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Comment by pmc1 | Hacker News Reader

My best guess is that the "store-of-value that can't be manipulated by banks" is effectively over. Big banks it seems will take over the trading volume of the big crypto coins and develop their own exchanges.

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They may be able to partially manipulate the price, but they can't influence the currency or money supply. That's the beauty of crypto.

The price is everything. You don’t need to defeat cryptography to manipulate BTC any more than you need alchemy to manipulate the gold market: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Friday_(1869)

If they can't influence the money supply, but can influence its price, what difference does it make?

If you consider BTC to be the stable currency then it is USD that is crashing.

If.

I see no reason to consider that, though. You'd have to say that, not only the US dollar, but every paper currency is crashing, along with gold. That seems quite a stretch.

That is exactly what the cryptocrazies are stipulating. It's cryptocurrency vs fiat. Seen from the fiat perspective, it's an obvious bubble. But if you're on the cryptocurrency side, it's barely the start of a massive and inevitable shift.

Fiat currencies, OK. I could maybe see that. But also gold? And petroleum? And real estate? And every other asset class on the planet?

No. Crypto's a bubble. This isn't fiat currencies sliding.

I think there are so many kids that did well in science and math and love science fiction and probably enjoy dabbling in some kind of tech libertarianism and have a certain naïveté about cryptocutrencies and what will happen in society. I mean this in a nice way but the view that the apparent obscene volatility of cryptocutrency is a sign of it's stability and the USD is crashing, is an intensely delusional view. That really cannot be understated.

In BTC terms the USD is doing pretty well this week.

Doesn't matter one single bit. Goldman Sachs can't mine gold and control its physical supply, but they sure can play with its market price. So they can drive down the futures price and then hoard physical bullion on the cheap if they have a large institution or country wanting to accumulate gold reserves. Rinse, repeat. Finance 101.

Except clients don't need a third party to store their Bitcoin, unlike gold. Additionally, the blockchain is a public ledger -- anyone can audit it.

Also, bitcoin as it stands right now is pretty useless compared to other cryptocurrencies. The value of bitcoin long-term is tied to the core team's ability to make the necessary changes to the protocol and to do it fast before another currency overtakes the lead of the cryptosphere. This is not gold, this is a world of software that changes and evolves constantly. The bubble for bitcoin might burst soon, but other coins that provide actual value will take its place.

Right now, this store-of-value is being manipulated by whales and exchanges. Bitfinex has allowed illegal wash trading for months, there is evidence that points to insider trading on Coinbase, it's entirely possible that exchanges have been front-running their customers...

The market is more free and open with Bitcoin than our own stock markets. Bitfinex and Coinbase are just two of hundreds of exchanges. There's even localbitcoins, which allows you to trade directly with the other party. The ecosystem has come a very long ways and is the freest market in the world.

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