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Considering Bitcoin had never fallen lower than a previous cycles ATH (All Time High) until now, who is thinking that this might be a sign of the end of crypto?

Considering Bitcoin had never fallen lower than a previous cycles ATH (All Time High) until now, who is thinking that this might be a sign of the end of crypto? Each cycle goes higher was pretty much the only thing that kept the whole thing going. Now that is gone I think the space will dry up. Tether collapsing in the next couple weeks will likely put Bitcoin under $10,000

iLoveOncall 4y ago
Tether collapsing would have a far larger effect than putting BTC to 10K, it would probably be the end of crypto. The vast majority of alt-coins cannot be exchanged against dollars and have a value only if they can be traded against USDT or other stablecoins.
- rvz 4y ago
  > Tether collapsing would have a far larger effect than putting BTC to 10K, it would probably be the end of crypto. Tether isn't the only stablecoin out there. Tether collapsing is basically the end of Tether and will send BTC below 10K and will take the others with them. It won't be the end of crypto due to this as there are other coins (not tokens) out there that are compliant (ISO 20020), have a use case and will survive this crash, but I expect the majority of useless memecoins, tokens, etc to be wiped out.
  - iLoveOncall 4y ago
    > Tether isn't the only stablecoin out there. The end of Tether will be the end of stablecoins, just like ICOs ended completely at some point.
- zdkl 4y ago
  > The vast majority of alt-coins cannot be exchanged against dollars I mean. You could, like, sell them on a forum or in person. With your wallet which is supposed to enable you to do just that. I admire the success of crypto-exchanges' marketing in making them out to be the only way to conduct transactions on a friggin transaction management system. But then you'd have to deal with the fact that next to no one wants to organically trade <random myriad of altcoins/tokens>. I for one rejoice about the upcoming altcoin extinction event.
  - redox99 4y ago
    What you are saying is kind of orthogonal. Nowadays you can and people do indeed sell crypto in person, and using your wallet. But you use a stablecoin because it's much more convenient since its stable. Then with such stablecoin you have purchased, you swap it for your desired altcoin either on a centralized exchange or decentralized exchange. I don't agree with the other comment that the USDT/Altcoin pair is such a big deal. If USDT became even less desired, other stablecoins pair would appear and surpass USDT pairs in volume.
    - zdkl 4y ago
      > But you use a stablecoin because it's much more convenient since its stable. I don't know how to say this without sounding snide but I am genuinely curious: you need to back every single part of that sentence up with some serious citations. Specifically can you challenge my perception that you're advocating for option B of the following: Option A: find someone to trade <thing you have> for <thing you want>, haggle, transact. Option B: trust some tentacled bio-monstrosity to perform sophisticated transaction chains with a ton of misaligned incentives at each layer.
      - redox99 4y ago
        > I don't know how to say this without sounding snide but I am genuinely curious: you need to back every single part of that sentence up with some serious citations. You can check binance and other sites that offer P2P listings and you'll find that most of the listings nowadays trade stablecoins. I can't easily cite that for F2F (face to face) but I have done F2F trades many times and it's always with stablecoins > Specifically can you challenge my perception that you're advocating for option B of the following: Option A: find someone to trade <thing you have> for <thing you want>, haggle, transact. Option B: trust some tentacled bio-monstrosity to perform sophisticated transaction chains with a ton of misaligned incentives at each layer. Option A isn't viable. That's basically barter economy, and the same reasons why people use money instead of barter in the real world apply. You have a thousand+ of different coins/tokens/etc. So that's 1000^2 pairs if you wanted a pair for each combination. Obviously impossible. So before stablecoins existed, BTC was the crypto that everything had a pair with. You would buy BTC and then trade that to something else. But with stablecoins most people