$19B Wiped Out in Crypto's Biggest Liquidation

It's a big deal from the standpoint that tether stepped in, printed ~ a billion USDT over the past three days, and prevented further plunging. Someone should investigate that...

Reminder, if you're invested in crypto long term, you'd better say a prayer every night that Tether is actually backed by ~$180B of liquidity.

There was a flash crash down to ~$104K that wiped out leveraged traders. Liquidation cascades are relatively uncommon and the last one was in 2021 IIRC.

For long-term holders, this hardly matters.

The real story here is insider trading and corruption by people close to President Trump, who knew, down to the exact minute, when to short BTC and ETH.

BTC, meanwhile, being a scarce asset, will recover as fiat supply increases with time.

it happened really fast so a lot of positions were liquidated automatically by force, rather than voluntarily by the user. that's really the main distinction

The wild moves occurred on alt coins, some went down 80%. Mr. President's own World Liberty Financial for example went down from 18c to even 6c in an instant.

Yeah, the commotion is a bit silly. "The crash" basically brought the price of BTC to the level it was comfortably at two weeks ago.

I think disproportional media interest in last two weeks of appreciation and "the crash" is a failed attempt to finally kickstart this BTC bull or bear market. Somebody is getting impatient with last two years of steady growth.

Fun fact: they're edible too

> In addition to the rationing system, the government provided food through soup kitchens in the cities. As the intensity of the famine increased, the reliance on soup kitchens increased. In April 1945, 1.8 million people in the cities were served daily. One pint of soup per person was the normal ration. The quality of the soup deteriorated over time and some people considered it inedible. The caloric content of a soup ration diminished from 483 calories to 268 calories. The soup served was often made from sugar beets, tulip bulbs, and potato peels. Pet dogs and cats were sometimes eaten.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hongerwinter

Just give us a date/year/etc in which you think the value of bitcoin will go to zero

If you are unable to do that, then you implicitly agree, as pretty much everyone does now, that bitcoin has an intrinsic market value that will remain over an indefinite time horizon

Thought i was the only one noticing that , people celebrating the rise in dollars they get for it. Then i check the euro price and it hasn't budged.

And it's not like the euro hasn't been inflating..

Is there anything people can actually use to see what's going on ? Gold? eggs?

Because Bitcoin is far, far more correlated with the stock market than the proponents want to admit. Notice that gold didn't budge, "digital gold" my ass.

When folks get scared, pure speculation instruments like BTC will tank.

At a logical level, Bitcoin should be decorrelated from stocks. The fundamentals of Bitcoin network adoption and utilization are largely separate and independent.

But, at an emotional level, Bitcoin is considered a high-risk asset. So, whenever fear gets heavy in the fear/greed equation, Bitcoin is one of the first places people pull money out of as they flee to safety. It's also the "High Risk-High Return" spot for folks to plunk their "spare change" when they are feeling safe. So, in practice short term moves in Bitcoin are highly correlated to short term moves in equities.

Meanwhile, if you actually run the numbers, Bitcoin has out performed the SP500 (or even the SP10) by a large multiple over the past decade while having a volatility usually around the median of the SP500-top-10 that everyone is currently betting heavily into. People just have a hard time getting out of linear thinking and so they look at the big dips as short-term linear disasters while on a long-term, logarithmic view they have been rather boring. https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fd...

> I mean, whatever the random thing was, it seems to have nothing whatever to do with Bitcoin.

I recently reviewed my investments and wrote about it on my blog, curiously around the time when US announced its tariffs around April, pretty much everything dropped, including crypto like BTC and ETH.

The same psychological forces that drive the stock market drive crypto. It used to be fairly disconnected, but that ship sailed long ago.

I guess because it's random things that cause anything to go up or down nowadays, so it fits.

From what I’ve read it’s because there is a massive amount of Chinese investment in US equities and crypto markets.

there were a couple of reasons

1) there is a lot of circumstantial evidence of insider trading before the timing of presidential tariff announcement. further the accounts that traded on hyperliquid DEX were funded 24hours before even the first tweet by the president indicating fore-knowledge.

2) crypto exchanges have a feature called auto-deleveraging which closes long and short positions to 'preserve the solvency & integrity of exchange'. apparently this got kicked in when some of the thinly traded coins just didnt have a market maker & basically floor fell out of price.

3) looks like some screwup happened (likely intentional unknown atm) with the price reporting oracle between decentrralized exchanges like hyperliquid and Centralized exchange used (binance). people are claiming intentional sabotage by binance because they have a competing dex called aster. who knows.

4) leverage play, everybody was levered up because of up-tober expectations. so even small movements wiped out peoples saving.

As many assets are held by leveraged players their prices crash when it's difficult to secure future loans at the same price. This is why seemingly random things like central bank of Japan raising rates can cause double digit crash on Nasdaq.

There is nothing to worry about if you are happy to hold the assets long term. It's an opportunity if you have spare cash. It's only a problem for those leveraged players and people who need to sell right now for whatever reason.

A lot of the value was wiped out from non-Bitcoin, and the percentages weren't the biggest, only the absolute value.

>Biggest crash in the history of crypto. I'm surprised this isn't on network news.

In dollar terms sure, but it's a meaningless blip percentage wise. The NASDAQ shed more than its entire market cap in the 2000s this year in a few days and it went right back up. We are in a fantasy world where numbers don't mean anything anymore.