Cryptocurrencies Tumble Even More, While One Asset Manager Proclaims 'Bitcoin is Dead' (marketwatch.com) 165
Cryptocurrency prices "fell sharply on Friday, as another bout of selling took digital currencies to fresh lows," reports MarketWatch, adding that Friday the price of Bitcoin "crashed through support at $3,500, falling more than 10% to a 15-month low at $3,230 on the Kraken exchange."
"What a difference a year makes," CNN Business quipped Friday, in an article headlined "Bitcoin's Epic Plunge Continues": In December 2017, bitcoin prices hit a record high of just under $20,000... Bitcoin is at a 15-month low. But prices have really gotten whacked this week, falling nearly 20% in just the past five days alone. Bitcoin isn't the only cryptocurrency getting hit either. Ripple/XRP, ethereum, stellar, litecoin and numerous other cryptocurrencies have plunged in the past week.
Little tangible news can explain or justify the current crypto carnage. One possible reason is that a pro-crypto member of the Securities and Exchange Commission warned at a conference this week that she's fighting an uphill battle trying to convince the rest of the SEC to approve more bitcoin exchange traded funds.... Nearly two-thirds of money managers surveyed by asset management firm Natixis still thought that cryptocurrencies were a bubble, the firm reported this week.
"In my opinion, bitcoin is dead," wrote the CEO of one wealth management firm with more than $32 billion in assets. It won't go quietly, but the recent precipitous drop may be the beginning of its inevitable and inexorable death spiral. Or there could be a dead cat bounce. Either way, I see bitcoin as a dead man walking. Future generations may read about bitcoin in a finance textbook as a curiosity and wonder what all the fuss was about. There are still some die-hard adherents espousing the virtues of bitcoin, desperate to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Unfortunately for them, the end may not be pretty when it comes.
Proponents of bitcoin tend to focus on the impact of the blockchain technology that drives it, and make no mistake, blockchain is the real deal. Blockchain is fundamentally changing the way industries do business, from traditional banking to supply chain management. But just because blockchain technology is creating a new paradigm doesn't mean that bitcoin shares that same distinction.... Most cryptocurrency transactions are purely speculative. There are no real fundamentals to evaluate; bitcoin doesn't produce any products or services, hire any employees or pay any dividends. The only way profits are generated is when the owner is lucky enough to find someone else who will pay more for the thing...
The minute bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency appears to have even the slightest chance of disrupting national monetary supply, I expect regulation to be swift and decisive. The SEC has already issued guidance around cryptocurrencies that has created roadblocks to gaining the same legitimacy as traditional marketable securities... If you enjoy the thrill of making bets, I suggest you visit your favorite sports book or table game in Vegas where your odds of success are much higher.
"What a difference a year makes," CNN Business quipped Friday, in an article headlined "Bitcoin's Epic Plunge Continues": In December 2017, bitcoin prices hit a record high of just under $20,000... Bitcoin is at a 15-month low. But prices have really gotten whacked this week, falling nearly 20% in just the past five days alone. Bitcoin isn't the only cryptocurrency getting hit either. Ripple/XRP, ethereum, stellar, litecoin and numerous other cryptocurrencies have plunged in the past week.
Little tangible news can explain or justify the current crypto carnage. One possible reason is that a pro-crypto member of the Securities and Exchange Commission warned at a conference this week that she's fighting an uphill battle trying to convince the rest of the SEC to approve more bitcoin exchange traded funds.... Nearly two-thirds of money managers surveyed by asset management firm Natixis still thought that cryptocurrencies were a bubble, the firm reported this week.
"In my opinion, bitcoin is dead," wrote the CEO of one wealth management firm with more than $32 billion in assets. It won't go quietly, but the recent precipitous drop may be the beginning of its inevitable and inexorable death spiral. Or there could be a dead cat bounce. Either way, I see bitcoin as a dead man walking. Future generations may read about bitcoin in a finance textbook as a curiosity and wonder what all the fuss was about. There are still some die-hard adherents espousing the virtues of bitcoin, desperate to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Unfortunately for them, the end may not be pretty when it comes.
