Bitcoin drops below $18,300 as sell-off accelerates

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/18/bitcoin-price-drops-below-18600-as-sell-off-accelerates.html

by mfiguiere • 4 years ago

83 154 4 years ago

rinze• 4 years ago

Still $18,300 to go. Getting closer, at least.

fny2• 4 years ago

I'm a huge bear, but thinking its going to zero is crazy. Even beanie babies retain some value. And crypto still has utility as a transaction medium for illicit exchanges.

Ekaros• 4 years ago

I think 0 is eventual end result. Unlike beanie babies or sports card. The operating costs of bitcoin is rather high. You can throw those in a box and then leave it at back of cupboard... But to do anything with bitcoin you need a network.

HyprMusic• 4 years ago

Crypto still has value, but bitcoin itself has shown little value in any of the things it's supposed to be a solution for. It's not really that decentralised (in as far as most people trade through exchanges, and the miners have pooled their power to elicit control), the transaction fees are too high to be good for commerce, it's too volatile to be a store of money, and it's not anonymous enough to be used on illicit markets (the majority of them have moved to Monero). In my opinion, for crypto to flourish bitcoin needs to die.

That said, I also don't believe it will go to zero because there's one thing it's great at.. speculation. It's an ingenious bit of technology that the general public doesn't really understand and so the greater fool theory will continue to prove true.

stevenalowe• 4 years ago

Beanie Babies actually exist IRL.

oleganza• 4 years ago

I like the sound of "this time it's different" from the bitcoin doomsayers.

609venezia• 4 years ago

This is the first time since inception it has traded below its previous bull market high.

This time is different.

bitxbitxbitcoin• 4 years ago

Thanks for your work :).

graeme4• 4 years ago

It is different, it’s bitcoin’s first recession. The “ultrahard” currency has always depended on cheap money to grow, especially from Tether

nivenkos• 4 years ago

There is unfortunately a fair amount of intrinsic exchange value in its use for illegal trades (drugs, CP, etc.) and tax evasion. So it won't ever drop to 0.

Unless governments actually start to do their job and stop all transactions to the fiat-crypto exchanges. They are literally being used to bypass international sanctions and fund all sorts of trafficking and cartels.

czbond2• 4 years ago

Lots of support in $11-$12k range. Be hard to break that.

rsrx4• 4 years ago

Bitcoin is here to stay. You're mixing up shitcoins and other ponzi-like schemes.

As with any new & emerging technology, blockchain ecosystem hosts various (intentional or unintentional) FUD and malicious coins that are backed by nothing and often run in a ponzi scheme manner. These coins will eventually crash and disappear.

Bitcoin's intrinsic values are similar to other asset classes, plus, its also decentralized and censorship resistant.

anon2020dot002• 4 years ago

Nothing wrong with Bitcoin itself but the rampant speculation is what draws the proponents and critics alike.

If Bitcoin just worked like a peer-to-peer neutral currency and had no speculative element, most people would have no issue with it.

The annoying element is when it is used as a get-rich quick pyramid scheme.

gigatexal6• 4 years ago

I am dying laughing right now. Sitting here with popcorn watching all the ponzi-coin bs burn

haswell6• 4 years ago

Why is this funny?

I'm no crypto apologist, but a significant number of innocent bystanders are being absolutely ruined right now.

I understand the pull of schadenfreude when thinking about a certain subset of the crypto ecosystem, but that is also tampered a bit by the tragedy that comes with it. The life savings lost, inevitable suicides, relationships shattered.

Laughing about this seems like an odd response.

gsibble• 4 years ago

Because a lot of those people acted like they were smarter than everyone else and shoved their gains in our faces for years. I'm happy to see crypto bros losing their shirts.

gigatexal6• 4 years ago

To be fair: I am not laughing at people losing their shirts but that the Bitcoin mania is cooling off and this huge sell off in this super speculative, highly energy inefficient panacea-coin-of-the-future-solve-all-our-problems-project is experiencing a sell off.

