rkbabang

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man You can't fix stupid. Plenty of people lost cash money to Nigerian princes over email. Doesn't mean cash is bad. A fool and his money are soon parted. That is just a universal law of human nature that is constant regardless of what you use as money. That's why next time that Elon Musk contacts me for my bitcoin I'm going to tell him to go to hell!

Tim Ferriss interviewed Vitalik Buterin. https://tim.blog/2021/03/08/vitalik-buterin-naval-ravikant/

On another board people were discussing NFTs and someone said something like "Art has always been nothing but money laundering it is no surprise that it would go digital." That is probably too broad a statement and a gross generalization, but still, there is probably a kernel of truth in that.

Took a little bit more than my cost basis out of NIO and FSRWS and added to both AMZN and AYRWF.

Yeah, if the stock market goes straight up the rest of the decade I'm selling everything in early 2029

Reviewing the entire list of mining equipment they have on order or already purchased, including 70,000 Bitmain S19s and 10,500 Bitmain S19 Pros, at current BTC prices I come up with a little over $1B in annual net revenue (after energy costs) when they are all up and running at year end. This of course includes their claim that Beowulf will be providing power at $0.006 per KWH which seems insanely cheap. I can't decide if this thing is a total fraud due to it's history of constantly switching businesses, employment count, executive turnover, massive share count increase, etc, or a potential huge value play. I mean if my math is right even at $10,000 BTC they probably justify their current market cap. I'm confused. Then why did you buy puts?

He is not a man of his word. http://dickening.com/

https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees.html Currently costs about $19 per BTC transaction. Which is amazingly cheap for large transactions. If you were a large institution which had $1B in gold in your safe in the US and you wanted to move it to another institution in Japan. How long would it take, how much would it cost, and what safety precautions would need to be taken? Even moving dollars rather than gold it would be much easier, quicker, safer, and cheaper with BTC. And as far as I know there is no other way to cross international borders carrying tens of thousands to billions of dollars safely in your head by memorizing 12 words.

There is a lot of BTC. It is currently divisible to 8 decimal places. At $1M/BTC the lowest unit (1 Satoshi) would be worth a penny and one μBTC (micro-bitcoin) would be worth $1. If there are 21M BTC then there are 2,100,000,000,000,000 Satoshi (2.1 quadrillion Satashi) and 21,000,000,000,000 μBTC (21 trillion μBTC).

Maybe you should ask yourself what it is that Square, Visa, PayPal, and other payment processors who are expanding the use of digital currencies must see since they're the experts. It's not just a couple of guys on a forum telling you this stuff. The industry is rapidly moving that direction. We can talk til we're blue in the face to get you to understand what it is and that it has value - or you can just look what the experts are doing. Acquiring crypto and developing crypto solutions... The reason the transactions aren’t instant is because of regulation. The government is trying to prevent criminal activity. That alone should sound serious alarm bells. They must have skipped the criminal activity part https://perspectives.dtcc.com/articles/leading-the-industry-to-accelerated-settlement Q: Why stop at T+1 or T+½? Why not go to real-time settlement? A: Real-time settlement is a simple technical solution but a very complicated market structure change. While the industry should continue to aspire to real-time, it is more pragmatic to reduce the settlement cycle in stages to capture the benefits faster. With real-time settlement in today’s market structure, the entire industry – clients, brokers, investors – loses the liquidity and risk-mitigating benefit of netting, and that is particularly critical during times of heightened volatility and volume. For example, on a typical trading day, NSCC processes an average of about $1.7 trillion in equities transactions. The multilateral netting process reduces that number by about 98%, and the total value settled is around $38 billion. Netting allows brokerages to transfer that $38 billion between parties only once at the end of the day. In a real-time settlement scenario, netting is not possible and trillions of dollars in cash and securities must move through the financial system on a continual basis throughout the trading day. This creates massive market and capital inefficiencies, increases credit and operational risks, and increases costs between trading parties, possibly undermining the stability of the markets. Accelerating settlement requires careful consideration, industry coordination, and a balanced approach so settlement can be achieved as close to the trade as possible (for example, T+1 or T+½), without creating capital inefficiencies and introducing new, unintended market risks, such as eliminating the enormous benefits and cost savings of multilateral netting. I'm very confused. Why are you guys referencing settlement times for equity securities? I can quite easily transfer small dollar amounts of my money to another individual today, instantly. Anything large has limitations and takes more time, due to regulations. What am I missing? You're missing that no settlement happens INSTANTLY in today's financial system. Not for securities. Not for cash. ACH takes 3-5 business days. Stocks take 2 business days to settle. Wires can still take a few hours and cost $. Even solutions like Venmo that seem instantaneous take a few days for cash to reach your account. The only solutions where cash moves "instantly" are solutions where a liquidity provider is giving you their cash while they wait for the cash you transferred to arrive (like trading Schwab allowing me to trade my cash deposit immediately or paying a fee to use an ATM). Cash does NOT move instantly in today's system - this is a result of the plumbing and structure and not of government regulation. Also, securities will exist as tokens and be traded on a blockchain in the future as well. Maybe on a chain such as Ethereum. Companies will issue shares directly to the blockchain and be able to buy-back and remove them. You will be able to see in real time how many shares exist. You will also be able to trade them almost instantly without 3rd party involvement. This I can understand, and I see the value. Why does this mean Bitcoin is worth $50,000 though? Even if real-time settlements don’t happen, it sure seems like they do to me as the consumer. Why does better plumbing, that I don’t even see, make Bitcoin worth $50,000? That was just an aside. But you won't be buying 25 shares of Amazon with $USD, value will be stored in BTC not cash.