moved to that because you don't have the volatility that BTC has. > Option B: trust some tentacled bio-monstrosity to perform sophisticated transaction chains with a ton of misaligned incentives at each layer. I don't know what you mean exactly by that loaded statement. But CeX are extremely simple in the way they operate. Of course the problem is if they are doing something not legit. DeX such as uniswap are a bit more complex but not that complex really. To put things into perspective, what do people do? A) Buy AAPL through NASDAQ (with a broker as an intermediary) using dollars B) Trade AAPL for WMT over the counter Of course A. B would be not only extremely situational, but also impossible unless you are really big investor.
- majani 4y ago
  I wouldn't call it the end, but it would set crypto prices back 5-10 years
- zarzavat 4y ago
  > The vast majority of alt-coins cannot be exchanged against dollars and have a value only if they can be traded against USDT or other stablecoins. Even in a hypothetical world without any stablecoins at all (which is different from a world without Tether), fiat-less exchanges could still exist: just exchange fiat for btc or eth, and then btc or eth for altcoins. Altcoins existed long before stablecoins.
- DickingAround 4y ago
  I can't wait for Tether to fail. These 'stable coins' are just waiting for disaster; how many times have we tried to tie asset prices together, or tried to make a paper version of something else where there wasn't clear 1:1 relationship... it always ends in disaster. Better have that done away with sooner than later. There is no way that will break Bitcoin; the network will keep running. And if bitcoin's fiat-price was too high because Tether existed, better to resolve that now as well.
nathias 4y ago
Do you think the tech disappears when Bitcoin goes below some magical threshold?
- highwaylights 4y ago
  No, the code still sticks around, useless as it ever was for almost everything that was boasted of it.
- akmarinov 4y ago
  No one cares about the tech if people won’t put money into it anymore.
- cuteboy19 4y ago
  It was fascinating 10 years ago but useless all along.
  - nathias 4y ago
    how is it useless if I've been using it for 10 years?
silisili 4y ago
Here's hoping. When stocks tank, one can decide if a company is undervalued and decide whether to buy in. Bitcoin has no value other than speculation, so it's a hard ask for people to buy in as it's never technically undervalued...
- lrvick 4y ago
  Bitcoin has value for the same reason Visa has value. A medium of exchange is a tool, and tools people use have value. I grant the majority of the market is speculation but many of us actually regularly use Bitcoin for things like payroll, settling debts, cheap international value transfer, buying coffee, and for cash-like privacy for online purchases. For those like me that have been continually buying, saving, and spending bitcoin for a decade, vs simply speculating, dollar cost averaging kicks in. Even 300% price swings do not matter all that much in the long run. Those that go all-in short term looking to gamble get wrecked, but that is often the case in trading. Bitcoin will be healthier when the short term traders are forced out.
  - igorkraw 4y ago
    Using this logic, we can value 1 bitcoin at 7/1700* 442billion /21 million = 87$ (Bitcoin Tps divided by Visa TPS times first visa market cap I found divided by number of Bitcoins ). Except if course, if you buy a piece of visa, you get a dividend and legal rights, while owning a Bitcoin gets you the privilege of paying miners to extract that value. So really, that 7/1700*442e9 $ is the value of those who own the network (the miners), not the users.
    - lrvick 4y ago
      The miners have no incentive to mine unless there are a large number of people choosing to exchange Bitcoin giving it buying power to offset electricity cost.
      - igorkraw 4y ago
        So you are saying there is no value to be extracted? Shocking
benj111 4y ago
While I appreciate that's somewhat psychologically important, I don't think it's magically going to drop to zero now.
- highwaylights 4y ago
  Probably not, but the myth that trees grow to the sky is the only reason 99% of the money that bought into this did so. A year ago the internet was non-stop jokes about how much it outperformed the S&P 500 year over year. It’s now underperformed it by 75% since the previous peak. The myth has been completely shattered.
- dzogchen 4y ago
