
Bitcoin, Bitcoin cash, ethereum and litecoin crash on Friday December 22 - rbanffy
http://uk.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-bitcoin-cash-ethereum-litecoin-crash-on-friday-december-22-2017-12
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buryat
Got a loan recently with 20% APR and dumped it all in bitcoin when it was at
$19k. Super depressed and haven't slept for two days.

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charlesdm
Borrowing at 20% APR is stupid. Did you think it would end up at $XXk without
any corrections along the way?

That said, look back next year and perhaps things won't be as gloomy as they
are today.

Edit: I can't believe I'm saying this, but you might want to look at
refinancing that debt using a credit card. Their APR tends to be around 10 to
13% per annum. Might as well limit the damage done.

~~~
bebop
Some will even give you 0% for a year and free debt transfers. But yeah seems
like a bad idea.

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marsrover
All coins are dropping not just those 4. This is just history repeating
itself. I'm sure it will upset people who are currently losing a lot of money
right now, but you'd have to be blind to not see this coming. Investing any
significant amount in the last week has been highly foolish.

~~~
coldcode
Just mentioned yesterday how all the barbers at the shop I go to were really
into bitcoin, which made me think the top was hit. Good thing I got out of
there before I was scalped by accident.

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etr-strike
Such cliche reasoning. If Bitcoin is going to be a successful currency and/or
store of value, everyone and the brother needs to be talking about it (just
like they talk about gold or the USD). I bet these same barbers have discussed
the S&P500 and index funds, is it time to get out of those too?

~~~
sdwa
It's a terrible currency, and I doubt many people are buying it because they
believe in the underlying technology. It's all about getting rich quick. It
may be a cliche but the logic is sound I think.

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coldcode
What goes up must come down. Cryptocurrencies have no real economic value
other than whatever people think they should be worth (which is interesting by
itself). Once people stop believing the emperors not just naked then everyone
will see him that way.

~~~
etr-strike
Bitcoin has immense economics value. There's no other asset on the planet that
allows me to put my faith in logic and mathematics instead of a person or
institution.

Meanwhile, there's a lot of people putting their faith in opaque corporations
and unelected central bankers. With the markets sitting at all time highs by
every historical measure and debt loads higher than ever it'll be interested
to see how that works out for them.

~~~
mrep
Actually, you are putting your faith in a few Chinese companies and the
Chinese government: [https://medium.com/@homakov/how-to-destroy-bitcoin-
with-51-p...](https://medium.com/@homakov/how-to-destroy-bitcoin-
with-51-pocked-guide-for-governments-83d9bdf2ef6b)

I'll take US corporations backed by the US government over Chinese ones any
day.

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cmurf
At the moment, Ethereum is still up 8000+% for the year, Litecoin up 6300+%
for the year. I think this is end of year profit taking. I do think these
ecurrencies are all speculative (my bias), but today's event doesn't strike me
as a crash. When the bubble pops we'll see these currencies in the vicinity of
their starting prices.

~~~
bdcravens
Bitcoin similarly is up 12000+%.

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lostmsu
Check your math.

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bdcravens
Doh! You're right. Unfortunately I'm outside the time I can edit. Should have
been 1200% (not shabby, but obviously not as good as ETH or LTC)

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swsieber
So, it looks like Bitcoin's price hasn't dropped as far (percentage-wise) than
the others - any ideas on why that is?

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etr-strike
Bitcoin is the least risky of all the cryptocurrencies. It has the largest
user base. It has the most widespread infrastructure. It has financial
products and derivatives. Every other coin is unproven, many are mostly
unheard of, and are the highest risk.

~~~
kybernetikos
The things you say are true, but it's also suffering the worst from
transaction fees, scalability problems and has worse technology and struggles
to innovate.

~~~
etr-strike
Scalability problems sure, bitcoin is hardly struggling to innovate though.
Rootstock, Schnorr signatures, mimble Wimble. These are awesome new
technologies. Every coin today would have the same scaling problem bitcoin has
if they had the same user base and amount of attacks going on.

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cdancette
Exactly the crypto tokens sold on coinbase

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8bittaco
It's not exclusively those coins; everything is down across the board.

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jerkstate
Almost everything else is traded against BTC (or ETH on some exchanges), very
few of the "shitcoins" can be traded directly for USD (or even USDT). So when
BTC and ETH go down in fiat value, so do the shitcoins, even if they might be
up in satoshis (or mETH)

Anyways, it's still higher than it was 3 weeks ago and appears to have found
supports. Nothing goes straight up forever.

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pqwEfkvjs
Well, now it is a good time to buy.

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s_kilk
But remember, it's mathematically impossible for this to be a bubble.

