Bitcoin Price Falls Again On Reports that China is Shutting Down Local Exchanges (cnbc.com) 115
China's clampdown on cryptocurrencies has reportedly taken a new direction -- to close down local bitcoin exchanges. From a report: Initial reports from Chinese media that the government plans to close down domestic cryptocurrency exchanges have seen the virtual coin shed more than $100 since Friday. Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal also reported Monday that that the country is planning to shut down digital currency exchanges. Bitcoin sunk to a low of $4,241 in late trading in the U.K. Friday, and reached a low of $4,108 on Monday, according to Coindesk data. It climbed to a record high of $5,000 dollars a little over a week ago, and has shot up by nearly 350 percent since the start of the year. The latest reported crackdown follows a decision by Chinese regulators -- including the People's Bank of China (PBOC) -- to ban initial coin offerings (ICOs). ICOs are a means of raising funds by selling off new digital tokens. A crackdown on ICOs would not affect the original cryptocurrency directly, but bitcoin still dropped more than $1,000 over a period of three days. China's latest move to shut down local exchanges would mark a new direction for the country in its efforts to regulate the market.
Drop of $1000? $5000 - $4108 1000 ?? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Price changes like this are not what you want in a medium of exchange, but they are exactly what you want in a pump-and-dump stock.
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Well, it sank to $3940 during the 4th but finished the day a little over $4000, then reached $4600 over the next few days before falling to $4100 yesterday. Don't blink. So somewhere in there it lost $1000 although it gained half of it back along the way.
Re: Drop of $1000? $5000 - $4108 1000 ?? (Score:1)
Re: Drop of $1000? $5000 - $4108 1000 ?? (Score:1)
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"Anyone and everyone "investing" in any type of digital (fake, nonexistent, not linked to anything tangible) currency is just plain fucking stupid. At least dirt is real. Bitcoin is just 1s and 0s and linked to nothing of value."
Odd that my ROI with this fake money was 10 fold in real $$. Also, you do realise that all fiat currency isn't based on anything tangible. While US$ used to be based on gold, that hasn't been the case for decades. That dollar in your wallet is only worth the value that society gi
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All cash is "fake, nonexistent, not linked to anything tangible".
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In major currencies, cash is linked to gold held by the central bank (e.g. Bank of England) or similar.
That depends. Which year do you believe it is currently?
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Currency is useful as a means of decoupling barter from direct person-to-person exchange. I don't have to go to a dairy farmer, a butcher, a corn farmer, a winery, and the newspaper printer - I can go to the local Von's and buy everything there. I give them paper to procure goods; they give some of that paper to others for goods, and so on. Currency is great because it's universally accepted at a recognized value.
Bitcoin? Where the price can bump 20% in a matter of a few days (and plunge by that too) is
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From this perspective, all money except precious metal is fake.
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They're not stupid. They're rich. They're simply leeches, draining money out of the economy while contributing no productivity whatsoever, not even as much use as the banking and stock leeches (who at least supply money to productive people).
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Please, someone, verify the math... how did Bitcoin lost more than $1000 and still be above $4000 when the all time high was $5000.
By asking that question you have shown you clearly don't have what it takes to be an investment banker.
Bitcoin roller coaster. (Score:2)
how did Bitcoin lost more than $1000 and still be above $4000 when the all time high was $5000.
Bitcoin is so unstable and changes so fast, that by the time you finish your subtraction the numbers doesn't mean anything anymore.
And I'm only half joking.
Seriouly, do we *Really* need a new /. article each time the exchange value of BTC jolts ?
At that pace we could actually use the exchange rate as an entropy source for random number generators.
Stick to the bitcoin *protocol* as a way to make decentralized transactions only, and keep using *fiat* for your long-term storage needs.
Extreme Volatility (Score:2)
I'm suprised nobody has started arbitrating between different BC exchanges. With the current volatility the opportunities are massive. I guess you can't really short-sell but with a minimal investment you could make a mint!
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China subsidizes electricity and hardware for bitcoin processing. Are they trying to take over the global market while minimizing bitcoin's disruption in their own markets? That would follow with their methods for standard currencies.
Subsidies and solar power energy storage. (Score:2)
China subsidizes electricity and hardware for bitcoin processing.
Ha. well that will be another interesting aspect of bitcoin--- it will arbitrage electric power subsidies out of existence.