  It's not going to 'magically' drop to zero. It is going to drop to zero.
  - lrvick 4y ago
    It will never drop to 0, barring no fundamental security flaws are discovered, because there will always be people like me that are never willing to sell and always willing to buy more. If it hits $1, I will just stock up. Traders getting out is good for me. I am in Bitcoin, or any really viable replacement that emerges, long term for reasons fickle speculators do not care about. I fundamentally believe a healthy society needs a reasonably private, international, censorship resistant, and open source financial system that works over the internet. I see such a thing as having more -real- value than the US dollar that a small number of people can print more of at any time for political reasons.
    - kgwgk 4y ago
      > Traders getting out is good for me. Say everyone gets out except you. You own all the bitcoins in the world. Now what?
      - lekevicius 4y ago
        Assuming the node network and mining remains intact... now you own a pretty valuable and difficult to replicate infrastructure. At least some people will want to own the "native token" of that network.
herbst 4y ago
I may sound overly optimistic however crypto is still the most easy and often cheapest way to transfer money. I work in a weird field credit card providers don't like to work with. The only real international solution is Crypto, everything else are more local solutions with their own issues. Even thought I am losing money every day, I don't see any other solution to my, and some others, businesses.
- sentirism 4y ago
  I think we are just in a golden period like the 1920s before May 1, 1933 when gold was confiscated. Central bank digital currency seems inevitable. I imagine in the far future there will be central bank digital currency and illegal crypto currency that facilitates black market transactions. Crypto holders will be smeared in narratives as drug traffickers and criminals. At some point there will be risk outside of volatility with holding crypto. I just can't see how things evolve any other way. The digital Yuan is going to be incredibly tough competition for the West that I don't see how a renegade non-central bank digital currency does not eventually come to be seen as counterfeit.
  - herbst 4y ago
    I guess it depends. Crypto in my country doesn't have such a negative attitude. Some places allow you to pay your taxes in crypto, our main Amazon competitor is accepting crypto for years now, even our 'old people paper magazin shop' accepts crypto. In Switzerland you have banking privacy, no or high cash limits, you can privately buy a new car in cash without anyone raising an eye brow. Crypto isn't actually a real danger when your whole society is based on monetary freedom.
scoopertrooper 4y ago
> Considering Bitcoin had never fallen lower than a previous cycles ATH (All Time High) until now, who is thinking that this might be a sign of the end of crypto? This sounds like just another one of those synthetic signposts people create around crypto. It's just a pattern. It has no particular significance; beyond the fact that if enough people believe in it, then it might influence their actions in a way that moves the market. My favourite was that people were going around saying the cost of mining Bitcoin served as a floor to the market. As though the miners would (somehow) stop the price going down when it became unprofitable for them to mine. More likely, they'd just stop their mining activities and move onto something more lucrative.
- moffkalast 4y ago
  It's also worth pointing out that Bitcoin was created after the last major crash in 2008, there's no precedent for its behaviour in the current one. Ironically it was also made as a hedge against the existing financial systems, but eventually became just an extension of them. Became "the very thing it swore to destroy".
- nappy-doo 4y ago
  The arbitrary signposts are because the only way to look at Bitcoin is with technical analysis and looking at the graph. There are no earnings releases, press releases, or business conditions to discuss. We can only look at the price, and speculate. (NB: speculate, not invest.)
  - datadata 4y ago
    There is of course news that matters to bitcoin and impacts the price. When China banned bitcoin, one would expect price to go down. When Tesla bought bitcoin, price should go up. By your argument all commodities would also fall into the same camp.
Grimburger 4y ago
