Wow. Bitcoin is almost $1,500

[momeNt]

I admit I have not read a single thing or know anything about blockchain and Bitcoin and all these trash. But I don't need to read to know all of this is ridiculous nonsense. So VET uses some RFID chips and has supply chain product. Whoopie doo. That's worth at most $1 million if we're being generous.

You have fully drunk the Kool-aid and jumped in the deep end. I've seen this movie before, and I know how it ends. I stayed for the closing credits during the dotcom bubble and gave back almost million dollars. Trust me, it's not different this time. It's never different this time.

That's not really true. Maybe they aren't completely comparable, but take Underwriter's Laboratories for example, they have like $1bn in revenue yearly.

 

[IronWing]

I've spent about $10,000 in the last five months saving the life of my cat. She's a raging bitch to nearly everyone, and some days it is everyone. Nevertheless, I love her and the problem was fixable so I did it. The running joke in my household now is that we should rename her Bitcoin, because only a fucking idiot would pay $10,000 for one.

Viper GTS

What was wrong with the cat? How is she doing now?

 

[Viper GTS]

What was wrong with the cat? How is she doing now?

Cryptococcus infection in her sinuses.

https://www.petmd.com/cat/conditions/infectious-parasitic/c_ct_cryptococcosis

It's rare in indoor cats, but apparently it got tracked in from somewhere. It's considered relatively treatable, but the drugs made her stop eating. So there was a scope/biopsy at the beginning to identify the problem (hurray not cancer), the feeding tube insertion after she dropped nearly 40% of her body weight in a month on the anti-fungal drugs, a few months on a feeding tube, bi-weekly emergency vet visits for ripped sutures/moving tube/etc. The tube is out now and she's eating on her own and maintaining if not gaining weight so we hould be near the end now. We just need one blood test to show no fungus load and then one more month of anti-fungals and we're done.

Viper GTS

 

[ponyo]

Well like I said, I'm not overinvested. I won't feel it if we lost it all. That's the sanity you could see I have.

I'm not foaming at the mouth for bitcoin/altcoins revolutionizing the world.

You must be wired differently than me. I feel all my losses and anything over 5 figures stings. Bitcoin/altcoins have to revolutionize the world to even have a shot at keeping current valuation. At least the internet did end up revolutionizing the world.

 

[preslove]

Cryptococcus infection in her sinuses.

https://www.petmd.com/cat/conditions/infectious-parasitic/c_ct_cryptococcosis

It's rare in indoor cats, but apparently it got tracked in from somewhere. It's considered relatively treatable, but the drugs made her stop eating. So there was a scope/biopsy at the beginning to identify the problem (hurray not cancer), the feeding tube insertion after she dropped nearly 40% of her body weight in a month on the anti-fungal drugs, a few months on a feeding tube, bi-weekly emergency vet visits for ripped sutures/moving tube/etc. The tube is out now and she's eating on her own and maintaining if not gaining weight so we hould be near the end now. We just need one blood test to show no fungus load and then one more month of anti-fungals and we're done.

Viper GTS

"Crypto"coccus infected her sinuses? That's so on the nose (sinuses = on the nose, too!) you should def rename her bitcoin.

Good luck, kitty

The thing about asset bubbles is that a minority of people make boatloads of cash before the crash. So, I'm envious of the people who got into bitcoin early and have already made a real profit in real currency. The suckers who are buying now, tho...

 

[Yakk]

Those buying in soon as floor shows itself are are probably mostly the same people who took profit at 15K+ awaiting the inevitable correction to reinvest a portion of their profits.

 

[preslove]

Those buying in soon as floor shows itself are are probably mostly the same people who took profit at 15K+ awaiting the inevitable correction to reinvest a portion of their profits.

The floor is 0

 

[Yakk]

The floor is 0

Oh ok, that will be a great place to buy back in then.

