I like Preston- It's always good to have thoughtful, polite crypto skeptics around. However, I think by any objective measure his predictions haven't proven to be very accurate.
For instance, he congratulates himself on predicting a Bitcoin price collapse in his September 2017 essay, which is a time at which the price was only $3000, far less than half of what it is now. (His thoughts on the ICO madness fared better)
That said, he is right that the Tether/Bitfinex situation is relevant to the current price runup, though the fact that tether has only about 2% the total market cap of Bitcoin needs to be also taken into account.
It’s the volume not market cap that matters. Market cap is a bullshit metric for cryptocurrencies. If I issue a million tokens and sell you one for a dollar, I’ve created a million dollar coin instantly in terms of market cap.
I can see your argument... But would you agree that if the tether folks tomorrow say "Sorry, we're bankrupt, your tethers are worthless now LOLZ" that a max of 2.8 billion dollars would be lost by tether holders, i.e. equivalent to the market cap of tether? (I mean, you can go down the road of arguing that losses could be greater than that due exotic leverage and/or derivatives trading techniques that enter into this and allow for greater losses, but that seems a bit specious)
This article doesn't help itself by showing a bias against crypto and particular exchanges.
A few things:
- The scales of the first bitcoin bubble and the last one are very different. The last one created, literally, billions of value for the holders.
- A defunct bitcoin exchange can not "create" billion of dollars of wealth. That does not make any sense. People who bought early and sold when the price appreciated didn't make money from an exchange who went bankrupt but from people who bought higher.
- Bitfinex seems to be doing fine from a price perspective. The premium is gone. The AG doesn't seem to be interested in driving them out of business but rather regulating them.
- The era of the single exchange is gone. Bitfinex is a key player but there is no player holding the whole market. There is also an active off-line trading market.
- A bubble is usually the result of a FOMO-consumer market.
Some people are going to hate crypto and that's fine. But my guess is that crypto will stay here for longer and will mint more millionaires.
Whilst Bitfinex itself may not be a key player, arguably the Tether Stablecoin, which it controls , is.
From Coinmarketcap, Tether volumes are regularly second only to Bitcoin's , and many exchanges who have difficulty getting fiat banking arrangements, make use of it, to get funds into an out of their exchanges.
Loss of Tether would be a very serious blow to those exchanges.
So what's the risk? Well Tether's original proposition was that it was 1:1 backed with actual US dollars held in specific isolated accounts.
What we know now is that they "lent" $850 million to Bitfinex, to cover for funds that Bitfinex no longer has access to as their banking partner (crypto capital) has taken those funds and not delivered them to the appropriate customers.
There is now the risk that iFinex (who control both Bitfinex and Tether) could be technically insolvent, unless they can somehow cover that loss, or get their frozen/missing funds back...
> There is now the risk that iFinex (who control both Bitfinex and Tether) could be technically insolvent
There seems to be a sizable amount of confusion about the difference between insolvency and illiquidity in the tether-watching community.
The fact that they loaned out funds to Bitfinex means that their balance sheet is fine (they are solvent), but if everyone redeemed their tether tomorrow, they would have to delay the payout, which is a liquidity issue.
In short: Liquidity issues are solved by capital injections (loans or equity sales, much like the BFX LEO), but solvency issues are not.
That seems to assume that Bitfinex can repay them, which is in no way clear.
If Bitfinex can't cover the loss, they're insolvent. If everyone redeemed their Tether, it's not a delay it's "you're not getting all of your money back"
As Bitfinex's finances are far from transparent, it's not clear if they're insolvent or not...
I don't think there is any confusion on definitions of insolvency, there just seems to be disagreement on whether there is any risk iFinex can get their frozen/missing funds back at all, not how long it will take to collect them.
> The era of the single exchange is gone. Bitfinex is a key player but there is no player holding the whole market. There is also an active off-line trading market.
You could have said the same for LTCM and government had to bail the market out!
That's true of all currencies. It's just a shared delusion that the coin or paper has any value. That in itself has value, as otherwise you left with bartering with specific goods that have value to the person you're trading with - a significantly less liquid market than the one featuring the shared delusion.
In that sense, there's nothing special about bitcoin. It's just another shared delusion, just with fewer believers. As long as there are believers, there is value. The stronger the belief, the greater the value.
“Some” does not equal “billions in value”. Spending the energy equivalent of several countries on transaction power equivalent of a medieval lender is not billions in value.
In no doubt are consumers expectations of cryptocurrency market adoption wildly over speculated but make believe? People who invest is cryptocurrencies are in essence shorting the current global financial system.
Widespread "belief" in currencies other than those tied to national institutions leads to weakening of the nation state and therefore the current global financial system.
These articles come in like clockwork every time Bitcoin's price moves upwards (or downwards, or plateaus... you get it) to the point I'd take all of them with a truckload of salt.
It's been over 10 years since Bitcoin came out and it's still here. It'll still be here long after most loud detractors (and supporters, for the matter) have moved on, whether it's $1 or $1 million per BTC.
It definitely will never go to $1 again. This would imply trivial rewards for miners and would destroy the network's security. A lot of people don't realize that Bitcoin is as much about incentives and game theory-based security as it is blockchain technology.
