After a brutal stretch, cryptocurrencies are surging

https://www.npr.org/2023/12/26/1220603847/crypto-cryptocurrency-bitcoin-ftx-binance-cz-bankman-fried

by sowbug • 3 years ago

18 58 3 years 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.

EGreg9• 3 years 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-lo...

nytesky2• 3 years ago

You act like this behavior makes sense, but no other asset acts like this, except maybe penny stocks?

EternalUsenet5• 3 years 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.

EternalUsenet5• 3 years ago

For some reason, I am unable to reply to the original thread I was on and I need to start another one here. Probably too far down the tree?

At any rate, one consideration folks don’t seem to have for the halvening is the reduction in rewards for miners.

As mining becomes more expensive and transaction fees increase exponentially, I see more and more smaller miners dropping out of the pool as it becomes too expensive for them to operate (and we are in a high interest rate environment, so capital for borrowing is much more expensive to acquire). Then the miners that are left start to concentrate and potentially cause a security concern. It becomes too top heavy.

I’m not sure why alarm bells aren’t going off for Bitcoiners?

EGreg9• 3 years 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

alphabettsy• 3 years 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.

ur-whale4• 3 years 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.

m3kw94• 3 years ago

These were known applications 5 years back. How are they now?

EGreg9• 3 years ago

Well, we have some large paying clients and about a million community leaders that we plan to reach out to, once we launch the Software as a Service. We use the Factory pattern so you just fill in a form, press a button to launch the smart contracts, then grab a widget and put it on your site. Then invite everyone.

We have been spending a long time and $ on third party security audits etc.

danrl• 3 years ago

I really tried to be open minded and clicked your link. You lost me at:

By combining Web2 (community interfaces) and Web3 (smart economies), we can launch the next generation of applications — which we refer to as Web5.

This is not how versioning works. It looks more like marketing coming up with the highest number possible without a meaningful increase in value delivered. (Remember the old PC magazines with 999+ games on a CD Rom?)

EGreg9• 3 years ago

We used to call it Web4 but then Jack Dorsey changed the branding

leptons• 3 years ago

"Web3" is going great!

https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com

EGreg9• 3 years ago

When it was posted on HN, it’s very telling that the MAJORITY of TOPLEVEL comments were all downvoted into oblivion … any response other than “yeap, web3 sucks” is unacceptable on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36128484

gosub1003• 3 years ago

"an open mind" to getting rug-pulled?

EGreg9• 3 years ago

How, pray tell, are you getting rugpulled with say Intercoin’s blockchain applications?

riffraff• 3 years 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.

nytesky2• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

If the true value is speculation, it will never stabilize.

nicholasbraker• 3 years ago

And it needs to be inflationary. But this is "cursing in the church" for the typical right-wing, "liberal" BTC maxi

ErasticBrub• 3 years 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.

itsdrewmiller• 3 years 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.

throw0101b2• 3 years ago

That doesn't make sense. The value of anything can be volatile if you price it in units of a volatile currency.

This is only true if you are holding the thing for the sake of holding it. Generally currencies, as a medium of exchange, are held for the purposes of later use in buying goods and services: so while 1 BTC is 1 BTC, the fact that sometimes it would take 1 BTC to (e.g.) buy a car, something 2 BTC, somethings 3, makes it less useful for knowing if you have (saved) enough for trade.

Similarly for treating currencies as a store of value: is x BTCs enough for retirement? If it keeps jumping around, how do you have "enough"?

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.

Yes, because having it stay exactly the same in value is impossible (and generally undesirable), and having it go up in value (deflation), is considered even worse. An inflexible monetary system is not a good thing.

Centigonal• 3 years ago

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

gosub1003• 3 years 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)

belltaco2• 3 years 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.

cykros5• 3 years ago

Retail? Try Blackrock.

There's Bitcoin ETF's whose approval is imminent.

Never mind the fact that it's been able to be held in 401(k)'s for over a year now.

And while that sounds sort of nuts, consider that in the 70s, people looked at gold investors askance considering that given that it was no longer money and had very few industrial uses, it looked like quite an overvalued commodity.

That bubble hasn't burst yet. Maybe don't hold your breath too much.

My big concern is what happens when the original wallet structure can be broken by quantum computers. Modern wallets aren't vulnerable, but there's enough BTC floating around in lost wallets that the influx of liquidity could be quite an event, to say the least, when it hits markets.

tromp• 3 years 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.

latchkey2• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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-whale4• 3 years 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.

imjonse• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

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

latchkey2• 3 years 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.

cykros5• 3 years 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...

After a brutal stretch, cryptocurrencies are surging

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