Posted on 12/06/2022 4:13:39 AM PST by EBH
"I'm nearly bankrupt," says Jad Fawaz, a crypto trader in Abu Dhabi. "I'm laughing because there's no point in exerting more depression and more frustration about it."
The 45-year-old, who quit his real-estate job a year ago to focus on trading, has seen his holdings evaporate in recent months. He hasn't slept in a week because of the stress.
"I had about 40 coins and then I came down to 20 coins then I came down to 10 coins, came down to five coins and now I'm down to the last two coins, and it's bitcoin and ripple XRP," he says.
"So these are the last two coins and I will die before selling them."
For many retail traders and investors, enough is enough.
Bitcoin balances on crypto exchanges - where retail investors typically transact - have fallen to around 2.3 million from its 2020 all-time high of 3.1 million, exchange Bitfinex said. Self-custody wallet balances have not grown at the same pace, indicating more selling than storage, it added.
"There are signs that a significant number of retail investors have been discouraged to the point of exiting crypto entirely," Bitfinex analysts said.
Indeed, Fawaz is not alone.
It's been a brutal year for investors. Bitcoin's price has dropped 63%, while the overall cryptocurrency market capitalization has lost $1.63 trillion in value.
The collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX exchange hammered a long nail into the market.
November saw a 7-day realized loss of $10.16 billion in bitcoin investments as investors were forced to exit long-term positions, the fourth-largest loss on record by this measure, according to Glassnode data.
"This is not the winter season anymore, this is a bloodbath, because the FTX crisis was like a domino that toppled so many companies," said Linda Obi, a crypto investor in the
(Excerpt) Read more at finance.yahoo.com ...
Anyone who made a massive amount of money in bitcoin that didn’t take a lot of that out of bitcoin and put it into something real long ago, deserves to have lost it all.
I remember hearing a pair of economic show hosts who talk about crypto all the time, while frequently mentioning that even they don’t really feel like they understand it, admonishing people like me not to invest in something they don’t fully comprehend. I took them up on that, and have never regretted it.
so you have some sort of basis to judge its value.
I dumped my tulip stocks last week, and put it all in beanie babies.
I’ll never sell my beanie babies.
They are going to be worth millions.
(Or, about the price of a cup of coffee in a few years.)
“If bitcoin is better and safer than cash, why is its valuation always translated to a cash amount?”
Same with gold, right? My TV says the economy will crash and I need to buy gold…using paper (or digital) dollars.
That statement could be attributed to Janet Yellen, Democrat U.S. Secretary of the Treasury and former chair of the Federal Reserve.
The US dollar is not far behind.
And the Central Bank Digital Currency / Social Credit System is ready to roll.
All by design.
A fool and his money are soon parted
With gold, if you physically owned some, you could weigh some shavings and bargain with it. At least it’s real. Paper gold is fake like bitcoin IMHO. If you can’t liquify it at any time it’s worthless.
With gold, if you physically owned some, you could weigh some shavings and bargain with it. At least it’s real. Paper gold is fake like bitcoin IMHO. If you can’t liquify it at any time it’s worthless.
I assume he meant he was forced to sell them at a loss for living expenses he’d invested.
“If you can’t pick it up and run with it, you don’t really own it.”
L
“Why would he be losing his coins? The value has gone down, but the same amount of BTC is still there”
We all may have different opinions on crypto but one thing I think we can all agree on is that this was one poorly written article.
crypto is a Ponzi scam. period. crypto has no future value yield, so it’s ONLY value is selling it to greater fools. it’s NOT a unit of account: out of different billions of items traded and sold in the U.S. essentially none are really priced in crypto, and which of the 10,0000 cryptos would a retailer use, anyway? ...
which brings up the fact that crypto is NOT “limited” in quantity, essentially the quantity of crypto is infinite ... anyone can go to studentcoin.org and create trillions of their own crypto coins for about $24.00 in ethereum chain fees ... oh, and you can’t pay your taxes with crypto, which is a biggie ...
crypto is NOT a store of value, crypto does NOT function as a currency. In fact so-called “stablecoins” are the true currency of the crypto world because crypto itself couldn’t even function as a currency in the crypto world. Crypto is NOT a hedge against inflation, crypto is not a hedge against stock market fluctuations. Crypto is NOT private, in fact it’s quite public. ALL of the above hype about crypto is just that: hype. crypto could disappear tomorrow and the world would be a better place ...
fourteen years of BS hype about blockchain has been nothing but hype too ... blockchain solves no problems better than existing accounting methodologies ... no essential use-case has been found for blockchain during that 14 years ...
blockchain is NOT somehow magically decentralized: it takes thousands of data centers with millions of specialized computers to maintain the blockchain files ... blockchain ledgers are grotesquely inefficient and non-scalable and non-reversible and not even private: bitcoin alone uses the equivalent of the annual consumption of electricity as Belgium, can process only about 7 transactions a second, with a ten minute delay. Exchanges, another essential set of centralizations are necessary to trade crypto because the few decentralized methods of trade are extremely difficult to use and extremely insecure, having been hacked for billions in theft during their short but dismal existence ...
blockchain could disappear tomorrow and no one would care except hucksters, criminals, and fools who “invested” billions in data centers that process blockchain transactions, so-called “miners” ...
finally, crypto should NOT be regulated, because that would lend it a patina of legitimacy that’s completely unwarrented... no one would think of regulating Beanie Babies or Franklin Mint figurines, so why should crypto be regulated? just because it’s the latest bubble fad of worthless BS reeling in the suckers?
no, it’s best just to let the crypto Ponzi implode when enough ignorant and greedy suckers lose their shirts and the remaining suckers see the results and decide, “Hmmm, maybe crypto isn’t such a hot idea after all.” The Crypto Ponzi WILL burn itself out if left alone to die a natural death.
Because word DOES get around. it’s like the current dismal uptake of the latest covid “booster”: word got around that it doesn’t work (folks get sick and pass it along anyway), and too many folks know someone who was maimed or killed by the vax itself ...
at any rate, i wrote a little ditty sung to the tune of “76 Trombones”:
BUT IT’S BLOCKCHAIN! BLOCKCHAIN I TELL YOU! BLOCKCHAIN! BLOCKCHAIN IS REVOLUTIONARY! BLOCKCHAIN WILL MAKE CONVENTIONAL BANKING OBSOLETE! BLOCKCHAIN WILL ALLOW THE POOR AND DOWNTRODDEN TO BE RICH! BLOCKCHAIN WILL CURE CLIMATE CHANGE! BLOCKCHAIN! I TELL YOU! BLOCKCHAIN! DON’T FORGET THAT WORD: BLOCKCHAIN! BLOCKCHAIN!
Those kind of schemes you have to know when to fold em. Sell as soon as you make a good profit.
“ The 45-year-old, who quit his real-estate job a year ago to focus on trading,”
That says a lot.
Ping
“I dumped my tulip stocks last week”
you’re only about four centuries too late ... oh, well, maybe next time ...
“BTC reverts to its intrinsic value”
not quite ... the greater fool pool hasn’t been completely sucked dry yet ...
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