Even a dead cat will bounce if it falls from a great height
That last step is going to be a doozy too. Hopefully this is happening before too many people lose more than they can afford, because of FOMO and the relentless hype.
I had considered jumping in if what appears to be support at $9K held. Looks like this cat, though, might not bounce but just drill its way into the earth's crust. Granted, I'm apply analysis that is questionable with stocks, and might be (probably is?) completely inappropriate for cryptocurrency.
I remember balking when bitcoin increased from $20 to $30 as too expensive way back in the day. BTC has come so far and appreciated so fast. I find it pretty wild that people are acting like the price has plummeted. While it literally has fallen a non-trivial percentage from its high on the 3 year basis it would be really hard to find anything that had close to this sort of yield.
BTC crashed from 19k down to 9k. A lot of people lost a lot of money. Why are you discrediting this? Because BTC was even lower before? How is that related?
In the span of a few months....if you invested into BTC _needing_ to make a profit and only being able to hold for a few months you're just asking for it.
Yes, that was what I said exactly. The price was $20-30 dollars and if you were long on that with even a small position you would have made significant money over the long term. BTC has always fluctuated a lot but on average if you held the currency for long periods of time; >1 year, you would have more money than you had previously. It is short term speculators that have always driven volatility.
Past performance is not indicative of future returns. We will never again have the same climate for BTC as we had. It is absolutely "wild" for you to treat strong future BTC growth as a foregone conclusion.
The facts here are obvious. I doubt the point is to convey facts. I think the point is to mention past performance to imply future growth. To imply that if you buy BTC now then later you too can be one of these people who are up "from before."
That is close to an eternity in the cryptocurrency world right now. November is around when the hockey stick up started. The market cap roughly quadrupled in the next month or two after that. All of that is gone now.
That was one of them, yes. There have been a few. November was roughly when the mainstream craze started and there were everyday people like barbers getting into it and putting their mortgage payments in.
Only if you stored that value at the peak. If you stored that value a few years ago, it's not that big of a deal to be back to the price it was in November (which itself was pretty incredible)
So you're saying Bitcoin is only good for early adopters and it's dangerous for new users to use Bitcoin because they could lose all their stored value when early adopters cash out?
I agree and following that reasoning a 50% upward trend should be very alarming because it screams manipulation.
When an event like that occurs you should very much expect a correction, and when that correction occurs it should be expected and not a surprise.
What baffles me is that everyone involved in BTC accepted the 50% upward fluctuation. When the obvious correction occurred they were all surprised and started saying just what you did, that currencies aren't suppose to fluctuate by 50% in a month.
How didn't you see this coming and why do you still consider BTC a currency in light of this event?
Although if you take into account the cost in electricity that has been turned into heat, that does kind of represent s massive negative. That sacrifice of power is only worth it (sort of) if Bitcoin retains more value than the electricity was worth. Of course if cryptocurrency really does become worthwhile as a currency, it could be an acceptable price to pay.
How many people think that cryptocurrency has a real future worth that expenditure? I would guess fewer everyday, but I could be very wrong.
Owning >51% of the mining power for a sustained period would make it impossible to trust and presumably eventually wipe it out. The hashing power is frequently compared to small states, so a large state could presumably put together enough hashing power to sustain such an attack.
Well, mining Bitcoins is a net negative of wasted energy.
Every bit of computer power beyond the minimum threshold of efficiency needed to operate the transactions and database is a net loss.
Peak efficiency of the Bitcoin mining network would be about 3-10 basic desktop computers. Instead Satoshi Nakomoto's Proof of Work will waste more and more energy with nothing to show as time goes on.
If any crypto currency ever makes it and becomes mainstream, then I am pretty sure it will not be Bitcoin, to many unsolved or even unsolvable problems. If that turns out to be true, then the question becomes whether we already reached the final decline or whether the speculation will continue. Personally I don't think we have reached the final decline just yet but at the same time I find it hard to imagine that Bitcoin will ever reach $100k or so, people are probably slowly becoming sane again. If you hope to make as much money as some did by getting in at $0.10 and exiting at $10k, I think the chances are pretty much zero. Maybe you can double your money or get 500% if you catch the bottom of a correction but you may as well lose everything.
