Bitcoin up 70% as banks fail

Bitcoin’s price has appreciated by over 35% since Silicon Valley Bank collapsed on March 10, while the Nasdaq Composite Index has traded up less than 5% over the same period. Bitcoin’s price is up nearly 70% in 2023.

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Remember Bitcoin?

Hello darkness, my old friend 

Update on Bitcoin

Bitcoin is now closer to US$41,000.

Related post:

Bloodbaths galore this week/ BS about Bitcoin

Sell Gold, Buy Bitcoin?

Gold regains its lustre

So much so that the relationship between gold and inflation-adjusted “real” interest rates is starting to weaken amid concerns about the economic outlook and rising prices. Usually, real rates are negatively correlated with gold. Not this year, as real rates have increased, the gold price has remained resilient.

Err I tot Bitcoin was supposed to have taken gold’s place? Sell Gold, Buy Bitcoin?

Related post: Bloodbaths galore this week/ BS about Bitcoin (Fyi, it’s now around US$39,000)

Bloodbaths galore this week/ BS about Bitcoin

(Update on 23 January: “Bitcoin’s slide continued on Saturday: its price fell towards $34,000, around half of the peak it scaled in early November. Other cryptocurrencies also tumbled, Economist Expresso.)

And in Bitcoin too which its fans say hedges against stock markets fall

Sell Gold, Buy Bitcoin?

Recently, I wrote

I suspect that cryptos are now the real hedge against inflation or stagflation: Bitcoin is above US$60,000.

Stagflation? What stagflation?

Look at this

Bitcoin is trading around US$67,000 while investors angst over inflation and stagflation.

Stagflation? What stagflation?

The price of gold, the usual safe haven against inflation or stagflation, does not seem to reflect the possibility of stagflation.

Gold is suffering from an expectation that central banks will raise rates to stem the inflationary shock say the experts. But real interest are still negative so there’s no carrying cost.

I suspect that cryptos are now the real hedge against inflation or stagflation: Bitcoin is above US$60,000.

Bitcoin rises again and dips again

Don’t count it out/

Bitcoin is dead! Long live Monero!

Bitcoun: Easy come, easy go

The new King? Or at least the new kid on the block.

Bitcoin: a week that left the bulls wounded

The crypto exchange Coinbase was showing a bitcoin price just above US$34,000 late in the US afternoon on Friday, a 12% fall.

Earlier in the week, it reached a low of around US$30,000 set on Wednesday.

Bitcoin correcting, but what a run

Buy the dips?

Bitcoin price refuses to correct to mean

So now Citicorp, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America are now saying that it makes senses to invest in Bitcoin. JPMorgan has restarted trading Bitcoin.

Bitcoin: Over US$50,000 yesterday

Bitcoin: Shooting for the moon and beyond

Bitcoin came close to breaking the US$50,000 barrier at the weekend.

So is it going to Mars as Elon Musk’s first satellite? At the Axel Springer Award 2020, Musk said that he is highly confident that the first crewed flights to Mars will happen in 2026.

Or

What happened to GameStop?

It closed last Friday at US$52.40.

What a ride. The shares started the year at US$18 and hit US$483 on January 28.

GameStop: What goes up, comes thumbling down

Bitcoin consumes ‘more electricity than Argentina’

And the energy it uses could power all kettles used in the UK for 27 years, University of Cambridge researchers say.

Bitcoin: still going strong unlike GameStop

Game seems to be over for GameStop: GameStop: What goes up, comes thumbling down

But Bitcoin keeps on rolling like Old Man River

There are serious investors who think it will complement or even overthrow gold’s tradition role as an inflation hedge.

Bitcoin’s decentralisation is a big problem

Bitcoin was built on an unregulated network to decentralise power but banks do a better job safeguarding valuables.

In Bitcoin: born loser tales, I told the tale of a programmer who forgot the password of the e-wallet with $240m worth of bitcoin

He told the New York Times: “The whole idea of being your own bank – let me put it this way, do you make your own shoes?” “The reason we have banks is that we don’t want to deal with all those things that banks do.”

Here’s another sad tale: an entrepreneur who lost about 800 bitcoins when a colleague reformatted a laptop containing the private keys to his wallet.

Bitcoin: born loser tales

No, not because of the price volatility (now at US$39,000) after it hit a speed bum.

BBC reports that about US$140bn worth of Bitcoin is lost or left in wallets that cannot be accessed, according to cryptocurrency-data company Chainanalysis.

Here’s a tragi-comic real-life story about programmer Stefan Thomas who forgot the password that will let him unlock a hard drive containing US$240m worth of Bitcoin.

Mr Thomas, who was born in Germany but lives in San Francisco, was given 7,002 bitcoins as payment for making a video explaining how cryptocurrency works more than a decade ago.

At the time, they were worth a few dollars each.

He stored them in an IronKey digital wallet on a hard drive.

And he wrote the password on a piece of paper he has lost.

