rkbabang

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. Ha, a libertarian on FB just accused me of sounding like an 18 year old trying to be edgy because I don't believe in his god. I'll say here what I said there. Edgy or boring, there is no god and taxation is theft.

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.

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.

The Instant Pot doesn't have the precise temperature control for sous vide, unless you are talking about this ( https://www.amazon.com/Instant-Pot-SSV800-Accu-Circulator/dp/B07898VZN9 ), but that won't do pressure cooking.

"the MCAS appeared to have mistakenly sensed a looming stall and tried to force the plane's nose down. The pilots responded by pulling the plane's nose up to compensate, only to have the MCAS system force the nose back down again. In effect, they were wrestling with software and hardware inadvertently trying to kill them." Boeing 737 pilots battled confused safety system that plunged aircraft to their deaths – black box Data suggests one of plane's many brains was stuck in anti-stall mode

Even those who do know how to cook. I've never owned a pressure cooker before, it is amazing that you can cook potatoes from raw to soft in 10min. I've tried rice, but it comes out dry, I like how it comes out cooking it on the stovetop better. But you can cook a roast in a fraction of the time that it would take in an oven or crockpot, and it comes out tasting the same as it would have in the crockpot for 12 hours. I've also tried a New England Clam Chowder recipe that was quick easy and came out excellent. I bought the instapot on primeday last summer and got a pretty good deal on it. Another cooking device that I 1st heard about on social media that I absolutely love is my Joule Sous Vide cooker. I've made the best steaks and pork chops that I've ever had using that. https://www.chefsteps.com/ I cook the steak to 130 degrees F. Using a half chafing pan I already had, then sear it using either a cast iron pan or my searall with a propane tank from the plumbing department at lowes. Pork chops are the same only cook to 150 degrees F for medium.

Ohio becomes the first state to accept bitcoin for tax payments https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/25/ohio-becomes-the-first-state-to-accept-bitcoin-for-tax-payments/

AI is trying to find the Zodiac Killer while writing poetry. "Snap my finger on a dinosaurs, Catch a bullet from a lower jaw! And when I hear the sound of thunder roars, Fear of being blinded by the claw." https://www.iflscience.com/technology/ai-programmed-to-solve-zodiac-killer-mystery-creates-creepy-poetry-on-the-side/

"$500,000 from two separate accounts he had at Coinbase and Gemini" Yeah. I think I've said about a thousand times: don't hold your bitcoin in an exchange, it simply isn't safe. Everyone should know this by now. Part of what is great about Bitcoin is that trusted 3rd parties are no longer necessary, why are people still trusting 3rd parties?

The asset creates some form of value for its customer (ex. coke creates value for a person to enjoy a flavored drink over water, SAP allows a major organization the ability to monitor itself using SAP tools, etc.). If you believe that people will value these services long into the future, it does not matter what currency the company accepts. In this scenario you are not betting on what currency people will pay you in, simply that your company produces a value for its customers. +1. And the bull case for bitcoin is that people will choose it to store value. That thesis could be correct or not.

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.