Proponents of bitcoin tend to focus on the impact of the blockchain technology that drives it, and make no mistake, blockchain is the real deal. Blockchain is fundamentally changing the way industries do business, from traditional banking to supply chain management. But just because blockchain technology is creating a new paradigm doesn't mean that bitcoin shares that same distinction.... Most cryptocurrency transactions are purely speculative. There are no real fundamentals to evaluate; bitcoin doesn't produce any products or services, hire any employees or pay any dividends. The only way profits are generated is when the owner is lucky enough to find someone else who will pay more for the thing...
The minute bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency appears to have even the slightest chance of disrupting national monetary supply, I expect regulation to be swift and decisive. The SEC has already issued guidance around cryptocurrencies that has created roadblocks to gaining the same legitimacy as traditional marketable securities... If you enjoy the thrill of making bets, I suggest you visit your favorite sports book or table game in Vegas where your odds of success are much higher.
£3500 is not dead! (Score:4, Insightful)
Bitcoin will never reach $1000
Now, $3500, is dead. The problem isn't Bitcoin it's people's wild expectations. Well, that and the energy use to make the things.
Re:£3500 is not dead! (Score:4, Insightful)
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...knowing you'll be able to afford a coffee and a doughnut next week?
And knowing in advance what the "transaction fee" will be.
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Nope the poison pill always was exactly what you would expect, no fad lasts forever, no marketing program lasts for ever and once marketing started to fail the far product was doomed. Bitcoin is nothing but a marketing program, an illusion of worth created by quite successful hype marketing and of course human greed. Energy backed crypto across international and national exchanges, with an international currency supplied by the international exchange, where ever it may be based upon the future energy assets
Oh my (Score:4, Insightful)
No surprise here- currency not tied to anything but mindset is going to be destructively fickle and unstable.
Re:Oh my (Score:4, Interesting)
Little tangible news can explain or justify the current crypto carnage.
Maybe it's just that people are finally starting to realize its true worth, ie. zero.
It's not much use as a currency (unless you enjoy transaction fees and like seeing your money go down in value), it's certainly not an investment.
Sell while you still can!
(oh, wait, you can't... blockchains only allow a few transactions per second so you have to join a long line of sellers)
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Cryptocurrency proponents haven't helped their case with all the forks and new coins being constantly produced. There are now approximately 2100 cryptocurrencies, up from 1600 just last June. Even Bitcoin Cash, which was a fork of Bitcoin, has now forked into BCH ABC and BCH SV.
It doesn't take much of nonsense for people to realize that cryptocurrencies are nothing more than electronic monopoly money. How can something h
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It doesn't take much of nonsense for people to realize that cryptocurrencies are nothing more than electronic monopoly money.
How can something have any real value when more of it keeps appearing every day, backed by yet another group of people who want to become rich?
Bingo. By design or not, in their current incarnation cryptocurrencies are a scammer's paradise and a risky proposition at best.
Maybe I'll create and offer "JustAnotherOldGuy-Coin". Buy it now while the price is still low!
After it goes up, the exchange (which I run) will mysteriously get hacked. But not to worry- I'll send each buyer an email with my sincere condolences. I'll be sending it from my new private estate, located on "Hookers and Blow Island".
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The transaction fees are a result of stubborn stupidity by the bitcoin core developers, who insisted they had to keep the block size at a ridiculously small 1MB. That of course created high transaction fees. This is what caused the bitcoin/bitcoin-cash split.
Yes, we know why they exist.
Bitcoin-cash recently did a stress test, showing a far greater number of transactions/second with a 32MB block size.
Very good, but we're not talking about Bitcoin Cash.
Like it or not, plain old Bitcoin is the flagship cryptocurrency. If it goes down it'll take all the others with it.
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Money is just an idea backed by confidence (Score:2)
Money is just an idea backed by confidence.
I don't know who said it first, I thought it was Galbraith but apparently not. Similar quotes abound in economic literature. It is a phrase that likely has been around since the day money was first substituted for barter exchange.
