Nvidia released absolutely dismal sales related to crypto chip sales today after market close. This is another sign to me that the bear market is not reversing any time soon. Bitcoin is in a sustained decline, and I view the culprit as the stupidity and hype that sent it to $19,000 in the first place. It was unsustainable and it has now very much poisoned mentality as crypto continues to fail to prove a suitable replacement to digital fiat and traditional centralized payment processors.

Specifics on Nvidia's release:

Last quarter, they posted $289m in crypto-related chip sales, which is really a small percentage of their overall revenue. Despite that, they projected sales of only $100m this quarter, which at the time they made the prediction sent their shares down (despite it representing such a small portion of revenue). Today, they reported only $18m in crypto-related chip sales. Shares are now getting whacked in after-hours trading, which frankly makes no sense because they beat expectations on over all revenue and profit. Just shows that the idiotic crypto mentality has creeped into traditional investing.

Visa doesn't get details of what you buy, only where you buy it. The inventory of what merchants sell to consumers is not part of the data that is critical to running the payment platform.

There are certain companies that are poised to do very well as cash continues to die. PayPal, Square, Visa, MasterCard especially. All of these facilitate digital payments or deal with digital cash, and as physical cash becomes less and less common, these centralized platforms have outgrown the general market and are poised to continue doing so. Bitcoin isn't really an improvement among any one of them, it's far easier and reassuring using one of these services because  people have faith that if something goes wrong, there's someone there to fix it. If something goes wrong with a crypto transaction, you're out of luck.

Life is just a random series of events. Whatever meaning you ascribe to it is arbitrary. Life isn't fair or unfair, it just is what it is. Things happen, and if you ascribe negative values to this events, you say they are bad events. If you ascribe positive values to them you say they are good events. But life isn't fair or unfair because the things that happen are all completely neutral. The universe doesn't have intent or purpose, so you can't assign meaning to the things that happen. It's only on reflection that you make a judgement about what anything means, but that's always an arbitrary assessment. You may associate being "rich" with positive outcomes, but that's your value, not life's.

The US government has never designated Bitcoin a currency. The closest to an official designation of any kind is by the IRS, which has deemed Bitcoin to be "property" for taxing purposes. That's not a currency. It is true however that Bitcoin has no intrinsic value. It doesn't represent anything in particular, but people have started acknowledging it to have value. This is an entirely artificial construct, and the value is only a representation of what large groups of people agree it is worth. Because of this, there is an inherent desire to constantly value it ever higher, because that's the only way you can get a return. On the other hand, potential buyers want to value it lower so they don't spend as much to acquire it. But real currencies are being traded to acquire the property (Bitcoin), the crypto itself doesn't function as a currency very much in the real world.

Funny about how I post bitcoin-related thoughts on a bitcoin-themed forum, right? Or did you think the only purpose of this forum was to be an unquestioning echo chamber of hype? It is without a doubt that Bitcoin's value does not come from rarity and comes exclusively from speculation. When people buy Bitcoin, it's not because it's rare, because essentially it is not. You have no trouble at all buying as much Bitcoin as you want, there's no shortage of sellers. You're confusing a finite supply with actual rarity. People buying Bitcoin are speculating that because of the finite supply, some day it will be worth more than it is today. That's 100% speculation, based on the thesis that overall demand might one day render it rare and therefore more valuable. You can't call that anything other than speculation.

Expecting that because you bought a bitcoin, someday you will be a millionaire is just silly.

I don't know how many "old timers" have been smiling while bitcoin has been crashing from $19,000 to $6,000 over the last 8 months. If you're an old timer who's been holding this whole time, you've lost more money than you're going to make buying at these prices still unless the price gets back above $19,000, and there's absolutely to reason to expect that to happen and ever-increasing reasons to doubt that will ever happen again. $19k was the height of the hype bubble. People are unlikely to get that hysterical again. If you're counting on $20k, you have to be betting that a very large group of people are going to collectively lose their minds again and throw common sense out the window to chase a pipe dream. Odds are against it in my opinion.

Holy smokes, most of the "tips" are terrible advice. The ones you highlighted are some of the worst. Win Bitcoin in the lottery? Well damn, why didn't anyone think of that before? I guess the only thing stopping people from winning the lottery was they just never thought to win the lottery before!

Borrowing money to invest is a bad idea. Investment is supposed to come from savings. If you don't have any savings, you're not financially stable enough to take on the risk of investing. Don't borrow money to buy crypto, that's terrible advice.

Cloud mining is and always has been a scam. If the miners you're renting are so profitable, the people who owned them would be using them to mine, not rent to you. You will not turn a profit cloud mining.

