The Price of Bitcoin Spiked 40% Friday Night (newsweek.com) 83
"The price of Bitcoin skyrocketed overnight, rising by nearly 40 percent from a recent low," reports Newsweek:
The sharp turn came as Chinese President Xi Jinping spoke highly of the decentralized technology on which the digital currency is founded, telling members of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee that the country should "seize the opportunity" of blockchain... China banned cryptocurrency exchanges in 2017, and Xi's comments are believed to be among his first to embrace blockchain technology so thoroughly.
The price of Bitcoin cracked $10,000 briefly Friday night, a symbolic but notable threshold the digital currency has not reached in over a month, at which point it had been enduring a steep sell-off. Xi's speech may have suggested to investors that a potentially expansive consumer base for cryptocurrency could begin to open, although other reporting has suggested that Bitcoin could instead face China as a competitor, rather than an open market. Mu Changchun, a deputy director at the People's Bank of China, said at an event sponsored by the China Finance 40 Forum in August that the country is "close" to releasing its own cryptocurrency. The bank has apparently been working on such technology since last year.
Bitcoin has had something of a volatile week, owed in large part to testimony delivered Wednesday by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whose company is seeking to develop its own cryptocurrency: Libra... Democrats on the committee were largely unsatisfied with Facebook's promises, and analysts have suggested that their lack of enthusiasm may have cast a pall over cryptocurrencies more broadly, contributing to a major sell-off of Bitcoin Wednesday. The price sank to its lowest in five months. Increased regulatory scrutiny of Libra was largely credited for the decline. However, recent events, such as Xi's speech and a potential "short squeeze," have reinvigorated interest in Bitcoin, even if the market for cryptocurrencies remains plagued with uncertainty.
The price of Bitcoin cracked $10,000 briefly Friday night, a symbolic but notable threshold the digital currency has not reached in over a month, at which point it had been enduring a steep sell-off. Xi's speech may have suggested to investors that a potentially expansive consumer base for cryptocurrency could begin to open, although other reporting has suggested that Bitcoin could instead face China as a competitor, rather than an open market. Mu Changchun, a deputy director at the People's Bank of China, said at an event sponsored by the China Finance 40 Forum in August that the country is "close" to releasing its own cryptocurrency. The bank has apparently been working on such technology since last year.
Bitcoin has had something of a volatile week, owed in large part to testimony delivered Wednesday by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whose company is seeking to develop its own cryptocurrency: Libra... Democrats on the committee were largely unsatisfied with Facebook's promises, and analysts have suggested that their lack of enthusiasm may have cast a pall over cryptocurrencies more broadly, contributing to a major sell-off of Bitcoin Wednesday. The price sank to its lowest in five months. Increased regulatory scrutiny of Libra was largely credited for the decline. However, recent events, such as Xi's speech and a potential "short squeeze," have reinvigorated interest in Bitcoin, even if the market for cryptocurrencies remains plagued with uncertainty.
That's what you want in a currency (Score:5, Funny)
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-BeauHD
s e n i o r i n h i g h s c h o o l
(Hey, gotta have fun sometimes.
-Rick
Central controll (Score:4, Interesting)
China will of course propose a centrally controlled block chain. That's not special to bitcoing, One would expect that any country would require this since otherwise you can't 1. controll the money supply (monetary poliicy) 2. prevent export of currency 3. detect illegal transactions 4. audit income for taxation. 5. prevent money laundering.
While many people see at least one of those as virtues, the simple fact is the most people don't as they like the way the system works now,
That said, and regardless of which side you are on, the central system will always be able to beat bitcoin, even without crimminalizing it. THe reason for this is inescapable. Bit coin is by neccessity expensive to transact. proof of work is requires. Bit coin requires as something inseperable from it's design that the cost of the proof of work scale directly with the magnitude of the transaction size. Or very roughly with the size of the capitalization. But a centralized system had no such requirement. THerefore it will ALWAYS be cheaper to scale a central system. ALWAYS.
Now there is one escape clause. A central system is not quite as secure. if the central keys leak it's possible, depending on the design for 100% of the captialization to be stolen. Hopefully they have a way to segment that risk so that it's really hard for all the keys to be stolen at once. But it could be a staggering disaster. It may be there is some zerotrust protocol that assures that can't happen but i'm ignorant on that point. But if it's not designed that way and the eventuallity does happen then everyone will lose faith, and bitcoin will dominate.
But the central system has a second advantage. Tethering. The country can make and destroy the coin to counter inflation or deflation. It's value can be assuredly redeemed if they want to set up that. so why would anyone buy an untethered coin that costs more to transact? It will be a legitimate store of wealth not a transaction vehicle. You can loan it and get interest on it.
Bit coin is doomed. it will however continue to exist since a large sector of china is a grey market and people do need to move money out of the country and hide it. Which is why people are speculating the value may rise. THe govt will certainly make it illegal if a central coin exists. And courts will be told to stop recognizing it's value making it unprotected by law.
