rkbabang

I'm not a bitcoin bull, I've been watching bitcoin for years, but I have never owned any. If I did own some bitcoin right now, I'd probably sell some now and hold onto some to see what happens. Let's look at the potential, not what is likely, but what is the best possible case. That would be bitcoin being used for almost all human trade and replacing all other currencies. Almost every person in the world using bitcoin for every transaction, all businesses using it and reporting in it and paying their employees with it. Stocks trading on all the major exchanges priced in bitcoin, etc.... The world GDP is somewhere around $70T-$85T depending on how you calculate it. So to trade that amount with only 21M bitcoins each bitcoin would have to be worth at least $4M, probably a hell of a lot more. What will the world GDP be in 10 years? Even after this happens holding "cash" (i.e. bitcoins) will be a sufficient savings strategy for the average person as there will typically be a yearly deflation over time as the world economy grows. Of course none of this is the likely outcome. So, my prediction is that in 10 years 1 bitcoin will be worth somewhere between $0 and $100M.

Maybe I'm not understanding, but if you are going to give away 100% anyway, does it matter if you compounded it all and then gave it away or gave away your whole life? Aren't we just choosing who benefits--people now or people later? Is there a big difference between now-people and later-people? I'm not sure I particularly care which time period of people I'm helping, but perhaps there is some reason for preference for now-people. I guess you could argue affecting people now is better since they can influence more people, but isn't that similar to the lost-compounding of money that you have given away? (In other words, does the helping of people now help more over the long term than waiting and giving more away? That seems very hard to answer, and would dramatically depend on what you were giving to.) I think it is much better to give $190M away when you are 98 than it is to give $50M away when you are 75.

My very limited understanding of the mining process is that yes to both. You can think of the mining as the processing of the transactions. Obviously this processing takes more processing power as the number of transaction grows. When they successfully process a block they get issued a number of bitcoins. This is why it is decentralized and no big central data center is needed to process all of the transactions, people all over the world are competing with each other to do it. And if you take down one or two miners it doesn't effect the system. If you created a company called e-coin and you started a digital currency where you did all the processing with your own servers and charged a fee per transaction, someone could kill the whole system by shutting you down. Or the system would just die if your company went bankrupt. With bitcoin once it was released into the wild no one owns it or controls it and anyone can get in on the competition to process the transactions.

Just out of curiosity for the tech savy people: why has mining gotten harder over the last few years? My understanding is that it is getting more difficult by design. It was designed to get progressively harder to solve a block the more bitcoins are in circulation and also less bitcoins are issued overtime. There will never be more than a certain number of bitcoins (21M I think), but there will also never be 21M bitcoins. This is because as the number in circulation gets closer to the maximum, the mining gets harder and the number of bitcoins issued gets smaller. It will eventually take an enormous amount of processing to earn a tiny fraction of a bitcoin. At the beginning you could have mined with your PC's CPU and earned bitcoins (but they were only worth pennies each), then you needed a video card, then multiple video cards, then FPGAs, now ASICs, and even if you have an ASIC board you are competing with the facility in the above link which has many times the number of boards and each one running much faster than yours (due to the liquid cooling). In general the price per bitcoin has gone up as the cost of mining them has gone up. And the cost of mining them is going to continue to go up, by design. Basically the more total processing put into mining bitcoins the harder they get to mine. From this paper: Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System "To compensate for increasing hardware speed and varying interest in running nodes over time, the proof-of-work difficulty is determined by a moving average targeting an average number of blocks per hour. If they're generated too fast, the difficulty increases."

One thing is for sure, it is too late to try to mine bitcoins. Take a look at this mining facility in Hong Kong owned by a company called ASIC Miner. It looks like a supercomputer facility with racks and racks of mining ASIC boards submerged in some kind of cooling liquid from 3M which is piped up to giant radiators and fans on the roof. Visit of ASICMINER's Immersion Cooling Mining Facility

It's the day before Thanksgiving everyone is liquidating their portfolio to raise cash for black-Friday shopping.

You can book a flight on an airplane or a spaceship. You pay for a college education or buy a sandwich. I'm sure a year from now you will be able to use them in more places than now.

