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Bitcoin Bloodbath Nears Dot-Com Levels as Many Tokens Go to Zero


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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.

 
 

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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.

“You’ll have to see the market reverse before you see” institutions pile in, Peter Smith, chief executive officer of Blockchain Ltd., which introduced a crypto trading platform for professional investors on Thursday, said in an interview on Bloomberg Television.

Bitcoin declined as much as 4.2 percent to $5,791.19 on Friday, the lowest level since November, according to Bloomberg composite prices. It traded at $5,860 as of 8:52 a.m. in New York, down 59 percent for the year and heading for a second-quarter loss of 14 percent. Other coins including Ether and Litecoin slumped more, while the combined value of tokens tracked by CoinMarketCap.com declined to $236 billion. At the peak of crypto-mania, they were worth about $830 billion.

While it was difficult to find fresh catalysts for Bitcoin’s drop on Friday, hacks at two South Korean exchanges and a regulatory clampdown in Japan have weighed on sentiment in recent weeks. Regulators around the world have stepped up scrutiny of cryptocurrencies on concern that they’re a breeding ground for illicit activity including money laundering, market manipulation and fraud.

Lesser-known tokens have been hit the hardest. Dead Coins lists around 800 that are effectively worth nothing, while Coinopsy puts the tally at more than 1,000. Fewer than 4 percent of initial coin offerings raising from $50 million to $100 million were successful or promising, according to a March analysis from ICO advisory firm Satis Group.

Bitcoin may not go to zero, but it’s “very much” a bubble, Robert Shiller, the Nobel laureate economist whose warnings about dot-com mania proved prescient, said in an interview with Bloomberg Television’s Tom Keene on Tuesday. Last year’s Bitcoin surge was “not a rational response,” he said.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-29/bitcoin-falls-below-5-900-to-wrap-up-a-gloomy-2018-first-half?utm_source=yahoo&utm_medium=bd&utm_campaign=headline&cmpId=yhoo.headline&yptr=yahoo

 

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  • 4 months later...

lol how can they still call bitcoin a bubble after all the air has been let out ha ha ha, now is the perfect time to buy in.

 

Every market has cycles, cryptos are currently at a cycle low  ..... Like it or not crypto is the future ........ 

 

It may go a little lower ...... but then it won't and everyone will be saying "who could have predicted that" 

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  • 3 weeks later...

Bitcoin skids to a 13-month low, nearing $5,000

  • The world's largest cryptocurrency is now down 18 percent this week, falling 5 percent Monday to its lowest level in more than a year.
  • Other major cryptocurrencies ethereum and XRP dropped 10 and 5 percent respectively.
  • Bitcoin is now down more than 30 percent since last Thanksgiving, when it gained house-hold name status and became a common topic around dinner tables.

The world's largest cryptocurrency dropped to its lowest level in more than a year on Monday.

Bitcoin hit a low of $5,165.24, bringing its losses to more than 18 percent in the past seven days and more than 62 percent this year, according to data from CoinDesk.

The digital currency began stumbling last week after months of relative calm. Bitcoin had been trading in the $6,400 range, a break from its volatility earlier this year, for the majority of October as the rest of global markets sold off. The cryptocurrency is now down more than 30 percent since last Thanksgiving.

 

Its epic rise started right after the American holiday last year, as the cryptocurrency gained its status as a household name and became a common topic around dinner tables. Bitcoin first topped $10,000 at the end of November last year and was worth almost $20,000 ahead of Christmas, mostly driven by retail investors.

The rapid run-up also coincided with the introduction of a bitcoin futures market in December. Peak prices lined up with the day the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, or CME, introduced bitcoin futures trading on Dec. 17. The Chicago Board Options exchange, or CBOE, opened a futures market a week earlier. Until futures existed it was extremely difficult, if not impossible, to bet on the decline of bitcoin prices.

On Monday, both of those bitcoin futures hit their lowest level since they were introduced. Bitcoin CME futures fell as low as $5,015 while bitcoin contracts on the CBOE dropped to $4,990.

