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Bitcoin The Almighty Buck

Bitcoin Retakes $20K, Leading As Broad Crypto Rally Continues 106

Bitcoin's (BTC) 2023 surge continues, with the crypto now above $20,000 for the first time since the FTX collapse in early November. CoinDesk reports: The largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization started the week near the $17,000 mark after hovering in the mid-$16,000 area since mid-December. Now at $20,250, bitcoin has gained more than 20% in the opening two weeks of this year. Still, the crypto -- which topped $65,000 in Nov. 2021 -- remains near the low end of a brutal bear market. Indeed, $20,000 "once [was] deemed a disturbing low but now potentially represents a sign of a revival," according to Craig Erlam, senior market analyst at foreign exchange market maker Oanda.

Also moving nicely higher is ether (ETH), ahead more than 20% year-to-date and threatening $1,500 for the first time since early November. The CoinDesk Market Index (CMI) rose 14% for the week. Crypto-related stocks also benefited from the rally this week: Exchange Coinbase (COIN) was up 39% while bitcoin miner Marathon Digital Holdings (MARA) surged 76%.
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Bitcoin Retakes $20K, Leading As Broad Crypto Rally Continues

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  • Have that, all you sad naysayers who said they were all charlatans and my crypto coins would never be worth anything:

    https://99bitcoins.com/deadcoins/
    • by DVK9 ( 9481479 )
      I laugh at those "buying" their BC's thru xchanges. You really want a BC? Then mine one (or 3 like I did).
    • They aren't worth anything. They still aren't.
      • by Kokuyo ( 549451 )

        Yes, they are worth nothing, precisely like paper money or that number you see on your bank statement.

        Anything, anywhere, ever is worth as much as the value someone atributes to it.

        • To be more precise crypto had no underlying financial structure to determine a fair market value price. There is no P/E. No revenues. No sales. No anything that other companies are judged on, even if wrongly.

          It's a pure momentum, fomo thing.

          • by Shaitan ( 22585 )

            I know why that is. I'll tell you the secret if you want to come closer... closer *moves close to your ear* IT IS A MEDIUM FOR EXCHNAGE NOT A FUCKING INVESTMENT.

            There you go. Ultimately the only reason it goes up over time and other things go down is because there is a fixed pool of bitcoin and some of it gets lost or locked up being used as reserve for things. At the same time the currencies you are used to also have none of those things you mentioned for the same reason but by design inflate and have less

        • However I can take that paper money to a store and exchange it for goods.
        • Yes, they are worth nothing, precisely like paper money or that number you see on your bank statement.

          Then how come people can buy houses with it?

          How many people, who are not part of the scam structures, have actually made such a good return they could actually buy houses with it?

    • by rashanon ( 910380 ) on Saturday January 14, 2023 @01:24PM (#63208492)

      You arent investing. you are flatly gambling a throw of the dice. All crypto is just a ponzi scheme, but thatnks to people like you it hasnt completely collapsed. As long as people keep puting money into the scheme, it stay afloat. But as soone as output exceeds input it starts to collapse. And i dont care if you lose everything. as long as there are no government bailouts of this SHT when it all fails. Whoever or whatever bank or person who losees, loses all on their own. no more bailouts for idiots.

      • Whoosh.
  • by Ritz_Just_Ritz ( 883997 ) on Saturday January 14, 2023 @08:20AM (#63208010)

    Surely Lucy would never pull the football away from Charlie Brown.....not again....really?

    There's a sucker born every minute. -PT Barnum-

    • Re:The Football (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Pollux ( 102520 ) <speter@[ ]ata.net.eg ['ted' in gap]> on Saturday January 14, 2023 @08:43AM (#63208060) Journal

      Love the metaphor...but it begs the question, who actually is holding the football?

      Since everyone's an armchair quarterback when it comes to finances, allow me to throw in my theory: I believe there are large investment firms, asset managers, and bitcoin wales that see the drop to $15K as an opportunity to make one more pump & dump before the market collapses. There will be a lot of smaller investors looking for their "second wind" that see the sudden rise in bitcoin as an opportunity to regrow their wealth in the volatile market that was 2022. While each firm and independent owner may develop their own investment strategy, I expect the price to hit between $25K and $30K before there's another massive sell.

      Because the world is talking recession. Like a massive bout of diarrhea, we can feel it coming, but the exact time of the pending disaster is yet unknown. Investors are looking for their last opportunities to make out like a bandit before the marketplace implodes. So playing a game of chicken with the Bitcoin marketplace is always an enticing bet.