I first started investing in 1996 after graduating from college and from '96 to 2000 I invested mainly in tech stocks, Cisco, Texas Instruments, AMCC, ADI, etc, etc,. I made a lot, then I lost most of it. Since then my biggest "mistakes" have all been selling way too early. I seem to do this again and again. Some examples: I held MIDD with a cost basis of about $8. Most of it got called away at $80, because I wrote a covered call, and I didn't buy it back. I was waiting for it to go under $80 again and it didn't. I had Netflix with a cost basis of $11 and sold it around $60. Then also with Netflix, I had a small amount of Jan 2014 calls that I sold for about breakeven and they would have been worth 6X only a month later, and they are worth many times more today. I bought SAM in the $20s and sold around $115. These are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head, there are many more.

What makes you say that? If you buy one of their cheaper laptops, yes, but that is true with a cheap laptop from Samsung or Acer as well. They are all plastic and you will find the USB ports will stop working as something inside snaps off after you've used it for 6 months and don't dare drop them, etc. If you buy one of Dell's aluminum laptops they are very well built and durable. Yes, Dell loads their machines with all kinds of crap that you need to spend a day removing from your system, but I've seen this with Acer and HP as well. The best thing to do is format the Harddrive and install the OS fresh no matter which brand you buy.

I like to build my own desktop systems and then use my ipad for a tablet, but I don't really travel for business so the iPad is just for web surfing and email. What I would look for if I was you would be one device that can do everything. Like one of these from Dell: http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/xps-12-9q33/pd They look well-built, I used to have a business class Dell laptop made out of aluminum and it was very well built, this looks like similar construction. Get one with an i7 processor and 8GB of RAM so that it will last you a long time without you wanting to upgrade and get the docking station so that you can just plug it in at your desk and use a large monitor, desktop keyboard, & mouse.

As of right now: 70% BAC (Calls & Common), increasing daily lately. This was 60% not too long ago. 9% AIG (Warrants) 5% or less possitions in: BRK-B FRFHF HOTR AAPL SD (Calls) MNGGF MIDD SYTE This excludes: My 401k plan which I've been contributing to for 2 years at my present company and is 100% invested in mutual funds and would be about 2% of the above portfolio. Some real estate I own. About 50% equity in my house and I own 50% interest in 20 acres of buildable land. I've owned this land for about 15 years and I'm not sure what the present market value is. A large amount of restricted stock in company I work for. This would be about a 25% position if included in my above portfolio, but the majority of it isn't yet vested.

TCU are good and patient people. they must be as they employed my eldest child for quite a while!! ;D That's cool. I don't know how they are to work for, but I've had my checking account with them for 2 years and have been very happy with them.

I agree with this 100%. Too many people stand in front of that archer, seeing the tension on the bow getting ever tighter, saying that they aren't worried at all because they haven't seen an arrow in the air. Now imagine that this bow isn't being held by a human archer at all but by a machine where one human can pull the string back as far as he wants, but has no control over when it is fired. The firing is determined by an impossibly complex system involving trillions of variables that no one fully understands. It isn't a great place to be standing indeed.

I agree with everything you said. Regarding the bolded, I agree there are vested interests in selling gold investment products, but I think that is secondary to this criticism being 100% politically motivated - the usual "Evil government (and Obama) is debasing the dollar and inflating us into poverty!". There are two sides to this, of course. Obama probably knows less about inflation than we do or the people you are talking about. Like all presidents he's basically a figurehead to look good in front of a camera and say a lot of nothings to the public. The point Zarley made about the velocity of money is a good one. The fact is that having a huge increase in the amount of money available means that the potential for the velocity to rapidly increase is now there. The effects on prices don't have to be (and usually aren't) immediate and aren't always obvious (for example in an otherwise deflationary environment). Imagine a company issuing a significant number of shares to grant to management. If the stock is still increasing in value that doesn't mean the issuing of those shares had no effect on the price. The other side of the spectrum from the gold bugs and the Obama is evil crowd are the people who believe that those in charge of the money supply are omniscience with a superhuman ability to manage a system with trillions of variables, where in reality such a system is impossible for anyone to manage and any messing around with the inputs to such a system that does occur will have unpredictable results in the long run. This is something which this crowd refuses to admit or believe.

