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Bitcoin value tumbles almost 50% since record November
- steelstraw 5y agoPerspective https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbZ8zDpX2Mg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbZ8zDpX2Mg
- deeviant 5y agoI don't think your link shows perspective, it's just huuurah from the crypto gang. It's well known that bitcoin, and crypto as a whole, have and will likely continue to demonstrate a boom/bust cycle that will likely continue to excite the get-rich-fast-crew for some time to come. But people are mostly pointing out that bitcoin is not the equity hedge many hoped it would be, it's not an independent thing apart from the vagaries of the market. To me, perspective on bitcoin would mean seeing that it isn't the revolutionary thing it's sold as. It's not freedom money, it's not the way to stick it to the financial industrial complex, and it's not a safe harbor asset. It's only really good for one (legal) thing: speculation. It seems like the vast majority of bitcoin transactions are either people speculating on it or criminal in nature. And it uses more power than the entire country of Sweden. Maybe another coin in the future will address cryptos problems, but I haven't seen it yet, eth isn't it. I own some cypto, because it's fun. I watch numbers go up or down, but the money I put into it is already in the written-off-but-will-be-nice-if-pops category. That's perspective. You have people taking out loans to buy bitcoin or even just putting a significant amount of their portfolio in crypto, that is not perspective.
- r00fus 5y agoIsn't this just the way the unregulated crypto market operates? Volatility like crazy? I think there were other seismic shifts (e.g. Bitcoin) with 50% losses from peaks before.
- UncleOxidant 5y ago"bUt iT'S a sTaBLe SToRe oF vaLUe uNLiKe fiAT cURRenCY."
- rabuse 5y agoI always see this argument peddled, but I can't recall the notion in the earlier crypto days of it being a "stable store of value". We saw it as a means to bypass payment middlemen, such as PayPal.
- wbsss4412 5y agoJust because it wasn’t around in the early days doesn’t mean it isn’t relevant now. Bitcoin has thus far failed as a currency, so people have been pushing the “store of value” line for quite some time.
- jayd16 5y agoHappened as soon as someone decided to speculate on BTC, which was pretty early.
- lawn 5y agoBecause it wasn't there. It was only when Bitcoin could no longer function well for payments (due to the high fees), that bagholders changed the narrative from "medium of exchange" to "store of value".
- paxys 5y agoWhat percent of Bitcoin owners has made a single commercial transaction in Bitcoin? Or really done anything other than buy/sell it in a commercial brokerage account?
- r00fus 5y agoInstead you have other middlemen like Coinbase/Binanace who are unregulated and lose random wallets and stuff.
- delabay 5y agoNobody but you is making this claim
- dehrmann 5y agoI don't touch Bitcoin because I see it as a speculative collectible, not an investment, but there are plenty of regulated markets that are volatile.
- KptMarchewa 5y agoOnly 50% to go.
- UncleOxidant 5y agoIt seems possible.
- tryptophan 5y agoTechnically there is always another 50% to go possible
- kzrdude 5y agozeno's paradoxes, crypto edition: Can't go to zero value because it has to drop 50% first.
- pmohun 5y agoYou just accidentally rediscovered Zeno’s paradox
- lostlogin 5y agoI think it’s this one? That which is in locomotion must arrive at the half-way stage before it arrives at the goal. — as recounted by Aristotle, Physics VI:9, 239b10
- WrtCdEvrydy 5y agoBitcoin value increases 1000% since record low 2016 November.
- focusgroup0 5y agobuy the _______
- kwertyoowiyop 5y agobuy from the ________s!
- smallerfish 5y agohttps://jacobinmag.com/2022/01/cryptocurrency-scam-blockchain-bitcoin-economy-decentralization https://jacobinmag.com/2022/01/cryptocurrency-scam-blockchai...
- notch656a 5y agoNow lets compare how much gold a dollar bought a year after it departed from gold standard to dollar today. Then compare how much gold 1 bitcoin would buy a year after bitcoin was created, to how much gold 1 bitcoin would buy today.
- salamandersauce 5y agoDon't forget to compare how much gold you could buy with each 1 week ago.
- notch656a 5y agoI'm more concerned about the Y/Y and decade to decade change of my wealth than week to week. That's fine if others aren't. There are at least a hundred currencies in common use of both fiat and crypto variety, overall the dollar is looking to be a horrible choice as a long term store of value.
- selectodude 5y ago>overall the dollar is looking to be a horrible choice as a long term store of value. The Dollar is not and never has been a long-term store of value. That is a fundamental misunderstanding of what a currency is.
