Peak Crypto Craziness?
I’m writing this Saturday night, Pacific Time, and cryptos never rest. By Sunday morning, “Bitcoin Cash” might have soared another $1,000 or crashed by $1,000; and bitcoin might have soared or crashed by another $1,500. Neither would surprise me, the way these things are going. One thing for sure, you’re not watching grass grow.
Bitcoin Cash, which was split from bitcoin in August, began surging from $630 on Thursday mid-day Pacific Time. Within 24 hours, it jumped 50% (or by $320) to $950. It then lost steam. But in the wee hours of Saturday morning, it fired up again and soared another $450 to $1,400 by late morning. It then fell off, but Saturday night, it returned to form and spiked to $2,448 at the moment, nearly quadrupling in two days. Here is what the move looks like in US dollars in a seven-day chart (via WorldCoinIndex):
Its market valuation jumped by $30 billion over the two days, from $10.6 billion to $41 billion. I mean why even bother with the stock market.
Bitcoin went the opposite way. It plunged from a peak of $7,771 on November 8 mid-morning to $5,519 at this moment, losing $2,252 or 29% in three days. It’s now back where it first had been in late October. Its market valuation plunged by $35 billion from $127 billion to $92 billion. $35 billion is starting to add up, so to speak (via WorldCoinIndex):
Bitcoin ran into an entanglement on November 8, when developers called off a planned software upgrade, SegWit2x. The upgrade was supposed to have improved transactions speeds. This was blamed for the plunge that started on Wednesday.
Then the fun focused on Bitcoin Cash. By Friday, as Bitcoin Cash had soared 50% while bitcoin was crashing, it was blamed on traders that were switching from chasing after bitcoin to chasing after Bitcoin Cash.
At the time, Joshua Raymond, a director at the foreign-exchange and CFD broker XTB, told Business Insider:
“The delay to Segwit2x has damaged confidence amongst bitcoin investors concerning the much-needed resolution to speed up bitcoin’s slow processing speed.
“Everyone was hoping the Segwit2x would address this but unfortunately, the delay due to a lack of consensus on the mechanics has affected confidence. Confidence on transaction speed in Bitcoin has deteriorated significantly in recent months. As Bitcoin Cash enjoys much faster transaction speeds, we have started to see a recycling of positions out of Bitcoin into Bitcoin Cash as a consequence.”
Just don’t call cryptos an investment or asset or asset class or currency. While they could be used as currency, in reality, these kinds of violent moves make their use as currency way too risky and nonsensical. What’s left?
The blockchain technology, which underpins these cryptos, is free and open source. Currently a lot of smart brains are trying to figure out how to put the technology to work in all kinds of industries. Some of them will likely succeed. I’m looking forward to the moment when there is a way of transferring money around the world that is universal, convenient, cheap, fast, not subject to violent fluctuations, and 100% reliable. But that moment isn’t here yet, and neither bitcoin nor Bitcoin Cash will have anything to do with it.
Instead of being usable currencies, cryptos – CoinMarketCap lists nearly 1,300 of them, with many of them already worthless – are a form of online betting based on a new technology, and they’re subject to different dynamics than classic online betting, but not regulated or forbidden by governments, unlike classic online betting.
These dynamics include artificial scarcity and artificial demand. Everything is just a game. If the Big Money – hedge funds, for example – jumps in, this stuff soars. If the Big Money tries to take profits and convert those massive, lightning-fast gains into dollars, euros, yen, yuan, or whatever, it crashes. That’s it. But it sure is entertaining.
The thing with artificial demand is that it can completely dry up without notice and never return, and then the value can go to zero, a journey many cryptos have already undertaken. But like all forms of betting, it can be fun and very lucrative for as long as ceaseless hype continues to create this artificial demand.
On a side note: These moves tonight are so nuts that I have to change the numbers dramatically every few minutes as I’m working on this article. But I think it’s time for a good beer, to let these things go their crazy way.
Our risk-free forever-surging stocks are too tame? Chase “blockchain” and cryptocurrencies. Read… Big Bitcoin Investor Believes Bitcoin Might Still Go to “Zero,” Just Riding the Momentum
Enjoy reading WOLF STREET and want to support it? You can donate. I appreciate it immensely. Click on the beer and iced-tea mug to find out how:
Would you like to be notified via email when WOLF STREET publishes a new article? Sign up here.
