Bitcoin Falls Below $5,000 For First Time Since October 2017 (bbc.com) 180
The value of Bitcoin has hit a new low of $4,951, bringing the total value of all Bitcoin in existence to below $87 billion. Much of the turmoil can be attributed to the split of Bitcoin Cash on November 15th. The Bitcoin offshoot has been split into two different cryptocurrencies, which are now in competition with each other. The BBC reports: Bitcoin exchange Kraken said in a blog post that it regarded one of the two new Bitcoin Cash crypto-currencies -- Bitcoin SV -- as "an extremely risky investment." At its peak, in November 2017, it briefly hit $19,783 - which means the price has fallen by about 75%. After the excitements of last year when the price soared to nearly $20,000 and then tumbled, Bitcoin has been rather dull and stable for much of 2018, settling between $6,000 and $7,000.
$4,999 more to go (Score:5, Funny)
More seriously - there are better currencies. (Score:2, Interesting)
Bitcoin was the (technologically) best currency at the time it launched.
These days there are better.
For example, Monero's better in some ways.
People shouldn't stay married to the old technology when the better comes around. These currencies (with no actual value) aren't long-term investments. They're payment vehicles. And with better ones around (more private, cheaper transactions, etc) it's no surprise people leave bitcoin.
Re:More seriously - there are better currencies. (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is, dollar is better than all of them combined. It's literally too big to fail.
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Contrary... it is the biggest behemoth ready to topple over of its own gluttony.
All it will take is a little coordinated push... faster, harder.
Global p2p private cryptocurrency is the only way out of the centuries of mess created by Fiat Governments Bankers and Corporations upon you the sheeple.
You are the ones who must charitably educate and lift the masses from the grasp of Fiat control.
You must help not only yourselves, but them, help humanity.
Grow up... become free, independant, responsible, charitable
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Re: More seriously - there are better currencies. (Score:5, Insightful)
Failing? According to who? Relative to Bitcoin, the dollar is incredibly stable. It's never lost 30% of its value in a week.
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How is it fair for your money to lose 30% or more of it's value every few years? It happened with Gox, it just happened again. There is no parallel in history with the dollar. That would be like the US losing 30% of it's GDP inasmuch as a couple of days. It's never happened. Generally, if the US loses 2% of GDP, it takes years to recover. We just got out of a decade long recession from losing 1.5% of GDP on growth figures. If you were living on bitcoin right now, you would be dead. I'm not dissuading your f
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Re: More seriously - there are better currencies. (Score:1)
Putting tribalism aside, is Borrow and Spend really a more fiscally reaponsible tactic than Tax and Spend?
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Yes. Because it's the "spend" part that necessitate the tax (explicit and implicit). As long as you do the "spend" part, how you exactly fund it is irrelevant.
P.S. I guess to be pedantically correct, "Borrow and Spend" is more or equally fiscally responsible (or irresponsible) than "Tax and Spend".
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Yes. Because it's the "spend" part that necessitate the tax (explicit and implicit). As long as you do the "spend" part, how you exactly fund it is irrelevant.
P.S. I guess to be pedantically correct, "Borrow and Spend" is more or equally fiscally responsible (or irresponsible) than "Tax and Spend".
"Borrow and Spend" Creates inflation which is essentially tax on wealth, if done within a stable range it will encourage investment as cash not invested will decrease in value over time.
"Best"!?! (Score:4, Insightful)
How is a currency that's created by wasting energy at all valuable? If it stored energy, or stored some valuable work output, then you'd have a point. However, bitcoin is inherently turning coal into hashes that can't be used for anything else. It's the best of Ponzi schemes.
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I would tentatively confine discussion of post-quantum problems until we have actually had quantum problems.
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Before SOME pre-quantum cryptographic algorithms are crackable in trivial timeframes.
FTFY.
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I think you'll find it's mostly the algorithms related to number factoring that will fall.
AES256? Not so much.
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PQC algorithms are readily available, and don't take up that much more space.
More importantly, it is NOT necessary to store entire blockchains forever!!!
The only thing needed is confirmation of, and reference to, the UTXO set.
There are a few ways to do that.
Seek them out.
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The case against quantum computing [ieee.org]
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Oh, my. Please excuse my cynicism, but I saw precisely what we heard as the dotcom bubble topped out.
