I think the hype over blockchain is greatly overstated for one. But upon that, the success of blockchain doesn't necessarily mean anything for Bitcoin or any other crypto. Blockchain may indeed eventually reach some level of regular use in the overall economy, but equally likely is that Bitcoin won't be any part of it. All the blockchain research being done by companies that want to integrate the technology into their operations are agnostic about Bitcoin itself and have no use for a cryptocurrency as part of any blockchain implementation. So the conclusion that blockchain is going to continue to drive the price of Bitcoin higher is at best an unsound conclusion and at worst a wildly optimistic conclusion that will lose you a lot of money if you're still buying on that singular hope.

An under emphasized point is that Warren Buffet is a net buyer of stocks. He doesn't sell very often compared to how often he buys. The stock market has a tendency to go up over time, and has created enormous wealth. Warren Buffet may be the most recognizable beneficiary of this effect, but he isn't near the only one. Buffet's attributes are that he's a smart value investor and is rather well-known for removing emotions from the investing equation. On top of that, you need patience. The type of wealth he has built has taken decades, and it has compounded on itself. Over very long periods of time, he has allowed the market to realize and prove the investment theses he's put into practice, and that's what has created the wealth you see today.

The conclusion is ultimately wrong. Trading volume is a significant data point when considering price movements. Higher volume gives the appearance of more consensus and legitimacy that the price is sustainable. That's why wash trading is potentially an important issue, because if some of the data is faked or isn't reliable, it undermines confidence in the systems.

If a stock goes up in value from $5 to $10 dollars in a single day, that's a huge gain; 100%.  If the average daily trading volume is 100,000 shares and it goes up 100% on a trade volume of 25,000 shares, this is a potentially important data point telling us the price is not widely accepted by the market to be indicative of true value. It could be one trader who is out of his mind or will ultimately be proven to have greatly overpaid for his shares. However, if the price goes up 100% on daily trading volume of 500,000 shares, we now have a 5x increase in average trading volume, which tells us that the number of people who are consensus over the new valuation is significantly higher and the price increase is more likely to hold. In investing, market consensus is pretty important, since the wisdom of the crowd often prevails and the odds that everyone is wrong diminishes compared to one guy.

This is why trading volumes matter. The fraudulent trading volumes by the Chinese exchanges are meant to give the appearance of more consensus and to trick investors into trading more so they can earn more in fees. They are obscuring the risks of investing by hiding what may be far more shallow markets that would keep risk-averse investors away. It is not defensible in any way, and not a small deal.

Crypto is really the only version of a cashless society that has such high energy demands. There are far more efficient and robust cashless systems already in place that beat the pants off crypto for a slim fraction of the power consumption. Digital fiat, ACH transfer, and other forms electronic payments through the traditional banking system work better than crypto currently does and doesn't require this constant churn of processors sucking up power to rather pointlessly solve algorithms. The world is moving towards a cashless society, but it's quite unlikely to involve cryptocurrencies in any significant way due to the simpler and less consumptive system already in place.

The problem with a stable coin is that there has to be a bank or reserve of the asset the coin is pegged to so that people can redeem the coin for the asset. The ability to redeem it for a set value of the other asset is what gives the coin a stable value. If some coin has a $5 billion valuation backed by dollars, there has to be $5 billion dollars in reserve to exchange for anyone who wants to trade out. The first problem is amassing the enough of the asset to peg the coin to it. Also, pegging the coin to dollars should theoretically limit the upside of buying the coin, even if demand spikes, because the most you are guaranteed to get out of owning the coin is the same amount of dollars in the pegged value, so it's it entirely seems pointless to try and trade a pegged coin for profit.

Simply avoiding something because it's at an all time high is not a smart way to approach investing. Winners tend to keep on winning. Amazon trades at $1900, but it was at an all time high at one point at literally every number lower than $1900. I suppose people like you were saying "you'll never make money owning Amazon at $100, it's at an all time high!" And look how foolish a sentiment that is. The economy has a long track record of growth over time, and that's what pushes the market ever-higher. All time highs are not an indication you should not invest (in and of themselves), because the likelihood of reaching new highs is actually higher than falling and never returning, historically speaking.

