I work for FMZ Quant, www.fmz.com, a quantitative platform about crypto trading in China, and my colleagues and I all believe in bitcoin. I'd like to make friends here, maybe we can discuss trading strategy if u are interested in quantitative trading. thanks
No, because trading was deliberately halted by the CBOE to keep volatility down. That you think today is "volatile" shows how little you understand about cryptocurrency, Zennon. If you bought one bitcoin at this time Friday, you made $2000 before you lost $1000 before you made $1000 before you lost $2000 before it was fucking Sunday. Right now? Right now you're about a thousand dollars ahead. But if you bought BTC on Friday in preparation for making money on futures today, you're actually seeing a calming of the market.“It is rare that you see something more volatile than bitcoin, but we found it: bitcoin futures,” said Zennon Kapron, managing director of Shanghai-based consulting firm Kapronasia.
Personally I'm still tripping over that 88kW number. "I've got this great new way to send money to anyone in the world! It usually only takes around ten minutes to do and only burns six gallons of gasoline to do it!" If James Watt were that inefficient with pumping floodwater out of mines we'd still be riding horses. Ethereum's nearly-equally-appalling 30kW number is just as shameful. I have little hope that ETH will get to proof-of-stake before BTC grenades... but I also think it's here to stay simply because of the Chinese. EDIT: shit. Not 88 and 30. 288 and 58. Sweet jesus.
It's particularly stupid when you calculate the energy required to push one transaction:
Holy fuck I forgot my numbers. They were at 31 TW/h just twelve days ago. Now they're at 32.5. A gallon of gas is 33.4 kW/h. It takes the energy equivalent of 8.6 gallons of gas to run a bitcoin transaction. I can drive my Porsche about 200 miles on that and it's a gas guzzler.
So, uh, not looking like too bad of a time to cash out, huh?
What's that? a fundamental investing question? TIME FOR STOCK CRAZINESS 101! Burton Malkiel uses the two terms "firm foundation theory" and "castle in the air theory" in his seminal book A Random Walk Down Wall Street to describe two competing understandings of basic investment. "Castle in the air theory" is generally blamed on none other than John Maynard Keynes, but I can't find any source. Keynes is generally blamed for a lot of great quotes, such as "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" (more on that in a minute). "Firm foundation theory" is Malkiel's renaming of Intrinsic Value Theory, which goes back to Adam Smith and Karl Marx. The reality is that these theories describe economic behavior, not psychological behavior, and both theories have their proponents. An example of Intrinsic Value Theory is that GM stock is worth about $40 a share because it pays 30-40 cents a share, four quarters a year, sunrise sunset. Hold GM for a hundred quarters at $40 and it has paid for itself even if it never moves. An example of castle-in-the-air theory (I much prefer the term "greater fool theory" (see below)) is that Tesla stock is worth $326 a share today because tomorrow it will be worth $400. Hold Tesla for three weeks and sell it and you've made 25%. Unless you don't. Intrinsic Value Theory holds that Bitcoin has questionable intrinsic value. If you delve into it you observe that it's a useful black market trade good for transacting and holding value outside the possibilities of regulation or policing. At 288 kW/h per transaction and climbing, it has no intrinsic value as a medium of regular exchange. Greater Fool Theory holds that Bitcoin is absolutely worth $17k today because some schlub is going to buy it for $19k tomorrow. Unless he doesn't. The advantage of Intrinsic Value Theory is you can calculate it. It's based on numbers and math and charts and truth. The disadvantage of Intrinsic Value Theory is it would have told you only a moron pays $1000 for BTC at the beginning of the year because eventually people will figure out it's worthless. The advantage of Greater Fool Theory is people are so much stupider with money than you can really conceive, probably because we so rarely talk about it in frank, honest ways we can all learn from. Failure is a source of shame and rarely discussed; we all point at the Lehman brothers and LTCMs of the world as if to imply they failed because they weren't virtuous enough, rather than that their number came up. As such, markets generally will pile on for much longer than really makes sense, generally because the people with the most sense have exited and leave a feeding frenzy of late-arrivers and neophytes in their wake. The disadvantage of Greater Fool Theory is you're banking on the predictability of a stampede. So. Not a bad time to cash out? Shit could go to $30k next week. Shit could go to $1k. The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. - Probably not John Maynard Keynes Another motherless maxim is "recessions return money to its rightful owners." One of the guys I follow tweeted to a heckler last week "Yeah, I missed Bitcoin. I also missed housing, the tech bubble and Black Monday. That's why I'm still here, fucko." ___________________________________________________ See: Greater Fool Theory on Wikipedia, which suggests you see also: Arbitrage Speculation Bagholder Economic bubble Tulip Mania Beanie Babies Bitcoin
Here's a practical question: How do I even move from ETH to USD at this point? Shit's changed a lot since I first moved USD to ETH.
As a Washington State resident your options are limited but not to the point where you can't do anything. 1) Go to Gemini 2) Create an account 3) Link your bank account 4) Hie thee to MyEtherWallet 5) Send Ether to yourself 6) Sell it on Gemini 7) Transfer the ca$$$$$$H MONEY to your bank account 8) Figure out if you owe capital gains since you had some money show up in a bank account Almost nobody pays capital gains on cryptocurrency. If you go through an exchange that is regulated up the yinyang and into a bank account that is regulated up the yinyang, your likelihood of being the almost, rather than the nobody, increases.
You can sell all of your coins at once. But then you have to pray to Satoshi that that particular exchange doesn't implode before your money is out. (By the way, Kraken has a 5k/24h limit, transferred within a day in the EU. So your mileage/kilometrage may vary.)