FYI- Myself and almost all the hardcore bitcoiners I know feel the recent price drop was due to China, not Dimon. Dimon has been making these pronouncements for years, and things had already started to turn with the rumors coming out of china.
Even then the recent drop was basically just a big trading opportunity-- the rumors kept building and once an exchange said they were going to shut down, all the whales piled in at once... to kill the price and take profits and drive out the weak hands.
And then when the other exchanges were clearly going to shut down and all the shorts had been built up, these same whales piled in at once again to get coins at a lower price.
Thats why the move is so dramatic and so quick.
I don't think this was collusion. I don't think this was coordinated or communicated or even intentional-- it was just an obvious trade and so a bunch of people jumped on it.
One thing about BTC is that it is a free market, and that means you don't have market makers who act as stops on price movements (or trading hours, LOL!) and so things are very different there.
This is why the general advice is HODL. Just buy bitcoin using dollar cost averaging, don't risk too much and hold it. Timing the market is a PITA, and I'm convinced impossible on the micro. On the macro scale, though, HODL is the best strategy.
PS; here by HODL I mean "hold on for dear life". Don't get shaken out of your coins by roller coaster weeks like this one.
Raphaelle Nicole, the CEO of Bitfinex invested in the past
years in a number of ponzi schemes and also supported
Trendon Shavers, who was found guilty recently for "a
classic ponzi scheme" and was sentenced to 18 months in
prison. In 2012, Raphaelle tried his own ponzi scheme:
“When I need more coins than I have to fill an order, I
will ask everyone that previously “registered” with me to
lend me some btc. After 7 days, I will return all of it,
principal + 2% interests [per week]…. Now the questions
you might have: What could you do to make so much profit?
Let just say that I do “arbitrage”: I buy low and sell
high.”
Now that Pirateat40 closed down his operatations thanks
to all the fud that was going on and growing on the forum,
I expect everyone that spreads this fud, accused and
insulted Pirate and the people that supported him to
apologize.
Not only did Pirate brought us a great opportunity for
investors (once in a lifetime actually), he did help
stabilise and grow steadily bitcoin price, volume
exchange, and thus contributed to the success of bitcoin.
For that, Pirate, I want to thank you. You've done a
wonderful work, and I hope you're stay around here.
Now, apologies on.
Not only are you linking to reddit, you're linking to the sub reddit with the least educated bitcoin users in it. That sub reddit is where people who don't understand enough about bitcoin to be able to discern that SegWit is, in fact, block size increase to up to 4MB, hang out.
Yep, we certainly live in strange times when the most useful source for information about certain financial markets is Reddit.
That is truly the case though. Most of the active developers for every client as well as the largest stakeholders in the entire crypto ecosystem are on Reddit.
>... you're linking to the sub reddit with the least educated bitcoin users in it
Nope. They are linking to the sub where the least educated people's voices are still allowed to be heard. The other subreddit has been turned into the very thing Bitcoin was built to destroy.
> ... SegWit is, in fact, block size increase to up to 4MB
China was the trigger. But it was not the reason. The reason was the incredible appreciation over the last year. A meaningful correction was imminent.
I still don't think it is done. I would expect to see 1500 again before the next leg up. But you are right, trying to nail the bottom is not a good strategy.
NVDA was a great buy a year ago but the current price only seems fair in a very optimistic scenario. I wouldn't short it, but there isn't much hope it'll go higher.
"Here by HODL I mean".... pretty much makes it explicit what I am meaning by the term... which has been used in different ways. You are linking to the origination of the meme, like I've somehow made an error by specifying the specific use I'm intending.... which only reveals you're less familiar with the term than me.
