rkbabang

You keep saying "intrinsic value", "intrinsic value", "intrinsic value", ...... The first thing you need to understand about the reality of the universe you inhabit is that there is no such thing as "intrinsic value", there never has been, and there never will be. "Intrinsic Value" is impossible, because all value is subjective. Try this thought experiment. Aliens land their ship in your back yard and ask you to explain this concept of "intrinsic value" to them and ask you to give them an example of something that is intrinsically valuable. You tell them the US Dollar. They say "but we have no use for those, they aren't valuable to us, and studying your history we see that even humans don't value them the way they used to since they have lost 99% of their purchasing power in the last century, so that is hardly something that has intrinsic value." You say "gold" and they laugh and say "we can stop by a trillion different rocks in space and pick up as much of that as we please why would we want that?" You say diamonds and they laugh again saying "we can manufacture them any time we want why would we value such things?" You say a company which produces valuable products and has earnings. Once again they laugh as say that those products are of no use to them and the so called earnings are in a currency that is of no use to them. All value is subjective. When you fully internalize this completely you look at the world in a different way. There are some things that a lot of people happen to value highly now, but there is nothing that "everyone" values. Even the same person (or alien) will value things differently at different times. Things that are widely valued now may not be widely valued in the future because of differing tastes, trends of history, or technological change. Oil was just a messy nuisance until technological advancement made it valuable to many people. Further technological advancements could very well make it valueless to everyone again. Currencies come and go all the time in the span of centuries. Companies come and go (Sears used to be extremely valuable, but there was nothing intrinsic about it as it is now gone). Nations, kingdoms, and empires come and go, none of them have intrinsic anything. If your argument for, or against, anything is the property of "intrinsic value", then you have a completely different view of our existence than I do.

We were talking about older folks not adopting new technologies and how older systems need to be kept in place for them while they are here. But of course, you are correct. We both had to have accounts with 3rd parties and trust them to store our value safely and make the transactions we requested. Neither of us paid the grocery store directly, that technology has yet to be adopted by them.

Suddenly the IRS knows exactly how much the neighborhood kid who cuts your lawn is making and wants their cut. They know you sold some old stuff on Craigslist for $5K last year, do you have receipts for when you bought all that stuff to prove your cost basis? Probably not. CBDCs are a nightmare.

Yes. It's like saying what is so special about the existing internet? Couldn't you just start your own separate network with all the same features and get everyone to leave the existing internet and switch to your network? Say you come up with some novel networking feature, would it be more plausible that everyone on the planet leaves the internet and starts using your network instead? Or would it be far more likely that the current internet simply adopts that functionality and everyone continues to use it?

Agreed. I was at the grocery store this summer and this old woman, probably in her 80s, was paying with a check. I hadn't seen that in years. She wrote out the check, then filled in info about it in the transaction journal above the check in her checkbook. Here's someone who's never adopted credit cards or even debit cards. I'm sure she wouldn't understand why anyone would need Applepay. I came next and paid with my watch.

Got it. Fair enough. I didn't realize that commodities, fixed income, etc wasn't allowed there either. Maybe the name should have been "Stock Ideas" rather than "Investment" Ideas.

I ran across this today and thought of this topic on excess deaths. At least in the UK ambulance response times are horrible and appear to be trending in the wrong direction. About an hour on average some months of this year for "category 2" calls which includes chest pains and strokes, with 90th percentile up over 2 hours some months. https://www.health.org.uk/publications/long-reads/why-have-ambulance-waiting-times-been-getting-worse

Thanks alxcii, I agree, the unwillingness by some to understand crypto is almost like they deliberately are trying not to understand it. I tried at some point a few years ago to add a topic in the "investments" area of this board called BTC - Bitcoin and it was deleted and the few messages in it were appended to this topic here. No one on this board wants to discuss an individual crypto currency as an investment, they just want to throw them all together as a single topic where it can all be dismissed as "rat poison" as the seer says.

Twitter isn't going bankrupt. He's going to cut expenses to the bone and keep it running. He won't make his money back and it won't ever be thought of as a great investment for him. But there is no reason he can't keep it as a going concern. Twitter was mismanaged from the start and Musk vastly overpaid for it. None of that means it will go bankrupt.

Yes, stability is important too and this will take some time to come. Stability won't come until the end of the adoption curve, but fortunes will be made at the beginning of the adoption curve. The security comes from having an enormous amount of computing power securing the network. Other blockchains have had problems with 51% attacks, but Bitcoin never has even though it has been the most valuable crypto for over a decade. At this point it would take a huge amount of resources to attack it, something that only a handful of a nation-states could feasibly pull off with some effort and expense. I think eventually it will be at the point where the network is secure even from the largest nation states. For this to change, the world would have to decide to abandon Bitcoin and settle on using some other blockchain. Why would this happen? The more people, institutions, and states have invested in the Bitcoin network, the less likely they are to want to move on and use something else instead. If there is a feature everyone agrees that Bitcoin needs, it can be hard-forked in. I expect Bitcoin to continue to evolve, rather than be replaced.

