A Crypto Website Changes Its Data, and $100 Billion in Market Value Vanishes (wsj.com) 69
Paul Vigna, writing for WSJ: Prices for some of the most popular cryptocurrencies dropped sharply Monday. One apparent reason: an adjustment from a popular website on its digital-currency price quotes (Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source). A website called coinmarketcap.com on Monday removed data from some South Korean exchanges from its price quotes for a range of virtual currencies including bitcoin, Ethereum and Ripple's XRP. The move followed a South Korean government crackdown on cryptocurrencies. The move by coinmarketcap caused some amount of chaos when prices across the board suddenly plunged. In mid-Monday trading, XRP had fallen 26% over the past 24 hours, Bitcoin Cash was down 18%, and litecoin was down 12%. Of the top 40 cryptocurrencies, 31 were down, including bitcoin and Ethereum. [...]
Coinmarketcap has become one of the most popular destinations for price quotes as the sector surged last year. According to Amazon's web-ranking service, coinmarketcap is currently the 154th most popular website in the world, in the same ballpark as Chinese retail giant Alibaba.com. The website's rejiggered prices led to a flip in market-value rankings on the site. Ethereum, with a $109 billion total market valuation, moved into second place, the spot previously occupied by XRP, which fell to third place with a $97 billion market value. Bitcoin remained number one, with a $255 billion market value.
Coinmarketcap has become one of the most popular destinations for price quotes as the sector surged last year. According to Amazon's web-ranking service, coinmarketcap is currently the 154th most popular website in the world, in the same ballpark as Chinese retail giant Alibaba.com. The website's rejiggered prices led to a flip in market-value rankings on the site. Ethereum, with a $109 billion total market valuation, moved into second place, the spot previously occupied by XRP, which fell to third place with a $97 billion market value. Bitcoin remained number one, with a $255 billion market value.
Re:How much (Score:4, Informative)
All I know is that you can trust Dogecoin to hold its value of 1 Doge = 1 Doge.
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Indeed.
In Jan 2016, dogecoin was valued at 15 million.
In Jan 2017, dogecoin was valued at 24 milion.
Now, it's valued at 1.7 billion
quite impressive. [coinmarketcap.com] It really shows off the fundamental strengths of a bubble economy.
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I have the feeling that if I bought any dogcoin, I'd just get bitten.
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Then buy the quantity of Dogecoins that you can afford to lose. Example: only buy $20 worth of Dogecoins.
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Tulip bulbs couldn't be used as a proof of existence or even a message board.
Dumping messages into OP_RETURN is really fascinating since it's as immutable as you can get.
As a currency, eh. But there aren't many places where you can write a message and have it backed by several billion dollars of continuing to exist in the future.
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Sure they could. Throw a turnip at someone. It proves you exist. Write a message on the turnip bulb before you throw it. Now you have a message board. Still more useful than bitcoin.
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Messages that anyone put there in 2014 are still there today and still exist in every Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash and other fork's blockchain.
Short of sha256 breaking they're going to exist there.
Flooz (Score:4, Funny)
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I put everything into zombo.com, I really wish they'd update to HTML5 though.
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They did ages ago: https://html5zombo.com/ [html5zombo.com]
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Nice, thanks :)
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My wife is really confused right now. "What it that?" "I have no idea."
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I am still hoping that my Worldcom stock will turn around.
hey, market fluctuations! (Score:2)
... on something with no intrinsic value. bubble time.
LIke 100B in monopoly money (Score:3, Insightful)
An nothing of real value was lost. At least if a 100B in monopoly money went up in flames it would keep your warm for a bit.
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An nothing of real value was lost. At least if a 100B in monopoly money went up in flames it would keep your warm for a bit.
Mining 100B of bitcoin will keep you warm even longer; that's a lot of heat given off mining that much.
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Try your precious (country) dollar bill and try spending it in (another country) store. You will get out of the store empty-handed.
Re: LIke 100B in monopoly money (Score:1)
Actually my US dollars are good in almost any store on the planet.
And in the few places where they aren't, there's a bank, embassy, or back-alley dealer happy to exchange them for a local currency.
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Actually in most countries of the world a US Dollar is far preferred over their own currency
In some countries (Venezuela), bitcoin is preferred over their own currency.
Re:LIke 100B in monopoly money (Score:5, Funny)
So I was in a math mood...
The most accurate looking Monopoly money template I could find in a quick Google image search has 12 bills per 8.5x11" page. Assuming you go all $500's, that's $6000 per page. $100B / $6000 = 16,666,666 pages. That's 33,333 reams of paper. Quick Amazon search shows $5.97/ream (it's an Add-on item, but I think we'll make the minimum order here). So that's about $199,000 worth of paper for $100B Monopoly money or an exchange rate of 0.00000199.
