Aren't ICOs more of an altcoin phenomenon? How does this impact upon Bitcoin?
To me It looked like Bitcoin just bounced off a psychological ceiling at 5000USD. It has done this with various round number levels in the past. It makes a bit of sense if you consider people are inclined to think something like "I'll sell when it reaches $5000"
There also seems to be a tendancy to use evocative language (collapse,tumble,collapse etc.) to describe what has often been a loss of only a few weeks worth of gains. I guess when people have an agenda to push on the other side they call the same thing a correction.
I don't claim to have any special knowledge of how all this works. It just seems to me that many of the authoritative sounding voices are actually as clueless as the rest of us.
"However, the wording of the PBoC edict also suggested that trading and usage of all cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin, could now be illegal in China.
The PBoC said that virtual currencies that are "not issued by the monetary authorities... do not have legal status equivalent to money, and can not and should not be circulated as a currency in the market use."
The PBoC added that "any so-called tokens financing trading platform shall not engage in the exchange of legal currency and tokens." It even goes so far as to ban platforms from "provid[ing] pricing, information, [and] intermediary services.""
What does mean for AntMiner and people that sell the hardware for hashing power? SHA256 & scrypt hashers can't take cryptocurrency they are trying to mine with it? Not the end of the world, but ironic nonetheless.
It does seem that consistently this year, every time Bitcoin hits an ATH or psychological price, that the PBOC issues some edict or warning that causes the price to drop. There's even a meme for this phenomena:
This is from 2014! (I know the link goes to content not typically found on HN, I'm doing it for the purposes of illustrating that this is such a seemingly common occurrence.)
People don't buy and sell ICO tokens with fiat, they do it with bitcoins. If a bunch of people want to sell their ICO tokens for fiat, they first end up with a bunch of bitcoins, and then they need to sell bitcoins for fiat. This pushes the price of bitcoins in fiat down.
It's a temporary phenomenon, but the price going down can make the price fall farther, because there are a bunch of amateur traders who think it's a good idea to buy when the price is rising and sell when it's falling.
It's true of almost all ICOs launching ERC20 tokens because on Ethereum you can write code that automatically turns your ETH into ERC20 tokens. A couple pages of code and it all just happens on the blockchain by itself.
If you take bitcoin contributions, you need something offchain to track who contributed what, and issue a bunch of minting transactions.
Some ICOs do that, but if it's ERC20 that's generally in addition to automated minting via smart contract, and since the token and ICO are running on the Ethereum blockchain it's predominantly ETH that gets contributed.
Liquidity on exchanges later doesn't have much to do with any of that.
To go from altcoins to fiat, one needs to first buy Bitcoin with altcoins, then sell Bitcoin for fiat. Why would this not be price neutral for Bitcoin?
That's called momentum trading and it's not a bad idea in a market where most traders aren't setting a price… aka, all public markets especially this one. Who needs fundamentals?
There's weird stuff going on with Tethers, which are supposedly pegged to the dollar and fully backed, being created apparently out of nothing when Tether has no US banking arrangements, and these being used to prop up margin trading on Bitfinex. The price then goes up on Bitfinex, then on other exchanges.
The upshot is: every time margin gets too deep on Bitfinex, another batch of Tethers is created out of thin air, and the price gets a pump. Bitcoin's recapitulated the history of finance, and now it's got to Quantitative Easing.
It's amazingly tangled, I'm trying to put together an explainer blog post, but Bitfinexed has the best coverage of the pieces:
"supposedly fully backed" isn't the same as "actually fully backed". If they are being created out of thin air, it would mean the claim about them being backed by dollars was a lie.
Edit: Although, whether or not they're backed by anything isn't really all that relevant, considering that their terms of service[1] say:
"There is no contractual right or other right or legal claim against us to redeem or exchange your Tethers for money. We do not guarantee any right of redemption or exchange of Tethers by us for money."
So backed or not, nobody has any obligation to give you dollars in exchange for your tethers.
If any other asset lost that much percent of its value that fast it'd be called a crash too. It isn't biased. It isn't the writer's fault that BTC is so volatile. Isn't it at least a little concerning that it could gain or lose that much value in a matter of weeks?
It already gained that much value in a week so effectively nothing happened. The technical traders might believe we've hit a big ceiling, but ceilings could be just temporary. The article is mentioning bitcoin price just for drama.
While I'm inclined to believe this, the big sell off triggered by this news started at the same time that the news was made public. You can view the rapid drop in Neo (heavily affected by the ban) started in the same 15 minutes when the news broke.
Ether is privileged on Ethereum. It's what mining gets you, it's what transaction fees are paid in, if proof-of-stake comes around, it will be what's staked, and any transaction can include some. I don't expect any of these to change.
I've seen the term fall out of usage. Years ago, when Bitcoin made up 90% of the cryptocurrency market cap, and nearly every other cryptocurrency was a fork of Bitcoin, with a name that was some variation of *coin (e.g. Litecoin, Peercoin, Dogecoin, Novacoin, BBQcoin) it made sense. Not so much now anymore, with Bitcoin's market cap under 50%, and original projects being its major competitors.