DO NOT participate in a "risky" (or even "non risky") HYIP. They're 100% ponzi schemes and if you "invest" in one, you deserve to have all your money scammed. There's no such thing as a guaranteed investment, so stop looking for one.

Well, it's a long game. I'm not going to champion BCH or what it stands for, but I do at least believe there is a legitimate case for it, but only given specific and unlikely circumstances coming to pass. I don't think that BTC and BCH folks were ever going to bridge their differences. There was too much ideological disagreement over the block size and acceptable level of centralization and all that. BTC is still not appropriately scalable for global use, and I'm not really convinced Lightning Network is ever going to be a viable sell. The technological difficulties of using crypto are already too steep for mainstream adoption, so additional opacity and technicality on top of that is a no-go. From that perspective, there is a hard block in the road to global adoption for Bitcoin. BCH addresses that to an extent. But I currently don't believe crypto will ever have enough use case for BCH's increased capacity to ever matter, so it's unlikely to ever surpass BTC. Of them all, XRP is probably most likely to fulfill any global need, as it's the most scalable of them all and already has major financial institutional support.

I've answered your points just fine, you just ignore them and your answer for everything when you've got no real answer is something about global conspiracy theories. That's not my weakness, it's yours.

The market does not create money in equal proportion to real economic growth. Or at least, if that's your assertion, you're going to explain how that's possible. As money is an artificial construct and doesn't exist naturally, all value assigned by man in a society is also an artificial construct. We collectively determine what is valuable, and exchange that item for other things that are valuable. Absent fiat, traditionally gold has filled that role for historical and scarcity purposes. But at no time was the production of new gold ever magically matched to real economic growth so that the value of gold remained constant. That's what you just said would be the natural state of things 'absent the rigging,' which doesn't make any sense at all. Perhaps there's a global conspiracy theory that could explain it...

It's actually directly on point, you're just not following it. Your point is you can trade in and out of a market and make more money than if you were to buy and hold it. There is no track record or body of data that supports this assertion for longer than a few years, which means that any short period of time where it does happen is variance (i.e., "luck") and those instances revert to the mean of under performance soon enough. There is no shortage of people who similarly believe like you do that they're smarter than everyone else and can magically put up market beating returns at will, despite the fact that of all the traders and investors who have tried to do so in recorded history have never had sustained and predictable success. So to think you can reliably make money trading in and out of a market better than just buying and holding, regardless of whether you're using all your capital or not (which doesn't even have any relevance at all to the topic), is to essentially believe that you're luckier than normal, which has nothing to do with investing acumen. What I disagree with is that investors generally, but you specifically, have the ability to put up market beating returns by actively trading.

Using Bitcoin in a transaction doesn't do anything for supply or demand necessarily. Those Bitcoins have already been bought or sold, so transacting in BTC shouldn't affect the price. The replacement of those Bitcoins by someone who spent them in theory is how that would come into play. On the flip side, it's more likely that transacting in btc has a negative pressure on price than someone buying with btc and then eventually buying more btc to replace what was already spent. That's because businesses are unlikely to hold btc, they just accept it as an accommodation, but are likely using a processor who instantly credits them with a USD equivalent amount. Holding it for any period of time threatens to erase the profit margin of the transaction due to price volatility, so purchases are likely to be instantly sold and converted to USD.

Typical hype post is typical. First, at what point does a "dip" stop being a dip and start becoming the new reality? The risk perpetual hypers run is that the reality surrounding Bitcoin could have materially shifted and they wouldn't recognize it, instead thinking they're going to be rich some day because they've been buying on every price "dip" since the ATH of $19,000. At some point, you have to stop and reflect on whether you're in the vast minority getting it right or if you're so blinded by greed and lambo dreams that you're missing what everyone else knows, and that's that continuing to buy is more risky than you'd care to admit.

Second, more people were buying in the run up to ATH than had previously ever owned Bitcoin, so far more people are sitting on losses than people who made huge profits at the ATH. Because the smart money was selling then, and the fools were still rushing in trying to get rich. The odds of another run up happening like that are even less likely a second time around. You can't catch lightening in a bottle by trying; it's better to just admit you got lucky through no special wisdom of your own, and also acknowledge it's not gonna happen again. If you live in a world where you can't even acknowledge the likelihood of that, you're going to burn yourself because you think you're infallible. Nothing is more dangerous to an investor than that mindset.

