
Crypto’s $600B Crash Hits a New Low - pseudolus
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-08/bitcoin-tumbles-to-3-week-low-as-sec-postpones-etf-decision
======
avgDev
I used to ride on the crypto hype train. Made quite a bit of money from btc.
However, it is too risky of an investment. Most people that push crypto sound
like pyramid scheme people.

At a party dude was telling everyone to invest in btc because it is the
future, and it was $14k at the time. I explained that it is very risky and
volatile and dude would just ignore whatever I was saying, even though I mined
many cryptos, bought btc for 1 penny and had a better understanding of tech
than him. 3-4 months later crypto was back to $6k and he never mentions it
again with me around lol.

The point is many crypto businesses screwed people over (MtGox). Many people
lost fortunes from private wallets due to malware, forgetting pw.

If I pay with a credit card I have level of protection. When I put my money in
a bank the money is insured. Crypto is simply too risky as a way of storing
money and trading.

~~~
agumonkey
A serious % of btc is near pure cult. So much time and energy wasted for the
prospect of quicksilver it's insane.

~~~
all_blue_chucks
The value of any particular coin is pure marketing. Anyone can start a coin.
There is literally an infinite supply. The only thing giving them vale us
popularity, and marketing is what drives popularity.

Token price speculation (aka "crypto investing") is much more about marketing
than it is about technology. This is why you see cult-like marketing attempts.

~~~
georgeecollins
This note is legal tender for all debts public and private.

Is not pure marketing.

~~~
all_blue_chucks
Fiat currency gets value from the fact that it is legally required ('by fiat')
to use. There is no such requirement for tokens.

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alkonaut
Practical use of these things is always just around the corner. At the moment
it seems to be too slow and expensive to use for transactions (as currency)
and too volatile to use as a value store. Right now it's a fun gamble, and for
transactions where using normal currency woule have a higher cost (i.e. you
are buying something illegal).

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joeblau
What a wild ride. I bought Ethereum almost two years ago at 12 dollars a token
on Coinbase and it's changed the financial trajectory of my family. I still
have high hopes for cryptocurrencies, but I think this pullback is necessary
to clear out the speculators and let the developers work on the core
infrastructure of a lot of these tokens.

~~~
aw3c2
Did you turn it into real money or are you still speculating (now with the
future of your family at stake)?

~~~
joeblau
I turned it into " _real_ "(fiat) money. I expect to be sitting on the
sidelines for another 2ish years. We bought a Model X and took the remainder
and invested it into a pretty strong (IMO) YC startup.

 _#ThisIsNotInvestingAdvice_

~~~
baccredited
Investing in a single company (even YC) is just about as risky as investing in
crypto.

Disclaimer: I own a portion of about 100 YC companies. And some crypto.

~~~
joeblau
It depends on what stage, but yeah it's risky.

~~~
dpiers
Investing that large of a percentage of one's portfolio in any single company
is extremely risky; even if it is a large, publicly traded giant like
Microsoft or Amazon. In order for the investment to be successful, not only
does the company have to do well, but their sector has to do well, their
country's economy has to do well, and stocks as an asset class have to do
well.

If you don't have hedges to insure against those risks, you are still
essentially gambling with your principal. Even a Series A/B Ycombinator
company probably has a double-digit percentage failure rate.

~~~
joeblau
Well the company is not A/B and it's not a large percentage of my portfolio.
All I said is that it's the remainder of the money from cashing out of crypto,
you're making a bunch of assumptions beyond that.