Market cap is a poor way to measure each coin.
You can create your own coin premine 1 million of them.
Sell a few for ~5 dollars and claim it has a market cap of 5 million dollars.
Market cap can be a totally valid way to measure total worth. In the case of a cryptocurrency with a large circulating and trading volume, like Ether, it's a reliable measure of total value.
A new way to fund companies. Instead of selling parts, issue tokens that work like a cryptocurrency and promise they will entitle to some profits. Sell these for bitcoins. Recently some companies raised a billion USD that way (yes, billion)
The concern, that I share, is that this system is very vulnerable to Ponzi scheme. And unlike Bitcoin, the crash of the pyramid is not a feature in this system.
I think people are right to warn and forbid this thing. Pyramid scheme can have large-scale effect in an economy.
I think etherum provides way to do things more responsibly but I understand that authorities moved quickly when they saw anonymous companies with no products receiving a billion USD.
Even that will cause ripples when it collapses. You don't want it to grow more.
It's an Initial Coin Offering, a unregulated way for a company to raise funds, but which has also been associated with scams and Ponzi schemes recently.
You offered it without any promise and they buy it. You sell it all so the price goes down and those buyers lost the value.
Stock has a lot of regulation based from the many fraud cases. ICO backed by digital currency doesn't have regulation so it's like 15th century when the concept of stock appears without any regulation all over again.
What's HN's criteria on the [video] tag, is it appropriate for links which include a large auto-playing video, but also contain article text? Or is it reserved for content which is exclusively in video format?
I don't know what HN's criteria are, but Safari recently blocked autoplay videos and I suspect other browsers will add this functionality soon enough that this problem will disappear.
why does it feel like every time bitcoin goes up, the chinese government has some sort of announcement to bring it back down? see: last time when they prohibited banks from buying/selling cryptocurrencies. does someone there hope to earn some quick $$$ from shorting bitcoin (profit motive), or are they doing it to cool down a bubble (protect chinese investors motive)?
Because Bitcoin and ICO are the main mechanism to get money out of China, with overseas cash withdraw very limited for Chinese citizens, with 50% of millionnaires in China wanting to leave (http://bit.ly/2uzYLyu) (and the other 50% already having left probably), and with Chinese government cracking down on real estate/insurance tactics to move money out.
But it's really doubtful they can prevent bitcoin from transfering money out of China altogether (unless they ban bitcoin)
>Because Bitcoin and ICO are the main mechanism to get money out of China
No bitcoin and ICO's are a mechanism to get money out of China. Shady HK pawn shops, "family" vacations with strangers (the limit on money moved is per person) and straight up smuggling in bodily crevices are still far more popular. Right now China makes more on bitcoin than it loses because 70% of mining happens in China. So long as this remains true China will not ban bitcoin. Everything else is just noise and FUD.
I think China likes Bitcoin because money flowing into it does not strengthen the dollar thus putting pressure on their foreign reserves. If people are sneaking their money out of the country, they'd rather be trading it for Bitcoin than dollars.
The government doesn't care what the bitcoin/rmb exchange rate is because they don't buy oil or imports in bitcoin nor do they hold any bitcoin reserves.
I'm not disagreeing with that: Bitcoin isn't a sneaky way of doing forex unless the RMB used to buy bitcoin is being converted into dollars (or another convertible currency), which most definitely is cared about.
Mining operations can convert Chinese electricity into bitcoin.
So use RMB to purchase electricity for mining bitcoin, convert mined bitcoin to currency outside of China (or sell for RMB to someone that wants to do that and use RMB to buy electricity to mine more bitcoin).
Except if they leave the money in bitcoin they don't have to explain where they got it. If they turn it into a foreign currency they have to tell a bank where it came from. Come to think of it, that's probably where all the ICO demand is coming from. These guys have money stuck in crypto and are desperately looking for a way to invest it.
If China could effectively ban bitcoin, they'd have done so long ago; they don't because they can't enforce it and they know it and it's better to look like you don't care that to show that you don't have the power.
Apart from this ICO ban, how has the Chinese government acted against Bitcoin? If anything, the large presence of Chinese miners in the blockchain space should suggest that they have the government's blessing.
"Mining" looks like an export business from a Chinese perspective. Mining companies build facilities in China, hire people in China, make something of value, and export it. That's encouraged by policy.
"Exchanges", though, are iffy. Those are financial institutions, and the PBOC can regulate them if they want. They've done a little regulation, clamping down on margin and accepting credit cards to buy Bitcoin.
Bitcoin used to be down in the noise as a way to get money out of China, and was tolerated in the way that putting all your relatives on the train to Hong Kong loaded up with 20,000 RMB each is tolerated. The numbers for Bitcoin are getting bigger, though, making PBOC action more likely.
A few years ago, it looked like yuan convertibility was on the horizon, but that didn't happen.
At-large people are more interested in Bitcoin in the news. I personally agree with you at Ethereum being more interesting, and much more central to the ICOs issue, but it's also less stable (bigger swings in price), and higher risk (risk/reward) while being newer, and more unknown in the market.