The value of any currency is tied to the belief that if it is accepted for payment today then it will be accepted tomorrow.
That's it. Nothing else.
The belief that currency value must be supported by some physical item such as gold has l
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.
Fun thought experiment for those who think anything other than "it's worth what others will give you for it".
I'm crusin across the desert and I encounter you - you've run out of water, but have a big pile of gold (or bitcoin, or other fiat). You are going to die - you offer me your whole stash for just one canteen. I laugh, continue my journey, rent a vehicle on the other side, with borrowed money if necess
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What point would that be? The value of gold and silver (also other metals, gems etc.) were established long before taxation became a thing.
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Money is just an idea backed by confidence.
Then feel free to invest in bitcoin to your heart's content.
I do wonder though- if it's so great why haven't most bitcoin enthusiasts converted all of their wealth into bitcoin?
I suspect it's because everyone involved realizes that this shit is at its heart fundamentally unstable and unpredictable, and no one is foolish enough to basically risk everything on the fickleness of the cryptocurrency carnival ride.
The fact that it's not tethered in any way to anything of tangible value is concerning, but go ahead
And here lies the problem. (Score:1)
99.999% see the bit-monies as a COMMODITY...something to eventually be traded for something more desirable, like American dollars. It is not viewed as a currency.
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Re:Oh my (Score:5, Insightful)
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I think it is a mistake to say virtual currencies have no relationship to economic size. Bitcoin may not be tied to any particular national economy but it is certainly tied to a virtual economy where Bitcoins characteristics are valued. This economy is only "virtual" in that it is not defined by any particular national borders or nationally defined economic output. The economy that is the productivity tied to bitcoin transactions is very real, just hard to pin down and count separately from non-bitcoin
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Honestly, the whole article's got it backwards. I'll believe crypto-currencies are dead when people have stopped using them; and, emphat
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Name a bank that's actually doing that, and show proof. Not that they're looking into the possibility, but proof they're actually doing it. You won't find any- nobody is actually doing this.
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Yeah, they cap it out at 10K euros? That's not a serious system, that's something they put out there to ride a fad. Call me when they process 10 million euro transactions. You're not showing a serious use of blockchain, you're showing a toy.
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My friend just got laid off from Yet Another Blockchain Startup that was trying to create banking software on top of the blockchains. Turns out that banks don't really need to have immutable history of transactions. Basically there are no situations when it's useful, the regular record-keeping systems are more than enough.
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Blockchain is fundamentally changing the way industries do business, from traditional banking to supply chain management
it IS?
Probably not. [theregister.co.uk]
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Blockchain is fundamentally changing the way industries do business, from traditional banking to supply chain management
it IS? I've been paying some attention, and have yet to see a single interesting use case where -- aside from crypto-currency for which it's well suited -- blockchain does anything better than the centralized, backed up data repo of whatever corporation or conglomerate is working with data. If someone can point me to something interesting being done, please do tell.
My company uses it to track medical payments over our pharmacy network, and it seems to be working well for that.
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You do realize that applies to almost all currencies in use today as almost none are based on any kind of resource-backed standard, where there's a guarantee that the currency can always be exchanged for a certain amount of some other commodity.
This is true of currencies. Bitcoin stopped being a currency as soon as its fixed money supply caused its exchange value in terms of what a currency trades for began fluctuating wildly every day. At that point it began being traded as a storehouse commodity, but not one whose value has been embedded in all cultures for thousands of years.
Taxes and all debts. Get dollars or go to prison (Score:5, Insightful)
If you don't get some US dollars and then give them to the IRS, IRS agents will eventually show up at your door and remind you that you better get some soon, or they'll be back to take you to prison. Ask Wesley Snipes - even action movie heroes need to have dollars. It might take a while, but eventually they show up.
That means dollars will always have value, as long as the IRS exists. Dollars keep you out of prison.
Additionally, as a bonus anyone who has debt of any kind needs dollars to get rid of that debt, so that the bank doesn't come take their house, car, etc. "Get some dollars or lose your house" is pretty powerful.
