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I haven’t paid any serious attention to crypto-type markets in a while but historically BTC/USDT was a pretty good number to look at if you could only look at o
by benreesman 3y ago
I haven’t paid any serious attention to crypto-type markets in a while but historically BTC/USDT was a pretty good number to look at if you could only look at one and it’s (glances)…whoa back above 30k? That’s not like peak tulip or even close but historically like, high-ish I think. I don’t particularly feel like reading the entrails of the crypto chicken at the moment so I’m going to assume that the crypto market (including the perpetual futures and stuff where Binance makes the big bucks) isn’t lying in ruins. I’m sure someone will let me know if that’s way off.
8 thousand people is not a lot for a company doing trillions of dollars of transactions in dozens of countries most which have at least some regulation. That would be a lot if they were all engineers and quants, but even there, an electronic stock market is a tricky little devil to build and operate.
So is this a bad outlook for crypto, a serious setback in the various regulatory battles, or just another brick in the wall of what is increasing looking like Don’t Poach Gate 2.0? (Sorry Bond Villains, the kids were going to hear about that eventually.)
- davidgerard 3y agonumber is one thing, but volume is through the floor
- MuffinFlavored 3y agoHow much is it down % wise compared to what period previously?
- davidgerard 3y agosolid numbers are sometimes not so easy to find - you should presume that any number in crypto that could be faked is being faked - but there's clearly been a serious decline. Coinbase reveals in 10-K and 10-Q filings how it's lost over 75% of retail customers, i.e. the guys who supply the scarce actual dollars to crypto. CoinDesk has been running regular articles on how it's down, e.g. * https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2023/07/05/crypto-trading-volumes-rise-for-first-time-in-3-months-amid-etf-optimism/ https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2023/07/05/crypto-trading-v... - "Still, spot trading volumes remain at historically low levels. Spot trading volume in the second quarter was the lowest since Q4 2019, according to the report." * https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2023/06/15/crypto-trading-volumes-drop-in-q2-to-yearly-lows/ https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2023/06/15/crypto-trading-v... - "Average daily volumes for the second quarter of 2023 were $10 billion for the top 10 tokens (excluding stablecoins), compared to $18 billion average daily volumes in the first quarter of the year." this is important, because a thin market means the price is more easily fakeable. The TrueUSD stablecoin seems to have lost its backing recently, but simultaneously with that Binance somehow printed $2b worth of TrueUSD. What could you do to the bitcoin price if you had $2b of fake money to do it with?
- automatic6131 3y agoHi David! I love your blog and your twitter
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jasmer 3y agoThe price of all crypto is managed. All exchanges have a huge % of wash trading to hold up prices, and insiders with giant ownership stakes manipulate markets. All exchanges are either a scam, or 'implicitly colluding' with shady things. BTC is ironically not a very free market in that sense, moreover, because nobody needs it for anything, it has a buy-hold characteristic. If people needed BTC for things (which would force some liquidity ops) then we'd see a price that reflected something. Crypto markets are essentially 'schemes' of one kind or another, they serve no purpose other than to be a hustle. If people want to play dumb games, that's fine, as long as they are doing it legally and it doesn't rope in a lot of external players.
- ceejayoz 3y agoPrecisely this. It's like being pleased about the value of your Madoff holdings. Looks great, on paper, until too many people try to cash out at once.
- pfisch 3y agoI mean you could say that about any stock or bank. If everyone tries to cash out it goes to 0.
- pid-1 3y agoStocks have value because they are cash flow generating assets, so if you sell low enough it will make economic sense for someone to buy, except for some liquidity catastrophe.
- MicropenisMike 3y agoWhat about commodities then, like oil? It was not too long ago that the price for a barrel of oil was negative $40.
- pid-1 3y agoOil is a regular good that is priced according to supply and demand expectations. Goods can have negative prices due sharp drops in demand (a lot of X was produced, but no one wants to buy x and you are paying to store it).
- tippytippytango 3y agobitcoin and crypto have long since parted ways, they are different things now. even from a regulatory perspective bitcoin is the only one that has clarity being defined as a commodity and not a security, everything else is in a grey area
- meowkit 3y agoThis isn't accurate. BTC has the best legal argument for being treated as a commodity, but there has been no legislative decision on this. The CTFC sees BTC and ETH as commodities. Gensler pre-SEC said BTC, ETC, and LTC are commodities. The SEC and Gensler post-SEC says they are all securities, except maybe BTC. The Ripple decision (Yesterday) says that unless a crypto is contractually sold to an investor (e.g. not directly listed via an exchange) then its doesn't fall under the Howey test. https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-judge-says-sec-lawsuit-vs-ripple-labs-can-proceed-trial-some-claims-2023-07-13/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-judge-says-sec-lawsuit-vs-r...
