Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Bitcoin

Bitcoin's 10-Minute, $1,800 Plunge Wednesday Shows Its Volatility (siliconvalley.com) 153

An anonymous reader quotes Bloomberg News: Bitcoin soared as much as 39% this week to $13,852, the highest since January 2018. But it hit a brick wall around 4:30 p.m. New York time Wednesday, plunging more than $1,800 within about 10 minutes. Moments later, prominent cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase Inc. reported a system outage, which was resolved after an hour. Swings continued Thursday, with the coin anywhere from down 7.3% to up 4.8%... Volatility in Bitcoin is near the highest levels since early 2018, when the bubble was bursting. Analysts said this was likely a sign of things to come. It was just last Saturday that the price of bitcoin surged past $11,000 -- less than 24 hours after rising past $10,000. (Right now it's within $50 of $12,000.)

But another Bloomberg article notes that the price of Bitcoin tends to spike on weekends (when the traditional stock exchanges are closed), and that those spikes since just the beginning of May accounted for nearly 40% of Bitcoin's price gains in 2019. One pundit tells them it "takes a lot less to move the needle when everyone's sleeping or it's the weekend."

That rang true to Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Mike McGlone. "It is more Asia and those more sophisticated traders picking time and paths of least resistance to profit," said McGlone. "I fully expect the leveraged money professional-types are utilizing all tools to spark moves and profit from."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Bitcoin's 10-Minute, $1,800 Plunge Wednesday Shows Its Volatility

Comments Filter:
  • One crazy spike in Bitcoin is no worse than all of the others. It's always been volatile, and it always will be. It's a dumb get-rich quick scheme for suckers, is all it is. There's no other use for it.
    • by Rei ( 128717 )

      At least there was an actual market for tulips.

      • Tulips never bubbled. Tulip futures did.

      • I've been watching this latest bubble quite closely.

        It's completely unlike the previous one because the price is going up exponentially like before but the trading volumes are tiny, ie. it looks exactly like a small bunch of people are trading bitcoin between themselves at ridiculous prices.

        Conclusion: Bitcoin is now almost 100% scam. A handful of people own most of the bitcoins out there and they can inflate the price to whatever they want by creating sock puppet accounts and moving 'money' between their w

  • by Rei ( 128717 ) on Saturday June 29, 2019 @04:39PM (#58847278) Homepage

    ... associated with being an investor in libertarian internet play money.

  • Not A Currency (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Cmdln Daco ( 1183119 ) on Saturday June 29, 2019 @04:47PM (#58847312)

    It's fine to call them 'cryptocoins' but they are not a currency. A currency is a unit of stable value that people use as a means for monetary exchange. When John the butcher buys sides of beef to cut up and sell in his Meat Shop, he counts on the currency they trade in being a stable value so he knows what to charge for steaks.

    These blockchain coins are volatile speculator's adventure items.

    • So you donâ(TM)t consider money in Venezuela to be currency? Itâ(TM)s had much worse declines.

    • Re:Not A Currency (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ClickOnThis ( 137803 ) on Saturday June 29, 2019 @08:26PM (#58847962) Journal

      It's fine to call them 'cryptocoins' but they are not a currency. A currency is a unit of stable value that people use as a means for monetary exchange. When John the butcher buys sides of beef to cut up and sell in his Meat Shop, he counts on the currency they trade in being a stable value so he knows what to charge for steaks.

      These blockchain coins are volatile speculator's adventure items.

      Other posters in this thread have it right: stability is not a requirement for something to be a currency. Many currencies are not stable. What makes something a currency is that it be a medium of monetary exchange in common use. [wikipedia.org]

      I once heard a currency specialist on NPR comment about Bitcoin. He said that it was a collective hallucination that a particular abstract concept has a value. He then immediately pointed out that all currencies are collective hallucinations that a particular abstract concept has a value.

    • It's fine to call them 'cryptocoins' but they are not a currency. A currency is a unit of stable value that people use as a means for monetary exchange.

      Stability is not a defining characteristic [wikipedia.org] of a currency. It's a nice feature in a currency but currencies routinely are unstable as a store of value. In fact no currency is entirely stable as a store of value - the only question is how quickly it fluctuates in relation to the value of other commodities. Even the mighty US dollar goes up and down in value over time - just much more sedately compared with bitcoin.

      When John the butcher buys sides of beef to cut up and sell in his Meat Shop, he counts on the currency they trade in being a stable value so he knows what to charge for steaks.

      Go to Venezuela or any other country experiencing hyper-inflation and let me know how that th

      • In Venezuela, their currency has failed. The people no longer have any trust in it. This proves my point. Sure, you can still call Venezuela's money a 'currency' if you want to be pedantic. You can call Magic The Gathering cards a currency if you like, and are at a flea market table at the right convention.

  • Isn't that headline like a near tautology? Why not write something like: Bitcoin is bitcoin! Or: Volatility is Volatility!

    Pretty much means the same thing doesn't it?

    • They should make it so bitcoin can only be purchased with bitcoin. Clearing one transaction takes at least an hour so volatility on the scale of 10 minutes would be wiped out!
  • by Jeremi ( 14640 ) on Saturday June 29, 2019 @05:29PM (#58847438) Homepage

    Everybody has their finger poised on the "sell" button so that they can be the first out the door when the bubble inevitably bursts again. In the meantime, they buy more, in the hope that other people (who are bigger suckers than they are) will drive up the price a bit further and make them a quick speculative profit.

    This doesn't look like a currency, it looks like the home edition of some dystopian game show. Or perhaps Amway, without bothering with the pretense of any actual product.

    • Or perhaps Amway, without bothering with the pretense of any actual product.

