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Bitcoin

Bitcoin Surges To Record Above $69,000 (bloomberg.com) 181

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
Bitcoin surged to a record as demand from new US exchange-traded funds and a looming reduction in the token's supply growth fuel a breathtaking rebound in the original cryptocurrency. From a report: The largest digital asset rose as much as 2.5% to $69,191.95 as of 10:10 a.m. Tuesday in New York. Bitcoin has climbed about 62% so far in 2024, outperforming global stocks and spreading optimism across the digital-asset market.

In an ironic twist, Bitcoin owes much of its resurgence to a regulator long-viewed as hostile to crypto: the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC approved spot-Bitcoin exchange-traded funds in early January after suffering a legal defeat last year in its attempt to reject them. The move has widened the mass-market accessibility of Bitcoin, helping the crypto sector to turn the page following a bear market in 2022 and a string of subsequent bankruptcies, including the implosion of Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX exchange.
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Bitcoin Surges To Record Above $69,000 More

Bitcoin Surges To Record Above $69,000

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  • please /. stop advertising blockchain-as-currency (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tirnacopu ( 7327590 ) on Tuesday March 05, 2024 @11:27AM (#64291168)
    It's gone way past a nerd curiosity, and became toxic eating the savings of millions and consuming immense amounts of energy we need for other stuff. There are valid uses for the blockchain idea, this particular implementation is flawed and used as a ponzi scheme - thus the request to stop talking about it. I would grade talking about cryptocurrencies in an uninformed context for non-professionals as dangerous as continuously publishing methods of cooking meth at home.

    • Re:please /. stop advertising blockchain-as-curren (Score:5, Insightful)

      by haxor.dk ( 463614 ) on Tuesday March 05, 2024 @11:57AM (#64291282) Homepage

      >"It's gone way past a nerd curiosity, and became toxic eating the savings of millions"

      That it's reached a new all time high would indicate that it has only "eaten the savings of millions" if these people investing in it bought high and sold low, ie. fad-driven buying followed by panic selling.

      You know where that thing also happens every damn year?

      The mainsteam stockmarket.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        That it's reached a new all time high would indicate that it has only "eaten the savings of millions" if these people investing in it bought high and sold low, ie. fad-driven buying followed by panic selling. You know where that thing also happens every damn year? The mainsteam stockmarket.

        Stocks pay dividends. For every dollar someone made on bitcoin, someone else lost a dollar. Bitcoin is a zero sum game. Stocks are capital investments aimed at actually producing money. That's a massive difference you are entirely ignoring.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by NFN_NLN ( 633283 )

          > Bitcoin is a zero sum game. Stocks are capital investments

          I'm assuming he doesn't know about Calls/Puts or derivatives all of which are a large part of the stock market today.

        • AC is copy-pasting the usual anti-btc talking points. Most stocks either pay no dividends, which has been a waning tendency over the past half-century anyway, or they slash their promised dividends during bad years, relying on the investor hope to make it up on price growth alone over the following year, which is pretty much what keeps the stock market up, combined as of late with loose monetary policy and with the insane hopes for AI payoff, which are both gobsmacking phenomena to behold from the viewpoint

          • relying on the investor hope to make it up on price growth alone over the following year

            lol "but the stock market does it tooooo"
            Hold onto your money folks, stay away from these people.

      • if these people investing in it bought high and sold low

        There are two sides to every trade.
        Every. Trade.

        Every share sold high is a share bought high. Which end are the least financially literate "investors" on? Crypto markets are robbing them blind.
        It's not rocket science. Are the financially illiterate taken advantage of on real markets too, yes, absolutely.

        Here's where we differ.
        Me: The finically illiterate should stay away or be protected from predatory investment schemes, or from markets entirely, but I can't stop them from an unfortunate learning opportunit

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by avandesande ( 143899 )
      I don't hold any bitcoin, but WTF? How high does it have to go before you admit you were wrong?

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Powercntrl ( 458442 )

        I don't hold any bitcoin, but WTF? How high does it have to go before you admit you were wrong?

        I've been one of the naysayers about cryptocurrency for awhile now and I've never said you can't make money when the odds are in your favor. Problem is, it's a zero-sum game, so your gains are all ultimately someone else's loss. It is mathematically impossible for cryptocurrency to make every investor rich. You're welcome to play if you're feeling lucky, and it helps to already be wealthy enough such as if you do end up on the losing end, you won't have to sell your house and eat ramen noodles for the re

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

          That's probably not true. On the positive side, bitcoin could produce value, and does in some circumstances. The main ones people have found are pretty niche though, like buying drugs and money laundering.