Also I agree with everything you said.

~~~
dpiers
Sorry - when you said it altered your financial trajectory I assumed that to
mean it represented a majority of your net assets. I'm in the process of
diversifying a very concentrated portfolio (a year ago >95% of my net worth
was in Uber stock) and may have projected my own concerns onto your situation.

------
devinus
I'm one of the core developers for Nano[1] (formerly called RaiBlocks). It's
one of only a handful of cryptocurrencies with an actual working product
available _today_ that does everything it claims to do: Instant transactions
with zero fees on a green network that could be powered by a single wind
turbine.

Despite what _I_ see as it's massive potential for things like micro-
transactions, global remittance, arbitrage across exchanges, a development
platform for payments and functioning as an actual currency (i.e. a medium of
exchange, what you send is exactly what the other person gets) -- the market
does _not_ reflect this reality at all right now. There are several projects
that are objectively scams with higher market caps than Nano.

To me this reflects that the market is completely irrational right now. I knew
as early as January that there was going to be a reckoning, but until some of
these coins and tokens that are going nowhere are shaken out projects will
just have to stand on their own merits and prove that they're valuable.

[1]: [https://nano.org/en](https://nano.org/en)

~~~
atomical
It's not working because it's impossible to use Nano as currency when it has
so much volatility. Imagine sending your friends $10 and they only receive $9.

~~~
DSingularity
That’s actually not true. Even if the volatility were that extreme, you could
easily mitigate it.

At this point you are just saying anything that comes to mind and is negative
without putting in thought.

~~~
atomical
It is _actually_ true. Please post how one can easily mitigate extreme
volatility. I'm all ears.

[https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/nano/](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/nano/)

~~~
devinus
My reply:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17722685](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17722685)

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patrickg_zill
I've always had the opinion that Bitcoin's price was supported in part, by the
Chinese using it to get around China's capital controls.

So possibly this crash, in addition to the SEC refusal to let a Bitcoin ETF
trade, is also affected by the recent tariffs and the Yuan devaluation...?

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leowoo91
It looks like there were people waiting for a good quit spot, other than that
crypto market doesn't seem to be hard hit since 8 months straight and still
stays valuable.

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jefe_
Take the resources being spent to get Bitcoin onto Wall Street, spend them to
get Facebook Moms onto Bitcoin and suddenly the value rises. Salvageable
currency, without that utility it suffers.

------
mkirklions
I believe in Bitcoin only.

The people that have been around for almost a decade have treated Bitcoin as a
hedge against Fiat currency inflation. Similar to how people treat gold. I am
one of these people that believe in the 21,000,000 solutions as something that
is nuclear chemistry proof and rare.

Outside of that is a joke.

dApps unused, copypasting bitcoin (or various alt coins), then promoting it as
a world changing idea. Various centralized currencies which defeat the entire
purpose.

I imagine things like Tether will be the future allowing money to be moved
cheaply. As I develop my own coin, I choose to tie it to a very popular
investment rather than produce yet another silly 'rare' number.

CryptoCURRENCY needs to move things that are hard to move, cheaply. Crypto
that stores and manages data seems like a foolish application due to the
enormous expense, unreliable txn times, and unneeded verification.

~~~
cortesoft
Why would you use bitcoin as a hedge against inflation instead of some real
asset that has persistent value? Land, gold, etc?

~~~
mkirklions
Land is good, but can be seized by a government. I know an Iraqi family that
went from riches to rags due to this.

Gold is good, but as a chemical engineer, nuclear chemistry is a real threat.

I love ETFs, but I think the market is artificially inflated by the current
trump bull run.

Bitcoin is used worldwide and can be kept on a cellphone or piece of paper.

~~~
pavel_lishin
> _Gold is good, but as a chemical engineer, nuclear chemistry is a real
> threat._

I never thought I'd run into someone who believes in crypto _and_ practical
alchemy at the same time.

------
1996
Spoken differently to see the glass half full: Ethereum Classic jumped to new
hights, the highest of the last 4 month, while Bitcoin returned to the
6.something it was at the last month before passing 7k due to ETF rumors

Business as usual, some people make money (those who bought ETC 2 or 3 weeks
ago at the dip, and are selling now in BTC or in USD), some people lose money
(those who speculated on the ETF success). These are cold hard facts - not the
half full, or half empty glass.

The article title however is just dramatization, maybe for clickbait, or maybe
intended to please an audience of people mostly hostile to crypto? It is
bloomberg that hits a new low.

