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Crypto hoarders dump tokens as shares tumble
- stevenalowe 1y agoAt some point one must expect to run out of bigger fools
- wmf 1y agoThey're being born every minute though.
- DaiPlusPlus 1y agoWelp: https://www.theblock.co/post/287680/younger-generations-more-invested-in-crypto-than-stocks-survey-finds https://www.theblock.co/post/287680/younger-generations-more...
- krackers 1y agoThere was some HN article a month back about how all types of gambling: sports gambling, prediction markets, etc. are becoming more popular. All of this presumably downstream from a felt perception of economic malaise and nihilistic sense of resignation.
- satvikpendem 1y agoThere are good books on this effect, like Freakonomics and especially The Psychology of Money. After reading them I understood how people could gamble even though most know it's a net negative outcome; it's psychological, not rational.
- CPLX 1y agoIt's a mistake to call it irrational. Consider the example of a person who has been trapped by a malevolent aggressor in some sort of detention they find miserable. The de facto prison that they live in is surrounded by barbed wire fences, snipers, and angry dogs. They're considering whether or not they should try to run through those perils. A clever, urbane economist comes up to them and tries to explain to them about cost-benefit analysis, wants to talk to them about the expected value of their decision, and the chances of death and all of that, how to make a rational decision. That person is a fucking idiot. Because, from the perspective of the person making the actual decision, it's a binary outcome: accept a life of unending misery or do something, anything, to improve it. There is nothing at all irrational about running into almost certain death when imprisoned unjustly. And there's nothing irrational about extremely risky behavior when your current life is miserable and there aren't enough levers to pull to get out of it by other means. For the most part, the kind of people who write those books find themselves very popular and well-supported by the kinds of people who build those prisons.
- satvikpendem 1y agoFunny you say that in your last paragraph because your example is essentially exactly the type of analogy the authors make too, so you're agreeing with them. Maybe you should read the books first before speculating on their contents and writers.
- vkou 1y agoSome of it is that, but much of it has a much simpler answer. Advertising and availability. Sports gambling was limited to Vegas a decade ago, now you can lose thousands of dollars while fiddling with your phone on your toilet. If every corner store and gas station had a heroin vending machine, you'd probably see a lot more opiate addicts, too, regardless of how well the economy is doing. And doubtlessly, their owners would screech to the skies at any attempt to curb that shit.
- AlexandrB 1y agoThere's also gambling Jr. in the form of gacha and other "surprise mechanics" that gets younger kids into the gambling pipeline.
- wakawaka28 1y agoLook back in history and you'll find that easy money policies, credit bubbles, and economic chaos caused by inflation fuel all kinds of vices and resentment.
- zerosizedweasle 1y agoI just want out. I don't know how to put this but at the deepest level what's happening right now is making me sick. So many people below the poverty line barely making it by and then you have this stuff and Wallstreet Bets. Michael Saylor tops them all. Decadent and depraved. S&P at all time records and SNAP benefits not being renewed. I hate it here.
- Computer0 1y agoThe only way out is through direct action.
- zerosizedweasle 1y agoYeah, but it feels like shouting into the void.
- King-Aaron 1y agoAsk the dragon nicely to give up it's gold
- napierzaza 1y ago[dead]
- slashdave 1y agoThe whole point of the crypto market is decentralization. So who do you want to act?
- wmf 1y agoThe whole point of the government is to ban harmful externalities like crypto speculation.
- christophilus 1y agoThat’s not the point of the government.
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- krackers 1y agoWhat triggered the bubble pop in this case?
- pants2 1y agoOctober 10 crypto liquidation bug on Binance triggered a cascading sell-off
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- mise_en_place 1y agoThis is unsurprising. Maxis won't care, because in theory they don't care about the price. The only people complaining about this are those who bought at the top and made unsound financial decisions. If you couldn't tell the majority of crypto influencers were foreigners before Twitter/X disclosed their location, I don't know what to tell you.
- bix6 1y agoIf a company’s crypto holdings are worth more than its market cap wouldn’t that mean I should buy the stock as its enterprise value is higher than its current market cap? Unless of course it’s saddled with debt which this article alludes to but doesn’t explain since most of the purchases seem to be for share buy backs?
- jmount 1y agoYou would need a mechanism to extract that value- i.e. the ability to strip the company apart for parts. Buying a non-controlling portion of shares doesn't give you that ability.
