And now it’s back above $20k.
There is a strange level of glee at the drop in Bitcoin, by those who scandalized by Musk suggesting a recession would be a good thing, perhaps not realizing the two are very closely related to Fed policy.
Thrag
3650
There is also a strange level of strawman arguements and false equivalence.
KevinC
3651
Big time congrats on that!
Lantz
3652
What aspect of Fed policy is driving crypto to meltdown? Honestly super curious on what it could be. Most of the meltdown so far has a slew of crypto pretend-banks and hedge funds blowing up because they were over leveraged. They all blew up before the Fed actually raised rates.
Market participants began to increasingly expect imminent Fed policy tightening from late 2021. Bitcoin peaked in November 2021, SPX in January 2022. I think (warnings of) the end of ultra low interest rates and excess liquidity was especially bad for Bitcoin (to a lesser extent than SPX) - if people were going to start shifting their investments, the riskiest first makes sense. “Risk off” environment as traders say.
Sure. And how was the way BTC and cryto-scams were going, and might still be going, supposed to be better, except for the grifters, the insiders, and a rare few lucky ones?
rei
3655
The Cryptoland island in Fiji is still happening right?
I don’t think Bitcoin and crypto are nearly the existential crisis that is the prevailing sentiment on this thread insist it is; nor the utopia it’s boosters insist. Some made a lot of money, some lost a lot, some found it functional for real world uses, but for the overwhelming majority, including financial professionals, it was and was likely to remain an exotic corner of financial risk - something you read about during big swings, but don’t have any real exposure to.
It’s not existential, other that the modern-economy-country-sized energy requirements (either directly leading to huge amounts of CO2, or increasing cost and/or removing access of alternatives for everyone else). But it was starting to spread non-negligible tentacles in finance as well as increasing both current and future damage to non-negligible amounts of marks, increasing the amount of inevitable fallout of something that cannot work anywhere near as advertised.
Which has nothing to do with an economic recession; in both cases, it’s up to governments to deal with the fallout, but in the former, there is no choice, in the latter, they could, if they wished, both significantly prevent parts of it and not reward the perpetrators.
It’s only a valid comparison if you think governments (including the CB departments) are powerless. Well, no; it’s choices all the way down.
Thrag
3658
Um, who/what are you talking here? I mean we just went through a bit in the thread where someone implied crypto was already so entwined with the economy that a crash there would bring the economy down and several people pointed out that’s not the case. A crypto crash is not an existential crisis for the economy at large. Which largely goes against your description of the sentiment in the thread.
“Still” is a bit misleading, as it was never actually going to happen, but I believe even the pretend plans have exploded at this point.
Timex
3660
Cryptoland is continuing at the exact same pace it always had.
Here’s the deal:
Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme.
Bitcoin profit only comes on the heels of other suckers money.
Bitcoin has driven up the cost of electricity tremendously, has strained the electricity grid, and is destroying the environment.
If you’re old enough to invest in bitcoin you’re old enough to do 5 minutes of Googling to find out how this crap works. I have zero sympathy for anyone investing in this that decided abject greed was more important than having a planet we can survive on.
There are tons of other investment vehicles that are legitimate and safe. People investing in crypto were in it for greed because traditional investments weren’t as lucrative.
Sorry.
Yea, for hackers and money launderers. It’s truly been a phenomenal vehicle for holding company data ransom after their systems were compromised, bleeding billions of dollars from companies around the globe, thus driving up the costs for goods and services for you and I.
It’s also been super for human traffickers. Since there’s no oversight or regulation, like the kind banks could monitor, this is now the preferred method of payment for selling people, especially girls and women.
FTFY.
Seriously, people need to understand bitcoin better before they defend it.
Blockchain technology has potential uses but cryptocurrency is not a good use case. The problem with cryptocurrency is that the path of fixing its (many) problems is that effectively destroys all its vaunted advantages, whether anonymity, decentralised and unregulated nature, or speed.
I remember a time when people put their spare cpu/video cycles into decoding complex proteins to cure diseases: folding@home
How things have changed :(
Back to almost $21k, from a weekend low of $18,300 so maybe the worst is over.
Banzai
3666
as long as it exists, the worst is yet to come, sadly