- notch656a 5y agoI was intending to prompt someone to finally admit they don't care about store of value. I agree the bashing of BTC is fundamental misunderstanding. If you don't worry about store of value, dollar or BTC will work just fine for many transactions. >The Dollar is not and never has been a long-term store of value Depends on what you mean by long-term. If you held the dollar from 1813 to 1913 it was an excellent store of value. If you hold it from 1971 to 2071, with our current target of 2% inflation, you'll be lucky if 13% of your value is left. The systemic intentional destruction of value of the dollar has accelerated rapidly since at least the early 70s.
- UncleOxidant 5y agoAnother way to look at it: Prices are up 50% since November if you buy everything in Bitcoin.
- electrograv 5y agoEdit: My original response totally misunderstood your post, below is an updated response: When Bitcoin's fiat-denominated value drops, the claim that the price of everything actually increased while Bitcoin remains stable — becomes a clearly silly argument when you realize we can make the exact same argument for literally any other asset of your choice (which will in some cases yield completely contradictory conclusions about whether the price of everything else is going up, or down). To make this argument, you are essentially axiomatically proclaiming that the value of X is fixed, and so when its value appears to drop relative to other things, this therefore is actually just a case of everything else getting more expensive. The problem is you actually have to justify why you believe the value of X is fixed; otherwise, the conclusion is tautological. Without justification, you will find endless logical contradictions by applying the same logic simultaneously to multiple assets, yielding stark disagreement/contradiction on whether "everything else" went up or down in value, depending on which asset you chose as your denomination reference point :)
- UncleOxidant 5y agoIf you bought a Tesla in BTC in November and bought another one with BTC today you'd have to spend twice as much bitcoin to buy the Tesla today. That's price inflation in relation to BTC is it not?
- pram 5y agoOnly if it’s denominated in USD. The purchasing power of bitcoin to teslas might not have dropped at all. That is the problem though, price discovery is impossible because no one buys things denominated in bitcoin. It’s never actually used as a currency.
- electrograv 5y ago
- sgt101 5y agoHopefully this kills "alt gold" ideas for BTC for good. No one can hold it as a hedge vs equities now after the correlated fall. I feel awful for everyone in El Salvador and Turkey and elsewhere who've been conned into holding this instead of fiat and are now in a mire - a mire that probably involves not eating. Christ, I decided that I couldnt handle the BTC risk - people who encouraged those folks to take it on should be... well... should be sorry.
- delabay 5y agoForbidding folks in these countries (Turkey, Lebanon, Argentina, Venezuela) from holding a crypto alternative to their native currency is sentencing them to a guaranteed loss of 90%+ of their purchasing power, versus weathering crypto volatility.
- The-Bus 5y agoI agree with this statement but the solution is not solely crypto nor does that provide any inherent value to residents outside of those nations.
- sgt101 5y agoThere does need to be a solution for countries that do this - that is to say indulge in radical devaluation; but it is clearly not BTC or ETH. It could be a properly backed and regulated crypto currency, one that also could be used without burning barrels of oil. There is no such crypto currency though, and there may never be one.
- delabay 5y agoIn aforementioned countries the established financial system becomes a tool of theft by the government. Just listen to news reports or podcasts from normal folks who have to survive under these conditions. Thought you had a dollar denominated savings account? It's Liras now. Want to withdraw your money? Limited to $40US a day. Crypto is one compelling alternative. Note, I lump a reputable USD stablecoin in here too. It's all software after all.
- nineplay 5y agoMy pet theory is that it was the Matt Damon commercial. Not because the commercial was bad ( though it was ) but because the 'mainstreaming' of crypto took away a lot of the appeal. When it was a cool coin that only the the techies understood, owning it felt like FU to the big banks. Now that it's being promoted on commercials shown during football games, it's not as much fun. Next thing you know, boomers will be buying it.
- aantix 5y agoWhat happened to the 100K projection by end of year?
- mythrwy 5y agoSome year it likely will happen. Followed by a year where it touches 28K again. But you bring up a very good and often missed point. Highly speculative wagers are, if maybe not rational, understandable when 100X+ or 1000X+ potential gains exist. But that's not where BTC is right now. If everyone is very lucky maybe BTC does 3x. Maybe even 6x but that's much more tenuous and uncertain. 100X? Very unlikely right now. The downside risk just isn't worth potential 3X gains for me and probably many others, but I'd feel different if there were realistic 100X gains possible.
- wombat-man 5y agoyeah that's how I see it. Feels like to get rich now you'd have to start throwing real money into it and I'm just not that big of a gambler.