He isnt complaining about your intended meaning. He is complaining about your spelling of the term. It shouldn't be in caps because it's an intentional misspelling, not a sentence reduced to each words first letter
I've been following bitcoin for a while and understand that there's been interesting stuff going on the the space for a while. That said I really can't understand what fundamentals could possibly be driving the recent price rally. I started to get into it more heavily back in late 2016 when there was legitimate volume and fundaments due to use as a instrument to avoid Chinese currency controls. But now it seems like it's solely a speculative thing, albeit with some relationship with the greater blockchain ecosystem. Even if blockchain technologies do take off, why would bitcoin benefit or gain a some fundamentals in the market?
It's important to understand that Bitcoin is a new asset class we haven't really seen before-- it's the first technological money.
So, it's "market cap" is not based on shares like a stock is, it's more like other forms of money.
Yet its price is the result of it going thru the technology adoption lifecycle, and it keeps jumping up as inflation slows and ever wider groups of adopters start owning some.
In the past year, it has been made much more easily owned and accessible as an investment in South Korea and Japan, and of course it is highly relevant to the Chinese. These trends will continue for awhile.
It will be "speculative" until it is mainstream. The only thing making it "speculative" is that it isn't more widely adopted, but to be widely adopted there will have to be much higher prices, given the very limited supply.
There's not going to be enough bitcoin for every millionaire in the world to own even one of them.
My understand was that much of the innovations is happening with the general set of blockchain technologies, most of it happening on chains other than BTC (ETH). Why should bitcoin be correlated with them?
I am a fan of at least the idea of bitcoin, blockchain technology, and cryptocurrency, but I'm not sure it would be possible to describe bitcoin in a way that makes it sound more like a scam than you just did.
It's not as much about Bitcoin as it's about capitalism. If you can make profit on using electricity, you will use it. If you can make a profit on building coal power plants, you will build them. Bitcoin is just yet another thing in the pile of products where externalized costs are not included in the price.
The greater problem is how we will solve global capitalism in relation to environmental destruction. Nation states that do not have any moral considerations have a competitive edge over those that do.
Nobody will use anything that includes $3-5 transaction fees to buy something unless it's over $500. That you haven't used it is prototypical. Nobody has used it because traditional alternatives like Visa, Mastercard, or cash are better.
I doubt it happens directly on the blockchain, but there are plenty of things built on top of bitcoin that make that work. Its like arguing that no one uses bank accounts for small purchases because wire transfers are too annoying.
I haven't studied it, but the general compaint seems to be it takes a fair amount of power to run the computers to generate coins, validate transactions. (enough to power over 1,000,000 american homes, by some accounts[1]) China has some of there mines near hydropower (the cheapest power source).
No one cares about your narrow focus... bitcoin mining, just as with gold mining a century ago, drives other technological developments which end up benefiting everyone.
What currency is not being used in the drug market?
I would love to have a rational debate and hear objective arguments agaisnt bitcoin vs gold that can be applied uniquely to bitcoin or rather that dont apply to both.
Scarcity?
No intrinsic value? Speculative?
Thefts?
Used in illicit ways?
All these apply to both gold and bitcoin.
"Gold has been historically valuable to humans". So have many other rocks, flowers, spices, etc.
I am geniuenly interested in seeing why Bitcoin should fail as being a store of value.
> I am geniuenly interested in seeing why Bitcoin should fail as being a store of value.
Oh, it's a great store of value. But that doesn't make it a good currency. Currencies aren't intended to store value, they're intended to facilitate the transfer of value. Assets (be it physical such as property, governmental such as bonds, or corporate such as stocks) are what is intended to store value.
In general, you want a currency to suffer from inflation and decrease in value over time. While this may seem counter-intuitive to having a healthy currency, it's the best thing for the economy, as it encourages the currency to continually be in circulation, and whatever cannot be readily spent to be invested into assets or placed into a bank, which then goes and loans it out to others who need it, stimulating the economy.
Gold has never been easy to use as currency. It needs to be weighed, and now its value is so high that in order to buy everyday items, you'd be dealing in almost immeasurably small slivers of gold. So instead people used it as an asset; They would buy it speculatively and watch the price rise as scarcity increased. As more people bought it, the scarcity increased even more quickly, leading to effectively a deflationary spiral.
