rkbabang

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.

Yes, comparing one thing of value to another always has multiple variables. Even using USD is problematic because not only is BTC always changing in respect to the USD, but the USD is changing in value with respect to other goods as well, not just BTC. Saying BTC will be worth some X amount of USD someday doesn't tell you much because the obvious question is "which USD?" The 2007USD, the 2022 USD, or the someday USD? Because if BTC is ever worth $1M USD it will be both because BTC is worth more than now and the USD is worth less than now.

Because most people in the US use and understand dollars, so it is very easy to use dollars to convey the idea that BTC or ETH will hold more value in the future than they do now. If we started talking about the number of bananas, pineapples, gallons of crude oil, or pork bellies you will be able to buy with bitcoin in the future vs now it wouldn't make as much immediate sense to most listeners.

Yes, I was thinking the same thing. The ideal is to get human reasoning abilities and even creativity without the human-like mistakes and misunderstandings.

I was just reading about this on twitter this morning and ran across this answer. I'm not sure I'd trust the answers this gives you without verifying them for yourself afterwards.

Sold all my Jan 23 TSLA puts. Large loss on the $86.67 puts and large gain on the $180 puts. Made a few percent combined.

You are almost certainly correct. It will be a thing on Instagram soon.

The governments of the world not being able to confiscate your wealth could be considered a feature, rather than a bug.

"illegal" The ruling elite always calls protests illegal. When you agree with a protest it is a "mostly peaceful protest by people with legitimate complaints" even if it burns down a portion of a city. When you don't agree with a protest it is a "illegal insurrection by terrorists", even if it is basically a bunch of smiling people walking around a building taking selfies. I'm sure in the eyes of CCP the Hong Kong protests are "illegal" and in the eyes of the government of Iran the Iranian protests are "illegal". It's all tribalism. When your tribe agrees they are freedom fighters, when your tribe doesn't agree they are terrorists and criminals. I applaud anyone protesting their government whether it be BLM, the Jan 6th protesters, the Canadian truckers, or people in Hong Kong, China or Iran. Governments are the real criminals and "illegal" just means something the real criminals don't like.