Fly

Transaction throughput on bitcoin Layer 1 is on par with FedWire. Layer 2 solutions like the Lightning Network are akin to Visa/Mastercard with capability for millions of TPS. The infrastructure is there for currency-like transactions. Developed nations won't be adopting bitcoin as a currency since we already have access to banking and financial infrastructure. It will start in places lacking those benefits like S.America, Africa, parts of Asia. The other reason we won't see it as a currency in developed nations is due to the tax regulations. It is a pain to calculate cap gains/losses for buying a cup of coffee.

Agree 100%, that's why I included the 2nd picture. Bitcoin would have gone to zero by now if it was just a bubble.

Classic Tulips: But....wtf???

I was born ready Agreed. ETH has some nifty tricks but it is not in the same category as BTC. Ultimately, I think we will see BTC Layer 2 or 3 solutions dominate altcoins. We're already seeing it with stuff like Strike/LN making high-TPS transactional altcoins irrelevant. I guess all adoption is good? This is a puzzler to me. I'd rather see increases in low/no fee BTC ATMs like this: https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/k1-the-first-bitcoin-atm-designed-and-built-in-el-salvador-2021-08-26 Lastly, thoughts on Twitter adding Bitcoin LN integration for tipping?

Same as it ever was...

Volvo S60

Another reason that I'm becoming more and more of a BTC maxi. Yes, ETH will always be here and I do think it has some great capabilities/use cases, but 90% of current platform traffic is pure shit.

Hacker returned a portion of it. He/she made some mistakes and their identity is known. They will likely see some jail time.

It will be interesting to watch for another Bitfinex premium to develop like we have seen in past years whenever there was Tether trouble: https://news.bitcoin.com/crypto-community-monitors-bitfinex-wallets-and-the-strange-6-btc-premium/ Or is it being arbitraged away now by Alameda and other big players. Binance is another one to watch. Their BTCUSD and USDT pairings are starting to wander from the rest of the pack. With all of the regulators around the world shutting down their operations we could see a gray swan of sorts.

Add Panama to the list:

I thought this was an interesting take and would be curious if anyone thinks this is really feasible, or just hopium:

Coinbase, Kraken, Gemini are the big 3 in the US. Also look into BlockFi as a way to buy stable coins and produce some yield in one spot. Currently 8.6% APR: https://blockfi.com/rates/

In other news, looks like Bitcoin mining power is physically leaving China. Short term bearish long term bullish. Look for some forced selling this week and capitulation.

1- Crypto is still such a young asset class and Bitcoin is the flagship product. Bitcoin has name recognition as well as a relatively simple narrative (digital gold) that few other coins have challenged. Without Bitcoin the rest of the list would wither and die. 2- Dogecoin shows the power of social media and the collective stupidity of social media. Elon Musk knows his audience and pumps the Doge themes to gain internet clout. His tweets on Bitcoin had similar effects on price.

The Weekend Dump has been a thing for a long time. I'd love to see some data to backtest the "Sell on Thursday and go away" theory.

Don't you think we are beyond the point of "killing" crypto? It is going mainstream and held by wealthy as well as retailers. How would the government successfully kill it? Shut down the internet? Heavy regulation and targeted higher taxes maybe? But would the wealthy find a way to offshore their assets to more friendly jurisdictions?

Doge is a reflection of retail joining the frenzy. I'd say we're in the 6th inning of the game. Same with stuff like Shib and the other animal/food meme coins. There is certainly money to be made on these, but they are fickle and a pure hype trade with little unique underlying technical aspects. Some have fun tokenomics like burning coin supply for each transaction and things of that sort, but they do not have large networks of miners/nodes/developers to challenge the security and "hardness" of BTC.

It is not that different technically speaking, but it has a wide audience of twitter/YouTube/social media followers who talk about it. It is also very "cheap" in terms of price per coin, which I suppose has a psychological attraction vs buying a tiny fraction of a Bitcoin. "I bought 1,000 Dogecoins!" sounds better than "I bought .00464 Bitcoin!"

BTC vs ETH https://danheld.substack.com/ Pretty critical view of ETH, but he brings up solid points.

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 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. At least the NYAG and Tether settled their case: https://www.coindesk.com/ny-ags-850m-probe-of-bitfinex-tether-ends-in-an-18-5m-settlement

This is interesting to me just because my experience with it is so different. Obviously crypto is seeing more headlines now after it's 5x run, but my experience is that the interest in it still isn't close to what it was in 2017. In my own anecdotal experience, my little brother's college friends were trading shit-coins and getting "rich" in 2017. My NYC finance friends were talking about buying lamborghinis with their crypto profits. I couldn't go to a holiday party at Thanksgiving or Christmas or Ned Years in 2017 without cyrpto being a topic of conversation for people there. Now? Not a peep out my bro's college friends last time I checked in with him (a month or so ago around 35-40k), I have one friend in NYC who still owns Ethereum, and nobody really ralks about it in my social circle except for me. So to me it looks like retail interest is still relatively minimal while it seems it truly is institutional demand pushing the price. While I don't think BTC's boom bust cycle is over, I do think we have further to boom before the eventual bust. The pullback from 40k to 30k was a healthy consolidation that lasted 2-3 weeks. My guess is that we'll pull back to 35-40k for another consolidation in the near future. I don't think this run exhausts itself before 100k though (which would still be shallow compared to prior rallies). Consider 2017. Prices start ~$900/coin and rallies to ~7k by early December. And then goes from 7k to 20k in 4-5 weeks. A massive blow off top that accelerated at the end. We've just seen the rally from 10-12k to 57k over the course of 5 months (akin to the 2017 run) , but haven't yet seen the blow off top IMO. I imagine this will be a 30-50% correction/consolidation like January proved to be and that we'll continue to move higher in the near term. My best guess is this exhausts itself somewhere around 120k a coin, but we'll probably have two or three more 30-50% pull backs along the way. We're definitely not at the 2017 retail hysteria for Bitcoin: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?data-ipsquote-timestamp=today%205-y&q=bitcoin But... https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?data-ipsquote-timestamp=today%205-y&q=ethereum https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?data-ipsquote-timestamp=today%205-y&q=cardano https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?data-ipsquote-timestamp=today%205-y&q=ethereum,cardano,bitcoin I do think this time around retail will be brought into crypto through lower priced coins since seeing ~$50k BTC prices isn't as attractive, even if they know they can purchase tiny fractions of a coin. Retail wants something "cheap" price-wise that will turn into the next $50k coin.

I have some questions for anyone with any insight into how public companies securely hold Bitcoin on their balances sheet. 1) How do they secure the BTC from theft, both internal and external, and what tools to they have to detect attempts? 2) How is BTC handled in an audit? How do auditors confirm the claimed amount is securely held, and not stolen or fraudulent? My guess would be they're using custody services from either a custodial bank or an established crypto exchange. How do those counterparties secure it from theft? I'm sure it varies, but probably have measures around it just like they would cash, or physical gold, or securities. How can it be audited? The third party custodian should be able to report the value at any given time OR could allow auditors read access to the wallet in which the BTC is stored. I believe Coinbase provides the custody service for MSTR and TSLA. Something to consider when they eventually have their direct listing IPO

Agree with this. I mean, how far of a jump are we from UBI becoming reality?

That's what I struggle with. Sure, I will accept we are in a bubble but what do you do with that assumption? Invest in value assets in hopes they don't crash as bad when the bubble pops? Or go hard and play the EV/Crypto/SPAC roulette while it's still hot in an attempt to juice gains before the crash?