rkbabang

How could you not have known the moment you understood what Bitcoin was? If you don't get it yet, you will still be asking "how could you have known?" 20 or 30 years from now when people who bought under $100k are rich. Oh, and you are correct about worms with machine guns. Not seeing how Bitcoin is still worth only a small fraction of what it will be worth is like knowing that worms are acquiring machine guns and not understanding that the birds are screwed.

The problem with this reasoning is that you can: A. Attach it to anything B. It has no upper or lower bounds. Which is how speculative bubbles start and end. Under this reasoning, there’s almost no upper limit to pay for bitcoin - and no way to even determine a price that makes sense or not. It’s easy to say “the upside is infinite and the downside is capped”, but the truth is you’re picking statistics at random. Why should there be a 50% chance of 1000-1 odds on bitcoin? How do you know it’s not a 1% chance of 10-1 odds - how would you do this in a rigorous way? It seems too easy to fool yourself with these number games. As we're the idiots on probalility, and have material expertise in blockchain; a few comments. Ultimately investor X is forecasting an expected value, at time X, over a range of possibilites, and acting on it. If the forecast for XYZ is $7.50, after Q2 earnings are released, and investor X can buy XYZ today for $6.00; investor X should buy XYZ today and sell on the Q2 earnings release in expectation of a $1.50/share profit. Investor X could actually make more/less on the day, but expects to make $1.50. The coin flip is just a simplification of the same thing; 50% x $1payoff +50% x $1loss = $0.00 EMV = unbiased coinflip. It doesn't matter how many times one flips the coin, to make a profit - we just need a payoff>cost. We just differ on how it might be achieved - tossing bones works for us ;) The premise of the Bitcoin/Gold equivalency is that Bitcoin displaces a % of the existing gold market interested in store of value. Take the $ displaced, divide by the max possible 21M Bitcoin, and there's your value. Maybe this is valid 80 years from now, but TODAY, if you need to run from your homeland - are you putting your money primarily in gold, or Bitcoin? History has repeatedly demonstrated the utility of gold, Bitcoin ... not so much. SD If you need to run from your homeland and take your entire net worth with you and you know there is a good chance that you may be stopped and searched at any number of borders that you will be crossing, you would be insane to take gold.

Is there a reason you are purposely ignoring the bitcoin = gold thesis? Yes, there is. I don’t like gold. I don't either. I do like gold at a 95% discount though. To be fair, the fact that I don’t like gold isn’t negating the thesis that crypto = gold. I am sure for some people it is and that may be good enough. I don’t know where the 95% discount is coming from - the market cap of gold vs crypto? No. Crypto != gold. Bitcoin = gold. There is a big difference. People keep wanting to confabulate "crypto" with "bitcoin" and vice versa. Even the name of this thread itself was changed from "BTC - Bitcoin" to "Cryptocurrencies". In that fundamental misunderstanding is where some will profit and others will be left behind. It's like changing every discussion about Amazon.com to "online shopping" and saying it's all the same.

A man walking down the street sees a young boy sitting on some steps with a huge bag of candy, popping one piece after another into his mouth and chewing furiously. He walks up to the boy and says "You know, if you keep eating so much candy you are going to rot your teeth out and you won't have room in your belly to eat your supper." The boy responds: "I don't know about that, but do know that my great grandpa lived to be 102 years old!" The man confused asked "And do you think he lived that long because he ate a lot of candy?" The boy says "No. He lived that long because he knew how to mind his own business."

> Thanks, I've got that stuck in my head now. And I don't even like that song. >:(

The reason for using gold is that everyone has always used gold. This is something that Mises espoused in The Theory of Money and Credit, but not to get too nerdy but the alternate theory is that money is a system of clearing and settlement of societal obligations because reciprocity only works in very small bands and there is no other way (pre-writing) of deciding who owns what to whom so we use money and we owe it back to society. Other people use other kinds of money. If I tried to buy a house from a Yap tribesman with gold, they wouldn't take it, preferring instead their far superior giant rocks with a hole in the middle. So, if you think about Bitcoin as as using the underlying blockchain technology to build secure applications on (like for transfering title to property or managing digitial permissions), instead of as money, I wonder why I would pick the most expensive version of something to underly applications if the others are exactly as secure. If you think about it as money (in the alternate clearing and settlement theory) why would a society switch from one system to another? Do you know of any country that has done so besides in an economic collapse where they knock a few zeroes off the bills and rename the currency? I don't own bitcoin but I wouldn't short it either. To me it's genuinely something where it's too early to tell. Why would you build applications on top of Bitcoin outside of finance? The value proposition is the security of the ledger, monetary policy and rapidly growing liquidity. This is software eating away at the legacy financial system. Yes. And how is "the price" "too high"? 1 Satoshi = $0.0000935957 1 US cent = 207 Satoshi. Wow pennies are expensive!