> the end of crypto How do you propose to replace the $100bn online drug market?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- lamontcg 4y ago
  That question can't prop up a liquidity crisis. If everyone runs for the exits then crypto suffers an old fashioned bank run, and it doesn't matter if it has any intrinsic value. A bank suffering a run still has loans on the books that are being paid back, but it has a cash crisis and people can't withdraw. A systemic failure starts knocking over institutions one by one as they each hit a liquidity crunch and don't have cash. Once the music stops playing everyone tries to grab some of the remaining chairs and get out. If all the cash is removed from the system and there's still billions in demand trying to exit while there's only a trickle of people trying to catch a falling knife, then it is going to overshoot and unwind to very nearly zero. The reason why we have things like FDIC, is to prevent things like this, but crypto decided that was all old fashioned thinking. As a result, crypto is buttressed only by some billionaires who are true-believers in it, and if it only takes a few billion here or there then they may produce a bailout package for the system. If not, then the system will fail.
  - Grimburger 4y ago
    > crypto suffers an old fashioned bank run Any half decent exchange in a western country that holds them to account has over 100% of customer assets, they don't get special rules like banks who only need a few % of customer deposits. Bank runs aren't really possible unless there is corporate fraud happening.
yieldcrv 4y ago
Bitcoin hit $3,000 like 2 years ago, just trade my guy! I love the volatility in digital commodities, its like seasonal commodities every year except with way greater amplitude and traders that treat it like forever-up equities The origin of “hodl” was a drunk guy languishing that he couldnt trade well > Yeah you good traders can spot the highs and the lows pit pat piffy wing wong wang just like that and make a millino bucks sure no problem bro. Likewise the weak hands are like OH NO IT'S GOING DOWN I'M GONNA SELL he he he and then they're like OH GOD MY ASSHOLE when the SMART traders who KNOW WHAT THE FUCK THEY'RE DOING buy back in but you know what? I'm not part of that group. Just trade my guy. Nobody has to ever make an opinion on the asset class’ utility, only liquidity. Know your risk and accept the consequences. I’m very keen on this shakeout, the money is barely exiting the market its still in the stablecoins ($200bn+) and ready to pounce into any other crypto in the matter of any single block. Even if those implode too, good! Shake it out! I love 1,000% swings that dont have an expiration date, I still dont know another market to do that, especially randomly on a weekend. That was happening before hedge funds with LPs that are QE beneficiaries got into this space, and will happen after.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
timmg 4y ago
Does anyone know what price it needs to drop to to no longer pay for mining? Like with the most efficient rigs? (Particularly with energy prices going up.)
- petertodd 4y ago
  Mining difficulty adjusts automatically. There is a price at which Bitcoin is no longer secure from the entity willing to spend the most money to 51% attack it. But there's no good way to know how big that threat is. Most likely Bitcoin has a significant safety margin there (I'd take a rough guess at >100x).
- physicsguy 4y ago
  I read in the FT this morning that it’s about $16000 in electricity costs to mine a bitcoin at the moment
lamontcg 4y ago
> who is thinking that this might be a sign of the end of crypto? I think some billionaires may still be able to bail it out, I'm about 50-50 it dies. > Tether collapsing in the next couple weeks will likely put Bitcoin under $10,000 I kind of doubt this happens, I think Tether is fundamentally structured differently than Terra/Luna and is all debt-based and won't face a run on the bank until crypto is basically a smoking hole in the ground. Everyone wants Tether to implode to take out crypto, but I think it is the other way around. The Tether redemptions though are signs that the underlying value of the collateral (crypto) has gone below thresholds, and the redemptions withdraw liquidity that was causing inflation in the price. Something else is likely to pop though, and eventually one of the really big exchanges is going to go under. Coinbase going full MtGox or something like that.

