Wednesday, May 19th 2021
Cryptocurrency Market Bleeds Trillions in Less Than 24 Hours; Did the Bubble Pop?
The cryptocurrency market is experiencing another major shakedown in pricing, with the overall crypto market valuation dropping by more than a trillion dollars in less than 24 hours. As of time of writing, leading cryptocurrency by market cap Bitcoin has lost more than 30% in value, dropping to $31,000. Ethereum is down by 40% to $2,424, and memecoin Dogecoin has fallen by 45% - one would think a memecoin would have had its value dropped to zero from the instant of its conception, but that's not the world we live in.
As the market tries to staunch the bleeding, major cryptocurrency platforms Coinbase and Binance are down, citing "network congestion" issues stemming from the unexpected volatility. As investors see their attempts to sell neutered by these network congestion issues, this seems like a way to reduce the amount of cryptocurrencies available in the market, which would feed the descending value cycle even more. Whether or not this is the bubble popping, it's yet another foundational shock to the trust that was already achieved by these platforms and the cryptocurrency market as a whole. How this will affect market availability and demand for graphics cards and hardware is anyone's guess, but even if it does, it'll take some time until we see availability in the main and secondary channels.
As the market tries to staunch the bleeding, major cryptocurrency platforms Coinbase and Binance are down, citing "network congestion" issues stemming from the unexpected volatility. As investors see their attempts to sell neutered by these network congestion issues, this seems like a way to reduce the amount of cryptocurrencies available in the market, which would feed the descending value cycle even more. Whether or not this is the bubble popping, it's yet another foundational shock to the trust that was already achieved by these platforms and the cryptocurrency market as a whole. How this will affect market availability and demand for graphics cards and hardware is anyone's guess, but even if it does, it'll take some time until we see availability in the main and secondary channels.
136 Comments on Cryptocurrency Market Bleeds Trillions in Less Than 24 Hours; Did the Bubble Pop?
I love how the AMD CPUs are smothered in thermal grease. Clearly we should all be using Pentium 4s!
False alarm?
There are so many mistakes in methodology and conclusion made makes no sense. I almost want to go back in time and slap Tom for all that nonsense. What a pillock.Tom's says that I need phase change for Pentium 4, I'm too poor for that:
I will enjoy my wimpy i5 silently in the corner of my room.
And all my mother said to him was less haste more speed.
Without something to correct it it will likely slowly bounce down to a fraction of it's value like this, seesawing the whole way.
And yes, the term is mean, I didn't make it up.
Keep in mind, something to boost it is pretty likely too, so don't write it off.
15k was a pretty big bounce.. he he
trog
The only reason to hold it is to sell it on to someone else for more than you paid. It doesn't have any utility, despite 10 years of trying. There's loads of BS around it but also an infinite number of potential variants.
Lockdown, social media and covid stimulus cash are the catalysts.
It has utility, but also kinks. For example, fees right now are so high I'd never use it at the moment.
Plus if a lot of ppl bought just a bit, they simply wont care that much if it gets lost or not.
And then there is that whale which has ridiculous amount of DOGE and its keeping it still.
It might crash more and in short term it will, but after that? Maybe some surprise.
General idea behind crypto is still the same, altho not very visible right now. And as long as governments, FED and its equivalents will do what they do, ppl will look for alternative.
As long as less than 1% of ppl hold almost all wealth on the planet, those 99% something will try to get their own piece while preferably not making that 1 richer.
I don't think my tomorrow's small batch of PSUs paid for in USDT is legal. I can't even offer my services for crypto, which would've brought a decent chunk of income to my wallet, since miners also need to fix laptops and PCs. I'd even pay taxes, but still no. I know a few local guys (also specialized in component-level repair), who also accepts ETH/BTC/USDT/USDC, but it's all "under the table" cause there is no legit way of doing it.That may require service providers to collaborate with major exchanges. Coinbase used to have a "Commerce" API(or still has), Binance has "Pay" API, plus there are tons more, and they all benefit from layer 2 networks that are already in place. It won't be decentralized or absolutely anonymous and will be everything that BTC tried to move away from, but since the goal is to buy/sell stuff and pay taxes to uncle [insert your local equivalent of Sam] - there is no way around it.
I think the only time I paid a crazy-high fee, is when transferring USDC from Binance to Coinbase (but not the other way around). Bitcoin is far easier nowadays. Normally it's something like $1 or 80c on SegWit regardless of transaction value, which is nothing.
