rkbabang

No problem, glad to help.

Agora Financial has been running these types of ads for $5000 newsletters for years. They used to be about stocks, now they mention cryptocurrencies. Nothing new though. If I knew a fool proof way to make easy 100x or 1000x returns why would I bother creating a newsletter? It's amazing to me that anyone falls for this stuff. A fool and his money are soon parted.

No political agenda here. I'm the chump who got left in the dust in 2017 with my large cash holdings. So trying to reason and learn from my mistake that's all. I would say that not all companies deserve to be 21% higher because the ones with no moat don't deserve to trade higher. To add a few points. A lot of companies did not pay the statutory 35% so the tax cut will be lower for them. I think some will even pay higher taxes. Also there's a lot of talk of buybacks. If the stock prices are overvalued then buybacks will be value destructive. Of course, but no company needs to buy back overpriced stock, they could pay a dividend instead and let the shareholders spend the money.

Is this correct ??? https://blockchain.info/pools?timespan=4days The big ones are mining pools, some have tens of thousands of members each of whom can switch pools or start mining on their own with a couple of keystrokes. They also all know each other. Distributed 'security' as advertised doesn't really exist; you're really relying on 'inertia' and self interest ( the fact that the 'craze' is worth much more to everyone if nobody screws the pooch, and the 'ethos' that you don't take your money out). Nothing wrong in that (everyone eventually grows up), but it's a different way of thinking. SD I owned Bitcoin back 5 years ago and sold out after 9 months because it volatility was too much for me. I got interested because of the Silk Road in 2012 and sold before Ullrich got caught. Back then the sellers on Silk Road didn't like it because they preferred a stable currency. I bought/sold through Mt. Gox which shut down later and it took weeks on both sides to set up an account/ get my cash. A few summers ago work took me to China and I spent a lot of time with a few small(ish) business owners that were looking to retire as there were fears of corruption crackdowns as some of the heads of the biggest companies were arrested on their drive home from their towers. These guys were small scale distributors and these actions killed their business by 75% overnight as they waited to see what else would happen. Two of the guys told me that their plan had been to set up a "business" in Canada (Vancouver). Then use the business to buy an asset (house) paid for by the business. Then wait 2 years and sell the house at a loss (10-20%) but it was a way to get around the currency controls. But they had started to hear about Bitcoin as a way to get their money out without doing it via asset purchases. These mining groups are in China due to the huge subsidization of power to create domestic industry which makes their ability to mine (which updates the distributed ledgers) and due to these huge draws I guarantee that China will look to eliminate (reduce) it. RKbabang - Have you downloaded the software to have a ledger on your computer. I did back in 2012 and it took over 3 days to download and setup. (yes speeds were lower but I expect that due its growth the time would still be long). I used it to "mine" for a few weeks - got a little. The infrastructure is more fragile than most people think. (That said - I think there are uses for BlockChain tech but the coins feel like gambling). I did actually download the whole thing back around when you did. I even tried to mine, but after a day or two with nothing to show for it I gave up. I didn't join a pool, I was just using my own computer with $40 video card, it would have taken me forever to solve a block, I was just wasting electricity. It took a long time to download the blockchain, but you only have to do it once. Also I have 400Mbps internet access now, so downloading it again would be doable if I wanted to run a node. I didn't actually buy any back then, but I looked into it. I should have.

You only listed 16 out of the 20. You forgot: - Atlanta, GA - Austin, TX - Boston, MA - Chicago, IL

Read from around page 12 onwards. The inference is only buy in a collapse, only buy Bitcoin, and it'll be your kids who collect https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/john-pfeffer/An+Investor%27s+Take+on+Cryptoassets+v6.pdf +1 Anyone who hasn't read that paper yet, do not invest in any crypto assets until you have read it. BTW. I bought some more Bitcoin yesterday.

Each bar represents a decade and the plane represents flying coach. There, I fixed it. :)

That one looks pretty good. But as DooDiligence said, it would look best if you started from the original editor file with all of the layers.

++ simple fix! How about to grab this JPEG file named "cropped-cropped-Handover-Corner-Of-Berkshire-Fairfax-JPG-e1516151433460" from the site, fix it and send it to Sanjeev for a reinstall on the CoBF webserver installation? [ ; - ) ] -I have forgotten how to do [read: manipulate] this in i.e. Photoshop, and nobody has asked me to document my investment returns here on CoBF so far, so I've had no need to refresh my memory! Thanks everyone! I figured the site isn't going anywhere, and it was time to make it a bit more permanent and recognizable. John, I can send you the different JPEGS if you know what to do...I'm not particularly tech savvie. I believe doing a clear version wouldn't be that difficult if you know what you are doing. Cheers! Since I suggested it I'd be willing to do it. I don't have photoshop on the computer I'm on right now so I did this with GIMP (which I'm not all that familiar with). If you want to email me the files, I'll do it tonight when I get home. I'll send you an email in case you no longer have my address. EDIT: deleted file, transparency didn't work. Like I said I'm not too familiar with GIMP.

I like it as well, although I think it would look better if the background were transparent rather than white so that the light blue background would show through. Just a suggestion.

Is this correct ??? https://blockchain.info/pools?timespan=4days The big ones are mining pools, some have tens of thousands of members each of whom can switch pools or start mining on their own with a couple of keystrokes.

Considering they went down for scheduled maintenance and haven't come back up, I'm assuming that they haven't been hacked (you don't usually schedule being hacked) and are just having unexpected technical difficulties with their upgrades. But as I've said a bunch of times by now: Don't leave any balance in an exchange. If you must use an exchange, make a deposit, make a trade, make a withdrawal. The whole process should take about 10-30min depending on the coins involved. Get in then get back out as quickly as you can.