That's just another way to say that the value of these is purely speculative and based on someone else being willing to buy it off you when you want to sell, not much on intrinsic value (since there's no cashflow and so far the utility case is a fairly minor part of the story and trading). If I fork it alone in my basement and nobody knows about it, I won't find sellers and won't be able to make a market. If a large group within a big coin community makes a fork, people will make a market and start buying and selling the thing giving it value. There's no intrinsic value, but the dollar amount that people are willing to put into a thing is limited, which is why I'm saying that these forks are dilutive (if they weren't, they'd be free money). So my basement fork that nobody knows about isn't really dilutive because nobody spends anything on it. But the bitcoin cash fork is dilutive because suddenly thousands of people might start speculating in it and use resources in it that they would otherwise have used on ethereum or bitcoin, leaving less resources to cash people out who are trying to sell their BTC or ETH, affecting the price of those. There's no such thing as a free lunch, as Heinlein would say. No one is saying bitcoin has intrinsic value (which you are defining as having cash flow), gold has no cash flow either. We are saying that it makes a good store of value. Gold has some industrial uses in the electronics industry, but that is a fairly new. For thousands of years gold was valuable for a number of properties it has. - It looks pretty (an advantage it has over bitcoin, but equal to other metals). - It doesn't rot or tarnish or otherwise lose it's physical properties over time (equal to bitcoin, advantage over other metals). - It is easily divisible into smaller units or combined into larger ones. (bitcoin has advantage here, gold is equal to some metals like silver, advantage over others like platinum) - It is easily stored or transported (bitcoin has large advantage, gold equal to other metals) - Impossible to counterfeit, to a knowledgeable buyer anyway. (equal to bitcoin and other metals) Bitcoin is equal to or better at all of those properties with the exception of being shiny and pretty. Also bitcoin has some properties that are important which gold, nor any other metal, has. - Easy to store/hide huge amounts. - Easy to carry large, even huge amounts secretly and anonymously. You can easily carry a $Billion worth in your head without anyone else knowing. - Easy to quickly send any amount large or small to anywhere on Earth. The long thesis is that those properties along with the properties that gold has, but bitcoin is better (like divisibility), will be important enough to make BTC a replacement for gold. Of course it is all supply and demand. Everything is, including your stocks which you think have "intrinsic" value. It only has that value if the market eventually agrees with you. The same goes for Bitcoin.

Bitcoin isn't exactly doing great right now either... For a while Litecoin, BCH, XRP and ETH and others were stars too, it's not like no other coin had success (even if temporary). When your "store of value" is down 80% in a year, after being up hundreds of percents before, maybe the value isn't being stored, but rather the tulip bulbs are being ferociously traded back and forth and speculated on because nobody can know what the thing is actually worth but everybody hopes that they can be on the "ground floor" of this new-age MLM. Even the utility of sending money anywhere around the world is pretty theoretical for most people at this point when you never know if your account will be worth 20% more or 20% less a week from now... Bitcoin has been around 10 years and 3 years ago almost no one on Earth had even heard of it. Gold has been around for many thousands of years and for all of our lives, and for hundreds of generations before us, just about everyone on Earth has know what it is. Yet in 1981 gold fell more than 32%, in 2013 gold fell more than 27%, in 1997 it fell more than 22%. Yet people still consider gold to be a store of value.

It's not dilutive, but it isn't necessarily additive either. You can go home tonight and write a script to fork bitcoin a billion times and you will have a billion worthless forks without effecting Bitcoin at all. I wasn't talking about a private fork, but the official forks like bitcoin cash that had wider support. People woke up and now had a new coin in their accounts, and its value wasn't zero. If it's not dilutive, then they should just keep doing those. Private fork? "Official" fork? What is the difference. There is no difference. A fork is a fork. People value some of them to one extent or another, but don't value others at all. There is no officiating agency which says this fork is an "official" fork and that one is not.

It's not dilutive, but it isn't necessarily additive either. You can go home tonight and write a script to fork bitcoin a billion times and you will have a billion worthless forks without effecting Bitcoin at all.

If you think that the market cap of BTC will one day equal the current market cap of gold the price will be north of $350K using today's gold prices as a comparison. But comparing the price of 1 BTC with the price of 1 oz of gold is a strange equivalence. It is like comparing the price of whole apples to oz of orange juice. To me, comparing market cap to market cap makes sense. Obviously you would never expect them to exactly match but similar to stocks, it is a comp. They are both stores of value. Obviously they are not the same, gold does have real world utility while bitcoin, in my mind, has negative utility as transaction have to pay for all the mining used to secure it. Gold also has stood the test of time, bitcoin still has some proving in that regard. However, bitcoin does have the use case that all you really need to remember is a key. So theoretically you can just flee your country if need be and later on retrieve your bitcoin using your memory, say what you will but that does offer some additional safeguards. Anyways, weight it all out and apply an appropriate discount to the $350k and go from there. It is absolutely better than trying to hide your wealth in your underwear. https://whdh.com/news/officials-thousands-in-undeclared-cash-found-sewn-into-womans-underwear-at-logan-airport/

If you think that the market cap of BTC will one day equal the current market cap of gold the price will be north of $350K using today's gold prices as a comparison. But comparing the price of 1 BTC with the price of 1 oz of gold is a strange equivalence. It is like comparing the price of whole apples to oz of orange juice.

