Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
The Almighty Buck Bitcoin

Bitcoin, Ether, Other Cryptocurrencies Suddenly Drop More Than 16% (marketwatch.com) 105

Posted by EditorDavid from the Bitcoin-bears dept.
"Cryptocurrency was down by as much as 20% Saturday, hitting its lowest point in months," reports MarketWatch: Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency by market value, was down 18% at $46,571.84 at about 7 a.m. ET, according to data from CoinDesk. It temporarily dipped to $42,000 before bouncing back. Ether, the second-largest cryptocurrency, was down close to 16%.

The declines were widespread across the crypto universe. Other widely traded cryptocurrencies including Solana, Dogecoin, and Shiba Inu coin lost more than a fifth of their value.
Dogecoin now appears to be down more than 33%. According to the article, a "market insights" official at cryptolender Genesis Global Trading speculated that a large sell order might have triggered cryptocurrency margin calls and liquidations.

Meanwhile, the president of El Salvador gloated on Twitter that they'd snapped up 150 bitcoins at an average price of $48,670 each, bragging that "El Salvador just bought the dip!" MarketWatch reports.

"He later wrote that the country had 'Missed the f***ing bottom by 7 minutes,' followed by a laughing emoji."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Bitcoin, Ether, Other Cryptocurrencies Suddenly Drop More Than 16% More

Bitcoin, Ether, Other Cryptocurrencies Suddenly Drop More Than 16%

Comments Filter:

  • That's why banks need to accept crypto to secure loans.

    • That's why banks need to accept crypto to secure loans.

      Just great, then people can be underwater on their mortgage *and* literally the loan value.

    • I've heard that there are plans afoot to replace /dev/random with /dev/cryptocurrency. It takes the current price of BTC, Doge, Ether, etc and produces better randomness than the original /dev/random ever could.
    • NOT ! Cryto not based on anything except dummies to keep buying it ! Just computer code and not safe !

    • Not sure why you think that would be a problem. If the price drops far enough that the collateral is at risk, then the bank would just sell the asset to cover your loan. How is that a problem?

  • Just bought the dip... (Score:4, Funny)

    by gosso920 ( 6330142 ) on Saturday December 04, 2021 @11:37AM (#62046597)
    ... said the dipshit president of El Salvador.

    • Re:Just bought the dip... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Lisandro ( 799651 ) on Saturday December 04, 2021 @12:30PM (#62046747)

      That's gross malfeasance, IMHO. El Salvador definitely doesn't need those BTC right now, and by gambling the country's (terrible) reserves he's just losing money long term.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Rei ( 128717 )

      The last time he boosted of "buying the dip", it was 27 October [bloomberg.com], when Bitcoin closed at $58482, vs. the current $49387 (on that "dip", they bought 420 coins rather than a mere 150)

  • So just an ordinary day in crazy crypto land (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ffkom ( 3519199 ) on Saturday December 04, 2021 @11:39AM (#62046607)
    ... where volatility has always been off the scale that currencies are usually measured with.

    • It's part of the appeal. But sadly there isn't a good mechanism to build an iron condor [wikipedia.org] on crypto.

      • It's part of the appeal.

        For speculators, sure. But also destroys its usefulness as day-to-day currency, which (iirc) was intended purpose of most crypto currencies. Or at least @ some point in time, was.

        I have no problem with speculators speculating themselves into a frenzy. Free-for-all, have at it. But many crypto currencies were (at one time or another) meant to replace fiat currencies. Meant for use as day-to-day payment option. Extreme volatility kills that purpose. Which -imho- is a sad thing.

        The concept of crypto curre

    • Meh. All it means is that the bitcoin-pumpers had a day off or something.

    • So yet another case of pump and dump.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by vivian ( 156520 )

        Every ponzi scheme holds great promise. It's the delivery on that promise that is the problem.
        Any cryptocurrency scheme which is based on a proof of work that is essentially a competitive burn of electricity to decide who wins is provably unviable as a currency, and is just a great big fat waste of resources.
        Some people will make out like bandits, a lot more will lose a little and some will lose a lot, in the end game.

  • Money just bleeds out 15k coins and counting (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Goatbot ( 7614062 ) on Saturday December 04, 2021 @11:41AM (#62046619)
    Seems like every 7-10 days marker goes up and down by 10-20%. This my friends is called siphoning off cash. Seems today everyone is minting and mining their own coins to flip for other coins or cash.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      big crash gonna be big. i foresee lots of broke individuals, but this time it will be people who need to make rent/mortgage/car/food payments

      *popcorn*

      • Yup until they scream loud enough for social support or just start looting.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by ebvwfbw ( 864834 )

          Yup until they scream loud enough for social support or just start looting.

