I love to read analyses like this. Wide sweeping generalizations, no specifics, unactionable, little understanding of the actual subject matter, open ended time frame so you can’t ever be “wrong”.
You can plug in any store of value and change a few details here and there and this “prediction” is your standard boilerplate for why anything is a bubble.
Sounds like you should just go ahead and bet the farm on BTC then.
Funny you should mention that. I’m in the process of looking for a job within the crypto/blockchain space and leaving my very safe job that I’ve been working at for the past 5+ years in an industry where I’ve been successful for the past 14 years.
At any rate, I’m not saying that BTC is going to be the long term winner within this space, just that all the arguments about tulips and ponzi schemes are uninspired and unoriginal with very little value. Most arguments I’ve seen against BTC/cryptocurrency talk about it as a commodity (no real underlying value) or an investment (no cash flows). Very few actually mention all the development and projects that are ongoing to continue to improve and evolve it.
Blockchain, cryptocurrency, smart contracts are all part of a phase in which I liken to the internet in the 80s. Whether BTC is the next Pets.com or Amazon.com remains to be seen. Are we going to see some kind of bubble burst like the dot com? I wouldn’t be surprised if we did but don’t forget that Amazon lost over 90% of its value during the last bubble.
Interesting you say this. I am seriously considering a carreer change into blockchain as well. I see blockchain as a technology that will continue to grow. I don’t know about the cryptocurrencies that run on blockchain, but I think that the technology in general will continue with rapid growth, and it will make the need for developers an interesting, and possibly lucrative carreer change for me.
Are you guys looking at startups? What kind of crypto jobs are out there?
I am, although there are plenty of jobs within the space that are with traditional financial institutions. Even with JPM, famous for having a CEO that called bitcoin a fraud recently. http://jobs.jpmorganchase.com/ListJobs/ByKeyword/blockchain/
Some startups that are hiring:
https://www.blockstream.com/careers/
I’m no BTC fan either, but tripleB’s analysis here is flawed by having a significant assumption that there is massive market manipulation going on, without any evidence that is occurring.
Although blockchain is pseudonymous (no, it’s NOT anonymous), it’s still possible to determine a source and destination of a transaction. Unless the manipulation is very complex, it should be detectable that there were massive amounts of intra-trading sham transactions.
If there were real evidence posted of market manipulation other than pure speculation, that would be interesting. Otherwise this is just a long speculative post that is interesting at most.
So who’s the governing agency that polices this type of activity?
I understand what you’re saying, that all the transactions could be audited. But has that happened? Is that happening?
It will start with the IRS:
Someone wanted to start an ETF but it was denied by the SEC partly because of potential fraud.
Now the news is that a futures market seems to be coming soon. That will start requiring some more transparency and auditing.
If you are using the Coinbase article to support this, it is only one example, and it is a US-centric example. Your example assumes that the manipulation only occurs in the US, or other countries where exchanges require verified personal identity. It doesn’t take into account any of the countries where the exchanges do not require this level of personal verification to purchase, trade, use, or hold bitcoin.
I’m not saying you or TripleB are wrong. they simply both lack hard evidence.
I guess you didn’t read my original post - I agree there is no evidence offered to support massive market manipulation speculation of tripleB.
I did read your original post, in fact I quoted it.
that wasn’t my original post, it was a reply to another. look earlier in the thread.
Given the fact that we frequently hear about large institutional investors entering and trading in bitcoin, enough so that CME futures are opening soon… the market manipulation argument doesn’t seem like the simplest explanation for the rise. It simply went from a hobby asset to a full-fledged institutionally-accepted asset. Of course it’s going to rise massively in the face of that.
Sure, maybe there’s manipulation, but I don’t think there’s a great reason to think that’s a major factor at the moment.
I have looked earlier in the thread. I quoted from the first post that I see you making in this thread, post 26 of 24, from 15 hours ago. I don’t see anything else from you earlier than that.
well damn - somehow my reply didn’t go through then. I wrote up a long reply to tripleB’s post. What a waste of time.
That’s good. For a minute I thought you were a troll trying to make me think I was losing it!
WTF 15k. Could have loaded up a fortune at pennies fml
We all know we would have sold way way back at $30, or $50, or $100/coin LONG before it reached these levels, had we bought in when it first came up on Fatwallet (in the $1-$2 range).
In no realistic circumstance would I ever have held on until these levels of ridiculous.
This analysis shows a profound misunderstanding of the technology. To get a better understanding let’s look at a company that recently decided to stop taking BTC as payment: Steam, the software game distributor. Steam recently announced they were no longer going to be accepting btc for two reasons: transaction times and transaction fees. These are the two things that are glossed over in any discussion of block chain tech and Bitcoin in particular in almost all news articles but they are the two most important parts to those actually involved.
Everytime someone wants to exchange btc with another person they must submit their tx to a “queue” but this queue isn’t a standard FIFO instead each time a new Bitcoin is mined the miner gets to decide which tx’s he’s going to include in his block and since space is limited to 1mb / block, in general, the miner will choose those TX’s which provide him the most money (aside from the 12.5btc he’s getting). Each submitted tx also includes a “bribe” which is called a “tx fee” and that tx fee is decided by the submitter so it can be anything from a $.01 to $100. Historically its been around $3/TX. But recently that fee has been as much as $20/tx to ensure that the submitter of the tx gets his tx added to the main blockchain in a timely manner.
Now you understand why your theory that the early adopter mafia is somehow manipulating the market doesn’t really make any sense.
The other reason it didn’t make sense is that the block chain is really just a ledger that’s available to the public, there’s no need to hypothesis conspiracies when you can just look and see who’s making these tx’s.