6 ms·

After a brutal stretch, cryptocurrencies are surging

18 points by sowbug 3y ago

PedroBatista 3y ago
[flagged]
- govbankpolice 3y ago
  "No seriously u guys, some people made mistakes but we are totally legit now.." Is that the us government you are quoting? Or maybe the police or I know, it's international bankers! People who reflexively shit on cryptocurrency are amazing, people have no clue what fiat currency is and isnt, and it certainly isnt legit -- yet you believe in the fairy tale that a dozen bankers in a board room can set the price of money for billions of people. Thats the fairy tale you believe in. But dont worry, they are from the government so we know they are here to help... Unbelievable, how many outright lies do you need to be told before you question the government and state lead propaganda?
  - ur-whale 3y ago
    > people have no clue what fiat currency is and isnt No one ever made friend by disturbing the carefully woven set of lies people love to surround themselves with to ensure the harsh reality of the world doesn't come and disturb their little mental comfort. Fiat currencies, religion, deeply held belief that the culture/country they were raised in is the best possible thing in the world, government exists for my benefit ... etc ... endless list of examples.
EternalUsenet 3y ago
Just as a friendly reminder, if you bought any major crypto when Matt Damon told you “Fortune favors the brave”, you’re still technically down on your initial purchase. This is probably the media trying to get some bags pumped.
- EGreg 3y ago
  No, this is the bitcoin halving event coming up in April 2024 and also the Jan announcement of ETFs in USA which open the door to institutional investment. The graph of the price of bitcoin has been going up exponentially since it launched. Every four years starting one year before the halving event it shoots up for a year and then falls: https://www.monochrome.au/research/articles/why-do-people-look-at-bitcoin-s-price-on-a-log-scale https://www.monochrome.au/research/articles/why-do-people-lo...
  - nytesky 3y ago
    You act like this behavior makes sense, but no other asset acts like this, except maybe penny stocks?
    - ur-whale 3y ago
      > no other asset acts like this You say it like it's a bad thing? The fact that Bitcoin behaves like no other asset on the planet is precisely what makes it interesting, worth understanding, and if you can stomach the volatility over sizable stretches of time, worth owning. This was true (although hard to understand back then) on January 3rd 2009, 18:15:05h UTC and still holds true 15 years later.
  - EternalUsenet 3y ago
    The ETF angle makes no sense to me. An ETF is designed to be based against a basket of securities. A bitcoin ETF seems really pointless. Why not just gamble on the token itself? I see this as a means to sucker more retail cash in and have the early adopters of Bitcoin hoover it up. For the record, my statement as of right now is still true. Remember that Bitcoin peaked at nearly 69k a piece and it’s currently at around $42k a piece.
    - deweller 3y ago
      Because IRAs cannot purchase BTC directly.
EGreg 3y ago
I think HN will be the last place to embrace this news. I look forward to reading all the comments about how blockchain is just a bunch of scams that solves nothing. But for those who have an open mind, here is a list of some useful applications: https://intercoin.org/applications https://intercoin.org/applications
- gosub100 3y ago
  "an open mind" to getting rug-pulled?
  - EGreg 3y ago
    How, pray tell, are you getting rugpulled with say Intercoin’s blockchain applications?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- alphabettsy 3y ago
  I don’t recall people saying Blockchain is useless. I do recall people having that sentiment about cryptocurrency, especially as it exists now, which is not precisely the same thing. And for a technology that’s been around so long it’s taking an awful long time to start solving problems at any noteable scale.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - ur-whale 3y ago
    > I don’t recall people saying Blockchain is useless. About half of the natives here have a hard time telling the difference between Crypto, Bitcoin, Blockchain, Web3 and NFTs The moment any of theses words are uttered here, instant skin rash. At this point in time, it's so predictable it's actually quite enjoyable.
- m3kw9 3y ago
riffraff 3y ago
As someone said, we had already started to see the return of the "have fun staying poor" comments. Random media picking up on the hype is the signal you should buy stuff to dump it in a couple of months on other people's FOMO.
nytesky 3y ago
I think for true believers this is dispiriting news; to become an actual currency we use in everyday life its needs to stabilize and stop these wild swings. Find its “true value” and set, stop this wild price discovery process.
- kleene_op 3y ago
  If the true value is speculation, it will never stabilize.
- nicholasbraker 3y ago
  And it needs to be inflationary. But this is "cursing in the church" for the typical right-wing, "liberal" BTC maxi
- ErasticBrub 3y ago
