ValueArb

Holy crap, did Dave Portney really lose all $1.1M in BTC because he bought it at FTX?

Instead of taking your toys home, you could instead promote discussion by defining “centralization” and cite facts that show differences between BTC and other crypto currency’s beyond trading volume. I'll be happy to admit when I'm wrong, because it means I'm learning something new. But if you can’t rebut my post with anything other than a tirade, it just seems like you are emotionally involved in a speculation that you don't really understand.

Merry Christmas and may you never make the same mistake I did and turn Xmas into a family book exchange. I now have a new library to read!

These tokens are literally cloned off the Bitcoin code base, created just as arbitrarily is Bitcoin was, snd are just as decentralized as Bitcoin. The only difference is that BTC is harder to manipulate.

I'm not shorting home builders, but my ex worked for two of the largest home builders in the country this year, and both had major layoffs and both are slashing acquisition and construction budgets to near zero. I'm thinking its primarily linked to which markets a builder is most heavily involved in.

It's crazy that the one time Qatar wasn't responsible for a murder the victims brother jumped to that conclusion and the MSM reported on what he said.

FTX will let sell you BTC futures, oops, well I'm sure that there is someone else selling BTC futures who is a trustworthy counterparty;) Drug dealers and tax cheats had no problems when BTC's market cap was under $100B. The reality is that speculations are like the whip end of market liquidity, when there is a lot of liquidity they run up many times more than safe investments, when liquidity declines they collapse. More specifically zero interest rates created a huge pot of money looking for higher returns, it peaked with stimulus payments adding to that mountain of liquidity that blew up the crypto/tech bubble. But now interest rates are increasing rapidly, that makes bonds far more attractive inflated to profitless speculations. I expect the fed to run up rates rate up to 5-6% next year, which will continue to drain liquidity from crypto and profitless tech speculations, and even profitable equities.

Under $31 now for it's 5 year low

I don't understand Caroline Elllison's affidavit. Isn't this just how all crypto works (outside of BTC and ETH)?

Homes have cash flows. They almost all have rental value. Cars are depreciating capital investments. Wood, copper, Gold, iron, rock, etc are commodities with utility for producing goods. Crypto doesn't have any cash flows, and hence any intrinsic value. Just like commodities. The difference is that no one needs crypto to build anything with any utility. The exception BTC has utility, BTC is useful for transfering money in situations where you lack access to the banking system or want anonymity. But every step away from BTC in the crypto space produces less utility. Why is Dogecoin needed for money transfers in situations where BTC works fine? Network effects means BTC wins. ETH is interesting because of smart contracts, but those contracts only have utility in creating and trading crypto, which has no intrinsic value or utility so ultimately ETH has little utility. Prices in the crypto space are solely driven by money in/money out flows. If you can predict those flows you can profit. But it's just speculation, not investing. If money out flows decimate the S&P 500, causing it to drop 80%, so what? I can continue to hold it in my IRA and earn that fat 9% yield until the market recognizes its value again. If BTC drops 80% you have no way of knowing whether it wont' drop another 80% and no benefit from holding it.

What percentage of required Venmo transactions do you think are going to be reported? I'm guessing its going to be pretty low