Please correct me if I'm wrong because I might be but my educated guess about bitcoin is that there's no price bubble at all. My reason for stating this rests on the assumption that the price of mining a coin is exactly equal to the electricity and hardware costs plus a thin markup (thin-ness dictated by competition which is intense). By price here I mean the cost of buying a coin pl
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You have identified a strength of Bitcoin, which is that the algorithm that limits its money supply also sets a maximum value at any given time, based on the cost of mining new coins. If there are a significant number of miners who can still profit at a market price of $4000, they will keep on mining. But at the same time, speculative trading in the outstanding supply of BTC can take place at any price level, and is not less frothy and speculative just because there can still be new mining.
All of the econ
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the algorithm adjusts the difficulty to maintain a constant increase in supply of btc, so there is no upper limit to the price. the harder people try to mine, the more mining has to be done to find a block.
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The only thing I have BitCoin seen reliably disrupt is the wallets of the gullible.
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So, you think Bitcoin is like tulips?
Wrong!!!
You can put tulips in a vase. (for a few days, anyway).
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So the market is far from being saturated.
The more people get word of bitcoin and develop an interest, and actually buy it, the more it will go up.
If the price increases another factor 10 or hundred, you need to be a really big player if you want to disrupt the market.
So, when the market is saturated we'll see a final price, but not a dump.
Just my 2 cents...
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I'm suprised nobody has started arbitrating between different BC exchanges. With the current volatility the opportunities are massive. I guess you can't really short-sell but with a minimal investment you could make a mint!
Hard to make a mint when a transaction takes hours to days.
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That's not necessarily relevant, if your cash flow is big enough. Remember it's small profits repeated many times. Imagine one exchange will sell you a bitcoin at $5000 and another is still buying at $5100 because it updates slower, you've made 100$ (minus fees).
But you'd have to invest larger amounts, and you're right, transaction times are quite limiting.
There is plenty of arbitrage. Fees, delays limit (Score:2)
There are many people who do Bitcoin arbitrage. Software for doing so is readily available. Exchange fees and the time required to settle transactions limit the profitability and increase the risk. You don't know for sure if your transaction will settle until days later. Recently, there were 200,000 transactions awaiting settlement.
There is also risk from exchange issues, and not just frauds and hacks. An FDIC-insured bank has to prove it has sufficient assets to cover liabilities, both liquid and long te
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sell while they are worth anything at all children...
Whereas they could fall in value to be a lot less than they currently are, I don't think they will be as completely worthless as the tulip bulbs. That's not a fair comparison. There will always be transactions that people want to hide from governments. Online, the closest thing to that you have are crypto-currencies. Bit coin will have value to some for the foreseeable future. It may drop a few thousand in value, but it's not going to crash completely. It's used too much for that to happen now.
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Yeah, like ransomware! Bitcoin and all the other cryptocoin fuckers can just die. Stupid assholes.
While I completely agree Bitcoin are just an idiotic concept, so is debt-based currency. Currency lacking a tangible backing is just all around stupid because it is in essence an abstraction for a quantity of Human labor and nothing more. Though at least debt-based currency has a whole host of Labor dedicated to it (not just wallstreet and bankers in general, but people who will stomp your shit in if you counterfeit it as well.)
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While I think it's probably stretching the facts to assume Bitcoin will behave exactly analogously, why is it unfair to make the comparison?
During the Tulip Mania, people actually did use tulip bulbs as a medium of exchange. They were compact, portable carrier of value that unlike, say, a bearer bond or letter of credit, couldn't be forged. If the Tulip Mania happened today, contraband dealers absolutely would be taking payment in bulbs.
The whole idea of Bitcoin is that there is no central authority that c
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Most of the Dutch tulip mania trading was actually in futures contracts rather than physical bulbs.
As for Bitcoin, the deflationary design doesn't necessarily mean that people won't lose confidence in it. They must first accept that the "currency" has value in the first place. If I told you that I would sell you a "nealric coin" for $1,000 and that there will never be more nealric coins created, I doubt you'd be very interested in it, because nobody places any value in a "currency" that I just made up. Righ
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I don't pretend on being able to predict the future; ultimately we're talking about how people feel about Bitcoin, and anything could happen to that. My point is that the design of Bitcoin makes an inflationary crash less likely, not impossible.
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A "currencies" with no physical embodiment and are "supported" entirely by people thinking happy thoughts? What could possibly go wrong?
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A "currencies" with no physical embodiment and are "supported" entirely by people thinking happy thoughts? What could possibly go wrong?
You just described the dollar and many other state issued currencies. The only thing that makes the dollar worth anything is that people are willing to exchange it for other things.
Yep, Myspace ruled social networking (Score:2)
>Bitcoin has value mostly as the original and primary blockchain currency.
