Could you imagine for just a moment what it might feel like today, or any day recently as the value of one Bitcoin has hovered around $100,000 United States Dollars, if you and a few of your buddies had mined those earliest tokens back before it was worth a penny, and then when it was worth only a penny, and then as news of this new "cryptocurrency" slowly spread among a few people here and there, who continued to mine those early coins while they were easy to mine, who, from their own perspective were rapidly seeing other people join in and mine, but to who everyone else saw as very far out on the fringe and too obscure to be able to consider serioiusly whether one wanted to become invested in it, what with everything else going on back then?
From this bankrate.com article:
January 2009 — July 2013: Bitcoin is created and attracts techies
The New Liberty Standard Exchange recorded the first exchange of Bitcoin for dollars in late 2009. Users on the BitcoinTalk forum traded 5,050 bitcoins for $5.02 via PayPal, making the first price mediated through an exchange a bargain basement price of $0.00099 per bitcoin. In other words, the price was about one-tenth of one cent.
I myself hesitated a while to get in. You need money to make money, and I haven't ever found those elusive things called "extra" dollars, anywhere I've ever looked, so it took me a while to find any money that I could put towards this risky enterprise known as cryptocurrency, but then one day a friend gave me a LTC, just because he had bought them when they were fresh, and he was floating through life on them now and giving me one while they were $100 was like breaking me off a tiny piece of his gold brick that he carried around with him.
Once he gave me one LTC, and then I found out how to download mining and trading software and as I learned how the varying "exchanges" worked, I found myself studying it more than buying in, but eventually I bought in a chunk and began writing software to help me trade it.
I soon needed to use that money again, and got out for a long while, but I kept making the software, if for no other reason it seemed, to have a reason to stay closely connected to the "pulse" of the markets, as I noticed they were being more and more dominated by machine algorithms, and more and more obviously so.
Nowadays, the markets are awash in the ebbs and flows of lesser and greater automata, trading day and night, without a Sabbath or a Regulator to slow things down or halt them if the markets have sudden fluctuations. But, there are.
If the value of Bitcoin suddenly accelerates, the large exchanges always seem to have "maintenance mode" on those same days, and won't let you cash out your money.
Also, less overtly, there are mega-"donors" who have funded bots with seemingly impossible amounts of money, and those bots buy and sell, based on algorithms, using multiple bot accounts, to keep markets where they "should" be, or to move them to where their target has been set to move them.
These automata are programmed to recognize each other, and even to learn to cooperatively work with each other, and they learn to outwit each other on-the-fly with modern probability math and human "oversight."
The bigger ones always win. They are the defacto "house" in this massive game of Crash.
There is not enough money in the system to sustain a cash out. When that day comes, everything will break. There is not a "stock market capital" in cryptocurrency. That is such a joke that so many people think along those lines. It doesn't exist. BTC can go up or down any arbitrary amount of value in any arbitrary amount of time, with enough individual purchases, of even infitesimally small amounts each, as long as each one is registered as a purchase on the blockchain, because it's not the market capital that determines the price, but only the value of the last purchase.
The value that the last person was willing to buy or sell it for is what sets the price.
