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Bitcoin slumps below key $20k threshold
- dotcoma 4y agoNow what? It’s still a lot of money for a bunch of useless 1s and 0s…
- Hellion 4y agoWhile I’m not a fan of cryptocurrency… cash is just colored paper, why don’t you give it all to me :)
- brianwawok 4y agoI can pay my real estate tax with cash. I can go to the store and buy food with cash. What can I do with crypto? Maybe exchange it for cash if I’m lucky and willing to pay a high fee?
- robcohen 4y agoBy that logic, gold and silver are also useless. Edit: I was not saying gold and silver have no use, I was saying the argument that usefulness is dictated by whether you can use something to pay a mortgage is spurious. Also, to all the people who say "what about X use of gold, crypto can't do that". Obviously that's true. However the vast majority of value in gold has little to do with its applications, it has to do with its scarcity. 9% of gold demand is driven by technology. [https://www.gold.org/about-gold/gold-demand https://www.gold.org/about-gold/gold-demand]
- nequo 4y agoYou can make fake teeth and cutlery out of gold and silver
- philipov 4y agoYou can make really good conductive devices out of gold, and silver is used for high end solder and other things. Both metals have immense industrial value. Crypto is not precious metals, crypto is art bought at a hot auction. Have you framed your hash codes and put them on the wall yet, or do you just keep them in the basement?
- forty 4y agoMy electric devices that are full of gold disagree ;)
- bleakcabal 4y agoBesides being used in jewellery, gold and silver have other practical applications, particularly gold. It's used in electronics, aerospace and medicine among other fields. Industries are interested in buying gold for it's practical applications.
- OJFord 4y agoBut by that definition cash is useless. I'm not a cryptocurrency fan, but I don't think this is a good argument against it, anything people ascribe value to (however dumb one thinks it is) has.. value. If I can swap a bitcoin for $20k then a bitcoin is just as useful as $20k.
- plq 4y agoSure, but the price of gold doesn't really follow industry trends -- it's got more to do with the fact that it's a historical store of value / object of desire for the masses.
- alangibson 4y agoRice and beans have a hell of a lot more utility then silver and gold. The later definitely don't derive their value from utility.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ildon 4y agoNot if you are typing from any kind of device that uses gold in its components, or if you consider any of the uncountable ways in which you can exploit precious metals in the real world
- MrRiddle 4y agoDepending on the county, you can walk into a bank and get cash for your gold coins. In other words, governments are behind it. Good luck doing that with crypto.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- vageli 4y ago> I can pay my real estate tax with cash. I can go to the store and buy food with cash. People in El Salvador can do the same with bitcoin, no?
- el-salvador 4y ago> I can pay my real estate tax with cash. I can go to the store and buy food with cash. There is no real estate tax in El Salvador :) But paying in bitcoin, even in government institutions, is a hit or miss.
- alphabettsy 4y agoMaybe, but in the time it takes to click the button the value may have changed 5%. Doesn’t seem ideal.
- sumedh 4y ago> I can pay my real estate tax with cash. I can go to the store and buy food with cash. Can you do that in Zimbabwe?
- Hellion 4y agoI can buy an array of chemical substances on the internet with cryptocurrency
- sockopen 4y agoI invested a few thousand dollars just before they hit a dollar each. I hoped they would hit $10. It still amazes me they ever hit $100.
- JoeyBananas 4y agoso basically you're rich beyond your wildest dreams now?
- ntoskrnl 4y agoNot if he doesn't sell
- sockopen 4y agoI sold most of it at $100 and the rest of it at $1000. I made less than 2 million, knowing about it since near inception.
- lelanthran 4y ago> so basically you're rich beyond your wildest dreams now? Doubt it. People who've made a thousandfold gain probably think that's the best it is going to do, so they sell. If you bought into BTC at $1, chances are you never held it all the way up to $20k.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- gitfan86 4y agoIn the HBO show Silicon Valley there is a joke about how it is better to be pre-revenue because your valuation is tied to an idea, nothing real. Companies with revenue have P/E ratios, tying them to reality in some way. If Bitcoin is a "store of value" and also " a hedge against inflation" the price in USD could go up to infinity as the dollar goes down in value. Obviously at this point neither of those things are true. It is basically just a poker game. The miners are the casinos taking their percentages and the players are all colluding by talking about how much fun the game is in hopes of getting more people to buy in to the game.
- cardosof 4y agoBitcoin's value will move towards zero as more governments make it illegal, just so they can roll out their own central bank's crypto.
- alangibson 4y agoBitcoins best use case has always been in illegal trade. My guess is it'll retain some value due to use in the drug trades, etc
- cardosof 4y agoDon't forget Ethereum for money laundering through NFT auctions.
- alangibson 4y agoYea, you've gotta have some way to sell your unlicensed securities.
- jl6 4y agoWhat does central bank crypto even mean?
- timbit42 4y agoIt means digital money, controlled by a country's central bank the value of which is tied to the country's fiat currency. Of course it requires cryptography to make it secure, but it's not like Bitcoin which is not centrally controlled and the value of which is not tied to any fiat currency.
- kwertyoowiyop 4y agoI’ll trust the upcoming CCP digital currency more than Bitcoin.