My sentiments also would be the same for the NFT space. What a hilarious idea that a jpeg of some ape could be worth thousands or millions.

I hope this is a learning opportunity for those “investors” to not gamble With money they can’t afford to lose.

yellowbanana• 4 years ago

The store of value argument is now dead.

cozzyd2• 4 years ago

Definitely feel bad for all the people duped into thinking BTC is a hedge against inflation.

prirun• 4 years ago

And the "will enable low-fee microtransactions" argument has never panned out either.

pvg3• 4 years ago

It's an everdupe at this point, turning the front page into a bitcoin price tracker which is not particularly interesting

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

cozzyd2• 4 years ago

Double entendre of dupe here? :)

pvg3• 4 years ago

More of a single entendre

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dupe#Serbo-Croatian

fragmede2• 4 years ago

For the non-native speakers here, dupe as in duplicate post, but also dupe as in scam as in Bitcoin is a scam.

graeme4• 4 years ago

It’s plausibly the collapse of the largest ponzi the world has ever known, by lrders of magnitude. Madoff was $60 billion. Crypto was $2.6 trillion at its peak.

This article itself doesn’t add much but having the ones with analysis pop up frequently seems valid. Very interesting to watch this in real time, as in 2008.

Ponzi doesn’t quite fit and my hope is some day crypto will be known as a Nakamoto Scheme.

pvg3• 4 years ago

pop up frequently seems valid

It's not HN-valid on a daily, never mind hourly basis which is where we're at. That's just how the site functions and maintains its own interestingness, irrespective of the interestingness of any individual topic or article.

robga• 4 years ago

my hope is some day crypto will be known as a Nakamoto Scheme

It’s called this in various places. See https://salbayat.org/the-strange-case-of-nakamotos-bitcoin/

lamontcg4• 4 years ago

Crypto was not a $2.6 trillion scam.

The "market value" does not have any correlation to how much money was thrown into the pot.

Back in 2018 the estimate of the 2017 bubble that blew it up to $1T the first time was that there was $5B-$10B or so sent into the system.

This time was probably several tens of billion.

rufus_foreman• 4 years ago

It's probably close to the peak of people not knowing what the term Ponzi means, which is notable.

mekster4• 4 years ago

It's also the tech with largest misunderstanding of its value in HN. 13 years of existence without a center figure shilling for the most part, it's still holding as a way to store value without any central authority and more application logics built on higher levels and the conclusion that some people bring is a ponzi scheme?

Do people actually know what cryptocurrencies are about or are those people someone who lost buying ATH or missed the boat seeing a friend become a millionaire?

rsrx4• 4 years ago

Controversial take, but the amount of salty comments on crypto here always amuses me.

kanonieer• 4 years ago

Where's the take? As it stands it's a silly flame-bait.

monkeybutton• 4 years ago

You're only going to see the salty and bullish takes, the truly neutral have nothing to say about it.

rsrx4• 4 years ago

Comments on other internet sources I follow are mostly mixed bag of beans, however here they are prevalently salty when it comes to crypto and every time I stumble upon topic like this I wonder why. I was expecting that HN audience sees blockchain tech and bitcoin for what it is, and unique capabilities it offers, beyond "omg its a ponzi scheme!!11!" narrative.

lamontcg4• 4 years ago

Anyone that uses the word "salty" makes me think they're 16 years old.

That word along with "cringe" desperately needs to get removed from the lexicon.

ionwake• 4 years ago

Sounds salty tho

Max_Mustermann• 4 years ago

It's futile to ask for things to be removed from the lexicon. Language advances and those 16-year-olds will decide how they speak now and in the future.

I think this is already outdated but a fitting response to your comment could also be "ok boomer"

pcdoodle2• 4 years ago

Anti bitcoin people are pretty toxic.

What an amazing invention to have the absolute truth published every 10 minutes.

Back in the day before naval armies, merchant ships used to have to carry their own cannons and couldn't max out their payload with goods.

Bitcoin has a neat feature of not requiring armies or vaults to protect itself. Is it a currency? I think not but it is many things all the same.

