Longnose

You would need some medium of bank or exchange. in the example your getting paid in USD or Saudi currency (whatever it is). You would need to exchange a % of your income to a stablecoin via an exchange. US example: exchange my USD via coinbase into BTC Need to assume parents have a crypto wallet (either web based or mobile based) Need to assume parents have a a local crypto exchange (https://www.bitrawr.com/bangladesh) *Binance Send BTC to parents crypto wallet. Parents exchange BTC to their local currency (likely requires local banking system) Very doable and if done on the right network very nominal fees. ** if I were doing this regularly I would pick a network like AVAX or SOL to and maybe even use those tokens as the transaction fees are less than $0.15 USD per transaction. And if your passing currency through the system pretty quickly you shouldn't be subject to too much AVAX or SOL token volatility.

My Costco Hotdog is still only a $1.50! Boom, now you can afford your 3x lumber

My Costco Hotdog is still only a $1.50! Boom, now you can afford your 3x lumber

Honestly, its probably more me fighting against "The Man" than anything. What problem am I trying to solve? - I don't actually own my money. I can't actually buy the securities. Wells Fargo holds my money. I have to ask WF to send my money to Fidelity to buy and hold securities in my name. At the same time WF & Fidelity are using my money to make more money for themselves. So I'm trying to solve 2 things. 1. Actual ownership of money and securities. 2. Screw the middle man. Now granted your points are all valid. Currently I don't have to pay anything any trading fees and I get little bonuses. cool? Who are you going to call when there is a problem with a decentralized exchange? (valid - currently it would be emailing a developer who set up the exchange. But even if the decentralized exchange goes down I can go connect to another one because the assets are still in my wallet not on the exchange) Who pays for trading costs.? (me, but if I'm not transacting on ETH i dont really care. Networks like AVAX, SOL, Polygon all have fraction of cents transaction fees and I believe these will only come down over time) Who sent statements? the blockchain ledger of my wallet. Typing this out made me thing of stories from the great depression and the runs on the banks. God forbid it ever happen again but what if you went to WF and said I need my money and they said well... see the markets are down so actually you cant have it or whatever their excuse is. But don't worry you can file an FDIC claim and maybe get some money back in the next 10 years... So this is what I am trying to solve. I own my money and I don't need a broker to buy my stocks because I can purchase them on a decentralized exchange and hold them in my wallet. Are we anywhere near this point right now? No, we are not. But the world will get there and I will welcome it. Also, I wont be an early adopter with a significant portion of my money. But i will be dabbling in it and looking for opportunities that will be exploiting the power of this technology. I am a value investor at heart. 90% of my portfolio is tied up in equities via a broker and that wont change anytime soon.

https://forum.mirror.finance/t/liquidations-caused-by-unrepresentative-oracle-pricing-of-mspy-on-jan-3-2022/2569 When I go to the development forum and read stuff like this I know that the project hasn't been vetted enough for me to put any real money into it. But It is still the direction I want things to go.

It doesn't solve anything and I likely wont use it. But i will take a look. (ETH is way to cost prohibitive currently) But realistically when you start playing with these decentralized exchanges. I connect my wallet to mirrorprotocol then when i swap my ($$, BTC, whatever) for tokens representing the shares of these companies. Then what is the purpose of Fidelity, or TD Ameritrade, or IB? why do i need them to do it for me? the token then becomes the equivalent of the stock certificate. I can trade or transfer my stocks to you directly to your wallet without anyone in the middle. Whats the purpose of the middle man? or why you would want someone in the middle balancing a bunch of ledgers based on the transaction when it can be done without them?

I will admit that my knowledge of BTC and the PoW (proof of work) is a little more limited than the alternate projects on the PoS (proof of stake) side. But from what I thought i understood about BTC is that anyone can run a node and you dont need to mine BTC to run a node. The node is still becomes a validation point when the blockchain goes to validate the PoW. I listened to a podcast that talked about how a majority group tried to diverge or change the network back in I think it was 2017? (Ill need to see if I can find the podcast again.) but essentially the blockchain said this vote wasn't unanimous against all the nodes and rejected the changes. Essentially showing that majority players cant bully changes onto a small time holder. This is the real value of the decentralization. The fact that I can run a node housing the blockchain in my basement and it requires a nearly unanimous vote to change the ledger. I could be wrong. ill need to see if I can find the source on this again. I would love it if they made actual crypto's tied to equities. Then allow me to trade them on a decentralized exchange. Hot damn now were talkin.