          It'll get to the point where they'll shoot looters on sight. I think we're close to that.
          If they move after being shot, they'll shoot them again. People are getting really tired of that nonsense. They're not hurting the insurance company, they're hurting people. People own those businesses. We all pay when insurance pays. A lot of people lost everything they had last year and into this year. All over big lies.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by ebvwfbw ( 864834 )

        big crash gonna be big. i foresee lots of broke individuals, but this time it will be people who need to make rent/mortgage/car/food payments

        *popcorn*

        I've run into people that almost had their house paid off and took out a home equity line of credit and dumped it into bitcoin last week. I bet they're S** a brick right now. I'm not mean enough to call and ask.

  • The NASDAQ was down 2% yesterday too. Who fucking cares? This is not tech news, this is Pyrite Pete masturbation material. Go back to Reddit where you fucking belong.

    • Imagine NASDAQ dropping 20% overnight.

      That's why.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by ArchieBunker ( 132337 )

      Crypto currency is everything slashdot should love but they don't for some reason. It's open source, it's decentralized, and it's free from government control.

      • Re:Why the fuck is this on /. (Score:5, Interesting)

        by tekram ( 8023518 ) on Saturday December 04, 2021 @01:03PM (#62046817)
        Free from government control means cryptos operate in unregulated exchanges where almost any big player can fleece the little speculators just as they have done repeatedly in the history of cryptos as well as penny stocks and bucket shops that came before them. But anyone who has studied this already know this and that is why informed Slashdot readers are so much against cryptos.

      • Re:Why the fuck is this on /. (Score:4, Insightful)

        by istartedi ( 132515 ) on Saturday December 04, 2021 @02:46PM (#62047197) Journal

        I think it's because when Slashdot's culture was formed, the Open Source community tended to be left leaning, often working for government or academia. Larry Wall worked for NASA. Linus Torvalds was a student in Finland. RMS was an academic turned advocate.

        The crypto community at its founding skewed towards libertarians, and self-styled Austrian economists--the kind of people who would have tended to be gold bugs earlier. That community is fiercely capitalistic and tends to be right-leaning.

        Just my $0.02, but the tension makes sense even if these days you can't pidgeon-hole either community quite so easily. Culture tends to endure even if the reasons no longer apply.

        • Depends on how long ago. Back in the mid-2000s when I joined, it was already a bit libertarian, united by Jack Thompson suing the games industry, and creationists trying to get taught in science.

          And I would have considered myself libertarian.

          Then I grew up and out of libertarianism, largely in part of watching Slashdot slide into the crazy side of libertariansim. It's funny now watching Slashdot becoming allies of the same Republicans who wanted to kill the games industry and push creationism in schoo

        • It's a strange phenomenon, almost like crypto skews away from people that are capable of understanding how equity markets and monetary systems should work.

        • Slashdot leaned libertarian almost from the beginning. Nazi propaganda has been here almost from the beginning, so there have also been crazy right-wingers the whole time.

          I was actually surprised to find lots of "liberals" arriving over the last 5 years or so. Maybe they were always here, but SJW'ing made them more vocal.

      • No, it's not something we should love.

        It's not a currency, has none of the attributes of money and fails all the tests of money. It's a gambling token only.

        Bitcoin isn't taken for payment, it's exchanged for money immediately.

        The fact that a banana republic with smaller GDP than Rhode Island owns some ten million dollars worth of the gambling token is not an argument for its legitimacy either.

        It's a farce, Tulip Mania II without any tulip bulbs that are at least edible in a pinch.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by danda ( 11343 )

          sure, keep telling yourself that.

          • Crypto is dumb. It's like pretending GME is currency. Well, if GameStop shutdown their entire business and the market kept on trading GME for some magical reason. That's what a crypto currency is. Except the real-time exchange of GME, let me see if I just hand wave all market and broker regulations away like crypto, yup we could actually get instant settlement of GME transfers working at scale, at least as well as say the Visa network, and totally unlike crypto. But that would still be fucking stupid.

            • Re: (Score:1)

              by danda ( 11343 )

              yeah, keep telling yourself that.

              • love how crypto-cointards like you have no coherent arguments at all for the bullshit you believe in. Bitcoin price only buoyed by suckers and right now the gas is escaping out of your btc blow-up doll. Better blow harder.

      • Re:Why the fuck is this on /. (Score:4, Interesting)

        by subreality ( 157447 ) on Saturday December 04, 2021 @04:24PM (#62047541)

        Crypto currency is everything slashdot should love but they don't for some reason.

        I love the tech. Unfortunately, we're a decade in and cryptocurrency hasn't lived up to our hopes of wresting control away from the banks and credit cards, yet the collateral damage keeps piling up. I walked away because there's little headway on the tech side, and the speculative investors and other finance people are miserable to be around.

      • It's open source, it's decentralized, and it's free from government control.

        It's very similar to Systemd in that regard. We love that too right?

      • Crypto currency is everything slashdot should love but they don't for some reason. It's open source, it's decentralized, and it's free from government control.