I'd like to know what you consider to be "unsolvable" problems. While there are other cryptocurrencies solving problems in different ways, none have been around as long as BTC and none have endured the trials that BTC managed to survive. I'm rather shocked that the system has been so robust.
I think a fallacy many make is that this is open source, not corporate-created software. That changes a lot of the context. For years, people compared Linux to Windows and Mac and I can't count the number of times Linux was dead. I can probably actually count the times that Bitcoin was dead, but it's still a lot.
If you watch other crypto prices, many are tightly bound to BTC. I expect to see Bitcoin has a core part of the cryptocurrency network of the future. Maybe BTC won't be the ultra high-speed payment provider we had hoped for, but it's really difficult for me to accept that it will die off.
Ultimately, we're all speculating. I love that this is such uncharted territory.
First things first, nothing is truly unsolvable. Proof of work and its energy consumption, for example, seems highly problematic to me but it would certainly not be impossible to swap out the entire consensus algorithm for something else. Whether Bitcoin would still be Bitcoin in that case then becomes somewhat of a philosophical question. If you think it would still be Bitcoin, then that is not an unsolvable problem assuming you believe proof of work is not going to be a long-term viable consensus strategy. If on the other hand you think proof of work is a defining feature of Bitcoin, then that would be an unsolvable problem.
With that out of the way, the major problems seem to be scalability, pseudonymity instead of anonymity, missing regulatory oversight, mining centralization, adoption and as already mentioned proof of work and its energy inefficiency. I am probably missing things, I went from really excited about Bitcoin to a more rational and pragmatic view about the time it reached dollar parity and haven't followed the development too closely ever since because in my opinion everything in existence is really far away from prime time and it will take some more new ideas on the level of Bitcoin itself to get there, i.e. some tweaks here and there alone will not be good enough.
Also note that I mentioned such general things like adoption as problems but what I really mean there is in the interaction, for example between regulatory oversight and adoption. But I don't want to flesh those arguments out in a comment, it would just be very time consuming and I don't think I would have to add much if anything new, many others have discussed all kinds of problems again and again. Some will follow those arguments, some will dismiss them and repeating them once again won't change that.
When you are talking about digitizing the world's assets, 100k doesn't even come close. I would recommend thinking more broadly and being open to what is really happening with Bitcoin, blockchains and alt coins.
I've discussed this with some analysts who are looking at the cost of mining hardware and also power consumption/costs. They concluded that around $5k is the appropriate target price right now.
Long term price of mining does not matter at all, because the more expensive mining is - the less mining does happen - the less competitive mining becomes - the less expensive mining becomes.
No matter how low cryptocurrency price is - some of the miners would be able to afford it (long term).
In the previous 3 bubbles bitcoin stabilized after the crash around 2-3 times the top of the previous bubble.
So applying this logic, the bottom of this bubble should be around $2-4k. For a couple of reasons however this bubble is different - lots of finance guys participating. Because they are experienced they will buy ahead of that to make sure they don't miss the bottom. So I see this bubble bottoming at $5k. This has the nice property that most of the "dumb money" who entered in Nov-Dec without any idea about trading or cryptos will lose money (markets tend to make sure that people who entered during a frenzy lose).
The dataset you are basing your assumptions on is extremely small. Your reference should be the history of highly volitle assets, not the history of bitcoin. The behavior after previous collapses tell you precisely nothing about what is going to happen next.
price can be irrelevant. i have mates that buy on one exchange and sell on another right away. they make weekly on the difference. some cap you at what you can buy/sell and increase what you're allowed each time. with a few $k you can make $150 a week. i.e buy on coinbase if that's cheapest. transfer to another another exchange and sell. bingo. few of them been doing it for months.
Before I begin, I'm not going to tell you what to do with your money. But when I see questions like this, I often think that there may be some inexperience with investing. So here's how I look at investments. This is not advice -- you do what you want.
If I'm investing in a company, the first thing I do is read the quarterly and year end reports. I take a look at how the money is being used. I look for things that might be fishy. You need to be careful, even with blue chip stocks -- often the numbers don't add up. I look at how well the company is executing. What kind of margin are they getting? How are they using that money? If for growth, then what are the investing in and how well is it paying off? If for profit, how much profit are they making and what are they doing with the profits? That kind of thing. I look at the products they make. I read reviews. I look at the competition. After I've done all that, I decide how fairly the company is valued. Often they are over valued. Sometimes they have about the right value. Rarely they are undervalued. I try to buy the latter stocks and hold them for a long time.
