bitcoin falls 99% in one day to 1 cent - 2011

bitcoin falls 56% - 2012

bitcoin falls 83% to $50 - 2013

bitcoin falls 84% to 12k - 2017

bitcoin falls ~50% to ~30k - 2021

"crypto is not looking good long term" - numerous people on hacker news every single time crypto is down.

I mean with that volatility idk what kind of usage it can get besides pure speculation.

So either way you're making the same argument as the "crypto is not looking good long term" people

Volatility isn't a virtue for a currency. It's fine for speculative financial vehicles that involve cryptography in some way, though. That vehicle might be driving to $0, though.

This crash has the sparkle of DeFi, which makes it more toxic. With the amount of leverage we're seeing peek it's head up, and the size of these yield farming ponzis, the fallout could finally breach the barrier into real-world finance.

Bitcoin at 12k in 2017? Really?

You should welcome all the nay saying here if you think Bitcoin is bound to go up again.

I hope this is not a revealing comment on who you are, because I read that as "you should hope to speculate on some asset to make money off of other people simply because they were wrong"

I'd much rather see a stabilized crypto that could act as an amazing tool for people in poor countries to lift themselves out of poverty than I would see it be a vehicle to take me from top 1% wealth in the world to a higher tier of top 1% wealth in the world.

> I hope this is not a revealing comment on who you are

Get off your high horse. Literally the entire stock market is based on trying guess better than other people and make money off of other people's poor decisions.

> stabilized crypto that could act as an amazing tool for people in poor countries to lift themselves out of poverty

If cryptos were stable, no-one would be making any money "investing" in them.

(Genuine) Q: How exactly would that lift anyone out of poverty?

I'm not a fan of crypto, but having a stable currency that the local government can't inflate/manipulate for their own gain would go a long way in many developing countries.

Think about it this way, how much trade would the US have if our currency changed every 10-20 years and all of our old debt was effectively thrown out? How would people save to build a business? How secure would they feel investing in their own future?

> having a stable currency

The devil's in the detail: "stable" but vs what, exactly? Local prices? Local incomes? Gold? USD? SDRs[0]?

[0] https://www.imf.org/en/About/Factsheets/Sheets/2016/08/01/14...

Stable, to some degree, in all of those respects, since they are interdependent. Being stable with respect to any of the above indicates a degree of stability with respect to the rest. You can't be stable against gold without a degree of stability against USD, as USD/Gold is pretty stable, and arbitrage would close the gap. Likewise with local prices and income.

I'm not familiar with SDRs.

> USD/Gold is pretty stable

Umm, I'm not sure I can agree with that[0]

To be fair, it was fairly stable until about 2006. However the whole point of "being stable" is also to be stable in times of external stress. USD/Gold fails that one quite spectacularly.

[0] https://goldprice.org/charts/gold_30_year_o_x_usd.png

That's significantly less volatile than Yen/USD. Stability in currencies is pretty relative.

> see a stabilized crypto that could act as an amazing tool for people in poor countries to lift themselves out of poverty

Would you mind explaining to me, or linking to some resource you find convincing, how crypto would succeed in this goal? (or even which organisation or coin has this as a goal)

Step 1) Person in Malawi buys Bitcoin.

Step 2) ???

Step 3) Person's village experiences famine due to severe draught exacerbated by climate change driven by, among many other things, Bitcoin.

Step 4) ???

Help, I can't find the step where they lift themselves out of poverty.

Step 5) lift themselves out of poverty

I assume he meant drops to 3k - 4k in 2018

no, I didn't - although admittedly I left that data point out to achieve a more shocking progression, if I'm being honest LOL

but the point is still very self evident even with that data point.

Do these line up with major markets downtowns? Fwiw, all major markets are down like 3% (so far) today. Crypto behaves more like a stock and typically when there are market downturns the more volatile stocks are impacted much more.

The irony of course being that for a while the pitch behind some crypto assets (at least Bitcoin) was that it was a hedge against inflation (which I would argue is what is roiling the traditional market now) and not correlated to overall stock market performance

The bad look is that major exchanges are freezing up with these drops

And BTC just dropped below $24k... a lot of people trying to catch falling knives today.

HODL those knife blades!

"A falling knife has no handle"

Not only that but Bitcoin fell over 23.5% over the last 7 days.

Also, Ethereum has dropped 37% over the last 7 days, 18% in the last 24h.

Could be an interesting week.

24k is too high. Way way way too high.