The tumble in cryptocurrencies that erased nearly $US500 billion of market value over the past month could get a lot worse, according to Goldman Sachs's global head of investment research.
Most digital currencies are unlikely to survive in their current form, and investors should prepare for coins to lose all their value as they're replaced by future competitors, Goldman's Steve Strongin said in a report this week. While he didn't posit a timeframe for losses in existing coins, he said recent price swings indicated a bubble and that the tendency for different coins to move in lockstep wasn't rational.
"The high correlation between the different cryptocurrencies worries me," Strongin said. "Because of the lack of intrinsic value, the currencies that don't survive will most likely trade to zero."
Today's digital coins lack long-term staying power because of slow transaction times, security challenges and high maintenance costs, according to Strongin.
He said the introduction of regulated bitcoin futures hasn't addressed those concerns and he dismissed the idea of a first-mover advantage -- noting that few of internet bubble's high fliers survived after the late 1990s.
"Are any of today's cryptocurrencies going to be an Amazon or a Google, or will they end up like many of the now-defunct search engines?," Strongin wrote.
"Just because we are in a speculative bubble does not mean current prices can't increase for a handful of survivors," he said. "At the same time, it probably does mean that most, if not all, will never see their recent peaks again."
Strongin was more upbeat about the blockchain technology that underlies digital currencies, saying it could help improve financial ledgers. But even there he sounded a note of caution, arguing that current technology doesn't yet offer the speed required for market transactions.
Isn't it funny how the crypto world was started around the bottom of the 2009 stock market crash low and promoted as a way to get free of the Federal Reserves "fiat" money system and now that every sheep has put their money into it the same guys promoting it are now likely behind crashing it.
Why is that?
I personally think it was the "backdoor" way to introduce a cashless society to the sheep so they would accept it willingly thinking they were free of the criminal cartel running the system only to find out that the thing they feared most (the theft of their physical cash through taxes and mass money printing to devalue it) has be replaced with digits locked up in some computer algorithm that doesn't allow them to access it easily without time delays and fee's... which by the time they get it converted back to cash the price of it has crashed!
Either way they are screwed as having digits locked up in some algorithm is scary as hell to me as if you lose the key you have totally lost all your money. That doesn't include the huge moves up and down in value it has every day! To me it's EXACT what the elite wanted in the first place.... a "cashless" society.
The next step is to get rid of all the independent crypto's and replace them with one they control and is backed by something like SDR's (special drawing rights). I did a post sometime back about Goldman Sachs stating that they are going to do their own crypto currency at some point... whether they do it or some one else the next move by the elite will be to destroy the freely traded and non-regulated or controlled crypto's and replace them with something under their thumb.
Red