Just because of how I do my job (I am a internationally remote contractor), I am forced to speculate on currency. Note the subtle change in vocabulary. I am not investing in currency. I don't expect a rate of return over time on currency. Instead, I look at geo-political situations and I guess how it might affect the price of a currency against another currency. At the moment, I live off the Japanese yen (I'm in Japan), but I get paid in Great British pounds. I need to have some insurance that my revenue stream is relatively constant, so when GBP is very low (it was down to just over 120 JPY last year!) I try to hold it. When it is very high, I try to sell it. Sometimes it makes sense for me to even buy it when it is low. When I am looking at this, I look at both the British and Japanese economic policies. I look at elections that might change that policy. I look at the (complete lack of) progress wrt Brexit, etc, etc. But this is not an investment. My goal is to hedge against the changes as much as I can, because otherwise sometimes I'm working for 60% of the wage that I normally make (and it's hard to ask your clients to double their payments just because something like Brexit happens).
Now, let's look at Bitcoin. What economic factors influence Bitcoin? It would be tempting to say "none", but this is not strictly true. First, we have to look at the likelihood that bitcoin will become viable as a general currency. It's pretty unlikely, but the chance is not actually 0 (Much to my surprise, I can actually buy things with Bitcoin from mainstream shops in Japan -- even a local pizza restaurant takes them). However, it's clear that changes to the protocol need to happen for it to scale. To understand the implications, you have to understand the chances for various proposals to succeed (both technically and politically).
When you look at trading currencies, often you look at indicators like interest rates because the change of interest rates encourages (and sometimes outright forces) trading of the currency. With bitcoin there are precious few outside influences like that. There are things like "tethers", but since they are a complete scam you have to figure out what it's likely to do to the price (will it force people to buy BTC, or will it tank the price).
Having said all that, I hope you can see a kind of gradation in the "investment" type. When I buy stock, I can reason about the performance of the company by looking at their past performance, their execution, their product, the oppositions performance, etc. When I engage in FOREX (which I try to avoid, but alas am unable to), I am stuck with the politics and economic policies. I have to kind of guess what countries are going to do and how that will result in changes to the price. I try my best to stick to ...
When I engage in FOREX (which I try to avoid, but alas am unable to), I am stuck with the politics and economic policies. I have to kind of guess what countries are going to do and how that will result in changes to the price. I try my best to stick to hedging strategies, because otherwise you might as well be laying bets at the bookie wrt economic policy. With Bitcoin, it's just gambling.
That pretty much sums up why I've stayed away thus far. I've done well with equities over the years, but FOREX kicked my ass (a lesson I could thankfully afford). As you point out, there's at least some semblance of sense in FOREX, which I obviously have yet to grock. I don't even play games in Vegas unless I can figure out the odds ("how are you going to fuck me?"), and I fully cop to that as gambling. Cryptocurrencies, phhhht, I haven't the first clue as to what drives the price, or how I'm going to get taken. To me, it's even worse than gambling, because though I might know the odds at the craps table, try as I might I can't get a grasp on the drivers of cryptocurrencies other than hype.
With all the respect consistent with the sentiment I’m expressing, I suspect you wildly overestimate your ability to improve your predictions about company performance by reading about the company.
I would buy more at 1k even though I don't really believe in it. Just because of the volume of people and brainpower being devoted to it. Basically I would be hedging in case I'm wrong (which is is a frequent occurance).
I don't ask this rhetorically: why would a Tether collapse negatively affect Bitcoin? If anything, it's proof that fiat-backed financial tools are flawed at inception. If there's a run and people need to dump USDT, it seems they will flood into BTC/ETH, not try to convert to USD/fiat.
The reason being (from my understanding) that the price of BTC has been pumped higher and higher by Buttfinex printing Tethers and using them to buy BTC. Essentially, they create value out of nothing, transfer that value into BTC, rinse and repeat. Therefor the high valuation you see in BTC is actually a lot of paper dollars that have no backing. This has been compounded many, many times. When it's found that Tether is insolvent, all that perceived value that's been pumped into BTC will dissolve, and the market (including all the alts that ride BTC's coat tails) will come crashing down.
I've been trying to figure out how Bitfinex and Tethers manipulate BTC.