- 4y ago
- graeme 4y agoThe whole space levered up. When Terra Luna and UST blew, it exposed holes in other companines’ balance sheets. These holes are slowly getting exposed and then a new company blows up, triggering ongoing liquidations Leverage sent it up on the way up, now leverage knocks it down as it unwinds If it gets so bad that Tether crumbles then expect an astonishing collapse. Tether’s money printing caused both recent crypto bubbles. They’re the crypto money printer
- sparkie 4y agoAll these money creating schemes highlight the need for a kind of money which nobody can create. I wonder if anybody has come up with a solution to this yet?
- neonnoodle 4y agoI have solved this with my crypto, Zilch. Zilch is pegged to zero, and no Zilch will ever be mined. The filly diluted market cap is zero.
- alangibson 4y agoI hope you're kidding, and I also hope you're totally serious.
- wslh 4y agoYou can always create an NFT connected to Zilch that tries to capture value for your unique collectible.
- alangibson 4y agoI'm creating an NFT for every unique point in the void of outer space. They'll be auctioned off denominated in Zilch.
- jfk13 4y agoSounds a lot like ZeroStableCoin, discussed a few days ago at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31714556 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31714556.
- Erikun 4y agoCan’t read the article, what makes 20 000 a key threshold?
- gonzo41 4y agoEmotion. BTC and others have the gold rush effect on people, so there is enough emotional energy in crypto to match the funds and electrical energy being poured into it. The ride up was an elation and the ride down will be something aswell.
- ulfw 4y agosame as 420 for TSLA stock
- mckirk 4y agoEssentially: The mere symbolism of it. People ascribe a bit more meaning to such 'round' numbers, and since you are in a market with other people that do the same, it actually starts to make sense to see them as important markers at some point. (That's been my personal explanation for it, anyway.)
- yokem55 4y agoIt's roughly what the 2017 all time high was. The meme was that it wouldn't matter at what price you bought your BTC because if you just wait long enough you would eventually be green again. But, with dipping below 20K now, folks that bought at the peak in 2017 would be in the red again.
- dr_zoidberg 4y agoIn march 2020 it dipped as low as 4k[0] and nobody batted an eye. I thought if it stayed there for long enough it'd finally burst, but then the prices soared up to 70k. I'm surprised everyone's acting like it hadn't been down below 20k since 2017. Sure, it wasn't for long, but it did happen in 2020. [0] Before posting I looked it up and what I'm finding is a lowest in 2020 of $4,861.32 for March 12th. I vaguely remember lower numbers, but this is aggregated data, so it might've been lower during the day but that was the closing price or the mean or something. I'm still sticking with the 4k number for quick reference, though you can take it as 5k if you want -- it's still a lot lower than the 20k that's making the news currently.
- eqmvii 4y agoJust unregulated fraud fantasy and hype. It’s been embarrassing to watch this “industry” for the last decade.
- sumedh 4y agoPeople need an alternative to regulated fraud.
- carapace 4y agoSure, but not unregulated fraud, not fraud at all, eh? I've met "normals" that introduced themselves as "in tech" and then revealed that they meant some NFT/crypto scam BS. That's embarrassing. The transistor and the Universal Turing Machine and the Internet were not invented so people could sell each other imaginary pet rocks. I know why they do it: we all would like an easy way to make money using a computer! D'uh! (I count myself very fortunate that I'm good at programming, if I wasn't I'd probably be homeless.) But... there has to be a better way!
- docdeek 4y agoIs the $20K threshold 'key' in any way other than just being a nice round number?
- mudrockbestgirl 4y agoI'll never understand these arbitrary numbers people come up with to write news articles. As if $20k is any more special than $20.313k. Liquidity isn't even concentrated at round numbers. The only key threshold is zero. Like, you know, the thing Tether hopefully converges to.
- eqmvii 4y agoThis one is a little less arbitrary. The community put a lot of stock in the fact that while volatile, bitcoin had never crashed below a major previous peak. As of this morning, that’s no longer true. Still “just” psychology, sure, but the collective impact of that psychology makes the market.
- alangibson 4y agoDoes anyone seriously studying economics seriously make a distinction between market behavior and psychology anymore? It seems like the Homo Economicus rational optimizer idea is dead to all but those ideologically committed.
- wheresmycraisin 4y agoAside from psychology, a lot of people set triggers to sell if it drops below these round numbers. So once it "breaks a barrier" it's likely to go done further than if it breached $20.313k
- roflyear 4y agoAlso algo trading....
- repomies69 4y agoReasons are journalistic. People need explanations and stories. The complexity that real world offers doesn't make a good story, but sounds just boring and doesn't collect clicks.
- dageshi 4y ago
- newobj 4y agoBurn baby burn
- jliptzin 4y agoNothing stopping it from going to $1. Bitcoin is just as functional at $1 as it is at $50k.
- avrionov 4y agoWe still don't know how big is the problem. Here is what happened this week: - Celsius Network suspended withdrawals. The money in the accounts might be gone or they are going to get a significant haircut[1] - Babel Finance suspended withdrawals. - Three Arrows Capital is having troubles. - Finblox limited the withdrawals $40B - 50B are locked in this companies (or more likely gone).