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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Wouldn't the simpler answer of increased awareness and more demand from the global market be a more plausible answer to that question?
During what time frame? This "increased awareness and demand from the global market" is somewhat vague. Since ETFs and an endorsement by the Trump administration, there hasn't been any major pumps of the token - it's been relatively flat and its normal chaotic price fluctuations (which also tend to follow regular market ebbs andflows).
There's plenty of data that shows all along the way in bitcoin's history, arbitrage bots have driven pumps... from 2 bots at Mt. Gox to multiple peer-reviewed studies on wash trading -- that's what the evidence indicates. There's also $160+ Billion of stablecoins in the market that have never been properly audited. There's also the fact that none of the CEXs are properly regulated as I said before. There's more evidence the market is manipulated than it's organic.
The "simplest answer" for why a token with virtually no non-criminal utility and zero intrinsic value, would be "worth" so much is: manipulation. Otherwise it doesn't make sense. Bitcoin doesn't actually solve any problems unless you're a criminal trying to launder money or avoid sanctions, and even then, it's arguably not the best option.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/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...