One way it can go south is if Bitfinex is using the money it gets from Tethers to buy BTC. Effectively not converting the money to paper, but holding onto BTC. In other words, Tether may be backed by BTC.
So a run on Tether might affect the price of BTC negatively as Bitfinex would have to sell BTC to dollars to pay for the Tethers people are trying to sell back.
Problem is, Tether doesn't actually buy back USDT from anybody. Nobody has successfully converted their USDT to USD through Tether...only via USDT -> USD market on Kraken, or more commonly USDT -> BTC -> USD.
In other words, it's like a bank you can only put money into, but not take money out of, and you can only redeem your money by finding some poor sucker who'll trade your USD vouchers for some other currency that's actually worth something.
Unless you're just talking about maintaining the peg by buying large amounts when the price falls below $1. In that case, yes they'd have to sell BTC to maintain the peg because it's conjectured that they back USDT with BTC (not USD), and even with the BTC they have, at its market value it wouldn't actually back the amount of Tethers they've printed.
Well there are more people that are willing to pay than just Coinbase. A more comprehensive answer would be that arbitrage is not that up to speed in the Bitcoin world, especially in KRW and JPY markets:
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/#markets
Used to be that crypto is massively overpriced there, now it looks like Korea and Japan are leading this price fall.
Bitcoin is currently the world's reserve cryptocurrency - All cryptocurrencies can be exchanged for Bitcoin. But unfortunately in technical terms, it's not fit for this purpose.
The reserve cryptocurrency of the internet needs to be fast and offer cheap transactions so that it can easily and cheaply be moved between exchanges.
I think it will take some time before another cryptocurrency takes the place of Bitcoin. Part of the problem is that very few people currently have the skills to evaluate a cryptocurrency based on its technical merits. So exchanges are not currently in a position to agree about what the next reserve cryptocurrency should be.
I think that replacing Bitcoin with Ethereum right now would be a mistake. Ethereum has a lot of big scalability hurdles - I think that technically Ethereum actually has more hurdles to overcome than Bitcoin - Their community does seem a lot more motivated though; but I'm not sure that will be enough. Ethereum still needs to switch to Proof-of-Stake and THEN it needs to implement sharding.
Also, I don't think that pruning will be feasible for Ethereum. It wouldn't make sense to prune the Ethereum blockchain because that would entail pruning out smart contracts. Most no-smart-contract cryptocurrencies are not limited in this way.
Also , i m not sure how often people use BTC to transfer stuff between exchanges, it's just too slow and expensive. i think ppl use LTC or ETH more often for transfers.
Absolutely. The day traders switched to Eth as a reserve back in December when Bitcoin shit the bed under the load of main stream media attention. It's not perfect, but it's an order of magnitude faster and cheaper than Bitcoin.
I think Bitcoin will be seen like Geocities some day. A hell of an idea that many people have done much better.
I was thinking of putting some of my crypto money to ETH, but after the huge parity multisig bug (and the fact that I'm using multisig to secure my BTC) and finding out that the ,,most secure Ethereum wallet'' has no testing for the multisig wallet that it has (and all the hard forks that I don't agree with), I decided that I never want to touch ETH.
Meanwhile Schnorr signatures and Lightning network are amazing scaling solutions for BTC (of course right now you have to dig into the details to understand why)
> But unfortunately in technical terms, it's not fit for this purpose.
Can you explain why, in technical terms?
I don't believe any other cryptocurrency has faced anywhere near the same volume of transactions.It looks to me like Etherium maxed out at around 230k transactions per day while Bitcoin has faced nearly 500k transactions.
At least Ethereum has a roadmap, some consensus on what needs to happen to achieve scale, and a decent track record of getting things done. Yes, I am aware some things are experimental and might not fully work out. But personally I haven't been particularly impressed with the development of Bitcoin in the last 2+ years.
I think Nano (https://nano.org -- just rebranded from RaiBlocks) will become one of the biggest arbitrage currencies due to zero fees and its highly scalable architecture (7k+ TPS tested). I've been working my butt off to make sure as many people as possible will be able to build with it as the documentation and ecosystem are currently lacking. See https://www.nanode.co/node-api
I looked into the whitepaper of Nano. It is definitely intriguing, however there is relatively little attention paid to how it is attack proof.