My dad has started sending me Bitcoin news. I'm so proud. I was proud at first when he was able to find Bitcoin news in his regular news sources. I'm even more proud now that he's sending me news with relevant, quality information that I hadn't already heard!
It is not that strange though, when you consider the market cap of Bitcoin today is $71B and the cap of Ethereum is $28B (and is measured in bitcoin, at least on the first Google result that I was able to find.) Is a 30% drop in ETH prices really bigger news than a 20% drop in Bitcoin prices?
Bitcoin was the first mover, basically made the market, and has all of the mindshare. It's basically the USD of cryptocurrencies.
In 2013, China's government declared Bitcoin to be illegal, and Bitcoin crashed from $1,200 to $425. I figured that it would be impossible for Bitcoin to succeed if China outlawed it, so I sold my Bitcoins at $425. I think I was the low trade. Now Bitcoin is at more than ten times that level. Let that story inform your decision making now.
Why would anyone base their decision off one anecdotal piece of evidence from a rando on HN?
P.S. I sold the 10 bitcoins I mined at $5 (got a $50 amazon gift card). Woulda, coulda, shoulda, e.g., "I should have bought AAPL at $XX".. etc. I don't lose any sleep over those type of situations anymore.
The moral of the story is not whether I sold at the low or when the low was, or whether there was time to get back in, or when I did get back in. The moral of the story is that one nation's policy is not sufficient to derail bitcoin.
Long term, having some governmental oversight is key to the mainstream success of cryptocurrency.
While this may make the ride bumpier, I'm happy that China has decided to setup some regulation around ICOs, mostly impacting scammers and fraudsters. My only concern is this regulation takes a while to figure out and this kills some momentum.
Governmental control of the monetary system (AKA "oversight") is one of the biggest reasons Bitcoin was invented in the first place. The last thing this world needs is more oversight and control by disconnected bureaucrats with no skin in the game.
Long-term, however, such attempts at regulating cryptocurrency simply make it even MORE decentralized / antifragile as people stop using traditional exchanges (which can be easily regulated) and start using decentralized options such as LocalBitcoins.com (which is all but impossible to regulate).
Everything is going to be alright. Major coins crashed for a few hours but are now coming back up. There's a strong long-term potential in crypto that would be worth a lot, in privacy/operability if not value. Between now and then, there are going to be a lot of scammers and ups and downs. Hopefully the coin can mature and survive through all of it.
BTC has never-before seen volatility, biggest bubble of all time. If bagholders are all aboard, prepare for a dip below 2k for a swing. The market is very orderly (which is why I was able to predict both the price and time of peak, see my other account) using tech analysis only. Therefore there is sufficient evidence of a balanced disparity between insiders (brought to you by GS and company) and the uninformed.
For there to be a move above 5500 you'll need a new wave of buying pressure. This puppy is now owned by your rent seeking masters. It's up to the big players to govern how price is to move and that's largely a function of how much buying interest really remains.
It doesn't take much to realize BTC itself has dubious value; better tech will emerge in our generation. This was merely a first step. That has nothing to do with the short term price or where it finally tops if it hasn't already, though.
Goldman came out on public radio to state the price will be a buy below 2k. Wise to heed their advice here. Trick is to know which of their info they release is reliable, which requires a system in and of itself.
"BTC has never-before seen volatility, biggest bubble of all time."
You are very wrong. First, volatility used to be much worse: https://mobile.twitter.com/lsukernik/status/8649208737189519... Secondly, the importance of a bubble is measured relatively not absolutely: BTC may be near the all-time high but it has seen only a ~2x increase in the last 30 days, while the Nov 2013, Feb 2013, and Jun 2012 bubbles all saw 10x...
Sorry meant nothing has risen from a fraction of a penny to five grand in human history, iow referring to the percentage moves that we may never see again in our lifetimes. I stand corrected. Meant relative to any other investment in history.
The short 5k-5.5k idea could be a bust anyway; maybe we do rally to 6k from here. I am concerned with managing risk, less so with any particular idea itself. That's why I thought it was funny that another posted how I was "very wrong" about how I described volatility. Who cares who is right or wrong? It doesn't matter. Just be safe, that's all that matters. Protect capital.
This could also be related to China's recent crackdown on VPNs.
Eliminating ways to export value without controls by the government, in retrospect, seems like one of the more obvious reasons to control the flow of information. There's suppression of nationally embarrassing facts, but only recently have things actually gotten more serious than providing a high (but climbable) wall.
It works opposite way. Bitcoin mining is centralized in China, so firewall would cutoff rest of the world. (it ads latency and makes it harder to announce newly mined blocks)
To me It looked like Bitcoin just bounced off a psychological ceiling at 5000USD. It has done this with various round number levels in the past. It makes a bit of sense if you consider people are inclined to think something like "I'll sell when it reaches $5000"
There also seems to be a tendancy to use evocative language (collapse,tumble,collapse etc.) to describe what has often been a loss of only a few weeks worth of gains. I guess when people have an agenda to push on the other side they call the same thing a correction.
I don't claim to have any special knowledge of how all this works. It just seems to me that many of the authoritative sounding voices are actually as clueless as the rest of us.