- randomhodler84 5y agoEventually all fiat currencies will be worth less than 1 sat. Today there are 4 countries that fit this. They should ditch their garbage money and use BTC. BTC has 100x left in it, easily. Probably a lot more.
- mythrwy 5y agoBTC at 3 million? 3 million x 21 million = (probably more money then is in circulation worldwide?) I guess anything is possible but it seems highly improbable to me. (edit) Just for fun I checked with quick and dirty math/2 second Google lookups. Say BTC does 100X and attains 3 million. 3million/BTC x 21 million BTC = six hundred thirty trillion! Right now there is around 40 trillion worldwide in the form of "money". So they are going to have to print a lot more money and BTC is going to have to represent all of it near as I can tell for 100X to happen.
- labrador 5y agoIt's funny how Bitcoin advocates say "widen the chart" to point to the rise since 2012, like that's the slope it will keep rising at. Sure, if my great-grandfather bought General Motors in 1908 I might be filthy rich now, but does that make GM a good investment today?
- rawtxapp 5y agoNo need to go until 2012, Bitcoin price has been above current price for only like 6 months in it's whole existence. So if you bought at anytime outside of those 6 months, you're in the green.
- nexuist 5y agoThere are plenty of investors who believe dumping your money into a stable company like GM would be better than speculative startups like Tesla or Rivian...isn't this typical risk-averse advice? The status quo is that GM is a good investment. They're probably not going bankrupt tomorrow.
- throw0101a 5y ago> The status quo is that GM is a good investment. They're probably not going bankrupt tomorrow. Well: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_Chapter_11_reorganization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_Chapter_11_reor... * https://www.reuters.com/article/us-autos-gm-treasury-idUSBREA3T0MR20140430 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-autos-gm-treasury-idUSBRE... * https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/loans-canada-account-finance-auto-sector-bailout-2009-gm-chrysler-1.4722529 https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/loans-canada-account-financ...
- nexuist 5y agoI guess I'll rephrase and say that they're probably not ending tomorrow, because of the historical precedent the Fed set when they bailed them out. What's a few hundred billion dollars between friends?
- 5y ago
- time_to_smile 5y agoThe funny thing is that if there really is anything revolutionary to be done with crypto currency it will happen when they are cheap. Ethereum's "world computer" vision for example, might actually lead to some neat stuff if it was dramatically cheaper to run smart contracts. Cheap, less volatile BTC makes it much more useful as an actual underground currency. I sort of want crypto to crash, not because of some schadenfreude, but because so much more technical experimentation with ideas can happen if it's dramatically cheaper to play with.
- lowdest 5y agoPlenty of alternative chains out there with cool experiments that are cheap to run.
- ruste 5y agoClear misunderstanding of the economics in this article. Bitcoin is a stable store of value. Every other Currency just deflated 100% simultaneously and the cost of all goods as represented by bitcoin also went up 100%!
- gpderetta 5y agoWe can't catch a break with inflation this year!
- henvic 5y agoIt can't be a store of value when there it represents no value whatsoever. It is an instrument of speculation only. https://henvic.dev/posts/bitcoin https://henvic.dev/posts/bitcoin
- selectodude 5y agoThat was what we refer to as a joke.
- mam4 5y agoSince the end of the Gold Standard, the value of ANY currency is only based how much other people accept to give you in exchange. That's why you see half of the thirld world countries currencies dropping, in particular, faster than bitcoin drops. And this is why it is so popular in these countries.
- sporkland 5y ago"the value of ANY currency is only based how much other people accept to give you in exchange" Wasn't that mostly true for gold as well? (Unless you wanted to make jewelry out of it, low utility high status signaling)
- notch656a 5y agoJewelry is almost 40% of the demand for gold. Industry is like 7%. The idea that gold has low utility outside of speculative investment needs to die.
- 0x500x79 5y agoIs bitcoin "to big to fail" at this point? I think the thing this points to the most is that Bitcoin is no immune to market movement and it is a speculative asset (since right now speculative assets are the places where the market is getting hit the hardest).
- bluetwo 5y agoThat only works if you can convince those in the government that it is "too big to fail". This is why there has been a push to get politicians involved. When bitcoin fails (and it will), those who mine will be the first to move their value out to whatever BitCoin2.0 is. Then they will be able to charge whatever they want to the suckers left who want to exit, because you literally will have to pay the miners transaction fees to let you do this, and there will be no cap on what they can charge. The final appeal will be to the government, saying "you bailed out the banks, homeowners, students, the auto industry, the airline industry, why not those who lost money in bitcoin?"