          On the other hand, bitcoin costs quite a lot of useful resources to make. It's basically designed so that it costs very nearly as much to make and use as its current value.

          So over all, bitcoin has been quite strongly negative sum.

          • The "investing" aspect is zero-sum. It's basically wealth redistribution for libertarians, which means the money mostly flows upwards (if you're wealthy, you can risk greater sums for greater potential rewards, and HODL through a bear market without worrying that your nest egg might go *poof*).

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

              It doesn't change anything because you put "investing" in front of it. When you invest in something you input capital, expect that capital to be used productively, and expect more capital than you put in to be eventually returned. Bitcoin is no different.

              If you expect that bitcoin is eventually going to end up a wash you're as mistaken as someone who buys into a company that's operation consists solely of lighting cuban cigars with $50 bills.

              • Does wasting a small country's worth of electricity cause to Bitcoin suck more value out of the economy than it creates? Probably. But the average person dumping money into Bitcoin doesn't believe they're directly contributing to that, they're just thinking they'll be able to turn around and sell it later for a profit.

              • Bitcoin is part of our negative-sum economy in which natural resources are consumed faster than they are replenished. We are already using too much energy given the pollution resulting from our generation mix, not enough renewables. Bitcoin makes this worse, by accelerating this conversion of natural capital (things we can't live without) into financial capital (things we can't live without only because of rent seekers.) It is just another way to hasten our doom, and accomplishes none of the stated goals ex

    • Its not Ponzi, it Greater Fool (Score:4, Interesting)

      by drnb ( 2434720 ) on Tuesday March 05, 2024 @02:46PM (#64291906)

      It's gone way past a nerd curiosity, and became toxic eating the savings of millions and consuming immense amounts of energy we need for other stuff. There are valid uses for the blockchain idea, this particular implementation is flawed and used as a ponzi scheme

      Not Ponzi, that's a different scheme. Bitcoin is a plain old Greater Fool scheme. Greater Fool is based on plain old price speculation and unwarranted enthusiasm. Ponzi required a payout of dividends or interest, which is fraudulently paid to older investors using the deposits of newer investors. Bitcoin offers no interest or dividends, just price changes.

      thus the request to stop talking about it. I would grade talking about cryptocurrencies in an uninformed context for non-professionals as dangerous as continuously publishing methods of cooking meth at home.

      The popular press talking about Bitcoin rapid price surges, record high after record high, is great. It's a signal to sell. Even if you don't sell near the top the eventual 75% correction leaves a lot of room for buying back in at a much lower level.

      You can gamble sensibly. You don't have to bet it all on wild speculation. Yes one should be able to afford to lose that initial investment. But then one should also be wise enough to sell if up, take back that initial investment, and buy back in with only the profits. Play the game with only past winnings. Don't be afraid to take out some profits to enjoy a little when future boom/bust cycles occur.

      Now for a retirement account, I'd be conservative. 49.5% S&P 500 index, 49.5% auto adjusting Targeted Retirement Date fund, 1% Bitcoin, delay investing using periods of record highs, look for a 4+ month plateau. If and when Bitcoin doubles take initial investment out. If you are patient over a multiyear timeframe, the ongoing hype will likely get you there. Note the expectation of ongoing hype is the heart of the Greater Fool scheme. But hey, Greater Fools are easier to find for Bitcoin than Tulips. Now apply this initial investment into self directed stock picking. Invest only in companies where you thoroughly understand their business and customers, otherwise just put the initial investment into the S&P 500 index bucket. Note thoroughly understand is not watching a 5 min presentation by a financial TV personality. It's probably something involved in your daily life, but that's just a starting point, you still have to read the financial statement. For me, as a software developer and Mac and Linux user, it was Apple and Red Hat. Use the bitcoin profits, equivalent to initial investment, for future playing the Bitcoin market, guessing tops and bottoms. Again, with corrections on the order of 75% not guessing the precise top and bottom can still be profitable.

      You can gamble sensibly. You don't have to bet it all on wild speculation.

    • Re:please /. stop advertising blockchain-as-curren (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 05, 2024 @05:13PM (#64292320)
      You've just perfectly summed up the US Dollar and the US military that backs it. This is why we need Bitcoin.

    • The Bitcoin bulls need sites like Slashdot to stir up FOMO and get people to keep buying at the top in order to keep the momentum going.

      This will all come crashing back down eventually, but not before we hear a few horror stories about people filling up their Retirement IRA's with crypto and losing millions.

