[throw0101a]

> Actually Bitcoin is down 13.52% in the last 7 days

If a stock market index (e.g., S&P 500, FTSE 100, etc) was doing the same there would be many more headlines and people freaking out.

Some people claim that Bitcoin is "money", or at least a store of value, but I'm not sure I'd want to have any net worth stored in something that is as volatile at Bitcoin has been over the past year:

* https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/

[OnlineGladiator]

The S&P 500 market cap is over $40 trillion. The bitcoin market cap is under $2 trillion. I just looked up this data super quick with Google so corrections are welcome. And yep, I'm editing my comment because apparently that data is for all of crypto - bitcoin is $815 billion according to ycharts.

https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_market_cap

That's still an absurd amount of money, but there is more than an order of magnitude difference just in money, not to mention how almost no parts of the modern economy interact with cryptocurrencies in any way whatsoever.

[dan-robertson]

I don’t understand what you’re trying to say. That is, why do market caps matter here?

[OnlineGladiator]

I don't necessarily agree with it, but market cap is essentially the standard metric for how we measure value in our economy. If Apple goes down 10% people care because they're worth trillions and lots of people lose money. If a mid-size company goes down 10% a lot fewer people care.

[dan-robertson]

I understand what market cap is but I don’t understand why it is relevant to your point. Apple is the same order of magnitude as bitcoin but you claim the media would care about a 10% move in the former but not the latter.

Firstly it doesn’t make sense to me because bitcoin isn’t a company, nor is it made of them so this doesn’t feel like a like-for-like comparison. Secondly it doesn’t make sense to me because I don’t understand why market cap should be related to media reactions to volatility.

I don’t see what cohesive theory underlies your claim that a big ‘market cap’ is required for the media to care about volatility.

[OnlineGladiator]

I was saying Apple is the S&P 500 and Bitcoin is a random midsize company - it was an analogy. No analogy is perfect though, and you can certainly poke holes in mine (as you have).

> Secondly it doesn’t make sense to me because I don’t understand why market cap should be related to media reactions to volatility.

Because larger amounts of money matter more than smaller amounts of money. That's all. Penny stocks can fluctuate 1000x in a day but nobody cares.

[dan-robertson]

I put it to you that market cap is not a particularly relevant quantity but the thing that matters is mostly a mix of retail exposure and expected volatility (as well as eg media interest). Bitcoin is basically expected to be volatile (which is why 10% down is not news). I think you were trying to make a point about retail exposure rather than market cap, but that does not sufficiently describe why the media care because a big move in something that is meant to be stable (e.g. some fixed income index) is smaller in percentage terms than a big move in something that is expected to be less stable (like an equity index).

[rawtxapp]

Bigger market caps means bigger market makers with far more liquidity, so an average trade is much smaller in the grand scheme of things. When there isn't as much liquidity and smaller volumes, the market will move more quickly.

[outside1234]

He is trying to say that Bitcoin is wildly overvalued.

[zitterbewegung]

Last year 2021 the S&P 500 had a large amount of volatility and Bloomberg does report on this.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-03/how-to-ha...

[sp332]

It is a lot of volatility, but it's also weird to compare an index to a single security.

[dylkil]

some people have different risk appetite