Lightning Network adds more complexity on top of an already obtuse payment solution. Although perhaps technically feasible, I don't see it as a practical solution for the scalability problem because getting regular people who don't understand Bitcoin to a point where they understand and can use the Lightning Network is virtually impossible. Bitcoin has real limitations for widespread adoption due the inability of the average person to understand how it works, and LN compounds the problem.  I don't see crypto serving a real market function beyond speculative investing (gambling), and without real utility in commerce the upside is severely limited.

What you're referring to is the opportunity cost of holding in a bear market. If your holdings are worth $5,000, you might believe they will eventually be worth more, but the if you continue to hold it could continue to trend lower and you would be better off selling now and buying at the lower price and earning more in the long run if you're right. The problem with this is nobody can predict day-to-day movements, so selling opens you up to risk that you're wrong about the price continuing to drop in the short term and then miss out on the longer term trend of rising prices that you ultimately believed in anyway. Short term trading opens you up to more inefficiency than simply holding and taking advantage of long term trends.

I don't think this brings up too much concern. If you look at the list, most of the US based (and all of the major US based) exchanges appear not to be overstating their trading at all according to this. I highly doubt that any amount of fraud by the Chinese exchanges could inflate the price to the point where they are bringing up the rest of the world. Everyone knows not to trust China to begin with, and when you add crypto on top of a general culture of fraud and theft, you have even less reason to trust any of the Chinese exchanges. But boy, look at the suspected over-statements:

• Huobi: 12.5x inflated
• Okex: 19.2x inflated
• HitBTC: 5.3x inflated
• Upbit: 11.0x inflated
• Bitbay: 3.1x inflated
• Coinex: 68.6x inflated

If I had an account with any of these, I'd immediately close it and withdraw all coins. They cannot be trusted at all. But ultimately, I wouldn't be concerned that fraud by these exchanges could tank the whole system. There's enough other major exchanges operating trustfully to conclude that there is a baseline demand for crypto that is sufficiently robust to prevent too much of a collapse.

It's not becoming a competition for banks. In the last 8 months, enthusiasm for Bitcoin has been falling along with the price. At its height last December, you couldn't say it was becoming a competitor for banks because NO ONE is using it as such. This pipe dream that BTC is going to overthrow the banks needs to die, because it's directly related to the irrationality of the price in the markets.

Outlived itself how? The economy is a result of the banking system we have. Credit is the essential ingredient that grows the economy. The economic system hasn't outlived itself. Prosperity is what creates peace. The world wars were both caused by economic tensions that were used to exacerbate nationalist tendencies. The EU is largely an effort to foster cooperation and create aligned economic interests as a means of avoiding nationalism, which is now failing in the face of growing riftwing extremism. The current economic system is out best hope for continued stability. The notion it has outlived itself is silly.

Exactly, crypto is the king of speculative assets, zero inherent value. When the stock market tanks, crypto will tank right along with it, and more likely harder. The reason is the evaporation of economic confidence. When things begin to fall, people aren't going to have the confidence that this inherently worthless digital token is going to be valued higher by someone else in the future than what you bought it for. Stocks have inherent value; each share is worth the liquidation value of the company, which makes them vastly safer than crypto. Stock market crashes are about a flight to safety and reducing risk, so if money is fleeing far safer assets than crypto, logically I would expect money to flee the riskier assets quicker. That means away from crypto.

Bitcoin is a nonproductive asset that is only worth what everyone else is willing to pay for it. Uber is a company that has an in-demand service and generates cash flow off of that. The market cap of the company is the value of future expected cash flows. $18 billion seems a bit high to me personally based on an inability to turn a profit and a horrible business culture that may prove to limit growth, but nowhere near as overpriced as the Bitcoin market cap is.

The dollar is not backed by gold. Backed by gold means you can exchange the dollar for gold at the bank. This hasn't been the case for a very long time. Similarly, because something is "priced" in dollars does not mean it's backed it. Dollars are what everything is valued in in our economy. Bitcoin, as an asset, is just another one of those things priced in dollars because it's what people are familiar with. Bitcoin's value is arbitrary. There's just a significant enough group of people insisting it has value so it does. I find bitcoin's utility to be very low and not anywhere near the value it currently has. As more people disagree with the price and refuse to buy, the price falls, as it has been steadily now for 8 months.

