I have sat out the crypto craze. I was actually one of the first to introduce the idea to my friends after having stumbled upon Satoshi's paper. I even joined a mining pool early on, but never did I put my own money into it. I'm not an expert economist by any means, and am often intimidated when I go on crypto boards and the average user seems to be able to throw around advanced macroeconomics terms no problem.<p>Nevertheless, my basic economic background in crypto told me that, since the currency is neither tied to ownership in something with value or some entity that actually produces something valuable or some token which governments will arrest you if you fail to pay, that it has no useful value. For years, I pointed this out to those around me, who thought I was some kind of Luddite.<p>But, I think this is going to vindicate my basic argument. There is nothing valuable in crypto. It failed as a means of payment. It's failed to decentralize finance. And now, it's failed to be a store of value as well.
Anecdotally, a <i>lot</i> of people have been using a <i>lot</i> of leverage to do a <i>lot</i> of insanely speculative things with cryptocurrency over the past few years. And it's worked out <i>great</i> for them... until now. I imagine many leveraged speculators are facing the prospects of financial ruin.
Their official explanation, that bitcoin txns are getting stuck due to low fees, is plausible.<p>See: <a href="https://mempool.space/graphs/mempool#24h" rel="nofollow">https://mempool.space/graphs/mempool#24h</a> & zoom out farther to see how the current fee regime is higher than usual.<p>This does show a nasty form of contagion within crypto. One player pauses withdrawals which causes a run for the doors elsewhere, any given L1 can only process so many txns per second, so fees spike, their code doesn't handle it gracefully so more players pause withdrawals to fix it.
CNET says Binance withdrawals are back up.[1]<p>[1] <a href="https://www.cnet.com/personal-finance/crypto/binance-resumes-bitcoin-withdraws-after-hours-long-freeze/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnet.com/personal-finance/crypto/binance-resumes...</a>
Misleading - a transaction was stuck due to the fee being too low. See <a href="https://twitter.com/binance/status/1536337215877283840" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/binance/status/1536337215877283840</a>