Cryptocurrency thread

[Bearcat-Doug | 5,104]

2 hours ago, Brickman said:

@Gloves did you lose some sort of bet? I keep thinking OptOut is talking to himself with your user icon.

I'm glad that I wasn't the only one that was confused!

[OptOut | 8,879]

Oof... We got another one... Apparently there's this thing called Celsius Network, which is basically like a bank where you can store various cryptos in order to earn interest and the like. So, like they are holding hundreds of million dollars of other people's Bitcoins and whatever, and all of a sudden they aren't honouring withdrawals...

I think the short story is they were gambling with borrowed money, basically all the money their customers have deposited with them, and just straight up lost now that the crypto market has tanked. So, basically everyone is shitting bricks trying to get their money out of the exchange, which is impossible because withdrawals have been suspended, and meanwhile Celsius themselves are transferring hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin, Ether and whatever else OUT of their own network, presumably to try and liquidate it and get out with the bag...

This is a real nasty one, no joke, they straight up robbing people at this point! 

[Bearcat-Doug | 5,104]

Here we go again.

[Bearcat-Doug | 5,104]

4 hours ago, OptOut said:

Oof... We got another one... Apparently there's this thing called Celsius Network, which is basically like a bank where you can store various cryptos in order to earn interest and the like. So, like they are holding hundreds of million dollars of other people's Bitcoins and whatever, and all of a sudden they aren't honouring withdrawals...

I think the short story is they were gambling with borrowed money, basically all the money their customers have deposited with them, and just straight up lost now that the crypto market has tanked. So, basically everyone is shitting bricks trying to get their money out of the exchange, which is impossible because withdrawals have been suspended, and meanwhile Celsius themselves are transferring hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin, Ether and whatever else OUT of their own network, presumably to try and liquidate it and get out with the bag...

This is a real nasty one, no joke, they straight up robbing people at this point! 

Things definitely aren't looking good.

Edited June 13, 2022 by Bearcat-Doug

[OptOut | 8,879]

17 minutes ago, Bearcat-Doug said:

Things definitely aren't looking good.

 

They were promising ridiculous rates of interest and bonuses and all sorts of things to get people to leave their money with them, just like Luna did with their whole thing. Honestly, when people are offering you 15%, 20% interest, at some point you have to ask where is all that money supposed to be coming from?

I am starting to genuinely feel so bad for all the poor desperate people getting their lives ruined by this bullshit. Even if people should have known better before they threw all their money into it, it's getting to the point where it's not just a couple idiots getting screwed, it's like tens, hundreds of thousands of normal people getting bled dry. It's really sickening, honestly, it's not a joke any more!

[Californication | 1,477]

Yay! I'm sure there will be a new episode of Scam economy coming out b/c of this.

[a3quit4s | 4,090]

A fool and his money are soon parted?

[Bearcat-Doug | 5,104]

Basically me all morning.

[Bearcat-Doug | 5,104]

[Bearcat-Doug | 5,104]

On 5/11/2022 at 10:00 AM, DoctorEncore said:

Crypto crash hasn't hurt me much since I changed my investment strategy. All my coins are in liquidity pairs with USDC and USDT, so I'm still earning interest and only suffer about half the damage when the paired crypto drops.

How are you doing now? With the bitcoin prices dropping as low as they are, I'm almost back to where I was two years ago when I started. I had actually considered selling a full coin back in November near the ATH, but I talked myself out of it, which isn't looking so good right now.

[Californication | 1,477]

 

[Bearcat-Doug | 5,104]

Bitcoin reclaimed $20k and held onto it overnight, but I'd feel better if it could string a few green days together and start to trend back upward.

[RH | 4,890]

I’m calling it.  It’ll bottom between $8,000-9,000.

[Bearcat-Doug | 5,104]

9 hours ago, RH said:

I’m calling it.  It’ll bottom between $8,000-9,000.

It's just over $21,000 this morning, so hopefully it keeps going in the right direction. 

[jonebone | 1,307]

13 hours ago, RH said:

I’m calling it.  It’ll bottom between $8,000-9,000.

I think it'll find support around $10k eventually.

[Bearcat-Doug | 5,104]

On 6/20/2022 at 9:41 PM, RH said:

I’m calling it.  It’ll bottom between $8,000-9,000.

 

22 hours ago, jonebone said:

I think it'll find support around $10k eventually.

I'm not sure if it will get that low. The miners are already losing money at the current price. I think (and hope) that $17,500 last week was the bottom, otherwise things could really get bad.

