War On The Blockchain - The Era Of FUD
Perhaps it can be argued that anytime there is the potential to lose money, that fear, uncertainty, and doubt will not be far behind. Therefore it is no surprise that we are seeing monumental amounts of FUD when it comes to the crypto markets.
One of the most stark examples of FUD in recent times that I can remember, is when the Bitfinex exchange was hacked, and a number of people had their Bitcoin stolen. It was of course a problem for the exchange, not for the currency itself, however the news caused the price to crash from a then $700ish dollars, to around $200.
By the next day the price was back up to around 95% of what it was before the FUD, and of course now is many times that.
It is easy to dismiss the fudders as flighty fools who only exist to sell the wiser among us, their assets on the cheap. However it is fudders that can often determine a market's direction.
Clearly it is good to have some FUD, because as mentioned above, a little bit of FUD can turn out to be very lucrative for the patient and canny investor. However too much of it can bring a market crashing down.
Enter The FUD Wars
Of course the concept of fear, uncertainty, and doubt, is nothing new. However perhaps it is the fact that cryptocurrencies are often based on a kind of virtual value that is hard to quantify in real terms, that make it particularly susceptible to FUD.
In more traditional markets you have real world events to measure your FUD against. So if you are invested in coffee and you're worried about tropical storms ruining crops (I know nothing about coffee), then you can either allay, or confirm your fears by learning about the weather.
Or perhaps you want to invest in a particular mineral that comes from a country on the brink of war, again a bit of research may be able to help you.
However when the kind of FUD that surrounds crypto starts to spread, it can be a lot harder, if not impossible to use real world events to help you work out whether you should be panicking or not.
Old School FUD, Banking Style
The rhetoric we have heard from the banks regarding cryptocurrency, has not been at all surprising. Various luminaries from the world of finance, have been warning us about the Bitcoin bubble, which of course is an old tactic. It's good now; but will it last?
Then we have seen the banks try and create FUD around the use of cryptocurrency. Are you unwittingly funding terrorism and/or paedophillia?
Which of course, coming from a bank is laughable, but still they try.
We have even seen Eco FUD, There isn't enough electricity to keep Bitcoin going! It is worse than 1000 nuclear bombs being detonated in the atmosphere!
Apart from providing me with some big lols, the FUD from the banks will have its own successes and failures, however there is something comforting about it.
We didn't expect them to go quietly, so now we see that they aren't, it is just the natural order of things; the devil you know, so to speak.
The Network Wars
Often when a new innovative technology comes along, at first there are many who take advantage of it, and attempt to sell it to the masses. Then after not very long, there are few.
Thus there will always be struggles for dominance in new fields, and cryptocurrency will be no different. Recently for instance we saw the Litecoin creator Charlie Lee, call the Litecoin Cash (LCC) fork a scam.
From as far as anyone can tell, he had no reason to do so, other than he didn't want another coin with Litecoin in the name.
He cited reasons such as the LCC devs hadn't even released a whitepaper, of course omitting the fact that Litecoin; itself being a fork of Bitcoin, does not have a whitepaper also.
Also recently there were some FUD ripples caused on the Ethereum network by CryptoKitties. Claiming that the little feline crypto token could bring down the entire network due to huge bandwidth issues.
I believe we may just be seeing the start of the network wars. Silent wars, whereby instead of weapons of mass destruction, it will be the bombs of FUD that are the main ordinance used.
WHAT ENGINEERED FUD HAVE YOU WITNESSED? ARE YOU YOURSELF CONSUMED WITH FEAR UNCERTAINTY AND DOUBT? AS EVER, LET ME KNOW BELOW!
I think one of the main issues with FUD is that it's often shared around without the person even reading the article. Someone will post some FUD (usually nonsense), and then people will be quick to panic without stepping back and assessing what is actually going on. This spreads like wildfire, and the markets respond accordingly.
The most recent example for me was the Binance 'hack'. People were sharing articles and posts as if it were the end of crypto. In reality, Binance acted brilliantly; spotting unusual activity, halting withdrawals, and protecting funds.