  That doesn't make sense. The value of anything can be volatile if you price it in units of a volatile currency. 1 BTC is still 1 BTC, just as 1 USD is still 1 USD. 1 USD isn't worth the same amount of Argentine pesos as it was yesterday, nor is 1 BTC. If an apple was priced in BTC, you wouldn't care if it was worth a different amount of rupees or ounces of gold yesterday, just as you only care about the dollars and cents on the price tag now. USD is sure as hell not stable. It's unstable by design - it is constantly declining in value as the money printers continue to churn. If you are hoping for a stable BTC-USD then you are hoping for a bizarre and unlikely situation where BTC declines in value at the exact same rate as the USD. I don't understand.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - itsdrewmiller 3y ago
    Come on - there is a difference between mild currency fluctuations and wild swings in value (relative to all other currencies, not just USD). You know it, I know it, GP knows it, and this kind of nitpicking isn’t helpful to anyone. Nobody wants a Zimbabwe dollar currency.
  - 3y ago
Centigonal 3y ago
If retail investors still have fun money to splash on bitcoin, I'm worried more inflation may be in our future.
- gosub100 3y ago
  Or maybe retail investors are more worried about inflation (realizing it's ruining them anyway) and buying BTC as a hedge? (doesn't matter if it is one or not, it's about what they believe)
  - belltaco 3y ago
    Inflation means the Fed will increase interest rates, which means there isn't much money sloshing around for speculators to put into Bitcoin. Which is why BTC went down when inflation was high, and now is going back up after the Fed signaled interest rate cuts next year because inflation is going down. So it doesn't sound anything like an inflation hedge because the demand for it isn't constant. Bitcoin is tracking tech stocks speculation more than being stable during inflation.
    - gosub100 3y ago
      yep, lack of disposable income is why poor people practically never buy drugs. See, the money supply is too tight and they cant borrow, they dont earn anything, so they simply can't pay for drugs or alcohol. This is why low-income segment has the lowest substance abuse percentages ever. /s
      - belltaco 3y ago
        If you give poor drug addicts more money they're going to use that money to buy mroe drugs, so I don't get what you're saying. Prood that BTC is inversely correlated with inflation. https://news.cryptorank.io/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/photo_2022-09-15-11.13.21.jpeg https://news.cryptorank.io/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/photo_...
- cykros 3y ago
tromp 3y ago
> A spot bitcoin ETF would track the price of the cryptocurrency and allow investors to have it in their portfolios through an investment fund, instead of having to shell out over $43,000, or the price at which bitcoin is currently trading. This betrays some big misunderstanding of Bitcoin, which you can buy in quantities much smaller than 1 BTC (technically, as small as 10^-8 BTC). Many people gamble a few hundred dollars on Bitcoin.
- latchkey 3y ago
  Exactly, you can buy any $ amount that you want. Way back in Nov 2020, Paypal opened up crypto transactions and for the hell of it, I bought $100 each of bitcoin and ethereum. I haven't touched it at all. Today, it is worth a combined $742.28. ETH is up 381%, while BTC is up 161%. It has been a fun experiment and I plan to donate it all to charity at some point.
mertd 3y ago
The apparent comfort of the community with Tether is proof for me that crypto is nothing but the greater fool theory playing out over and over until the music really stops for one last time.
- aranchelk 3y ago
  A very small dataset, but people I talked to about Tether (even early on) didn’t trust it. It was just so useful a functionality to have they were willing to use it expecting it to someday fall apart. So the music-stops metaphor is apt, “greater fool theory” I’m not so sure — collectible NFTs? Yeah.
- ur-whale 3y ago
  Complex things must be looked at from many different angles before one can try and draw conclusions about them, Willingly choosing to restrict yourself to one very narrow aspect (tether) of a rich and complex ecosystem such as Bitcoin and deriving a definitive conclusion from that narrow and restrictive point of view is very likely going to lead you to an incorrect outcome. And even if, by miracle, you happen to predict the correct outcome, it'll be by sheer luck, not on the strength of your analysis, thereby lending no credibility whatsoever to your ability to predict things in general.
- ErasticBrub 3y ago
  [dead]
imjonse 3y ago
There's going to be a brain drain and the number of startups that are basically OpenAI API+React is going to plummet.
jnsaff2 3y ago
Twitter nowadays has almost exclusively ads for ‘drops’ and ‘pumps’ and all other kinds of crypto scams.
- latchkey 3y ago
  Indeed, but I wouldn't blame crypto for what Twitter allows for ads. Given all the companies that have pulled out, they have to get revenue from somewhere. I also daily block multiple "hot girls" fake profiles liking my 6 month old tweets.
cykros 3y ago
Had to open this up just to see what year it was from, as it's been true so many times in the past. I guess every cycle brings with it people who weren't around for the last one though. And to think I was told I'd "missed it" when I bought at $140...

