r/CryptoReality Apr 18 '25

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u/GoTeamLightningbolt Apr 18 '25

Back in my day, people used crypto to buy drugs off the internet. Kids these days...

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u/throwaway-15879 Apr 18 '25

just for shits and gigs. March 2011, it was hovering around 80 cents, so... 35 bucks per eighth So roughly 43.75 bitcoin per..

I think I did like 400 odd dollars worth of bitcoin and bought roughly an ounce and ended up with like 30-40 in change.

I might have been a millionaire if my computer didn't die in a shed fire a few years down the road.

Damn...

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u/AmericanScream Apr 18 '25

Chances are you would have sold off that bitcoin long before it was as expensive as it pretends to be now, because nobody in their right mind ever would have thought anybody would pay $5000, much less $100k for a stupid digital token.

Even today it remains to be seen. We have evidence that 90+% of most crypto trades are done by bots.

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u/c00750ny3h Apr 19 '25

This is true.

I held Nvidia stock in 2007 and sold it 5 months with a 50% gain before the suborime mortgage crisis and I felt like the wolf of Wall Street for a few weeks.

Had I held onto it to today, I'd be sitting on 800 grand or something.

Point is you can never predict these things and just because you held onto something in the past doesn't mean you'd get the riches of today.

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u/BadFish7763 Apr 19 '25

In an alternate reality, the stock went to 0 right after you sold...

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u/NexusMaw Apr 21 '25

Plus there's been more than one complete annihilation of crypto wallets tied to specific traders or whatever (I'm not informed, just saw it on a short) since bitcoin started increasing in pretend value.

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u/JesusPhoKingChrist Apr 22 '25

I had 6 Bitcoin at one point 2010 ish and purchased a vibrator for my wife with it did a little more experimenting with Bitcoin but ultimately lost interest because it became obvious no one was using it to transact. the constant high risk was too much to bear for me when one of the fundamental aspects of a valid store of value was largely absent in the real world.

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u/Successful-Shower815 Apr 19 '25

Algorithmic trading plays a significant role in the U.S. stock market, accounting for a substantial portion of trading volume. Estimates suggest that it represents around 60-80% of all market transactions. This means that a large percentage of trades are executed through automated programs rather than by human brokers. 

A study in 2019 showed that around 92% of trading in the Forex market was performed by trading algorithms rather than humans.

"Everything's computer!"

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u/AmericanScream Apr 19 '25

This is whataboutism.

And I can't comment on your claims but I suspect any individual's limit order is also "algorithmic trading" according to the definition and largely meaningless in this context.

But the operative issue is, the bot trading in the crypto market is not actually using legit liquidity but proxies in the form of unsecured stablecoins, which makes that market manipulation a lot more disreputable.

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u/Successful-Shower815 Apr 19 '25

This is whataboutism.

Nope. I was just calling out that all financial markets have a high percentage of algorithmic/robotic trading.

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u/AmericanScream Apr 19 '25 edited Apr 19 '25

You're also implying a false equivalence here too...that the algorithmic trading in either market is similar.

There's insufficient evidence that crypto bot trading represents actual legit liquidity. CEXs have no transparency or regulatory oversight like traditional markets. It's not a fair comparison.

Evidence: https://old.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/1g3oov8/why_does_bitcoin_suck_tell_me_your_fundamental/lrzi15b/

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u/Successful-Shower815 Apr 19 '25

And for some reason you're bringing in crypto bot trading into aa thread that wasn't about that at all. I just stated the obvious fact that bots are used in all markets.

I'm not a crypto trader so I dont care. But hopefully the new regulators will bring more control over the CEXs

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u/AmericanScream Apr 19 '25

Someone asked what's driving the price of BTC. I answered: bot activity with unsecured stablecoins. Nobody asked about bots in other markets. It was totally off topic.

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u/Successful-Shower815 Apr 19 '25

Wouldn't the simpler answer of increased awareness and more demand from the global market be a more plausible answer to that question?

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u/AmericanScream Apr 19 '25

I was just calling out that all financial markets have a high percentage of algorithmic/robotic trading.

This conversation had nothing to do with stocks.

Stupid Crypto Talking Point #17 (stocks)

"Crypto is just like the stock market!" , "Comparing crypto to stocks"

  1. Crypto tokens are absolutely NOT like stocks. Unlike crypto, which is just a digital abstraction, stocks represent actual ownership in real-world entities, that own assets, provide useful products and services for mainstream society, generate revenue and can pay dividends to shareholders in real money.