But why would it be? I have no idea, ask SharperDingaan, he is the one who used this weird equivalence to argue that BTC was overpriced.

:o But are you sure you're comparing an ounce of gold with an ounce of bitcoin? There are more than 21M oz of gold in the world. In fact there is 190,040 tonnes of gold that has been mined which is (if my calculation is correct) 6,703,470,960 oz of gold. So there is 320.21 times more oz of gold than there is bitcoins. So for BTC to be equal in price to gold at $1222/oz it would be $390,074.62 per BTC. EDIT: Actually that calculation is wrong, because I converted from metric tons to oz instead of troy oz. So there is 6,109,919,028 troy oz of gold, which means there are 290.95X more troy oz of gold than Bitcoins and the equivalent price to gold at $1222 would be BTC at $355,540.90

I don't know about pounding the tables, but I'm still dollar cost averaging in. If there is a more significant drop (BTC < $1K) I will put larger amounts in.

I haven't read this yet, but it is on my to read list. I have read his "The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies" and it is excellent. I also read his blog regularly: http://www.econlib.org/econlog/

This is the largest reason that this is going to happen. I don't know about the rest of the country, but up here in New Hampshire all everyone talks about is the lack of people to fill jobs. There was just a new local restaurant built that hasn't opened because they can't hire enough people to work there and another one that was only open a short while and closed for the same reason. My kids have had no problem finding jobs that pay way over minimum wage for bagging groceries or working at restaurants, anything. We can't get our furnace cleaned for the season until January, the company told my wife that they are severely short staffed and can't find anyone to hire. Every McDonalds in the area has one person working the register and 4 automated ordering stations. They all remodeled this year to install them. It is the same everywhere you go, big "hiring" signs in the windows of most businesses. Finding contractors to do anything is close to impossible, because they are all short staffed and booked for months. I know it isn't just New Hampshire, my daughter just moved to FL a month ago, she applied for 3 jobs the first day and got all three. She took two of them and the 3rd one begged her to not refuse the job, the hiring manager kept calling her and even texting her, and even offered her more money. She's 18 with just a high school diploma and some restaurant experience. One article I read quoted someone who said "what are teenagers doing with their time", I don't know, but it's great for the ones who do want to work. https://www.wmur.com/article/portsmouth-restaurant-closes-due-to-lack-of-workers/24192393 https://www.sentinelsource.com/business_journal/the-labor-shortage-good-help-is-hard-to-find-in/article_740cee2c-9897-11e7-bea7-d78d275357cf.html https://www.laconiadailysun.com/news/local/good-jobs-few-workers/article_3ec3fcdd-9265-5208-b4f0-5d1df7e36033.html https://www.marketplace.org/2016/12/12/economy/low-unemployment-rate-new-hampshire-creates-labor-shortage Automation, wherever it's possible do to, is going to be a necessity. I think the pace of automation in the short to medium term is going to be surprising to many.

