (pre covid crash). Wait, what? I don't see SPY below 250 for all of 2019. A 100% gain would be 500, but it's 406 now. (Its 2020 nadir was ~228, but it's still not up 100% from that.) https://www.google.com/finance/quote/SPY:NYSEARCA?window=5Y https://www.google.com/finance/quote/SPY:NYSEARCA?window=5Y
- SavantIdiot 5y agoAh sh^t, you are right: I was looking at $258 and said 258 * 1.5 = ~400, and that is ~50%... but not 100%. Edited! Thanks!
- arcticbull 5y agoThere are nitro versions of all the index funds but you usually have to buy them separately, and they come with their own fat stack of disclosures haha. For SPY see UPRO, for QQQ see TQQQ.
- hexedpackets 5y ago10% annual is not huge at all, it would actually be on the lower end of a year that had positive gains. 10% average is what you should expect for the SP500 - and that tends to be driven by lumps, years with returns >20%. 50% is high from a historical perspective but there are plausible explanations for why it's not absurd.
- mahogany 5y ago
- paulpauper 5y agoIn terms of risk-adjusted returns, Bitcoin worse than index funds. You can get smoother returns using 3x ETFs like TQQQ and TECL compared to bitcoin and about the same absolute returns. Nasdaq 100 has much better sharpe ratio compared to bitcoin. Same for FAAMG portfolio
- DennisP 5y agoWhen I google "Bitcoin Sharpe ratio," every article that comes up shows its ratio to be quite high. Here's a chart comparing various assets' Sharpe ratios over time, always for the previous four years. Bitcoin's is at top of the chart, staying over 2 and sometimes over 3: http://charts.woobull.com/bitcoin-risk-adjusted-return/ http://charts.woobull.com/bitcoin-risk-adjusted-return/ The lowest I've found is in this article, calculating over the past five years a Sharpe ratio of 1.6: https://www.forbes.com/sites/baldwin/2021/03/02/how-bitcoin-fits-in-a-retirement-portfolio/?sh=415cfd4d3a55 https://www.forbes.com/sites/baldwin/2021/03/02/how-bitcoin-... According to this, from 2007 to 2021 the Sharpe ratio of the Nasdaq 100 was 0.97: https://backtest.curvo.eu/portfolio/nasdaq-100--NoIgcghgzgJhCOACAjABlSANMUAZAqsgGwAcaAzCeQExFbIC6TQA https://backtest.curvo.eu/portfolio/nasdaq-100--NoIgcghgzgJh... And this gives a FAANG portfolio Sharpe ratio of 1.25: https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/3-ways-to-evaluate-the-performance-of-your-investment-strategy-ac3783a38929 https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/3-ways-to-evaluate-the... In terms of absolute returns, TQQQ has done well but not so well as Bitcoin. Since 2016 TQQQ has done 12X, compared to Bitcoin's 85X. Since April 2013 (as far back as Coingecko goes) TQQQ has gone up 37X, compared to a Bitcoin's 272X. As a bonus, Bitcoin has a long-term correlation with the S&P500 of only 0.01, according to the Forbes article linked above.
- cableshaft 5y agoIf you're holding as long as most people do index funds (i.e. 5-10+ years), historically you would have been way better off putting that money into bitcoin. Even taking this crash into account, I'm way up on crypto compared to my 401k. Not going to stop putting money into my 401k though, for the sake of diversification.
- paulpauper 5y ago
- taylodl 5y ago> Cryptocurrency market is extremely volatile. This isn't that far from normal. If that's true then cryptocurrency is pretty much worthless to use as currency. A desired property of currency is to not have wild fluctuations in value on a weekly or monthly bases.
- JoeAltmaier 5y agoExactly. Its not so much a currency as a tulip bulb, or a ponzi scheme, or something new that has the worst features of all those.
- broighbrobroigh 5y agoThe tulip bulb mania story is an incredibly persistent but inaccurate myth.
- hedora 5y agoThe “debunking” of Tulip Mania has, itself, been thoroughly debunked: https://fee.org/articles/tulip-mania-not-a-myth/ https://fee.org/articles/tulip-mania-not-a-myth/ Plenty of financial records still exist from back then. Tulip bulb mania actually happened.
- Morvan 5y agoThat article doesn't debunk anything lol Goldgar's points are still just as valid.
- MomoXenosaga 5y agoAs a Dutch person I can attest tulips have an actual purpose. And worth- the flower business is worth billions every year.
- perl4ever 5y ago>tulips have an actual purpose As a 1/4 Dutch person I can attest tulips hang around for decades doing nothing while being completely ignored.
- virgilp 5y agoIf SPY dropped to the level where it was at the start of the year, would we call it a crash? Also, maybe BTC is not like SPY but more like TSLA.
- arcticbull 5y agoHonestly, if SPY returned to 368, a 13% draw-down from the near-term peak, the financial press would lose their damn minds. That's half way between correction and bear market territory.
- nikanj 5y agoImagine one person moving $SPY or USD tens of percentage points by tweeting a meme or two. The volatility in crypto is quite something.
- inter_netuser 5y agoThat's because Bitcoin is very tightly held, and the amount of tradeable float is very very small compared to holdings. This results in outsized volatility, as it is still a developing market. 1T for a global currency is very small. We'll see how it behaves at 10T.
- arcticbull 5y ago> That's because Bitcoin is very tightly held, and the amount of tradeable float is very very small compared to holdings. By the diamond-est of hands: those who lost their keys.
- inter_netuser 5y agoI see you often comment on Bitcoin negatively, curious why?
- arcticbull 5y agoIt's a substantially-manipulated negative-sum distributed Ponzi scheme. The most blatant example of a naked emperor I've seen in my lifetime. And it consumes the energy of Argentina to achieve as much work as a Raspberry Pi.