Since BTC's security is dependent on hashing power, and you need money to purchase hashing power and run mining machines, the floor must be high enough that rogue parties cannot easily perform 51% attacks. If the price were to dip to say, $100, then the incentives for miners to mine for new coin would dissipate along with it. It would cost more to mine a coin than a coin sells for on the market. Presumably, network hashing power would drop until profitability was met. Problem is, since all that idle hashing power would exist, there would be a feasible attack vector to take down BTC. I can't venture to guess where that imaginary floor is without some in depth research and analysis, but I would guess it's got to be at least $1K if not higher. And it will continue to rise as the network gets more valuable.
Right. OP predicted it would be around whether at $1 or $1M and this is no longer possible. The chain would die if it ever falls below a cheap attack price.
But, that's part of the reason holders have a vested interest in holding, and thus available supply on the market is restricted, and the price remains high. Game theory keeps the chain alive.
Yeah, and 10 years later there are still no use cases for butcoin except:
- moving money illegaly (even if some of it is with good intent)
- speculation
And yes. It’s not just the most loud detractors who’re moving away. The loud and not-so-loud supporters are either moving away or never starting the actual support (e.g., look up why Steam stopped accepting bitcoins).
FYI Preston Byrne is a longtime blockchain skeptic that crypto bears love to post. He made a big statement that $100 Ethereum was some sort of death knell to the cryptocurrency space, and it's at $185 currently.[0]
No one knows if crypto is going up, down, or sideways. But he does make cryptocurrency haters feel good inside.
> I haven’t made any predictions for awhile (seeing as my Bear Case for Crypto is playing out more or less exactly as described), but I will sound a warning today.
The bear case article the author links to spends 2/3 of its effort railing against Ethereum and ICOs. It's doesn't even lay out a proper bull case for Bitcoin itself. Instead it sets up a few Bitcoin-will-replace-the-state strawmen.
Bitcoin has a long history of being dismissed by those who don't understand it economically, technically, or both. The new article adds little to the discussion.
Bitcoin is a strange animal. It exhibits many traits of a Black Swan (an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalized after the fact with the benefit of hindsight.)
The switch to believe in its value happens suddenly in many people. It is difficult to make sense out out of its price movements. I am skeptical of any advice trying to rationalize its price movements.
Do your own diligence on how it works, your risk tolerance and stay long.
The great thing about publicly traded things with active markets is that if you have have real insight into their underlying structures and values that other people don't understand, you have an immense ability to personally profit. Anyone rambling online about how it's going to the moon, or it's a scam, or it's going to collapse are trying to affect sentiment not convey some deep understanding they already have.
If they really were confident in their predictions they'd have every incentive to sit there quietly and become wealthy.
As long as BTC doesn't have any practical real-world use besides buying drugs and speculation I don't see how anybody couldn't see the sudden spike in the exchange rate as a huge red flag. You're effectively buying into a pyramid scheme: you bet that there'll be enough people who will enter after you for you to make some money.
It shows that all those revolutionary blockchain projects over the past few years have amounted to basically nothing, the killer app still isn't there and BTC is as wild as ever.
You are describing a bubble, not a pyramid scheme. A pyramid scheme uses N people to pay for 1, and collapses when the supply of people runs out. There's no imagination that something's value is constantly increasing. A bubble uses one person paying extra to pay one other person, and collapses when people stop believing that there is a richer sucker.
It's odd that Mr. Byrne doesn't mention the ICO craze at all in contributing to the 2017 bull run in this post.
"ICOs and token sales became popular in 2017...By the end of 2017, ICOs had raised almost 40 times as much capital as they had raised in 2016..."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_coin_offering
This article makes perfect sense to me, and doesn't display an anti-bitcoin bias. What he is saying is that you should look at for warning signs at an exchange, such as a halt of USD withdrawals (in the case of MtGox) or the suspicions around Bitfinex and tether, and treat that exchange as unsafe. Back when MtGox was operating without USD withdrawals, it was still the most talked-about exchange, and many people kept putting their money into it, and didn't withdraw bitcoin from it into their own wallets.
> When someone does a bank heist USD doesn't get devalued
This is a bad comparison. If a bank experiences a sizable heist, their stock price will probably fall because shareholders eat dirt before depositors. Such explicit seniority doesn't exist in the cryptospace, however, so depositors would probably eat dirt alongside the exchange.
It's my understanding that the contingency fund was held in a cold wallet consisting entirely of BTC. If true, then that couldn't be the reason for the surge (but who knows).
It was flagged by users and rightly so, since an article about price fluctuations in Bitcoin is (a) not substantive, and (b) there have been loads of them.
This one was also flagged by users, and also rightly so. See (a) and (b) above.
In a world where crypto is everywhere, I think a lot more people would be into physical crime. You have no recourse to having everything stolen and the funds are harder to track.
We need more people like Preston in the space, more importantly people who can speak simply and plainly about both technical and game-theoretic aspects of blockchain projects.
As a supporter of the technology and more recently less so of the community that shamelessly keeps making outlandish predatory claims it still blows me away that HODL'ers can still be found on HN...
For instance, he congratulates himself on predicting a Bitcoin price collapse in his September 2017 essay, which is a time at which the price was only $3000, far less than half of what it is now. (His thoughts on the ICO madness fared better)
That said, he is right that the Tether/Bitfinex situation is relevant to the current price runup, though the fact that tether has only about 2% the total market cap of Bitcoin needs to be also taken into account.