I have not heard of ANY self driving vehicles on American roads being used in regular commerce. It is all R&D at this point, unless I am tremendously mistaken. Are you in USA? Could this perhaps be a TEST to see if consumers are willing to do this? Much like automated vehicles for Uber & Lyft, I wonder if there is really a commercial market for this. How much of a savings will a typical Domino's franchisee save by having self driving vehicles for pizza delivery? A pizza delivery driver provides their own vehicle and makes about minimum wage from the franchisee. Tips provide the rest of his earnings. In my area of the world, the pizza delivery driver almost always provides their own vehicle. For an automated delivery, the franchisee is going to have to buy the vehicle. How much will that cost? I would guess at least 50k. How much cheaper will it be to run than having a delivery driver? What will the savings be if any? $50K outlay for a delivery vehicle is going to be a HUGE percentage outlay for the typical franchisee. The typical Dominos would probably also need MORE than 1 vehicle. I would think they would need at least 2, if not 3 or 4 (more?). I've heard rumors that the typical Domino's franchise costs as little as $150k to about $350k in investment. Way back when, I used to be a delivery driver when in college. On busy nights, which were usually Thursday, Friday and Saturday (sometimes Sunday), we would have up to about 10 drivers. On slower weekday nights, we would have 3-4. Drivers would also not usually work 8 hour stretches. Drivers would typically be promised a minimum of 4 hours, and then those who wanted to leave earlier could (if business was slow). So the franchisee could adjust labor pretty quickly. With self driving vehicles, you've got a constant expense, can't let a robot go. Delivery is a pizza place's bread and butter, so I think they might be the last to convert to driverless delivery. But there are a ton of other restaurants who do not deliver today. What if a company say Uber, who had a large fleet of driverless cars already, offered restaurants a delivery service that they could subscribe to for less than it would cost them to hire delivery drivers and not have the hassle of having more employees to manage, and had a pricing scheme where it would be cost effective even if customers only seldom ordered for delivery? Right now delivery is basically just pizza places or using Uber Eats and other services in which the customer pays extra for a service to go and pick up takeout for them. Most sit down restaurants don't hire delivery drivers because the vast majority of their customers eat in the restaurant rather than order takeout. But in the above subscription service scenario where offering delivery would be cheap and easy for any restaurant to offer, a restaurant could be at a serious disadvantage if it didn't offer delivery when almost all other places do. My wife and I order takeout all the time from restaurants which are usually too crowded to get a table on the weekends on short notice, it would sure be nice to just have it delivered rather than need to go and pick it up.

I've held MIDD since 2005. I've sold a lot along the way and added back on dips, but I've had some amount of MIDD in my portfolio for over 13 years. I really cleaned up when they aquired Turbochef and CHEF was trading as if the acquisition was not going to happen (this was right after the financial crisis and a lot of announced mergers where being cancelled), I bought a ton of CHEF and even converted most of my MIDD to CHEF only to get it back and then some after the acquisition. I had held MIDD for a while by then and knew that MIDD had the cash and that they would go through with the acquisition even if the market was skeptical. What I like about MIDD is its CEO Selim Bassoul. He's a serial acquirer, only unlike most CEOs who try to do this, he makes it work every time. He is a master of making acquisitions work, integrating the companies, finding synergies, and getting them to add to earnings quickly (most of the time in under a year). He's been doing this again and again, multiple times per year, successfully at MIDD since (IIRC) 2003 or so. It's definitely a bet on management. It's not like everybody in that industry is doing that well. Yes, 100% a bet on management. They are the best operators in the business. They have a nack for buying mediocre companies cheap and making them profitable. My two worries is that Bassoul gets hit by a bus or at some point they will just get too big and will need huge acquisitions just to move the needle at all. I’m not sure at what size that is.

I've held MIDD since 2005. I've sold a lot along the way and added back on dips, but I've had some amount of MIDD in my portfolio for over 13 years. I really cleaned up when they aquired Turbochef and CHEF was trading as if the acquisition was not going to happen (this was right after the financial crisis and a lot of announced mergers where being cancelled), I bought a ton of CHEF and even converted most of my MIDD to CHEF only to get it back and then some after the acquisition. I had held MIDD for a while by then and knew that MIDD had the cash and that they would go through with the acquisition even if the market was skeptical. What I like about MIDD is its CEO Selim Bassoul. He's a serial acquirer, only unlike most CEOs who try to do this, he makes it work every time. He is a master of making acquisitions work, integrating the companies, finding synergies, and getting them to add to earnings quickly (most of the time in under a year). He's been doing this again and again, multiple times per year, successfully at MIDD since (IIRC) 2003 or so.