The people who focus on the price haven't seen the forest for the trees.

isatty• 4 years ago

Idk if it’s about btc or eth but it really started leaving a foul taste with hundreds of garbage Ponzi scams and NFTs - combined with non tech and older folks getting scammed. The moment someone brings up crypto (coins) not cryptography I just don’t entertain them anymore.

d_watt2• 4 years ago

Relatively few people are against the blockchain as an interesting technology for creating distributed truth in areas that can actually benefit from that.

I think if we're extending your age of sail metaphor, I think people are against it being used for the modern version of tulip mania.

Personally, I'm now more excited now about blockchain than I have been in the past. I think the the rush to extract money from people via btc, nfts, etc. is what has overshadowed it's ability for interesting/novel use cases.

988747• 4 years ago

So far the only real use of blockchain technology is Git. Cryptocurrencies are misuse of it :-D

pcdoodle2• 4 years ago

Tulip mania is the best stress test we could ask for. You are right though, the greedy will use it to exploit the uninformed. Not the best PR for Bitcoin in general.

dogma11382• 4 years ago

There aren’t many applications if any in which a blockchain can’t be replaced by a simpler and more efficient solution.

enduser2• 4 years ago

Digital fiat currency also does not require traditional armies or physical vaults.

Digital fiat and crypto both require armies of cybersecurity geeks and "vaults" of servers participating in the network.

I don't see your point.

adventured2• 4 years ago

They all require militaries with guns to protect them, to the extent they're worth anything of consequence.

Obvious, exaggerated example to prove the point: Ukraine is the center of the Bitcoin universe. Every computer that powers the Bitcoin network resides in Ukraine.

Does Bitcoin require a military to protect it or not?

I guess the electronic stock exchange systems of the US don't require a military to ultimately protect them either according to that premise.

Bitcoin is also a physical asset in the end, because it can't exist without the hardware. It's exceptionally obvious that you have to protect the hardware with a military (both the ability to defend and respond if need be, to an attack). This is particularly an issue if you're going to build an economy around it, or otherwise allow Bitcoin & Co. to become a supersized asset class (such that your economy could be severely damaged if that asset class is severely damaged).

Oh hey there Latvia, your domestic systems are holding $13 trillion worth of Bitcoin (which has become the globally dominant asset). You're the Switzerland of the Baltics. No need to protect your systems with guns, don't worry about it, you don't need a military for that, because Bitcoin is magical pixie dust that only exists in the digital realm. Oh whoops, the digital realm exists on physical hardware (that someone somewhere has to protect with guns).

Sebb767• 4 years ago

On the other hand, Bitcoin obviously has a lot of drawbacks and so do most other cryptos. And, although crypto might has it's uses, it's currently used pretty exclusively as very speculative investment medium and for scamming people.

adventured2• 4 years ago

Bitcoin has a neat feature of not requiring armies or vaults to protect itself.

That premise is false.

If Bitcoin wins out and becomes dominant, nations with very large economies (in particular) and a lot to lose accordingly, will absolutely have to use their militaries to defend the networks that power Bitcoin.

There is no scenario where Bitcoin becomes a lot bigger and doesn't require military protection globally. It'll require military protection as much as any other super asset, if it reaches the scale of the others that comprise a large chunk of national wealth in a given country.

wonderwonder2• 4 years ago

"Bitcoin has a neat feature of not requiring armies or vaults to protect itself." I hear what you are saying but this premise is actually wrong. To steal someones money from the bank criminals probably need a group of armed men and must attempt to breach the banks vault. Which is very unrealistic. At any moment an army of police could arrive and kill them plus they have bank employees and customers to deal with and likely a security guard. To try and take fiat digitally is even harder as you have to actually hack your way into a banks systems and transfter the money and still withdraw or launder it somehow later. To take someones btc they just need to get into someones house with a gun or some pliers and a hammer and their target will just send it to their wallet from their laptop. Its far easier to steal large amounts of crypto currency than it is to steal large amounts of fiat.

hourago2• 4 years ago

Bitcoin has a neat feature of not requiring armies or vaults to protect itself.