      • It's not clear there will be a recession. We are also hitting the post-pandemic boom.

        • Both of which are irrelevant to the mechanics of a pump and dump scheme. The amount of wholesale fraud and criminality in the crypto ecosystem is mind boggling. There is a vanishingly small amount of legitimate commerce conducted and most of those "assets" have no real value other than what "the greater fool" is willing to pay.

        • Do not delude yourself. A worldwide recession is coming, will definitely include the US. Just a question of how bad it is.
      • by mjwx ( 966435 )

        Love the metaphor...but it begs the question, who actually is holding the football?

        If you're playing Foot-Ball instead of Hand-Egg, the guy holding the football is pretty freaking obvious as he's the one everyone is looking at because he's doing it wrong.

      • Re: (Score:2, Redundant)

        by fatwilbur ( 1098563 )
        Wall Street actually has a “technical” term for this: the dead cat bounce. From Wikipedia: Derived from the idea that "even a dead cat will bounce if it falls from a great height",[2] the phrase, which originated on Wall Street, is also popularly applied to any case where a subject experiences a brief resurgence during or following a severe decline.
        • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

          Wall Street actually has a âoetechnicalâ term for this: the dead cat bounce. From Wikipedia: Derived from the idea that "even a dead cat will bounce if it falls from a great height",[2] the phrase, which originated on Wall Street, is also popularly applied to any case where a subject experiences a brief resurgence during or following a severe decline.

          Yes this happens a lot everywhere.

          Let's say you have something, it surges in value because interest in it increases. But then interest falls because

      • I'm sure there is a lot of pent up desire to buy BTC, especially as the Fed just caused a recession due to interest rate hikes. However, will this last? Who knows. Governments are rushing head-first to regulate, or just outright ban it. A day doesn't seem to go by without an exchange having issues or laying off people.

        With the economy tanking, BTC is something that seems to have a lot of misplaced hope around it.

    • And there is a person who thinks he/she knows everything born every minute too.
  • "Oanda is a market maker/ECN hybrid and takes the opposite side of trades where it acts as the direct counterparty, profiting from client losses."

    So when you lose on crypto, they win.

    https://www.dailyforex.com/comparison/oanda-vs-fxcc
    • Seems like they already won if they were shorting last year. If they established long positions on BTC vs. the bears that were running amok after the FTX crash, they're making money now, and they stand to make more of the bulls keep running.

      Then they'll try to find the top and start shorting. Wash rinse repeat.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    The plan for all cryptocurrencies isn't what they want to make you think it is. It's more sinister than the egalitarian image the crypto boys portray for it.

    After the 2008 financial meltdown, cryptocurrencies were born out of it, declared to be the means by which people could be freed from banks/governments, and promised to avoid any such future meltdowns from happening ever again.

    But the crypto boys watched closely the result of that meltdown, and formulated their plan: create a new form of currency, and

    • by j-beda ( 85386 )

      The plan for all cryptocurrencies isn't what they want to make you think it is. It's more sinister than the egalitarian image the crypto boys portray for it.

      After the 2008 financial meltdown, cryptocurrencies were born out of it, declared to be the means by which people could be freed from banks/governments, and promised to avoid any such future meltdowns from happening ever again.

      But the crypto boys watched closely the result of that meltdown, and formulated their plan: create a new form of currency, and for it a new financial system detached from traditional ones (those burdened by "governments and regulations") - they called it "DeFi" for "Decentralized Finance", but its dirty little secret is that it's really "Deregulated Finance".

      Dan Olsen had a great video about this back in Feb of 2022, "Line Goes Up – The Problem With NFTs". The video talks about the whole crypto-finance infrastructure as well as NFTs.

      https://youtu.be/YQ_xWvX1n9g [youtu.be]

      Yes, the block-chain is an amazing system technically, and the underlying ideas are really neat, but it is in no way a solution to the stated problems of banking. At best, "DeFi" replaces those currently with lots of power and money with a new groups of elites with lots of power and money, but with

  • by Anonymous Coward

    On Monday April 26, 2021 @02:16AM UTC, Pyrite Pete [urbandictionary.com] had said:

    That was back when bitcoin had already fallen, and down to about $47K at the time. It should've been back up to "twice its value" no later than June 26 2021 - over one year ago. It is now sitting at only about $20K.

    Now that's what I call a prediction #FAIL!

  • by Big Hairy Gorilla ( 9839972 ) on Saturday January 14, 2023 @09:14AM (#63208090)
    My read is that, if you can't stem your losses by cashing out, you would do the next best thing, and buy/convert the market leader?