- 0x500x79 5y agoUnfortunately, the US politicians are largely incompetent in technology and currently have market holdings across a lot of different sources (possibly including Bitcoin). So the question becomes: Will the politicians let it fail, or will there be a bailout/support purely on economical reasons. We can't look at Bitcoin as a purely economical issue. There are a lot of facets that need to be understood. DeFi COULD be useful for people in under-developed or generally economically limited countries but I believe that the implementation needs to go back to phase-0 and solve many of the speculative issues that are inherent in DeFi today.
- bluetwo 5y agoYou don't need them to understand it. You need them to repeat the right words after donating to their campaign. That's how everything works. So you would be against crypto getting bailed out by the government?
- cassac 5y agoEverything is down though and this just lets people who’d like to bash crypto a reason to bash crypto. Etsy stock is also down more than 50% from its high but nobody is bashing Etsy. What does it all mean????
- kkjjkgjjgg 5y agoI wonder if it is a rehash of March 2020, when Covid started for real. Except now in reverse - nobody knows what to expect, everybody is extremely nervous.
- wbsss4412 5y agoAre people evangelizing the benefits of Etsy stock over fiat currency?
- cassac 5y agoNo, but they are saying that bitcoin losing 50% from its high is saying something about it. But Etsy dropped the same amount in the same time period. Which is causation and which is correlation?
- wbsss4412 5y agoEtsy market cap: ~20 billion Bitcoin market cap: ~656 billion Is it really that hard to figure out? Edit: re correlation v causation. That’s the problem, people having been pumping Bitcoin as an alternative to gold, it’s supposed to be uncorrelated to the stock market…
- nexuist 5y agoBy definition anyone who is trying to get you to buy stock of any kind is trying to get you to believe in the benefits of stock holding over saving fiat currency, so I think it is fair to say people are evangelizing Etsy stock the same way they evangelize Bitcoin.
- rawtxapp 5y agoThis isn't the first or the last time that'll happen. There are multiple 50-80% drops in Bitcoin history and we famously went from 20k to 3k in 2017 cycle. For reference, sp500 also dropped like 10% since december. Since it's market cap is like 40 trillion, that 10% drop is worth like 7-8 times the market cap of all Bitcoin. Smaller markets with lower liquidity moves more.
- voisin 5y ago> Smaller markets with lower liquidity moves more. Above a certain level of liquidity the difference is marginal to nonexistent. Bitcoin certainly exceeded that level. This was not a small, illiquid market.
- rawtxapp 5y agoJust pull up some order books from exchanges, 10-100M$ worth of market orders would move the market in a meaningful way, you can't do the same in a more established market 40x the size. Bitcoin gets a lot of press, but in the grand scheme of things it's still very tiny.
- bluetwo 5y agoWaiting for the day when I can buy a MadoffCoin. Or TulipCoin. Or plain old PonziCoin.
- agrewall 5y ago
- rastapasta42 5y agoThis price drop indicates too much faith in Fed's tapering efforts. Markets are underestimating the rate of inflation, and the price will bounce back like it always does. On another note, what's the update on the proof of stake? It's insane that we're using 0.55% of global electricity production for a decentralized spreadsheet. Phasing out coal power might be detrimental to lives of millions of people who depend on coal to power their dwellings, but shutting down coal power plants used for crypto mining sounds like a reasonable compromise.
- ChrisClark 5y agoBitcoin will probably never move to Proof of Stake, they couldn't even increase the block size and that caused the whole BCH fork situation. But Ethereum is still on schedule for Q2 this year. It already uses far less electricity than Bitcoin does, but will do so much better as PoS.
- rastapasta42 5y agoGood to hear, and I hope Ethereum team will be able to complete a smooth transition. I've been hearing about Ethereum POS for many years, and almost started losing hope at this point.
- halpert 5y agoIf the markets are underestimating inflation, then the Fed will need to be even more aggressive with the interest rate increases, meaning the price of speculative assets like BTC will drop even more.
- rastapasta42 5y agoToo many people are invested in the speculative stock market, so I'm skeptical on whether the Fed has the courage to ruin American worker's 401k. If the supply chain issues persist, there's also a chance that raising interest rates will fail to deflate commodity and product prices, in which case we might be overestimating Fed's ability to control inflation. Let's hope China decides to stick with dollar as the reserve currency and doesn't decide to suddenly cut off the flow of goods, or things might turn very ugly.