Not even cannons can protect it.

- One day, due to the accidental wallet destruction during the server reboot, they lost keys to all BTC wallets, resulting in loss of 17k BTC.

- The hackers breached Bitcoin7 servers and gained full access to the main BTC depository and 2 of the 3 backup wallets.

- The 43,000 BTC Linode theft was not enough, and another 18,457 BTC was stolen from Bitcoinica’s reserves. The CEO Zhou Tong was barely able to prevent the loss of 30,000 more. The site was immediately shut down for security reasons.

- Hackers outside the country infected the internal network of the exchange with a virus that was transmitted through email, and it allowed them to steal private keys.

- ...

https://medium.com/hackernoon/a-huge-list-of-cryptocurrency-...

Bitcoin is not safer than the security of your key storage.

eltradero2• 4 years ago

Most people around here eat (or wish to) at the Silicon Valley VC money manger. They are ultra-fiat people. It's understandable that a decentralized form of money that removes money mangers (other notable ones are the military and medical industrial complexes) makes them unhappy.

eterm• 4 years ago

Maybe HN should incorporate a price ticker? /s

I appreciate that we get to look down upon the "fools" losing their shirt but there probably more appropriate places to do so.

Yes, we warned them. Yes, we told them that it was all greater fool theory, but remember it's usually the average punter who got in just before* peak hype that loses everything. And they don't really deserve it.

Those who fooled them do, but they're often the ones offloading their bags to the next.

* Just before because they're the ones who hit 60% gains and didn't sell, and risk chasing that high all the way down.

twiceaday• 4 years ago

Maybe these waves of new lows stories will counter-balance the fomo-harvesting 'new all time highs' that were suspiciously absolutely everywhere.

radu_floricica6• 4 years ago

I really really don't understand how anybody can look at a long term graph of bitcoin price and still think people were "tricked" into anything. It's... I don't know, I firmly believe there a lower limit of due diligence needed for something after which "tricking" just isn't a right word. You google "btc price" and you get a nice graph with all the info you need.

They could be mistaken - or not. Right now odds are maybe 4:1 for each price peak to be surpassed in about three years. Even if it won't and it turns out to be a bad investment, the odds make it a pretty legitimate decision, right or wrong.

jacquesm10• 4 years ago

So does that translate for you into "I'm buying BTC"?

hmate93• 4 years ago

I have no horse in this race but it seems like a lot of people are rooting for as much pain as possible for Bitcoin as that justifies/makes people feel good for missing its bull run.

Also it’s not just Bitcoin falling in a vacuum. The entire US and European stock market is absolute garbage too (housing showing cracks as well) so it’s hard to blame Bitcoin alone although it has undeniable failed as an inflation hedge.

francoi8• 4 years ago

A lot of people are rooting for Bitcoin to crash so it will stop pumping carbon in the atmosphere like a middle sized country.

Imnimo• 4 years ago

I think it depends on your perspective. If you believe the options are bitcoin goes down or bitcoin goes up, then you're rooting for more pain if you're rooting for bitcoin to go down. But if you believe the options are bitcoin goes down now or bitcoin goes down later, then bitcoin going down now is minimizing pain.

jmyeet2• 4 years ago

I disagree.

Bitcoin is hugely wasteful. Estimates on the power usage of the Bitcoin network have it using more energy than Sweden.

Now that might be fine if it provided more than a modicum of utility but it doesn't. The only use case I've seen is to bypass laws on where money can be moved. Some of this is moral (eg totalitarian governments with capital controls on the poor) but most of it isn't (eg scams, ransomware, otherwise illegal gambling, drugs, child abuse material and so on).

I'll agree there's probably a little schadenfreude here because of how many Crypto Andys have pumping crypto so hard for many years pretty much for no other reason than their own gain.