Ethereum is my guess. I find both compelling and so own BTC and ETH.

Maybe you should ask yourself what it is that Square, Visa, PayPal, and other payment processors who are expanding the use of digital currencies must see since they're the experts. It's not just a couple of guys on a forum telling you this stuff. The industry is rapidly moving that direction. We can talk til we're blue in the face to get you to understand what it is and that it has value - or you can just look what the experts are doing. Acquiring crypto and developing crypto solutions... The reason the transactions aren’t instant is because of regulation. The government is trying to prevent criminal activity. That alone should sound serious alarm bells. They must have skipped the criminal activity part https://perspectives.dtcc.com/articles/leading-the-industry-to-accelerated-settlement Q: Why stop at T+1 or T+½? Why not go to real-time settlement? A: Real-time settlement is a simple technical solution but a very complicated market structure change. While the industry should continue to aspire to real-time, it is more pragmatic to reduce the settlement cycle in stages to capture the benefits faster. With real-time settlement in today’s market structure, the entire industry – clients, brokers, investors – loses the liquidity and risk-mitigating benefit of netting, and that is particularly critical during times of heightened volatility and volume. For example, on a typical trading day, NSCC processes an average of about $1.7 trillion in equities transactions. The multilateral netting process reduces that number by about 98%, and the total value settled is around $38 billion. Netting allows brokerages to transfer that $38 billion between parties only once at the end of the day. In a real-time settlement scenario, netting is not possible and trillions of dollars in cash and securities must move through the financial system on a continual basis throughout the trading day. This creates massive market and capital inefficiencies, increases credit and operational risks, and increases costs between trading parties, possibly undermining the stability of the markets. Accelerating settlement requires careful consideration, industry coordination, and a balanced approach so settlement can be achieved as close to the trade as possible (for example, T+1 or T+½), without creating capital inefficiencies and introducing new, unintended market risks, such as eliminating the enormous benefits and cost savings of multilateral netting. I'm very confused. Why are you guys referencing settlement times for equity securities? I can quite easily transfer small dollar amounts of my money to another individual today, instantly. Anything large has limitations and takes more time, due to regulations. What am I missing? You're missing that no settlement happens INSTANTLY in today's financial system. Not for securities. Not for cash. ACH takes 3-5 business days. Stocks take 2 business days to settle. Wires can still take a few hours and cost $. Even solutions like Venmo that seem instantaneous take a few days for cash to reach your account. The only solutions where cash moves "instantly" are solutions where a liquidity provider is giving you their cash while they wait for the cash you transferred to arrive (like trading Schwab allowing me to trade my cash deposit immediately or paying a fee to use an ATM). Cash does NOT move instantly in today's system - this is a result of the plumbing and structure and not of government regulation. Also, securities will exist as tokens and be traded on a blockchain in the future as well. Maybe on a chain such as Ethereum. Companies will issue shares directly to the blockchain and be able to buy-back and remove them. You will be able to see in real time how many shares exist. You will also be able to trade them almost instantly without 3rd party involvement.

I'm sorry that the entire financial system doesn't get rebuilt overnight. And yes - there a DeFi options, there are CeFi options, and there are hybrid companies that currently bridge the gap (crypto exchanges, BlockFi, etc). If the US is serious about releasing a digital dollar, you likely won't need companies that straddle both as your on-ramp as the digital dollar will likely be immediately available as an on-ramp into DeFi without using one of these intermediaries If you are going to wait until you can spend crypto everywhere you shop the opportunity to get in early will be gone. I'm old enough to remember when not every store you went into accepted credit cards and not everyone had them. They did catch on though.

Did you know that by the year 2020 Bitcoin will consume all of the worlds energy? https://www.newsweek.com/bitcoin-mining-track-consume-worlds-energy-2020-744036

Bitcoin is an idea. But so is any other money. Money, corporations, stocks, governments, contracts, bonds: are all nothing in reality but stories people tell themselves.