    So BC goes up with demand, while ShitcoinXYZ goes to zero?
    • by Anonymous Coward

      So BC goes up with demand, while ShitcoinXYZ goes to zero?

      But BTC is just ShitcoinXYZ with a different name - they’re all the same.

  • Why not post news about every stocks price change? Stock market uses computers so it is news for nerds according to current slashdot standards.
    • Don't spoil the crypto fans, they don't yet realize that the crypto market pretty much mirrors the movement of the stock market at this point.
  • by walterbyrd ( 182728 ) on Saturday January 14, 2023 @10:18AM (#63208170)

    I don't see how.

    Crypto is supposed to be a way to buy and/or sell goods and services without any financial institution, or government, being involved.

    I cannot believe any government would allow that. Without taxes, a government cannot exist. But how can a government tax such transactions?

    As it is, crypto is not really "currency." You can't buy groceries, or fill your car with it. And don't tell me about crypto creditcards. When you use crypto creditcards you are paying in dollars, not crypto, the institutions just exchanges some of your crypto for dollars. This eliminates the idea of crypto since you are still going through a financial institution.

    Crypto is really just worthless 1s and 0s on computer storage somewhere. It is mostly used to sell to a bigger idiot and profit. Aside from that, crypto is used for money laundering, ransomware payments, and other types of fraud.

    Money can be made with crypto, if you time it right. But the fact remains, crypto is really just an earth destroying Ponzi scheme.

    • For an investment vehicle, crypto isn't great. If I buy stock, I'm buying a company which is at least supposedly producing something, and some stocks pay quarterly dividends. If I buy land, I can put something there or lease it. Other investments... not so much. Precious metals don't do anything, and take money to securely store.

      Cryptocurrency is not great either as an investment. One not just has to great pains to store it securely, but also have redundant backup systems in place. For example, to sto

  • Then investing in crypto is the right move #jokingnotjoking
  • Or rather "fools" as that is the correct term. Of course, once these have been separated from their money, things will be continuing to crash.

    • Depends on what's driving up the "value"? Is the value being driven up because a bunch of the cryptillionaires are buying when the price is low?
    • Or, and at this point I wouldn't deem it that implausible, the big cryptogamblers (I refuse to call these people "investors") are trying a pump-and-dump. Try to rekindle interest and faith in cryptocurrencies to recover so they can get out with minimal losses.

      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Or, and at this point I wouldn't deem it that implausible, the big cryptogamblers (I refuse to call these people "investors") are trying a pump-and-dump. Try to rekindle interest and faith in cryptocurrencies to recover so they can get out with minimal losses.

        That would be my take also. First they waited a while to see whether it would crash further and when it did not, they began pumping. May be their last chance to do so before all crapcoins (which BC is) crash down to their actual value of zero.

  • by burtosis ( 1124179 ) on Saturday January 14, 2023 @10:46AM (#63208208)
    I love these bitcoin rally bits when broadly nearly all the markets are up, almost as good as the ones saying bitcoin is doomed in a crash when markets are broadly down. Despite all the claims crypto isn’t attached to markets the reality its people toss their money in when money is flowing, and it’s the first place they take it from when the easy money dries up.
    • Timings are not as hard as people think. When rates are low betting markets like bitcoins and futures like Gold and commodies go up in value. This is because rich people and hedge funds take at near 0% loans so if they do not earn much they make a profit as it just has to earn more than the interest rate.

      With higher rates even if the price of oil, wheat, gold, or bitcoin go up it must earn more than the interest rate which is much much higher now than a year ago to remain profit ... not counting if you lose

  • People forget rich people not you and I regular folks set the price and make the market.

    These large hedge funds and rich people got 0% interest loans from the FED and used them to buy bitcoin. The risk now is not worth it due to the interest that needs to be paid back. Bitcoin must gain more value than the interest of the loan to be profitable

  • by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Saturday January 14, 2023 @02:24PM (#63208622)

    A nice rally, but I still would not get back into crypto until the FTX repercussions have fully unwound, and probably until Tether is gone.

    But congrats on those who have some gains from this!

  • by Anonymous Coward
    I read the headline as "shortage of greater fools now at an end".
  • by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday January 14, 2023 @03:09PM (#63208748)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Tulip bulbs either rot or sprout eventually. In both cases, they lose their value.

  • So, the dead cat is bouncing?

The truth of a proposition has nothing to do with its credibility. And vice versa.

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