Bitcoin Erases Year's Gain as Crypto Bear Market Deepens (msn.com) 50
"Just a little more than a month after reaching an all-time high, Bitcoin has erased the more than 30% gain registered since the start of the year..." reports Bloomberg:
The dominant cryptocurrency fell below US$93,714 on Sunday, pushing the price beneath the closing level reached at the end of last year, when financial markets were rallying following President Donald Trump's election victory. Bitcoin soared to a record US$126,251 on Oct 6, only to begin tumbling four days later after unexpected comments on tariffs by Trump sent markets into a tailspin worldwide. "The general market is risk-off," said Matthew Hougan, the San Francisco-based chief investment officer for Bitwise Asset Management. "Crypto was the canary in the coal mine for that, it was the first to flinch."
Over the past month, many of the biggest buyers — from exchange-traded fund allocators to corporate treasuries — have quietly stepped back, depriving the market of the flow-driven support that helped propel the token to records earlier this year. For much of the year, institutions were the backbone of Bitcoin's legitimacy and its price. ETFs as a cohort took in more than US$25 billion, according to Bloomberg data, pushing assets as high as roughly US$169 billion. Their steady allocation flows helped reframe the asset as a portfolio diversifier — a hedge against inflation, monetary debasement and political disarray. But that narrative — always tenuous — is fraying afresh, leaving the market exposed to something quieter but no less destabilising: disengagement. "The selloff is a confluence of profit-taking by LTHs, institutional outflows, macro uncertainty, and leveraged longs getting wiped out," said Jake Kennis, senior research analyst at Nansen. "What is clear is that the market has temporarily chosen a downward direction after a long period of consolidation/ranging..."
Boom and bust cycles have been a constant since Bitcoin burst into the mainstream consciousness with a more than 13,000% surge in 2017, only to be followed by a plunge of almost 75% the following year... Bitcoin has whipsawed investors through the year, dropping to as low as US$74,400 in April as Trump unveiled his tariffs, before rebounding to record highs ahead of the latest retreat... The market downturn has been even tougher on smaller, less liquid tokens that traders often gravitate toward because of their higher volatility and typical outperformance during rallies. A MarketVector index tracking the bottom half of the largest 100 digital assets is down around 60% this year.
Over the past month, many of the biggest buyers — from exchange-traded fund allocators to corporate treasuries — have quietly stepped back, depriving the market of the flow-driven support that helped propel the token to records earlier this year. For much of the year, institutions were the backbone of Bitcoin's legitimacy and its price. ETFs as a cohort took in more than US$25 billion, according to Bloomberg data, pushing assets as high as roughly US$169 billion. Their steady allocation flows helped reframe the asset as a portfolio diversifier — a hedge against inflation, monetary debasement and political disarray. But that narrative — always tenuous — is fraying afresh, leaving the market exposed to something quieter but no less destabilising: disengagement. "The selloff is a confluence of profit-taking by LTHs, institutional outflows, macro uncertainty, and leveraged longs getting wiped out," said Jake Kennis, senior research analyst at Nansen. "What is clear is that the market has temporarily chosen a downward direction after a long period of consolidation/ranging..."
Boom and bust cycles have been a constant since Bitcoin burst into the mainstream consciousness with a more than 13,000% surge in 2017, only to be followed by a plunge of almost 75% the following year... Bitcoin has whipsawed investors through the year, dropping to as low as US$74,400 in April as Trump unveiled his tariffs, before rebounding to record highs ahead of the latest retreat... The market downturn has been even tougher on smaller, less liquid tokens that traders often gravitate toward because of their higher volatility and typical outperformance during rallies. A MarketVector index tracking the bottom half of the largest 100 digital assets is down around 60% this year.
The thing with no intrinsic worth... (Score:5, Insightful)
... is dropping in value!
Re:The thing with no intrinsic worth... (Score:5, Insightful)
Gold has intrinsic value, as you said, but a lot more than in just industry. Jewelry is a pretty big market last I checked. If gold were less valued, its use in industry would be more widespread, because it doesn't oxidize. Gold may be overvalued, but it has intrinsic worth.
NVIDIA stock is ownership of a small part of the company. The company has a tremendous amount of value. NVIDIA stock may be overvalued, but it has intrinsic worth.
The dollar is backed by the The Full Faith and Credit Clause of the United States Constitution, which means it's backed by the American people. That is a lot of value right there. It may be overvalued, but not by all that much.