[RH | 4,890]

21 minutes ago, Bearcat-Doug said:

 

I'm not sure if it will get that low. The miners are already losing money at the current price. I think (and hope) that $17,500 last week was the bottom, otherwise things could really get bad.

 

On 6/20/2022 at 9:41 PM, RH said:

I’m calling it.  It’ll bottom between $8,000-9,000.

Yes, and even my estimates could be high if the disparity between cost and profitability of mining gets too high.  I pointed out years ago over at BTT (I mean, maaaaany years ago) that the major flaw with POW coins is that as hash-power and mining competition increases, unless there is a much quicker algorithm for scaling difficulty, all coins will have a point-of-no-return where once mining becomes to expensive vs. the pay-off, people will either start to shut off their miners or switch to more profitable coins.

This will have a net-negative effect toward the coin because if difficulty cannot adjust fast enough to match the loss of hashing power, the coin may never recover.  BTC already has ~10 minute block times by design.  I don't know how confirmation standards have worked out in the past 6-7 years, but 6 confirmations was the recommendation.  This obviously meant, on average, that it will take 60 minutes for transactions to fully verify.

However, if the value of the coin had stabilized at a high price (let's say the +40k price range was what was needed for miners to be profitable) anything below that, especially for extended periods of time, will cause miners to stop mining on the network.  Not everyone will switch at once, but if a rapid accelerated number ever happens, a "tipping point" may occur where to many people stop mining to reasonable support the network.

Many of the early supports (and I think Gavin was even one of them) balked at this idea, but it's not illegitimate.  Everyone wants to mine BTC so long as it's profitable or hopefully profitable in the near/mid-future.  However, once that hope dwindles, people start shutting off other miners and the can dramatically affect network viability and confidence.

So yes, if you're paying attention to the charts and seeing where support is, if it break through another major support barrier, we might be reaching that critical point of no return.  I don't think the hashing network will die, entirely, but if it gets down to 15-20% of what it was, it might take a while for the hash-power to properly re-adjust to the timing and that too will affect the greater collective psyche toward BTC and it could get quite ugly.

[Californication | 1,477]

40 minutes ago, Bearcat-Doug said:

 

I'm not sure if it will get that low. The miners are already losing money at the current price. I think (and hope) that $17,500 last week was the bottom, otherwise things could really get bad.

The issue is that the system does not generate any value and cannot sustain itself without more incoming money. You guys sound like you actually believe in this stuff and I am not sure how you get past that fundamental problem.

[a3quit4s | 4,090]

On 6/20/2022 at 9:41 PM, RH said:

I’m calling it.  It’ll bottom between $8,000-9,000.

This would still be great for something that was worthless 10 years ago. Cryptobros crying because they got in at $40k+ wtf did you think was going to happen lol

[guitarzombie | 923]

People never learn 

[MiamiSlice | 3,089]

42 minutes ago, RH said:

 

Yes, and even my estimates could be high if the disparity between cost and profitability of mining gets too high.  I pointed out years ago over at BTT (I mean, maaaaany years ago) that the major flaw with POW coins is that as hash-power and mining competition increases, unless there is a much quicker algorithm for scaling difficulty, all coins will have a point-of-no-return where once mining becomes to expensive vs. the pay-off, people will either start to shut off their miners or switch to more profitable coins.

 

This is a bit reductive. You are missing a couple factors. First, mining cost is not constant across the network. Some miners have a lower cost due to having access to cheaper energy sources, cheaper hardware, cheaper infra, lower taxes, etc. The "losing money due to current price" does not apply to everyone. Some people are still making money while other miners may be losing money. Second, as some miners leave the network due to not being able to shoulder the cost, the difficulty for other miners goes down. With fewer miners on the network, the chances of successfully mining blocks and capturing rewards goes up for the remaining miners on the network. And with less demand for mining hardware, a lot of the secondary costs go down too (like cost of graphics cards). So the profitability adjusts accordingly for the remaining miners on the network. Competition among miners does scale with price across secondary markets. The difficulty does adjust in this way, without requiring a network wide difficulty adjustment in code. So I think this issue is a bit overblown. 