It amazes me the big guns have the stomach for this crypto craps, given the amounts of money involved. Or is it just peanuts and just looks big to us crumb crunchers out Main Street America?
Nobody I know has $7,000 laying around to buy 1 (one!) Bitcoin. The price alone bars mere mortals playing. And maybe that’s why it’s so successful? Small club + lots of leverage = move big things.
Just wanted to note here, you can buy a fraction of a bitcoin as far as I know. It is nearly infinitely divisible. I could be wrong, but that’s my understanding which means you could bet 5 bucks on the horse race if you so desired, which I believe a large number of regular folks around the works with access to a con wallet are doing.
The is a fundmental feature of all crypto currency. You can trade fractions of coins. This is necessary given that most cryptos have a hard lifetime cap buily in on the amount of whole coins minable.
For professional traders, the crypto market is a God sent sector. Price action follows technical rules very well, which is why funds who can legally get involved do so. You can’t go wrong if your trading team has a disciplined approach. TradingView is full of pros blogging about their trades. If you follow them, you’ll see what I mean. There is a massive number of amateur traders and investors who get involved emotionally, rather than strategically, making all this possible.
I was not surprised when Bitcoin (BTC) doubled since the last fork that created BTC Cash. Essentially the BTC owners had double the number of coins and were selling BTC Cash to buy more BTC. If you think about it BTC can just keep forking in the future which would provide more currency to buy itself. Thus BTC, and the forks, provide a way to keep the price going up forever.
These dates are not exactly correct but in the past 3 months BTC has tripled the amount of crypto’s that can be used to buy BTC.
So let me put down some estimated numbers
July 31st there roughly
15 million BTC
August 1st (BTC fork creates new Bitcoin Cash)
15 million BTC
15 million Bitcoin Cash (out of thin air)
October 25th (BTC fork creates new Bitcoin Gold)
15.5 million BTC
15.5 million Bitcoin Cash (out of thin air)
15.5 million Bitcoin Gold (out of thin air)
November 10th (Bitcoin Cash fork creates Zcash )
16 million BTC
16 million Bitcoin Cash (out of thin air)
16 million Bitcoin Zcash (out of thin air)
16 million Bitcoin Gold (out of thin air)
Thus in just 3 months, BTC tripled the number of BTC variant cryptos to from 16 million to 64 million. They are printing faster than a Central Bank ever did.
At this rate of forking , there will probably be 1 billion BTC and BTC variants in 4 years.
So with this information…how will BTC or any of these variants be excepted as a currency or store of value when they can fork and create double the amount of coins for an owner.
Actually, I am not sure how the Government will not step in if people start using BTC to purchase things in stores….etc. Talk about seeing inflation kick in if cryptos are allowed to buy cars, houses, etc.
Great point. If bitcoin becomes a medium of exchange, its value will increase and USD will decrease as people shift from USD to bitcoin.
The governments will of course shut this down, claiming it harms the general population, which holds USD. The government could do this without serious resistance. Nobody wants a massive wealth transfer from savers of USD to early adopters of bitcoin (greedy speculators).
Not gonna happen. I can’t put some Bitcoins in my pocket and walk up to Lowe’s and buy paint. Bitcoin is some new twist, something like a Ponzi scheme, which I thought was 100’s of years old but actually only dates back to the 1930s.
It’s probably OK for drug deals (backed by drugs?) or for laundering large amounts of money, in the same way that if Al Capone gives you a hand-written IOU that you, and everyone else, agree is genuinely from Al Capone, that could be sold to another gangster.
When the power goes out, or something happens to my computer, my money doesn’t go away. I don’t reach in my pants pocket and find the $60 that’s in there right now, has suddenly disappeared. Bitcoin will never be money.
