Bitcoin Falls Below $2,000 | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin Falls Below $2,000

bloomberg.com

23 pointsurahara51 comments

And now its up around $2,150. Why even write these articles.

You're complaining about the headline, not the article.

A commodity that is trading 30% below a peak it set just one month ago is absolutely newsworthy, are you serious? If the SP500 did this we'd be posting in a 5000-comment thread and asking how long the recession would last.

That's because the SP500 doesn't regularly swing violently like the crypto market

Exactly, this is an everyday thing. Sometimes its hourly.

The crypto market is more volatile for sure, but this is still the second biggest one-month hit it's taken and the worst decline in three years. Again, if the SP500 did that it would be news, not finger-in-ear complaints about coverage.

You're discounting the volatility of said commodity. Prices (approx) for the last 30/60/90 days are: 2500, 1700, 1200.

The S&P 500 market cap is also 600 times bigger than Bitcoin. Your complaint is equivalent to complaining that Apple ($786B market cap) gets more press for blowing earnings than First Merchants Corporation ($1.64B market cap).

Clickbait? Someone wanted to speculate more and the market was starting to settle down a bit so they decided to stir the pot a bit? Every time you see a "major" news outlet put one of these pieces out, either talking about how ridiculously overvalued bitcoin is, or else how the bottom is dropping out of the bitcoin market and it's a blood bath, it always results in the price swinging wildly up and down for a little while.

bloomberg is a broken record repeating "x end is near" until the conditions are right and can come out telling "told you so"

it has been foretelling the doom of the chinese market for a decade and an half now, of course it will happen at some point but that won't make it useful, like all other predictions without a date they do.

A signal that something is overvalued is still a useful signal, even if it's impossible to forecast how long a market will remain irrational.

I've noticed that it seems to fall on weekends and then go up on Monday or Tuesday. Wondering if I should put in some cash on an exchange to see if I can make money from this observation ...

I tried to calculate when the big buyer/seller "whales" go to sleep to figure out what their time zone was. It pointed to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean :/

Whales indeed.

You should, it will be great for you to discover how wrong you are and how unpredictable the market is.

Anyone who wants to, can go here https://www.coinbase.com/charts?locale=en-US

My observations track roughly to weekends, at least over the last month or so.

After the cash is on you can't change your predictions anymore.

The real reason of declining of cryptocurrency is due to the shut down of AlphaBay. Alpha Bay was basically the replacement for Silk Road after that site was also shut down.

Is there any reason for the Bitcoin being worth anything? Even in North Korea or Cuba it is easier to hold USD than Bitcoin. I'm sorry for the late investors, but people was warned since long ago.

Same reason gold is worth something, it's a limited resource that's fungible and a large enough people are willing to trade in to make it useful for acquiring goods.

Gold has use cases. What are the use cases for Bitcoin? Are any of them compelling? So compelling that a Trump or a Buffet would ever tangle with them? (I chose those two names as two extremes - not related but a spectrum.)

Globally distributed ledger that you can trust without having to trust any specific entity; that has to be worth /something/ right?

NBA star Dennis Rodman shilled PotCoin in North Korea http://money.cnn.com/2017/06/13/technology/dennis-rodman-nor... , a place where I'm sure execution is the punishment for pot. And probably for coin too.

Nobody investing in gold is doing it because of the industrial applications of the metal. If you're valuing gold based on its uses it's massively overvalued. The use case for bitcoin, or more accurately what it gives you that no other currency (except other cryptocurrencies) gives you is being decentralized, finite, and digital. The first and last points in particular make it very suitable for usage on the internet since it can be freely traded for goods and services across international borders while not being tied to any particular country.

It remains to be seen if enough of a market can develop around bitcoin to stabilize its price (or indeed the price of any of the cryptocurrencies). The reason traditional fiat currency prices are as stable as they are is that they're coupled to the value of the goods a country trades which tend not to fluctuate up and down much. In theory cryptocurrencies value should be tied to the value of all the goods and services that they can be used to purchase, but since so few goods are actually purchasable using those currencies currently, the vast majority of their current value is derived from speculation in the market which causes the huge swings in value we see.

