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Comment by frgtpsswrdlame | Hacker News Reader

>Are we really going to see this type of posts every time there's a 50%-70% crash in prices?

Lol. Yes, duh. A popular new asset which had gone to the moon and received all sorts of financial press buzz and was even receiving coverage inside financial companies, etc. falls back to earth and falls hard. Of course it's going to be covered this way by the press. Besides when you say "every time" how many more times are you expecting Bitcoin to crash? At a certain point doesn't it stop being an asset and start being a gamble?

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This "crashed" term must mean different things to different people. Stop looking at daily charts, zoom out.

Bitcoin is 50% down from it's 20k peak a month ago.

https://imgur.com/tCAXmKt

If that isn't a crash then what is?

There is still a long way to go. I did not believe it when it first crossed $1,000. It is still above $10,000.

For now, however the 1929 stock market crash right before the Great Depression was only an 80% drop. Saying it's up from 4$ / coin is also true, but does not mean much to the people that bought at 20,000$.

The Great Depression stock market crash was much less brutal than many think, but the consequences were severe. Initial drop about 10%, going to 20% with peak to peak at ~50%, but YoY it only was ~20% down.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_Street_Crash_of_1929

However, since many people were using excessive leverage, they got margin called and their positions were liquidated, leaving them royally screwed.

If the market goes down 50% to recover to -25%, that’s fine. But if the market goes down 50% when you are using leverage 4:1 you will be liquidated quite fast.

There is a great story in Harpo Marx's autobiography where one or more of the Marx brothers had a massive margin call and covered it by doing a command performance for some of the major mobsters.

Over a few weeks the Dow fell ~50% from it's 1929 peak Sept. 3, 1929, 381.17. Longer term it as a ~90% drop by July 8, 1932 at 41 points.

So, it depends on the timeframe your talking about. If you bought in 1910 or 1990 then the 1929 or 2000 crashs seems less important than if you bought at the Peak.

It's also up around a 1000% since the start of 2017. If that isn't a healthy correction, what is?

A 1000% up in a year is IMHO not a sign of health.

That's why the GP didn't say it was.

For a startup financial technology, not bad at all.

Zoom out even further – bitcoin was literally worthless in 2008 and it’s been growing ever since!

Indeed, it was worth zero, and now it's worth has multiplied 10 000s of times!

Crashing implies an event that leads to serious damage. The U.S. housing market crashed in 2007/2008 resulting in people loosing their homes, companies going bankrupt, people loosing jobs... If Bitcoin goes down by 50% nothing like that happens. People just loose money, but Bitcoin/crypto is not yet linked to reality. It's all artificial and therefore: Bloomberg, who cares?

What? Bitcoin is linked to reality in that people paid money for them.

I posted the link yesterday (and many other times), but a survey showed most people have spent ~3k on BTC. There is no comparison of a BTC crash and losing 3k to the housing crash and people being on the hook for 100s of k and losing their job.

Play money, but your mortgage won't burst because of this.

You could argue that:

* Bitcoin reached the price of 10k 2 months ago, at the end of November. The Bitcoin has only lost "one month" of its price, for the moment.

* There has been a dip in the price of Bitcoin every January for the last 3 years. It fell from ~1200 to ~700 in January 2017, for example.

I'm not saying that this is not the "final crash", just that what's happening for the moment isn't really surprising. I saw numerous people predicting that the price will fall at least back to ~8k.

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