Also from the King. "“I was too dumb to realize [the opportunity with Amazon],” Buffett said on CNBC. Amazon shares have quintupled since 2011. “I did not think [bezos] could succeed on the scale he has.” https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2017/05/08/warren-buffett-google-amazon-ibm-tech-stocks.html Kings are not infallible.

MoviePass owner hints at ICO https://seekingalpha.com/news/3322080-blockchain-watch-moviepass-owner-hints-ico

Only time will tell if I can do that for 20 years though. I'm half way there.

Well, that didn’t take long. Jamie Dimon says he regrets calling bitcoin a fraud and believes in the technology behind it https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/09/jamie-dimon-says-he-regrets-calling-bitcoin-a-fraud.html

I'd like to thank Elon Musk for looking out for us all. "Sorry NSA, I don't know what happened to your secret spy satellite" https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/08/highly-classified-us-spy-satellite-appears-to-be-a-total-loss-after-spacex-launch.html

This is how I answered this last time it was asked: http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/general-discussion/what-books-do-you-periodically-re-read/msg63492/#msg63492 "How to Win Friends and Influence People", by Dale Carnegie "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values", by Robert M. Pirsig "Civil Disobedience", "Life Without Principle", and "Waldon", all by Henry David Thoreau "Atlas Shrugged" and "Anthem", by Ayn Rand "For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto", by Murray N. Rothbard "The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism", by David Friedman "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress" and "Stranger in a Strange Land", both by Robert A. Heinlein "The Illuminatus! Trilogy", by Robert Anton Wilson "Pallas", "Tom Paine Maru", and "The Probability Broach", all by L. Neil Smith "Cryptonomicon", "The Diamond Age", and "Anathem", all by Neal Stephenson "The Law" by Frederic Bastiat "No Treason, by Lysander Spooner

For example gold and human beings coexisted on this planet a long time before gold was used as money. What happened? Gold didn't change, but all of the sudden it had value where it previously did not.

Similar to your thinking, one would assume that if people were looking for store of value one would assume that gain in cryto would translate into an equivalent drop in gold. When I look at charts of golds it seems quite flat, suggesting one is speculation while the other is business as usual. BeerBaron Anyone who doesn't think Bitcoin is pure speculation right now is insane. I just think it is a good bet, just don't bet the farm.

Yes gold isn't going anywhere, but if the US government gets tyrannical to the point where it shuts down the internet I suspect I'll have larger problems than my Bitcoin holdings.

The value of the US dollar also changed during that period. Pretty big difference between changing that much over 40-50 year and that much in a year. No disputing that. I'm just saying nothing is completely stable and bitcoin is so new and so few people use it (and even fewer understand it) that I wouldn't be surprised if we have a few more up or down 30X years coming. On the bear side: there is a lot of Bitcoin in a small number of hands, when those whales start selling things are going to get bumpy and panic will ensue. And on the bullish side: With so few people currently invested and it being so hard for people to invest in (see my above posts that you mentioned), I don't think we've even even come close to seeing how insane Bitcoin mania can get. Bitcoin will be as easy to use as normal banking is now and every joe sixpack will be buying, so the real mania is still to come (Bitcoin with a $30T market cap maybe). But 20 years from now all that will have shaken out and it will be close to as stable as gold has been (up or down 3-5X in a decade).

How do you value gold? Should it be valued at $7T right now or is it over or under valued? I've read many times that Bitcoin is too volatile to be a good store of value. While that is true currently, the volatility will need to be less than it is, even gold isn't completely stable. Gold went from $35/oz in 1970 to $850/oz in 1980. It fell to as low as $250 in 1999 and was trading over $1000 in 2008. Just in my lifetime gold has ranged from $38 to $1800. That is a 47X difference on a store of value that has been in common use for thousands of years (you aren't going to get more stable than that). And it wasn't a smooth increase from $38 to $1800, but up and down massively. I don't know how to exactly value Bitcoin, but there are some things I'm sure of. It will be used as a store of value that will be more commonly utilized than gold. Therefor it will be valued at some portion of what gold is valued at today. It won't be 100%, people will still hold gold and there will still be a market for it. So will Bitcoin be valued at half of what gold is today? 85%? Maybe I'm wrong and it will only be 25%. I don't know. But at 25%-85% of $7T the market cap will be in the trillions eventually. I don't know how long this will take (5-15 years maybe), but I am counting on being approximately correct rather than precisely wrong.

I agree that meeting the goals is important, but measuring whether in the long run you can outperform a strategy of putting 100% of new cash added immediately into cheap passive indexing, either in absolute returns or in some long term risk adjusted measure (over a whole economic cycle), is a helpful sanity check for whether or not you're right to be an active investor. You can feel great about your investment returns like me in the last couple of years thinking you're way ahead then find that after accounting for new cash added and currency windfalls you only beat the S&P500 Total Return Index by a few percent each year, far less outperformance then you'd have guessed from how well each decision turned out. I suspect it has a lot to do with riding BRK down to $124 in my case before going in even heavier at the market low, and seeing the whole market rise alongside it. So I made some great decisions but only affecting 15-25% of my portfolio and each only being a modest amount better than a decision to buy the index would have been. +1. This is exactly why I track it. If I can't beat an index fund then what am I even doing? According to Fidelity where all of my actively managed assets are (I have my 401K for work somewhere else, but those are in index funds so I don't track those when calculating my returns) I have an annualized return of a little over 12% over the last 10 years and according to Fidelity the S&P500 has done 8.5% annualized over the same period. I wonder how good a return that is considering my time spent. On the other hand I enjoy it, so I guess my hobby pays me a little bit. Beats golf.

I may just do that in the near future. I suspect it will show me that Bitcoin is easier to acquire and store. It couldn't hurt to own a small amount of gold though.