iLoveOncall 4y ago

Tether collapsing would have a far larger effect than putting BTC to 10K, it would probably be the end of crypto. The vast majority of alt-coins cannot be exchanged against dollars and have a value only if they can be traded against USDT or other stablecoins.

rvz 4y ago
> Tether collapsing would have a far larger effect than putting BTC to 10K, it would probably be the end of crypto. Tether isn't the only stablecoin out there. Tether collapsing is basically the end of Tether and will send BTC below 10K and will take the others with them. It won't be the end of crypto due to this as there are other coins (not tokens) out there that are compliant (ISO 20020), have a use case and will survive this crash, but I expect the majority of useless memecoins, tokens, etc to be wiped out.
- iLoveOncall 4y ago
  > Tether isn't the only stablecoin out there. The end of Tether will be the end of stablecoins, just like ICOs ended completely at some point.
zdkl 4y ago
> The vast majority of alt-coins cannot be exchanged against dollars I mean. You could, like, sell them on a forum or in person. With your wallet which is supposed to enable you to do just that. I admire the success of crypto-exchanges' marketing in making them out to be the only way to conduct transactions on a friggin transaction management system. But then you'd have to deal with the fact that next to no one wants to organically trade <random myriad of altcoins/tokens>. I for one rejoice about the upcoming altcoin extinction event.
- redox99 4y ago
  What you are saying is kind of orthogonal. Nowadays you can and people do indeed sell crypto in person, and using your wallet. But you use a stablecoin because it's much more convenient since its stable. Then with such stablecoin you have purchased, you swap it for your desired altcoin either on a centralized exchange or decentralized exchange. I don't agree with the other comment that the USDT/Altcoin pair is such a big deal. If USDT became even less desired, other stablecoins pair would appear and surpass USDT pairs in volume.
  - zdkl 4y ago
    > But you use a stablecoin because it's much more convenient since its stable. I don't know how to say this without sounding snide but I am genuinely curious: you need to back every single part of that sentence up with some serious citations. Specifically can you challenge my perception that you're advocating for option B of the following: Option A: find someone to trade <thing you have> for <thing you want>, haggle, transact. Option B: trust some tentacled bio-monstrosity to perform sophisticated transaction chains with a ton of misaligned incentives at each layer.
    - redox99 4y ago
      > I don't know how to say this without sounding snide but I am genuinely curious: you need to back every single part of that sentence up with some serious citations. You can check binance and other sites that offer P2P listings and you'll find that most of the listings nowadays trade stablecoins. I can't easily cite that for F2F (face to face) but I have done F2F trades many times and it's always with stablecoins > Specifically can you challenge my perception that you're advocating for option B of the following: Option A: find someone to trade <thing you have> for <thing you want>, haggle, transact. Option B: trust some tentacled bio-monstrosity to perform sophisticated transaction chains with a ton of misaligned incentives at each layer. Option A isn't viable. That's basically barter economy, and the same reasons why people use money instead of barter in the real world apply. You have a thousand+ of different coins/tokens/etc. So that's 1000^2 pairs if you wanted a pair for each combination. Obviously impossible. So before stablecoins existed, BTC was the crypto that everything had a pair with. You would buy BTC and then trade that to something else. But with stablecoins most people moved to that because you don't have the volatility that BTC has. > Option B: trust some tentacled bio-monstrosity to perform sophisticated transaction chains with a ton of misaligned incentives at each layer. I don't know what you mean exactly by that loaded statement. But CeX are extremely simple in the way they operate. Of course the problem is if they are doing something not legit. DeX such as uniswap are a bit more complex but not that complex really. To put things into perspective, what do people do? A) Buy AAPL through NASDAQ (with a broker as an intermediary) using dollars B) Trade AAPL for WMT over the counter Of course A. B would be not only extremely situational, but also impossible unless you are really big investor.
majani 4y ago
I wouldn't call it the end, but it would set crypto prices back 5-10 years
zarzavat 4y ago
> The vast majority of alt-coins cannot be exchanged against dollars and have a value only if they can be traded against USDT or other stablecoins. Even in a hypothetical world without any stablecoins at all (which is different from a world without Tether), fiat-less exchanges could still exist: just exchange fiat for btc or eth, and then btc or eth for altcoins. Altcoins existed long before stablecoins.
DickingAround 4y ago
I can't wait for Tether to fail. These 'stable coins' are just waiting for disaster; how many times have we tried to tie asset prices together, or tried to make a paper version of something else where there wasn't clear 1:1 relationship... it always ends in disaster. Better have that done away with sooner than later. There is no way that will break Bitcoin; the network will keep running. And if bitcoin's fiat-price was too high because Tether existed, better to resolve that now as well.

nathias 4y ago

Do you think the tech disappears when Bitcoin goes below some magical threshold?

highwaylights 4y ago
No, the code still sticks around, useless as it ever was for almost everything that was boasted of it.
akmarinov 4y ago
No one cares about the tech if people won’t put money into it anymore.
cuteboy19 4y ago
It was fascinating 10 years ago but useless all along.
- nathias 4y ago
  how is it useless if I've been using it for 10 years?

silisili 4y ago

Here's hoping. When stocks tank, one can decide if a company is undervalued and decide whether to buy in. Bitcoin has no value other than speculation, so it's a hard ask for people to buy in as it's never technically undervalued...