Trying sending the IRS some Bitcoins. Not gonna happen. Check your mortgage statemwnt. It's 100,000 DOLLARS you have to eventually pay the bank to keep your house. Sending them a sha-256 hash isn't going to let you keep your house.
How do we know the bank won't switch to denominating mortgages in Bitcoins or Buttcoins or Anonymous Coward Coin? Because the bank needs fifteen million DOLLARS to pay their taxes. So they are always going to want dollars from their customers.
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Nope, still dollars (Score:3)
The text of the much-ballyhooed Arizona bill (that passed) is:
[The tax office may] "develop, adopt and use a payment system that enables the immediate remittance and collection of tax in real time at the point of sale, including payments of additional amounts after audit."
Their was discussion that this immediate payment system could allow one to pay their 800 DOLLARS of taxes though MasterCard, Visa, CoinDesk Discover, PayPal ...
It's still 800 DOLLARS of taxes you have to pay, whether you pay through PayPal
IRS raided his house in 2002 (Score:2)
The raided his house in 2002.
https://www.foxnews.com/story/... [foxnews.com]
I've have revenue officers knock on my door regarding a company I used to work for.
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Bullshit. Gold is naturally rare and useful. Bitcoins are artificially rare and (in themselves) useless.
It'll always bounce back, and more and more use it (Score:2, Insightful)
A lot more people use bitcoin now than before. Irrespective of the current price, it's still above what it was a good while ago, and each time it falls, it's to a higher level than it was before.
Bitcoin is not going away, no matter what the financial 'oligarchs' would like. A big fat 'Up yours' to them. This article is just more scaremongering to try to drive the price down more. Won't work love.
Re:It'll always bounce back, and more and more use (Score:5, Funny)
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I feel the same way about my Microsoft Zune.
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Everybody point at the libertarian and laugh.
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You are delusional. [gutenberg.org]
I remember when (Score:2, Insightful)
No one thought Bitcoin was worth $100. Now its the end when it hits $3000.
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No arguments here (Score:5, Interesting)
Failed Experiment, or brilliant... (Score:2, Interesting)
SHA256 cracking method?
Someone I talked to claimed that bitcoin has provided an excellent checksum collision database due to the way it works, and that said database reduces the need for brute force when attempting to create collision hashes. I don't know if this is true or not, but as both a social experiment and way to do Folding@Home style distributed crack of sha256sum, it would be a brilliant social hack and experiment all rolled into one.
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Chalk it up as a failed experiment and move on.
Recently (as in the last 4-6 weeks) I have heard ads on AM radio *cough*Beck*cough* spruiking Bitcoin and how it was going to go through the roof by the end of the year, and that you need to order this special report to tell you all about it.
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Their money comes from people ordering the report, so bitcoin itself doesn't matter.
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...spruiking Bitcoin...
Aha! Australia must be getting farmers driven out of South Africa. I love coming across little signs like this.
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...spruiking Bitcoin...
Aha! Australia must be getting farmers driven out of South Africa. I love coming across little signs like this.
We are, but spruiking is a word that has been in common use for many decades and, according to the Oxford English Dictionary at least, is Australian, not South African.
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Good points.
Is there really any difference (Score:4, Insightful)
between buying bitcoin or wall street or penny stocks from an investment point of view?
Both tend to be controlled by rumor, innuendo and flash trading, with the average person left out as anything but a source of income based on payments to provide the services of exchange.
You can of course mine bitcoins, but lacking large amounts of free electricity and computer parts, most of the people I know with bitcoins bought them at some point, some did very well and dumped them for large gains, others just sat on them and are complaining about their current valuation.
As usual, there are people "behind the scenes" making legendary amounts of money in either investment.
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Yes, huge difference (Score:3)
Both tend to be controlled by rumor, innuendo and flash trading
Yes but the difference is, there is a fundamental base of Bitcoin users that will remain.
A penny stock is mostly not about the company, but about the manipulation. Whereas bitcoin is at times manipulated, but still has value.
A penny stock company could shut down any time, but Bitcoin cannot go away from the choice of any one person or even small group of people...