[RH | 4,890]

5 minutes ago, MiamiSlice said:

This is a bit reductive. You are missing a couple factors. First, mining cost is not constant across the network. Some miners have a lower cost due to having access to cheaper energy sources, cheaper hardware, cheaper infra, lower taxes, etc. The "losing money due to current price" does not apply to everyone. Some people are still making money while other miners may be losing money. Second, as some miners leave the network due to not being able to shoulder the cost, the difficulty for other miners goes down. With fewer miners on the network, the chances of successfully mining blocks and capturing rewards goes up for the remaining miners on the network. And with less demand for mining hardware, a lot of the secondary costs go down too (like cost of graphics cards). So the profitability adjusts accordingly for the remaining miners on the network. Competition among miners does scale with price across secondary markets. The difficulty does adjust in this way, without requiring a network wide difficulty adjustment in code. So I think this issue is a bit overblown. 

But I don't think it is.  My main point is that though this can largely be true, if difficulty doesn't adjust fast enough on sharp enough falls, the loss in compute-power can create a spiraling affect.  Other coins had considered thoughts along my own.  This is why some use much more dynamic difficulty calculations and some coins, historically, either updated difficulty ever few blocks, or they replaced the algorithm with on that scaled with "Time since last block", so that if they expected 2 minute block times, but if they reached a block going on 10 minutes, the expected difficulty could be decreased.  I can't recall the efficacy of those mechanics because even back in 2013-2017. there were many, many, many new coins being created with adjustments to the hashing algorithms, difficulty settings and, of course, many other "features".

Cost might go down for miners and I am very well aware that costs are not the same for everyone.

My main point (and unfortunately, I never had the math chops to create a functional expression for this) is that when a coin escalates in value AND mining matches the expectation of price vs. cost to mine, there is certainly an "invisible line" where once it's breached, to many miners will shut off their hardware to support the network.  I don't know what that is, but non-BTC coins have definitely hit that chasm.  The biggest BTC supporters believe that will never happen, but BTC is at the greatest risk because it has the greatest value AND it has one of the longest adjustments between difficulty recalculations.  And another data point that had supported this ideology is that even back in 2015-2016 when I was paying way to much attention to waaaay to many graphs is that during major drops in price, rarely did hashing power drop enough to for difficulty to almost ever have a readjustment going down.

This might sound like a positive, but the problem is that it just shows that the tipping point was never reached.  However, at some point if mining costs your X dollars (even in the cheapest environments) due to compute costs, and prices drop to X/n (where n is the magical tipping point), you may see a quick, massive loss of miners because they can't afford to add and upgrade hardware.  The picture is that the loss is a curve and is not linear.  When prices go down, the curve is mostly flat for a while, but when prices dive to far, and stay that way for to long, the loss of hash-power can, and theoretically should, accelerate.  If the price of the coin never picks back up in time, hashing might slide off that curve and never recover.

Again, this has happened with many dead coins.  BTC is nothing special beyond being the first of it's kind and, therefore, it's the one that gets the most positive attention.

[OptOut | 8,879]

People talking about passing bitcoin on to their grandkids in their will 50+ years from now... How likely is it that bitcoin will really still be around all those years from now?

I'm rewatching Breaking Bad and laughing at how shitty all their phones are, and that was barely TEN years ago! People seriously betting on bitcoin staying relevant and valuable in 2070? Pshhh...

Only one coin GUARANTEES you to hold its value till then. Only one. 

[Californication | 1,477]

48 minutes ago, MiamiSlice said:

This is a bit reductive. You are missing a couple factors. First, mining cost is not constant across the network. Some miners have a lower cost due to having access to cheaper energy sources, cheaper hardware, cheaper infra, lower taxes, etc. The "losing money due to current price" does not apply to everyone. Some people are still making money while other miners may be losing money. Second, as some miners leave the network due to not being able to shoulder the cost, the difficulty for other miners goes down. With fewer miners on the network, the chances of successfully mining blocks and capturing rewards goes up for the remaining miners on the network. And with less demand for mining hardware, a lot of the secondary costs go down too (like cost of graphics cards). So the profitability adjusts accordingly for the remaining miners on the network. Competition among miners does scale with price across secondary markets. The difficulty does adjust in this way, without requiring a network wide difficulty adjustment in code. So I think this issue is a bit overblown. 

All of that is after the fact that the money to pay for miners expenses has to come from some where and the system does not generate any type of revenue. This eco-system is essentially functioning like wiley coyote running off a cliff and not looking down. 

It's amazing how many educated people are getting bamboozled.

Edited June 22, 2022 by Californication

[RH | 4,890]

2 minutes ago, Californication said:

All of that is after the fact that the money to pay for miners expenses has to come from some where and the system does not generate any type of revenue. This eco-system is essentially functioning like wiley coyote running off a cliff and not looking down. 

Brevity is not my gift.  ^^ THIS ^^