I covered this multiple times in the cryptocurrencies thread, but yes it is the first and thought of as genuine, but even more importantly it is the most secure blockchain in the world. The value is in the security. You can easily create a bitcoin clone this afternoon on your PC, but anyone with twice your computing power can destroy it. Ethereum is worse as far as security goes, but better for functionality. It is a different product altogether. If you wanted to create a smart contract you would do it with Ethereum, if you wanted to store value on the most secure blockchain on Earth you would use Bitcoin. What makes Ethereum excellent for smart contracts (Turing completeness) makes it less secure and less suitable for being money. Money has always been something that is rare, hard to produce, fungible, divisible, easily transferable, and difficult to counterfeit. Right now the thing on Earth that best fits all of those properties is Bitcoin. My guess is that Bitcoin and Ethereum will coexist, with Ethereum being in far more danger of being obsoleted by a new technology than Bitcoin.

I've never understood how a person's skin color or private parts can contribute to "cooperate governance" or shareholder returns. And isn't having long term board members who have deep understanding of the company a good thing, not a negative? The whole thing seems like politically correct posturing to me.

People who don't understand what makes Bitcoin valuable have been saying this for over a decade. There have been thousands (maybe tens or even hundreds of thousands) of bitcoin clones already, with new ones created constantly. Why are they not nearly as valuable? When you fully understand the answer to that question you will understand. Related question: Why would anyone pay tens of thousands of dollars for a Rolex when you can get one in Chinatown for $50?

This applies to any natural commodity. There is no natural resource for which our galaxy doesn't have way more than humanity could ever possibly use. BTC is different. It is designed from the start to be scarce. You won't find a better way to get more Bitcoin from some hole in the ground on Earth and you won't find any more Bitcoin in the asteroid belt.

More OSTK, BRKB, and JOE. Funded by selling my trading position in WFCF, I usually buy ~$10 and sell ~$15.

What does that last statement even mean? No one that knows anything about crypto has ever said that you should store your value in one of these centralized exchanges or trust these so-called "stable coins". Everyone but the completely ignorant have been expecting these things to crash and burn for years and have only been surprised that it is taking so long.

So prepare to defend it. I'm with Castanza. The amount of time, money, and resources you would need to adequately prepare for the end of the world would be huge. And a huge waste if the world never ends. I'd rather live with the assumption that society isn't going to collapse completely. Sure I have some spare food and ammo, but nothing like what would be required to survive the apocalypse. It's wise to prepare for a week or three with no electricity, or a few days of rioting, but other than that, I'd be as screwed as everyone else.

PBR-A and $15 VRE July calls, both small positions.

I don't see any way currently to invest in fusion right now. I do own some SRUUF however which is a bet on fission. Also I just turned 50, so my investment horizon is probably less than 50 years unless there is some massive improvement in life extension technologies in the coming decades.

They created excess energy, but it is still a long long way from commercialization. My feeling is that there will be a huge ramp up of modern advanced fission nuclear generation long before fusion becomes commercially available. It looks like many in the US are awakening to the fact that we have a safe, dependable, environmentally friendly option already available to us which we aren't using. Many states are studying this issue now and have repealed laws banning new nuclear generation. https://www.nei.org/news/2022/states-continue-to-recognize-value-of-nuclear I was just listening yesterday to presentations given to New Hampshire's new Nuclear Study Commission by Oklo, Inc and by Meredith Angwin, author of “Shorting the Grid,”. You can find the meeting and slides here: https://nuclearnh.energy/event/regular-meeting-dec-12-2022/ I'm going to listen to one of their past meetings today where they heard from NuScale power and someone from the Nuclear Energy Institute https://nuclearnh.energy/event/regular-meeting-nov-21-2022/

The fee and time delay are minimal for large transactions, actually they are a huge improvement on any other method of transferring large sums, and for small everyday transactions there are solutions such as the lightning network. This type of thing will become easier and more common.

Tax revenues are paid in USD. So USD is backing the USD? If the value of the dollar is dropping then it is smarter to hold your wealth in something else and convert it to USD to pay your taxes. The fact that you owe taxes does create a market for dollars, but it isn't enough to completely save them from being massively devalued. Ever since the gold window was slammed shut by Nixon they don't even claim that there is any amount of gold backing the USD. All the government buildings and aircraft carriers in the world won't save the USD if people stop trusting it, and won't save its value if too many of them are printed. The government owns buildings and assets, but that doesn't mean that changes the market value of the USD, because those things aren't backing the USD. It isn't like you can say, hey look I have $X so I own Y% of the Whitehouse. You can not calculate an intrinsic value for the USD at all. All fiat money is faith based, when people lose faith, the money becomes worthless. If the USD became worthless then the government could still sell its buildings, but not for dollars.

Eventually that will be unnecessary more and more often. You send BTC from your wallet to mine and I give you the goods or services you are purchasing from me. Right now this type of exchange doesn't happen often, but it does happen and is growing. If enough people stop trusting the local currency or simply prefer BTC to the local currency the government loses all control whatsoever.

The same could be said for the USD. What is the intrinsic value of a piece of green paper? You can wipe your butt with it, but Charmin does that better. It's all just stamps if the world goes to shit. If the world doesn't all go completely to shit, then the USD is likely to keep losing value over time, while I think BTC is likely to keep gaining value over time.

Well said. Many people think the USD is some standard by which everything else can be valued, but its value is in constant flux. Pricing stocks in USD has the same problem. When a stock increases in price over time, it could be that the stock is more valuable, but it also could be that the USD is less valuable, or more likely some combination of the two. You see this when you own stocks priced in foreign currencies. The value in USD goes up and down not only with the stock price, but also with the fluctuation in value between the currency it is priced in vs your local currency. Right now most Americans use the USD as the baseline of value in their heads, but that could easily change. I only care about how much BTC I own, not what it is happens to be worth today in USD.