‘Tis just a seasonal dip! Watching the Bitcoin fire from a safe distance — what just happened

 

The price started collapsing this morning. I’m not going to be so foolish as to call it, but looking at the reactions from horrified December buyers of Bitcoin, I am saying “I told you so” — the only actual money people will get out is actual money that other people put in. And the exits are congested.

This crash didn’t just happen — it appears to have been provoked by a pile of fake sell walls, such as a large spoof order at $12,000 that disappeared as soon as the price approached it, and another at $11,000. If this isn’t our friend “Spoofy”, it s a close relative.

(This sort of glaring manipulation is ridiculously illegal in real securities trading — but welcome to Bitcoin.)

 

https://twitter.com/Bitfinexed/status/953380378844258304

 

The cryptocurrency “market cap” showed itself as complete illusion, a bad and useless marketing number that you should never pay any attention to. What happened to all that value? The answer is: it never existed.

(That altcoin bloodbath is not quite as bad as it looks. Altcoins tend to track the price of Bitcoin, rather than the US dollar, because almost all of them can only be traded for other cryptos — which is why CoinMarketCap charts altcoin prices against BTC as well as USD. But this is why there’s not really such a thing as a “diversified portfolio” of cryptos.)

 

 

The CoinDesk price chart page had trouble coping:

 

 

The day of the 2013 crash, it was Reddit /r/bitcoin that pinned a link to a suicide hotline to the top of the forum (per chapter 4 of the book). This time, it was /r/cryptocurrency. They didn’t actually pin it to the top, but it was the top unpinned post:

 

 

Around 22:30 UTC, another 100 million Tethers showed up, after 150 million yesterday — every single one no doubt backed by a genuine US dollar in a bank account:

 

https://twitter.com/Bitfinexed/status/953393873983803404

 

The tethers pushed the CoinDesk average price back over $11,000. So I’m sure it’ll all be fine by tomorrow!

(Remember that the “price” is a made-up marketing number — “$11,096.68” means “$11,000 plus or minus $1,000 or so.” The low on Binance was $9,035.00, for example. Though that was actually Tethers, not real dollars.)

 

 

Right now I’m listening to CryptoWorldNews on Twitch, which has its greatest listener numbers of all time, helped by @ButtCoin linking them. It’s the financial equivalent of listening to very detailed and erudite pseudoscientists, talking about how to correctly align your chakras with your body thetans while Mercury is in retrograde. “This is a bloodbath today … and also the best time to buy!”

 

 

 

 



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8 Comments on “‘Tis just a seasonal dip! Watching the Bitcoin fire from a safe distance — what just happened”

    1. The price on your portfolio is (was?) still higher than on Jan 1 – are you sure you can get that price for your entire portfolio (“worth”) in this thin market?

      1. Yeah I am pretty good for liquidity, except for two coins – Ardor was not trading on Bittrex for weeks but just came back today, and I run XMCC masternodes that there is no way I could liquidate all at once but the ROI is super spectacular because I bought in early so I would rather take rewards.

        Been a good bounce since my first post anyway, the rumours of crypto death always seem to be exaggerated, so far.

  1. Jesus christ how do people fall for this? I used to occasionally look into bitcoin here and there, and popped my head back in after hearing of another crash.

    “Hey guys you can’t exchange for actual money but we have our fake money with a total 1:1 exchange rate with USD Aka money you can pay rent with! We can just make more of this money anytime so there are no issues whatsoever!” how. how. how.

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