rkbabang

This has been said every year for the last 7 years or so. It also has been claimed that value investors will outperform when market goes down. Which has pretty much shown to be wrong in the years like 2018 when market went down. (Yeah, I know there's a ton of superinvestors on CoBF who outperform every year. More power to them.) I disagree that value investors, as a group, largely outperform on years when the market goes way down. When fear dominates it causes a sinking tide which lowers all boats (for the most part). But value investors start buying when everyone else is selling, so they do outperform when the market goes back up. By the time everyone else starts pouring money into the market in a big way you are more than halfway to the next top.

This is undoubtedly true. The reason I only hold 5% in BRK now is that I have asked myself: Is BRK worth more, less, or the same without WEB? The only answer I can come up with every time is: LESS. The only questions now are: How much less? And is that already priced in?

Yes, I knew about it in advance as well and there is quite a bit more to the story than that article lets on. But it was a good time and I wouldn't hesitate to meetup with you or Eric again. As far as John’s objection to the name change, that puzzles me. I've been on this board since it was on the orher platform way back when. That was the pre-facebook days when almost no one used their real names online. That is why my username isn't my teal name. I don't see the issue with changing usernames or going anonymous.

I am slightly under 5% for the reasons you and LC have articulated. I wonder if when WEB retires or can otherwise no longer be CEO what will happen in the short term to the price? Will there be panic selling? At the right price I'd increase my position, but probably not higher than 10-15% unless the price was really crazy low.

What are you talking about man? None of these supercomputers are double sha256 asics and wouldn't make a dent in the hash rate. Complete hogwash. When people talk about (peta)flops as a unit in the context of Bitcoin mining they don't know what they are talking about (on this topic at least). His larger point still holds that it is physically possible to spend $X to build a system that could 51% attack Bitcoin. My point was that you would never be able to cash out and earn a return on your investment if you did that, because the $X you would have to spend is so high and the price of Bitcoin would plummet immediately upon your attack. The danger is that a state actor does this not to profit, but to destroy Bitcoin.

I'm not so sure. If you find a way to steal a ton of gold, you have that gold and it is just as valuable as it alway was. The same with Bitcoin, if you steal it (hack an exchange for example). But if you acquire bitcoin with a 51% attack I don't see how you expect to cash out, because once the news hits that Bitcoin has been successfully attacked the price will plummet. You will have spent many tens of millions of dollars on a supercomputer to steal a crypto currency that is now almost worthless because of how you stole it. You would have to attack bitcoin, make your changes, and cash out before anyone notices. I don't think that is possible.

I'm surprised no one else has commented on this, as a non-expert on this stuff it seems like a big deal, are the other cryptos at risk for this? Ethereum (the real Ethereum) was forked years ago to undo some theft (it gave of up immutability). The article you linked is about Ethereum classic, some small (but still top 20, showing there isn't much serious crypto short of Bitcoin) fork of Ethereum that was created at the time for people that thought giving up immutability was stupid (they were right of course but never got traction as the public followed the Vitalik messiah). Neither of these things will happen in Bitcoin. The culture will not break immutability and a 51% attack is economically unviable (Eth classic had a pittyfull hash rate protecting the network because of the low value and overall lack of interest in it). It's also unlikely (but not impossible) to happen to other serious crypto (e.g. LTC and XMR). Of course a shit show like Ripple already has no immutability (it's not a cryptocurrency but a centralized database so Ripple Labs can do whatever it wants), bcash does all sorts of retardation (hard fork every few months) and most of the token crap everyone seems to like so much is on the Ethereum blockchain to start with. So no not a big deal at all. Crypto is Bitcoin and Bitcoin is fine. Exactly. This just shows how dangerous it is to hold altcoins. The strength of crypto is that a 51% attack is insanely expensive bordering on impossible, but that is only true for Bitcoin. This is why the store of value function of crypto is a winner take all market and that winner is Bitcoin. I'd be willing to bet this won't be the last such attack we hear about, so buy shitcoins/altcoins at your own risk.

The Devil shows up in a crowed church and everyone runs out screaming except one old man. The Devil says to the man "Why don't you run? Aren't you afraid of me?" The man replies, "Nope, I married your sister!"

The fed controls the supply of base money, so how can the market ever truly be setting rates? If you're going to have a national currency, someone has to decide how quickly to grow money supply, no? Bingo. Money should also be a market phenomenon.