      Turns out people are more than happy to buy and sell nothing so long as it's the original nothing , there's a only a limited supply of nothing, they believe they can turn around and sell their nothing to the next person for more than they paid for it, and they get a number showing them exactly how much nothing they own.

      That's cryptocurrency, in a nutshell.

  • A fool and his money are soon parted.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      If that is the most interesting comment you have to make, then kindly fuck off. In what world does repeating two hackneyed phrases qualify as an intelligent comment that other people might find interesting?

      Hold yourself to a higher fucking standard. "Fool's gold", "A fool and his money are soon parted". Pathetic.

      Nobody cares about your shitty uninformed opinion about something that you barely understand. If you don't make more of an effort with your posts, everybody will just assume that you're a fucking id

  • Because most crypto-currency closely follow bitcoins pricing (and some are even pegged), wouldn't it be very easy for a large wallet holder to manipulate the price of cryptocurrencies by doing a bunch of back-and-forth sales to accounts under their control?
    • by Kaenneth ( 82978 )

      see: Roger Ver

      Fortunately, BTC to too big for any one person to control (Unless Satoshi rises from the dead)

      • Over 1/3 of Bitcoins are held in less then 2000 wallets, perhaps "too big for any one person" but not for a small group
  • Ha ha ha ha, err...I mean, "Oh no, that's terrrible.

    Helen Lovejoy: "Won't someone think of the miners?"

  • Since we are now at the beginning of the next recession thanks to Trump [msn.com] I expect the price of bitcoin and gold to go up as nervous investors move their money out of risky stocks.

    The people buying them now are funds groups who are starting to see the data I posted above and looking for safe bets as employers start to cut back on production and employees.

    • no, that link you provided had nebulous crap such as

      "âoeI think weâ(TM)re probably already in a recession, but I think [it will] probably be a run-of-the-mill affair, which means real GDP would decline 1.5% to 2%, not to 3.5% to 4%, you had in the very serious [past] recessions,â

      so maybe we're probably in something that likely won't be dire, sorta.

      Very amusing.

  • by Beeftopia ( 1846720 ) on Saturday June 29, 2019 @07:28PM (#58847812)

    Some attributes of bitcoin:
    * Scarce
    * Hard to produce
    * Property right is guaranteed
    * Immune to counterfeiting

    But unlike gold, it's not indestructible. It's only as persistent as your storage medium.
    Bank balances are relatively persistent - if there's an anomaly, the bank will probably fix it.
    Also, there's the 51% attack possibility.

    Remember that guy who tossed his hard drive, and when bitcoin skyrocketed, it would have been worth like 75 million? He was searching through a landfill but never found it?

    What about bitcoin versus paper? Again, which is relatively more stable? Hard drive or paper? Both are subject to destruction. If cash burns there's no recourse. One would have to consider how bitcoin fares relative to paper

    • by beckett ( 27524 )

      Remember that guy who tossed his hard drive

      that was a good story back in 2013, but some things have improved

      SOP these days is to secure a wallet stored on the blockchain with a seed phrase, which is converted into a seed integer, to a deterministic wallet that can recreate the wallet's key pairs. with this type of storage, you can lose your phone or hdd, and still recover the 'lost' bitcoins if you have the seed phrase, and the wallet software.

      not perfect by any stretch, but is secure enough for the

  • Bitcoin is censorship resistant transfer value - Bitcoin is still volatile, yes, but this is not an issue. The volatility will be lower with an increase in the market capitalization.
    • Volatility is the issue.

      The volatility has been very sensitive to various governments' actions against bitcoin in the past few years.

      Bitcoin is not a reliable store of value and is very illiquid. It's volatility makes it useless for anything but gambling.

  • For Bitcoin, this is an expected level of volatility. I've actually been much more intrigued by the relatively low volatility buildup over the last months. That's an unusual situation for BTC and might even presage a big boom: normally low volatility hangs around before bubbles start. If the bubble is just starting now that volatility has returned, we could easily see prices hit $30k or more over the coming months.

  • A bunch of people bought up vast amounts and some of them and some robots likely trade but why should you?

    For transactions at least transaction costs had gone down before but .. really why there too? Could even use the useless Facebook one for that.

    Normal people don't participation in BTC so whatever they decide to make the price doesn't matter.

  • As said recentely it is simply a pump and dump : https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org] I hate to link myself, but when I see stuff like this with BT, or similar scheme with penny stock, usually it is hyping stuff to pump it up, then a few days later a dump just happens. From the high on 26th june to the next day it lost 1800 or nearly 15% of its price. "Bloomberg article notes that the price of Bitcoin tends to spike on weekends" the spike was on a wednesday. But if you look at the BTC price https://www.coinbas [coinbase.com]
    • > I hate to link myself, but when I see stuff like this with BT

      Arent you jumping the gun a bit here with that pat on your own back?

      With the dump still being a 300% rise, perhaps you should wait until it actually falls in price enough to actually call a dump.

      Or at least wait until the price is lower than the amount it was when you posted your prediction.

  • If you have the right expectations for a completely unregulated gambling device:

    https://www.zerohedge.com/news... [zerohedge.com]

    Someone made good gains on some 'coins'. Everyone should get in now while its still low.

  • by ayesnymous ( 3665205 ) on Sunday June 30, 2019 @08:02PM (#58852450)
    Wall Street used the futures to take Bitcoin down from $19K to $3K, at which point they had loaded up enough and let it go back up. They can't control the price on the weekends when futures don't trade.
  • This is bitcoins fundamental issue as a medium of exchange and why coins like DAI have had such a huge success

Every nonzero finite dimensional inner product space has an orthonormal basis. It makes sense, when you don't think about it.

Working...