Other major cryptocurrencies were mostly lower this week and have fared even worse than bitcoin this year. XRP, the second largest by market capitalization, fell 5 percent Monday while ether dropped more than 10 percent, according to data from CoinMarketCap.com. Roughly $40 billion has been wiped off the entire cryptocurrency market capitalization in the past week, and was around $172 billion Monday.

Analysts attributed bitcoin's continued sell-off to technical levels and stop orders in the market kicking in after bitcoin fell below $6,000.

"The next logical level of support is at $5,000 but if that doesn't hold, the next logical support level isn't until $3,500," eToro analyst Mati Greenspan said in a note to clients Monday. "With all the falling prices lately, this definitely fits the definition of a buyers market."

BTC.CB=_chart.1542637335595.jpeg

Others pointed to a split in the cryptocurrency bitcoin cash. That digital currency split into two versions last week — "Bitcoin ABC" and "Bitcoin SV" — which analysts said added to uncertainty in broader crypto markets.

U.S. regulators made good on promises to regulate non-compliant cryptocurrency projects last week. The Securities and Exchange Commission announced its first civil penalties against crypto founders Friday as part of a bigger regulatory and legal crackdown aimed at abuses and outright fraud in the growing digital currency industry.

SEC Chairman Jay Clayton said earlier this year that all cryptocurrencies aside from bitcoin and ether constitute securities and "if it's a security, we're regulating it."

The cryptocurrency tumble also comes after fresh warnings from European Central Bank Executive Board member Benoit Coeure last week, according to a report from Bloomberg News. Coeure called bitcoin "a combination of a bubble, a Ponzi scheme, and an environmental disaster," at a Bank International Settlements in Basel.

"Bitcoin was an extremely clever idea. Sadly, not every clever idea is a good idea," Coeure said. "In more ways than one, bitcoin is the evil spawn of the financial crisis."

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/19/bitcoin-skids-to-a-13-month-low-nearing-5000.html?__source=yahoo|finance|headline|story|&par=yahoo&yptr=yahoo

 

 

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Bitcoin for payments a distant dream as usage dries up

 

LONDON (Reuters) - The use of bitcoin for commercial payments has dropped dramatically this year, even as the original digital coin starts to fulfill one of the basic features of any payment currency: stability.

The value of bitcoins handled by major payment processors shriveled nearly 80 percent in the year to September, data from blockchain researcher Chainalysis shows. That suggests the cryptocurrency is struggling to mature from speculative asset to a serious alternative to state-issued money.

Months of relative calm in bitcoin prices after the wild swings of last winter had fueled hopes it would become widely used for payments, its intended purpose.

But its collapse in use as a payment currency has instead left big finance and crypto insiders eyeing better technological infrastructure to help bitcoin take off as a way to pay.

"There would have to be a stability requirement if it is to become another form of money," said Joni Teves, a strategist at UBS in London.

"But one thing that would take bitcoin into the mainstream is scalability -- is it able to process the value or volume of transactions that money tends to do?"

The blockchain technology, where all bitcoin activity is recorded and validated, can only process a fraction of the transactions per second that major credit card companies can. That renders its mass use impractical.

Bitcoin still endures torrid swings in price, as this week's 30 percent plunge shows. For a spell last month, though, the cryptocurrency was more stable than U.S. stocks.

Graphic: Bitcoin volatility falls from February - https://tmsnrt.rs/2PA9yVj

Despite that growing stability, the value of bitcoin payments collapsed to $96 million in September from a December high of $427 million, the data from Chainalysis shows.

The firm surveyed 17 bitcoin payments processors, including Atlanta-based BitPay, one of the biggest. Most merchants that accept bitcoin do not do so directly, instead using intermediaries like BitPay to covert bitcoin to fiat currencies.

Comprehensive data on bitcoin used for payments is patchy, as trades with other currencies tend to be included along with its use for commercial payments.

That said, separate figures for individual payments processors reflect the downward trend. At Vancouver-based Coinpayments, for example, incoming and outgoing transactions slumped by more than half between January and October, according to blockchain analysis site OXT.