In I way I find it amusing, that you and others proclaim Bitcoin is heavily manipu
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We have a traditional saying, here in East London: "If you can't tell if you are being scammed: you are being scammed".
Re:Is there really any difference (Score:5, Informative)
Is there really any difference between buying bitcoin or wall street or penny stocks from an investment point of view?
If I buy shares on wall street, or even penny stocks, there is a good chance I will get dividends and make my money back and more that way. People who invested in Apple in 2000 when the whole company was only worth $5bn and kept their shares have received more in dividends and buy backs than they probably paid for those shares initially - Apple has paid out more than $100bn. Yes, you could have made your money by selling the shares as well, but you didn't have to. This is why Apple (and other shares) are investments and not some zero sum speculative activity. You don't need a "greater fool" to make your money with an actual investment.
With Bitcoin, the ONLY way to make a profit is to find someone (a greater fool) to buy it off you for more than you paid for it (by spending I am referring to either by exchanging cash for bitcoins, or by racking up electricity bills mining coins). This is why bitcoin is speculative, and you basically need a "greater fool" to make money off it.
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You can buy .0001 bitcoins, but you might end up paying more for the transaction cost than for the bitcoins you will gain. There was a time when transactions were free, but clever investors figured out how to squeeze money out of all the various mechanisms designed into the scheme. If you want to "use" bitcoin to buy stuff, everyone is waiting to help you out for a small fee.
Most trades on the currency exchanges operate in the range of 0.05 to 2.0 bitcoins per transaction, or $200 to $8000.
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Not exactly. The smallest division is 0.00000001 BTC (1 Satoshi). Pretty small, but not infinitely. I don't know how easy that would be to change if needed.
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Think of it as the anti-Trump.
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Because I'm smart (Score:3, Funny)
Thank goodness I sold all my Bitcoin and put my money in the stock market.
bitcoin is dead? (Score:4, Interesting)
"killed it" (Score:2)
That's pretty hilarious, you seriously think that people in countries that "killed it" are no longer using Bitcoin?
Huh (Score:2)
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Dogecoin.
BTW: I've heard rumors about you from various people in multiple villages.
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2016 to now ... (Score:4, Informative)
Power consumption is reducing in par with price (Score:3)
The best part (for the environment) is that the overall energy consumption of the Bitcoin network is dropping significantly. According to this estimation [digiconomist.net] the power consumed by the aggregated network has dropped from 73.12 TWh per year (around 8.3 GW on average) one month ago, to 45.54 TWh per year (around 5.2 GW on average) today.
Note that solar panel market installed 98.9 GW last year [cleantechnica.com]. With an optimistic efficiency of 50% (nigths, clouds), this means that one month ago we were dedicating one in each 6 new panels installed last year, worldwide, to power Bitcoin. Today, it is "only" one in 9.5.
And yes, those panels are the "clean energy" we are installing to save the world. Bitcoin saves nothing, please save (pun intended) the "but this is the cost for lack of trust/decentralized/...". This is good, and should keep dropping, considering the environmental impact.
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Also, power consumption is not fundamental (Score:4, Informative)
It was only associated with the version 1 blockchain and cryptocurrency technology.
Proof-of-stake and other new concepts will replace the energy-intensive proof-of-work.
I wish people would STFU with this particular criticism of crypto/blockchain because it's like criticising houses because you're opposed to bricks.
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Yes, but any currency also needs credibility. After the Bitcoin debacle, ordinary people (those who don't know the difference between PoW and PoS, and don't care to know) will never trust any other cryptocurrency.
Not to mention fundamental storage limitations of blockchain implementations, should a cryptocurrency be used at large scale...
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this means that one month ago we were dedicating one in each 6 new panels installed last year, worldwide, to power Bitcoin. Today, it is "only" one in 9.5.
Can you convert that to how many library of congresses can be powered?
Blockchain technology (Score:5, Informative)
the blockchain technology that drives it, and make no mistake, blockchain is the real deal. Blockchain is fundamentally changing the way industries do business, from traditional banking to supply chain management. But just because blockchain technology is creating a new paradigm
Wait, are we talking about the same blockchain?