- celticninja 5y agoMissed a couple of early opportunities to buy eh? Don't worry about, expending your energy is going to get you nothing. Even if it all implodes tomorrow all you can do is say "I told you so". And you may feel superior to others, but no one will care. And if it doesn't implode you are here expending energy unnecessarily, which, we have already gathered, is an activity that you don't appreciate.
- arcticbull 5y agoClassic coiner arguments. "Have fun staying poor!" For the record I: (1) Bought during the 2017 run-up, and sold around $17,000 in early 2018, and parlayed that into various other investments that have done quite well. I've posted to that effect here in the past. (2) Shorted CME futures at $56,000, and a bunch of Coinbase and a bunch of Tesla. That's roughly $100,000 USD per contract in profit - deposited directly into my SIPC insured FINRA regulated account with zero counter-party risk, 60% long term capital gains. Not bad for two weeks work. You worry about your account, leave mine to me :) I'm talking about crypto on its merits, not its price. The merits of course inform my investment decisions. There are tons of ways to make money on this planet, HODLing crypto is just one among them. I was addressing the question directly: why do I hate bitcoin? Asked, and answered. But to supplement: the thing I hate most about crypto are the touts and the community.
- lhorie 5y ago> If $SPY dropped 40% we'd all call it a crash SPY is highly diversified though. The crypto market is known to move in tandem w/ BTC swings. A 40% swing may seem large compared to SPY's usual 1-2% swings, but consider that other crypto coins frequently swing by 10-50%. For example, MATIC was up some 47% just yesterday. The reality is that crypto is highly volatile; it doesn't make sense to compare its volatility to ETFs or REITs or other conservative vehicles. Some analysts were even expecting a correction, saying that a BTC drop to 30k would still be within expectations...
- serial_dev 5y ago> If $SPY dropped 40% we'd all call it a crash. This isn't that different. Hmm, yes it is different. Cryptocurrencies are very-very volatile. In the last weeks, it wasn't uncommon to have 25% change in either direction within 24 hours for most top currencies. Stocks are less volatile. With that said, the current nose-dive isn't over yet, so I'm not saying there won't be a crash, I'm just saying that comparing stocks and cryptos sounds to me like comparing apples to oranges.
- afterburner 5y agoRegular stock markets have circuit breakers in place and don't even operate 24/7. There are plenty of things that slow down price movement there. If they didn't have circuit breakers and did operate 24/7, I'd imagine we would have seen far greater record price movements over history, maybe even as bad as the absolute worst crypto swings.
- JoeAltmaier 5y agoIs this a condemnation of crypto markets then? Because you put most of that stuff in place, you probably lose the 'value' of crypto (anonymity, lack of central governance etc).
- afterburner 5y agoI don't care if crypto fails or succeeds.
- quickthrowman 5y agoIndex futures trade 23/5, close enough for me to 24/7
- playingchanges 5y agoWhile we do call them crypto currencies I don’t think crypto market is really comparable to the currency market. Maybe more like a precious metals etf or something.
- pradn 5y agoIt doesn't seem like anyone believes cryptos are supposed to be currencies any more. All the talk around them is around them being a new, exciting, and potentially very lucrative investment class. If you go to Coinbase's front page, you see that you can buy and sell them, like you can with Robinhood. It's not trying to be a PayPal. The currency-ness does serve an important purpose. It helps bring in investment for the nebulous future where using them as currencies will have advantages.
- vmception 5y agoUSDC, DAI, USDT are all used more than ever, orders of magnitude more People dont have to talk about them as currencies because they just work No different than cellular reception in an underground subway, you dont have to think about it anymore
- kllrnohj 5y ago> People dont have to talk about them as currencies because they just work Well that's not really true, it was headline news when Tesla started accepting crypto payments (and then headline news when they stopped). Stores accepting crypto still makes the news, it's not common and not something that "just works." But what you can do is at least semi-reliably convert between crypto & things that stores do accept using the various conversions you listed. But you still do have to convert from crypto to a traditional currency to use it as a currency.
- vmception 5y agoThere have been debit cards loaded with crypto for almost a decade now Your fictional higher standard of currency would say that the euro is not a currency because my transferwise debit card converts it to dollars when I spend in the US The peer to peer payment mechanism works and all crypto assets inherit that
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- sakopov 5y agoI don't care what $SPY does. Crypto market isn't the stock market. 40% crash in crypto -- even in bull markets -- doesn't mean shit.
- redisman 5y agoLook at the full chart for 2021 though. Crypto went completely bonkers for no apparent reason this year so a correction isn't too surprising.
- tastyfreeze 5y agoI can think of about $9 trillion reasons that crypto markets, and other financials, are going bonkers.
- calimac 5y agoPerspective: BTC and crypto in general retraced to January 2021 levels. Since the article was printed we have recovered 25% of that correction. The perspective is volatility.
- devmunchies 5y agoat ~$2,700 (current), ETH is where it was on april 30th, which was only 19 days ago. Would you consider being reduced to last month's price a crash?
- shrimpx 5y agoThe comparison to SPY is unfair since it’s so diversified. A comparison to a correlated sector of stocks — like EV stocks, which can dip 10-25% in a week in unison — would be more fair.
- elif 5y agoWrong.. ether is up 30% on the month. They are only both massively down if you cherry-pick the absolute peak as your point of comparison.
- garmaine 5y agoIf you 40% crash is back to where you were a week or a month ago, it is the rise not the crash that was anomalous.
- lfxyz 5y agoIf SPY dropped 40% I'd suggest that it's gone on sale.
- stevep98 5y agoA month ago ETH was ~$2200, now its $2500.