Yeah it’s not like you spend Bitcoin at Lowe’s or any-… oh yeah:
https://www.egifter.com/bitcoin/lowes-gift-card-bitcoin
ChrisR – You mean the Lowe’s where the POS machines barely work and i have to explain what a hammer is? Yeah, I’m sure trying to use the bitscam there when they barely comprehend a cash sale, is gonna be rock solid.
ru82, ” …excepted as a currency… ” you meant to say “accepted” right?
I am sure, the central bankers must be studying this technology. They actually have to buy some select securities for their printed fiat, which seems like too much work.
They’re studying it alright……and what no one is talking about is the fact that the block chain technology will one day be used against the people to scrutinize and keep track every single financial transaction.
I’ll take the time tested method of cash and anonymity, over the block chain any day of the week. I’m not at all interested in seeing all assets and property digitized.
Yes, and related to your comment, I just want to point out a news article that I saw about a Calgary woman who took a 6 minute UBER ride, and found an extra $40 charge on her credit card (on top of the fare charge). UBER says it was because she had “snowy boots” (remember this is in snowy Canada).
So, you can see how you will be screwed at every turn if you cannot have some control over payments.
Bit coin isn’t bought. It’s mined
It’s not “mining” it’s “math” – you sound like a speculator.
Yip the more things change the more they stay the same.
The digital area is making inequality much worse
Right. But the gullible believe that the opposite is the inherent virtue of this unprecedented anarchic free market experiment. They want to abandon the government-controlled fiat for the software developers/miners-controlled bits and bytes.
http://www.ofnumbers.com/2017/10/19/who-are-the-administrators-of-blockchains/
“popular euphemisms commonly used by cryptocurrency promoters and lobbyists include supposedly supporting “open” or “public” blockchains – several feelgood words – but as we empirically observe, in many cases these networks are not open to the general public: either as an actual validator or as a developer. Access can become gated by a clique who determines who can be involved.”
“Today mining pool operators pick and choose which transactions to include into blocks and validate the chain they are building their blocks, is the chain they intended to do so on. They can (and do) censor transactions. For a pre-arranged fee, some will include your transaction before including others, including transactions from the mining pool operator itself”
“Bitcoin Core does control the GitHub repo and tightly controls the commit access, occasionally removing those that do not align with their political views.”
You read some articles and comments on sites like Coindesk and you quickly realize the snake oil machine is, um, well-oiled.
It’s the new tulip mania. We all know where THAT one ended …..
We know nothing of the sort.
Yes we do – most people in it are dreaming of infinite wealth and won’t listen to reason. All we need to see is a strong correction and the house of cards could be over.
“At this rate of forking , there will probably be 1 billion BTC and BTC variants in 4 years.”
No forking way!
It would be rather humorous if this was a way for the FED to unwind QE. You can eliminate quite a bit of liquidity by starting a scheme, having people buy into the scheme, and then making that scheme illegal. Then having wiped out the liquidity, they could justify ceasing to increase interest rates.
Would make for an interesting movie or novel.
@RU82, this reminds me of the different rounds of currency issue in this book…
“Fiat Money Inflation in France”
https://mises.org/library/fiat-money-inflation-france
Free .pdf of this 80p. classic book by Dickson White avail. from the Mises Institute.
Mises Inst. blurb:
“It records the most gigantic attempt ever made in the history of the world by a government to create an inconvertible paper currency, and to maintain its circulation at various levels of value. It also records what is perhaps the greatest of all governmental efforts — with the possible exception of Diocletian’s — to enact and enforce a legal limit of commodity prices. Every fetter that could hinder the will or thwart the wisdom of democracy had been shattered, and in consequence every device and expedient that untrammelled power and unrepressed optimism could conceive were brought to bear. But the attempts failed.”
This show is obviously being run by Wall Street sleaze balls and banksters for the usual reasons. It will be interesting to see how much these sharks will fleece the ordinary fools. I’ll throw a party when crypto currencies scam crashes and the sharks laugh all the way to the bank.
Crypto currency is a good concept, but this is obviously a scam, and perhaps run by the banksters to damage the concept of crypto currencies and scare the world so that only their fiat currencies are valued.
Looking at volumes by country it’s apparent Bitcoin has a very interesting story.
There are a number of early adoptees among which the US, the UK, Sweden and Switzerland are the most prominent. These countries have been trading large volumes of Bitcoin since it was conceived and keep on doing so.
