[narses]

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/05/technology/virtual-currency-regulation.html

SAN FRANCISCO — You did not have to be a technophobe to worry that the virtual-currency boom of the past year papered over plenty of problems.

The scale of those problems is starting to become clear as digital tokens have slid more than 50 percent in value from their peaks in early January, with steep drops on Monday pushing the value of Bitcoin specifically below $7,000.

Hackers draining funds from online exchanges. Ponzi schemes. Government regulators unable to keep up with the rise of so-called cryptocurrencies. Signs of trouble have appeared at nearly every level of the industry, from the biggest exchanges to the news sites and chat rooms where the investment frenzy has been discussed......

[palmer]

Two years ago the MSM declared bitcoin "dead" and I bought mine. Yet it went up and up and I am still way up and don't care in the least if it drops to a couple hundred bucks what I paid, or below. Nice while it lasted. CC is great without the $ value although it requires some to be useful. I have worked the same PKI algorithms for different purposes for almost 20 years. The disstributed consensus algorithms are somewhat new to me, but those are working nearly flawlessly despite constant attacks.

It's been said bitcoin is a multi-billion dollar bug bounty, unclaimed. The keys are trivial to protect and it's getting easier all the time. It's easy to tell a scam, just look at the ridicule on CC forums. That NYT article ignores all that and focuses on losses and scams. But like the bitcoin investor and advocate said at the end, those will go away with a big enough correction. I have no doubt the CC ecosystem will bounce back with new ideas. Ultimately that's what it is, new ideas to create, exchange, and store value.