 

[IronWing]

Cryptococcus infection in her sinuses.

https://www.petmd.com/cat/conditions/infectious-parasitic/c_ct_cryptococcosis

It's rare in indoor cats, but apparently it got tracked in from somewhere. It's considered relatively treatable, but the drugs made her stop eating. So there was a scope/biopsy at the beginning to identify the problem (hurray not cancer), the feeding tube insertion after she dropped nearly 40% of her body weight in a month on the anti-fungal drugs, a few months on a feeding tube, bi-weekly emergency vet visits for ripped sutures/moving tube/etc. The tube is out now and she's eating on her own and maintaining if not gaining weight so we hould be near the end now. We just need one blood test to show no fungus load and then one more month of anti-fungals and we're done.

Viper GTS

That's really rough. Hope the fungus is gone and she gets back to being a happy kitty.

 

[njdevilsfan87]

I feel for you. We have a cat that had skin cancer on her nose (is now a permanent open wound), was treated for hyperthyroidism, had a few early morning ER visits when she couldn't poop (we've resolved that), had to have IV fluids done, etc. She's around 20 now and a fighter. She is more than worth every penny we spend to keep her alive and happy.

 

[Denly]

Cryptococcus infection in her sinuses.

https://www.petmd.com/cat/conditions/infectious-parasitic/c_ct_cryptococcosis

It's rare in indoor cats, but apparently it got tracked in from somewhere. It's considered relatively treatable, but the drugs made her stop eating. So there was a scope/biopsy at the beginning to identify the problem (hurray not cancer), the feeding tube insertion after she dropped nearly 40% of her body weight in a month on the anti-fungal drugs, a few months on a feeding tube, bi-weekly emergency vet visits for ripped sutures/moving tube/etc. The tube is out now and she's eating on her own and maintaining if not gaining weight so we hould be near the end now. We just need one blood test to show no fungus load and then one more month of anti-fungals and we're done.

Viper GTS

I learned my lesson, now if there are cares that a normal vet not equip to fix I go straight to the Vet college attached clinic. To me it is 1hr ish away, they have vet on duty 24/7, they have the best resources and their rate just like regular clinic. Cats stay there until they say is good to go.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Blockchain is going to survive as a supply chain technology. It will be very important for reacting to food borne illnesses.

Seriously? You think that's the only thing that people can do with blockchain technology?

Cryptocurrency/bitcoin is an idiotic asset bubble mania product that will replace "tulips" in the vernacular for bubbles

The fact that people can't differentiate between Bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general is part of what inspires comments like this one.

Crypto might be overvalued at the moment. It's exceptionally difficult to know what will be the true market value of something as vast as Ethereum. Ethereum alone could eventually handle the entire transaction volume of SWIFT, Visa, Mastercard, and AmEx once they've moved to the PoS model with sharding and a complementary offchain solution (Plasma or Raiden). And that's before you factor in other applications, private blockchains based off Ethereum, etc. How much is ETH worth? Do you know?

XMR is currently the "darkcoin" of choice. Great for evading the law/IRS and other fun stuff. And how much is XMR worth?

You can't do any of those things with tulips.

Bitcoin has failed in its original mission to be "digital cash" as described in Satoshi's whitepaper. BCH will fail that mission once any significant number of people try using it. Ethereum will get there eventually, though it won't be ETH tokens you use as money (you might wind up using stuff like DAI. IOTA might actually be the long-term winner if they can ever get their act together (IOTA isn't even a blockchain; it uses tangles).

People like Sarah Jeong who think cryptocurrency is "digital beanie babies" can't see beyond the hype. That makes her no better than the people trying to buy Bitcoin at $19k. The first goal (and just the first one, mind you) of blockchain tech is to vastly improve the efficiency of existing payment/currency networks. No more SWIFT, no Paypal, no more cumbersome (and often insecure) proprietary payment networks. Instead you will get near-instant transfer of wealth to any part of the world for pennies (and thanks to stuff like PoS, no more running tons of ASICs/graphics cards to secure the network). People today are betting on which technology will win out in the end, or at least make a significant contribution to the future of payment networks and other blockchain-related efforts. Visa/Mastercard/AmEx are putting quite a bit of resources and doing quite a bit of hiring to address this matter; why do you suppose that is? Are they all caught up in the hype, too?

Problem is that many investors do not understand cypto at all. There's a great deal of "stupid money" pouring into the sector. After the S2X debacle, most people should have pulled out of Bitcoin anyway (as well as all its forks), but they didn't. Shows you that the crypto market is infested with a great deal of irrational behavior and territorial thinking.