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Tulips all the way.
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And then it'll be time to move on to the next speculative craze. My money is on collectable emojis.
It's called Tesla - TSLA. It's STILL way overpriced - unless it becomes as big as Toyota in January 2019.
Re: $4,999 more to go (Score:4, Insightful)
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I'd guess until it costs more to heat an apartment in St. Petersburg (Russia, not Florida) in February by mining bitcoin than by paying for the regular heat.
Re: How low does it have to go (Score:2)
When that happens, people turn off their miners, the hash rate goes down, the difficulty lowers, and it's profitable again. Whatever price it hits is an amount that will price SOMEONE out of the market. It's meaningless.
No intrinsic value (Score:5, Insightful)
Bitcoin had faith and mindshare. With faith evaporating, there's no intrinsic value to it, so it could go down to 0. This realization further spooks the "investors". It's kind of like a bank run against an extremely over-leveraged bank with no FDIC to prop anything up.
"below $87 billion" (Score:2)
I don't disagree, just curious where the estimate of the value of electricity spent to mine the current bitcoin so far is, so it can be compared to the $87B.
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The fact that bitcoin is 100% tractable by governments for every single transaction makes it totally useless as cash replacement. No one wants the government tracking them when they make a small transaction over Craigslist for some lawn furniture, or have to calculate their capital gains when they trade pokemon cards at a flea market. That combined with very slow wait times to make a successful transaction and ensure you are not being ripped off, pretty much make bitc
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Currently it’s a good way to destroy value
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You mean like when it dropped from $20,000 to $8000?
You might notice it never went back to $20,000. Just saying.
Apart from that one, no it hasn't dropped this much before.
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Should happen this week...
Re: No intrinsic value (Score:1)
Except for literally every other cryptocoin, most of which have lower transaction costs and security risks to your wallet.
Or hell, limit order penny stocks. Buy, sell, partner does same. $20 each roundtrip anywhere in the world. Works fine if you aren't trying to launder money.
Re:No intrinsic value (Score:5, Insightful)
Bitcoin has utility. It is the only way of digitally transferring value that is not centrally controlled and not a copycat.
You know, human civilization somehow made it through its first 5,000 years without any means to "digitally transfer value without central control". That doesn't seem to be a problem that's been holding back human achievement in any significant way, and certainly not to the extent that it needs to have a big chunk of the world's electricity output thrown at it.
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Capital flight has alays been a thing, throughout history. It used to be completely physical: when the government went nuts or collapsed, you'd flee the country with your valuables, and if you were a wealthy trader you likely knew how to smuggle yourself across the border.
These days "valuables" are mostly journal entries in a purely digital world, and the governments have the borders locked down tight. It's the new panopitcon that calls for new ways of smuggling valuables across the border. And that's be
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made it through its first 5,000 years without any means to "digitally transfer value without central control".
On the contrary, for 4900 of the first 5000 years all value was transferred without central control.
It wasn't until electronic payments were common that central control was dominant.
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That's one reason for what I stated. You can still transfer value without central control, the same way it has always been done. Adding this particular "digital" way doesn't justify the huge consumption of energy resources that it involves.
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Perhaps in the first 4900 years of culture, there was no central authority. In every tribe and every family that I knew of, in most families and tribes, the leader limited the size of exchanges, exchange rates, and in many cases whether the the transaction would occur at all.
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You know, human civilization somehow made it through its first 5,000 years without any means to "digitally transfer value without central control". That doesn't seem to be a problem that's been holding back human achievement in any significant way
Money laundering is a $2 trillion industry [unodc.org] and it's excellent for that. Or maybe you're in North Korea and you want to carry out a ransomware attack [wikipedia.org]. How will you possibly get paid with all those sanctions? Wanna sell drugs on the dark web and are looking for a cur
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Except that
- among digitally transferred currencies.... *without* central control is in fact a necessity towards progress away from immoral war, murder, theft via taxation... and toward self enablement and charity for all human beings
- electricity consumption by cryptocurrency *absolutely unequivocally FAILS* to even come close the that consumed by all the systems supporting the worlds Fiats.... their politicians salaries healt retirement, their buildings construction maintenanace heating cooling, all their cars and fuel and environmental impacts etc.