Some countries have been trading Bitcoin on and off since its inception, generally in a pattern of massive spikes in volume followed by long dry spells. Iran and Japan are the most prominent here.
Then we have those that have been riding the bubble.
The recent crazy bubble started out on the Pacific Rim: with The Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia all starting to trade very large volumes pretty much out of the blue in 2016.
Intriguingly enough China didn’t join in until February 2017, but when she did it was a classic case of “Après moi, le déluge”. The money China has poured into Bitcoin and its offspring is simply unbelievable, but it doesn’t explain the recent crazy valuations.
What explains them is looking at “other countries”, those which had a literal handful of Bitcoin users until valuations took off like a Soyuz rocket this year. Volumes in Denmark and Hungary increased ten times literally overnight in June and quadrupled in India over the same time frame. Nigeria and Tanzania went from pretty much zero to large volumes in a matter of days.
Sure, none of these countries has the financial firepower China has, not even India, but put them all together and the sums of money involved become amazing.
There’s nobody running this thing: it’s part traders looking for a market where central banks haven’t destroyed volatility yet, part people looking for a safe place to park their money and a large number of latecomers merely hoping to make money quickly and disappear into the night like bandits.
Agreed. The crypto currency mania also conveniently siphons off demand for gold.
My main question is, if some folks are actually playing CCs as a hedge against inflation / fiat money debasement, and they are apparently quite willing to drop huge sums of money into it, what happens to gold when it finally gets rediscovered as having most of the virtues and none of the flaws of CCs? It moves higher? Maybe?
Crypto mania = Tulip mania. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania )
Simple.
As other posters have pointed out, the amounts of money involved in this foolishness preclude ordinary mortals from participating. So, who is making these trades ? The question isn’t academic either. As the amounts increase, so does the likelihood of a blow up. The nearest comparison would be a car fishtailing on an icy road. Unfortunately the results could be the same.
Are we setting ourselves up for a parade of sleazy bankers coming to Congress to plead for a bailout because they’ve put the system itself at risk ? Again ? I know, I know, “no one could have seen this coming.”
Its a car on ice.
Its int fishtailing.
Its overloaded with teenagers, they are all under the influence of drugs, and they are doing high speed doughnuts.
What could possibly go wrong.????????
As Robert Moriarty from 321 points out…….at the end of the day Bitcoin will end up worth less than a beanie baby.
A far more prudent investment right now would be to plunk down some cash on a shale oil stock that’s highly leveraged to wti/brent and wait for Israel and the Saudis to escalate the situation with Iran.
Ethereum was hacked out of $30M and wallet holders were locked out of $300M. This is following the same pattern Bitcoin established from its inception. The “investors” keep getting scammed out of their money at different points, but nobody can find the coins in the public ledger, really! Crypto currencies are a scam at this point in their evolution. IMO they exist in order to condition “investors” to the idea of no recourse, where they can take your money with impunity.
This is the kind of info that should be in the article, or a follow up article, (hint!)
And the point about ‘no recourse’ – this is showing up everywhere – investment system as a protection racket, there is no alternative investment system! The pension system is that way, funds go right to Wall st. Individual has little or no say in the matter.
Well, what part of “unregulated market” is it that “investors” didn’t quite comprehend?
The “Aaand – It’s Gone”-part:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/10/parity_280m_ethereum_wallet_lockdown_hack/
“When you are tracking all their transactions, you realize that they were deliberate… Therefore, we tend to think that it was not an accident. We suppose that this was a deliberate hacking. We believe that if the situation is not successfully resolved in the nearest future, contacting law enforcement agencies may be the right next step.”
Good Luck with that! It’s like explaining that all of my WoW-gold got ripped off at a scammy auction in Azeroth by those Bad Horde People.
Maybe the sums are massive because bots are trading bits of bitcoins in micro seconds up and down to make money on the volitility
This. It is a small market and easily manipulated. A huge % of Bitcoin is in very few hands.
“Crypto investors”?
“Investors” is a misnomer. To be truthful, the correct term is ‘speculator’.
