Bitcoins/Litecoins/Virtual Currencies

Rajaah said:

It'll probably dive right afterwards. Best time to buy is Saturday night IMO. Just wait it out.

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Little late for that lol. 3pm was pretty fucking close tbh, shoulda trusted my gut!

Now I just sit back and wait for the fake Truebit to make me a millionaire.

Yeah I don't know either but the value of $USD in my metamask is correct.

Jive Turkey said:

What do you suspect is happening?

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Deflating bubble, I've been warning about bubble signals for a few months now. Look at the speculative bubble page on wikipedia and tell me you haven't seen all or most of these in the last few months:

Economic or asset price bubbles are often characterized by one or more of the following:

1. Unusual changes in single measures, or relationships among measures (e.g., ratios) relative to their historical levels. For example, in the housing bubble of the 2000s, the housing prices were unusually high relative to income.[33] For stocks, the price to earnings ratio provides a measure of stock prices relative to corporate earnings; higher readings indicate investors are paying more for each dollar of earnings.[34]
2. Elevated usage of debt (leverage) to purchase assets, such as purchasing stocks on margin or homes with a lower down payment.
3. Higher risk lending and borrowing behavior, such as originating loans to borrowers with lower credit quality scores (e.g., subprime borrowers), combined with adjustable rate mortgages and "interest only" loans.
4. Rationalizing borrowing, lending and purchase decisions based on expected future price increases rather than the ability of the borrower to repay.[35]
5. Rationalizing asset prices by increasingly weaker arguments, such as "this time it's different" or "housing prices only go up."
6. A high presence of marketing or media coverage related to the asset.[11]
7. Incentives that place the consequences of bad behavior by one economic actor upon another, such as the origination of mortgages to those with limited ability to repay because the mortgage could be sold or securitized, moving the consequences from the originator to the investor.
8. International trade (current account) imbalances, resulting in an excess of savings over investments, increasing the volatility of capital flow among countries. For example, the flow of savings from Asia to the U.S. was one of the drivers of the 2000s housing bubble.[36]
9. A lower interest rate environment, which encourages lending and borrowing.[37]

Household savings rate going up drastically (because of decreased spending due to covid) in a near-zero interest rate environment is probably a factor here. I believe it magnified the effects of the already low interest rate.

From June 2017 to July 2017 the price of Ethereum went from nearly $400 to about $130, and recovered by September to break ATH in November->January 2018.

"We've purchased more Bitcoin in 2020 than in the previous 5 years combined, and we're on pace to buy even more than that in 2021"

"Bitcoin is our peaceful weapon of choice against Central Bank driven time theft. Not on my watch, I'm not letting the Central Banks steal the time of my partners, my colleagues, or my clients." - Ross Stevens CEO of Stone Ridge Asset Management + Founder of NYDIG


Worth a listen

"How do we get Bitcoin into the hands of the highest percentage of people who are poor, who hold their money as cash, as possible?.. Bitcoin is an ark to protect from the fiat flood, and it is raining"

wormie said:

I posted some things about bitcoin in the general investment thread. Didnt want to post it here because it would be taken incorrectly. Worth a look.

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Yea, theres a lot of Tether FUD. They're not very transparent with their holdings so its certainly possible that they're rehypothecating. However NYAG settled their case so I dunno. Even if Tether is a massive scam Bitcoin will survive, it doesn't rely on Tether fundamentally. The entire crypto market would take a hit if that happened though.


EDIT: Regarding ransomware and crypto, this is 100% going to be a regulatory attack vector on the industry. I have some exposure to some ransomware attacks and the companies that "respond" to them. There is ONLY 1 company, and its founders are 'former' CIA. I don't buy it as anything other than a false flag to attack crypto. That being said, criminals using the money just shows that it is effective. Bitcoin being used by criminals shows that it works. We don't blame cash for bank robbers, why blame crypto for ransomware attacks? If your infrastructure and security measures are poor, you're going to get hacked.

This idea that we need to have 100% transparency for law enforcement so they can stop all crime is stupid and authoritarian. It has never been that way and it never should be. There are other methods for fighting criminal enterprises than spying on all transactions.

Tether will eventually implode, that I'm sure of. There's not a doubt in my mind that they're full of shit and don't have that much money backing their issuance. If it happened tomorrow, it would hit a significant portion of the crypto space -- I'm insulating myself from it as much as possible, but I know that some of the projects I like would be affected by the loss in liquidity. If it happens after CDBCs roll out, probably won't even register as a blip.

Tether FUD is so stupid. As if Tether was the only stablecoin. As if Tether was run by a bunch of nobodies. Tether is less than 4% the global crypto market cap. It was originally primarily used to sell bitcoin for it so you could sell it without touching USD which would trigger a tax event. (crypto to crypto is not a tax event in many countries) Then you rebuy BTC with it later. Nowdays stablecoins are often used as money themselves without touching BTC. So how exactly does this artificially inflate BTC's price?

Tether is run by the Bitfinex people, which is one of the the largest and oldest crypto exchanges. It's been around for almost a decade. This exchange was hacked in 2016 and they paid back all their customers and ate the loss themselves. Their crime was to use a small portion of the Tether reserve to give themselves a loan, which they paid back, because some of their assets had been stolen (or frozen by government agencies? not sure) by an unlicensed payment processor which they had to use because banks don't like to serve crypto businesses, and failing to disclose this. So yeah, that's not good, but it's a far cry from 'the money is all gone!'. Part of the settlement was that they are required to submit proof of custody for another two years.

Frankly I find it bullshit that New York state feels like they can be the world financial police to begin with when Bitfinex refuses to serve US customers and is not incorporated here. I'd have an account there if I could. They serve over 190 other countries though. I can't even use Exodus wallet's built-in exchange without a VPN in my state. Land of the free. US law is singlehandedly driving the push for DeFi.