According to Stack [stackexchange.com], a ream is around 5lbs (which matches Amazon's shipping weight) and paper yields about 7000 BTU/lb or 35,000 BTUs per ream (which seems high, but second source [balboa-pacific.com]). They're claiming that's "enough to heat the average US house for 15 weeks" which seems implausible to me? Maybe if you're assuming 100% conversion efficiency with no losses and not living somewhere the air hurts your face.
So that pile of Monopoly money yields around 1,166,655,000 BTUs or about 12,820 gallons of propane [exothink.com] and weighs 166,665 lbs (83 tons).
If nothing else, I suspect it would hold value more consistently than most crypto coin.
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35000 BTU is only about 1/3 of a therm, which is about 33cu ft of nat gas. 1/3 of a therm might keep your house warm for a day if it is not cold at all outside. A fairly typical sized furnace is 100KBTU/hr or 1 therm/hr to run as a point of reference.
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Nice idea, and it's funny to find that Monopoly money even has an exchange rate. The closest priced crypto coin I could find is "StrongHands" at $0.000007.
But that's the wrong kind of paper -- real Monopoly game money is much much thinner and cheaper, especially at the industrial quantities they buy. Both less money and less BTU.
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There is one very significant difference between cryptocurrencies and monopoly money: people believe that cryptocurrencies have value.
That's really the main ingredient you need for something to be money: people have to believe it has value. Now the fact that the value people assign to certain cryptocurrencies is so volatile make those particularly currencies inconvenient as money. But the value that people ascribe to them is as real as the value they ascribe to any other non-tangible asset. If you're ho
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A sack of potatos has value but it's not a currency. A certificate of IBM stock has a value, and widely accepted value that can be looked up easily and have millions of people agree on it, and is reasonably easy to convert to other forms, you can even barter with it, but it's still not currency.
The more important ingredient for currency is not that it has value, but that you can USE that value as a convenient and widely accepted medium for exchange of goods. Crypto currencies fail in this regard, and so ar
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and it appears monopoly money [amazon.com] is currently running about $0.0555 per bill at Amazon. which is currently higher than dogecoin which i think it is an appropriate comparison since they are both the usual joke currencies.
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If something simple makes $100B disappear, then the "valuation" wasn't real to begin with. Don't count the chickens before they hatch, as everyone should know but not everyone uses that advice. That's why you see similar sudden plunges in stock based on a single analyst's quip. Speculative investments are often like Schrodinger's cat, you don't really know what the item is worth until you actually sell it. Just be glad the IRS doesn't tax you on what you thought your investments were going to be worth.
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The price is now more correct (Score:5, Informative)
It has nothing to do with the nth crackdown. Prices have been significantly higher in South Korea compared to the rest of the world for many coins, if you take the South Korean Won (KRW) trading pair and then convert that price to its US Dollar (or Euro, or whatever) equivalent. However you should see the crypto/KRW exchange rates as a closed system, as it is not an easily traded coin internationally, which make arbitrage (almost) impossible.
It is correct for CoinMarketCap to filter out the crypto/KRW pairs to arrive at an average price, as you were never actually able to trade your coins for the KRW listed (unless you're Korean, of course), and they had a very significant effect on the price if many coins.
Of course, real traders care only about the specific prices of the exchanges they can actually exchange at.
Bitcoin is dying... (Score:2)
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Which currency will dominate?
Threats or promises. Possibly a combination.
Other indices (Score:1)
BitcoinAverage, CryptoCompare, and Coinhills all seemed to automatically detect Bithumb's prices as outliers and removed them from their averages. Against these other indices, CoinMarketCap's prices were artificially inflated and they've now re-normalised. My own trading scripts do not trust a single rate data source, detected something was strange with CoinMarketCap, and gave me no problems.
Also, I'd take the market cap figures and rankings with a pinch of salt. Some coins don't have their supplies list
This is all about electronic currency. (Score:2)
What does it have to do with Crypto?
"Crypto" as an abbreviation for cryptocurrency. (Score:2)
On Slashdot.
Get out the soap bars and pillowcases, everyone who let this happen gets a blanket party.
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Well if you've got a better use for that abbreviation, I'd like to hear it!
Please encrypt all submissions.
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bullshit works for me.
What about the market cap of gold? (Score:2)
Cryptocurrency valuations are criticized for the simple math of point price times total supply. What about more traditional commodities such as gold or crude oil? Surely the price of gold will plummet if someone starts selling huge amounts?
As a friend pointed out recently, the simple math for market caps makes sense assuming it's the same for everything. It's a tool for comparing things against each other, not a measure of absolute worth. Most of the "money" in the world is locked up outside active circu
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It depends.
You see, the price you see quoted on a market is not average price or anything. It's "last traded price". As in, the last time someone bought (and thus, someone sold) that commodity, that was the price they agreed to. There is no "current price" of say, gold,
Nothing to see here (Score:2)
Just a Literal correction. These kinds of things happen all the time with large markets.
Hopefully lesson learned (Score:1)
Coinmarketcap should have announced this change before execution. Not notifying users was irresponsible and has damaged their reputation as a reliable data provider.