TIKR Seeking Alpha (I read comments more than articles. I form my own thesis then go to comments to see what other investors are saying to attempt to invert my argument) macrotrends.com (I like that this does historical ratio mapping)

Id rather own BTC than Gold. So there is that...

Actually this may be the real issue. The job that makes more money may actually be a liability when it may impact qualification for welfare, subsidized housing, WIC, etc.

When I look back on when I was moving out. I had a job paying a little over minimum wage. I remember looking at apartments and what I could afford. So many of them I would pull up and it would be like a crack house neighborhood. I was like WTF... I guarantee most these people aren't event working... I thought to myself I could quit my job get on welfare and get this same lifestyle as working hard with my job to afford the same POS apartment. Luckily im not the kind of guy who just gives up.. So fast-forward I now make more than most people in my network and can take care of my life. But when you get down to the minimum wage level it really does pose the question.. do I just live on welfare and let the government cover my crap?? or do I work minimum wage jobs to afford the same lifestyle?? Many of the low income people work part time just enough to cover extra expenses but will literally quit a job to stay under the poverty threshold for government assistance. IMO the people who have it worst are the honest ones that ride the poverty line.

Thats fair, and TBH i had no conviction till I started playing with it. I did this purely from an educational perspective. But I think anyone who pays the little bit to get into the ecosystem and start playing with it from an open minded perspective will gain conviction quickly. On the other end of the spectrum. I still believe that circle of competence stuff. Stick with what you know and youll make as much or more. My fasciation with crypto is mostly that... Fasciation. Im not YOLOing into anything with crypto. I cant value it other than I am confident that it will shape the future. I still spend most of my time looking at businesses that have real revenues and cash generation for the majority of my investments.

I think we will get to a point where people wont realize the difference anymore. Eventually you'll be able to name your wallet like an email address. Your money will be tied to whatever wallet you make. Potentially hardware wallets could get to the point where you buy the equivalent of a raspberryPI that has a software preloaded. Where you set up the wallets for your household. I guess there may always be the group that doesn't even want to do that but w/e. I think DeFi will become more and more mainstream over time.

This sounds similar to what I think ZIL is trying to do. They call it creating shards. But it sounds similar to what you are describing and ultimatlely all the shards periodically sync to validate that the chain is correct.

Not exactly the market cap but still pretty absurd. https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2015/03/02/beanie-baby-bubble There was also almost nothing on the man behind them. Ty Warner had an education that consisted of one year studying drama at Kalamazoo College and a net worth that Forbes estimated at $2.6 billion, all of it the product of the three-year Beanie Babies craze

Good info! I'll be curious what BTC spits out in the DeFi realm. The whole reason I've actually steered clear of ETH is the transactional costs you mentioned. Which is why I've migrated towards AVAX. They are trying to solve transaction times, cost, and cross chain compatibility issues that are common in the ETH network. I believe SOL is doing similar to AVAX here but still haven't played with them. Also, AVAX has lots of DeFi projects on their chain. I love messing with the DeFi stuff so that's where I've been spending time. I know i listened to a really good podcast on lightning network stuff with BTC a while back. I'm also quite curious about this as well and have thought of taking it as a homework action to set up my own lightning BTC node and play with the lightning network. https://www.theinvestorspodcast.com/bitcoin-fundamentals/bitcoin-full-nodes-instant-settlement-on-the-lightning-network-w-btc-sessions/

Does BTC have many DEFI projects going on? I honestly haven't played much in the BTC ecosystem other than owning some BTC. I've been playing with AVAX and ZIL quite a bit and am now delegating both. AVAX has lots of DEFI projects on its chain that I quite like and I feel they are attempting to solve some of the issues that ETH has weaknesses with. I've heard good things about Solana but haven't played with their stuff yet.