Most don't believe in any utility here. It's just a get rich quick scheme. AGain, that would be fine if it wasn't so horribly wasteful.

hmate93• 4 years ago

It’s energy usage is indeed terrible. I’d love to see it move to a proof of stake model.

nyolfen2• 4 years ago

the proportion of criminal activity with crypto is estimated to be an order of magnitude lower than the conventional economy:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/haileylennon/2021/01/19/the-fal...

most crypto is actually not well suited to criminal activity. it is pretty appealing as a savings and transaction medium when your alternative looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/JcaAbC4.png

88913527• 4 years ago

Is Bitcoin is as wasteful as say, poor zoning rules where N million Americans have to commute to job centers from suburbia, burning Y gallons of gas per year? We often talk about the environmental impacts of Bitcoin but look at how grotesquely wasteful we are in virtually all aspects of our living in the west. It's like when someone is hotly critical of a $10B portion of the >$2 trillion dollar national budget. I get you have to start somewhere but eliminating crypto alone won't solve any of our environmental problems without other material changes to our way of life.

Mertax2• 4 years ago

I also have no horse in this race, never owned any BTC/crypto, but I feel like the wastefulness is made to be too big of an issue. Seems like it can be solved eventually.

So if it wasn’t wasteful, my question is, does a decentralized currency provide any real value? From my limited perspective it seems like it would solve some problems with things like inflation, free market transactions — but it also probably creates new problems. I guess my question is, would the world ultimately be better off or worse off if a decentralized currency was the predominant world currency?

1270018080• 4 years ago

I bet I could've made a lot of money as an early adopter in Herbalife or Amway too. I don't care that I missed out and I'm not jealous of those who did get in. I don't want to be near it and I hope they collapse too.

moonchrome2• 4 years ago

I had plenty of opportunity to "get in" on the bitcoin - I did some trades back when it was in 1000$ range and thought it was an interesting peace of tech with potentially great future.

I even did a POC of a smart contract back when ETH was <100$.

Ever since then I've seen very little practical applications and soo much bullshit - I would never "invest" into anything crypto related even if the payout was guaranteed - for the same reason I wouldn't go work for a betting company, hack people for money or run scams - that's not how I want to make money, and I do feel contempt for that entire "movement".

dubswithus• 4 years ago

You feel contempt because you got “justed” like all the other high earners here. It’s “just” a decentralized database.

Most startups on AngelList are a waste of space, time, money, and employment. No different with blockchain.

schleck8• 4 years ago

I have no horse in this race but it seems like a lot of people are rooting for as much pain as possible for Bitcoin as that justifies/makes people feel good for missing its bull run.

I for one am a supporter of progress in finance, no matter the medium, but the crypto fandom is so incredibly insufferable, full of snobs, tech-, environment- and money-illiterate folks that I might as well watch the bubble burst and cheer.

fragmede2• 4 years ago

Money illiterate folk are generally poorer, with fewer job options. While the gifters deserve what befalls them, I find it hard to laugh at the misfortunes of those with fewer options that have been conned into this scheme.

hourago2• 4 years ago

as that justifies/makes people feel good for missing its bull run.

That is the same argument that 'people wants to reduce inequality because they hate the rich'. It appeals to feelings but it is a not very realistic nor useful explanation.

The entire US and European stock market is absolute garbage too (housing showing cracks as well)

If my house losses it's value, it's still my home. If bitcoin losses their you just got a very long number.

mekster4• 4 years ago

If your house loses its value to zero as you suggest Bitcoin to become a random number, your house is in a terrible condition that no one can live.

anon2020dot002• 4 years ago

It's not about the money, it's about a scam finally unravelling and preventing a scam from doing future harm.

Even if someone missed the Bitcoin bull-run, they could have easily joined the stock market bull-run.

caeril• 4 years ago

seems like a lot of people are rooting for as much pain as possible

No, some of us are very pro-Bitcoin, but we love seeing the bubble pop so that it can return to its correct use-case: as a currency, not a speculative risk asset.

nathanaldensr2• 4 years ago

Unfortunately for you, Bitcoin will soon be neither.

benj111• 4 years ago

Personally I'm not /rooting/ for it to go to zero. I just don't see how you can value it. The fact that it's worth $20k is as arbitrary as $60k.