Buy tech stocks, sell BRK. I'm waiting for the publication of the book "DOW 96,000" as a signal to put my plan into action.

Why couldn't you switch to another metal. Say Titanium? Titanium isn't quite as malleable, but it could be made into many differently sized coins with modern metal working techniques easily enough. Or silver, it is just as malleable as gold, the only downside is that it tarnishes, but you could keep it vacuum sealed. Or copper, or brass, ... The reason for using gold is that everyone has always used gold. This "you can make a million copies or forks of the bitcoin blockchain" criticism, while in a sense true, is not really a downside. Go and make a copy or a fork of bitcoin and see for yourself how hard it will be to convince anyone to value it. It would be like creating a yellow metal alloy that was as pretty as gold and trying to convince investors that it is worth just as much as gold. Your bitcoin copies/forks will be just like bitcoin with one exception, they won't be bitcoin. They won't be on the bitcoin blockchain secured by the massive mining power on that chain. It would be very easy for someone to 51% attack your new coin, so why would anyone use it?

Possibly my favorite part about bitcoin is those who continue to scream tulips/bubbles/scam over and over again without thought, as if blessing the "scammers and gamblers" who own bitcoin with their infinite wisdom. Will continue to do so as bitcoin transitions to a multi-trillion dollar mature non-sovereign censorship and depreciation resistant store of value? It's not surprising at all. People say gold is in a bubble all the time. Yes, and they pat themselves on the back every time gold has a significant drop in price as if they were correct the whole time. Gold (and Bitcoin) will always have permabears.

I thought it was time that Bitcoin had its own topic in the investments thread separate from other crypos. It has a market cap over $160B which would make it a very large cap if it were a stock. I came across this tweet and thought it was an interesting way to look at it. I had never kept track of the yearly lows before. The yearly highs are all over the place, but the lows show an upward trend. YTD the 2019 low was in early Feb around $3390

Very true, the simplest solution meaning the one with the fewest low probability assumptions, not just the simplest to state such as "god did it" or "it's all a simulation" The problem with the "god did it" or "it's a simulation" is that they explain nothing. If god did it, then where is god, what is god, and where did he come from? If it is a simulation, then who are the simulators? Where are they, what are they, what is their universe like, and where do they come from? All those do is create even more questions than they answer, so they solve nothing at all. But that doesn't mean you can rule them out as remote possibilities. My own opinion is that we are alone in our area of the Milkyway Galaxy or maybe even alone in our entire Galaxy. I think that life is probably fairly common, but intelligent life is probably much less common than most people think. Think about all the things that evolve over and over again independently (eyes, ears, wings, echolocation, etc) but intelligence on the human level has only evolved once in the history of the Earth and had that asteroid not taken out the dinosaurs it might never have evolved here at all. The universe is big, so there are probably other planets with intelligent life, but if they are located in other galaxies then we will never know about them nor them about us. I doubt very much that there is any creator like being. I like to think about the simulation hypothesis, but If I had to wager, I'd probably bet against it being true. I don't know how to explain the UFOs, but there is a lot we don't know about our planet/universe. There could be an explanation that has nothing to do with intelligent life at all. Or they could be intelligent beings keeping an eye on us. We may never know.

I've never said life probably exists elsewhere, only that it is possible and can't be ruled out. It may be that life doesn't arise very often, or it might be that life when it arises doesn't become intelligent life very often, ... the whole Drake equation. If any variable is extremely low then we could be the only intelligent life in the universe at this time.

You are telling an anarchist that order can't come from chaos. :) I think this is the same mental block that people who support central management over free markets can't get over. Unplanned order does come from chaos, in fact it is the only place it arises. Central Planning tries to create order, but in reality disturbs it and invites chaos back in to reign. I'm a Libertarian so I understand what you're saying (to an extent). But comparing physics and biology to economic or political systems is absurd....just saying. If you take a random complex system with a few simple rules order will often arise. This is just as true in the physical world with the rules of physics as it is in a computer simulation, or a functioning economy. The end result looks "planned", but it isn't. BTW: I'm using the term "rules" loosely as in "how something works", not as laws enforced by an enforcer. Right, but you have to know those rule exist. Life being created from nothing is not a rule. It's a guess. I've referenced the computer simulation used to "create life" earlier in the thread and the creators of it admitted that they introduced the parameter which allowed for life to be created in the first place. I disagree. Matter doesn't need to "know" that the law of gravity exists. Matter has no conscientiousness. The laws of physics are what they are, whether or not anyone "knows" what they are. The universe has followed the laws of physics since long before Newton or Einstein. Your example of that experiment where they had to change the rules, just proves that life might be able to come about even if the rules where different. We know life is possible in this universe, simply because we are here.