Cryptocurrency takes only highly optimized, narrow silos of
- Silicon sand
- Electricity of any source
- Internet (sand + electricity)
You forgot the fourth, fat, silo:
-Kool-Aid
You'll need plenty more of that, given your current levels of consumption.
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"not a copycat" doesn't confer utility.
"not centrally controlled" might confer some advantage, but there's nothing in the Bitcoin technology that can prevent it from being centrally controlled. If one person controls 51% of the mining capability, Bitcoin is then centrally controlled. In any case, not being centrally controlled does not, of itself confer utility. My credit card is centrally controlled and it is a more effective means of transferring value than bitcoin, at least for legal transactions
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Re:There's no intrinsic value in any Fiat (Score:2)
But there is value in a fiat currency. Currency is much like shares in a company, except the company is the country that issues the currency. Now granted, the country can issue more currency, and your share can get smaller, but fiat currencies very much do have intrinsic value. Unless you think the US economy is worth nothing, of course, which is pretty self-evident that it's not the case.
Bitcoin (and other "cash" cryptocurrencies not tied to an asset or a fiat currency), on the other hand, is a share in li
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bf (Score:5, Funny)
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Or don't speculate on such a volatile commodity. Sure, it might see some corrections, but, I see no reason to believe it will not just continue going down over time.
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Bitcoin investors are not a monolithic entity. There are many different investors with diametrically opposed preferences and interests. Speculators for example want volatile and erratic, while institutional investors want dull and stable.
Being both is the worst of all possible options, as that means it's unattractive to both speculators and institutional investors.
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Their laugher early on was much better than yours. There are quite a few who made a killing on it, and are in the game only for small portions of their early bitcoin-based fortunes. If it completely folded tomorrow, they ultimately still made out with massive profits.
Re:Bitcoin has been rather dull and stable... (Score:5, Insightful)
For every dollar gained in bitcoin, someone else lost it.
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This is true for any zero sum investment, and bitcoin is tiny in comparison to many such investments.
Re:Bitcoin has been rather dull and stable... (Score:5, Interesting)
I read this as "dull" referring to, very little trading volume:
https://data.bitcoinity.org/ma... [bitcoinity.org]
ie. nobody cares unless it's going up. If there was a decent trading volume when it was stable, that would be an excellent thing for bitcoin. That's not what's been going on.
Re:Bitcoin has been rather dull and stable... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: Bitcoin has been rather dull and stable... (Score:1)
Yes, you should definitely invest more. All of the technical analysts (who are also bitcoin holders) agree that purchasing new coins with the soon to be defunct US dollar is the right thing to do. They may even sell you some of theirs.
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Dull and stable == bitcoin bad
I never saw that sentiment in the article or summary. They simply said it was dull and stable with no indication that is a bad thing.
Re:LOL Bitcoin can't win (Score:5, Insightful)
These aren't lies.
Low trading volume in the stable period means a lack of interest in anything except the speculation:
https://data.bitcoinity.org/ma... [bitcoinity.org]
That's not healthy for any security.
Re:LOL Bitcoin can't win (Score:5, Insightful)
It's basically a 'penny stock'.
One million $/day trading volume is easily manipulated by any of the big Chinese miners.
That chart shows 200 bitcoin (including alts)/day as total trading volume. That seems low, for such a popular penny stock.
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It's basically a 'penny stock'. One million $/day trading volume is easily manipulated by any of the big Chinese miners.
Yeah, except in this case I'm not so sure even they are in control.... cause a big drop, does it crash and burn instead of letting you buy cheap? Start a big price hike, are people buying into it again or are they glad to recover their losses and bail? With a penny stock they know who's playing and being played, here it's more like a herd that can at any moment set off on a crazy stampede.
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The unknown is how much of that volume are fake trades at fictitious prices between left and right pocket of some miner.
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Or high frequency trading, engaging in arbitrage.
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Arbitrage in that thin a market? Danger Will Robinson!
HFT doesn't really work when it takes an hour to clear a trade.
Intrinsic value (Score:3, Interesting)
Knife - Can be used for dozens or hundreds of useful situations especially in survival scenarios.
Apple - Can be eaten as a nutritious snack.
Gun & Ammo - Can be used to kill enemies or food to feed oneself.