  • But why? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by eggstasy ( 458692 ) on Tuesday March 05, 2024 @11:31AM (#64291186) Journal

    Bitcoin is completely useless and the fact something is finite doesn't mean it's valuable. My great-grandfather put all his money on land and nobody lives in former agricultural towns anymore. The land is worth shit.
    Gold is way overrated as well.
    I can't fathom what sort of idiots just want to park their spare million on obscure risky assets instead of letting a certified professional handle it. Blind faith and money laundering.

    • Re:But why? (Score:5, Informative)

      by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Tuesday March 05, 2024 @11:34AM (#64291194)

      I can't fathom what sort of idiots just want to park their spare million on obscure risky assets instead of letting a certified professional handle it. Blind faith and money laundering.

      "Idiots" who are hoping someone more gullible will come along and give them real money for these pretend assets.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Lehk228 ( 705449 )
      around ago it was great for buying drugs on the internet

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Ed Tice ( 3732157 )
        It has since been proven that BTC is a terrible choice for procuring black market goods on the internet. Now it has no uses.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Lehk228 ( 705449 )
          slashcode ate a part in brackets there should have read "around [statute of limitations plus a day] ago"

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by DarkOx ( 621550 )

      Really I don't buy it. I hope for your sake you still have that land; because I bet its exploded in value in the past few years.

      The average distance from work pre-pandemic to post went from something like 9 miles to 27. Now we know most retail/service workers did move further from their jobs so that means the professional class moved out even further. WFH seems here to stay with them.

      Our county in rural VA assesses property every 5 years. The new assessed values on undeveloped land and farm land are gene

      • If you hold land long enough -and- you're lucky / foresightful enough to buy in a good spot....

        One of my HS teachers was about 26 and worth $15m. This was many decades ago. When she and her brother were very young children, her mom bought oodles of land in nowhere for 25 cents an acre. 20 years later all that land was some where builders wanted to build. She wouldn't tell us how much her mom got but it was a lot more than she and her brother had and described mom's lifestyle of the rich and obscure. Sh

      • That'll reverse with time, but not because a bunch of old-school executives force everybody's butts back to the office. It's because of all the network effects that occur when people are actually in the same physical area. It makes my retch slightly, but the term "synergy" is absolutely applicable here. And the internet just can't quite duplicate the effects. The companies with larger numbers of people actually rubbing shoulders will have an advantage. This is why cities have been so successful for literall

    • Money Laundering and Ponzi Schemes (Score:4, Insightful)

      by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Tuesday March 05, 2024 @12:22PM (#64291414)
      our current batch of regulators are a combination of corrupt bastards (like Jerome Powell) or completely gutted by decades of court packing that prevent them from doing even the most basic enforcements.

      So what should have happened is that the FTC and DOJ come down hard on the money laundering and ponzi schemes, instead there's been barely anything on either front.

      Meanwhile the SEC has rules Bitcoin and crypto can be bundled into securities on the main stock exchanges. They've also more or less declared Bitcoin a commodity, meaning it's regulated by much weaker laws (in theory because it's safer).

      We'd need new laws, but the crypto scammers are profitable enough they've been buying off congressmen, so that ain't happening. Katie Porter out of California's been pushing for more regulation to protect consumers, but she's got a crypto backed super pac trying to shut her down for it.
    • If you have some worthless land, you'd like to get rid of, send it my way. Your two statements don't go together quite the way you might be thinking. Nobody lives in former agricultural towns anymore due to past economic restructuring. However, now that work-from-home has at least some permanency, lands that already have the infrastructure in place are ripe for redevelopment.

    • I can't do a whole lot with my $1 bills in my wallet either. They're hard to write much on because so much of them is covered in print already. Takes too many of them to heat a room if you resort to burning them for warmth. At the end of the day, they're just another odd sized piece of fancy paper. Same for a $5, a $10, a $20 or even a $100 bill.

      Yet, they're still valuable as currency because we collectively put faith in the *idea* they represent value for economic transactions.

      For that matter, even gold is

      • the collective acceptance of them as symbols of value.

        I get looked at funny for trying to explain how the economy is literally a giant game of make-believe.

  • They all see it coming (Score:5, Interesting)

    by CEC-P ( 10248912 ) on Tuesday March 05, 2024 @11:45AM (#64291230)
    I've been following crypto since 2011. Regardless of any other factors, it spikes before any presidential election. So does ammo and gun prices btw. It is a very reliable and predictable cycle and you can reliably make a lot of money every 4 years on it. This financial advice is not financial advice lol.

    This time around, it's bigger than normal. A LOT of large company owners are liquidating shares for cash with no publicly stated intention to use them for a specific purpose like another acquisition or retiring, etc. In a surely unrelated story, gold and silver are going up and getting hard to come by and it's not just because electric vehicles and chargers use more and more silver. You know, emergency foods kits are hitting record highs in demand too. I'm sure they're all unrelated. Better safe than sorry.
    • Are there any publicly-traded derivatives that I could buy (ideally puts) so that I can profit on the decline of BTC. I can't short an ETF as I'm allergic to the possibility of unlimited losses.

