Because it’s a rigged market and easily manipulated because it’s unregulated.

The same reasons it’s run in the past...essentially the same reason for boom and bust cycles in normal markets.

That statement doesn’t make sense. The dynamics of open markets with open trade data that make spoofing difficult (e.g. the stock exchanges) are very different than a rigged market.

So not the same reason for boom/bust cycles at all.

>The dynamics of open markets with open trade data

Well the mortgage data was available, but no one looked into it until they did, and even then the smart money bet against the market...yet everything remained AAA rated for years despite the known toxicity, turns out the ratings were rigged also.

It’s pump and dump schemes all the way down, public markets/crypto markets it make no difference. There isn’t an economist alive who doesn’t say the stock market is significantly overvalued at this time and yet...historic highs remain, until they don’t.

>> historic highs remain, until they don’t.

As someone who started a 401k fresh out of college in 1988, this fear will be in the back of my mind until convert my entire portfolio into bonds. Probably in a few more years it'll begin.

Rigged how? Isn't a major point of blockchain its unriggability?

The price is easily manipulated due to the low liquidity of the BTC market. The blockchain itself is irrelevant when discussing trading/price manipulation.

Correction: low liquidity of the majority of cryptocurrencies/tokens. BTC has by far the best liquidity among the cryptocurrencies.

Still very low compared to normal markets, I would think.

Yes.

S&P 500 E-mini futures have a notional value of roughly $147,000 right now, and on average, 1-2 million contracts change hands daily.

On average, about 35 billion dollars of SPY, a single S&P 500 ETF is traded daily.

It's hard to find accurate BTC average daily volume numbers, but probably somewhere between 1 and 10 billion dollars daily.

So yes, bitcoin is an extremely thin market compared to the market depth of 2 extremely liquid assets, both of which pale in comparison to the 550 billion USD daily volume of the treasuries market.

BTC does have the tightest bid/ask spread of pretty much any asset that is traded, as a percentage of the asset's value. It's typically a penny to a few cents on the major exchanges, which is a few thousandths of a percent.

so is market cap

Best != good.

i guess you need to define what "good" means in this context

Blockchain is absolutely riggable, that’s what a famed “51% attack” is, but that’s not what we’re talking about.

Very little blockchain activity happens “on chain”, and absolutely none of the buying/selling to and from other currencies (including USD) does, because thats not possible. Instead most activity happens on exchanges, which hold onto coins for the user and track account balance in a SQL database just like a traditional exchange. Only if a user moves between exchanges or takes possession of their own coins (a rare occurrence) does an on chain transaction happen, otherwise the rest happens in a SQL database somewhere.

These exchanges are absolutely full of straight up fraud, with some analysts claiming up to 95% faked trade volume. Most exchanges trade on their own account, sometimes badly, and the seediest didn’t even require that you create 2 accounts to wash trade. In this case the on chain transactions aren’t rigged, but the price sure is.

Note: these are the exchanges that also famously get robbed (or “robbed”) and go bankrupt with their clients money. Examples famously include Quadrigacx, Mt. Gox, and others.

> Blockchain is absolutely riggable, that’s what a famed “51% attack”

that sounds a bit FUD-dy. 51% allows you to make a double-spend, not "absolutely rig" the blockchain. even with 100% hashrate you won't be able to spend bitcoins without having a private key.

51% attack means you own the chain and can submit a new chain and miners will happily accept it since you are now the majority

yes but miners(nodes) will only happily accept valid chain. so no spending of coins you don't own.

Yikes, crossing into personal nastiness is not cool and will get you banned here. Please don't do that! Please do review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

If another user broke the guidelines (such as by accusing you of shilling) and we missed it, you're welcome to let us know by emailing [email protected]. Or by simply flagging the comment, which usually brings it to a moderator's attention.

I have no idea how what I said was nasty or personal, unless if describing past experiences and personal wishes are against the rules. I’ve reported plenty of things they’ve said to me, I believe some of them got modded away, and I’m expressing an interest to not engage with them again over the same things. How is that personally nasty?

Let me try to explain. The main thing is: if you're combining personal language with pejoratives, your internet comment is likely to come across as a personal attack, unless you find a way to explicitly show that you don't mean it that way. That is not always so easy, so it's safer just not to combine personal language with pejoratives in the first place. By pejoratives I mean words like "negative", "bait people", etc., but also grammatical constructs like "I'm not going to X with you just so you can Y" and "If you want to X, find someone else", which carry a reproachful charge.

In the case of that particular comment, your use of hyperbole intensified the effect. "I’ve had enough negative experiences with you for one life" is the sort of thing said by lovers who are about to become exes. Ditto for "I’m not going to chat with you just for you to call me an X again", and so on. This language is way, way too intense for an internet forum disagreement. If you go there, then on a meta level you're communicating something much more personal than the format calls for. Even if the other user did treat you unfairly in the past, you end up positioning yourself as the one who is most out of line, and your comment is likely to strike most readers the way it struck me.

It seems that we have wildly different definitions of what pejorative means. I am describing my experiences, their actions, and my wishes. I’m not labeling them as a person or describing them in intrinsic ways. If saying “you did X to me” or “I don’t want Y” is pejorative I’m not really sure what to tell you.

If I’d said “you’re an X person” or “you’re Y”, I would understand. But I didn’t do that.

I would also like to point out that my complaint about them interpreting my words in bad faith, a pejorative according to you, was exactly what they were doing in that comment, as they literally made up a weak argument on my behalf and then shot it down. (I also must complain about the FUD bit, which I’d argue is similar to calling me a shill).

Next time I’ll just flag and move on I guess, but I genuinely do not understand what you’re on about here.

low volume means price can be relatively easily manipulated.

rigged market is one argument. another is that price discovery is still in process, it's still a relatively new commodity, there's as much reason for it to go up as there is to go down. bull run of 2017 was no different from one in 2013 and 2010 before that - there's no strong argument to say 2017 was the last one.

Blockchains have a 3-way mechanism of value, security and adoption, which are also strongly tied to network effects. The value somewhat follows the square of the number of users. That's why the strongest will get stronger, in value, security and adoption.

Obviously the market value is based on speculation which tries to predict the future development, and is also strongly affected by the current mood of the markets. That's why there has been a constant increase in value and in addition cyclical 'bubbles'. Currently it seems that the market is starting an another 'bubble cycle'.

There isn't enough users and security for all blockchains to be valuable.