18 points by sowbug 3y ago

PedroBatista 3y ago

[flagged]

govbankpolice 3y ago
"No seriously u guys, some people made mistakes but we are totally legit now.." Is that the us government you are quoting? Or maybe the police or I know, it's international bankers! People who reflexively shit on cryptocurrency are amazing, people have no clue what fiat currency is and isnt, and it certainly isnt legit -- yet you believe in the fairy tale that a dozen bankers in a board room can set the price of money for billions of people. Thats the fairy tale you believe in. But dont worry, they are from the government so we know they are here to help... Unbelievable, how many outright lies do you need to be told before you question the government and state lead propaganda?
- ur-whale 3y ago
  > people have no clue what fiat currency is and isnt No one ever made friend by disturbing the carefully woven set of lies people love to surround themselves with to ensure the harsh reality of the world doesn't come and disturb their little mental comfort. Fiat currencies, religion, deeply held belief that the culture/country they were raised in is the best possible thing in the world, government exists for my benefit ... etc ... endless list of examples.

EternalUsenet 3y ago

Just as a friendly reminder, if you bought any major crypto when Matt Damon told you “Fortune favors the brave”, you’re still technically down on your initial purchase. This is probably the media trying to get some bags pumped.

EGreg 3y ago
No, this is the bitcoin halving event coming up in April 2024 and also the Jan announcement of ETFs in USA which open the door to institutional investment. The graph of the price of bitcoin has been going up exponentially since it launched. Every four years starting one year before the halving event it shoots up for a year and then falls: https://www.monochrome.au/research/articles/why-do-people-look-at-bitcoin-s-price-on-a-log-scale https://www.monochrome.au/research/articles/why-do-people-lo...
- nytesky 3y ago
  You act like this behavior makes sense, but no other asset acts like this, except maybe penny stocks?
  - ur-whale 3y ago
    > no other asset acts like this You say it like it's a bad thing? The fact that Bitcoin behaves like no other asset on the planet is precisely what makes it interesting, worth understanding, and if you can stomach the volatility over sizable stretches of time, worth owning. This was true (although hard to understand back then) on January 3rd 2009, 18:15:05h UTC and still holds true 15 years later.
- EternalUsenet 3y ago
  The ETF angle makes no sense to me. An ETF is designed to be based against a basket of securities. A bitcoin ETF seems really pointless. Why not just gamble on the token itself? I see this as a means to sucker more retail cash in and have the early adopters of Bitcoin hoover it up. For the record, my statement as of right now is still true. Remember that Bitcoin peaked at nearly 69k a piece and it’s currently at around $42k a piece.
  - deweller 3y ago
    Because IRAs cannot purchase BTC directly.

EGreg 3y ago

I think HN will be the last place to embrace this news. I look forward to reading all the comments about how blockchain is just a bunch of scams that solves nothing. But for those who have an open mind, here is a list of some useful applications: https://intercoin.org/applications https://intercoin.org/applications

gosub100 3y ago
"an open mind" to getting rug-pulled?
- EGreg 3y ago
  How, pray tell, are you getting rugpulled with say Intercoin’s blockchain applications?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
alphabettsy 3y ago
I don’t recall people saying Blockchain is useless. I do recall people having that sentiment about cryptocurrency, especially as it exists now, which is not precisely the same thing. And for a technology that’s been around so long it’s taking an awful long time to start solving problems at any noteable scale.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- ur-whale 3y ago
  > I don’t recall people saying Blockchain is useless. About half of the natives here have a hard time telling the difference between Crypto, Bitcoin, Blockchain, Web3 and NFTs The moment any of theses words are uttered here, instant skin rash. At this point in time, it's so predictable it's actually quite enjoyable.
m3kw9 3y ago

riffraff 3y ago

As someone said, we had already started to see the return of the "have fun staying poor" comments. Random media picking up on the hype is the signal you should buy stuff to dump it in a couple of months on other people's FOMO.

nytesky 3y ago

I think for true believers this is dispiriting news; to become an actual currency we use in everyday life its needs to stabilize and stop these wild swings. Find its “true value” and set, stop this wild price discovery process.