You are telling an anarchist that order can't come from chaos. :) I think this is the same mental block that people who support central management over free markets can't get over. Unplanned order does come from chaos, in fact it is the only place it arises. Central Planning tries to create order, but in reality disturbs it and invites chaos back in to reign. I'm a Libertarian so I understand what you're saying (to an extent). But comparing physics and biology to economic or political systems is absurd....just saying. If you take a random complex system with a few simple rules order will often arise. This is just as true in the physical world with the rules of physics as it is in a computer simulation, or a functioning economy. The end result looks "planned", but it isn't. BTW: I'm using the term "rules" loosely as in "how something works", not as laws enforced by an enforcer.

You are telling an anarchist that order can't come from chaos. :) I think this is the same mental block that people who support central management over free markets can't get over. Unplanned order does come from chaos, in fact it is the only place it arises. Central Planning tries to create order, but in reality disturbs it and invites chaos back in to reign.

Nope. I can say there is possibility of life else where based on my observation that life exists on this planet. Its a fact and I have several ways to prove the hypothesis. I don't need to understand how planet was created to prove that there may be other planets in the Universe. Probability does the trick here. Actually it makes no sense. Current hypothesis is based on the fact that life exists here and we have observed it. Let me know when you observe the God almighty. If you can prove life exists elsewhere then NASA wants your number. We observe life as it already exists. We have never observed life being created from nothing. You're blurring lines to fit your hypothesis. I'm simply saying a God could exists, just like you're saying life could begin on its own. You also can't disprove a God with science soooo. Is god alive? If so, then all you are saying is that you think other life besides us exists.

Your statements may be correct but your inference is precisely wrong. If you believe both to be true AND you can observe life on earth than it is safe to assume that there is a possibility of alien life somewhere else. Mind sharing the hypothesis for that pre supposition? If life exists here, then it is possible that exists in other places too. Life exists, so we can say that life originated somewhere. That could be either here on Earth, somewhere else and was transported to Earth (naturally or by other life), or it may have come to be in multiple places in the universe independently. Even if we are living in a simulation, that means that intelligent beings created that simulation and are living in a universe where life originated somehow. We do not know the answers to these questions and nothing can be ruled out. There does not have to be anything greater than ourselves. That is a subjective statement anyway depending on your definition of "greater". There may or may not be something other than ourselves.

Although I personally like the simulation hypothesis, it may be just glitches in the matrix that we are seeing. Maybe very little processing power is spent rendering those areas normally not observed by humans and we just never noticed before. If this is the case, wait until we start expanding into space. Maybe the whole system will be in need of some serious upgrades, or maybe they will just decide to turn it off or let it crash. The other possibility is that it is intentional, the creators of the sim are just messing with us to see how we react. Of course there is the possibility that there is some other explanation, extra-terrestrial explanations shouldn't be ruled out entirely until they can be ruled out. It is interesting that the state (all existing governments) are not more interested in this. There is a possible explanation in this Washington Post piece: "Wendt and Duvall argued that state sovereignty as we understand it is anthropocentric, or “constituted and organized by reference to human beings alone.” They argued that the real reason UFOs have been dismissed is because of the existential challenge that they pose for a worldview in which human beings are the most technologically advanced life-forms: UFOs have never been systematically investigated by science or the state, because it is assumed to be known that none are extraterrestrial. Yet in fact this is not known, which makes the UFO taboo puzzling given the ET possibility.... The puzzle is explained by the functional imperatives of anthropocentric sovereignty, which cannot decide a UFO exception to anthropocentrism while preserving the ability to make such a decision. The UFO can be “known” only by not asking what it is." UFOs exist and everyone needs to adjust to that fact UFOs are not the same thing as extraterrestrial life. But we should start thinking about that possibility. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/05/28/ufos-exist-everyone-needs-adjust-that-fact/

This is reassuring. I was worried that wouldn't be the case. I'll have to pick up a copy. Unfortunately it isn't $1.99 anymore. I'm putting it on my to read list. Hopefully it will go on sale again.

Rkbabang won. Fame? Fortune? BTW, it traded lower than that yesterday, so someone else somewhere in the world won.

Haha. Yeah, they left me out of the count. I just assumed everyone one this site, wisely, had me on ignore. Sorry, I didn't count. I wrongly assumed DooDiligence could count. :)

Me 4 @ $199.66

If you shop around for the right neighborhood I'm sure you can accomplish this immediately.

I hate to disappoint you, but I think you're in the wrong profession. You should take up investment banking instead. Sure. Just crush a man's dreams why don't you.

Independence. Quit my day job before I'm too old to enjoy retirement. House paid off, maybe a condo someplace warm. Ability to go on many vacations every year. I don't have any desire to learn how to fly a plane, and I don't plan to waste a ton of money buying a fractional jet share (even if I could afford it, it seems like a waste), so I'll be happy flying 1st class commercial.