
Crypto-currencies have lost 30% of their value in the last 3 weeks - jatsign
https://coinmarketcap.com/charts/
======
cs702
Gold, which is possibly the oldest store of value used by civilization, is
just as volatile.

The inflation-adjusted price per Troy ounce of gold went from a high of around
$2400 in the the late 1400's, to a low of $200 in 1919; then, it rose in fits
and starts until it peaked at nearly $1600 in 1980; it then declined, again in
fits and starts, until it bottomed just below $400 in 2002; then it rose to
nearly $2000 in 2012; and since then, has dropped to just over $1200, today's
price:

    
    
       1490   1919   1980   2002   2012   2017
      -----  -----  -----  -----  -----  -----
      $2400   $200  $1600   $400  $2000  $1200
    

The price of gold is unstable over shorter time frames too. For example, since
the start of last year, the price has oscillated between just over $1000 and
nearly $1400 per Troy ounce.

This kind of volatility seems normal for assets used as a store of value.

Sources:

[1] [http://www.zerohedge.com/news/charting-price-gold-all-way-
ba...](http://www.zerohedge.com/news/charting-price-gold-all-way-back-1265)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_as_an_investment#/media/F...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_as_an_investment#/media/File:Gold_price_in_USD.png)

[3]
[http://www.kitco.com/charts/historicalgold.html](http://www.kitco.com/charts/historicalgold.html)

~~~
Twisell
Except that during crisis Gold is guarantee to fall back at worst to it's
"practical" value as a metal being used for jewelry. Even tulips bulbs have a
practical value as every gardener could tell you.

However the practical value of a crypto currency is zero. And no technical
small talk was able to contest this truth so far.

EDIT: Downvote what you can't contest, how mature!

~~~
yoran
* I can buy a new Dell laptop with Bitcoin ([https://blog.dell.com/en-us/we-re-now-accepting-bitcoin-on-d...](https://blog.dell.com/en-us/we-re-now-accepting-bitcoin-on-dell-com/)).

* For that laptop I can buy Windows with Bitcoin ([https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/13942/microsoft-acc...](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/13942/microsoft-account-add-money-with-bitcoin)).

* I can book my holiday with Bitcoin ([https://www.cheapair.com/help/payment-and-billing/what-is-bi...](https://www.cheapair.com/help/payment-and-billing/what-is-bitcoin/)).

* I can donate to Wikimedia with Bitcoin ([https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Ways_to_Give#bitcoin](https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Ways_to_Give#bitcoin)).

Can't really do any of those things with tulips or gold. This is just a small
set of places where I can do purchases with Bitcoin.

As for currency, sure a tulip has practical value. But does a $100 bill? You
can roll it for a cigarette or it can give you 5 seconds of warmth if you burn
it. But that's about it. The reason you have all your savings in $ or € or
something else, is because we all as a society say "this piece of paper (worth
less than a cent in materials) is worth $5, and this one $50, and this
slightly bigger one is $100". Same with crypto-currencies.

~~~
klochner
You're agreeing with him.

Gold and tulips are commodity currencies, they have value outside of their
uses as a currency.

The dollar and bitcoin are not commodity currencies, i.e., they have no value
or use outside of their use as currencies.

Whether bitcoin can be called a 'fiat' currency is debatable because it's not
a currency "by fiat", though "fiat" currency has come to mean a non-commodity
currency.

~~~
yoran
I see now that I misunderstood his point.

------
gravypod
Hopefully everyone looses confidence in mining and I can start buying cheap
used GPUs.

~~~
vbezhenar
Is it a good idea to buy GPU from mining farm? Surely it was overclocked and
in bad thermal condition, so it could barely survive. I think, electronic
circuits degrade in those circumstances, so this GPU won't last long.

~~~
Anderkent
Mining is about flop/$, rather than flop/s, so overclocking is actually rare.
The best mining GPUs are the ones that are most efficient, not most powerful;
overclocking usually trades efficiency for power.

~~~
Taek
Not true in the current environment. Right now pretty much everything is
profit, so more hashrate means more profit, even if your electricity costs are
higher.

Once AMD and Nvidia print enough cards to match demand though that'll change
again.

------
anovikov
Why am i not surprised? Nearly all or maybe all ICOs since May have been a
deliberate scam. That is beyond the word 'bubble'. That is just it -
collective scam. Crowdsourced Bernie Madoff.

~~~
jorgec
Exactly. People pay real money and get nothing in exchange.

