The prices are real because you can trade at them. Everything else you mention is possible and likely in an unregulated market.
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Bitcoin prices can absolutely be manipulated over the short run. The market is relatively small and it wouldnāt be difficult for organizations with a lot of capital to manipulate the prices.
Can you sell now and get $7,000? For now, so long as you donāt dump enough in the market to collapse the price. If a large number of people tried to cash out their bitcoins they would quickly run into a liquidity problem.
Over the long run though, it will be impossible for them to keep prices rising. As long as bitcoin is going up its a fun party, everyone wants to own it. Once the expectation changes and people believe bitcoin will fall in value rather than rise then party is over.
The music will stop, the price will collapse, all the sellers try to get out at the same time and realize there are few buyers on the other end other their transaction. Hilarity ensues.
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Annoyed that one of my sportsbooks has started using Bitcoin. It means that Iām now dealing with wild fluctuations between deposit and cashing into the book. Cash out is the same, Iām subject to losses on the wagers and then a second speculative win/loss on the BTC.
Eventually, we will all die.
Again, anyone predicting the eventual death spiral care to wage a timeline?
The death spiral will occur on January 23, 2018 at 11:42 AM Eastern time.
Of course not, it is impossible to know when precisely a bubble will pop. If it was possible, it would be easy to get rich. But that doesnāt mean it isnāt going to happen or that people buying bitcoin are smart investors.
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Well, if the conviction that the comparison to beany baby or tulip is sincere. Wouldnāt it logically follow that say, 5 year down the road it would be worth next to nothing?
On the other hand, if my thinking is more correct than it would still be around and actively being used/traded at a reasonable high value compared to today.
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The biggest problem I see with Bitcoin (maybe all crypto currency, Iām not sure) is that too many people are treating it like a stock, rather than a currency. People are buying to āholdā as an investment rather than using it to transact for goods. This fluctuates the price wildly and hurts its goal of acting as a currency, because people are unwilling to use it for fear of losing out on the swings in value.
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Bitcoin seems more analogous to buying gold. Both can act as a currency but people also invest in them speculatively.
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If you have a little background in economics or currencies in general, youāll find Chris Burniskeās writing very interesting on the topic.
Highly recommend his book: Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investorās Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond
Book recently came out and heās written TONS of Medium articles on the subject.
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FYI, Bitcoin is a distributed network - you donāt own 0s and 1s on just a hard drive, you own 0s and 1s on everyone who has a bitcoin clientās harddrive.
Any thoughts about some of the other blockchain cryptocurrencies out there? Bitcoin is simply digital money, and in my opinion has no tangible value. However, there are other blockchain technologies that result in other cryptocurrencies. To me it seems that the better quality blockchain technologies will be more valuable than bitcoin in the sense that they provide a product that has value to the user. As this happens, I would assume the current valuation of bitcoin would diminish.
A simple way for me to think of it is in terms of computer OSs. At its incpetion, Windows OS was only as tangible as the disk it came on. However, the value it provided has resluted in revenue of billions, and has made other OSs obsolete. Of course, there are other OSs that fourish, but the survivors seem to target the specific needs of the use, and this results in value.
We are already seeing large organizations adopting some of the blockchain technology available, one of these being used by various large banks and the Gates Foundation. So, will the value of the technology drive the value of the cryptocurrencie that is a result of the technology?
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So what youāre seeing within financial institutions is largely implementation of private blockchains which on the whole does not necessarily have a direct impact on the public blockchain cryptos you see. However, it can have some ancillary impact for example, Ethererum and zCash.
When JPM and ZECC announced a partnership, zCash really popped. However, JPM is not using zCash itself, but the underlying privacy tech on top of Quorum, which is a private blockchain built on the ethereum network.
ETH is the second largest cryptocurrency out there by market cap, right behind Bitcoin. I would say that ETH has the most amount of buzz out there because of the potential of āsmart contractsā that can be layered on the coin. The implications for the technology behind this coin are far and varied from digital rights management to crowdfunding to digital signature to verify authenticity and provenance. There is a TON of development out there with literally thousands of developers working on different decentralized applications built on the platform. Recently some of the sheen has been taken off ether due to news around China banning initial coin offerings and general growing pains.
There are plenty of other coins/tokens that have some sort of āvalue/productā other than serving as a form of currency like Steemit (social media platform) and Siacoin (cloud storage).
Of interest are also Sexcoin, Titcoin, and my favorite but now defunct, Groincoin which are being used by the adult industry.
Coindesk is usually on top of crypto news out there and is a lot more newbie friendly than sites like Github forums or Bitcointalk. Reddit can be a good source once you know which coin youāre interested in althoughā¦itās Reddit.
Big news in the bitcoin space, Segwit2x called off, expect new highs
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Or new lowsā¦ Though it looks like BCH is doing well as a resultā¦ Just gotta find a reputable exchange to trade it on.
Iām not too surprised by that. Itās been on a non-stop upward trajectory since the user activated soft fork in July. Letās be clear, it did hit new highs when Segwit2x was called off. This part is just the profit taking and shaking out of some weak hands.
I have some suspicions of whatās driving it down and if Iām right itāll be just a few weeks/months before we hit new levels.
Care to share what you think is driving it down right now?
Or could it be days? BTC is up 10.5% in the last 24 hours, and is only $600 away from itās previous high. This after diving to well under $6,000 just a few days ago.
At its current prices, the instability of BTC would make me nervous if I held a lot of it, but the other cryptocurrencies (altcoins) that I have are doing well. They are more long-term holdings, whereas right now I feel BTC and many altcoins are good for pump and dump.
Iām not fond of spreading unsubstantiated rumors so Iāll provide a caveat that this is purely my own opinion based on my own experience as well as my interpretation of current sentiment among major players in this space based on their public statements on various forums and social media.
Itās also a little bit of technical analysis based on the volume of the recent moves.
My own thought on this is that there is a really big push for certain altcoins which is essentially anything that isnāt BTC. There are some with a vested interest in that space who have significant holdings in BTC who have the capital to drive the value down like short sellers in the stock market. However the market for cryptocurrencies isnāt one which there is an effective way to push down the value in a sustainable way without eventually cutting your own nose off. That combined with some simple profit taking lead to the recent declines.
That being said, I would be cautious getting back into this as you never know how motivated some of these vested interests are. Also keep in mind that cryptocurrency has never truly been tested in a risk-off trade to see how the price movements are to a correlated to the US stock market. I would not be surprised to see another pullback if volatility picks up in a sustained fashion in equity markets.
Long term Iām a big believer in cryptos but I would not go mortgaging my house to get more into this space. Iām probably leaving some money on the table but thatās the risk manager in me as a financial planner.
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Okay wow. I was wrong. Bounce back took just a few days, lol. This thing is about to break $8k
Crazy. BTC set a new high a few days ago, and Iāve been watching it dance around $8,000, even missing it by $3. However, I just watched it cross that threshold. Not saying I would buy any now, but I wish I had bought more when it was cheap.