Bitcoin is nothing more nor less, than a de facto digital currency and thus yet another fictitious form of wealth, with a computer system as its counter party.
If you believe in crptos enough to store your wealth there, then I have some very desirable sea side property in Arizona, that I know you would very much like to purchase. (sarc.)
I’m not sure it is fictitious form of wealth 1 bitcoin will always be worth 1/26000000th of the bitcoin blockchain of course backing(block) might become worthless but then at one point gold was a useless yellow rock
Update: I’m just sitting here and drinking my morning coffee (WS is on Eastern Time, but I’m on Pacific Time). While I was away from the desk…
Bitcoin Cash crashed by $1,000 in eight hours and is now $1,445. Easy come, easy go.
Bitcoin rose about $600 and is now at $6,179.
Throw another dollar on the fire!
More blockchain shinanigans to add to the stinking pile.
http://www.incakolanews.blogspot.ca/2017/11/more-on-upcoming-scam-called-global.html
Easy come, easy go. Wolf I love your insouciance. Anything that fluctuates that sharply WILL end up in a ditch. I just don’t want to be their insurance policy.
Yikes cryptos gone wild ! If you didn’t want to buy an actual bitcoin buy a derivative . Probably more liquid . Yes my friends another financial product added to the mix. Lets see how the algos move the needle on this.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-31/bitcoin-growing-up-as-futures-open-floodgates-to-wall-street
Or: Big Casino just introduced a new game.
Nobody really knows how it works but they all heard some players made a lot of money.
“Our [sic] risk-free forever-surging stocks are too tame?
Emphatically, “Yes!” “Crypto-currencies” are more of a “scheme” than a “market.” I cannot, however, reserve this contempt for the current speculative bubble in cryptos. With the heavy hand of government/oligarchical interference in markets these days, everything seems more like a scheme than a free market.
All these comments are interesting especially from those that never “speculated” early in the Bell Curve of crypto’s and lost their chance at
early retirement.
The underlying issue is a world wide demand for cutting the umbilical cord of worthless inflated currencies.So think of this as a world wide experiment to cull out the losers -cut out the ability of governments to steal the wealth of their citizens .
The Blockchain has enormous potential to create a triple ledger to forever protect the ownership of property -in a day and age where land is carved up and confiscated by tribal wars.
Consider the potential of the promise in “smart contracts “where your imagination is the limitation of a technology .
Fiat currencies are backed by all the things you can buy with them, and the stability of their governments and markets.
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are not backed by anything, except other people’s faith in their value. It won’t be a blockchain that protects the ownership of property, but a government powerful enough to enforce the rules. A blockchain just keeps accurate records.
So far, the invention of the blockchain only shows that people will speculate on anything, as long as the price is moving. But the price has to keep moving up, otherwise people who paid real money will all start to realize they paid for some numbers on the screen and will want their money back.
I don’t doubt there will be some interesting applications of blockchains in the future, and most likely already somebody is working on them, but to be a store of value it needs to be backed by something stable.
WHEW! 37 comments later Philip Schelin expresses a non-consensus view. Thanks Philip, what these fools don’t see coming will astound them!
hA…and then, they will claim they knew it all along! But if the wolfstreet comments thread was on Blockchain, THEN we would know someone’s been fibbin’. It’d all be there in 1’s and O’s
Block chain is cool. It is a transaction and ledger technology. Who decided it will be a currency. Some guy named Satoshi. Of course he creates it and mines 1 million coins almost immediately. Did he mine those coins before he released the open source code.
Mining is is a waste of energy. It only made the early 1% wealthy. Why not distribute the coins in a more efficient manner. Why not distribute coins base on the value somebody will create with a block chain instead of just how much energy and CPU cycles they can throw at it.
The technology is good, the method of applying….not so much.
Quite obviously it is contrary to the interest of all governments (esp Washington) to let this silliness take hold as an actual medium of exchange.
Further, DC is hand in glove with the tech industry.
Could they make this effectively go away in more or less an instant if – rather, when -they want to? Clearly. Think FATCA and how they have bullied more or less the whole international banking industry successfully.