Plus, its amazing how people don't get how the system works.

~~~
Singletoned
I'd be genuinely interested to find out what you feel is real about the money
compared to the nothing you got in exchange?

Also how does the system work from your point of view?

~~~
colorint
The thing that's real about real money is that you can use it to pay your
taxes. You may talk about how you could, in principle, barter goods and
services and account for everything in terms of chickens, but the IRS doesn't
accept chickens.

------
danmaz74
For now it's just a rather small correction, keeping in mind how much they had
gone up in the last 60 months.

On the other hand, the uncertainty with Bitcoin's Segwit activation, possible
chain split etc won't help in the next few weeks including August. It could
make the bubble pop... or not.

What's weird is that coins that have already adopted SegWit, like Litecoin,
seem to suffer even more than BTC during the dips (even if LTC was the best
alt during the one since yesterday).

~~~
this_user
30% is not a small correction. Per definition, anything that is down more than
20% is in a bear market.

~~~
empath75
Over a two-month period, usually. If the price shoots up from here (and that
would be pretty normal for btc, etc), then it was just a correction. It could
also drop another 50% from here. cryptocurrency markets are nuts.

~~~
mirimir
Yes, they're nuts. And that's so because they're so small, relative to fiat
markets. So it doesn't take much to push relatively large amounts into them,
or drive them out.

But whatever. I just use Bitcoin because I can easily make it as anonymous as
I like. Price spikes are sweet when they happen, and crashes can be an
inconvenience. But that's just what's so.

------
louprado
Ethereum traded around $380 three weeks ago and is now hovering around $200,
which is quite a loss in value.

Ethereum makes up 44% of the total market cap of altcoins, but does anyone
know what percentage of the remaining altcoins are just ERC20 tokens ? My gut
tells me those ERC20 tokens are vulnerable to ETH price declines since miners
get paid in ETH. A token may lose value, for example, as transaction times
start increasing especially during a sell-off. When trading volume goes up but
network capacity goes down that can cause even more panic selling.

Note, ETH mining is done with GPUs so it is really easy to just mine another
currency. Mining CAP is about 7X more profitable than mining ETH at the moment
[1].

[1] Coinwarz.com

~~~
CamelCaseName
There's not a huge difference, practically, between 17 seconds and 13 second
block times.

------
arcaster
Interesting to see the paradigm of "bitcoin is doing well, everything else
must be less useful" is making a comeback? I the reason progressively larger
corrections have been happening is due to more people who know nothing about
crypto entering the space, therefore introducing more volatility and reflexive
baseless reasoning.

If you question this, join one of the "crpyto currency" groups on FaceBook and
read through a majority of the posts... I've come across people who've taken
out loans to purchase crypto and people who installed wallets locally and
wondered why the crypto they bought on CoinBase didn't magically appear. The
most disconcerting posts are those who constantly ask "why did the price go up
or down" or blindly post their chart predictions as to why the currency will
keep going up in value.

~~~
libertine
The fear emotion is really something else.

People fear they are missing out on something - a quick scheme to make
money...

------
kreetx
Looks like it's Ethereum and Ripple which are falling, no? Bitcoin is pretty
stable, Litecoin has been climbing, didn't check the others.

~~~
dumbfounder
Bitcoin is down over 20% from its high a month ago. Not exactly steady, but
weathering a bit better.

~~~
h1d
When ETH and XRP drop by 20% in 1 day, 1 month duration seems mild.

------
seibelj
Does this include all of the altcoins built on top of ethereum? For example,
BAT adds another $90million of value that isn't represented strictly by
looking at the ethereum market cap[0].

[0] [https://coinmarketcap.com/assets/basic-attention-
token/](https://coinmarketcap.com/assets/basic-attention-token/)

~~~
beager
I'm not familiar with what "built on top of" means in this case, as it
pertains to overall cryptocurrency value. Is it additional, actual coin with
tradable value? Is it a derivative? Can someone describe in comparison to
traditional means what this is?

~~~
seibelj
Ethereum is a blockchain technology where every block contains a list of
Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) instructions. The EVM is a Turing-complete
virtual machine that allows arbitrary programs to be built upon it, making it
much more powerful than Bitcoin, which (although it has a limited scripting
language) is really just for transferring value.

Every program in the EVM is called a "contract" but in reality it's a program.
One of the fundamental contracts built atop Ethereum are additional coins,
traditionally sold in an ICO. Most coins follow a protocol called ERC20 that
allows them to be easily exchanged with any other ERC20 coin and Ether itself.
In liquid markets, like for the Basic Attention Token (BAT), one can sell off
a lot of BAT for Ether without tanking the market too much.

------
predavlad
Any speculations on why this is happening, and whether/how much they will grow
in the near future ?