lrvick 4y ago
Bitcoin has value for the same reason Visa has value. A medium of exchange is a tool, and tools people use have value. I grant the majority of the market is speculation but many of us actually regularly use Bitcoin for things like payroll, settling debts, cheap international value transfer, buying coffee, and for cash-like privacy for online purchases. For those like me that have been continually buying, saving, and spending bitcoin for a decade, vs simply speculating, dollar cost averaging kicks in. Even 300% price swings do not matter all that much in the long run. Those that go all-in short term looking to gamble get wrecked, but that is often the case in trading. Bitcoin will be healthier when the short term traders are forced out.
- igorkraw 4y ago
  Using this logic, we can value 1 bitcoin at 7/1700* 442billion /21 million = 87$ (Bitcoin Tps divided by Visa TPS times first visa market cap I found divided by number of Bitcoins ). Except if course, if you buy a piece of visa, you get a dividend and legal rights, while owning a Bitcoin gets you the privilege of paying miners to extract that value. So really, that 7/1700*442e9 $ is the value of those who own the network (the miners), not the users.
  - lrvick 4y ago
    The miners have no incentive to mine unless there are a large number of people choosing to exchange Bitcoin giving it buying power to offset electricity cost.
    - igorkraw 4y ago
      So you are saying there is no value to be extracted? Shocking

benj111 4y ago

While I appreciate that's somewhat psychologically important, I don't think it's magically going to drop to zero now.

highwaylights 4y ago
Probably not, but the myth that trees grow to the sky is the only reason 99% of the money that bought into this did so. A year ago the internet was non-stop jokes about how much it outperformed the S&P 500 year over year. It’s now underperformed it by 75% since the previous peak. The myth has been completely shattered.
dzogchen 4y ago
It's not going to 'magically' drop to zero. It is going to drop to zero.
- lrvick 4y ago
  It will never drop to 0, barring no fundamental security flaws are discovered, because there will always be people like me that are never willing to sell and always willing to buy more. If it hits $1, I will just stock up. Traders getting out is good for me. I am in Bitcoin, or any really viable replacement that emerges, long term for reasons fickle speculators do not care about. I fundamentally believe a healthy society needs a reasonably private, international, censorship resistant, and open source financial system that works over the internet. I see such a thing as having more -real- value than the US dollar that a small number of people can print more of at any time for political reasons.
  - kgwgk 4y ago
    > Traders getting out is good for me. Say everyone gets out except you. You own all the bitcoins in the world. Now what?
    - lekevicius 4y ago
      Assuming the node network and mining remains intact... now you own a pretty valuable and difficult to replicate infrastructure. At least some people will want to own the "native token" of that network.

herbst 4y ago

I may sound overly optimistic however crypto is still the most easy and often cheapest way to transfer money. I work in a weird field credit card providers don't like to work with. The only real international solution is Crypto, everything else are more local solutions with their own issues. Even thought I am losing money every day, I don't see any other solution to my, and some others, businesses.

sentirism 4y ago
I think we are just in a golden period like the 1920s before May 1, 1933 when gold was confiscated. Central bank digital currency seems inevitable. I imagine in the far future there will be central bank digital currency and illegal crypto currency that facilitates black market transactions. Crypto holders will be smeared in narratives as drug traffickers and criminals. At some point there will be risk outside of volatility with holding crypto. I just can't see how things evolve any other way. The digital Yuan is going to be incredibly tough competition for the West that I don't see how a renegade non-central bank digital currency does not eventually come to be seen as counterfeit.
- herbst 4y ago
  I guess it depends. Crypto in my country doesn't have such a negative attitude. Some places allow you to pay your taxes in crypto, our main Amazon competitor is accepting crypto for years now, even our 'old people paper magazin shop' accepts crypto. In Switzerland you have banking privacy, no or high cash limits, you can privately buy a new car in cash without anyone raising an eye brow. Crypto isn't actually a real danger when your whole society is based on monetary freedom.

scoopertrooper 4y ago

> Considering Bitcoin had never fallen lower than a previous cycles ATH (All Time High) until now, who is thinking that this might be a sign of the end of crypto? This sounds like just another one of those synthetic signposts people create around crypto. It's just a pattern. It has no particular significance; beyond the fact that if enough people believe in it, then it might influence their actions in a way that moves the market. My favourite was that people were going around saying the cost of mining Bitcoin served as a floor to the market. As though the miners would (somehow) stop the price going down when it became unprofitable for them to mine. More likely, they'd just stop their mining activities and move onto something more lucrative.

moffkalast 4y ago
It's also worth pointing out that Bitcoin was created after the last major crash in 2008, there's no precedent for its behaviour in the current one. Ironically it was also made as a hedge against the existing financial systems, but eventually became just an extension of them. Became "the very thing it swore to destroy".
nappy-doo 4y ago
The arbitrary signposts are because the only way to look at Bitcoin is with technical analysis and looking at the graph. There are no earnings releases, press releases, or business conditions to discuss. We can only look at the price, and speculate. (NB: speculate, not invest.)
- datadata 4y ago
  There is of course news that matters to bitcoin and impacts the price. When China banned bitcoin, one would expect price to go down. When Tesla bought bitcoin, price should go up. By your argument all commodities would also fall into the same camp.

