Gold, which is possibly the oldest store of value used by civilization, is just as volatile.<p>The inflation-adjusted price per Troy ounce of gold went from a high of around $2400 in the the late 1400's, to a low of $200 in 1919; then, it rose in fits and starts until it peaked at nearly $1600 in 1980; it then declined, again in fits and starts, until it bottomed just below $400 in 2002; then it rose to nearly $2000 in 2012; and since then, has dropped to just over $1200, today's price:<p><pre><code> 1490 1919 1980 2002 2012 2017
----- ----- ----- ----- ----- -----
$2400 $200 $1600 $400 $2000 $1200
</code></pre>
The price of gold is unstable over shorter time frames too. For example, since the start of last year, the price has oscillated between just over $1000 and nearly $1400 per Troy ounce.<p>This kind of volatility seems normal for assets used as a store of value.<p>Sources:<p>[1] <a href="http://www.zerohedge.com/news/charting-price-gold-all-way-back-1265" rel="nofollow">http://www.zerohedge.com/news/charting-price-gold-all-way-ba...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_as_an_investment#/media/File:Gold_price_in_USD.png" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_as_an_investment#/media/F...</a><p>[3] <a href="http://www.kitco.com/charts/historicalgold.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.kitco.com/charts/historicalgold.html</a>
Why am i not surprised? Nearly all or maybe all ICOs since May have been a deliberate scam. That is beyond the word 'bubble'. That is just it - collective scam. Crowdsourced Bernie Madoff.
For now it's just a rather small correction, keeping in mind how much they had gone up in the last 60 months.<p>On the other hand, the uncertainty with Bitcoin's Segwit activation, possible chain split etc won't help in the next few weeks including August. It could make the bubble pop... or not.<p>What's weird is that coins that have already adopted SegWit, like Litecoin, seem to suffer even more than BTC during the dips (even if LTC was the best alt during the one since yesterday).
Ethereum traded around $380 three weeks ago and is now hovering around $200, which is quite a loss in value.<p>Ethereum makes up 44% of the total market cap of altcoins, but does anyone know what percentage of the remaining altcoins are just ERC20 tokens ? My gut tells me those ERC20 tokens are vulnerable to ETH price declines since miners get paid in ETH. A token may lose value, for example, as transaction times start increasing especially during a sell-off. When trading volume goes up but network capacity goes down that can cause even more panic selling.<p>Note, ETH mining is done with GPUs so it is really easy to just mine another currency. Mining CAP is about 7X more profitable than mining ETH at the moment [1].<p>[1] Coinwarz.com
Interesting to see the paradigm of "bitcoin is doing well, everything else must be less useful" is making a comeback? I the reason progressively larger corrections have been happening is due to more people who know nothing about crypto entering the space, therefore introducing more volatility and reflexive baseless reasoning.<p>If you question this, join one of the "crpyto currency" groups on FaceBook and read through a majority of the posts... I've come across people who've taken out loans to purchase crypto and people who installed wallets locally and wondered why the crypto they bought on CoinBase didn't magically appear. The most disconcerting posts are those who constantly ask "why did the price go up or down" or blindly post their chart predictions as to why the currency will keep going up in value.
Does this include all of the altcoins built on top of ethereum? For example, BAT adds another $90million of value that isn't represented strictly by looking at the ethereum market cap[0].<p>[0] <a href="https://coinmarketcap.com/assets/basic-attention-token/" rel="nofollow">https://coinmarketcap.com/assets/basic-attention-token/</a>
"Market cap" is a vacuous and bogus number.<p>Cryptocurrency advocates and lazy journalists like to talk about it, but it's not actually useful - it’s not money that was put into the crypto, it’s not a realisable value like a company market cap, it doesn’t affect prices. It’s just an easily-calculated number that sounds good in a headline. It literally doesn't indicate anything.<p>Trading is so thin in any crypto, even Bitcoin, that you could never realise a fraction of the number in any way.<p>If you want to compare interest and activity in crypto assets, you need to compare trading volumes, if you can find good numbers for those.<p>What the drop indicates is that prices in <i>all</i> cryptos track each other, as is usual.
What I don't get is why alts are losing value against BTC. Like, if you look at this chart it shows that Bitcoin is gaining market share and alts are losing it:<p><a href="https://coinmarketcap.com/charts/#dominance-percentage" rel="nofollow">https://coinmarketcap.com/charts/#dominance-percentage</a><p>I would think that people would be leaving BTC and putting their money in alts due to August 1 jitters, but it seems to be the opposite that's happening.
Perhaps the Petya effect. If users don't trust paying bitcoins will help them recover their data, they don't have any reason to buy bitcoins to pay a ransom.
I still remember when Bitcoin was at $1,000 for the first time. The Economist ran a story and it was discussed nearly everywhere. The price fell by 30%+ after that. A few years later it was at $3,000.<p>It's normal that markets crash when everyone starts talking about how high they are. Once booming stockmarkets make it to the front page of newspapers it's often the end of the boom. It wakes people up who realise they still have stocks (or bitcoin in this case) and quickly sell it.<p>So the crash after hitting $3,000 was somewhat expected, given the attention in the media. Doesn't mean that it won't be strong over the next 2-3 years.