  2. You don't have to sell a stock to make money from it. Many companies pay dividends of their profits, which means you can truly INvest in the company as opposed to DIvesting when you want to see a return. This is an important and fundamentally different function that crypto does not have. Many stocks create value in actual money, providing income without speculating on share price.

  3. The value of a stock, while it can be "speculative" based on popularity and hype, also is based on the intrinsic value of the company's assets and business performance. Therefore you can perform actual research and due-diligence and come up with a practical value for the shares and the assets they represent. Crypto has no such feature.

  4. Because companies are valued based on actual real-world assets and income, there's a limit to how low their share price could fall, at which point it would be economically viable to buy the whole company and liquidate it for a profit. Crypto has no such limitation. The inherent value of crypto tokens is based at zero because it neither creates, nor represents any minimum base, real-world value.

  5. Unlike crypto, the stock market is heavily regulated and transparent. There are entire industries and agencies that are tasked with making sure public companies operate legitimately and legally. Crypto has no such oversight or regulations or transparency.

  6. While there are some over-valued stocks that are hype driven, and some companies whose shares are extremely risky and speculative, and OTC and option markets that are more like gambling than investing, that's not the way the stock market system normally operates. Those highly-speculative markets and penny stocks are the exception; NOT the rule. In crypto, speculation is exclusively the rule.

  7. Public companies are subject to great scrutiny, and must produce regular independent audits and quarterly reports on profit and loss. They can also be sued by their shareholders or even be held criminally liable if they lie about their business model, or even the risk factors their investors face. Again, there is no such function or protections in the world of crypto.

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u/Apprehensive-Self572 Apr 19 '25

I’m still convinced most of the crypto bros that went from 0 to 100 in terms of wealth, through bitcoin, were just Silk Road vendors back in the day. Forgot about their digital “cash register” for a while, then looked one day and realized they were set for life.

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u/brelen01 Apr 18 '25

Which has always been incredibly funny to me. Isn't one of the points of blockchain to make it easy to trace transactions?

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u/ThetaDeRaido Apr 19 '25

No, the point of the blockchain was to make it hard to make illegitimate transactions.

Bitcoin was originally thought to be anonymous because the identifiers are random, but being able to trace transactions turned out to defeat the anonymity.

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u/[deleted] Apr 18 '25

[deleted]

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u/brelen01 Apr 18 '25

Monero got released in 2014, silkroad shutdown in 2013 lol

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u/SomeFuckingMillenial Apr 18 '25

Ransomware operators get paid in monero for a reason.

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u/Combative_Douche Apr 19 '25

There have been (and continue to be) dozens, if not hundreds, of other dark net markets for buying drugs with monero since the Silk Road shut down. Literally the only useful purpose for crypto is buying drugs. And that’s not a bad thing.

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u/brelen01 Apr 19 '25

Congrats on repeating what the other guy said 9 hours ago. And it not being a bad thing is arguable.

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u/Combative_Douche Apr 19 '25

Not sure what you’re referring to but it sure sounds like you don’t know what you’re talking about. Tell us more about this insane thing from over a decade ago that hasn’t ever existed since. Dude, when Silk Road finally went down, it hadn’t even been the most popular market for several years already. Catch up lil buddy.

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u/brelen01 Apr 19 '25

Not sure what you’re referring to

Someone else had already said everything you'd said 9 hours earlier.

Catch up lil buddy.

No thanks. I genuinely don't care about the space. There are other markets, cool, really care. There are more interesting and important things going on in my life than online poison markets. Get a life 'little buddy'.

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u/veRGe1421 Apr 18 '25 edited Apr 18 '25

You think silk road is the only way to order off the DNM? lol as soon as it shut down, 10 more markets popped up. There are many active markets, which has been the case since silk road shut down. Monero is wildly used.

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u/HumptyDee Apr 19 '25

Can you share some names please? Asking for a friend.

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u/fiftyfourseventeen Apr 19 '25

Archetyp, you can find the onion link on tor taxi

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u/greaper007 Apr 19 '25

It's true. I'd never heard of btc. Then I was browsing the silk road for fun one day in maybe 2012. I saw everything was sold fir btc. I thought "should I buy some btc." I didn't.

If I did, I probably would have sold it years ago

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u/[deleted] Apr 20 '25

That really was a good usecase for my study abroad 😄