A network partitioning attack, combined with a double spend that is embedded and sent to the chain of a major economic actor (like an exchange), will result in the blockchain irreversibly forking in perhaps an hour without any way of reconciliation.
Basically someone created Raiblocks by forking another DAG 'blockchain' database, and allocated themselves millions of coins spread across many addresses. A few thousand coins were given to the public if they clicked captchas.
These people who generated raiblocks / nano are now essentially multi-level marketeers trying to convince you to buy their beanie babies.
As an outsider who has become deeply involved in the community, your assessment of the creators could not be further from the truth. They are hard-working, honest individuals who are extremely open about their process and holdings. Check out the dev fund, which represents about 5% of total holdings: https://www.nanode.co/account/xrb_1ipx847tk8o46pwxt5qjdbncjq...
The core team has been working very hard to try and improve the software, and they are making strides every month. I am constantly impressed with their professionalism and stature.
> anytime you buy a cryptocurrency means someone else is trying to cash out.
The reason people sell stuff is usually to optimize their portfolio construction, not because they think the price is going to go down. Just because you think something is going to go up 10x in the next year doesn't mean it's a good idea to hold onto it.
I think Stellar is going to go up 10x by the end of next year. That doesn't make it a good life decision to mortgage my house and put my life savings into XLM.
Please explain which blockchain they forked? The original RaiBlocks paper and first beta implementation was published in December 2014.
If you make accusations, please back up your claim.
To be honest, I don't care about them cashing out. Everyone who builds a company that changes the world cashes out.
Nano is solid technology, doing what it promises in practice. So I don't see how this is a scam or a get rich quick scheme. If them make the new bitcoin, they can cash out for all I care, and I hope they do.
Beanie babies? Please explain how their technology is inferior compared to e.g. Bitcoin, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, ... .
> The reserve cryptocurrency of the internet needs to be fast and offer cheap transactions
The most important things about any cryptocurrency are decentralization and censorship-resistance. Without those two, you might as well be running a PayPal clone in a datacenter. That way, you get the fastest and cheapest transactions possible.
> so that it can easily and cheaply be moved between exchanges.
Exchanges can set up big payment channels between one another and do instant Bitcoin transfers. However, since they operate in a regulatory environment, this may never happen.
If you don't subscribe to the bitcoin-dev mailing list, then you're missing out on the latest developments toward scalability and privacy, which are really exciting.
> That way, you get the fastest and cheapest transactions possible.
Not currently. Have a look at the Nano cryptocurrency (renamed from RaiBlocks): it has instant and free transactions, and should be scalable (but this last part is not proven in practice yet). The instant and free is definitely true in practice already.
You mean a single point of failure central database? How much uptime do you expect for such a database? 99.9%?
Where is this database located? In US while I do payments in Australia?
I think you are seriously underestimating the complexity of a decent payment system.
Nano/RaiBlocks sounds good in theory and they seem to have fewer hurdles to achieve scalability than a lot of other cryptos but in practice at the moment every transaction still needs to propagate through every full node so it's not actually scalable in its present state.
> The reserve cryptocurrency of the internet needs to be fast and offer cheap transactions so that it can easily and cheaply be moved between exchanges.
Segwit addresses the "fast and cheap" transactions bit and has been seeing more widespread use. Do you have an opinion on it?
Ethereum has the most trading pairs after Bitcoin, and a pretty comprehensive multi-pronged scaling plan. It's the most likely successor to Bitcoin as the reserve cryptocurrency.
It is just what emerges, because people need a stable high-liquidity currency, for things like an intermediary for trading between lower liquidity currencies, and as a lower-volatility store of value.
scalability is being solved by lightning network which is already seeing alpha testing on the Bitcoin main net (production) I am doing what I have done every big drop in Bitcoin and buying a little each week
just because it performed in the past doesn't mean it will in the future but the same reasons I liked it still exist and are getting stronger. the market will lag behind lightning because people don't realize what it is yet and it might take a year or two but it will be back even stronger than $20k (the first time it's bought by a countries reserve bank it's game over cryotos will beat fiat then)
people are already using lightning to pay for VPN service instantly with less transaction fee than $0.01 USD, from my perspective this solves the problem of Bitcoin transactions being too expensive to pay for everyday items
In order to do that, you had to pay a large transaction fee to set up a Lightning channel in the first place. Since all transactions between you and TorGuard are one-way, you will have to do this repeatedly, paying large transaction fees each time.