It’s a trade. Analogous to what bankrupts the imbeciles who mess about with quintuple leveraged gold mining ETFs. That’s all it will ever be. If it ever shows signs of becoming a viable substitute for King Dollar on any level, the big nest of Vipers (to paraphrase Al Swearengen) will strike. And that will be that.
But even 3x PM leveraged ETF’S Don’t show volatility that makes them trade 300 percent above the their 200 day MA.
For these coin freaks….its pure speculative action.
Show me any trading strategy or discipline antwhere…. that teaches you to trade an asset that moves up and down 300 percent above or below its 200 day MA
How much electricity is used to mine one bitcoin?
How much electricity is used to trade one bitcoin?
t some point the cost of the electricity used to mine and trade these ridiculous things is going to be more than they are worth.
IMO nothing more than a high value Ponzi scheme. The people who managed to get in first made a fortune. (Don’t you wish you all threw US$100 at Bitcoin when it first started?) Those in last will lose everything.
All it takes is one big government to outlaw the use of the things and it is all over.
All it takes is one big government to outlaw the use of the things and it is all over.
I wouldn’t touch this scam “currency” with a ten-foot pool.
As you note, governments, especially the tax man, must find it abhorrent that huge amounts of “money” are changing hands without them getting their cut. In addition, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies facilitate illicit transactions and markets, something no law enforcement agency can abide. It’s one thing when TBTF banks engage in money laundering and racketeering – these scofflaws are also major donors to the Republicrat duopoly, so they get a free pass. However, run of the mill criminals do NOT donate to our political overlords, so they must be made to feel the full wrath of federal law enforcement.
Last but not least, the Fed and Treasury would like to think they have a monopoly on creating counterfeit fiat currency with no intrinsic value. They are not going to appreciate competition from the likes of Bitcoin.
Most people who own Bitcoin like me I imagine have made no trades with it since before the Bitcoin Cash fork. As a result a person like me –
I suspect the vast majority of BTC holders – has seen the value of both combined, as we own the same amount of both, slowly grow as speculator money flowed this week from one to the other. Only people who have placed bets on the success of one side of the fork by selling off their holdings on the other side for sharply speculative purposes, tossing all hedging out the window, have seen money go poof or come pouring in this week.
All I see is that my Bitcoin continues to outpace in value the USD, on which I would get exactly negative interest in a traditional savings account, and that’s without being subject to the tender mercies of Wells Fargo-level “customer service.”
The petrodollar of course is poised to go poof, at which point having a globally traded store of value looks like a good idea. Anyone who wanted to buy $10 worth of Bitcoin last year could have done so, and it’d be worth $100 now. Maybe $90 one day this week and $110 the next, but probably $120 in a month. Not bad for the still relatively early adapter. I’m enjoying the wine, maybe other commenters are not enjoying their sour grapes? Aren’t people still making money selling tulips in the stable industry that developed out of some early chaos?
Bitcoin fluctuating in price a thousand USD per won’t be thought of as anything other than a normal day’s trading when it hits $100K.
Wrong, tulips are extinct.
If you are tempted to follow up on the binary option ad embeded in this article, read the following article from the FBI first:
https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/binary-options-fraud
B O ‘S have finally been outlawed in In Israel.
Any platform that pushes them, should be treated with extreme suspicion.
Most of them that do, will do almost anything, to stop you withdrawing from your account once you have been foolish enough to open one.
I would bleat a Wolf loudly over the binary add if I didnt know he has no real control over a lot of the adds that appear.
Sure sounds like a place where I want to keep my life savings.
/sarc
Currencies are and always have been the creations of government. They facilitate, through taxation, the provisioning of the central authority with some part of society’s production. The acceptance of their value is supported by their usefulness in paying taxes. Yes, this is the MMT explanation. It makes intuitive sense to me because money is deadly serious. The possession of currency, for an individual, can often be a life and death matter, and its no coincidence that the government that creates currency has the unique right to use force in the maintenance of the law, including tax law.
Bitcoin is a great real world experiment that tests this idea. If cryptocurrencies last and become more stable then the MMT folks will be proven wrong about the essential nature of currency. I don’t expect that will happen. If I owned any crypto-coins, I’d trade them in now for money backed by a national government.
