rkbabang

Thanks I’m going to check this out. My initial thought is that Network=good State=bad Networking people together is a good thing with powerful effects. Creating yet another coercive criminal organization to rob from them and pretend to protect them is probably not a good idea. The world has far too much statism as it is. I’ll withhold further comments until I read it though, I don’t want to judge a book completely by its cover.

Coinbase Pro is being discontinued and those features are all coming to Coinbase. But right now, you are correct. https://cointelegraph.com/news/coinbase-to-shut-down-coinbase-pro-to-merge-trading-services

I’ve been using Coinbase to buy it, then once I have accumulated a larger amount than I am comfortable with them holding I move it to my own private wallets where I hold the private keys. There is a saying: Not your keys, not your crypto. If you are only going to buy small amounts, holding on Coinbase is probably relatively safe for the near future, I usually don’t move it until I have $5K or more in there, just realize that there is risk to doing that. Coinbase could get hacked, or go bankrupt tomorrow and you could lose your balance. A good exercise to learn about doing all this would be to buy a hundred dollars worth and practice moving it to a private wallet and then moving half to another private wallet, just so you get a feel for how it works. Print out the private key and then try restoring the wallet by typing in the key to a new device.

Exactly. Every market has people who don’t understand what they’re doing or what they are investing in and trying to get rich quick. These people are often hurt when the market turns. Crypto, being a new type of asset, is even more prone to this than more mature markets. It is what it is and it presents massive opportunities for people with more knowledge and patience.

Value investing isn’t a religion, it isn’t something you believe in. It is one tool among many.

Yup, it’s going to be a bloodbath. I’m loving it. My prediction is a huge sell off from here and over 50% of the shitcoins go to zero. Buy Bitcoin when everyone you talk to has sold, thinks it’s a scam, and is as pessimistic as everyone on this board is.

Praise be to Bob!

The question is worded wrong. The answer is clearly no with how it is worded. Many people have a lot of money which they didn’t create. People have inherited money, politicians and criminals have money stolen from others, etc… Does the amount of money a person earns/creates reflect their worth to society? Almost always, yes. And before someone gives a bunch of outlier examples, of course there are always exceptions to the rule.

Quite the opposite. Since he's been dead for 67 years, you couldn't pay me $5M to have lunch with him. Gross.

That was great until the end "coming never". WTF, I wanted to see that movie!

Yeah, I wish I had an answer for that. An N of 2.5 is not a large enough set to make predictions from. We could already be at the bottom or we could get surprises in one or both directions.

If you want to use past numbers to predict the future you could look at the last 3 high to low cycles you have: High of about $1100 in 2013 to a low of about $200 in 2015. High of about $20K in 2017 to a low of about $3200 in 2018. High of about $68K in 2021 to a low of ?? in ??. The first one dropped about 82% in 2 years, then recovered to a new high about 100X the low and 18X the previous high in 2 more years. The second one dropped about 84% in 1 year, then recovered to a new high about 21X the low and 3.4X the previous high in about 3 years. If the 3rd cycle sees a drop of 80-85% you should see a low of about $10.2K-$13.6K and the next high could be maybe double the previous one. Say ~$140K in 3 or 4 years. That would be a 10X-14X return from the low and a 6X-7X return from here.

BTC will win #2 there is almost no doubt in my mind about that. I think #1 will be a layer 2 solution backed by BTC. The lightning network or something like it, maybe many competing solutions. There is no reason to pay for a cup of coffee with an on-chain transaction. Making large purchases on-chain will make sense, storing large sums of value on chain will make sense, but for everyday spending faster, less secure off-chain method will work just fine. #3 is something entirely different from a store of value or a currency, and there will be a lot of competition in that space. Here too I think the most critical/valuable smart contracts will involve BTC, but most lower value financial contracts and non financial web3 (and web3+) applications will not need the security and cost of the BTC blockchain and there will be a lot of competition in this area for different mixes of privacy, security, speed, reliability, functionality, etc.... As you said most of the competition is in this area already, no one takes the pure store of value alt-coins seriously even now.

