[Nursie]

> I’m confused what the alternative is.

For years it has been claimed that cryptocurrency represented a great hedge against traditional assets and investments in the case of a downturn.

Like many other claims made about the utility of cryptocurrency, this too has been shown not to be the case.

[trixie_]

Like stocks, don't confuse short term volatility with long term performance. The fed is expert at manipulating short term valuations, but their manipulations only hold for so long before they have to lower or raise rates again.

[Nursie]

I'm not.

Cryptocurrency has explicitly and repeatedly been touted as un or anti-correlated to the wider financial ecosystem, fiat currencies and the stock market, and has been loudly, noisily and never-endingly sold as a great hedge against these things, absent any evidence.

The evidence is in now, and those theories are a bust.

[trixie_]

There are many theories about everything. Sorry the ones you bought into didn’t work out. Most of us aren’t surprised that when the dollar is manipulated that other asset classes’ dollar values change as well.

[Nursie]

I didn't buy into them, nor was I the slightest bit surprised. The point is that like most theories about cryptocurrency value that originate with cryptocurrency proponents, they have been shown to be wrong when exposed to the real world.

To turn it back on you - I'm not sure why you're upset that a central bank currency is being manipulated, that's entirely the point of such a system, to allow manipulation by steering committees to attempt to smooth out the bumps and judders in the economy and keep things on an even keel. It's a good thing!

[aaaaaaaaata]

I had a comment written, I'll leave it at this: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10966165/Jerome-Pow...

Your faith is misplaced.

[Nursie]

When I claim that anyone has perfect knowledge… I still won’t be interested in what it says in a Daily Mail article.

[trixie_]

I'm not upset either. The dollar is a stable because of manipulation though unfortunately over the long term it does lose value. The cost of stability. Crypto on the other hand I do expect to go up over the long term while being short term volatile. Let's check back in five years and see if that's the case.

[Nursie]

We can do that, and I'm not sure I would like to make a prediction about the price of any particular cryptocurrency asset that far ahead.

But I'm also not sure what that has to do with my posts further up, which are saying that another claim about cryptocurrency, that it's a hedge against the stock market and the wider financial system, is wrong. If you're trying to say "Well it might work out, longer term!" then I'm not really sure it qualifies as hedge at that point, you're just talking about another investment which it turns out is quite strongly correlated to the general financial markets.

[FabHK]

The notion that the volatility of crypto currencies are due to the value of the dollar being manipulated (rather than the "value" of the crypto) is absurd. You can trivially compare the value of a dollar to a basket of currencies (e.g. the U.S. Dollar Index/Dixie), or a basket of goods (like the consumer price index), and it is fairly stable, and definitely not as wild as the gyrations of crypto prices.

[trixie_]

Just as companies like Celsius offered a high interest rate on Bitcoin, and lots of people moved their money into Bitcoin; the government can do the same by changing interest rates which incentivize people to move their money to/from dollars.

[Gigachad]

Feels like all the crypto marketing has been saying you should get crypto to avoid government manipulation. And yet the government manipulation is just as effective.

[trixie_]

The government can short term manipulate the dollar and as a result the dollar value of various assets. That's what causes the short term volatility. Long term though the value of assets resistant to manipulation will go up, while the value of the dollar will steadily go down as it always does.

[Nursie]

Cryptocurrency does not seem to fall into the category of "assets resistant to manipulation".

In fact it seems to be very, very prone to manipulation by all sorts of parties.

[trixie_]

It's pretty simple, all the Bitcoin 'manipulation' you see is simply buying/selling open market coins. Not selling massive quantities of newly minted coins. The government on the other and has minted and spent trillions of dollars in stimulus which has resulted in permanent inflation.

The point is, Bitcoin will bounce back, the dollar will not.

[Nursie]

> It's pretty simple, all the Bitcoin 'manipulation' you see is simply buying/selling open market coins.

LOL. And every tether is backed by a US Dollar in a bank account, right? Nobody could possibly (say) fake buy pressure to put the prices up?

> The point is, Bitcoin will bounce back, the dollar will not.

What point? For what purpose will bitcoin "bounce back" that the dollar will not?

As the dollar is not an investment, but a means of exchange, it doesn't seem particularly important whether the dollar 'bounces back', because nobody is trying to sell you dollars to stick under the mattress as a get-rich-quick scheme.

What a weird comment.

[tsimionescu]

There is plenty of other manipulation, like constructing ponzi schemes that require BTC/ETH to get into, or "stable coins" backed by other crypto, or selling "art" like NFTs.

These all sooner or later crash down, and bring the value of ETH and BTC down with them. Already billions of dollars have left the crypto space, and are unlikely to ever come back.

It of course isn't impossible that BTC will bounce back, but there is also no guarantee of it. Perhaps Gamestop will bounce back as well, or the Venezuelan Dollar.

[andirk]

Most of the money minted and spent goes to dropping bombs on brown people and guarding Arab oil investments. And while the average American got a small check, giant companies got massive interest free loans. Again.