Thank you Clutch, very well said. I would add gold your list as nothing but a fantasy, a construct of the human mind rather than anything in reality. It cracks me up when people say its value comes from its usefulness. Aluminum has every useful feature that gold has and is better at most of them, yet it isn't used as money and isn't "worth " thousands of dollars per oz. Why? Because it doesn't have the mythical history that gold has going back thousands of years, it isn't a pretty yellow color that humans fancy, and it isn't as rare. But again it is more useful and worth practically nothing. All value is subjective, seeing people trying to come up with post hoc reasoning for why we value one thing and not another is often hilarious. The easiest people to fool is often ourselves. Bitcoin solves some problems and why will people value it over any other crypto which can also solve such problems? For the same reason people don't hoard aluminum coins. Its history, its story, its rarity, and because everyone else values it.

At $53, isn't the BTC market cap around $700B as I seem to remember that accounting for lost and unmined total count was closer to 14M? Or is that way off? No one knows for sure how many coins are lost (including millions of bitcoins presumably owned by Satoshi Nakamoto), so the market cap is calculated based on the only number which is known for sure: the number of mined bitcoins. So yes the real market cap is somewhat less, but no one knows how much less. I know there have been people who have looked at the number of coins which has not moved in X numbers of years, but that doesn't mean anything as a lot of people are holding. Most of my coins haven't been moved since 2014, but they are not lost. There is really no way to ever know for sure which coins are lost and which are being intentionally held. 100 BTC which haven't moved since 2010 were recently moved, further illustrating the point that no one knows which coins are owned and which are lost. https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-whale-from-2010-moves-100-btc-for-first-time-in-11-years

"Blind to the facts on the ground" is a very good way to describe it. You are talking about a government which reigns over and taxes a multi-trillion dollar economy with the most powerful military empire the world has ever seen. Anyone who thinks that is going down in a year or even in a decade is crazy, but anyone who thinks the empire it is immortal is equally crazy. It will take some time, but the Federal Government of the United States will not last forever. And the United States Dollar will not last forever. Loose monetary policy does have the power to eventually take the dollar down, it won't be overnight. Just because it hasn't happened yet, isn't evidence that it isn't happening. The dollar has lost over 85% of its value since Nixon untied it from gold, this current round of printing will send it even lower. In the next 50 years it will go down from here even more than 85%. The dollar is doomed eventually, the only question is when?

TwoCitiesCapital, I think there are some people who just can't imagine change. It's like telling someone in the 1840's that slavery would someday be illegal in the US. The dollar has value now and it is unimaginable that it won't always have value. Yes, you are correct every currency that has ever collapsed had the same government requirement that it be used for tax payments, therefore that will do zero to protect the dollar if and when it collapses, but you are going to bang your head against a wall convincing someone of this if they can't wrap their heads around it. Nothing backs Bitcoin, nothing backs the dollar, and nothing really backs gold. All value is subjective, so another way to look at it is the same thing backs all 3: demand.

A lot of crypto is crap of course (as is many stocks), but BTC and ETH will both beat the SP500 by a wide margin over the next 10 years.

I've owned crypto since 2014 and none of my stocks have outperformed them over the last 6-7 years and I don't think any stocks I own will outperform them in the next 6-7 years either, same probably goes for the 6-7 years after that as well.

I mean, as long as the Fed reserves the rights to issue unlimited digital dollars, it doesn't seem to erode the competitive advantage much. Just means that the entire USD system is getting a digital upgrade for faster/cheaper transfer and settlements, but doesn't take away from the advantages of BTC being global and scarce. Quite honestly, this might INCREASE adoption as I envision a digital USD would increase on-ramps into DeFi. Right now, it's difficult to get dollars into DeFi. You have to deposit cash on an exchange, buy a digital asset, wait 4 days, transfer to a wallet, convert to the token you need, and then you can get involved. Multiple fees paid in expensive ether along the way. A digital dollar might forego the need for first 3 steps and make it easier to get dollar liquidity into the system. It's more likely that the digital dollar negates the need for stable coins as opposed negating the need for BTC and would actually lower transaction costs as less gas would be wasted exchange between, and supporting, stablecoin transactions. This would be great news because the stable coins are all pretty shady, it would make trading into and out of crypto much easier and safer.

I'd love the opportunity to buy at $6K again. Don't get my hopes up like that.

Yes, I had a similar situation. As I wrote (here) I looked at it at some point 2011 and almost bought it, but I couldn't get over wiring money to mtgox, it just seemed so sketchy. I changed jobs that year, moved, sold a house, bought another house in a different state, and didn't think about bitcoin again until it went to over $1000 and was in the news in 2013. When it crashed back down to $200 I made sure to buy some, but not as much as I should have.

He obviously wants to buy more