None of those are as safe from 51% attacks in my opinion. Crypto currency is a winner take all proposition. People will trust the one with the highest difficulty and the others will fail or at least forever be worth a lot less.

Nice. I was way too cautious buying O&G. I sold some tech and bought some O&G, but not a large enough percentage to keep me in the green. I'm glad I bought what I did though. I'm up over 100% on ATHOF, over 85% on OBE and have done well on a few others as well such as CVEWS. Also my Apple and Tesla puts are doing well. Now I have to decide when to sell them, which is always the hard part.

What backs gold? What backed shells or colored rocks when people used that for money? Money needs to have utility as money. Which means scarcity, divisibility, very difficult to create more (BTC is almost impossible to create more), transportability, durability (doesn't break, rust, deteriorate, rot, etc over time), and verifiability against fakes. Gold checked all of those boxes except for transportability once global international trade became a thing. BTC checks all of those boxes and is better at most. Gold wasn't money because it was backed by something or had some other use, it was money because it had the properties of good money. I know we've gone over all this before....

I know I've said this before, but read "The Bitcoin Standard" and "The Fiat Standard". Money has always been the hardest thing to create, easily transported, fungible, divisible, and durable. Gold served that purpose for a long time, it has all of those properties except ease of transport. Governments created fiat which is even easier to transport, but lacks the "hard to create" property. BTC solves all of those problems. 2nd layer solutions will solve the speed/cost of small transactions problems. Only a small fraction of the planet uses BTC as money right now, most people are just speculating, so of course it is volatile. Eventually if adapted by a large portion of the population as money it will stabilize at a value hundreds of times what it is now. If that never happens it won't.

Same. All of my oil positions were purchased Nov-Feb based on a lot of discussions on this board as well as reading Kuppy's blog. People DID see it and DID take advantage of it. That and real estate stocks are the reason that I am not down anywhere near what the market is YTD.

The full interview with the AI is here: https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-interview-ea64d916d917 I'm not convinced, but it is an incredible chatbot. It makes me think though, what could an AI say to convince me it was sapient? I don't know the answer to that, which makes me think conscience AI will exist long before most people accept that conscience AI exists.

Imagine trying to run a datacenter with massive buildings containing 1960s computers because that is what the government regulations mandated and complaining that computers are just too expensive and need so many people to run.

How much of that capex has to do with over regulation and the fact that we are still using basically 1950s light water reactor technology?

Nat gas should be thought of as holding us over until enough nuke plants can be built. I can't understand the loony environmentalist left's opposition to nuclear. A closed nuclear fuel cycle is the safest and cleanest energy source we have. Our stockpile of so-called "spent" nuclear fuel contains a truly massive amount of useable energy that we are doing nothing with, and more is being created by our existing plants every year. Yet they're yammering about fcking windmills. smh. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/02/nuclear-waste-us-could-power-the-us-for-100-years.html

I've been almost fully invested since 1996 or so. I rarely hold more than 5% cash. In bear markets I do the same thing I do in bull markets: look for individual stocks I think will go up from here and sell stocks I think will go down from here. I got clobbered in 2000, because I was heavily invested in tech. I started investing in 1996 and thought tech stocks simply go up and never down. I discovered value investing shortly after the crash and re-evaluated what I was doing. I actually had up years in 2008 and 2009, due to Fairfax, Middleby/Turbochef acquisition arbitrage, and Steak & Shake. I'm not down as much as the market is this year, mostly because last year I started lightening up on my tech stocks and buying real estate and O&G stocks. Just selling things I think are bubbly and going into things I think will go up.

Yeah, hopefully China thinks it through before acting.

Excellent episode with Saifedean Ammous, author of "The Bitcoin Standard" and his new book (which I haven't read yet) "The Fiat Standard". He talks about why Bitcoin over gold. And Lex does a good job of challenging him on a lot of what he says, it isn't a completely friendly interview. Excellent listen. Also, I've said this before if you actually do want to understand Bitcoin and not just hate it because WEB and Munger hate it, read The Bitcoin Standard.