The important thing to remember is that the meritorious projects with lots of skilled developers behind them haven't even reached version 1.0 yet. None of them are fully-functional at this time. Except Bitcoin. With Bitcoin, what you see is what you get (don't give me that LN/RSK nonsense). Regardless, people are investing a lot of money in unfinished products. The people putting their money in crypto right now are visionaries, gamblers, or suckers. You can't just hold up the suckers and claim the entire thing is a scam.

 

[Yakk]

Short heavy CME Futures expiring... BTC still above 10K

Hmm... pretty sure wallstreet would've wanted lower at expiry.

 

[ponyo]

Short heavy CME Futures expiring... BTC still above 10K

Hmm... pretty sure wallstreet would've wanted lower at expiry.

Well they got way lower price to buy in than last week. It should make their annual bonus check they just received go lot further.

 

[Yakk]

Well they got way lower price to buy in than last week. It should make their annual bonus check they just received go lot further.

Yeah but wallstreet's greed knows no bounds. They also initially loaded up in Oct./Nov. So my guess is that was their target for a solid 100% min. gain in one quarter. With liitle-to-no-risk, which is impressive.

Sh!tcoins get amateur pumps&dumps. Bitcoin gets professional pump&dump.

 

[momeNt]

There isn't enough volume coming out of USA to cause this price change. This was Asia. Unless you mean "Wall Street" in a more global sense.

 

[Yakk]

By my thinking... Just like an amateur P&D you can factor in a big number for FOMO traders who don't really know what they're doing and just end up buying at or near top and give up during dump. The volume can become global on FOMO alone, as we saw.

Bitcoin needs waaaaaaaay better & more efficient arbing. (Ref my post earlier on decentralized exchanges.)

 

[Genx87]

Here comes the regular doomsayer with his "prophecy foretold" grandeur.

Not yet, bud, cool your jets. It may go down some more, could even stay at these levels or worse for a few months, but the market isn't down and out just yet, just down. The DOW is still very healthy so overall economic optimism is high, cryptos just have high volatility due to a weird combination of fairly high demand, big players, yet fewer big players and many small players actively trading at the same time. Unlike just about any other asset/market combination, cryptocurrencies trade globally on international exchanges, the entire globe at the same time. Total uptake is actually astonishingly low for such a global asset, but since every market is still nearly entirely independent at a regional scale -- even with international reach for the large exchanges -- huge fluctuations are common.

Dont forget the Pump and Dumps. But regulations should fix that and deflate prices further.

 

[FelixDeCat]

5

 

[VirtualLarry]

It suddenly hit me, IF, according to that article I linked from Forbes or Fool, that the IRS considers mining to be "Capital Gains", then that means, that it's NOT "Income", right? So therefore, I wouldn't have to give 30% of my profits to my Housing, in addition to paying the IRS for Cap. Gains. That might be a win, if it's not considered Income at all. It also means, that I theoretically wouldn't be capped, as I'm on Disability, like I would if it were considered "Income".

Could be some opportunities for me here. If only the price of Bitcoin would stay up there.

 

[Printer Bandit]

https://i.imgur.com/02Bxkye.gifv

 

[DaveSimmons]

> Wow. Bitcoin is almost $1,500

Soon.

More seriously, I have no idea when the bubble will pop so I'm not going to try to short any coins. Holding index funds for decades and getting rich slowly is good enough for me.

 

[ponyo]

> Wow. Bitcoin is almost $1,500

Soon.

More seriously, I have no idea when the bubble will pop so I'm not going to try to short any coins. Holding index funds for decades and getting rich slowly is good enough for me.

Well good for you. Your index bubble will pop too. Hopefully it won't be right before you're trying to retire.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Well good for you. Your index bubble will pop too. Hopefully it won't be right before you're trying to retire.

I've been through two pops already. I made out quite well buying during the last recession since unlike with Bitcoin I expected Apple, Microsoft, and the rest of the S&P 500 to recover over time.

 

[Vericonx]

and Ethereum is almost $80, up almost 900% this year. And the crazy thing is now you can actually buy things other than drugs with it.

So... Things seemed to have reaaaaaally escalated the past year huh?