Bit Coin? It's just what people are willing to pay and nothing more. Even if you value the law-skirting uses of crypto, there is no reason to have limited coins, unless that is you want to make a tulip craze and fuck people out of their money. Zero intrinsic worth. Zero.
You sure use the word "leftist" a lot. Might want to get your head checked.
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The repaying of debts is just one way that fiat currency is used. It's not the only way, unless you want to redefine money as just paper showing debt.
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If you think of the cryptocurrency boom and then the AI boom as gold rushes, you'll notice that Nvidea was the one selling shovels.
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It's not a bad metaphor, but it's not a great one either. I'd think of them as the train, brick, machinery, energy, and coal sellers of the industrial revolution, if I thought "AI" is all it is cracked up to be. I take the technology seriously and see many business uses, but it's not going to be quite as revolutionary as the investors hope.
Re: The thing with no intrinsic worth... (Score:2)
Recommendation: check the left hemisphere first.
Re: The thing with no intrinsic worth... (Score:4, Funny)
Well, women like bright shinny objects to wear. Gold is among their favorites. So gold will help me get laid.
Nvidia stock? A little more difficult there, but it is a very large company that makes a bunch of chips. Some of which make games look really good on my computer. So, if I can get enough gold to give to the ladies to get laid, I'll lock myself in my mom's basent and play videos games which is a decent backup plan to hold.
Now for the big onr, USD. I can always pay someone for sex or if I have enough USD someone might be attracted to my ability to buy lots of gold.
To that end, never been asked how much BTC I own. YMMV.
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Trivialize it all you like. But that's just shortsighted pedantry. Gold has been considered valuable for longer than people have been writing it down. There's almost nothing with the unbroken track record of gold in being a store of wealth, and it'll still be wealth after we've all turned to dust.
And why would aesthetic uses not be intrinsic value? Sure, if it were a case of unproven demand or a fad... but that isn't the case.
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Interesting thing is that if you 2000 years ago had enough money to hire a soldier and you turned that money into gold. If you today would turn that gold into a money, you could hire a soldier with it.
On the other hand. If you 5 years ago had enough money to hire a soldier and you bought NVidia stocks with that money. Today the stock would be worth of about 30 soldiers.
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That's the difference between a store of wealth and a speculation. Long after nVidia - or Bitcoin - have faded into history, gold will still be valued as wealth.
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Nice bunch of extreme lies you have there. Not any surprise.
Here is the first one: In actual reality, the industrial value of gold is not far from its market price. Typically about 50% of it. Do you really think it would get used in industrial applications if it was 100x more expensive than the value using it provides?
Re:The thing with no intrinsic worth... (Score:4, Funny)
Jesus fucking Christ. I didn't know every incel was going to get all philosophical.
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Jesus fucking Christ. I didn't know every incel was going to get all philosophical.
It's easier than washing one's balls.
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But my balls hang so low.
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Are you ok?
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Trust me. If all the Incel's get truly philosophical, none of us are going to be "ok".
Re:The thing with no intrinsic worth... (Score:4, Informative)
el Bunko's achievements:
1. he or his companies being convicted of fraud.
2. bankrupting a handful of casinos (that took some doing but he found a way).
3. stiffing myriad small businesses out of bill payments after service had already been rendered.
4. stacking the Supreme Court with Nazis.
5. defiling Christianity by convincing the Evangelicals they really hate migrants, people whom them deem to use the wrong restroom, minorities, etc.
6. screwing up the U.S. and the World's economy.
7. handing Ukraine over to those nice Russians.
8. blowing up boats with people in the Caribbean because they MIGHT be carrying drugs, when in fact he simply hates non-whites.
9. making the former allies hate the U.S. to the point they are refusing to share intelligence information.
10. royally pissing off the mild-mannered Canadians to the point the only thing that would make them happy about the U.S. is his death.
11. destroying health care in rural counties by taking $1 billion out of Medicaid, and that doesn't even cover trying to take away ACA subsidies.
12. backing Israel for killing over 50,000 Palestinians.
13. being Putin's bitch.
14. saddling the American people with a value-added tax int the form of tariffs.
15. destroying health and food aid for foreign countries so that he could crow about how many billions he's saved (less than $30 billion) and thus causing the deaths of at least 200,000 of those non-whites he hates.
I could go on but it is too depressing.
