Groups do only two things – icing on the cake or falling into a well.
The Ragged Crowd by Gustav Le Pen
In the last second, Musk was still supporting Bitcoin, and a sentence of "almost fiat currency" pushed Bitcoin to a sharp rise.
The next second, Bitcoin panicked and plummeted, plummeting $11,000 in 4 days, with more than 90,000 people bursting into positions, and many people were deeply trapped.
Bitcoin plummeted, falling by about $13,000. Image courtesy of BitFan
In the eyes of some people, Bitcoin has become beyond the existence of Chinese real estate and the US stock market, in order to "stud" overnight wealth, at the expense of betting on all their wealth, but also add high leverage, and finally lose all their money.
What kind of magic does Bitcoin have that can drive people crazy?
There is no most absurdity, only more absurdity
Some time ago, when Bitcoin was speculated to $58,000 a piece, a ridiculous piece of news made people not know whether to cry, laugh or scold.
This is a 2019 news, when the price of Bitcoin was about $8,000 per coin, and 60 bitcoins was $480,000, equivalent to about 3,100,000 yuan.
If these 60 bitcoins are sold at a price of 58,000 USD per coin, you will receive 3,480,000 USD, or about RMB 2,246,000.
Many people's brains are open, and they continue to write the next plot:
The husband cleared the warehouse for 8,000 knives (US dollars) each and was admitted to the same psychiatric hospital a year later.
The husband sold 60 bitcoins for the original price and now sits at home all day sighing and complaining that his wife does not have the spirit of resistance, so that the family misses the opportunity to get rich overnight.
The husband knelt outside the mental hospital and begged his wife to tell him the wallet password, and wanted to reconcile with his wife as before, and also sued the mental hospital for irregular admission process, suspected of violating the law.
Seeing more absurd things, and even making people feel that these "sequel" plots are not absurd, unreasonable everywhere is "reasonable", and it is really possible to happen, after all, there are too many real absurd things related to Bitcoin.
Discarding the hard drive containing 7500 bitcoins, the guy rummaged through the city dump and found that picking up scraps was more profitable than going to work.
The local tycoon sold $2 million in gold for Bitcoin and made a profit of $6 million, which is $3 million more than the 2020 gold surge.
To write a paper, the man bought 5,000 bitcoins for $27 and forgot, and only remembered a few years later after seeing the bitcoin news that a paper indirectly made $866,000.
As long as you talk about Bitcoin, you must be inseparable from the word "money".
Why is Bitcoin popular?
The global financial crisis of 2008 exposed many problems in the financial system. To solve part of the problem, a man who identified himself as Satoshi Nakamoto published a bitcoin white paper, "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System," on the P2P foundation's website, stating his new vision for electronic money — Bitcoin.
Bitcoin. Image courtesy of: 71 Republic
Compared with fiat currencies, Bitcoin has the following characteristics:
1. There is no centralized issuer, calculated and generated by the network node, who can dig, the total amount is fixed 2. The world circulation, theoretically can be freely bought and sold online, circulation 3. The transaction process is fully transparent, and the transaction behavior is publicly traced 4. Outsiders cannot identify user identity information during the transaction process
Bitcoin's characteristics are similar to the characteristics of the currency part, avoiding problems such as currency inflation and different transparency of transactions, which is why Musk said that "(Bitcoin) is almost legal tender", the vast majority of ordinary people "speculate", and buy houses, investment, the core driving force is still to resist inflation.
At the same time, some people will also give priority to bitcoin as a transaction "currency" for the sake of anonymous transactions. In 2018, the data of 300 million users of a courier company was leaked, and hackers specified that they were required to use bitcoin to trade in order to hide their identities.
It should be noted that as early as 2017, the People's Bank of China announced that Bitcoin is a specific virtual commodity, does not have monetary attributes such as legal compensation and mandatory, does not have the same legal status as money, and cannot and should not be used as a currency in circulation in the market.
Conspiracy theories and absurdities coexist
Along with absurdity, there are conspiracy theories related to Bitcoin.
Bitcoin's creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, remains a mystery to this day, and no one knows who he is to this day. He called himself Japanese-American, came and went without a trace, and it was as if the world had evaporated for so many years.
Satoshi Nakamoto has always been a mystery. Image credit: Talking about Bitcoin - Rosen (Zhihu)
As a result, all kinds of conspiracy theories are all over the place.
It has been suggested that Satoshi means "clear-thinking; resourceful; sensible," Naka means "internal or relational," and moto is defined as "origin; cause; foundation" which can be thought of as Bitcoin created by the CIA.
More conspiracy theories suggest that Bitcoin was manipulated behind the scenes by 4 companies, Satoshi = Samsung + Toshiba, Nakamoto = Nakamichi + Motorola.
Some speculate that there are four companies behind Satoshi Nakamoto. Image courtesy of blog.remitano.com
It has also been argued that Nakamoto is a NATO amok variant, the North Atlantic Treaty OrganisaTIon, which can be defined as out-of-control and disruptive behavior, which can be understood as a north atlantic treaty organization's crazy actions as a whole.
