rkbabang

That sucks, try to convince your company to use Fidelity for your 401K. My company uses Fidelity and it has the normal selection of funds or you can transfer the money into what they call 401K Brokerage Link and invest it into anything that you could in an IRA, even options (buy calls/puts, write covered calls and cash backed puts).

Yes, when you are praising The People's Republic of China for cracking down on the freedom of individuals to transact freely and wish your government would do the same, you really should examine your thinking a little more.

His analysis is done based on the number of wallets with >0.01 BTC in them ($220 at $22K/BTC), which makes much more sense to me than using the total number of BTC which is arbitrary.

I agree. Metcalfe has something to do with it, but not only isn’t it the whole story, but using the number of Bitcoins as the nodes in the calculation rather than the number of users is a mistake. By this method Dogecoin with its unlimited supply should be worth far more than Bitcoin. Bitcoin is, among other things, like a digital gold. Gold doesn’t become more valuable every time a new ounce of it is mined. Scarcity creates value in a money or store of value, adding more doesn’t create more value, rather it does the opposite. The network is the humans (or companies, governments, smart contracts, etc) using it, not the number of units in existence.

Would you rather own a useful asset that many people worship or a useful asset that nobody worships? People worshiped gold at times too and look how long that remained valuable to humans. That said, you don't need to spend a lot of time listening to the preachers, you just need to understand that they exist, and in large numbers.

It also gives us the opportunity to profit from the beliefs of others. Don't be part of the flock, be the preacher living in a 15,000 sqft mansion. Don't be the voter, be the guy selling the state $10,000 screwdrivers, or invest in the company that does. Don't worship Satashi and his blockchain, but recognize that belief in others and add some to your portfolio. I don't always succeed, but I try as hard as I can to be an atheist in all things. “belief is the death of intelligence.” ― Robert Anton Wilson “I don't believe anything, but I have many suspicions.” ― Robert Anton Wilson

Jan 2025 Overstock $40 calls

I don't think anyone is saying anyone _has_ to buy anything. The only difference is that you can discuss Berkshire here without someone chiming in that it's Rat Poison. And you can discuss AJ Gallagher here without people coming out of the woodwork saying its all a Ponzi scheme and worth nothing. Some things cause more heated debates than others. I've also owned Berkshire for over 20 years and I've never once had someone tell me quite confidently that it was worthless.

Well yeah, never go completely into any quasi-religious group of people obsessing about anything (value investing / Buffet-Munger worshipers included). As people become less religious in the traditional sense there is a type of personality that looks for someone or something else to deify and get all fundamentalist about. I don't want to bring politics into it, but you can see it there very easily, the more likely someone is to be a so-called "atheist" the more likely they are to practically worship the state as the god that can do/create/accomplish anything with a word (I'm looking at you Dawkins). Same with the bitcoin worshipers or any of the many people/things/groups some people worship. There is a type of person, for example, who will never give a moments thought to crypto because their god who can never be wrong called it "rat poison". It's usually best to not get bogged down with these people on any topic. Once you spot them they are easy to recognize.

This is true and if you invest a substantial amount for 40-50 years you will do just fine even if you underperform the market a little bit. The problem is that I think even investors who invest in index funds usually vastly underperform the market. They start putting money in close to the top after hearing everyone talking about stocks and then get scared and pull everything out after each crash. The only way to make market returns with an index fund is to keep your money in there and to dollar cost average new money in consistently. That itself takes discipline that most don't have.

+1 Bitcoin is getting bigger and will be a much harder asset to manipulate in the future and probably isn't that easy to manipulate now. That wasn't the case in 2013. There are a lot of microcap stocks that are far easier to manipulate than Bitcoin.

Yes I’ve heard the Tether theories for the 2017 run up, but that isn’t even what he is alleging this time, his allegation is that when Bitcoin gets too low people are buying it and the price goes back up. Like, yeah, no shit, I do that too.

Agreed, I’m not rich compared to anyone moving markets, but the behavior is the same. Buy low, sell high. If that behavior is immoral, then I am guilty.