kleene_op 3y ago
If the true value is speculation, it will never stabilize.
nicholasbraker 3y ago
And it needs to be inflationary. But this is "cursing in the church" for the typical right-wing, "liberal" BTC maxi
ErasticBrub 3y ago
That doesn't make sense. The value of anything can be volatile if you price it in units of a volatile currency. 1 BTC is still 1 BTC, just as 1 USD is still 1 USD. 1 USD isn't worth the same amount of Argentine pesos as it was yesterday, nor is 1 BTC. If an apple was priced in BTC, you wouldn't care if it was worth a different amount of rupees or ounces of gold yesterday, just as you only care about the dollars and cents on the price tag now. USD is sure as hell not stable. It's unstable by design - it is constantly declining in value as the money printers continue to churn. If you are hoping for a stable BTC-USD then you are hoping for a bizarre and unlikely situation where BTC declines in value at the exact same rate as the USD. I don't understand.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- itsdrewmiller 3y ago
  Come on - there is a difference between mild currency fluctuations and wild swings in value (relative to all other currencies, not just USD). You know it, I know it, GP knows it, and this kind of nitpicking isn’t helpful to anyone. Nobody wants a Zimbabwe dollar currency.
- 3y ago

Centigonal 3y ago

If retail investors still have fun money to splash on bitcoin, I'm worried more inflation may be in our future.

gosub100 3y ago
Or maybe retail investors are more worried about inflation (realizing it's ruining them anyway) and buying BTC as a hedge? (doesn't matter if it is one or not, it's about what they believe)
- belltaco 3y ago
  Inflation means the Fed will increase interest rates, which means there isn't much money sloshing around for speculators to put into Bitcoin. Which is why BTC went down when inflation was high, and now is going back up after the Fed signaled interest rate cuts next year because inflation is going down. So it doesn't sound anything like an inflation hedge because the demand for it isn't constant. Bitcoin is tracking tech stocks speculation more than being stable during inflation.
  - gosub100 3y ago
    yep, lack of disposable income is why poor people practically never buy drugs. See, the money supply is too tight and they cant borrow, they dont earn anything, so they simply can't pay for drugs or alcohol. This is why low-income segment has the lowest substance abuse percentages ever. /s
    - belltaco 3y ago
      If you give poor drug addicts more money they're going to use that money to buy mroe drugs, so I don't get what you're saying. Prood that BTC is inversely correlated with inflation. https://news.cryptorank.io/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/photo_2022-09-15-11.13.21.jpeg https://news.cryptorank.io/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/photo_...
cykros 3y ago

tromp 3y ago

> A spot bitcoin ETF would track the price of the cryptocurrency and allow investors to have it in their portfolios through an investment fund, instead of having to shell out over $43,000, or the price at which bitcoin is currently trading. This betrays some big misunderstanding of Bitcoin, which you can buy in quantities much smaller than 1 BTC (technically, as small as 10^-8 BTC). Many people gamble a few hundred dollars on Bitcoin.

latchkey 3y ago
Exactly, you can buy any $ amount that you want. Way back in Nov 2020, Paypal opened up crypto transactions and for the hell of it, I bought $100 each of bitcoin and ethereum. I haven't touched it at all. Today, it is worth a combined $742.28. ETH is up 381%, while BTC is up 161%. It has been a fun experiment and I plan to donate it all to charity at some point.

mertd 3y ago

The apparent comfort of the community with Tether is proof for me that crypto is nothing but the greater fool theory playing out over and over until the music really stops for one last time.

aranchelk 3y ago
A very small dataset, but people I talked to about Tether (even early on) didn’t trust it. It was just so useful a functionality to have they were willing to use it expecting it to someday fall apart. So the music-stops metaphor is apt, “greater fool theory” I’m not so sure — collectible NFTs? Yeah.
ur-whale 3y ago
Complex things must be looked at from many different angles before one can try and draw conclusions about them, Willingly choosing to restrict yourself to one very narrow aspect (tether) of a rich and complex ecosystem such as Bitcoin and deriving a definitive conclusion from that narrow and restrictive point of view is very likely going to lead you to an incorrect outcome. And even if, by miracle, you happen to predict the correct outcome, it'll be by sheer luck, not on the strength of your analysis, thereby lending no credibility whatsoever to your ability to predict things in general.
ErasticBrub 3y ago
[dead]

imjonse 3y ago

There's going to be a brain drain and the number of startups that are basically OpenAI API+React is going to plummet.

jnsaff2 3y ago

Twitter nowadays has almost exclusively ads for ‘drops’ and ‘pumps’ and all other kinds of crypto scams.

latchkey 3y ago
Indeed, but I wouldn't blame crypto for what Twitter allows for ads. Given all the companies that have pulled out, they have to get revenue from somewhere. I also daily block multiple "hot girls" fake profiles liking my 6 month old tweets.

cykros 3y ago

Had to open this up just to see what year it was from, as it's been true so many times in the past. I guess every cycle brings with it people who weren't around for the last one though. And to think I was told I'd "missed it" when I bought at $140...