Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/01/12/speculating-about-speculators.html
…
2 Likes
Who’s planning on holding onto their bitcoin until next December though, much less 2020?
4 Likes
$5000 for a frickin’ report?! Yeesh… do they take bitcoin?
10 Likes
No kidding?! Thank god there are overpaid financial analysts to charge me outrageous sums for insights that I figured out quite some time ago while brushing my teeth.
THere are few $5000 reports that are actually worth the price. Something tells me this is not one of them.
7 Likes
If the report is 156 pages, and actually has solid data backing up the argument, it may be worth $5K to a firm that is making real, and significant, financial decisions about these subjects. It’s obviously not aimed at a casual investor, although hah, I guess even a lot of them have bc collections worth quite a bit at this point, so maybe it is?
Kind of imagine this firm is also shorting bc and others quite a bit now, and this helps them in that effort. Even if the report is 100% credible, sort of highlights the overall shiftiness of our times.
6 Likes
Exactly. It doesn’t take blowing $5k on a report to know that the only thing Bitcoin is truly good for (besides buying arms, drugs, and humans) is speculation and arbitrage. For average investors, it’s the farthest thing possible from a long-term hold.
Yeah, I think it’s aimed at the big financial firms who’ve all been hopping on the BTC futures train. Of course, there will be competing consultancies selling $5k reports telling them BTC is going up-up-UP. It’s quite a racket.
2 Likes
I could have told folks that for ten bucks and a cup of coffee. Classic bubbles are always classic, as is the response of those who have invested in them (“It’s not a bubble, this will go on forever!”).
2 Likes
I wonder what percentage of our current market mega-bubble is from firms aligning with “blockchain,” “as-a-service,” “cloud,” and other total bullshit, but in a way that has still managed to inflate value significantly. A good chunk, I would imagine.
2018 – yeah, I think it’s going to be the crash year.
2 Likes
Bitcoin can be bought but not shorted. Of course it is overvalued. By how much, and on what timescale there may be a reckoning, are more likely where this consultancy does the real work that justifies the report price tag (or doesn’t, IDK).
For all the comments above: $5k is a typical price for this kind of report from most of the large market research or similar firms. Partly because they really do take that much work to create and market, partly because the target audience is small. But mostly it works because in the hands of a corporate executive, information that prevents a single mistake or enables a single deal is worth more than enough to justify buying hundreds of $5k reports.
3 Likes
I do see a correction coming for Bitcoin but not for the reasons stated. Bitcoin, compared to Ethereum and other coins like Raiblocks, no longer has an edge outside of being the first to market. There are coins that have zero transfer fee, near-instant transfer speeds, smart contracts, etc… Cryptocurrency isn’t going anywhere as a market but the coin of choice and the Top 10 will change drastically in the coming years.
6 Likes
$5000 to tell us what even people who aren’t that knowledgeable of markets what they already knew - Bitcoin’s price tied mainly to speculation.
My first thought on the BC bubble was that there was an increase in illicit wealth transfers due to Paradise Papers, Saudi “corruption crackdown”, etc. I haven’t seen anyone else saying this.
I’ve got a few friends at different startups that are all seriously looking at BTC futures and cryptocurrencies as possible funding sources. It’s the current shiny let’s-make-free-money thing, and I worry for my friends at those companies. I hope their companies spend $5K to be dissuaded to invest in volatile speculation.
4 Likes
At one point, Bitcoin’s market cap was higher than Tesla’s, which in turn was higher than Ford’s.
Yep, I detect the telltale aroma of
4 Likes
It’s pretty obvious that the whole crypto-currency craze is driven by investors who either don’t understand their potential utility or know that they can fool enough people into buying their bit/alt-coins at a steep price. Either way, it has to crash to correct itself if it’s to become useful. I can’t imagine a use case that warrants their existence. I can imagine a digital ledger to exchange real world goods would be nice but I think how they’re implemented makes that harder to manage (especially since the blockchain just gets incredibly large with each transaction on the network). Frankly, I think the idea of digital currency fails because it tries to do what their real world counterparts already do. The only reason crypto-currencies exist right now is to get around banking fees and taxes. They’re not much use beyond that.
1 Like
Dunno, is there a bitcoin futures market?
Hypothetically, Alice could draw up a contract with Bob that says that Bob will pay $10,000 per bitcoin for delivery in, say, Jan 2019. That would be equivalent to a short – a bet that the price will drop far enough below $10,000 by Jan 2019 for Alice to make a profit on the transaction.
5 Likes
I can’t imagine that there’s not a crypto futures market, existing essentially as you describe. There’s a futures market for basically any commodity, is there not?
1 Like
Apparently yes there is.
4 Likes
Son of a… you just had to dig that up, eh? 
See, now I’m tempted to short the shit out of bitcoin. heheh
4 Likes
No way, this is leading-edge technology, it can’t go down! I’m thinking next year will be the perfect time to make a big buy!
