rkbabang

Or just look closer to home at the CADUSD chart. 11/2007 it was 1.0695, but a year later 11/2008 it was down over 26% to 0.7868, then in 04/2001 it was up over 32% to 1.0452, now it is down over 30% below that at 0.7261. How do Canadians use such a volatile currency? Can you even call the Canadian Dollar a currency? Here in the US $1 = $1, but over in other countries their currency fluctuates like crazy. Yes this is how stupid it is to use the market value of another currency against the dollar to say that it is far too volatile to be used.

The funny part is that is kind of what I believe. Nothing in life is guaranteed and all value is subjective. There really is nothing that has “intrinsic value” because all value is subjective. You may think you have a company with intrinsic value, but people could stop loving any product or service and those cash flows would vanish.

Yes! 1 BTC = 1 BTC and that will never change.

" Intrinsic value means it generates internal cash flows" for a corporation yes, for a commodity or money this doesn't make any sense. Gold sitting in your safe isn't "generating internal cash flows". You are mixing up multiple concepts and applying it to the wrong category. There is no company behind bitcoin. "And something isn’t very useful for money if it can lose half its value in a few months." I think we've covered this already. Bitcoin won't be stable until it is used by a very large percentage of the global population. This will be a while yet. "the most popular other use for crypto is for producing rug-pulls. I’m never entirely dismissing crypto, I just spent 6 hours evaluating a crypto project on Friday to see if was different and could create actual value for holders. Turned out it wasn’t and can’t. But I will still evaluate new ideas as they come across my desk." I'm not surprised. 99% of crypto "projects" are frauds and scams. Crypto "projects" are just people trying to start businesses while selling unregistered securities to fund them and that is the legitimate ones, the scams are people selling unregistered securities to artificially create demand for them with the intent of rug pulling and running away with the cash. "I do believe BTC is inherently deflationary and offers the potential to retain value better than the dollar in the long run. But I can’t value it, it has no yield and does not pay dividends, I have no idea of what price it’s undervalued and what price it’s overvalued. So I sit out and invest in safer things." Fair enough. BTC is impossible to really value accurately right now. I am confident of the general direction, but I wouldn't place a bet on the exact $ amount BTC will trade in a year or even in 5 years. BTC will be far more valuable in 5-15+ years than it is now, but I can't put an exact price on it either. I intend to hold long term and am going on the premise that it is better to be roughly right than exactly wrong.

People tend to think value means industrial uses. But being useful as money IS an intrinsic value. Having better properties for that use than anything else ever discovered or invented gives it tremendous intrinsic value. The market isn't efficient and this value hasn't yet been widely recognized yet, but that shouldn't bother a value investor.

I'll talk only about $BTC here, because I think most crypto are scams. Bitcoin lost 80% of its value against the dollar in 12 months then gained 50% in the last year. The dollar on the other hand isn't coming back. It will just continue to degrade in value until it is completely worthless. We know where it ends. Bitcoin has the potential to replace the dollar as the world's money, but it hasn't happened yet. It is still early and thus still volatile. There are going to be large dramatic ups and downs yet to come as well before it stabilizes. Money isn't something that you can invent today and see it take over the world tomorrow. There is going to be a lot of back and forth in its climb to eventual dominance.

Gold has been used as money for millennia despite it's industrial uses, not because of them. Gold has been used as money because it has properties which make it useful as money. It is malleable, easy to divide or combine, portable, transportable, long lasting and indestructible, easily identifiable, hard to counterfeit, easily verifiable, fungible, and somewhat rare (compared to most other things). Had gold had no other uses at all, it would still have been used as money for those reasons. Gold has a use, its use is that it has the properties which make it useful as money. Bitcoin has other uses as well, which aren't currently widely understood (read "Softwar"), but even if it didn't have any non-monetary uses it would still be extremely valuable simply because it has all of the above qualities which make it useful as money and is far better than gold at most of them. This notion that money needs to also be used for something else is just plain wrong. Money needs to be useful as money and that is it. If useful for other things were a requirement aluminum would be far and away better than gold, as would steel or oil.

PoS is a method for the centralization of wealth and keeping the founders/rich elite wealthy. It's a scam which goes like this: The founders premine a bunch of coins for themselves and their associates. PoS makes sure that no one can ever catch up to them and that as a group they can remain in control of that blockchain. PoS blockchains will never be as decentralized or secure as PoW blockchains. And the most secure PoW blockchain will be what humans will use as the baselayer of money.

And human civilization isn't furthered by giving powerful nation-states the ability to print currency to fund wars. Without currency creation out of thin air war would be much harder to fund. Fiat currency is a destructive force for civilization, not a constructive one. In an age of nuclear weapons human civilization can't afford the dangers of fiat currencies.

