Bitcoin tumbles below $70k, wiping out gains since Trump 2024 win(www.reuters.com)
22 pointsby JumpCrisscross4 hours ago7 comments
  • duxup4 hours ago
    The Bitcoin ecosystem, folks looking at it as an investment / get rich pathway, all the scam / poorly run companies, straight up crime ... really seems to fly in the face of the whitepaper and presumed ethos.
    • jfengel2 hours ago
      The ethos assumes a world in which Bitcoin has become widely accepted as a currency and reached a stable exchange rate.

      That world wasn't necessarily impossible. Imagine that the US reconceived the dollar as a coin, and everybody simply accepted it as a replacement currency. Potentially, a very large bank or credit card company could have done that with a stablecoin pegged to the dollar.

      But that's not what happened. Bitcoin was never adopted as a currency so there was no way to anchor its value. Infinite shitcoins popped up, making cryptocurrency as a whole the most inflationary system in the universe (because anybody can mint their own coins). The whitepaper never considered that possibility.

      It's still possible that the US government could decide to start taking BTC for payment of taxes, at some fixed exchange rate. That would anchor the price of BTC, and the whitepaper ethos could find a foothold.

      • Terr_33 minutes ago
        IMO it was always a bad fit for a prospective currency, since its nature is tilted towards deflation, a speculative asset to be hoarded while everyone continues to conduct normal "I need a sandwich" business in anything else.
      • duxup2 hours ago
        Good point. It's strange as it seems like using Bitcoin to buy things is structurally difficult anyway. If that should have held the price stable ... it isn't very good at doing that thing.
    • avaer4 hours ago
      To a first approximation ~nobody who "invests" in crypto has read a whitepaper or considered the ethos.

      It's one of the bugs/features of crypto.

      • duxup3 hours ago
        I don't doubt it, but the sort of "I'm escaping the financial systems that is stacked against me" attitudes are prevalent among folks, the ethos lives on in a weird sort of way ... but really individuals are going to a worse place more often than not.
        • avaer2 hours ago
          You're right, but the people that say they're pilled/sticking it to the man/breaking out of the matrix -- they're just parroting things they saw on X or tiktok. And then shuffling their money based on that.

          They haven't researched or thought about any of this, otherwise they wouldn't be reducing finance to repeating someone else's soundbytes.

          There's no ethos there, it's just reposts. Yes, it is weird.

  • cs7024 hours ago
    Bitcoin has been declared dead many times:

    https://bitcoindeaths.com/

    It just keeps on existing.

    • SideburnsOfDoom4 hours ago
      > It just keeps on existing.

      That is not in itself a recommendation. You could say the same of most infectious diseases and parasites, or antisocial acts.

      • moralestapia4 hours ago
        >you'd have $70,482,477 today

        I wish COVID had that ROI.

    • toomuchtodo4 hours ago
      Bitcoin isn't going to die, but it isn't going to replace currency or gold. It'll remain as a speculation vehicle and a mechanism to move value outside of regulated financial systems.
    • notTooFarGone4 hours ago
      As long as crime exists BTC will follow
  • SirMaster3 hours ago
    Bitcoin goes up, bitcoin goes down, you can't explain that.

    Seriously though, bitcoin has always been highly volatile, is this really a story?

    • tim3332 hours ago
      You can kind of explain it in four year halving/hype cycles. A downturn around now is what you'd expect if it keeps that up so not much of a story really.
      • nfw237 minutes ago
        It's a reference to the Bill O'Reilly line about tides
  • gfdklgfdlkjl3 hours ago
    Russia-Ukraine war is being wound down and Russian sanctions will be lifted probably in the next 1-2 months. Crypto is the financial tissue that connects sanctioned entities to non-sanctioned Western banks. What you are seeing is Russians and other sanctioned entities dumping their coins since they won't be needed soon.
  • faefox3 hours ago
    It's a speculative instrument useful for enabling criminal activity and not much else.
  • almosthere4 hours ago
    I don't think the BTC market is worth playing unless you are good at knowing how the whales (who control it in its entirety) operate.

    Everyone already knows BTC will be back at 110 in a few months. It might dip to 30 first, who the hell knows.

    • unsupp0rted4 hours ago
      What can the whales do that is unclear until its over?

      They can all sell massively to drive the price down, then all re-buy massively?