I took my wife to a skating rink with a half-off coupon. She called me a cheap skate. ;D ;) 8) not on a first date (I don't think dating is usual in my country, most people never had a first date), but I did buy my wife´s engagement ring with a coupon (she thought I was taking too long and she bought the magazine herself just for the coupon ;D...) however even with the coupon it did cost about 100$ so it doesn't qualify for the thread best sub 50 buys? I would go for the wearables: food, water, shelter, a long warm daily bath... Other than those I wasn't able to remember a single one since this thread has started. Interesting. I'm curious, if there is no dating, how do you go from not knowing someone to knowing that you wish to marry them? A short while after my wife and I started dating I bought her roses (less than $50 back in 1990) and she yelled at me about how much I spent. Saying it was stupid because they were just going to die in a few days and she doesn't need gifts anyway. I knew then that I'd end up marrying her. It was my first value investment which is still paying dividends to this day.

It's outside the feds circle of competence too. Interests rates, the time value of money, are a market phenomenon. You might as well have a government board set the daily price of Avocados. Can I ask your opinion on the Fed slashing interest rates in the 2009-2013 period. This was most certainly not a market phenomenon, as credit was drying up. The Fed's action essentially re-started the US economy and prevented a depression. Beautiful deleveraging and all that. Do you think they were wrong, or lucky, or something else? Nothing the fed does is a market phenomenon. It is government setting rates. No different from the USSR setting prices in their economy either by their own opinions or sometimes by looking at ads in London Newspapers. If the rate is set by the fed then it isn't being set by the market. If the price of Avocados was set by a government board and you asked me "What do you think about the Federal Avocado Board reducing prices in 2009-2013? Did they do the right thing?" My answer would be the same. I don't know. The market should be setting the rate not some board of bureaucrats/experts.

It's outside the feds circle of competence too. Interests rates, the time value of money, are a market phenomenon. You might as well have a government board set the daily price of Avocados.

Mr Singh walks into a bank London and asks for the loan officer. He says he's going to Europe on business for two weeks and needs to borrow £5000. The bank officer says the bank will need some kind of security for the loan, so Mr Singh hands over the keys to a new Rolls Royce, which costs quarter of a million pounds. “The car is parked on the street in front of the bank,” says Mr Singh, “and I have all the necessary papers.” The bank officer agrees to accept the car as collateral for the loan. After Mr Singh leaves, the loan officer, the bank's president and all their colleagues enjoy a good laugh at the man for using a £250,000 Rolls Royce as collateral against a £5,000 loan. One of the employees drives the Rolls into the bank's underground garage and parks it there. Two weeks later, Mr Singh returns, repays the £5000 and the interest, which comes to £15.41. The loan officer says, "Sir, I must tell you, we’re all a little puzzled. While you were away, we checked you out and discovered that you’re a multimillionaire. Why would you bother to borrow £5,000?" The man replies, "Where else in London can I park my car for two weeks for only £15.41?"

Please keep me out of this. [sorry, I couldn't help it.] [<- What smiley is appropriate here?] Just keep creating the demand and we'll leave you alone.

But Netflix does produce TV shows and movies... a lot of them. A Netflix "clone" who doesn't produce TV shows and movies isn't really a Netflix clone is it? Such a "clone" is simply a streaming service, not a media company, and probably shouldn't be compared to Netflix at all, never mind be called a "clone". I don't envision there ever being 100s of true Netflix clones each producing billions to tens of billions of dollars per year of new content.

A tough one. I don't like trying to time the markets, but I have been trying raising cash in my taxable accounts for the last 6 months or so, mostly by not buying anything when I have new cash. And I sold a small amount of AAPL and AMZN in September. Just lucky good timing, because I thought they were getting a little ahead of themselves. I have about 10% cash in my taxable accounts now. In my retirement accounts I have over 20% cash which was also just lucky timing. My retirement accounts are broken up into over 70% in IRAs and a little over 20% in my current employer's 401K. My company told us in November that they were moving our 401Ks from where it is now to Fidelity. So in anticipation of that move I moved everything into cash and pretty much missed the worst of the large recent drop. My new Fidelity 401k will have a brokerage link option (where I will be able to invest in individual stocks), so I plan on holding that in cash and waiting until stage 3 of the bear market to deploy it. If the market crashes I will think I'm a genus, if it recovers and shoots to the moon I will kick myself and think I'm an idiot for letting all that cash sit there idle. We'll see.

So true. Listening to British people is even worse. I was watching the British series "Bodyguard" on Netflix and it drove me crazy. The main character's superior is a woman and he constantly called her Ma'am, but all I heard was "Yes Mom", "No Mom", "Thank you Mom", "Right away Mom", etc. It was just so weird hearing him constantly call her Mom.