Indeed. Even if one were to assume that crypto-currency would be around forever, that doesn't imply the same for Bitcoin. Bitcoin's value, compared to other crypto-currency, is basically because it's popular. In a way, it's popular because it's popular. Much like the leading social network. Plenty of sites offer features similar to Facebook, but people use Facebook because that's what their friends use. Everybody is on Faceboo
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Wanna bet?
Never mind, I'm sorry, I can't bet with you because you are a crazy person.
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Both the technology and the c
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WIth often long delays in confirmation ...
Compared to what? Typical credit card charges can be reversed for months afterward. With cryptocurrency the time to settle might be a significant fraction of an hour but when it's done, the cost was a tiny fraction of the transaction and the "money" is 100% really really transferred, this removal of trillions of dollars of economic drag on the economy in the form of fees to "trusted 3rd parties" is another huge potential benefit of such digital currencies.
Re: Tulip bulbs (Score:2)
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There will always be transactions that people want to hide from governments.
And that is where blockchain currencies completely fail. Yes, your blockchain can be anonymous - but if it is tied to you, then EVERY SINGLE TRANSACTION in that blockchain is also tied to you. With cash, if they tie one transaction to you - the others are still anonymous. Cryptocurrencies are 100% traceable and indentifiable to a single user; once you know who that user is, you know everything they've ever done with their blockchain.
Cash is still king for anonymity, as it requires ZERO identification for
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There will always be transactions that people want to hide from governments.
And that is where blockchain currencies completely fail. Yes, your blockchain can be anonymous - but if it is tied to you, then EVERY SINGLE TRANSACTION in that blockchain is also tied to you. With cash,...
That's why I said that "ONLINE" they are the "CLOSEST THING". Online crypto currency is still more anonymous and less trackable than any other form of payment even if not completely secure.
You can't pay with cash online.
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Hype (Score:1)
Yes, it did drop to below $4100, but it has now rebounded to nearly $4300. Yes it's dropped some compared to Friday, but it's about where it was last Tuesday. Whaddayaknow, it goes up, and it goes down. Look at the 30 day chart, and the trend looks like a fairly steady rise from about $4000 to $4250. Much as journalists would like the story to be "Oh noes, the bitcoin is crashing!", it doesn't really stack up (yet).
Of course, reaching a peak value at a "significant" number like $5000 is a signal for a lot o
Looking at it wrong... (Score:2)
I also suspect that with the volatility, there will be a bitcoin futures market at some point.
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"I also suspect that with the volatility, there will be a bitcoin futures market at some point."
Stocks are like betting on a horse race with no finish line. Bitcoin is like betting on a horse race with no finish line and no horses.
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"So it's like PayPal then?"
No.
- PayPal can only perform a heist once, then their reputation is destroyed.
- The net worth of Paypal is more than it would be worth destroying their own brand
- The number of people required to collude in a heist of Paypal and their lack of assurance of a payout makes a heist very difficult
- People don't speculate on the value of Paypal dollars
My point about stocks vs Bitcoin is that although stocks have a dubious valuation, there's some rough consensus on what "fundamen
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- PayPal can only perform a heist once, then their reputation is destroyed.
Yet they seem to have done it a lot. There are even websites. www.paypalsucks.com And they are NOT new...
- The net worth of Paypal is more than it would be worth destroying their own brand
Apparently not, since their brand is already destroyed, and it doesn't seem to be a problem.
- The number of people required to collude in a heist of Paypal and their lack of assurance of a payout makes a heist very difficult
Not really. Lots of people scam paypal, and paypal scams lots of other people.
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"...coming paradigm shift to digital currency..."
Check the top of the graph.
http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7236/6918834286_483518f635_b.jpg [staticflickr.com]
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Not sure why "Banzai7 Institute" is plagiarizing that image -- and changing the section labels: "Smart Money" to "Wall Street and 0.01 percenters"
Original source article of the image
Bubble cycle-- Momentum, delusion, despair, hope, recovery By Neil Behrmann
* http://marketpredict.com/articles/mp-bubblecycle.htm [marketpredict.com]
It is available on wikimedia
* https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stages_of_a_bubble.png [wikimedia.org]
Bloomberg has info on this (Score:1)
Basically, after some of us pointed out that the bitcoin exchanges were enabling Russia and North Korea to delay climate change action, and China had decided to force all new vehicles to become electric, they had to do something.
You can still exchange bitcoin legally, but only in person.
Consequences are like that. China does what it's going to do.
Of course the value of BTC just dropped! (Score:2)
I purchased my first Bitcoins about a week ago, and I'm known to have that kind of effect.
I can also stop a cashier lineup just by standing in it.
Bubble (Score:2)