If there aren't enough "outsider" idiots to buy the coins for $Y + $Z before the correction happens, the "insider" idiots lose their shirts. The original person, of course, makes a tidy profit.
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I learned this the hard way playing Runescape as a 16-year-old. 2007 was an interesting time for that game.
Playing that game over the years was the most thorough education in trusting strangers on the internet anyone could ever need
I don't think this is bad in any right. It looks (and I grew up in the bay area through turn of the century) just like the dot com bubble. The promising part of this is that the underlying technologies being developed, a way to distribute information and business logic in a way where there is an indisputable fully traceable truth, is huge. I think of blockchain-like platforms like Ethereum as the ARPANET to our internet. The opportunities to supplant existing fully centralized systems such as stock exchanges, escrow systems, supply chain/provenance tracking, etc. with a fully decentralized or hybrid approach is huge.
In the end though, I think it will come down to where governments draw the line in the sand. The sad but true reality is that the regulators with the guns will always have ultimate power.
But... those that survived with solid fundamentals have often gone on to thrive spectacularly -- e.g. Google, Amazon.
I can see something similar ultimately happening in the crypto space.
Not trying to be pessimistic but genuinely curious why so many people make the analogy to the dot com period.
One extreme negative, or extreme positive, derivative of a view does not condemn nor justify it. You need to consider the merits as a whole, not with piecemeal bias confirmation or condemnation.
I actually feel like the playing field is more uneven between individuals and firms in the regulated stock market vs the btc exchanges.
I also think the bitcoin exchanges are backroom dealing and insider trading, but I feel like they are less sophisticated vs the "legal" theft that is taking place on wall street.
I mean bitcoin exchanges are certainly the wild west, but I honestly don't care if people want to run pump and dumps on unsophisticated investors. That is something you can pretty easily defend against by doing your own research. There are far more nefarious things going on on both bitcoin exchanges and the real stock market.
Bought my first whole bitcoin in 2015.
Until the end of last year, I had a good feeling about crypto.
The alt-coin madness has me scared for family and friends. They arent listening when I tell them Bitcoin and diversify. They go all-in on pump and dump new coins like TRON and IOTA.
Im actually scared.
That said, IOTA is actually pretty interesting from a technical standpoint, you should read about the Tangle ;)
But it's decentralized~. Bitcoin was initially hyped by "crypto-anarchists", to be free of government regulation, transfer costs, etc - well that's what you get. Something something cake and eating.
The only cryptocurrencies that will prevail within the next five years are the regulated ones. The rest will be used for shady purposes like tax evasion and paying for ransomware, and they'll get hit hard regularly by hacked or dodgy exchanges. I'm fairly sure the current crypto exchanges operate as a ponzi scheme right now, they won't be able to convert back to fiat with enough volume.
Definitely illegal.
It's just sad this tech will end up being used mostly for black money.
That's not true. What makes you think so?
This is a sunk-cost, not added value.
https://twitter.com/iamjosephyoung/status/951428854085689344
"I talked to my contact in South Korea who works for a major exchange, don't fall into the FUD. The ban is ONLY applicable to exchanges that are not following the previous KYC regulations."
But, perhaps that's because in the grand scheme, SK is small news and other traders who got there first knew full well that it'd rebound.
Bought under 2$, already at $2.25.
This is the bull run market I hate, but I'm also well connected...
The ban's purpose is not to stop the most determined, persistent crypto-anarchists from realizing their dream. Its purpose is to scare away your average retired dads and office workers from pouring their life savings into BTC, because otherwise the country will have to feed their children when the bubble pops.
(Unlike crypto-anarchists, most Korean people and the government believe that it's the country's duty to keep children well fed and educated, even if their parents are raging idiots. Whether we actually follow through is... debatable, I guess.)
So far this plan doesn't have the full government support so it might not actually happen.
On one hand SK probably has to do something because so many people are jumping on and eventually will likely get burned. On the other, they just removed a bunch of "money" from the hands of their citizenry by tanking the markets. Which in and of itself may be world wide good deed as it could dampen dangerous rampant speculation but it does make less "rich" people.
My guess is the decline continues into spring but picks back up come summer and into next year (although at a slower rate which isn't a bad thing). BTC isn't going anywhere any time soon and although the whole thing is overheated right now I believe more gains are likely in store in coming years. Shaking the weak hands out stabilizes a market and a stable market is what is missing at the moment.
The entire article sounded like excuses to me for why they need to be 'monitored' and of course if they are monitoring the might as well tax it right?
Baning it is no going to solve much so it sound more like a threat to me to make the exchanges more cooperative.
So counterparty risks is still something which is misunderstood in the cryptocurrency space?