- jMyles 1y agoIndeed. The decision-making apparatus is sometimes so starkly separated from the stakeholders that there's no reason to believe that the balance sheet and the stock price are likely to be correlated at all in the future. If the company doesn't pay dividends, and can't be sold off for its assets, then what is the function of equity? I find Wall St. baffling for all the usual reasons, but this one is too rarely discussed.
- lmm 1y agoSo time for someone to do a big LBO?
- blitzar 1y agoYahoo was once valued at less than the value of its Alibaba holdings. Businesses (or parts of) can have negative value - still worked out pretty well for the execs there.
- chemotaxis 1y ago> If a company’s crypto holdings are worth more than its market cap wouldn’t that mean I should buy the stock as its enterprise value is higher than its current market cap? Well, one question to ask is if the company can actually cash out their crypto holdings at the current market price? If they have substantial holdings of thinly-traded crypto, the answer is usually "lol". Faith in the company matters too. You can't compel them to sell, and if you think the company is going to slowly drive itself into the ground, you probably don't want to give them your $$$. There are quite a few companies that traded below their book value for that reason. IIRC, Kodak is a current example. Want to bet on that?
- the__alchemist 1y agoI'm seeing a 2% decline in Bitcoin prices over a year, and up 410% over 5 years. Tumbles if you're day-trading. It gets old hearing this regularly over the past 10 years.
- lz400 1y agoIf you see the bitcoin charts, price has gone up a lot in the last few years but volume has tanked. Do I read this right that now crypto is basically a smaller market where a bunch of whales scam a ever dwindling but never completely disappearing flow of fools and marks?
- christophilus 1y agoVolume appears pretty normal to me. Where do you get the idea that it’s tanked?
- pants2 1y agoI think a lot of the volume on spot BTC has gone to ETFs, DATs, perps, WBTC, and other derivatives, when a few years ago spot was really the only option. Hard to track total volumes now.
- jameslk 1y agoVolume != value. Less trading can be a sign of more holding
- D13Fd 1y agoBut people are “holding” nothing more than a line on a spreadsheet. The only true value a cryptocurrency has is in enabling transactions. If that’s not what it’s doing, then it will eventually have no value.
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- Animats 1y agoMore info on "Strategy", the company, which is supposedly the world's largest public Bitcoin holder.[1] "According to its most recent X post, the firm has raised $11.9 billion through common equity, $6.9 billion in preferred equity, and $2 billion in convertible debt." The equity part includes listed stocks: STRF, STRC, STRE, STRK, and STRD. Those are on the NASDAQ, not crypto exchanges. Here's a long discussion of Strategy's strategy.[2] They're leveraged, but the financing for the leverage is not from crypto markets, and has more strength behind it. The whole thing will come unglued if there's a prolonged drop in the price of Bitcoin, but they can ride through medium-length down periods. Strategy's various stocks have dropped more than the price of Bitcoin. [1] https://cryptonews.com/news/strategy-reports-21b-raised-in-2025-as-access-to-capital-markets-accelerates/ https://cryptonews.com/news/strategy-reports-21b-raised-in-2... [2] https://www.vaneck.com/us/en/blogs/digital-assets/matthew-sigel-deconstructing-strategy-mstr-premium-leverage-and-capital-structure/ https://www.vaneck.com/us/en/blogs/digital-assets/matthew-si...
- jameslk 1y agoFor those that don’t know, the point of the bitcoin holding strategy of MSTR is that they sell convertible notes to buy bitcoin, which is essentially a put against the US dollar (they’re making a profit from the US dollar losing value over time due to inflation, assuming bitcoin rises against it). The convertible notes can be purchased by institutional investors that aren’t allowed to buy bitcoin directly as indirect bitcoin exposure because the notes can be converted into MSTR shares
- tim333 1y agoI think it's more a punt on bitcoin going up. It's worked quite well for them so far.
- disambiguation 1y agoI'm just disappointed in crypto. It was supposed to be internet currency, but became another meme stock instead. Maybe someday we'll be able to reboot it the right way so it can actually provide something of real value.
- AlexandrB 1y agoThe writing was on the wall from the beginning. Making a currency deflationary by capping supply sounds appealing, but undermines its usefulness as a medium of exchange since everyone will want to hoard it.