Good point on the GPU mining, but I would counter that Bitcoin is a proxy for the entire crypto market. Alts are not going to thrive while BTC languishes, as alts often trade in the same direction because of their pairing with BTC. So weak alt interest can be highly correlated with weak BTC interest. While the weak guidance by nvidia doesn't DIRECTLY indicate poor Bitcoin interest, it seems highly likely that alt interest is down because BTC interest is down.

To reply to both of you, chip sales are a leading indicator of sentiment. So follow my logic here: if chip sales are weak, it's because miners aren't investing in new equipment, which is likely because they don't think it will pay for itself. This means they don't see the price increasing. Miners, more than anyone else, are likely to have a better feel for the future price because their viability is at stake. When miners expect the price to continue rising, they can run losses in the near term to buy more equipment because they expect the higher price to eventually make up for it. So the inverse is the conclusion here. The fact that nvidia, which is a public company well-versed in issuing public guidance under SEC rules, was so blindsided by the weakness for crypto chips in the latest quarter is an indication of how fast the market is slowing down, which indicates how bleak miners view future price prospects to be.

The difference between nvidia and other crypto chipmakers is nvidia is a public company. They issue forward looking guidance and it was to meet certain requirements. Rose private chipmakers have no such obligation and are reporting numbers lookin backwards, so Bitmain's profits in 2017 are a lower quality data point compared to nvidia and also wildly outdated at this point.

That's why I think nvidia's guidance portends to poor sentiment by miners, which in turn portends to a poor price outlook going forward.

This is a stupid perspective and it's clear you didn't read the SEC's rationale. The SEC gives zero fucks about whether or not Bitcoin is an investment or how many noobs are invested in it. The SEC is tasked with enforcing the securities laws Congress enacts. Their rejection is predicated solely on fact that the requested rule change was inconsistent with current securities laws. The conspiracy theories about not approving an ETF until they get enough BTC for themselves is stupid and meritless. Further, the futures that have been approved don't have a direct impact on price because they're not settled in BTC, they're settled in cash. You can short the futures to zero and it won't impact the price of BTC, so the market manipulation claim is also garbage.

In short, you haven't got the slightest clue what you're talking about and you're an embarassment to people actually working in this space to make BTC viable.

You're confusing intrinsic value with extrinsic value. Intrinsic value is something that has value due to utility or some innate feature of the object that makes it valuable; essentially that the value comes from within (hence the name "intrinsic"). Extrinsic value is the value people assign to something, perhaps even arbitrarily. Silver has intrinsic value because it's a necessary metal for many industrial uses. Water has intrinsic value because it's necessary to survive.  Both of these have value that comes from within the commodity.  Bitcoin has value because everyone just decides it does. That's why it has value as an asset and it isn't intrinsic.

Your website example is not an example of things with intrinsic value. It was people arbitrarily assigning value to something that had no intrinsic value, which eventually collapsed the bubble. Bitcoin has traced the same path with the 70% crash this year.  Additionally, Bitcoin isn't necessary for blockchain, so if you want to make the argument the blockchain has intrinsic value (and I'm not even sure I agree with that), it would mean nothing for Bitcoin.

If everyone followed the advice, there wouldn't be panic. Being contrarian just to be contrarian is not the key to success. If you're just doing the opposite of what everyone else is doing, you are not guaranteed to succeed. Buffet's advice is specific to a set of givens which fundamental value investors know, he doesn't just blindly buy things when everyone else is selling them. Also, you can become successful doing what everyone else is doing, and that's essentially what Bitcoin is built on entirely. Bitcoin doesn't go up in value unless everyone (or very large groups of people) agree it's worth more today than it was yesterday.

Being in the green doesn't negate the crushing loss you've suffered in the $19k to $6k drop. It's about opportunity costs, and the opportunity cost of not selling and continuing to hold is the direct result of those losses. If you bought 2 coins at $500, you've invested $1000. Right now you'd be sitting on about $13,000, which is great to be up that much. But you missed out on locking in the gain at $38,000. Being up is better than being down, sure, but who's smiling about the fact that the opportunity cost of not selling resulted in a loss of $25,000? Looking at it your way may be optimistic, but looking at it this way is pragmatic.