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Bitcoin Bloodbath Nears Dot-Com Levels as Many Tokens Go to Zero
Bitcoin's meteoric rise last year had many observers calling it one of the biggest speculative manias in history. The cryptocurrency's 2018 crash may help cement its place in the bubble record books.
Down 70 percent from its December high after sliding for a fourth straight day on Friday, Bitcoin is getting ever-closer to matching the Nasdaq Composite Index's 78 percent peak-to-trough plunge after the U.S. dot-com bubble burst. Hundreds of other virtual coins have all but gone to zero -- following the same path as Pets.com and other red-hot initial public offerings that flamed out in the early 2000s.
While Bitcoin has bounced back from bigger losses before, it's far from clear that it can repeat the feat now that much of the world knows about cryptocurrencies and has made up their mind on whether to invest. Bulls point to the Nasdaq's eventual recovery and say institutional investors represent a massive pool of potential cryptocurrency buyers, but regulatory and security concerns have so far kept most big money managers on the sidelines.
The story sounds alarming but I would like to know the take of Soylentils.
Also at Quartz, CNBC, Fortune, and Cointelegraph.
See also: El-Erian calls bitcoin a buy if its price falls below $5,000
Bitcoin Hasn't Lost Its Way – It's Just Getting Started
All the Ways You Can Lose Your Bitcoin
Op-Ed: Challenge of Mining Centralization Unveils Bitcoin's Elegant Design
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Sunday July 01 2018, @11:41AM
Sorry, that's not relevant. I agree that there is an economic model of a free market that has idealized behavior for its traders, including perfect knowledge. But in the real world we accept information asymmetry, as well as the above failure of traders to act fully rational from our viewpoints, as necessary aspects of real world free markets. Instead, the primary characteristics of a free market are simply freedom from meddling and interference as AC noted in another reply.
A lot of people are stock market traders. What makes a stock market trader truly serious? Merely, the size of their investments. The same goes for truly serious cryptocurrency traders. And while luck plays a modest role, knowledge particular to the market (and to a considerably lesser extent that "well"-educated thing) will be quite relevant to becoming truly serious traders no matter what the market is.