After 10 failed attempts, the password will encrypt itself, making the wallet impossible to access.[My note: he has two more chances]

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55645408

And an ever more tragic and funnier story about another born loser. In 2013, a Welsh man desperately searched a landfill site after throwing away a computer hard drive containing 7,500 bitcoins.

At that time this was worth more than £4m, this would now be valued at more than £250m (US$182m).

Meanwhile in Cynical Historian: What the Dutch colonialists in Indonesia learnt from Raffles: Raffles moved fast and broke heads. Given LKY’s track record, maybe he learnt his style of govt from Raffles?

Bitcoin hits a speed bum

Bitcoin’s value surged above US$34,000 for the first time on Sunday. It’s now around US$31,000 

Meanwhile in Cynical Historian: A white horse The “Keppel” in Keppel Corporation

Inflation, what inflation? Why Bitcoin is flying?

So it’s not surprising that serious investors are joining the chase for Bitcoin . Remember the supply of Bitcoin is limited, unlike that of gold, the usual inflation hedge.

Even DBS is trying to get onto the Bitcoin wagon: https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/business/singapore-bank-dbs-launch-digital-exchange-virtual-currency-13743466

Bitcoin is on a roll

Even if fell by US$2000 last nite.

But did u know that the local price of bitcoin had recently risen in places of political turmoil: think Hong Kong and Tehran. People in those places don’t trust their govt, and so diversify out of paper curriencies.

Bitcoin in 2019

FT reports that San Francisco-based Pantera Capital in early 2018 predicted the price of bitcoin could reach US $50,000 by 2019. Now at US$3,800.

Now telling its clients to believe in fairies i.e. keep the faith.

Getting out of Bitcoin

Further to Bitcoin exchanges are not safe, on the first day of CNY, I heard of a cryptocurrency wannabe trader being made to take out his money (initial investment and profits in weekly tranches).

He stopped trading after this experience.

Bitcoin: Price on Fri

Just under US$10,000, according to CoinMarketCap.

Bitcoin: Happy days are here again?

On Thurday NYT time

Bitcoin’s up 12 percent over the last 24 hours, at $9,972, according to CoinMarketCap.

NYT;s Dealbook

Mkt that has fallen 50% in a month

The combined value market value of cryptocurrenciies has fallen from more than US$800bn to less than US$400bn in a month, FT reports.

As for Bitcoin, it’s back above US$8,500, having fallen to below US$6,000 earlier in the week. It rose above US$19,000 towards the end of 2017. Now taz real volatility.

Bitcoin falls are worse

Think equity and bond mkts falls are bad?

Well according to Reuters, Bitcoin on Monday fell 8.1% to US$7,524, its lowest level since November 18, 2017.

So far Bitcoin has fallen 40% this yr from its Jan high.

And more UK banks are thinking of joining Lloyds in banning the use of credit cards to buy Bitcoin: UK bank bans Bitcoin purchases on its credit cards.

Banks don’t want the credit and reputational risks involved. BS that they want to protect customers.

Wonder when the banks here will ban the use of credit cards to buy Bitcoin?

UK bank bans Bitcoin purchases on its credit cards

Lloyds Banking Group, a major UK bank, has banned its customers from today from buying Bitcoin on their credit cards following a sharp fall in the value of the digital currency.

It will not apply to debit cards, only to the banking group’s eight million credit card customers.

Lloyds fears people are buying Bitcoin to make a profit if its value rises but face debts if it falls.

It is concerned it could end up footing the bill for unpaid debts should the price continue to fall.

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-42940728

 

Bitcoin exchanges are not safe

Did you know this?

A third of the world’s bitcoin exchanges were hacked between 2009 and 2015, say US authorities.

FT

The FT reported this in its article about the U$500m theft of XEM coins by an anonymous hacker from Coincheck, a Japanese virtual currency exchange. It claimed the day before the theft that “Cryptocurrency exchanges are already down to 1.5 players. We’re top …”

“Will crypto-crime end the Bitcoin bubble?”

But first, did you know virtual currencies lost US$100 billion in 24 hours on thursday?

Coming back to:”Will crypto-crime end the Bitcoin bubble?”

Likely because the marshalls are taking more action because criminals are trying to take advantage of the interest in crypto-currencies.

[T]he cyber-security firm Digital Shadows produced a report on the latest fashion in cyber-crime: profiting from the crypto-currency boom.

The report – titled The New Gold Rush – details the various types of scam, from fake ICOs to raids on exchanges to simple phishing attacks. Its author, Becky Pinkard, tells Tech Tent that cyber-criminals have decided to jump on the bandwagon as the frenzy of popular excitement about the rise in value of Bitcoin has grown.

“We have people all the way down to my grandmother asking about Bitcoin and what it means and whether I can make money from it,” she says.

“What that does is then create the type of exposure that criminals need in order to come in and take advantage of folks who don’t really know what they’re doing.”

Digital Shadows has been scouring criminal forums on the dark web and has found plenty of conversations about ICOs – and how to profit from them.

“Just set it up, people will come and they will drop the money on you,” said one comment.