An interesting story that reinforces TwoCitiesCapital point about crypto being trackable. Quadrigacx was an exchange run by a canadian CEO who mysteriously "died" in India a couple years ago, and the exchange was missing $200M in crypto (would be worth more today if it still exists, but the actual $200M might never have been in crypto either, he may have just siphoned it directly according to Wikipedia). The CEO was the only one with the keys so no one can access the wallets and the restructuring accountants accidently transferred 100 BTC to the CEO's cold wallets after he died, so it was though unrecoverable. But guess what? 2 days ago someone with the keys to those wallets transferred the 100 bitcoin to other wallets and started transferring them through mixing services to obfuscate who owns them. So clearly BTC isn't anonymous, we can see "who" moves bitcoins even if we don't know "who" they are. If Satoshi awoke from his long nap and started selling some of their billions in crypto we'd know within minutes. https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/12/19/bitcoin-addresses-tied-to-defunct-canadian-crypto-exchange-quadrigacx-wake-up/ So the hard part with crypto is at the crypto->cash layer, where know your customer rules can catch you. So TCC is right, if your crypto is known proceeds of a crime getting it converted to cash is hella difficult. Where crypto is useful is when no one knows your crypto is proceeds from crime. I'm sure there are lots of low level criminals who slowly convert dirty cash into crypto thinking that the cops won't bother to connect their transactions to their crimes. When you have millions or hundreds of millions or billions, it gets much harder. The best schemes I've heard of is to try to use it to manipulate some small cap shitcoins price to profit from the price swings. For example, let say you have a $100M in bitcoin, so you target crypto with a total $100M market cap, 100M coins at $1 that might trade $1M a day. You slowly buy 1M coins in a "clean account" using $1M in clean funds, maybe a loan. Then you use your dirty account to buy a massive amount of coins so quickly that you drive the price to $10, and sell your 1M clean coins to your dirty account for $10M. Now you have $10M in clean cash you made from "trading crypto". Maybe you spent $10M of your dirty money to drive the price up, so the total cost was $20M to launder $10M. You might find that a fair swap on its face. But you probably could get it done for far less, and the coin might not trade back down to $1, you might be able to sell all the coins from your dirty account for most of the $20M cost so your actual cost is only a few million and you could do it again and again with different coins before you run out of "dirty" coins.

Would it be fairer to say Xi believes in one party rule and one man ruling that party? Because it clearly seems that he believes in capitalism, as long as it's under strict party controls.

US farmland has produced infinitely higher cash flows than crypto over any period you can measure. And in the long run the market weighs cash flows.

Twitter lost $100M the last 12 months on a GAAP basis. It's negative FCF was much higher, $800M, but as of June 30 had $6B in cash and cash equivalents with no short term debt. While I'm sure revenues have taken a steep decline, costs should be down by at least 50% since they are primarily headcount. I think Elon is a drama queen who loves to make employees think their back is against the wall because he believes it will motivate them.

In the last 13 years S&P annual earnings have grown from $70 to $193, and dividends from 90 cents to $3.32. Over the same time period Bitcoins annual earnings have gone from zero to zero, and dividends from zero to zero.

And LOL at hanging your hat on "Ukrainian corruption" in a country that just passed a 4,000 page appropriations bill that not a single representative or senator read.

And the second one while simultaneously fighting Nazi Germany!

One day the American empire will fall because no one comes to our aid, and we’ll say “we don’t deserve this! I just built a new house!”

The evidence is he’s been slowly increasing his power base and attempting to recreate the USSR ever since he came to power. That’s the main reason for the invasion of Ukraine, to increase the size of the Russian military significantly and give it unrestricted access to the Black Sea, along with all of Ukraines resources. The idea that Ukraine was ever a threat to Russia is as ludicrous as a defensive alliance like NATO being one.

I wonder if he is as bothered by the lack of focus and investment in non core low moat assets (ESPN, Hulu, streaming) as I am? if I owned Disney all I would want to keep is content production and the parks, and focus on quality over quantity. It’s likely I just don’t understand the business anymore since everyone wants to do the opposite of that.

nobody owes Ukraine anything. nobody owes Finland anything nobody owes Sweden anything nobody owes Poland anything nobody owes the next domino anything

Buffett was never a long term holder until his portfolio got too large to nimbly move in and out of positions. Before that he spent 20 years as almost entirely a value trader, and those were by far his highest return years.

if Putin wins in Ukraine, he becomes an existential threat to Europe. He’s been moving one country at a time for a long while. and the performance of the Russian military has been far better than their performance in 1941, and they ended up winning that war. Russia is enormous and deep with resources. They can easily replace their losses ten times over. Europe is massively wealthy, can easily afford higher energy prices AND to aid Ukraine. Especially when France and Germany have barely contributed so far.

SRG, my favorite net-net at two thirds book value. 30% of my portfolio now.