Though Blockchain has been touted as the answer to everything, a study of 43 solutions advanced in the international development sector has found exactly no evidence of success.
Blockchain Study Finds 0% Success Rate and Vendors Don't Call Back When Asked For Evidence [slashdot.org]
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Blockchain and the Standard Model of Physics:
https://slashdot.org/submissio... [slashdot.org]
Blockchain is prefect for doing what it does (Score:3)
No value? That's a failure in logic (Score:2, Informative)
"There are no real fundamentals to evaluate; bitcoin doesn't produce any products or services, hire any employees or pay any dividends. The only way profits are generated is when the owner is lucky enough to find someone else who will pay more for the thing..."
Modern currencies like the US dollar are not backed by anything tangible either. There is also something with Bitcoin and other crypto currencies of value. The most obvious being its ability to enable consumers and businesses to conduct transactions f
Re:No value? That's a failure in logic (Score:4, Insightful)
Modern currencies like the US dollar are not backed by anything tangible either.
This betray a fundamental misunderstanding of what a currency is, and what backs it. Currencies are backed by the economic activity underlying a specific economic area. The US dollar is backed by the economic activity in the USA, the British pound by the UK economy, and so on. Having dollars gives you the right to purchase goods and services from US providers. While the GDP is not "tangible", there is a lot you can buy with dollars.
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The US Government is definitely tangible. However, I agree its credibility is in serious doubt.
The good news... (Score:4, Funny)
People online will now be able to spell hold correctly again. But they will still think that the oppposite of win is loose.
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The meme will now be used in different contexts: baghodlers.
Less dead than it used to be (Score:2)
I was with him until... (Score:2)
"Proponents of bitcoin tend to focus on the impact of the blockchain technology that drives it, and make no mistake, blockchain is the real deal. Blockchain is fundamentally changing the way industries do business, from traditional banking to supply chain management."
So he's still a Blockchain-hyper apparently. I would go the opposite: Blockchain does solve real problems for cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Distributed cryptocurrencies were not possible before blockchain. It seems aro
Bitcoin is Dead... (Score:2)
... and prices of used high-end video cards crash.
Close to a bottom (Score:2)
This again (Score:4, Insightful)
Bitcoin has been pronounced dead over 3000 times already yet it costs staggering ~ $3300 at the moment.
Something that has no value whatsoever. Right.
Clearly there's a bias against Bitcoin here at /. but it doesn't invalidate Bitcoin in the slightest. Yes, a year ago it was hyped like crazy, rose like crazy and then subsided but it's still very much alive and kicking.
Shitcoins meanwhile have lost [coingecko.com] a lot more than Bitcoin because most of them are nothing but shit - "breakthroughs in using blockchain" which solve imaginary problems using imaginary tools. See how Ethereum has lost a lot more than Bitcoin because it's been used as a platform for hundreds of worthless ICOs.
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Well I'll be goddam if TFS doesn't answer your question:
Little tangible news can explain or justify the current crypto carnage. One possible reason is that a pro-crypto member of the Securities and Exchange Commission warned at a conference this week that she's fighting an uphill battle trying to convince the rest of the SEC to approve more bitcoin exchange traded funds.... Nearly two-thirds of money managers surveyed by asset management firm Natixis still thought that cryptocurrencies were a bubble, the firm reported this week.
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Tax considerations and nations asking more questions.
Tracking the past "use" in the wild to open investigations on any new owner.
Any past sanctions evasion use is in the past becomes part of what the new owner "did".
A fictional movie about an average person who gets into computer money early and finds they are tracked by big governments years later.
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Money X gets its value from the social agreement to use X as a token for value, and the maintained social agreement to transact economic transactions using X.
Nothing more, nothing less.
Yes, those social agreements have traditionally been associated with and given a certain stability by the prevailing hierarchical governance organization in one region or another.
No reason the social agreement in the future couldn't be based on X's transactional role in the global economy as a whole, though.
Ther
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