- globular-toast 5y agoIt's sad what Bitcoin has become. Not the price. That doesn't matter. I discovered it around 2012 and at that time people were really excited. Not because they thought about "getting rich". But because people were finally learning about how money works and how corrupt and fragile the whole system is. Bitcoin showed us at once both what money really is, how it works and gave us a solution to the problem. Very exciting times. Many of us dreamed of being free from the heartless leeches in private banks. But before long people did start to think about "getting rich". That's the really sad thing about finance. It has attracted some of the smartest people in the world who use their brains not to help others or do anything useful, but to essentially just leech off the real economy. So Bitcoin just became like everything else. Clever people "getting rich" doing nothing of value, and people like me just giving up trying to explain what the real problems with money are. Now I feel like the old world financial system is stronger than ever. People are singing its praises because now there is a failed alternative to compare it with.
- daenz 5y agoMaybe the real purpose of money is--and has always been-- to allow people who think they are clever to take value from others.
- vel0city 5y ago> gave us a solution to the problem > So Bitcoin just became like everything else It didn't really give a solution to the problem, as "the problem" is more of a human nature issue and not something solved by a few lines of code. People will commit fraud and be leaches with an economy in dollars or bitcoins or dog money or sea shells or 1,000lb stone wheels.
- Capira 5y agoIn absolute terms the number of good people working on bitcoin went up since 2012. Doesn't matter too much that there are so much more jerk investors now.
- delabay 5y agoYou changed, the space did not. Passionate folks always exist but along the way you stopped seeking them out.
- post_break 5y agoReminds me of the video where the guy is like you should sell your Bitcoin because it crashed to 50c, then he repeats that every crash, oh it crashed to $2, then $50, then $300, etc etc.
- traveler01 5y agoMeh, i've been into crypto for a long time and it's always like this. Cryptos fall of value for a week or two, and haters do parties, state how cryptos are a failure and how dead they are. They tend to shut up when they grow in value again, to values they never reached before.
- nexuist 5y agoAgreed. I invested in Bitcoin in 2014. If you still don't see the inherent patterns in this market (extreme volatility rollercoaster) given the 8 years during which it's happened on a near monthly basis, you have no business telling crypto investors what they ought to do. It has literally always been like this and there is no reason to believe it won't be like that again.
- traveler01 5y ago> It has literally always been like this and there is no reason to believe it won't be like that again. In some months it will spike again, and then it will fall like this or less, again. It's like that. > (extreme volatility rollercoaster) You do have some stable coins like USDT, BUSD, which follow the value of the dollar.
- traveler01 5y agoFunny to see how it works. When cryptos fall, everyone speaks about it and says cryptos are dead, when it grows nobody speaks anything about it. Cryptos are here to stay that's the truth wether you like it or not. Its already moving wayy to much money to stop.
- paxys 5y agoSo has the rest of the market. Interestingly, Bitcoin is often touted as a store of value and a hedge against market downturns/inflation, but in the recent past it has been tracking the overall stock market pretty closely.
- specialist 5y agoWhenever there's a big down turn in any market, I assume someone(s) were just taking their profit(s). Like bike racing's game of chicken in the velodrome.
- fennecfoxen 5y agoIt isn't necessarily a good assumption that someone is taking someone else's profit. More often it's simply people realizing that projected profits won't happen; many of them never existed in the first place. Crops fail. Promising biotech turns out to be impossible; new drugs are shown to be ineffective. The housing market turns out not-to-go-up-for-ever. A drought in Taiwan stifles semiconductor manufacturing and good chips are hard to find for years; ASML's factory catches fire. Oil spills, and must be cleaned up; Union Carbide leaks gas all over Bhopal. COVID-19 kills people, makes others (rationally) fear for their health, and far less gets done.
- specialist 5y agoSure. And maybe some events triggered this current downturn. Legislation, another big pwnage causing loss of faith, some failed IPO, scarcity of gear. TBH, if these things were rational, I would have guessed most "bad" news would have pumped bitcoin's value; but I clearly have no clue what's going on, which is why I'm asking. I'm also open to explanations that complex adaptive systems have intermitent booms and busts.
- jacknews 5y agoI see the mainstream financial media a piling on with the anti-bitcoin message. Don't get me wrong, I'm not really a fan (though blockchain tech does seem to have some promise), but let's just say these guys aren't exactly impartial.
- RickJWagner 5y ago"Goldman Sachs said that the price of bitcoin could reach more than $100,000 within the next five years." And currently trading at 35k, having shed 35k already, and numerous threats? No thanks.