When it was a toy and people were buying pizzas with it I can sort of understand that as a bit of fun, but beyond that I just don't see the value. And if there isn't value it's just pure speculation hoping there's a bigger fool than you so you can take a profit.

Housing and stocks at least have something tangible behind them. You may disagree about the correct value, but it is most of the time non zero.

dgudkov• 4 years ago

The entire US and European stock market is absolute garbage too

When markets grow by 20-30% a year, it's "wonderful". When they get corrected by 20% it's all of a sudden "absolute garbage".

Markets finally get back to a resemblance of sanity. Why people believed that double-digit growth without creating added value is somehow the new normal is beyond my understanding.

Geee3• 4 years ago

This is a very good buying opportunity, because this is mostly caused by overleveraged people and institutions having to liquidate into thin markets. Too greedy people are now wiped out. This gives an opportunity for those who have been wiser and have spare cash around. If you decide to buy, buy only the amount which you wouldn't need in a couple of years, taking into account increasing living costs and coming recession.

Obviously, buy bitcoin only. Other coins can have their few months of fame but then fade away.

The price can still go lower, but I think we're quite close to the bottom of this cycle.

hmate93• 4 years ago

If you are investing here please dollar cost average over the next ~6 months (likely recession/bear market duration) as opposed to buying in one go.

Sell ~4 years from now as Bitcoin tends to be cyclical and peaks 2 years after a halving event.

timeon2• 4 years ago

as Bitcoin tends to be cyclical and peaks 2 years after a halving event.

Watch out for cargo culting.

hwers• 4 years ago

It’s silly that you’re being downvoted because this is absolutely true. The idea that it would go to zero is mad, it will without a doubt go back up to similar numbers again. This is just a little gift

raesene9• 4 years ago

I'd say the problem is that no-one can easily predict where the bottom lies right now.

We have Celcius with frozen withdrawals and in an undetermined state having called in restructuring specialists. We have 3ac apparently not talking to their partners with a lot of loans outstanding and margin calls due, then we have all of the other people who were partners/customers of those organizations, who at the moment either can't access their funds temporarily, or may not be able to access their funds ever, so are essentially schrodingers companies right now, until they can get accurate information about what's happening

Once all the companies that go down have gone down, then there's a reasonable chance that a bottom can be called, but at the moment I don't think there's enough information to know.

Geee3• 4 years ago

Yeah, but I wouldn't care too much about the absolute bottom or short term price. Short term is impossible to predict, but it's also quite pointless to worry about. In the long term, this is a very cheap price.

nvdrx• 4 years ago

Definitely XBT is still the best performing asset in the past 5 or so years. This correction is healthy.

There is still a lot of leverage and greedy protocols around, but Bitcoin is solid. With all the fear around, I’ll be doubling my DCA (averages).

pid-1• 4 years ago

If I understand correctly, the actual cryptography in cryptocurrencies isn't terribly interesting.

Blockchains are, however, trying (or claim to be trying) to solve the Byzantine Fault Tolerance problem, which has no known efficient solution.

Is that correct? Are blockchains an actual area of research for folks studying distributed systems in CS Departments?

yata69420• 4 years ago

It is an actual area of research, mostly around scalability.

I don't know what happens in computer science departments, but you can watch Ethereum be developed in the open. They cite the research they're implementing.

For example: https://notes.ethereum.org/@vbuterin/proto_danksharding_faq#...

I'm not quite smart enough to follow all the cryptography, but there are a lot of unsolved problems being worked on. It seems that doing trust and accounting at global decentralized scale is trickier than chaining blocks together.

xtracto2• 4 years ago

There are a couple of blockchain projects doing BFT development n the first one I read about was AntShares (now Neo) doing delegated BFT. There IS some interesting R&D happening, but most if it is lost in the get-rich-quick noise. Also Zk-SNARK research is interesting . Monero and Zcash technology is also quite interesting ,and can go beyond cryptocurrencies.