Ether going PoS may also simplify and cheapify the payment process, but I'm still very skeptical of this whole "rich get richer" approach (or staking pools, for that matter).
Basically with crypto, the financial systems can become a perpetual conflict and whoever is winning, has the highest reliability. Put differently, its a financial transaction system forever in beta - that sweet, sweet middle ground between idea and release where no rules seem to exist, just yet. And that's even considering how well the ETH concept is at its core. It won't last, frameworks do evolve.
Perhaps you could defend the idea that its a principle of merit. After all, it is true competition over the best concept with the end goal of creating something that is super robust. Still, uncertainty everywhere obv.
With staking - anyone who can't afford 32ETH is automatically disqualified from participating (even at current exchange rate it's a shitton of money).
Staking pools are also a high-risk endeavor. My GPUs are warming my feet right now, so I know where my investment is. With PoS - I can't tell with 100% certainty whether my money will be used for staking or something I didn't sign up for. It's a perfect ground for the actual pyramid scams (people nowadays seem to confuse or misunderstand what it is). E.g. instead of staking they'll simply pay "pseudo-earnings" to early birds from deposits of newcomers in order to build up reputation and "pot size" until it's good enough to disappear.
Another big difference, is that right now people have an option to mistrust their mining pool, or mining aggregator, or online wallet, and move their assets around or diversify as they're pleased. With staking you have a financial incentive to keep all of your chickens in the same coup, so in case of staking pyramids, you aren't losing a week's worth of shares - you are losing everything.
With this in mind, if you aren't some filthy-rich bastard from beyond the wall, your only option is to chose the biggest and the most trusted staking pool, which in term means.... you guessed it - even more centralization. I'm sure by the time this transition is fully done, we'll have our usual suspects like top 20-25 in this list (e.g. the usual suspects):
www.coingecko.com/en/exchanges
Another big downside, is that people aren't incentivized to move their money around (spend, invest, etc). From your typical high-school course on introductory economics we all know that idle money gives no economic growth. I don't mean the money in your savings account, cause all that means is that you've entrusted your bank to invest/move your money around with a guarantee that you'll get it back whenever you need it. I mean, money that's stashed under your mattress for a rainy day. Only with staking it's gonna be one helluva big communal mattress which creates even more money that does nothing. As a staking participant(or legit staking pool) you have more incentive just to leave your money alone, and only use it in case of emergency. This creates less transactions, and as a consequence - even less staking rewards.
Nowadays people call bitcoin a "digital gold", cause it's expensive, limited, and hard to move around (TX fees, which you've mentioned). So, rich people put it in their treasure chests as a long-term investment.
ETH2.0 will be like your retirement fund (or 401k for Yankees). You only touch it in case of absolutely major emergency, or if you expect to be dead within the next 10 years.
In summary to my short rant: we may agree on mining inefficiency, but there are many other ways to solve this issue. PoS is only one solution, but Buterin with his team decided to chose the most unfair, unsafe, and rigged way of doing it. ETH is still promising as a base model for future crypto, but I don't want it to die soon after. I'm just talking out of my neck here, but in my opinion there are too many red flags already, and many more on the way.
Lets have the BTC-blockchain for example. Lets say there's two blockchains for simplicity: BTC-mainstream, and BTC-attacker. The BTC-attacker chain is made by copying the entirety of the BTC-mainstream blockchain (so it looks identical), but uses attacker-nodes to selectively double-spend some coins. This is because the attacker selectively makes new blocks (and each block is the listing of transactions that have occurred in 10-minutes) in such a way that it benefits the attacker.
How does PoW solve this? All PoW coins say "Trust the longest chain". As long as you have 51% or more "honest" miners, then the BTC-attacker will "lose". The BTC-attacker needs 51% of all computing power on the chain to possibly beat this "Trust the longest chain" heuristic. As such, PoW solves the trust issue, but at devastating cost to the environment.
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PoS on the other hand, doesn't seem to solve the problem at all. How does one determine the difference from "ETH2.0-mainstream" vs "ETH2.0-attacker" chains? PoS kinda-sorta says 51% of all stakes need to agree upon the chain, and then the stakes determine the longer chain. However, the attacker seems like it could very easily create 51% of the stakes on the attacker-chain. So we're left with two chains, both seemingly valid from within their blockchains, but no real way to determine which one is the attacker-chain.