"the manipulator or manipulators agree that every time the price drops to a target level, they’ll jump in to push it well above that benchmark." So this guy's theory is that every time the price drops some people with money rush in to buy it pushing the price up. I agree that is most probably happening. Buying when something is low and stopping your buys once the price rises, some people call that "manipulation" others just call it investing. There are lots of times I start buying something when the price drops and then stop buying it when the price rises again, then if it rises enough I sell. I guess I'm part of the manipulation cabal.

I've been wrong enough times in my life to know that I'm not infallible. The great thing about investing is that it's hard to lie to yourself. When you are correct you make money and when you are wrong you lose money. It's pretty hard to say, "Yeah, I lost 90% of my investment, but I still think that I was correct".

Of course. I obviously don't think I'm wrong. I thought Krugman was an idiot when I first read that quote in the late 90's and I think Munger is just as wrong now. I think history has proven me correct about the internet and I think it will eventually prove me correct about bitcoin. But of course I could be mistaken. Munger doesn't seem to have the humility to think that he could be wrong, he just wants governments to use violence to go after something he doesn't like.

Indeed. When I say "he doesn't get it," I am not saying he doesn't understand how it works. Let me give you an example of what I mean. In 1998 everyone pretty much understood how the internet worked. It's a network of computers that everyone can join, every device has an address on the network, and the devices can communicate with each other via a multitude of protocols. Conceptually not very complicated. But while everyone understood what the internet was, some people didn't get it. Paul Krugman wrote: "By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's." He clearly didn't get it. He understood how it worked just fine, but he still didn't get its potential, what it would become, what this capability would enable, what people would do with it, and its potential future impact on the economy and how people live. It is in this sense that I say Munger doesn't get it. Of course as @Dave86ch said above, there is the possibility that he does get it and just doesn't like it, but I don't want to think that about him, so I give him the benefit of the doubt and say he doesn't get it.

I'm up more than 50% on mine, but I'm going to hold. I paid up for another 23 months from now which I think should put us into the next crypto cycle. I'm not sure what I'd do if I held the Jan 2024s.

+1 He doesn't get it, and that's ok. Not everyone has to understand everything. It is unfortunate, though, that he has such a strong opinion on something that is way out of his area of competency and trying to use his considerable influence to sway the opinions of others.

The type of human being who wants to be a rulemaker is literally the worst among us. We are have set up a system where the worst possible people are always in control. At least with kings there was some random chance that once every few hundred years or so you could randomly end up with a good one. With democracy ending up with good people in control isn't even possible.

Picked up a few more SI 2025 $12.5 calls and a few more 2025 OSTK $25 calls.

The thing is that if you have a quantum computer which can do this it is only a matter of time until someone else does as well, so you probably wouldn't have a year. As @wachtwoord said the code to harden Bitcoin against this already exists, as quantum computers get better it will be adopted long before there is a real risk. Anyway I'm not too worried about this. Quantum computers are kind of like nuclear fusion, it is always 30 years away.

Yes, only if you don't give someone else your Bitcoin and trust them with it. The same for money with banks. I know there is FDIC deposit insurance because the government wants you to trust your bank, but if you have an amount above that in the bank when it fails it is gone. The whole point of crypto is that it is trustless, you don't have to trust anyone to hold it for you. If you do just give it all to someone else to hold and hope for the best, well stupid is as stupid does.

^ Exactly. Public blockchains are a winner take all endeavor. People are always going to want to store their wealth in the most secure blockchain on earth. No one will ever want to take a chance with a less secure blockchain that can be vulnerable to a 51% attack. @Parsadkeeps saying that blockchain is the real innovation not bitcoin, but that is not true. A blockchain is just a linked database. If the blockchain can be edited or changed by any individual, corporation, or government, then it is no better than any other private database. The real innovation is a publicly secured blockchain which no one controls. And for the entirety of its existence the most secure blockchain by far has been Bitcoin.