The mood about ICOs and other manifestations of the crypto-currency boom certainly seems to have shifted this week. Facebook has announced that it is to ban all adverts promoting any kind of crypto-currency product.

Meanwhile there has been a sudden slew of prominent thinkers casting doubt on everything from the value of Bitcoin to the significance of the blockchain technology underpinning it.

The boss of MIT’s Media Lab, Joi Ito, wrote a piece headlined The Big ICO Swindle. The respected economist Nouriel Roubini weighed in with Blockchain’s Broken Promises, casting doubt on a technology that proponents claim has great potential, whatever happens to Bitcoin.

Such downbeat assessments, combined with growing regulatory pressure, seem to be having an effect. Bitcoin and other so-called altcoins have taken another sharp lurch downwards in recent days,. The crypto-bandwagon may not have halted but at least one of the wheels looks like it is coming off.

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42917172

“Is Someone Manipulating the Price of Bitcoin?”

(Added at 11-05am: Btw it’s down 40% since 1 January. Sorry for the omission.) Given that the price of Bitcoin price has just fallen below USA$8,000 for first time since November 24, “Is Someone Manipulating the Price of Bitcoin?” (the title of the u/m piece from NYT’s Dealbook) is laughable because price manipulation must have been the other way or failed: New questions about Bitcoin’s price

Regulators are increasingly worried that Bitfinex, a widely used (and famously opaque) exchange, has been propping it up. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has subpoenaed the company, whose Tether digital token is often used to buy other virtual currencies.

More from Nathaniel Popper of the NYT:

Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of new Tether were created; almost always when the prices of other virtual currencies were heading down. The Tether were used on the Bitfinex exchange to make big purchases of Bitcoin and other tokens, helping push their prices back up, according to multiple analyses of data from Bitfinex. “This became more and more concerning, because every time the markets went down, you have seen the same thing happen,” said Joey Krug, the co-chief investment officer at Pantera Capital, which runs several virtual currency hedge funds. “It could mean that a lot of the rally over December and January might not have been real.”

Where we stand: According to CoinMarketCap, Bitcoin is trading at $9,545, down almost 7 percent over the last 24 hours, Ethereum’s Ether at $1,099, and Ripple’s XRP at $1.05, down 7 percent.

The digital money flyaround

• How Goldman Sachs was rushed into supporting Bitcoin. (Bloomberg)

• Meet Bibor, a proposed interest rate for lending Bitcoin. (Bloomberg)

• Samsung is making specialist chips for mining virtual currency. (CNBC)

____________________________

Today’s DealBook Briefing was written by Andrew Ross Sorkin in New York, and Michael J. de la Merced and Amie Tsang in London.

Bitcoin keeps on falling, amid more bad news

January has been the worst month for the virtual currency in three years, with its price down 30 percent. And it’s because of the very thing that Bitcoin and other digital currencies were supposed to be free from: central authorities and regulators. (NYT Dealbook) What the central authorities and regulators are doing to make mining or trading virtual currencies a lot harder:

• The S.E.C. froze a $600 million initial coin offering by AriseBank.

• China has continued to clamp down on Bitcoin mining.

• South Korea is still weighing legal checks on virtual currency trading. Then also Facebook’s ban ads for digital money

But amid all this, NYT Dealbook reports The Japanese messaging service Line has plans to open its own virtual currency exchange, while the embattled publisher of Penthouse magazine wants to promote its own adult-entertainment-focused token.

Bitcoin buyers: Young and male

And East Asian: the int’l financial media reports that the Chinese and Koreans are the most active traders based on info on which exchanges are used.

As to young and male, a FT reporter reported that in December

a survey released by Blockchain Capital, a venture capital firm, found that while two per cent of Americans have owned bitcoin, four per cent of millennials — generally seen as those born between the early 1980s and the early 1990s — have dabbled or owned the digital currency. Among male millennials that share rises to 6 per cent. More than 50 per cent of millennials polled said bitcoin was a positive technological innovation and more than a quarter considered bitcoin safer than banks.

Blockchain’s the casino and bitcoin the chips

Maybe taz why Jamie Dimon the boss of JPMorgan now regrets calling bitcoin a “fraud,” though he’s still not interested in it.). He wants his bank to be the dealer.

Seriously, an FT reporter reported hearing someone describe “blockchain was the casino and bitcoin the chips”. She said this was “an apt description since investing in cryptocurrencies is very much like gambling.” From NYT Dealbook “That’s made it the best penny stock and the worst currency in the world.”

— Matt O’Brien of the WaPo, writing about why Bitcoin is doing well as a speculative investment and terribly as a way to buy and sell things.

 

Trying to take profit from bitcoin

BBC reporter’s experience of converting it into cash

I have been selling some of the Bitcoin I bought 18 months ago, paying about £60.

In theory that is simple enough and indeed I have sold £500 worth for a small fee. But actually getting that cash into my sterling bank account is far from seamless – so far I am a week in to what promises to be a two-week process.

Hardly the frictionless finance that was promised by Bitcoin’s advocates and if the rush to sell gathers pace there is a good chance that the system seizes up completely.