Wagon - Can be used to haul cargo and various goods around in.
Rope - Can be used for all sorts of useful purposes.
Bitcoin - A useless waste of energy and disk space that relies entirely on the greater fool syndrome with no official backing.
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Knife, Apple, Gun & Ammo, Wagon, Rope, Bitcoin...
I accuse Col. Mustard who used a poison apple in the wagon AND he was paid in BitCoin.
You think this is something? (Score:3)
Wait until the bottom falls out of Tether.
Cryptocurreny has ruined too many lives (Score:2)
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Suckers were lucky to get together with their money in the first place. Fuck em.
BUY, Mortimer, BUY!!!! (Score:1)
This is a bargain price. The only way is UP, UP UP!!!!
Magic Beans (Score:4, Funny)
Magic beans no longer worth a cow.
NB (Score:4, Informative)
Not sure who is ripping off whom :) (Score:2)
This constant stream of insipid blabber about Bitcoin and how it's going to crash soon, that has been going on for years through self-proclaimed experts, is certainly doing much more in terms of money and exposure for those fuckers than they'd get actually investing in cryptocurrencies or in anything else for that matter. I'm inviting anyone to take a look at just how many Youtube channels, just as an example, deal with Bitcoin analysis an predict its crashing, and how many views they get. :)
Satoshi Nakamoto = NSA? (Score:4, Interesting)
I have wondered now and then, if not Bitcoin isn't actually a secret distributed Chinese Lottery [rfc-editor.org].
With all these machines out there dedicated to brute-forcing SHA-256 collissions â" which is also the world's most used cryptographic hash algorithm, whenever NSA (or whichever agency created Bitcoin) wants a SHA-256 hash collision it just injects some requests to a bunch of bitcoin nodes, exploiting some vulnerability in the code and protocol.
And then the suckers will do the work for them.
It has been done before with Javascript in web pages [slashdot.org], the same as "other" crypto-mining in Javascript on shadier sites more recently.
But this time the users would be none the wiser because the nodes are just doing whatever they were supposed to in the first place.
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Bitcoin uses SHA-256(SHA-256(nonce+data)) < target value. They don't actually look for collisions.
And if they did look for collisions, at the peak hash rate thus far achieved (about 2^69 hashes per second) it would still take about 2^161 years to reach a 50% probability of finding one. This would make BTC transactions a bit slower than they are now.
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Seems like an immensely risky scheme for a problem they could solve with a few billion dollars. In fact it would be odd if they hadn't spent a few billion on supercomputers that are able to brute force hashes and do massive dictionary attacks against AES etc.
Aside from anything else they couldn't really use it to brute force anything really interesting, because the public nature of the system would mean that other intelligence agencies would immediately know what they were doing. Plus the way Bitcoin works
With a bit of luck (Score:1)
Let's hope Rei just bought a load.
Editors, DO YOUR JOB (Score:1)
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BTC is really forked now (Score:2)
The speculative value of BTC was based in its limited supply. Forking the coin doubles the mineable money supply, so the speculative value has to drop by half to adjust for this, besides kicking off a whole new race to waste energy mining the new coin.
Then we have people touting this or that better new coin. "Investing" in each of these jumps the money supply for each one, further reducing the scarcity value.
This is what happens ... (Score:2)
... when pyramid schemes reach their saturation point.
Congratulations to all that made money.
To those that lost ... suckers! Go try Amway, at least they sell something material instead of pipe dreams.
We don't need a play-by-play (Score:2)
Geez, so what... it fell below $5000? There's nothing special about that... its not notable news --- Slashdot already covered that price was decreasing significantly 6 days ago, And didn't even bring up more important news within the Crypto ecosystem such as the BCH Chain forks and how those are doing; this is basically a duplicate headline within 10 days with 6000 changed to 5000.. A link to the exchange prices is good enough.
Are we going to get a big writeup again when it falls below $4000 within the
Transaction fees are holding (Score:2)
What's most interesting here is that while the number of transactions during this crash has risen to levels not seen since January, the transaction fees never went above $0.65. That's strong evidence that improvements like Lightning and SegWit have largely addressed the scaling concerns everyone had around the BTC/BCH split.
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It relies on market cap for security of transfer, so if it drops enough it becomes useless.