Bought MOMO 10$ calls for April yesterday. MOMO has announced a special dividend for the past several Februarys and usually has a nice run up into mid Feb. Short term speculative play.

Second this. Personally, The more I play with DEFI the more I want it mainstream. I want to hold my money and my assets in wallet and not in some middle man banking system. I want to connect to exchanges and make transactions there that are between me and the other party and not feeling like I am relying on 4 middle parties to make sure my money is backed by gold somewhere and that the assets and labilities are coming up and down on separate banking ledgers. I want to find companies that are focusing and leveraging the potential of these technologies though. Im curious more about SQ now that Dorsey has dropped twitter and is focusing on SQ and changed the name to Block and is working more in the crypto space. This company has real revenues and could seriously make waves.

I agree with SD that the physical world activity doesnt get changed or at least not easily. I think where things will get interesting is where blockchains can solve ledger related business issues. Entire industries exist to validate transactions. But when ledgers / accounts / data can be validated against private blockchain nodes held by various stake holders within a network and all members of the network want to share that data and maintain its privacy and accuracy. BlockChains can facilitate this. Theoretical example: medical records: These records are very sensitive and need to be accurate the amount of manual work and things that go on to pass these records between businesses is big and the amount of people touching it is big. But if medical records were held on a blockchain tied to an individual then the hospital sees the same thing as your private practitioner, your pharmacist, your insurance provider, etc. Each industry could hold its own node so that the insurance provider can validate that the records from the pharmacy and the private practice doctor are correct. This is a pretty astronomical example but i would not be surprised to see the world moving that direction. It will happen little bit by little bit. Until only a few noticed that it did. But the amount of OPEX each of those industry's will save by moving that stuff to blockchains will be substantial. BTC uses Proof of Work (PoW) to validate transactions which is one of the reasons I think BTC is more suited for a finance future as it is harder to validate and has a finite amount of tokens that can ever exist. ETH uses Proof of Stake (PoS) this proof of stake to validate the network makes it more suitable for smart contract usage. Essentially all the stakeholders need to align to validate the transaction. Then when the transaction is validated it can reward the nodes that are validating it. This is much more sustainable and easier to implement across various entities. Also could facilitate the "private" block chain as I don't want my medical records held publicly. Anyway. There are lots of business transactions that are transacting intangible items not tied to a physical action or product. Think real estate, title ownership, title insurance, and all the other bullshit that requires 10 people to touch your real estate purchase. None of this is happening overnight and is easily 20-50+ years out. Crypto to me is like looking at the internet in the 80's. We are still in diapers and who is the winner??? no idea... But I wouldn't not want to be exposed.

EDIT: in spirit of the overall thread Overall 2021 return ~32% I strongly agree with @rkbabang's statement of " I do think that anyone who doesn't have at least a percent or three of their portfolio in BTC is going to be sorry someday. " If you have not taken a look down the crypto rabbit hole, you should. Just taking the time to learn about what BTC & ETH really are and how they WILL impact the future will open your eyes. My personal opinion is that BTC will likely be the future of finance and very well could become a widely accepted form of currency. It may take 50+ years or longer to get there but I can picture a world where this happens. I think ETH and a few other projects will lay the foundation for smart contracts built on blockchains. I believe business transactions may start migrating this direction. We may see businesses in the future that have built themselves on blockchains based on ETH and other layer 1 projects that will allow them to eliminate substantial costs that current business today carry. By reducing that OPEX they these future businesses could have substantially better margins than their competitors. In short the underlying technologies coming from these technologies will radically change the future. @gary17 it is hard to assign a value to them but they are assets and they are not going away. My original thesis was I will spread 1% of my portfolio across about a dozen top crypto projects. This led me to want to learn more about what I owned. The more I looked the more I added. Since thanksgiving I have increased my exposure from 1% to 10% in personal accounts. Also, DEFI stuff is really amazing. In my fantasy world I would love to see the NYSE transformed into crypto tokens representing the ownership of my shares. Then I use a decentralized exchange to do my trades. The world is a hell of a long way off from doing that. But I can dream. Maybe ill see it before I die, who knows....

OESX