Note: when ever I note that bitcoin's transaction cost has to scale with the transaction size someone always misunderstants me and lectures me that the cost of hashing is independent of the transaction size. Yes. But to avoid the 51% attack it MUST be the case that the cost of getting 51% is more than what could be gained by reversing a transaction. And that scales with (not equal to) the transaction size.
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It is important to bitcoin, the Government of China will create their own and guess what they will do to people that catch with bitcoin files, it wont be pretty, they will make sure their bitcoin totally dominates the market in China. That announcement is a real threat, likely someone did a pump and dump, pushed up the price, spread a lot of B$ and try to get out before the Government of China really cracks down. Before they blocked exchanges now they will tackle holders of the currency, illegal files and t
Re:Central controll (Score:4, Insightful)
I think it's important to note from this that the people holding/buying/selling bitcoin are basically speculators and there isn't that much volume going on at the moment. hence winnie the pooh making a statement vaguely about crypto something spiking it up.
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"The price of Bitcoin cracked $10,000 briefly Friday night, a symbolic but notable threshold the digital currency has not reached in over a month, at which point it had been enduring a steep sell-off."
That tells you all you need to know:
a) A whole month since it was that high? Wow!
b) Reaching that magic price caused a "steep sell-off"? I hear the sound of suckers being parted from their money.
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The buyer was the sucker getting parted from his money.
Even if you believe in the bitcoin hype, buying anything after a 40% increase in price is a bad idea.
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I mean, if you want a virtual currency that is centrally managed, tethered to a real-world currency, and can be taken away at the first sign of disobedience, just get a credit card.
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Only if you're exceptionally bad at implementing it. On any kind of ledger, if fraudulent transactions are posted, you can roll them back. This is particularly easy with central control because you don't have to get a whole bunch of people to agree (a la Etherium).
A central ledger, whether it's a block chain or not, also doesn't mean that the central authority
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Yes, much like share prices of all large companies, right?
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Yep. Both are purely speculative.
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Re:That's what you want in a currency (Score:5, Insightful)
You want a currency whose value is massively influenced by a speech.
It's much worse than that. 50%+ of Bitcoin is owned by a dozen people. They can manipulate the price at will using sock-puppet accounts.
All these ups and downs aren't because of "speeches", the idiots who think they're going to get free money from bitcoin don't listen to speeches.
The ups and downs are because the Bitcoin mafia are watching those "speeches" and using them to reel in more suckers.
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And which currencies aren't, exactly? I get that the fluctuations are smaller, but accouncements of political changes often do impact currencies.
That's what the whole trade war thing is about anyway.
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Afterwards (Score:5, Insightful)
Bitcoin hit US$10071.47 at 26 Oct 19 02:00 UTC. In the next 12 hours, it lost 10.5% of that. It is still far too unstable for use as money.
Re:Afterwards (Score:5, Funny)
Nonsense! The value of Bitcoin is perfectly stable. Instead, it's all the fiat currencies, mercantile commodities and speculative investments that are wildly fluctuating in unison every day. Which just goes to prove that Bitcoin is the only reasonable store of value.
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Still waiting for the Coinye revival (Score:3)
Pegging it's value against the popularity of a rap icon.
Now that was a coin far ahead of it's time.
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Tron. You want to buy lots of tron.
Why is that not useful? (Score:2)
In the next 12 hours, it lost 10.5% of that. It is still far too unstable for use as money
If you bake in a 15% plus padding to accepting bitcoin transactions, and convert to "real" money right away, you have a lot of upside with the occasional downside. Most days it stays around the same and you'd get a nice 15% bonus and you could still weather some decent swings.
Privacy comes at a price, especially these days.
Re: Why is that not useful? (Score:2)
This makes total sense (Score:1)
I guess someone finally told Xi that if everything was blockchain there would be hidden transactions, because you know that if you're a Chinese citizen you'd only be allowed to use China government signing.
so bitcoin is a penny stock (Score:2)
bitcoin is like a penny stock trading on nothing but hype and hooey, with massive crashes leaving bagholders, until the next round of suckers buy into it.
what a toxic waste pile, would not touch with ten foot pole
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Yes, that's what the suckers are still thinking - they'll be the ones to beat the system.
The thing is: Did you manage to sell? The dozen people who own 50%+ of Bitcoin will flood the market at the exact same time as you're trying to reel in an idiot.
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hahaha, lotsa luck pal, give it a whirl and let us know how it worked out for you. cash in that retirement plan and go for the gold!
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You sound like somebody who has missed the boat. If you truly believed what you've just said, you wouldn't even read this story, let alone comment on it.
I have always found bitcoin news fascinating, like watching a slow motion train wreck. It's both spectacular and sad.
One difference though - I'll still get on a train, because despite the occasional wreck, they are still inherently one of the safest ways to travel, and offer some of the best passenger miles per kWh - but I will never "invest" into a crypto currency, or acquire them for regular purchases because I just don't feel right about using a currency that costs a significant proportion of its value i
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Funny you'd use rainforest analogy. Most the rainforest is still there, and the damage done by what's been burned so far pales in comparison to the pollution made by bitcoin calcs, it's much worse.