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[ 6.8 ms ] story [ 205 ms ] threadhttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_cat_bounce
Even a dead cat will bounce if it falls from a great height
That last step is going to be a doozy too. Hopefully this is happening before too many people lose more than they can afford, because of FOMO and the relentless hype.
...November... I think it was just last November.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.........
When an event like that occurs you should very much expect a correction, and when that correction occurs it should be expected and not a surprise.
What baffles me is that everyone involved in BTC accepted the 50% upward fluctuation. When the obvious correction occurred they were all surprised and started saying just what you did, that currencies aren't suppose to fluctuate by 50% in a month.
How didn't you see this coming and why do you still consider BTC a currency in light of this event?
How many people think that cryptocurrency has a real future worth that expenditure? I would guess fewer everyday, but I could be very wrong.
The ecosystem has some serious issues to solve for it to be ready for an everyday user.
[1] https://lbc.cryptoguru.org/about
Every bit of computer power beyond the minimum threshold of efficiency needed to operate the transactions and database is a net loss.
Peak efficiency of the Bitcoin mining network would be about 3-10 basic desktop computers. Instead Satoshi Nakomoto's Proof of Work will waste more and more energy with nothing to show as time goes on.
I personally don't believe it can go to zero (at this point that means blocks stop being mined and exchanges shut down).
I think a fallacy many make is that this is open source, not corporate-created software. That changes a lot of the context. For years, people compared Linux to Windows and Mac and I can't count the number of times Linux was dead. I can probably actually count the times that Bitcoin was dead, but it's still a lot.
If you watch other crypto prices, many are tightly bound to BTC. I expect to see Bitcoin has a core part of the cryptocurrency network of the future. Maybe BTC won't be the ultra high-speed payment provider we had hoped for, but it's really difficult for me to accept that it will die off.
Ultimately, we're all speculating. I love that this is such uncharted territory.
With that out of the way, the major problems seem to be scalability, pseudonymity instead of anonymity, missing regulatory oversight, mining centralization, adoption and as already mentioned proof of work and its energy inefficiency. I am probably missing things, I went from really excited about Bitcoin to a more rational and pragmatic view about the time it reached dollar parity and haven't followed the development too closely ever since because in my opinion everything in existence is really far away from prime time and it will take some more new ideas on the level of Bitcoin itself to get there, i.e. some tweaks here and there alone will not be good enough.
Also note that I mentioned such general things like adoption as problems but what I really mean there is in the interaction, for example between regulatory oversight and adoption. But I don't want to flesh those arguments out in a comment, it would just be very time consuming and I don't think I would have to add much if anything new, many others have discussed all kinds of problems again and again. Some will follow those arguments, some will dismiss them and repeating them once again won't change that.
So applying this logic, the bottom of this bubble should be around $2-4k. For a couple of reasons however this bubble is different - lots of finance guys participating. Because they are experienced they will buy ahead of that to make sure they don't miss the bottom. So I see this bubble bottoming at $5k. This has the nice property that most of the "dumb money" who entered in Nov-Dec without any idea about trading or cryptos will lose money (markets tend to make sure that people who entered during a frenzy lose).
If I'm investing in a company, the first thing I do is read the quarterly and year end reports. I take a look at how the money is being used. I look for things that might be fishy. You need to be careful, even with blue chip stocks -- often the numbers don't add up. I look at how well the company is executing. What kind of margin are they getting? How are they using that money? If for growth, then what are the investing in and how well is it paying off? If for profit, how much profit are they making and what are they doing with the profits? That kind of thing. I look at the products they make. I read reviews. I look at the competition. After I've done all that, I decide how fairly the company is valued. Often they are over valued. Sometimes they have about the right value. Rarely they are undervalued. I try to buy the latter stocks and hold them for a long time.