The Eco FUD I've witnessed - lol Is this true? I don't know. But it did make me think a little more about crypto currency and it's effects on the world/people. It truly is a new frontier and I'd like to learn more about it. I'm on Steemit for the community/creativity backed steem currency - but alas I've also witness some abuses in my short time here. I guess it really comes down to 'us'....where we want to take this new frontier of crypto. Thanks for your post. I like that it was speckled with both realism and humor - nice balance and very informative. Pleasant to read. Have a great day!
Lolz, it is no more or less true than, computers use electricity, in order to mine and use bitcoin computers are needed. The more people that use bitcoin, the more computers will be needed, the more electricity is used.
However you can swap the word Bitcoin for Amazon, Ebay, the FTSE, The Nasdaq, or a host of other things. So Bitcoin is no more or less eco friendly than any other process that is carried out using a computer.
Thanks for your comments :0)
Cg
Wow, very good perspective! That is so true, @cryptogee! Nice. I think it's time all those 'free energy' technologies are taken out of the closet. Truly. I think we've come to a point that this is necessary. Although, I would certainly enjoy a simpler life as well. Big steps.
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Good Post @ctyptogee
excelent my friends..
As bitcoin approaches $ 20,000, continuing to create new millionaires along the way, it's easy to deceive ourselves and think that we can all see this coming. It's hard to remember now, but the mood entering 2017 was a bit cry from the optimism that we see in the bitcoin community after something like a 20x price rise.
SegWit had not yet activated. The New York Agreement, UASF, bitcoin cash, let alone bitcoin gold, were not in existence. The community was very much struggling to figure out a way forward on its technical roadmap and many people were arguing about what to do and complaining about the toxic atmosphere. OK, maybe some things have not changed, but still, the community at the beginning of the year was very different from where we are now.
In this review of 2017, I'll be focusing on what we learn about bitcoin, how we got to the euphoria that we have now and what this means going forward.The year begins with a lot of uncertainty. Only about 30 percent of miners are signaling for SegWit, while Bitcoin Unlimited, a rival software program attracted 35 percent support. Nothing looked imminent regarding scaling. Many developers, users and businesses are getting frustrated at the lack of progress, Bitcoin Unlimited would completely ruin bitcoin.Yet despite all that, bitcoin entered the year on an upswing. Bitcoin passed $ 1,000 for the first time since 2013, and there was a real sense that the bear market had turned the corner.This would not be the first time that uncertainty and price rises would coincide in 2017, and indeed the two being correlated is a major learning for the community this year. Nice @cryptogee
Thank you for sharing with us.
Who falls for that. I have no experience regarding this but still I know this is bullshit.
Though I have to admit these are funny
You'd be surprised, I know people who sold cryptos because of bullshit surrounding the first two statements. Mental.
Cg
Lol..
Guess human beings can be really stupid..
I always imagine crypto land as row of dominoes. Good news push it in positive direction. More people come, more people profit, many more are attracted. We go faster and faster. On the opposite side there are problems (like kitty clog), hacks, governmental FUD thatalso do a mojor push. The current state of the industry is defined by those who push harder.
https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@cryptohumster/cold-war-theory-domino-effect-and-how-it-is-connected-to-mass-adoption-of-crypto
I've seen quite a bit of FUD and I've also seen the other end of the spectrum.
Look at TRON. It rose from about $0.03 to $0.28 in the course of a few weeks.
Now it's $0.03 again.
Market manipulation? You could have gotten rich if you knew how to ride the wave. Somebody was riding it for sure.
It almost makes me want to start investing in these smaller coins just so that I can try to find the FUD and ride on it. I can't say I advocate that sort of thing, but it frustrates me to no end to see other people taking the market that should be used for freedom and using it instead for their own personal profit making machine.
Yeah, this is the classic pump n dump, there are even groups on Telegram which try and manipulate coins into pump n dumps. Sure you can make a shed load, however unless you are in direct cahoots with the pumpers, there is no guarantee that you will make anything.
Cg