CANADIAN: Let's watch a movie. AMERICAN: Have you seen Titanic? CANADIAN: What's that about? AMERICAN: Yes, it was. A huge one that sank.

I remember that, I think it was in the Bank of America thread. I remember it, because I was trying to wrap my head around it and I ended up just sticking to BAC LEAPS.

"This bloat, especially by tokens, obscures the real picture of what is going on in the realm of bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. The upshot is that there will soon be a fork in the road for crypto. Tokens need to be looked at differently and evaluated and listed differently. We do this with stocks and bonds. You don’t want to see bonds listed in the same search and column as a stock. Likewise, the same goes for commodities. You don’t want gold to be listed under ‘g’ in your financial newspapers’ back pages. You want gold in a different section and the same goes for Forex. Tokens are securities, currencies are not" https://medium.com/forbes/who-killed-satoshi-nakamoto-3b05d07103fc

Gold has been in the public eye for 3? 4? thousand years now and has relatively no breakthrough public product to justify all the time and energy spent. Where is the value? Bitcoin (and gold) itself is the product.

My insurance company has notified all of its customers that if your tent is stolen while camping you are no longer covered.

That makes sense, because anyone who already knows how to block the Politics section doesn't need to see this anyway.

Yes, that is the bear case. But without some new thing with some much more attractive properties applicable to being a good store of value, none of the altcoins will have a long term effect on Bitcoin. They may have small short term dillutive effects for a while, but as they become valueless and disappear those small effects will disappear with them. Without substantial new properties/benefits, first mover advantage is everything. Why would you switch from bitcoin if everyone is already using bitcoin and go to a coin almost no one uses that isn't substantially better? It is like facebook, anyone can create a competing social network, but unless there is some feature that is massively better that FB can't copy, why would you switch when everyone you know (and a few billion people you don't know) are already using FB? Any dilution will turn out to be minimal and short lived. I do think there will be an endless number of app coins, which will not dilute BTC because they serve a different purpose altogether. I don't consider Ether, for example, to be a bitcoin competitor, because ETH will never be a store of value. And you value this "cash" why? It doesn't have intrinsic value and is only "valuable" because other people value it and will give you stuff for it. Maybe in the future you will be saying that companies have intrinsic value because they have coinflow. Try paying your federal taxes in bitcoins. You will find out why cash is valuable. Taxation is theft. I don't value things simply because violent thieves prefer them. As a matter of fact, holding your wealth in something the worlds most powerful and organized thieves do not want is a benefit. Wow man very edgy; I was a libertarian in high school too. You may not value freedom from prison, but the vast majority of people do. Extrapolating your extreme ideology onto the rest of the world is a laughably naive behavioral bias. It's like the miser who thinks AAPL is worthless because he uses a $50 Android smartphone. I don't want to pay taxes, but I value my freedom, hence I pay taxes and value dollars. Dread Pirate Roberts similarly believed taxation was theft and that bitcoin was a way to fight the man from behind a computer screen. I pay my taxes for the same reason. I don't want to die. I don't want to be kidnapped and locked in a cage like an animal. That doesn't make them not theft. You were a libertarian in high school? What are you now? Someone who thinks violence and theft is OK? How edgy. If you pay taxes in dollars then you do value dollars because " violent thieves" prefer them. Your actions speak louder than your internet posts. Dollars are incredibly valuable, as like you said, refusing to use dollars can get you killed or locked in a cage like an animal. It doesn't matter if this is good or bad, evil or moral. It is what it is. Letting your political ideology cloud your investment judgment makes for a poor investor. I value my life and freedom, not dollars. If they asked me for sea shells, I'd get them sea shells. It doesn't mean I value sea shells. I'd still value gold, bitcoin, and stock in a good company far more. Sea shells would simply be a means to an end. Gold is valuable and yet you can not send in gold coins with your tax returns, because that isn't the store of value those particular thieves want. So what. You can convert from one store of value to another. In a hyper inflationary environment you might store your wealth in something other than dollars and convert to dollars only to pay the tax man. The definition of value isn't "I use it to pay taxes".

I tend to agree with this line of thinking, and the portion of bitcoins that have been lost due to lost keys is staggering, some reports say its like 23% of all the mined coins have been lost. Could you imagine if 23% of the gold reserve disappeared. If you account for the dollar value of the loss at the time of loss the numbers are far less impressive. People will try harder for millions than for a few dollars. I was going to say that very thing, the vast majority of the lost bitcoin was lost when they had little to no value not in the last two years. It was only after the price went way up that people started saying "oh crap what happened to those thousands of bitcoin I mined in 2010?"