My question was a serious one. If you look at the S&P500 chart. It hit a top in 2000, then went sideways (up & down) until the bottom in 2009. Then it hit a top in 2022 and has gone basically sideways since. The question really isn't have we hit the top, the question is when will the bottom be before another period of growth, or have we hit the bottom already?

I hold over 30 stocks and in the last 14 days 5 of them have hit 52 week lows and none have hit 52 week highs. When does this discussion move to the "Is the bottom almost here?" thread?

If only we could ban Elizabeth Warren.

The Bear is really good. If they can keep knocking it out of the park for 6-7 seasons then you could be correct. I couldn't get into Yellowstone and Stranger Things is just 80s nostalgia. I loved S1 of Walking Dead, but then got bored with it by the end of season 2 and never watched it again, there is only so many Zombies you can shoot before it gets old. I know some people can't get enough of this stuff, but it gets repetitive to me.

Sopranos and Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul? These two, plus Fargo, are basically the only series I have watched or remember:) My Classics by decade 1950s : I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners 1960s : Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies 1970s : All in the Family, The Jeffersons 1980s : Married With Children, Roseanne (80s was not the best decade for TV) 1990s : Seinfeld 2000s : Sopranos, Breaking Bad 2010s : Shameless 2020's : (Nothing yet that I think will be a classic which defined the decade like the above shows).

"F#ck women's suffrage"

Sold JXN today for $40.40, bought it about 6 months ago a little over $28 and I received $1.24 in dividends as well. I just set an alert for myself if it goes below $29 again.

I too think Bitcoin is different from all of the others. My thinking is that Bitcoin is money. It is the most secure and decentralized computer network ever created by a long long way, and it isn't even close. It will eventually be the base layer of value for all of humanity. It will be the measure by which anything and everything of value will be compared. I'm not saying that every transaction will be on chain, it won't, but every price will be in Bitcoin (or more likely sats or satashis). When you get paid it will be in sats, when you buy a stock on any market it will be in sats, when you sell something you will price it in sats. I don't necessarily think of other crypto as scams, although many probably are. None of them are or will ever be as secure and decentralized as Bitcoin, which means they are not money, they are something else. They are more like securities in un-regulated start-ups for which you have no good information and are completely trusting the founders. For every outright scam there are probably 50 that are not scams, but will fail. There are also probably some gems hidden in there as investments, but it is difficult to sift through right now. Ethereum for example isn't a scam, it could possibly someday have extremely valuable use-cases (or not). It is certainly interesting from a technical point of view, but it is an entirely different animal from Bitcoin.

True, but how many children did Bush and Obama kill? How many will Israeli bombs kill? I know the western view is that civilized people slaughter children with bombs not with swords, but the two are morally equivalent in my opinion.

New Fidelity report on Bitcoin. Pretty basic bitcoin-maximalist arguments, but since I've basically become a Bitcoin-maximalist myself (even though I still hold a significant amount of other crypto assets) I agree with them. 1012662.3.0 Bitcoin First Revisited_Final.pdf

As far as I can tell this reporter Nicole Zedek is the only source for the 40 babies beheaded claim and there is no photo or video evidence of it. Remember that war time propaganda can get extreme on both sides and isn't always factual.

This definitely isn’t good news for the children working the cobalt mines. But I fear you might be correct, political correctness doesn’t have to make sense, it just needs to be popular. If things needed to make sense the world would have been building out nuclear plants for the last 50 years, electricity would cost a fraction of what most people are paying and no one would ever have heard of the phrase “rolling blackouts”.

I’m on vacation in the Berkshires this week, but I still bought some JOE and OSTK. Also today I saw these and thought I’d pick some up before the next run up.

Exactly. Looking only at the fuel savings at the vehicle use level is a mistake. People think solar panels, windmills, and batteries just appear out of the ether with no environmental impact whatsoever and that they can supply the grid entirely. Neither is even close to the truth. We need a ton of new nuclear plants all over the country and all over the world if we are to have a hope in hell of running all of our transportation on electricity without a worse environmental impact than the status quo. Not to mention heating of homes/buildings and cooking. I really think the aim of the WEF/environmentalist types is to make transportation so expensive that people just move around less over all. Just about every policy they want and every issue they push is to reduce human population and/or make everyone’s lives worse. Everyone will own nothing and like it. All cars will be EVs, but we will suffer from frequent rolling blackouts and still have polluted air.

Thanks for the recommendation. My first handgun was a Glock 26 and I always loved them for their ease of use, simplicity, ease of maintenance and durability. Search for "Glock torture test". There are people who try to kill their Glock pistols and can't get it to not work. Here's one where they freeze it, bury it, run it over, drop it out of a helicopter, and blow it up with explosives.