~~~
tluyben2
1st of aug there is a fork (maybe) which makes people very nervous. Most
people I know sold off because of that (and not understanding what stuff means
as in ; all crypto is the same and this sounds dangerous!). And correction
which was needed anyway. I'll be buying.

~~~
flashmob
Other metrics indicate could be just that it's holiday season. In the northern
hemispheres, people are outdoors & enjoying the summer.

This coincides with the sudden drop in Google searches for bitcoin and others,
also I've noticed the number of users online on poloniex has dropped
significantly. This seasonal pattern was first observed with bitcoin, check
this out: [https://medium.com/@octskyward/bitcoin-s-seasonal-
affective-...](https://medium.com/@octskyward/bitcoin-s-seasonal-affective-
disorder-35733bab760d)

Also, other negative news: 1. Alphabay, the largest darknet market went
offline, not sure if that is significant. 2. Bitnumb, largest(?) crypto
exchange in South Korea got hacked, also not sure how much impact this had,
but usually an exchange hack has a short term effect on prices and there has
been a lot of recent activity in SK.

Other reason may be that boom and bust cycles are a natural occurrence of
crypto markets. They were getting white-hot for the last few months and
finally need some time to cool. So move along, nothing to see.. The cycle
continues. The next boom might be bigger than anything we've seen before :-)

------
davidgerard
"Market cap" is a vacuous and bogus number.

Cryptocurrency advocates and lazy journalists like to talk about it, but it's
not actually useful - it’s not money that was put into the crypto, it’s not a
realisable value like a company market cap, it doesn’t affect prices. It’s
just an easily-calculated number that sounds good in a headline. It literally
doesn't indicate anything.

Trading is so thin in any crypto, even Bitcoin, that you could never realise a
fraction of the number in any way.

If you want to compare interest and activity in crypto assets, you need to
compare trading volumes, if you can find good numbers for those.

What the drop indicates is that prices in _all_ cryptos track each other, as
is usual.

------
ukd1
It looks like if you stack them it would be largely flat; just movement from
btc --> ripple, eth?

~~~
qznc
The third plot? It adds up to 100% by definition. ;)

~~~
ukd1
it's dollar market cap, so no it doesn't.

~~~
andypants
_Percentage_ of market cap, so yes it does.

------
yread
Is there blood in the streets already?

------
Strategizer
What I don't get is why alts are losing value against BTC. Like, if you look
at this chart it shows that Bitcoin is gaining market share and alts are
losing it:

[https://coinmarketcap.com/charts/#dominance-
percentage](https://coinmarketcap.com/charts/#dominance-percentage)

I would think that people would be leaving BTC and putting their money in alts
due to August 1 jitters, but it seems to be the opposite that's happening.

~~~
jcslzr
its not the same thing, Bitcoin is decentralized, the others have clear
owners, just like regular fiat (dollars, euros, etc)

------
cm2187
Perhaps the Petya effect. If users don't trust paying bitcoins will help them
recover their data, they don't have any reason to buy bitcoins to pay a
ransom.

------
dx034
I still remember when Bitcoin was at $1,000 for the first time. The Economist
ran a story and it was discussed nearly everywhere. The price fell by 30%+
after that. A few years later it was at $3,000.

It's normal that markets crash when everyone starts talking about how high
they are. Once booming stockmarkets make it to the front page of newspapers
it's often the end of the boom. It wakes people up who realise they still have
stocks (or bitcoin in this case) and quickly sell it.

So the crash after hitting $3,000 was somewhat expected, given the attention
in the media. Doesn't mean that it won't be strong over the next 2-3 years.

------
stefanwlb
Haha, just wait. It's the normal market manipulation...

------
GrumpyNl
Crypto currency, the currency for crooks based on air.

~~~
discombobulate
I used some bitcoin in place of a wire transfer last week. It worked well.
Amazing what air can do these days!

~~~
rsynnott
Given the fees now required to get anything through the network, was it
actually worth it? A SEPA transfer is normally free these days (though not
sure what the status of wire transfers in the US is).

~~~
discombobulate
I did it for speed.