No one here gets it lol. Everyone is too old school. Anyone here under 30?
Oh, I get it all right.
There is nothing new under the sun when it comes to manias and the madness of crowds.
Here is an innovative use for technology. Mount a live, streaming video feed on your monitor so we can watch your meltdown, live and in real time HD, when Bitcoin reverts to its intrinsic value: zero. Or when your Bitcoin vanishes from its not-so-“secure” wallet thanks to some hacker or larcenous administrator.
Then maybe the relics on this site will pool our donations and make a donation to whatever food bank you’ll be frequenting, or buy you bottles of Night Train or Mad Dog 20/20 to pass out to your new social set.
This is to announce THE MOON COIn 100% backed by a first class , ONEWAY ticket to the moon.There is a strict limit of million coins to be mined and tradeable until the time of departure. Introductory price of 10 cents.Hurry The Price will explode. Don’t be left out.
You’re just joking, and it’s funny … BUT I get this sort of stuff (or nearly this sort of stuff) several times a day in my inbox, for me to promote on WS, and these people are NOT joking. They’re very serious about extracting real money from other people that way. These people don’t even know how funny they are.
Should they last so long, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies will lose all value precisely two minutes after the first quantum computer goes online.
Bitcoin is a consensual ponzi scheme. It will continue to rise ($10,000 ..20k…100k) whatever until regualtors take it seriously as a contributor to inflation. People are starved for yield and they found a place where they can get it.
I wonder when you’ll be able to buy stock with bitcoin?
https://nypost.com/2014/01/04/real-estate-broker-we-accept-bitcoin/
http://www.nasdaq.com/article/what-companies-accept-bitcoin-cm323438
So if one bitcoin = one dollar, and through speculation suddenly i have two bitcoins, then i change them back into two dollars? isn’t the Fed a bit concerned about this?
My favorite cringe is that Google has decided to show me ads for “Bitcoin IRA” when I look at my promotions folder in gmail.
Ugh. I can’t imagine who would put their needed retirement savings in a scheme like Bitcoin. To me that is complete insanity. Sure it might keep going up forever, but the volatility is crazy and it might fall rather than going up forever at some point. Maybe big players can do technical analysis and reliably do a dump at the right moments to make their money, or maybe it’s a tiny part of their portfolios and they don’t mind the risks, but I wouldn’t bet on a small player being able to get out with the right timing if they really need the money.
My favorite wacky rationale for the future value is when the true believers calculate how much it will be worth when every person on the planet is using Bitcoin as a medium for trade, like a currency. ($100,000 a coin, $1 million a coin or whatever crazy numbers they come up with.) The thing is, very few people who bought into Bitcoin are using it as currency or to trade goods or services by holding Bitcoin for long because it’s much more attractive to speculate with because of the wild fluctuations that make it hard to know what you’re actually paying for something. Most people certainly care how much they pay for goods and services and Bitcoin becomes a big unknown there. Also, the tax records (for those not actively avoiding taxes) are at best obnoxious to keep track of for making any casual purchases with Bitcoin. It’s like buying groceries with stocks, at least in the U.S.
Having said that, my play money, which I used to buy into some small amount of Bitcoin in 2015 as an experiment (fully expecting I might lose it all and being ok with that) has paid off. Even if it goes to zero tomorrow, I’ve already taken gains of quadruple what I put in and still have more left to take out if I see some other insane rallies or more to “lose” from its current value if it goes down.
It has paid off more than occasional play of the lottery ever has for me (and I put it in the same class of “investment”), but I sure as hell wouldn’t invest money I couldn’t kiss goodbye for bills or retirement into either the lottery or Bitcoin. If people are putting money they can’t bear losing into this bubble, I feel really sorry for them, but it is certainly nice of whoever has been dumping money in to give me such a big payoff on my gamble when I’ve cashed out a couple digital chips.