Coinpayments did not respond to requests for comment.

"Bitcoin payments processing is seeing a slow but consistent decline," said Lex Sokolin, global director of fintech strategy at research firm Autonomous Next, of the data on Coinpayments.

FIRST DECADE

Through its first decade, Bitcoin has attracted a mix of investors, some convinced that it can reshape global finance by displacing traditional means of payments and others attracted by rapid gains that pushed it close to $20,000 in December.

It has since lost three-quarters of its value, falling below $4,500 on Tuesday, burning businesses along the way that had hoped to profit from growing investor interest.

Chip designer Nvidia Corp , for example, saw its shares fall sharply last week after it blamed disappointing results on unsold chips piling up after the cryptocurrency mining boom evaporated.

Bitcoin's relative stability this year has nevertheless raised expectations that its payments use by both individuals and companies will spread.

"The lack of volatility is a good step in the right direction that starts to make it viable for some of the non-retail use cases," said Zeeshan Feroz, UK CEO of Coinbase, one of the biggest cryptocurrency exchanges.

But both mainstream financial firms and cryptocurrency entrepreneurs say stability is not enough.

To gain traction, bitcoin needs to be faster and cheaper, they say. Clearer rules on an asset that has vexed financial regulators across the world would also help to give users a sense of legitimacy, UBS's Teves said.

LIGHTNING NETWORK

While coordinated regulation remains far off, some developments designed to address the so-called "scalability" problem -- how many transactions per second the bitcoin network can handle -- are underway.

Though in its infancy, the lightning network -- code that can be added to the bitcoin blockchain designed to make payments faster and cheaper -- is growing in use and capacity.

 

The network this week reached a record 4,101 "nodes" or computers that run its software, according to data aggregator 1ML, a rise of more than a quarter since August.

Lightning is popular, users say, because it allows users to send money to one another instead of having to complete time-consuming transactions on the blockchain.

"Lightning solves some of bitcoin's scaling issue," said Ed Cooper, who oversees cryptocurrencies at fintech startup Revolut. "It's getting payments into the wild, into the bitcoin network.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bitcoin-payments-distant-dream-usage-dries-124105660--sector.html

 

 

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Bitcoin extends slide below $4,500, new 2018 low

Bitcoin tumbled as much as 10 percent on Tuesday to below $4,500, bringing the world's best-known cryptocurrency's losses to 30 percent within a week as a selloff in digital currencies intensified across the board.

Other cryptocurrencies also skidded sharply, with Ethereum's ether losing 10 percent and Ripple's XRP down 13 percent in a largely sentiment-driven slide.

The latest move lower started this month after a period of relative stability, with prices of bitcoin having hovered around the $6,500 mark for several months.

"The euphoria has died and prices have consolidated with lower lows and lower highs. A lot of people have lost interest," said Fawad Razaqzada, an analyst at Forex.com.

Tuesday's falls coincided with broader drops in financial markets. European shares weakened following a big fall on Wall Street.

As well as a general decline in investor confidence in the value of cryptocurrencies, some traders have also blamed the recent drop on fears that a "hard fork" in bitcoin cash, where the smaller coin that split into two separate currencies, could destabilise others.

Bitcoin was trading on Tuesday at $4,354.20, its lowest level on the Bitstamp exchange since October, 2017.

Bitcoin has now lost about 75 percent of its value since peaking in December.

A regulatory clampdown on cryptocurrency trading in early 2018 and a drop in investor interest has sent people scrambling for the exit.

Cryptocurrency advocates say price volatility is to be expected, and that the need for virtual currencies which operate outside the mainstream banking system will outlast any short-term price falls.

The second and third largest cryptocurrencies, XRP and ether, were trading at $0.4451 and $133 respectively on the Luxembourg-based Bitstamp exchange.

According to industry tracker Coinmarketcap.com, the total market capitalisation of virtual currencies is now below $150 billion, down from around $800 billion in January.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bitcoin-extends-slide-below-4-084433184.html

 

 

 

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