        Blockchain smart
        Crypto currency stupid

        Not saying there isn't money to be made in stupid, but monetization hasn't really been a hallmark of /. has it?

        Think of the prevailing attitudes towards intellectual property, advertising, copyrights, etc. Why would trading virtual tokens for real money appeal?

      • The difference between software and currency is that while with software, it's a personal decision and you don't have to worry about other people's different personal decisions, with currencies, which are subject to the network effect, other people and their ability of getting scammed matters very much. So making an analogy is bound to be flawed here.

      • It's also because the average Slashdot reader is smart enough to not invest in something that isn't backed by actual assets. Rail all you want against fiat currency, but the United States Dollar isn't going anywhere. Ethereum could drop to $0 next week without warning and it would be met with a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing, because it's backed by nothing.

        People taking governmental currency loans to buy crypto are fucking insane - the crypto could sublimate into nothing tomorrow, and they'll st

    • You know, it is perfectly okay to say you're triggered and you don't like the article instead of putting off bad vibes.

    • Agreed. I've been on /. for 20+ years and the amount of cryptocurrency shilling by the editors is getting insane. Do we REALLY need to hear about cryptocurrencies every fucking week???

      • "Do we REALLY need to hear about cryptocurrencies every fucking week???". I agree. It must be a really slow news cycle if they have to publish nothing burger stories like crypto crashing 20%. They might as well post a "the sun will rise tomorrow" article next.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        This drop made the news on mainstream US media today. Why do you think it is not relevant on /.?

      • So stop posting in these threads if you want them to go away, genius. You came into this thread, you engaged with the content... You're signaling that you want more stories like this.

        • > You're signaling that you want more stories like this.

          Ignoring a problem doesn't make it go away.

          Staying silent [youtube.com] is only ONE way to signal that this crap doesn't belong on /.

          Stop being a cryptocurrency apologist and shill.

      • I don't think the editors shill cryptocurrency, lots of people reply and comment like you and I. The editors want popular stories that engage the readers/commenters, so the site survives.

        • I don't think the editors shill cryptocurrency

          Oh please! Many of us have been pointing out [slashdot.org] the obvious shilling that's been going on in /. for a while now.

  • Wait a minute. (Score:3)

    by Fly Swatter ( 30498 ) on Saturday December 04, 2021 @12:48PM (#62046771) Homepage
    Margin calls? Sell orders? This kind of sounds like a traded security... In that case it should be regulated like the stock market. It is even following the stock market pull back -- what happened to that 'independent currency' they all touted?

    While we're at it please ban cryptocurrency mining in the US, thank you.

  • ... another person (or group) manipulating bitcoin.

    You do all realise that not only is bitcoin (& friends) highly speculative, it is actively and chronically being manipulated by a few to make gains at the expense of many newer buyers of bitcoin?

  • Meanwhile, the president of El Salvador gloated on Twitter that they'd snapped up 150 bitcoins at an average price of $48,670 each, bragging that "El Salvador just bought the dip!" MarketWatch reports.

    "He later wrote that the country had 'Missed the f***ing bottom by 7 minutes,' followed by a laughing emoji."

    Oh no! Mean tweets! Mobilize the tech-stapo!!!!

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by tekram ( 8023518 )
      Bitcoin breakout occured 13 months ago at $13,437. That is the support line and El Salvador and many other late speculators are just fooling themselves in thinking they know how to buy the dips. In the end, they are all front-run by somebody and paying the price of foolish speculation on something that has no inherent value, no economy to support it and no military to protect it.

      • Technical analysis is just a shared delusion which breaks down when enough gamblers refuse to delude themselves any longer (or reality steps in).

        • That pretty much describes every stock market. If fundamental analysis was that much better, value stocks wouldn't be so volatile.

  • $1 billion liquidation (Score:3)

    by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Saturday December 04, 2021 @03:29PM (#62047383)

    The MarkeWatch story says this:

    Another possible factor accelerating the bitcoin selloff was the unwinding of heavily leveraged crypto derivatives, said Noelle Acheson, head of market insights at cryptolender Genesis Global Trading. She pointed to a large sell order that might have triggered margin calls and liquidations for investors.

    Whereas this CNN story [cnn.com] says this:

    Data from another platform, Coinglass, showed that nearly $1 billion worth of cryptocurrencies had been liquidated over the past 24 hours, with the bulk being on digital exchange Bitfinex.

    Obviously the two are related. A heavily leveraged position getting out which induced others to sell to cover their positions. All to the tune of $1 billion.

  • I hope blockchain goes into the hopper. I welcome the CPLDs that will come and crush it.
  • These things are good for speculating, money laundering, extortion - and very little else. No wonder their value fluctuates like a drunken sailor.
  • Crypto NOT safe as touted ! Suppose to be safe and security yet over the years, millions have been stolen !

Slashdot Top Deals

Did you know that if you took all the economists in the world and lined them up end to end, they'd still point in the wrong direction?

Close