It didn’t the last time crypto spiked and crashed, so I don’t see why it would this time.
Oh, of that I am aware. But, just like I wish that Hitler had never been born, I can also wish that the people that use Bitcoin will suddenly wake up realize how terrible many terrible life decisions they had made, up until this point, and dedicate themselves to fixing their mistakes.
Hopefully, the US can at least get around to banning Bitcoin and other vehicles of environmental or economic destruction before it takes us all down.
I think the difference here would be that the card can be physically examined and declared legit by experts even without provenance. It happens all the time.
With NFTs, the chain is also the provenance. Lose that, and all you have is a worthless jpeg, that’s assuming you grabbed an image before you lost the file. There’s no way for an expert to examine that.
I never denied climate change. There is a strange, demented logic where recognizing something as useful, and perhaps not as awful as the worst allegations on the internet, leads to accusations of climate change denial and comparisons with Hitler.
I think it’s just that the idea that you have a non-speculative, non-criminal use-case for crypto-coins that stems from having to deal with authoritarian governments’ currency controls was lost on people because it was made way up thread, and it’s also kind of foreign to the experience of most people who post on the board.
That reminds me have probably 1000+ baseball cards in the attic from the 80’s, wonder if they are worth anything today.
Bitcoin just drilled another 10% in a minute, with the other big cryptos similarly dropping. There’s no rhyme or reason to it, other than the sentiment now seems to have turned negative.
I wonder if it has to do with Biden saying they’re going to crack down on crypto tax avoidance?
Lantz
1796
One thing to note is that the actual bitcoin markets see pretty small actual trading volumes. It looks like something like 100k BTC are traded in a day:
https://data.bitcoinity.org/markets/volume/24h?c=e&t=b
Apple stocks trade about 100M shares a day by themselves.
https://ycharts.com/companies/AAPL/average_volume_30
If that’s the case, it only takes a relatively small amount of people selling to make big moves on the market price.
Timex
1797
Bitcoin’s value is based entirely on speculation at this point. There’s nothing about the commodity itself which justifies any sort of value. It’s just tulip bulbs, except you can’t grow anything with them.
At least tulip bulbs are sort of environmentally friendly.
Dollars don’t have any intrinsic value either. I really don’t want to read another 20 posts on “it’s not a real currency”, but if you’re going to critique BTC, at least pick some criteria that are generally applicable.
There are 18.7 million BTC in circulation. There are 16.7 billion Apple shares outstanding.
Bitcoin ect aren’t currencies, they’re commemorative civil war plates from Bradford Exchange that call themselves currency. The only really interesting things about them are their Blockchains.
The real risk of Bitcoin is spoofing or counterfeiting the Blockchain - and it will happen one day, and suddenly crypto collapses. Considering the value of crypto now it seems the smartest criminal minds should be cooking that problem rather than just buying a bunch more GPUs.
Lantz
1801
I think that just adds to my point, which is that BTC is more susceptible to large price swings just due to lack of order flow on the exchanges. It doesn’t require that much volume traded to exhaust the resting orders in the markets and spike the price up or down.
This isn’t a BTC is good/bad judgement, it is just a fundamental nature of the current markets.
Not that I necessarily disagree with the overall point, but this is an apples to oranges comparison.
If you look at order books on Coinbase and other exchanges you’ll see the vast majority of orders are for fractions of a BTC. However, fractional shares of stocks is still a relatively new thing and most investors (especially institutional) deal in whole share amounts. So 100M shares traded in a day for Apple puts a pretty likely cap of transactions on that day maxing out at 100M (likely less as its doubtful the average is 1 share per transaction), while 100k BTC transaction load is likely much higher than 100k transactions in a day.
Timex
1803
Dollars are backed by the US government though. And even now, off the gold standard, the USD has an established place at the center of international trade.
No crypto currency is going to go from zero to that in the foreseeable future.
Crypto currency is purely a speculative commodity at this point. While all currencies are speculative commodities to some degree, they all have a LOT more inertia than any crypto does now.
Are you suggesting there wasn’t a time it was based on speculation?
Come for the greatest Twitter handle of all time, stay for the fire.
Matt Levine has been making that point for quite some time, and he’s far from the only one.
China’s financial regulators said they need better oversight. Seems like a pretty clear chain of logic.
