Bitcoin Bloodbath Nears Dot-Com Levels as Many Tokens Go to Zero | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin Bloodbath Nears Dot-Com Levels as Many Tokens Go to Zero

bloomberg.com

66 pointstzury38 comments

I have no idea if this will end the madness but I hope it will.

Given bitcoin's vast energy consumption, the "production" of bitcoins produces enough pollution to be responsible for a significant number of deaths, amortized. [1]

Thus I have zero sympathy with those who may lose money here.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/shermanlee/2018/04/19/bitcoins-...

I've spit-balled this with some coworkers- but- I think that conceptually, the idea of our world cooking because of block chain is a great idea for a sci fi.

I don't think bitcoin is of much value either, but I think you're going too far, in the grand of scheme of things, any deaths related to bitcoin doesn't even register.

On the other hand, there are people making trillions of dollars by literally being engaged in murder-business that is war racketeering. And there is lots of "normal" and "common" people involved, from the politicians, to engineers, and all the way to the top, all the while, military men and women are worshiped as heroes.

The next halvening is in May 2020. When the miner reward shrinks energy consumption will also shrink unless the price increases. So far the price increases outweigh the reward decreases, but Bitcoin has a built-in mechanism to force miners to become more efficient over time.

What about the number of deaths caused by possibility for governments to finance war efforts via money printing? Most notably both world wars.

There's no evidence bitcoin serves as any real break again governments printing money or will any time soon.

The US suspended the gold standard to enter WWI. The US suspend bitcoin trading if it somehow did interfere with it's ability to make war.

Yes, the United States government could follow in the steps of great countries like Venezuela and north Korea.

No better way to validate it's usefulness than to ban it when you feel the pressure of competition.

At 5-10tps conventional bitcoin can never compete with USD. There are other reasons too.

But I think your argument is fundamentally incorrect. We had plenty of wars with gold backed currencies and we'd still have war if cryptocurrencies took over.

Cars produce pollution and nothing good comes from those either!

In other news, some cryptocurrency is able to handle 7000 transactions per second on its entire network, on the power of a single windmill. [1]

Bitcoin is old tech. But there is some pretty cool stuff out there, if you care to look.

https://www.reddit.com/r/nanocurrency/comments/7ucw1a/the_en...

I always wonder about this attitude.

How do you feel about the aggregate energy consumption of all Candy Crush games being played (servers, network, phones, PCs, monitors)?

What about all the energy used to grow, harvest, produce, transport and distribute alcoholic drinks?

For that matter, what about all distributed energy used by Twitter, including all clients, data centers, network routers, corporate offices, etc (where few tweets communicate something worthwhile to an actual human)?

Obviously, modern humans use energy for consumption (and hopefully for enjoyment), to varying degrees of efficiency. Racing muscle cars isn't my thing but I recognize here's an average person spending their gasoline on something they might get something out of.

Bitcoin seems especially heinous because it a group of moderately well-off folks burning a truly vast amount of energy essentially for the purpose of getting more wealth than, say, non-bitcoin owners.

And given that unbridled energy consumption currently promises local and global disasters on an increasing scale, this particular use of energy especially outrageous.

Does that explain things?

This is really clickbaity. The title implies Bitcoin just rapidly fell in value. It's been slowly declining all year, and is still nearly 10x where it was last year.

Going from 20k to 5k seems like a crash to me...

As did $30 to $2 back in the day. And again at $1k to $300.

It's sort of standard practice for Bitcoin at this point. Not saying it's a guaranteed recovery, but at the same time it's not exactly an unprecedented event.

Here is another way to look at the price:

  June 29 2017 BTC $2,480
  June 29 2018 BTC $6,414

If a stock dropped 60% you wouldn’t consider “it was very recently 10 times lower” a positive.

A crash implies you came down from somewhere. Bitcoin came from a price of zero. The 20k peak was just price discovery fueled by mindless speculation for a brand new asset. It will keep settling down, but I highly doubt it will ever be worth less than its value a few years ago again.

It's serious for miners, if I remember correctly - bitcoin is only profitable at ~7000$. But it's quite a bit below that now.

As miners withdraw and go bust the effort declines and the fees adjust until it becomes profitable again.

It's a clever aggregate system. Bitcoin is always worth what it costs to get it, which at root is relative to the aggregate effort deployed in the bitcoin system in 10 minutes.

10 minutes is a 'turn' in Bitcoin. Everything is relative to what can be done in that amount of time. Perhaps the inventor was an old school D&D player.