Re:The thing with no intrinsic worth... (Score:5, Informative)
16. Offering pardons for cash
Re:The thing with no intrinsic worth... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The thing with no intrinsic worth... (Score:4, Insightful)
18. Using the Fed. Gov. to grift for himself and his family.
19. Demonizing migrants whose only crime was to come here, work, pay taxes (including SS), and raising families, everything the White Nationalists want except their skin color, and not being able to collect any of the U.S. safety net including Medicaid, Medicare, and SS. Also migrants fight in America's wars for the boobie prize of being exported to a country in which they have never lived.
20. Creating concentration camps.
21. Sending migrants to foreign concentration camps and prisons.
22. Filling the White House with tawdry gold gewgaws.
23. Giving us an HHS moron who reads some blurb on-line and decides to make it health policy.
24. Floating a 50 year mortgage plan to fleece the gullible just a bit more.
25. Whacking science funding so that scientists decide that other countries would make better use of their skills rather than the U.S.
Damn, this could take the rest of my afternoon.
Luckily I invested all in ugly monkey pictures (Score:5, Funny)
Those ugly grumpy monkey pictures are cryptomagically blockchained so my investment is secure!
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Well, if you are naive enough even these things can have some "value" to a lot of people. In Norway there's something called "Miljøfyrtårn" which means "Environmental Beacon", which basically is a very expensive PNG with a subscription that you get to hang in your office to pretend to be "green". Their businessmodel is just like NFTs. They have a lot of traction and paying customers. I wonder who it speaks the most of, the cunning of the people selling the PNG, or the endless series of terrible de
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According to the Google translation [translate.goog]
So, the certificate gives you permission to sell to one of the richest governments in the world. That sounds pretty solidly valuable. They even say
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They're not measured. It's just a payment scheme to be able to sell to the government. I know because I have been in dialogue with them, and they refused to elaborate on their methods when I suggested that this cannot be a manual approval process with multiple manual steps. It's all "trust" by then, and that will be abused by all parties involved. I wanted automation and better tracking, but they ignored me. You are not even Norwegian or related to any of this, so if you defend this you are sadly a bad acto
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They're not measured. It's just a payment scheme to be able to sell to the government.
Then why didn't you make that accusation in the first place and why does Norwegian Wikipedia not have any level of accusations against them.
I know because I have been in dialogue with them, and they refused to elaborate on their methods when I suggested that this cannot be a manual approval process with multiple manual steps. It's all "trust" by then, and that will be abused by all parties involved.
If that's true and you took an actual interest in their methods then I congratulate you. Please recognize, though, that you wouldn't be able to do that if there wasn't a single identifiable scheme behind trademark protection (any blockchain etc. restrictions are largely beside the point). I'm not sure if I understand or agree with your proposals for improvement but if y
Re: What drives bitcoin price vs other things? (Score:2)
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Unless we go back to some backed currency, like a gold standard, the government will just spend and inflate away the value of its money, impoverishing the masses; we need an alternative.
Crypto is *not* that "alternative" (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless we go back to some backed currency, like a gold standard, the government will just spend and inflate away the value of its money, impoverishing the masses; we need an alternative.
Like I've said before [slashdot.org], this is just yet another financial system being created to have a minority of people manage the majority of the wealth, to their own advantage. This is just a new competing system created by the crypto bros to wrestle the current system away from the Wall St. bros.
Having a new system with less regulation run by a bunch of toxic crypto bros is not the alternative you actually want, buddy.
Wildcat banking (Score:1)
Crypto is Wildcat banking [wikipedia.org] + techno-babble.
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Crypto is Wildcat banking [wikipedia.org] + techno-babble.
More like "Wildcat banking backed by techno-babble".
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I was right (Score:2)
Once again. [slashdot.org]
Just the usual cycle (Score:3)
Pump, then Dump
Rinse, repeat ad nauseam.
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Even the most powerful crypto backer on earth can't overcome market forces.
Pyrite Pete's failed prediction (Score:1)
On Monday April 26, 2021 @02:16AM UTC, Pyrite Pete [urbandictionary.com] had said:
That was back when bitcoin had already fallen, and down to about $47K at the time. It should've been back up to "twice its value" no later than June 26 2021 - it took over 3 years to get anywhere near the $94K Pyrite Pete promised us.
Now that's what I call a prediction #FAIL!
Want more LOLs @ Pyrite Pete shitposts? Here are but a sample:
"It is pretty much a given that BTC will be up to 100,000 [slashdot.org]
Sorry (Score:2)
That I currently don't have mod-points, I would mod this up!
Maybe the words out? (Score:2)