With action pending against South Korea exchanges, higher prices were warranted.
(sorry, now i am more informed, China is imposing similar bans; also South Korea wants more synchronisation with Japan and China on these issues: https://cryptovest.com/news/south-korea-pushing-deeper-colla... )
There was common discussion about junk dotcoms like TheGlobe.com, DrKoop.com, Geocities and dozens of others, and how they had no actual sustainable business (and often no plan for when they'd develop one). Scient, Viant, Razorfish, MarchFirst, and dozens of dotcom service companies were granted crazy valuations versus existing traditional peers (which is history rhyming re Ripple vs PayPal/Stripe/Square/Ant/etc).
The high burn rates, the lack of business models to actually make money, some that went public with practically no plans for how they'd make money at all, extremely high valuations on the few that were making money, and so on. These things were all very widely discussed, many skeptics were shouting about it, it wasn't popular to give them TV talking time (channels/sites like CNBC et al have a vested interest in pushing exuberence).
Because of that, I don't think the possibility of the bubble popping can be built into the cost in the way you're implying. If you think there's a 20% chance your investment will dectuple and a 80% chance you'll be wiped out, you can split the difference to find your expected value. But since none of the market participants believe the current value is the long-term value, eventually it has to land one way or the other.
Seems like the whole crypto is a lot more resilient than it used to be, or maybe I just jinxed it ;)
Using Google Translate: "Cheong Wa Dae said the Justice Minister Park Sang-ki's remarks that the virtual currency exchange will be closed is not coordinated by the government.
A Cheong Wa Dae official said in a telephone conversation with YTN that Park's remarks are the position of the Ministry of Justice and that other ministries have various positions.
In addition, the Ministry of Justice approached from the dimension of elimination of speculation, but the Financial Services Commission explained that the Ministry of Science, Technology and MIC is interested in nurturing core technologies of virtual money to prevent similar reception.
He added that virtual currency-related policies will determine the best time for policies to be effective while looking at market conditions. "
and edit: this post isn't a month old
Basically the ministry of Justice announced they are working on banning exchanges between crypto and fiat currency in Korea, and they ultimately aim to close down all exchanges.
Few hours later, ministry of Strategy and Finance calls out that the ministry of Justice is announcing as if their words are final, but not all government bodies have agreed to that yet.
For reference, ministry of Strategy and Finance is one of the most powerful government body in Korea (they fund the ministries). After this news cryptocurrency value is starting to shoot up again in Korea after the crash.
I'm a South Korean citizen. Let me just tell you what
just happened. About 4 hours ago, Ministry of Justice
issued a statement that the SK government is seeking
to ban all crypto exchanges. They explicitly stated
that this was a decision that was well communicated
between various branches of the government. This
caused the market to crash, and really caused a media
firestorm among Koreans.
And then 2 hours ago, the Ministry of Finance and the
Blue House issued a statement that this decision to
ban all exchanges wasn't something that was
unilaterally agreed upon, and that the statement made
by the MoJ was not their stance on this matter. Now
here is my speculation on what happened.
There was a unilateral agreement to shut all exchanges,
but as you all would know, this is a very anti-democratic
and anti-capitalistic thing to do. So they decided to send
out a trial balloon.
When the statement was made it caused an outrage, as
there are approximately 2 million crypto investors
in SK. National elections are held on April, so to
control the damage I think the Blue House changed
its mind and decided to throw the MoJ under the bus.
A lot of Koreans are speculating that this is what
happened under the hood, which is very amateurish. I
just feel bad for all the guys who cut losses today.The ban will come. In this video, the commentator goes into detail what the South Korea government plans to do and what the government thinks about it. They see cryptocurrency as the second coming of "Bada Iyagi", which was a gambling game that got banned a couple of years ago [1].
[1] http://world.kbs.co.kr/english/archive/program/news_zoom.htm...
Could the peasant class that made money off BTC unite and Lobby/bribe/influence SK politicians?
Also, do American's have a plan if there is a ban?
That's what Reuters is saying right now.
That should trump any tweets you are reading about this being FUD or a market manipulation by the mystical bearwhale.
Reuters is fairly accurate and unbiased imho.
The transaction fees are so high that it seems useless for anything but speculation at this stage.
Seems to me that it completely lost its original purpouse if that doesn't get ajusted somehow.
Say 1% of transaction value with a maximum of the current transaction fee maybe.
Anyways, people who invested in a single bitcoin yesterday only lost $1000 overnight.
https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7plk7q/dont...
Maybe Google/FB ought to ban CNBC?
Admittedly, the speculation that crypto currencies are a bubble does seem even stronger, but personally I don't find that surprising: it did seem feasible that .com companies could coexist, whereas crypto currencies seem to be offering the same product.