Just because of how I do my job (I am a internationally remote contractor), I am forced to speculate on currency. Note the subtle change in vocabulary. I am not investing in currency. I don't expect a rate of return over time on currency. Instead, I look at geo-political situations and I guess how it might affect the price of a currency against another currency. At the moment, I live off the Japanese yen (I'm in Japan), but I get paid in Great British pounds. I need to have some insurance that my revenue stream is relatively constant, so when GBP is very low (it was down to just over 120 JPY last year!) I try to hold it. When it is very high, I try to sell it. Sometimes it makes sense for me to even buy it when it is low. When I am looking at this, I look at both the British and Japanese economic policies. I look at elections that might change that policy. I look at the (complete lack of) progress wrt Brexit, etc, etc. But this is not an investment. My goal is to hedge against the changes as much as I can, because otherwise sometimes I'm working for 60% of the wage that I normally make (and it's hard to ask your clients to double their payments just because something like Brexit happens).
Now, let's look at Bitcoin. What economic factors influence Bitcoin? It would be tempting to say "none", but this is not strictly true. First, we have to look at the likelihood that bitcoin will become viable as a general currency. It's pretty unlikely, but the chance is not actually 0 (Much to my surprise, I can actually buy things with Bitcoin from mainstream shops in Japan -- even a local pizza restaurant takes them). However, it's clear that changes to the protocol need to happen for it to scale. To understand the implications, you have to understand the chances for various proposals to succeed (both technically and politically).
When you look at trading currencies, often you look at indicators like interest rates because the change of interest rates encourages (and sometimes outright forces) trading of the currency. With bitcoin there are precious few outside influences like that. There are things like "tethers", but since they are a complete scam you have to figure out what it's likely to do to the price (will it force people to buy BTC, or will it tank the price).
Having said all that, I hope you can see a kind of gradation in the "investment" type. When I buy stock, I can reason about the performance of the company by looking at their past performance, their execution, their product, the oppositions performance, etc. When I engage in FOREX (which I try to avoid, but alas am unable to), I am stuck with the politics and economic policies. I have to kind of guess what countries are going to do and how that will result in changes to the price. I try my best to stick to ...
That pretty much sums up why I've stayed away thus far. I've done well with equities over the years, but FOREX kicked my ass (a lesson I could thankfully afford). As you point out, there's at least some semblance of sense in FOREX, which I obviously have yet to grock. I don't even play games in Vegas unless I can figure out the odds ("how are you going to fuck me?"), and I fully cop to that as gambling. Cryptocurrencies, phhhht, I haven't the first clue as to what drives the price, or how I'm going to get taken. To me, it's even worse than gambling, because though I might know the odds at the craps table, try as I might I can't get a grasp on the drivers of cryptocurrencies other than hype.
One way it can go south is if Bitfinex is using the money it gets from Tethers to buy BTC. Effectively not converting the money to paper, but holding onto BTC. In other words, Tether may be backed by BTC.
So a run on Tether might affect the price of BTC negatively as Bitfinex would have to sell BTC to dollars to pay for the Tethers people are trying to sell back.
But that's only a theory.
In other words, it's like a bank you can only put money into, but not take money out of, and you can only redeem your money by finding some poor sucker who'll trade your USD vouchers for some other currency that's actually worth something.
Unless you're just talking about maintaining the peg by buying large amounts when the price falls below $1. In that case, yes they'd have to sell BTC to maintain the peg because it's conjectured that they back USDT with BTC (not USD), and even with the BTC they have, at its market value it wouldn't actually back the amount of Tethers they've printed.
That might be the case if Tether were actually backed by fiat.
https://i.imgur.com/cjnwruL.jpg
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15987623
Used to be that crypto is massively overpriced there, now it looks like Korea and Japan are leading this price fall.
Or that folks trust their ability to get money out of Coinbase more than the other exchanges.
The reserve cryptocurrency of the internet needs to be fast and offer cheap transactions so that it can easily and cheaply be moved between exchanges.
I think it will take some time before another cryptocurrency takes the place of Bitcoin. Part of the problem is that very few people currently have the skills to evaluate a cryptocurrency based on its technical merits. So exchanges are not currently in a position to agree about what the next reserve cryptocurrency should be.
I think that replacing Bitcoin with Ethereum right now would be a mistake. Ethereum has a lot of big scalability hurdles - I think that technically Ethereum actually has more hurdles to overcome than Bitcoin - Their community does seem a lot more motivated though; but I'm not sure that will be enough. Ethereum still needs to switch to Proof-of-Stake and THEN it needs to implement sharding.
Also, I don't think that pruning will be feasible for Ethereum. It wouldn't make sense to prune the Ethereum blockchain because that would entail pruning out smart contracts. Most no-smart-contract cryptocurrencies are not limited in this way.