What do you think will happen as we get closer to the 21 million Bitcoin limit? It'll be the same deal. Everyone will hold onto their BTC because it's scarce, and increased scarcity increases value, and before long, the entire BTC economy grinds to a halt.
"But this has never happened with gold!" I hear you say. Let me point you to the Gold Reserve Act of 1934, where the government basically said "Naw, dawgs, give us that gold back. We gotta get this economy moving again.", and made most private possession of gold illegal, in order to help get America out of the great depression.
Bitcoin is an amazingly cool concept. Bitcoin is an awesome work of technology. Bitcoin is not a currency.
BTC isn't really scarce, there's quiet a few newer iterations like Litecoin, Monereo, Ethereum, Dogecoin etc..
It's also worth noting the supply was minted mainly by miners doing very low difficulty work early on, using basic home computers.
Satoshi made an intensional design choice to gain control of the supply for a very low cost, exploiting late adopters as bag holders.
The incentive system for bitcoin mining might of anticipated gaining popularity as time passes and increasing the reward as the network grows, but the system was designed completely opposite of that, at the expense of the masses for the benefit of sending the supply to the mining nodes operating in the first few months.
Ditto. Maybe you read my comment wrong but I am arguing for a store of value - not a currency. And I am asking why it should fail as a store of value because I don't see how gold has any advantage over it.
Sorry, I guess I conflated it with your initial statement of "What currency is not being used in the drug market?".
The first difference to come to mind is that if you forget the password to your gold, the gold still exists. If you forget the password to your wallet, your bitcoin is pretty much unsalvageable. And assets that are so easy to destroy aren't particularly stable. And yes, most wallets have all sorts of backup capabilities and safety features, but in the end it's used by humans and humans are stupid [citation needed].
Wow what bullshit. India invalidated a set of currency notes and immediately replaced it with new ones. Is that "banning paper money"? If a government mandates that all petrol cars must be replaced with electric by 2025, does that mean they have "banned cars"?
The difference is that it is likely that a majority of Bitcoin transactions for goods and services are for drugs, ransoms, and other illegal purposes because it is wildly inefficient to use as a payment system for legitimate transactions, due to high transaction fees, long confirmation times, and low merchant acceptance. The vast majority of transactions in US dollars, on the other hand, are legitimate.
Shapeshift to Monero before or after! Doesn't really matter.
Try buying cocaine from your local neighborhood cartel, contrast that to receiving shipments in the mail. World of difference as far as safety/security.
Its not clear to me how this proves they are buying it? Is there some further background around this. Perhaps as other posters suggested, its for a client
There are so many cases of JPM/Goldman/etc. advising customers of 1 direction while they themselves, do the exact opposite, it is no longer noteworthy... just cheerfully accept and internalize that they are SCUM and get on with your life.
Even then the recent drop was basically just a big trading opportunity-- the rumors kept building and once an exchange said they were going to shut down, all the whales piled in at once... to kill the price and take profits and drive out the weak hands.
And then when the other exchanges were clearly going to shut down and all the shorts had been built up, these same whales piled in at once again to get coins at a lower price.
Thats why the move is so dramatic and so quick.
I don't think this was collusion. I don't think this was coordinated or communicated or even intentional-- it was just an obvious trade and so a bunch of people jumped on it.
One thing about BTC is that it is a free market, and that means you don't have market makers who act as stops on price movements (or trading hours, LOL!) and so things are very different there.
This is why the general advice is HODL. Just buy bitcoin using dollar cost averaging, don't risk too much and hold it. Timing the market is a PITA, and I'm convinced impossible on the micro. On the macro scale, though, HODL is the best strategy.
PS; here by HODL I mean "hold on for dear life". Don't get shaken out of your coins by roller coaster weeks like this one.