USD is more useful than gold, as can be transferred electronically, and recognised everywhere. And also, the USD is more useful than Bitcoin, in the pragmatic usage, not in the idealistic. Demostration: Bitcoin liquidity is because of places where it is allowed to be changed for fiat currency. I.e. it is worth because people think they can make it liquid. What if no one wants to buy Bitcoins at current price because of thinking it is a bubble? It is the same pattern as in every bubble.

Because the information it provides is very precise, relative to gold it's quickly (therefore cheaply) transmitted (and stored), and relative to fiat currencies it's very hard ("virtually impossible?") to forge or devalue.

Huh. "Electronic Gold" isn't too bad as an analogy.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania

It looks like the part of tulip mania that made it famous lasted less than a year. Bitcoin is going on 8 years at this point.

Reason for USD in North Korea is... because it gets printed there as well, quite a bit :) (google it)

Other commenter explained benefits of bitcoin, so ...

Bitcoin is on sale!

Is now really the time to buy?

Maybe, or maybe not

Maybe? Depends on how it shakes out. Now is certainly the time to speculate, you've got probably a 1/3 chance of making money off it. The three possible outcomes would be, a) bitcoin never recovers, you lose the money you're speculating with, b) bitcoin recovers and you picked the winning side, congratulations, you bet when everyone was running away and it payed off, or c) bitcoin recovers, but you picked the losing side, you lost your money.

Should you be "investing" in bitcoin right now? Absolutely not, that's a stupid investment, but so far as gambles go there are worse odds.

"Absolutely not" invest in Bitcoin? Do you have data to back up this absolute claim?

The scare quotes around "invest" in the parent imply (correctly, in my view) that buying anything with this kind of volatility / lack of intrinsic value is not an investment, rather a speculative bet.

Yeah I have put a pretty significant amount of money into bitcoin and have seen amazing returns. If I thought of it as an investment I'd feel like a fool for not putting more, but as it stands I view it more as a hobby.

Sure, the value is highly unpredictable and swings around massively, not to mention the current squabbling that brings the future of the currency into question (not all crypto-currencies mind you, this is specific to bitcoin). Investments have risk profiles associated with them, for most long term investments people expect minimal risk in exchange for minimal rewards. Some more aggressive investment profiles trade more risk for greater rewards. But even the riskiest of investment portfolios pales in comparison to the levels of risk you see in the bitcoin market. Don't get me wrong, I myself have purchased a decent amount of all the crypto-currencies out there, and was one of the earlier purchasers and miners in bitcoin (sadly I lost most of my early mining results when MtGox melted down), but I've also never deluded myself into thinking this has been a wise long term investment, it's a gamble pure and simple. If you go into the bitcoin market investing anything you can't afford to lose at the drop of a hat you're an idiot, whether it pays off or not. Even if it works, that doesn't mean it wasn't a stupid idea in the first place.

Isn't a speculative market driven by gossip and rumors? I think the burden of proof is on you to prove why it is time to buy up BTC as an investment and not a wild gamble.

Now people is panicking, so it is likely that the sooner you sell, the better.

I'm sure people were panicking when it fell from $2,500 to $2,000.

If you believe that cryptocurrency will be part of our future, then yes. Otherwise, I don't know. There's also Ethereum and many other alt coins with a total market cap of over $70 billion https://coinmarketcap.com/ .

I think the biggest uncertainty is what happens to exchanges on and after august 1st. So the recommendation at this point is to take your coins and move them to a secure personal wallet. I think if you can make a purchase and have the transaction clear prior to the fork date with some time to spare to move your funds than perhaps you should be okay.

The time to buy is either before or after Aug 1. Unfortunately no one knows which it is.

why Aug 1?

There might be a bitcoin split:

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/bitcoin-beginners-guide...

My personal recommendation would be to have your bitcoins held by a private key you control on Aug 1st. I'd expect tx fees to be pretty bad leading up to Aug 1st as people move BTC out of exchanges.

Ethereum fell too. It's on it's way back up though, slowly. Hope it continues... definitely bought it at the wrong time.

FOMO is real

Because of this, i am finally understanding how markets work.

hype, hyyyype, HYYYpe, HYPE, HYYYYYYYYYYYPE, short sell, PANIC

Except you can't short it

There are a few exchanges that let you short sell.

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