Also , i m not sure how often people use BTC to transfer stuff between exchanges, it's just too slow and expensive. i think ppl use LTC or ETH more often for transfers.
I think Bitcoin will be seen like Geocities some day. A hell of an idea that many people have done much better.
Meanwhile Schnorr signatures and Lightning network are amazing scaling solutions for BTC (of course right now you have to dig into the details to understand why)
Can you explain why, in technical terms?
I don't believe any other cryptocurrency has faced anywhere near the same volume of transactions.It looks to me like Etherium maxed out at around 230k transactions per day while Bitcoin has faced nearly 500k transactions.
Prunability included.
But there are a dozen similar projects now, so why this one?
The only one I can think of is IOTA, but it mainly focuses on IOT or act as underlying technology, not really user friendly.
A network partitioning attack, combined with a double spend that is embedded and sent to the chain of a major economic actor (like an exchange), will result in the blockchain irreversibly forking in perhaps an hour without any way of reconciliation.
"Distribution is complete" - how was the supply created and distributed?
https://raiblocks.net/page/frontiers.php?limit=100
Basically someone created Raiblocks by forking another DAG 'blockchain' database, and allocated themselves millions of coins spread across many addresses. A few thousand coins were given to the public if they clicked captchas.
These people who generated raiblocks / nano are now essentially multi-level marketeers trying to convince you to buy their beanie babies.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=raiblock+captch...
Remember, anytime you buy a cryptocurrency means someone else is trying to cash out.
The core team has been working very hard to try and improve the software, and they are making strides every month. I am constantly impressed with their professionalism and stature.
The reason people sell stuff is usually to optimize their portfolio construction, not because they think the price is going to go down. Just because you think something is going to go up 10x in the next year doesn't mean it's a good idea to hold onto it.
Could you please explain this to me
If you make accusations, please back up your claim.
To be honest, I don't care about them cashing out. Everyone who builds a company that changes the world cashes out.
Nano is solid technology, doing what it promises in practice. So I don't see how this is a scam or a get rich quick scheme. If them make the new bitcoin, they can cash out for all I care, and I hope they do.
Beanie babies? Please explain how their technology is inferior compared to e.g. Bitcoin, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, ... .
Tech wise it's the best cryptocurrency out there for this purpose. If someone else disagrees on a technical level, please explain.
The most important things about any cryptocurrency are decentralization and censorship-resistance. Without those two, you might as well be running a PayPal clone in a datacenter. That way, you get the fastest and cheapest transactions possible.
> so that it can easily and cheaply be moved between exchanges.
Exchanges can set up big payment channels between one another and do instant Bitcoin transfers. However, since they operate in a regulatory environment, this may never happen.
If you don't subscribe to the bitcoin-dev mailing list, then you're missing out on the latest developments toward scalability and privacy, which are really exciting.
Not currently. Have a look at the Nano cryptocurrency (renamed from RaiBlocks): it has instant and free transactions, and should be scalable (but this last part is not proven in practice yet). The instant and free is definitely true in practice already.
Recently a redditor calculated a single wind turbine could power 7000 transactions per second (https://www.reddit.com/r/nanocurrency/comments/7ucw1a/the_en...)
The new generation of cryptocurrencies is here to compete with the previous ones, and with the established financial services.
Exciting times.
Disclosure: I own a few of those coins
I think you are seriously underestimating the complexity of a decent payment system.
Is there a cryptocurrency that is? A linear scaling factor like larger block sizes or faster block times doesn't count.
Nothing beats instant (=few seconds), free transactions.
Current problem is that Nano is not yet available on a wide range of exchanges.
Disclosure: I own a few of the mentioned coins
Segwit addresses the "fast and cheap" transactions bit and has been seeing more widespread use. Do you have an opinion on it?
just because it performed in the past doesn't mean it will in the future but the same reasons I liked it still exist and are getting stronger. the market will lag behind lightning because people don't realize what it is yet and it might take a year or two but it will be back even stronger than $20k (the first time it's bought by a countries reserve bank it's game over cryotos will beat fiat then)
My impression was that it was still not very user friendly(not saying much in crypto world) nor widespread.
https://www.cryptoground.com/article/btc-price-4000-usd-indi...