- tippytippytango 3y agothanks for clearing that up
- spaceman_2020 3y agoThe SEC just lost its case against Ripple, so I don’t know what’s happening on the regulatory front.
- raesene9 3y agoIt didn't lose the whole case, it lost certain summary judgement issues, and prevailed on others, the real case there is still to come. It was overall a bit of a win for ripple but far from the end of the game.
- treyd 3y agoThe ruling published yesterday was just summary judgements which can be appealed. The actual trial hasn't even happened yet.
- monero-xmr 3y agoThe trial isn’t interesting. The summary judgment says it’s legal to sell cryptocurrencies if you do so anonymously on retail exchanges, and the tokens also are not securities. Very interesting outcome. The appeals are likely to fail from my reading of various analyses.
- ac29 3y ago> The summary judgment says it’s legal to sell cryptocurrencies if you do so anonymously on retail exchanges, and the tokens also are not securities. This is a misrepresentation. The ruling says some specific XRP sales by Ripple via exchanges were not investment contracts. It does not say they are not securities, nor does it say that it is broadly "legal to sell cryptocurrencies" on exchanges.
- monero-xmr 3y agoHead of legal for Coinbase disagrees with you: https://twitter.com/iampaulgrewal/status/1679962578808709122?s=46&t=rj0k1HNugWNJfCGKyfSjQg https://twitter.com/iampaulgrewal/status/1679962578808709122...
- acaloiar 3y agoEverything you need to know about crypto today can be found at https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ https://web3isgoinggreat.com/
- vorticalbox 3y ago> and is definitely not an enormous grift that's pouring lighter fluid on our already smoldering planet. This is actually a worry i have about in regards to crypto, the BTC network uses a staggering amount of power. Ai is next of my power hungry worry list.
- nkuttler 3y ago> the BTC network uses a staggering amount of power Actually, bitcoin uses a ridiculously small amount of power for what it provides. See for example here https://www.lynalden.com/bitcoin-energy/ https://www.lynalden.com/bitcoin-energy/ for an introduction to clear up this misconception.
- the_gastropod 3y agoThis article is basically like arguing: “Sure, using the Infant-Chipper 9000 results in the deaths of infants. But it’s a rounding error if you consider how many infants die in the world every year!” Bitcoin purposefully wastes lots of energy to provide something of extremely dubious value.
- willcipriano 3y agoIt's literally an infant chipper insofar as it enables the sale of (and thus the production of) CSAM.
- ardme 3y agoYet obviously, some people find it useful. Who are you to tell people how to live their lives? Maybe you should stop flying on airplanes for the rest of your life?
- bardak 3y agoFrom my view there is room for sustainable crypto businesses but they get crowed out by the big unsustainable crypto businesses that were entirely relying on huge gains in price. That being said whatever practical uses there are for crypto is entirely detached from the value of crypto.
- RestlessMind 3y agoThe biggest practical use for crypto (specifically Bitcoin, as a store of value) is entirely dependent on the value of crypto.
- spamizbad 3y agoJust speculating, but I imagine BTC does well because there's way less competition sloshing around in the crypto world these days. The NFT craze is over, 20 ultra-hyped crypto coins aren't being launched every second, there's fewer (illegal) securities floating around. So if you want to be in crypto, but things are scary, and you're looking for something safe? It's Bitcoin.
- JeremyNT 3y agoIt's bizarre to me too. I think there must be some seriously big holders doing wash trading to prop things up on paper. Anecdotally, all of the normies I know of who were really "into crypto" during the pandemic are coming around to thinking of the whole thing as a shark pit full of scams. There can't be that much new blood out there left to recruit to the pyramid at this point.
- simple-thoughts 3y agoThere’s been a lot of advancements during this bear market (which is the longest bear market in crypto history). Most of the interesting advances have been along the decentralized application front, although there’s also been a lot of more fundamental advances as well. For instance Bitcoin now has ordinals that allow the inscription of altcoins and nfts on the chain. The more interesting applications are not on Bitcoin since the block time is too slow and expense is too high for the general public. Applications that have seen major technical advancements since 2020 include identity, gaming, money markets, trade routing, anti fraud, derivatives, concentrated liquidity, token launchpads, smart nfts, social media, and cross chain communication. My opinion is that of these blockchain gaming will likely be the most successful in the next bull cycle. Axie and cryptokitties from the previous cycle were extremely limited and unfun, with axie also having issues with design centralization that led to the huge North Korean hack. These issues will probably still exist but there are now technical solutions.