Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/03/12/cryptopocalypse-bitcoin-dro.html
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Kinda hard to use bitcoin when the power goes out in an emergency.
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Cash stayed even at a 0% change. Relative to what?, I wonder. If the price of TP will rise, then the value of cash should surely decrease, signaling inflation, no?
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Interesting that for a while medium-term US Treasuries were going well up, and they are still up, but there’s actually been a pullback and pause the last two days, the opposite of what normally happens when the equities market takes a huge plunge. Metals going down is also a bit weird. An article I read this morning in mainstream financial media talked about how weird this is, and didn’t come to a conclusion about why.
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I came here to say the same thing. Doesn’t the price of gold go up in a crisis?
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Gold went down in the 2008 crisis. Gold normally moves the same direction as the price of oil. Search for Gold and 2008 recession and you can read various theories as to what’s happening.
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It’s all about liquidity. Which means the value of a bucket of piss is sky high right now.
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That’s a bit of relief for all the people who lost the passwords for their wallets, no?
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I’m not an economist or financial guru by any stretch of the imagination but I am invested in crypto and have have been doing a fair amount of reading up , following market trends historically and watching for the last 29 years. my take is this dip in the stock markets is temporary and some insiders I’m guessing are betting on it . Berkshire Hathaway (warren buffet) is siting on a huge amount of usd right now looking for a buy and has been for some time. bitcoin/crypto wales I’m imagining are following suit and making big moves seeing an opportunity to ride the wave. I’m also suspecting jeff bezos impromptu dump shortly before all this might not be coincidence. crypto its dodgy as hell and bitcoin is very flawed and not actually all that decentralized in some ways as its made out be when looking at the the origins of Blockstream and its role in rolling out the updates and steering technical decisions for the mining consensus , but it and a lot of other crypto blockchains are still very very good at what they are intended to do ,get wealth from where it is to where its needed. i’m of the school of thought thats its very volatile but will stabilize a bit with maturity. my opinion blockchain is here to stay bitcoin , who knows ? on another note looking at the dow jones history during the spanish flu it dipped abruptly of the cliff for months then bounced up and roared till 1929. that being said I do feel like 2020s is the world and freedom and rights going to shit for the majority as opposed to 1920s which I imagine and romanticize as an age of abundant invention and increasing technological wonder that actually benefited the masses.
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Nice analysis. When this all started to look tacky I was just a bit surprised that there was not a rush to gold - at least, not a rush to buy gold. That BTC is collapsing is even a bit more eyebrow-lifting. I imagine, however, that there are a bunch of preppers out there marshalling their TP, cleaning their weapons, and breaking out their out-of-date cans of baked beans in quiet celebration. Vindicated at last.
Plausible theory I read: investors sellling whatever’s liquid and still worth anything to cover margin calls on their equity holdings. That would explain the treasuries oddity too.
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I wouldn’t call those guys “insiders”, because that is obvious. The question is: When will it start bouncing back, and can you afford to hold on to your stocks that long. That cannot be divined through “insider information”.
My guess is that it willl take even longer than after the previous crisis.
This crisis will reveal how critical those flaws are, and if we’re lucky more people will see that blockchain is mostly a hype.
Depends on you definition of “needed”, does it include this?
or this?
Much of bitcoin’s 2017 boom was market manipulation
or even this?
Majority of bitcoin trading is a hoax, new study finds
Crypo currencies exist as long as people buy those for real cash. If that stops, crypto is dead.
But that might very well be your definition of “get wealth from where it is to where it is needed”.
Yes, for the one or two application it actually makes sense. It’s likely those might not even have been discovered yet.
However we already know that proof-of-work is a stupid idea and mostly a waste of energy.
Also interesting: Blockchain study finds 0.00% success rate and vendors don’t call back when asked for evidence
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To say that the two move in the same direction is losing a lot of the pertinent details. Consider the chart at the bottom here: Barrels of oil per ounce of gold.
Yeah, the “insiders” are so leveraged right now that they are going to crumple from within.
Agreed. What I don’t think anyone’s really dealing with yet is the fact that this is global, hits every single sector and is being accompanied by what amounts to a global economic freeze. Not the markets, the whole goddamn economy. Factories won’t have workers to produce, warehouses won’t have dock workers and truck drivers to ship, stores won’t have staff to sell, small businesses won’t have cash flow to pay employees and the average human won’t have anything to buy food with. This is unprecedented and will dwarf 2008, which is the only real analogue to this sort of global crunch.
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They’ll have no peace until Bitcoin bottoms out and ceases to be traded at all. Or, when the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto incarnates, looks around, tells everyone “Look, I was just kidding!” and burns his own $20B bitcoin wallet as a lark.
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I’m confused that people still care about these “currencies”.
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We’ll see how that plays out, because ~98% of the workers will not be affected because of COVID-19 itself, but because of all the measures put in place to protect the part of the population that is at risk.
So the people who own the factories and stores will try to keep them running so they can make a profit.
That is only a problem in neoliberal economies where the social system has withered away. All others have systems in place for that, and support from the people to act accordingly.
Indeed. I hope it will at least help us to get rid of Trump, and maybe more people will understand how fucked-up a capitalist economy really is.
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…and then bounced right back again a few hours later. This is very common and normal for bitcoin and has been over it’s 10 year history. Buy the dip!