Grimburger 4y ago

> the end of crypto How do you propose to replace the $100bn online drug market?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
lamontcg 4y ago
That question can't prop up a liquidity crisis. If everyone runs for the exits then crypto suffers an old fashioned bank run, and it doesn't matter if it has any intrinsic value. A bank suffering a run still has loans on the books that are being paid back, but it has a cash crisis and people can't withdraw. A systemic failure starts knocking over institutions one by one as they each hit a liquidity crunch and don't have cash. Once the music stops playing everyone tries to grab some of the remaining chairs and get out. If all the cash is removed from the system and there's still billions in demand trying to exit while there's only a trickle of people trying to catch a falling knife, then it is going to overshoot and unwind to very nearly zero. The reason why we have things like FDIC, is to prevent things like this, but crypto decided that was all old fashioned thinking. As a result, crypto is buttressed only by some billionaires who are true-believers in it, and if it only takes a few billion here or there then they may produce a bailout package for the system. If not, then the system will fail.
- Grimburger 4y ago
  > crypto suffers an old fashioned bank run Any half decent exchange in a western country that holds them to account has over 100% of customer assets, they don't get special rules like banks who only need a few % of customer deposits. Bank runs aren't really possible unless there is corporate fraud happening.

yieldcrv 4y ago

Bitcoin hit $3,000 like 2 years ago, just trade my guy! I love the volatility in digital commodities, its like seasonal commodities every year except with way greater amplitude and traders that treat it like forever-up equities The origin of “hodl” was a drunk guy languishing that he couldnt trade well > Yeah you good traders can spot the highs and the lows pit pat piffy wing wong wang just like that and make a millino bucks sure no problem bro. Likewise the weak hands are like OH NO IT'S GOING DOWN I'M GONNA SELL he he he and then they're like OH GOD MY ASSHOLE when the SMART traders who KNOW WHAT THE FUCK THEY'RE DOING buy back in but you know what? I'm not part of that group. Just trade my guy. Nobody has to ever make an opinion on the asset class’ utility, only liquidity. Know your risk and accept the consequences. I’m very keen on this shakeout, the money is barely exiting the market its still in the stablecoins ($200bn+) and ready to pounce into any other crypto in the matter of any single block. Even if those implode too, good! Shake it out! I love 1,000% swings that dont have an expiration date, I still dont know another market to do that, especially randomly on a weekend. That was happening before hedge funds with LPs that are QE beneficiaries got into this space, and will happen after.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

timmg 4y ago

Does anyone know what price it needs to drop to to no longer pay for mining? Like with the most efficient rigs? (Particularly with energy prices going up.)

petertodd 4y ago
Mining difficulty adjusts automatically. There is a price at which Bitcoin is no longer secure from the entity willing to spend the most money to 51% attack it. But there's no good way to know how big that threat is. Most likely Bitcoin has a significant safety margin there (I'd take a rough guess at >100x).
physicsguy 4y ago
I read in the FT this morning that it’s about $16000 in electricity costs to mine a bitcoin at the moment

lamontcg 4y ago

> who is thinking that this might be a sign of the end of crypto? I think some billionaires may still be able to bail it out, I'm about 50-50 it dies. > Tether collapsing in the next couple weeks will likely put Bitcoin under $10,000 I kind of doubt this happens, I think Tether is fundamentally structured differently than Terra/Luna and is all debt-based and won't face a run on the bank until crypto is basically a smoking hole in the ground. Everyone wants Tether to implode to take out crypto, but I think it is the other way around. The Tether redemptions though are signs that the underlying value of the collateral (crypto) has gone below thresholds, and the redemptions withdraw liquidity that was causing inflation in the price. Something else is likely to pop though, and eventually one of the really big exchanges is going to go under. Coinbase going full MtGox or something like that.