[decentralised]

You're new to this :-)

Look all cryptos are extremely volatile because the real market liquidity is an order of magnitude less than most people think it is, and the way automated market makers work force all exchanges to keep their prices "in sync" to avoid arbitrage like we had in the early days when it was possible to buy for 50$ in one exchange and sell for 100$ in another..

On the plus side, atm BTC is up ~8% in the last year and about ~22% since the beginning of the month.

Source: me a blockchain dev, former CTO of a crypto exchange that raised 30M in an ICO.

[SilasX]

Well, yeah, there's nothing special about the prices of a single cryptocurrency moving in sync across all the exchange. But it's strange that all the >$1B market cap cryptocurrencies fell by about the same amount.

[random_moonwalk]

I'm curious how the automated market makers keep the prices in sync across exchanges, any more detail you can offer/links to further reading?

[decentralised]

Most of what I know I picked up by looking at AMM vendor websites and papers as well as attending industry conferences and talking with the people there.

[tuesday20]

A bit off topic - is it worth learning blockchain tech? Is it a viable career? If yes, where should be start - btc, eth..? Or something else?

[davidajackson]

It is a viable career--just make it one of the skills that you have. You can start with Solidity and program some basic smart contracts (check out https://remix.ethereum.org/). Then when you feel like you're getting the hang of it, try creating a server that listens for blockchain events and manages a DB of off chain activity... and then you can start architecting more complex systems, like contracts that interact with each other.

Speaking from a financial standpoint I think ETH will be more of a career for you if that's what you pursue--you can charge well for smart contract architecture. I think BTC will be more of a store of value (and then transactional too later on) and ETH will be computational/contractual. Lots of people have strong opinions on this and other decentralized scripting languages; this is just my opinion as a random guy on the internet :)

Speaking from a code efficiency standpoint: Solidity will force you to be very economical about the code that you write, since you pay per opcode to execute code. I think that alone is worth writing some smart contracts, because it forces you (as long as you set cost as a constraint) to be efficient in your architecture so it's a good exercise.

There aren't a ton of real world applications where you can honestly say "that architecture is better than a centralized one" yet. But if you study the tech and grow with it over the next 20 years you will have a complete understanding of how it works and will be in a position to contribute as it gets to higher adoption levels (or help push it there), which I consider a good idea.

[rini17]

It is certainly useful to learn enough to dispel the bull "X will be better with blockchain".

[mettamage]

I second this. Blockchain is still an amazing technology though. I think the general concept is even way cooler (blockchain is, I think, an implementation detail).

The concept is: decentralized databases

When should you have that? Well, one example: whenever you need a database, and a centralized database is politically or socially impossible.

Fun fact: bitcoin is a better currency than any currency that is undergoing hyperinflation right now. Some of those places also can't have centralized databases.