Not really true. WEB is contributing to the obesity epidemic with his KO investment and as more studies come out and more people (as well as governments) recognize this, I think you will start seeing the first signs of evaporation in the coke moat in the coming decade. I'm not worried about the future of steak houses.

This is why I like the definition of inflation as the increase in the money supply. That is something that can be measured, known, and agreed upon. It is impossible to quantify the "rise in prices". It just begs the question "the price of what?". Prices of somethings will always be decreasing and prices of other things will be increasing. The price of an item depends on so many other things other than the amount of money in circulation, that it is impossible to calculate the component of the price due to the money supply and not due to changes is supply, demand, quality, technology, availability of components needed for manufacture, weather, transportation, competing products, and a million other variables. I'm not sure how valuable doing a "CPI" calculation is, because this calculation is dependent on which goods go into the basket and which goods are excluded. And once you do the calculation, it can't be known which variables are responsible for the change in price. So when you have this number, what do you really know?

And the annual average temperature there is well below zero centigrade, about the same as atop Mount Washington, Maine, the windiest place in the world, and one of the coldest. Does the tenant pay the utilities? This could be a good investment if they bought property near a bottom. Did they? But there may be agency risk, political risk etc. Mt Washington is in New Hampshire.

Even though BAC is my largest holding, I do my banking with a small local credit union. Triangle Credit Union. I agree with your observations that you can find better deals at credit unions than at the big banks.

I agree. Tesla and Solar City aside, oil is going to be with us for a long time and the price will only increase (long term). This is more of a "hmm that's interesting" than a "WTF?" purchase. I think it will work out well. It's not like he's buying a failed handset maker or a textile mill in New Bedford or something.

After seeing XOM was the secret stock, I took a quick look this morning and it does seem expensive. An enterprise value of $392B with a TTM FCF of $12.6B. Capital expenditures seem to eat a lot of the operating earnings each year. FCF was $40B in 2008, but the highest it has been since then was $24.4B in 2011. I'm sure it will be a home run for Buffett, but I don't know why. I understand why he would want to own XOM, I'm just not sure why he is buying it now. He's getting a great company at a fair price, I'd rather see him get a great company at a great price. But then again, in 20 years it won't matter if BRK bought it at $60 or $100, it will be still be a great investment. I may own some amount of BRK for 20 years, but I don't usually hold my other stocks very long. Once they are fairly valued I start looking elsewhere. I suppose it is different if you are managing many $Billions.

Interesting. I bought XOM in 2010 for $59 then sold a little more than a year ago for $88. Unlike the market in general it hasn't done much in the last year. It doesn't look undervalued to me right now the way it did in 2010. I'd rather own BRK than follow him back into XOM.

Not this Ford. Archie was a lot of things, but he wasn't on crack.

Ahh, democracy. You've got to love it. So few people can even run their own lives very well, yet feel perfectly empowered with the "right" to choose who will run yours. In Toronto this is who they choose. 39 Breathtaking Photos of North America's Most Photogenic Mayor

A good book to read is Nassim Taleb's Antifragile, he goes into a lot of detail on why most attempts to stabilize complex mega-variable systems end in disaster.

Yes but the fact that things are never equal is really really important! In addition, context matters a lot! I doubt that you ever use such a generalized approach when you look at stocks All true. But ask yourself, has the fed been acting more like BRK (almost never issuing stock, only on a rare occasion to make a large accreditive acquisition) or more like some penny stock company run by a scam artist? I'd argue that they've acted as expected. BRK's job is to increase economic earnings power on a per share basis. The fed's job is the dual mandate, and they use CPI (targeted around 2%) and unemployment (targeted at 5%). It is your job to trade accordingly. If you wish to buy gold and ammo, or stocks and housing, or long or short the USD, that is a personal choice... but the fed has been pretty crystal clear about what they will do. It hardly seems like a scam to me. An older person on a fixed income doesn't have a lot of those choices. I think its main (only?) job, if it has a job at all, should be to protect the value of the dollar. A dollar today is worth less than what five cents was worth the day the fed was created. Inflation, the way it is used by the government is just a tax on savings. Since they are never up front about this, your average person has no idea what they are doing or why, compared with other forms of tax increases. In this sense it is a scam.