At the same time, ClanChat was introduced, allowing enormous groups of strangers to coordinate their activities.
While I dont own any Raiblocks, they are using like 7 severs to confirm. Supposedly fixes all fee/speed problems.
I worry most about the ownership of non-mined coins. The founders nearly always pre-mine or grant themselves significant amounts of coins. The faucet that is crypto mining is all based on work/energy.
This is definitely true. I first got into bitcoin as a way to do algotrading on an exchange without having to navigate whatever processes are required in order to be allowed to do so in "real" markets.
One could argue that a higher current difficulty increases trust in very recent transactions, thereby raising the unitility of Bitcoin as a medium of exchange (ha!) and thus affecting the price.
But that effect is small and we're talking about the difficulty during the last 10 blocks, at most.
Anything before that is for the past.
For all we know that crypto is here, it just hasn't been evenly distributed yet.
Ripple's underdog challenger, Stellar XLM, is trying to claim the same mantle. So are thousands of other 'utility coins', of course, including ETH, XRB, VEN, ICX, and even the "privacy" coins, like Monero.
The fact is this is uncharted territory. We don't know for sure whether we're at the leading or trailing edge of a bubble, and we don't know for sure that any, some, or most crypto will still be around in 5-10 years.
Interesting times!
If you ask around, there could be a really good reason for it.
I don’t think we’re going to have a usable crypto currency until economists get involved, or we simply relearn all the lessons we’ve learnt to date.
I made my fortune in high frequency trading of rune sets after they introduced Grand Exchange and steel smelting prior to it.
And before the Grand Exchange, buying in bulk cost more than buying small amounts, because buying large amounts of materials required you to sit on World 1 spamming "buying iron ore whatever each" for hours.
Correct me if I'm wrong but i have't seen any sites taking anything else so as far as I'm aware all the other crypto currencies have only ever been used for speculation.
And i believe how a currency is used is quite relevant if you ask me.
Nothing huge, but something.
https://gist.github.com/patio11/598ec35c6c1675c97d93383f41b3...
Look at all these btc ponzi schemes from 2012
Also I thought Mt Gox had a bot buying tons of btc on their own exchange pumping the price.
I've experienced at least one really big country-spanning pyramid scheme where lots of people participated, completely aware that it was a pyramid scheme. They just figured they'd be able to 'get out' before the thing would collapse. Obviously that often didn't work out...
That would still be a collapse, just a silent one. Niche market means that everybody has on some subconscious level accepted that a large stack cannot be liquidated and plays along by "hodling" so that they can continue feeling rich. This is what is eventually happening to most collector's items: trading volume drops faster than the price and before you know it, there isn't enough trading going on to regularly call out an updated market price. The last occasional buyers will happily buy at close to the price from the last time there was an active market, but potential sellers are not even trying to sell in bulk, knowing how little money they could expect. It's less frustrating to just forget about it than selling for a dime.
As to your second question - which I would rephrase as 'why would this technology be widely adopted?' I would say, if the role of a trusted third party can be automated, it will be because nature abhors inefficiency. And trusted third parties aren't a niche field - not just banks but also a large part of any civil service can now replace humans with algorithms. That's a lot of disruption.
Because most people are not creative nor critical thinkers and the extent of their brilliance is superficial pattern matching. To most people the dot-com bubble seems to fit all the patterns so by their logic it must have the same outcome. If you think critically about the differences of the crypto craze and the dot-com era, you’ll see how irrational it is to make a strong comparison.
Bitcoin is not Pets.com. Bitcoin is Google.
I'd say it's probably AltaVista or Yahoo!...
Perhaps the Bitcoin/Cryptocurrency situation is a close repeat of the dot-com boom/bust/rebirth.
Perhaps it's a close repeat of Tulip Mania.
Or perhaps it's a new category, and the rise of the next technology a decade from now will be a callback to what happened with Bitcoin.
This'll all seem obvious in a year or three. For now, we speculate and wait.
> Bitcoin is Google.
Is this satire?
Bitcoin, uhh...
And to people who self-identify with the term, I think it might also be a kind of rhetorical last line of defense for when someone criticises their trust and belief: "those may be fine arguments or not, see I don't care, I HODL which means I just don't take it as serious as you. Mind your own business and let me dream my dream". Could also be motivated as a psychological hedge for the day after, "sure, it was expensive, but look at fun we had!"
And yes, the HODL mantra is a way of reminding myself that I shouldn't make emotional decisions in the heat of the moment.
There really aren't all that many people that have problems with that, who are that distrustful of existing infrastructure.
And that's before we get on to whether it is moral to facilitate such anyway...