The profitability for Bitcoin production largely depends on power pricing. Here's one country-average based breakdown (from Feb 2018) - you can look at the $6000 down level to see where it's still profitable: https://cointelegraph.com/news/mining-margins-and-where-to-m...

You can also use a mining calculator to do a real time spot-check of whether Bitcoin is profitable to mine or not as well (even if you have pretty average electricity prices, very much so): http://whattomine.com/asic?utf8=%E2%9C%93&sha256f=true

For those interested in the most accurate and in-depth analysis on the economics, power consumption, and other aspects of Bitcoin mining, I can highly recommend @mrb's writeups like http://blog.zorinaq.com/bitcoin-electricity-consumption/ and http://blog.zorinaq.com/morgan-stanley-bitcoin-research-repo...

Note that the original article/title is pretty flawed to begin with since there are no tokens that depend on Bitcoin mining to begin with! (90% of tokens by market-cap are based on Ethereum, mining which is even more profitable than Bitcoin, and the economics of which will be changing drastically w/ Casper V2 soon).

Wow, thanks for the information! With that in mind, it seems that it will be a looong time until the bitcoin craze is over.

Well, it'll probably be a long time before the "bitcoin craze" is over since cryptocurrencies as a technology and an asset class are still in their infancy, but it's hard to say how long proof-of-work mining will last. Personally, I'm most closely following what the Ethereum guys are doing with proof-of-work (see: https://ethresear.ch/) but I'm also quite keen to see Chia's proof-of-space-time (an iteration of proof-of-capacity) or if something like proof-of-useful-work is possible. I think everyone's in agreement that PoW is expensive and wasteful, it's just a matter of developing//proving something that works better/cheaper...

Bitcoin pow is intentionally useless. The reasoning is that if there were alternative uses, the value of those alternatives could fluctuate and negatively impact hash rate.

If you bought $25k of BTC the first time an article like this ran in 2011 you’d have $75M right now.

Maybe I’ll go ahead buy. Thx.

I always have a hearty chuckle when articles like this are published. It was a little amusing when I saw people freak out when it "crashed" back down to a value over 500% of what it was just a short time earlier. Now it's even funnier. I don't know how many times people like this have to watch this happen before they get a clue.

There are few things more pathetic than someone who has been screeching arrogantly about the demise of cryptocurrency for over half a decade, laughing and taunting when the price decreases or someone gets scammed, and gnashing their teeth and desperately tweeting or posting when it soars, yet again, in response to market demand. If they'd used one PC to mine BTC in their downtime instead of screaming "LOL libertarians" they'd have paid off their house. If they'd put a few hundred dollars into it at literally any time in 2013, they'd be sitting on at least as much.

Please keep doing this stuff. It never gets old to me.

Hmm, I'm not sure this will end cryptocurrencies but I think it might make some of the less tech-savvy users really think about their investments and who is giving them what advice. I have a small holding that I've held for a while now and I like that but when BTC/ETH was reaching their highs and I had non-tech people buying into it because "it has to go up" had me rolling my eyes. It almost feels like people that are true believers in real estate and think that purchasing a house at any price is a good idea. I'd hate to see this end any long term cryptocurrency development/adoption and I don't think it will.

Never invest in something you don't understand.

Which apparently is the psychology of others.

> really think about their investments

you mean their gambling.

My long-time financial advisor has a fantastic saying: "I like to buy low, and sell high!" It's amazing how tempting it is to do the opposite. Wow, thing X has tripled, let's get into that. No!

Clickbait title and actually references 'Dead Coins' website which is completely unreliable - not to mention the fact that I could 'create' a new token worth zero in about 5 minutes.

Almost immediately after this article was published, the BTC price jumped 8.72% : https://coinmarketcap.com/

Crypto market caps move rapidly in either direction. They're extremely volatile. And this is nothing new. BTC has had much bigger dips before (% wise) and it will have more peaks and valleys as time goes on.

A long tail of under performers exists for websites, apps, stocks (especially OTCBBs) etc. Crypto is no different. Just as with websites and apps, crypto will have it's own long tail of under performers. It makes perfect sense.

According to such articles bitcoin has been crashing for nearly 10 years. The problem often being it being compared to other assets. It's a totally new concept and has never followed any previous pattern in human history.

Price movement with jumps like this

See https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/bitcoin

It is always too early to call it dead or alive

News of my death have been greatly exaggerated.

- Mark Twain

Dollar bloodbath nears dot-com level as many shitstocks go to zero.

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