Bitcoin Gold is even more of an alt garbage coin that Bitcoin Cash is. There remains an argument to be made over the utility of Bitcoin Cash and the ideological split between BCH and BTC. There is no such argument that can be made for Bitcoin Gold. It was a fork solely to enrich the forkers, and it serves no purpose as a coin because there is no improvement over BTC, no use-case, and it's even more obscure than even BCH is at this point. The only people making an argument otherwise are the same people who forced the split in the first place and then tried to convince everyone it wasn't a shameless attempt to create wealth out of thin air, which is exactly what happened. Unfortunately, some suckers are going to get fooled into trying to speculate in that market and providing an exit for the scammers who created the coin in the first place.

That loss was in Hong Kong where btc trading is notoriously shadowy and subject to manipulation and bad exchange policies. The exchange ended up socializing the losses among traders who were profiting in that particular market. Lack of regulation on these types of exchanges is certainly one major reason something like this was able to happen. If I was one of those other investors who had to take a hit because of some idiot losing $400m and a bunch of bad and lax policies by the exchange that allowed that much risk to be taken on in the first place, I'd be pissed. Exchange is OKEx, and they don't deserve to be in business.

We'll likely have a mostly cashless society, but that doesn't mean anything for Bitcoin. Digital cash denominated in US dollars will rule the US economy, as it currently does, and Bitcoin will not meaningfully penetrate into day-to-day commerce or business transactions. Compared to digital cash, Bitcoin is clunky, slow, and needlessly complicated.  Centralization is not nearly the problem Bitcoin proponents want to make it out to be. Everyone hates PayPal, but PayPal works exceedingly well and Bitcoin really can't touch it because most people want a centralized authority they can trust manning transactions in case the other party commits fraud or acts illegally. A trustworthy central authority (the payment middleman, like PayPal, MC, Visa, etc.) is far superior to a decentralized system where payments can't be reversed in cases of fraud.

Because anyone telling you they're "supposed to gain" doesn't know what they're talking about. When the price was $19,000, people were still saying it was a buying opportunity because the coins were "supposed to gain" all the way to the moon.  But they didn't, because that's not how markets work. People wouldn't know the moon if they crashed right into the side of it, which we very likely did. We already went to the moon, and now we're on our way back down to Earth in a slow, controlled descent. 

The market most certainly did crash. It's down over 70% from ATH. That's a monster crash. Any momentum to try and break this fall is short lived and easily reversed. As for why you would choose to sell, it's because you don't know how low it's going to go, if it will ever recover, or if it does recover how much the recovery will be or how long it will sustain. You would sell to limit risk of additional losses.

Seems more superstitious than anything else. There is a perception that gold holds value well, but this is only true over very long periods of time, a minimum of several decades. In shorter periods of time, gold experiences a lot of volatility; often losing 10% or more in a year is not uncommon.  So people who are holding gold when they're very old because they want to "guarantee" that the value is going to be there if they need it are actually acting irrationally, because there's a high degree of risk year-to-year that gold will experience significant depreciation when you need to access that wealth. These year-to-year variations tend to smooth out over decades so that gold is stable over long periods of time, but not so much in short periods of time.

Yeah but all other coins are falling because bitcoin is falling, not that they happen to be falling at the same time. Because of how their market caps and average price are computed, when Bitcoin falls, all the alts fall too. The average price on coinmarketcap is computed by taking the volume-weighted average of all markets, and the biggest market for most coins is BTC. So when BTC price is rising or falling, the average dollar value of trades in those BTC-to-alt markets rises or falls at the same time, which makes the average price rise or fall. That's why you see most of the alts trading in the same direction at the same time as BTC, it's because so much of their price is determined by BTC's price. It's not a coincidence.

No poor people are getting rich off bitcoin, and bitcoin doesn't redistribute wealth. "Redistribute" by the very nature of the word means wealth is taken from people who have it and given it to people who don't. Bitcoin doesn't do this. Wealth redistribution also is not a passive happening, you can't just expect a set of non-interventionist circumstances to redistribute wealth. Redistribution requires an active, intentional act and this usually comes from the government through taxation and welfare programs. As for poor people, they're not getting rich off bitcoin, and on the off chance a very few of them do, it's not because the wealth was redistributed to them, it's because they owned an asset that became more valuable; essentially new wealth was created (and artificially if you ask me).

Investments in digital currency couldn't be more opposite than investments in the stock of a company. Trading in either might be similar, but that's not the same as investing. In trading, you're trying to flip the asset without any real regard for the profitability of the underlying business (in the case of the stock) or the real world adaption or implications for the asset (in the case of crypto). All you care about is churning through volatility. Investing is a long term venture, and you make money because the business becomes more profitable over time and as a stock owner you are a legal owner of that business and a portion of those profits. They're completely different mindsets and not similar at all.