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Guess again.
I'm someone very entertained with the show, and enjoy watching the stupidity.
Who watches the Watchers (Score:5, Insightful)
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actually, cash has been traceable for a very long time. Right now there aren't many points where it is traced in practice, just the banks recording them, but that could be changed almost overnight.
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"Cash is not traceable." (Score:3)
It's only a matter of time before those little plastic security strips in bills $20 and up get something like RFID. In the name of anti-drug and anti-terror efforts, of course.
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It's only a matter of time before those little plastic security strips in bills $20 and up get something like RFID. In the name of anti-drug and anti-terror efforts, of course.
Just think of the children!
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It's only a matter of time before those little plastic security strips in bills $20 and up get something like RFID. In the name of anti-drug and anti-terror efforts, of course.
Conspiracy theory: they already have. They just respond to an unusual frequency, so no one has noticed.
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Meh. Just microwave them. Or keep them in a metal box if you're going to do something shady.
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my your brain gets trapped in a very little box, doesn't it.
It doesn't have to be just banks tracking it, and it doesn't have to be just when it is spent that it is tracked. It could be tracked everywhere and constantly whether used or not; again, trivial to implement with low cost tech too.
Instability is the name of the game (Score:1)
Pall has opposite effect (Score:3)
analysts have suggested that their lack of enthusiasm may have cast a pall over cryptocurrencies more broadly
I don't think the article writer and analysts understand something very fundamental here.
That is, the more a pall the (in theory) government and corporate sanctioned Facecoin has, the MORE valuable truly Free, uncontrolled crypto-currencies are.
In fact it could well be the "pall" that is the reason it rose generally. People can see an official and sanction cryptocurrency is a long way off if ever, so get the last free currency instead.
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Re: Pall has opposite effect (Score:2)
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Get the last free cryptocurrency? There are an essentially infinite number of them and people create new ones every day. There will never be a shortage of cryptocurrencies, that's the fundamental problem.
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You can't do that on anything else, for instance on Ethereum running a full validating node require ultra high-end hardware, and the software is fully under the authority of the company: Ethereum. The software is not auditable, and you must always trust a third part
more than cyber currency (Score:1)
The block chain can be used for more than just cyber currency. Anything that needs a transaction ledger, any kind of currency, goods or services could be kept track of in a block chain. Just because he's spoken out in favour of a distributed ledger block chain doesn't mean he's suddenly open to hard to trace (not impossible) cyber currencies.
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Anything that needs a transaction ledger, any kind of currency, goods or services could be kept track of in a block chain
It also needs to be a situation where no one trusts anyone (otherwise it would be cheaper to just have the trusted entity keep track, like we do now with real estate transactions), and it also needs to be a situation where the solution is to make the ledger public.
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It also needs to be a situation where no one trusts anyone (otherwise it would be cheaper to just have the trusted entity keep track, like we do now with real estate transactions)
“Cheaper” is quite the understatement. Bitcoin collectively wastes the energy resources equivalent of a small country.
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SELL.... fuck (Score:2)
Bitcoin - the new parasite (Score:2)
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In a cash-less society criminals, along with anyone else wanting to perform any kind of transaction "off the books", will be forced to resort to crypto currencies such as bit-coin.
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I think Satoshi is the FBI. They created a currency where every transaction is logged, publicly, and convinced idiots that it's "anonymous." The system has in-built limits in the form of the proof-of-work system so it doesn't get too big. It can even be used by criminals to "move money in or out of the country" without endangering any actual currency. Best yet, all they had to do was publish a paper and the anti-government wonks did all the work. Bitcoin is tailor made for criminals, except for the easy as
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Sure it can.
Even if it were possible to do so, and the FBI wasn't running the mixer, most people don't. And you only need to screw up once, because your transactions are recorded forever.
Still sounds like a good deal for law enforcement.
Translation (Score:2)
"The sharp turn came as Chinese President Xi Jinping spoke highly of the decentralized technology on which the digital currency is founded, telling members of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee that the country should "seize the opportunity" of blockchain"
Translation: We think we can manipulate the hell out of Bitcoin for our own benefit and hurt the West at the same time. Get the stupid Gweilo Millenials to buy in.
The price of BTC in USDT (fake money) (Score:1)
Morons (Score:2)
Ooh it spiked (Score:2)
Coins are doomed to worthlessness. (Score:2)
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The Gold Standard is buried;Welcome negative rates (Score:3, Insightful)
Bitcoin is just the Gold Standard 2.0; using technology. Bitcoin is an ultra-hard monetary asset; Harder than Gold itself!
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You have a low time preference, and you don't want to be a debtor. Gold or Bitcoin are your only option!
Freedom of choice is what matters!
Whew! (Score:1)
For a while there I was sweating like a Kenny Rogers rotisserie chicken.
In other news... (Score:2)
...the roulette wheel in Ceasar's palace landed on red. (/s)
It's time... (Score:2)
...for another pump and dump cycle.
Tulips...get yer TULIPS!
news sources (Score:1)