My main question is, if some folks are actually playing CCs as a hedge against inflation / fiat money debasement, and they are apparently quite willing to drop huge sums of money into it, what happens to gold when it finally gets rediscovered as having most of the virtues and none of the flaws of CCs? It moves higher? Maybe?
http://www.scmp.com/business/global-economy/article/2119743/bitcoin-speculative-and-thriving-due-anonymous-nature-says
Bitcoin’s “anonymous nature” that is so beloved by libertarians and criminals will be this scam currency’s downfall. With the corporate state wanting total information awareness so they can tax all transactions and wealth, does anyone really think that they are going to give cryptocurrency users a free pass? Privacy rights are being stripped away daily as we move closer to a National Surveillance State; now that Bitcoin has exploded in value, governments, tax collectors, and central bankers will all have powerful incentives to ensure all Bitcoin “wealth” and transactions are taxed and “civil forfeiture” applied to ill-gotten Bitcoin-denominated wealth and assets.
But it’s not anonymous – there’s a record of each transaction. Imagine if the $10 bill in my pocket had an RFID in it, and whenever it was spent, that number the RFID spits out is recorded, and paired with other information like what store, what I bought, time of day, etc.
This is pretty much how my Clipper Card for public transit works. All it’s got in there is a little RFID and when I “tag” a reader to get on a train or bus, that number is paired with other information like the fact that I’ve paid for an unlimited pass for November, time of day, maybe they know that I take the light rail to/from downtown, and like to go out to Mountain View on it, but have only been to the Berryessa station once and that was by mistake – I took the first train going the other way.
I don’t care about this transit stuff (a really paranoid person would buy single 2-hour tickets for the light rail, and pay cash for the bus) because I don’t see it as being intrusive, and the information helps them run the system better. But using Bitcoin, with a complete record of every transaction goes a lot further than even the rather intrusive “club” cards at supermarkets and drug stores. Bitcoin’s a dream for people like the FBI etc who are into “Total Information Awareness”.
It’s not a matter of tacking some kind of tracking onto Bitcoin, it’s baked in.
Once again, as I have said here before, these price increases are not driven by arms-length transactions, they are artificially created by individuals having huge numers of addresses pretending to different people at arm’s length. This is serving as bait, to draw in greedy naive outsiders. Why does nobody write about this? I can create my own, say, SillyCoin, mint a bunch of them in microseconds, then trade among tens of thousands of accounts of myself at sell prices that I artificially move upwards. The media will report on this fabulous price increase, sucjers will start buying my SillyCoins at the artificially high prices (from me…), and I can retire. It is a crying shame that governments are not tsking action.
Apologies for the typoos, Iphone ….
Please read, for instance, http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-08-06/mysterious-trader-nearly-unlimited-bankroll-said-be-manipulating-bitcoin-price. “Spoofing” is a related fraud to drive up prices. Of course, simply trading with yourself (pretending to be lots of different people) is a much easier way to go about to make it appear prices move upward (or downward in a lul, to make greater fools believe it is a good time to buy). All these kinds of fraud are a direct consequence of the fact that nothing is regulated. The “exchanges” themselves are in fact controlled by people who engage in fake exchanges at that own, well, exchanges …
basically there are 2 legit bitcoin bitcoin cash and bitcoin people in crypto call it bitcoin legacy bitcoin cash could be use as peer to peer electronic payment system because without bigger blocks bitcoin legacy can only be a institutional value transfer system.yes the price of bitcoin and a lot of cryptocurrencies are manipulated check out the tether scam millions of coins created just to pump the price of bitcoin if tethers goes bust the price of bitcoin is back to 2000 dollars or less
With all this “forking” going on, I get the feeling that a lot of people are about to get forked.
As Warren Buffett said, “Bull markets are like sex. It feels best just before it ends.”
At 62 years of age the most important life lesson I have learned is how easy it is to be wrong about things. I have always employed an 80 / 20 rule. Keep 80 percent safe and speculate with 20 percent. I feel I am in a giant casino today and everything except gold and silver are in a bubble. Nothing wrong with a little crypto as long as you are willing to lose it all.
” I feel I am in a giant casino today and everything except gold and silver are in a bubble”
Gold is in a HUGE bubble.
Look at the divergence between silver and gold since 2 years before the end of Bretton woods.
If you don’t see the $1000.00 (App) divergence, as a bubble.
there are no “bubbles”, anywhere.