    • So does ammo and gun prices btw.

      The problem with buying up guns as an investment is that it's surprisingly difficult to sell a gun. Plus you're opening yourself up to legal liability if it turns out you sold one to someone with a record who then goes and shoots up a school.

  • Was it worth funding North Korea's nukes for it?

    • North Koreas nukes and all other bad things that that rogue nation produces has primary been funded through printing counterfeit currency of industrial nations, as well as producing large amounts of hard drugs sold on international black markets. A major part of the high valuation of hard drugs in the Pacific region is the US drug policies. Thus, the biggest real subsidy to NK nastiness is the US legal apparatus that creates the incentive to do so, not cryptocurrency, which is a very new phenomenon for a di

  • Just part of the repeating cycle (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nocoiner ( 7891194 ) on Tuesday March 05, 2024 @12:14PM (#64291364)

    All this means is that we're now back at the "pump" part of the "pump-and-dump" never ending cycle.

  • Nice! (Score:2, Redundant)

    by darth_borehd ( 644166 )

    Times 1000.

  • Back above $67K... finally (took long enough!) (Score:5, Interesting)

    by NoMoreDupes ( 8410441 ) on Tuesday March 05, 2024 @12:24PM (#64291418)

    Oh wow - so it took over 2 years just to get back to that level.

    Of course, as that AC keeps posting [slashdot.org], we're all still waiting for it to hit the promised $100K mark....by 2022 no less!

    But wait, that's not all [coindesk.com]:

    The world's largest crypto soared to $64,000 Wednesday before quickly reversing [read: crashed] to $59,000, CoinDesk data shows.

    this within the space of minutes!. This 'coin' can't decide which way it's going to swing.

  • Decentralized Ponzi Scheme (Score:3)

    by JustAnotherOldGuy ( 4145623 ) on Tuesday March 05, 2024 @12:49PM (#64291524) Journal

    There, I said it. All cryptocoins are basically Decentralized Ponzi schemes.

    • Actually, self-correcting decentralized Ponzi scheme. Rather than collapse, it creates a bunch of bag holders and continues on for the next round of fool*cough*investors.

      • As do nearly *all* investments in securities, one way or the other these days, given time. Or non-securitized commodities for that matter. Society at large is still holding the very big bag after the 2008 bust where not a single banker went to jail after the money of millions of citizens... "just went poof". Oopsie.

        Unsophisticated investors will always get burnt, be it on cryptocoins, stockmarkets, derivatives or real estate. The difference is that on cryptocoins, people have no-one to blame but themselves,

        • You're forgetting the most important rule of investing: "Past performance is no guarantee of future results."

          If all investments always go up given enough time, why not invest in Blockbuster Video? Or how about Sears? Radio Shack?

          You see, Bitcoin isn't the entirety of the stock market, it's only one security of many in the cryptocurrency realm. There is absolutely no law of investing which says people can't get squirrely at some point and bail on it for something else. You're betting not just on Bitcoin

  • And getting ready to dump.

  • Bitcoin's value? (Score:3)

    by methano ( 519830 ) on Tuesday March 05, 2024 @02:30PM (#64291852)
    I don't know a lot about the value of Bitcoin, but if anything good comes of it, I think we'll know pi to a lot more places. Is that right?

  • I just fundamentally don't understand the premise. And so very early on I chose not to participate.

    I've gone my way, they went another. And so it doesn't bother me to see these stories. I don't get upset at their successes, I don't revel in their failures. I don't begrudge anybody who wins, and I don't feel sorry for anybody who loses - or gets fleeced.

    I feel as invested in the story of bitcoin as I was when a cousin tried to get me to give them money to invest in Beanie Babies. I don't get it, so don't I a

    • Generally I agree/have the same sentiments, with the exception that all the crypto stuff has gotten its tentacles into the traditional finance stuff already, so it's no longer just confined outside of things that has the potential to affect the general/global economy. And I think there's probably enough levers already that can muck things up significantly.

      My concern is that if (or perhaps, when) this happens, it'll make things even worse than we've seen in the past (like 2008's "too big to fail" fiasco). So

  • Might want to wait until BTC holds that price (or higher) for a week or so before attempting salient commentary. The price has already crashed, and it'll maybe surge again a few hours after this post.

  • Economy in the toilet and everyone with spare cash is 'investing' in a useless currency, instead of new businesses!

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