I'm very pro blockchain tech, and I'm glad this "winter" is coming so that all that noise is reduced and good interesting projects get more visibility.

There's a little known project called selfkey who have been developing some interesting "Sovereign digital id" stuff. Pretty early but interesting.

Just get away from the "money money money" stuff and you can find some interesting projects.

xtracto2• 4 years ago

Also , the basic cryptocurrency stuff is basic PKI with signing. Plus a version of Kademilla plus a database linking records with hashed previous records and the infamous PoW. Nothing really fancy computationally.

The "genious" of Nakamoto was to put all the existing parts together. But hashcash was there, kad/BitTorrent were there, chained append only DBs were there, etc.

DantesKite• 4 years ago

What I'm most curious about is what the knock-on effect this will be to crypto businesses. From what I hear, a few pension funds invested into Bitcoin. Wondering how that'll turn out...

jpgvm• 4 years ago

Most pension funds probably had an exposure somewhere on the order of 0.05% AUM or less so it should have no significant impact. It's the crypto hedge funds and other businesses that were holding huge chunks of BTC/ETH that are in trouble.

jacquesm10• 4 years ago

A pension fund with significant Bitcoin exposure is not 'investing' they are recklessly endangering the funds they have been entrusted with and the fund managers ought to be held personally liable.

valdiorn• 4 years ago

Dude, you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.

I fucking loathe crypto but to say fund managers are "recklessly endangering the funds" shows you have no knowledge of how a hedge fund works.

Source: I work risk management for a large UK fund.

czbond2• 4 years ago

Generally a pension would put 1% or less to such investments. So while the absolute value of the loss may be large, the percentage of portfolio loss will be little.

The loss of S&P and equities at large impacts them much more greatly.

jacquesm10• 4 years ago

The thing to watch is the hashrate, once the bigger miners start pulling out it will get interesting.

https://www.blockchain.com/charts/hash-rate

Overtonwindow• 4 years ago

If larger miners pull out, what will that mean for the smaller miners?

jacquesm10• 4 years ago

The bitcoin algorithm that determines when to double/halve is well tested in one direction, but the halving suffers from some problems if the hashrate drops too quickly. I would imagine that suddenly the number of transactions that can be processed will rapidly decrease as well simply because not enough blocks would be mined.

This might cause a massive increase in the interval between two subsequent blocks and that in turn may cause more people to lose faith in bitcoin because transactions would slow down significantly. Which in turn would put more downward pressure on price and eventually again on the hashrate.

And halving are just that: they are halvings, you can't skip multiple halvings in one go.

So in short: it may cause a downward feedback loop.

Zopieux• 4 years ago

oh no! anyway.

rossdavidh• 4 years ago

Hypothesis: if, as some have asserted, the BTC market is driven by the Tether market, then BTC dropping might be related to the recent wobbling of Tether USDT, which never quite regained $1 peg.

If Tether is about to go the way of Luna and Celsius, then it may be that one of the major remaining purchasers of (heavily discounted) Chinese property bonds is about to go away. We have already seen a couple small runs on the bank in China in recent weeks. Perhaps we are about to see more?

Whether the above hypothesis is true or not (and I am not attached to it, as I own no BTC nor USDT), I suspect that one way or another, the crash of BTC is going to have knock-on effects on the rest of the global economy. Remember, at the beginning of the GFC not many people in Greece or Iceland or Spain probably thought that American housing bonds had anything to do with them...

jacquesm10• 4 years ago

I suspect that one way or another, the crash of BTC is going to have knock-on effects on the rest of the global economy.

I highly doubt that because there just isn't enough volume in BTC compared to what the rest of the world transacts in other currencies. It may affect the price of drugs for a while.

eltradero2• 4 years ago

Considering that you're pricing it against a spreadsheet stored in a DC basement, maybe backupped in some Jersey data center, it's indeed doing poorly. Cheap USD and free (i.e., unregulated) derivative markets are doing the rest. Speculation is the lifeblood of commerce. There are some who rejoice at the sight of it.

Bitcoin drops below $18,300 as sell-off accelerates

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