There are all kinds of interpretations, and no one can convince anyone.
Finally, in 2016, a man named Craig Steven Wright claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto, and some people agreed and some doubted, and the jury is still inconclusive.
Craig Steven Wright calls himself Satoshi Nakamoto
Wright also expressed his opinion on Bitcoin: "Bitcoin today is not really Bitcoin. Now Bitcoin is just impersonating Bitcoin. This is just a plagiarized version designed to gradually change the protocol to allow people to make various transactions anonymously, thus allowing criminal activity to occur. The aim is to build a system that allows people to commit crimes, extort money, spread automated ransomware viruses, and even engage in worse criminal activities. That's not what Bitcoin is for."
However, for the people who "speculate", it does not matter who Satoshi Nakamoto is, as long as Bitcoin is still Bitcoin, this is the "basic disk" that Bitcoin can continue.
Why Bitcoin has skyrocketed and plummeted
The logic behind the seemingly magical guarantee is actually very simple - more people buy Bitcoin.
According to foreign media reports, a series of well-known institutions, including large asset management company Guggenheim and Massmutual Life Insurance Company, have announced the purchase of bitcoin in 2020. MicroStrategy, the world's largest independent business intelligence company, has purchased large amounts of Bitcoin in four separate transactions for a total of more than $1 billion since August 2020.
Glassnode's report found that from the beginning of 2021 to February 5, the number of "whales" (addresses with 1,000 to 10,000 bitcoins defined as "whales") increased by more than 14%. The buying frenzy of "whales" and "humpback whales" peaked in January when they snapped up 80,000 bitcoins, worth $3.84 billion at today's prices.
When Bitcoin was at its hottest, Musk changed his Twitter profile to #bitcoin#, "bringing goods" for bitcoin, bitcoin instantly soared 800 US dollars, and he also changed his new avatar on February 20, showing a big bitcoin logo.
Musk changed the Twitter profile to Bitcoin. Image from: Zinc Scale (Sina Chuang Column Genesis)
Bitcoin is so much, everyone is optimistic about Bitcoin, they all go to buy Bitcoin, naturally the price increases.
Bitcoin plummeted, of course, everyone is not optimistic about Bitcoin, and the selling behavior has become more.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen recently said publicly that bitcoin is often used for illegal transactions and is an inefficient way to trade. This shouting releases an obvious signal that Bitcoin is not as good as imagined, and there is a high risk.
Some economists said that the index of global technology companies has fallen sharply, after the market generally believed that many technology companies and bitcoin growth in 2020 provided a certain basis, and now these companies themselves are weak, which also affects people's expectations of bitcoin.
The data shows that since February, "whales" and "humpback whales" have reduced their holdings by 140,000 bitcoins, equivalent to a reduction of $6.72 billion since the beginning of this month.
Bitcoin trading machine
For many technology companies, the rise and fall of these figures can even be said to be "painless and itchy", but for individuals who "speculate in coins", losses are unbearable, and it is not uncommon for people who lose their homes.
The reality is more cruel than imagined, during the epidemic, the United States in order to save the market, to the market to put a large amount of money, under the flood, money is less and less valuable, the strong can "do whatever", Xiao San had to get involved in the zero-sum game, and then spontaneously became fanatical, in order to use collective behavior to save their wealth.
In response to the ups and downs of Bitcoin, Cheng Lingfeng, former director of Tencent Technology Center, commented in his public account "Lu Hongyan":
In order to counter Wall Street's whims, retail investors have rushed Gamestop's stock price to a point far higher than its actual value, but now it has fallen to 1/10 of the highest point, and many people have lost everything.
In order to combat the unbridled flood of currency depreciation, Bitcoin was rushed to a very high price.
Bitcoin is similar to Gamestop, which is to use one unreasonableness against another unreasonable, and to use the actions of one group of people to oppose the actions of another group of people.
Riches and bankruptcies under the zero-sum game
If you use an old Chinese saying to describe the behavior of coin speculation, it is that "the world is bustling for profit, and the world is all for profit", risks and advice are left behind, and there is only one night of wealth in the eyes.
Some people joke that Tesla has "brushed a lonely" on the Bitcoin price chart. Image credit: omid (Twitter)
In the financial market, which has always been regarded as a high-end field, when the market buys bitcoin, it buys bitcoin at a blood cost, and in the countryside, it sees that others have made a lot of money by planting apples, and the whole village has planted apples in the second year, which is essentially the same: the layout of the sitting house, the harvest with strength, and the blood loss of following the trend.
However, in the face of the massive currency flying around the sky, this absurd behavior has a very realistic side, in the anxiety of the whole people, many people are not willing to take a step behind in wealth, the concept of "standing still is regressing" is deeply rooted in the heart, and bitcoin-related absurdities, conspiracy theories, madness, perfectly show a sentence in "The Ragtag":
If the phenomenon that can be felt is the wave, then we know nothing about the chaos in the depths of the ocean.