scorpioncapital

maybe hedge with assets uncorrelated. or avoid bubble sectors.

Does NK have the resources to initiate a 51% attack even if most mining stops? From what I understand bitcoin fees represent 1% of mining income, therefore in that extreme case you'd expect there to still be some miners around so attack cost won't be zero. But do you think all miners will stop if input cost > cost to mine? And is that happening or has ever happened or likely to happen? Reminds me a bit of negative cash flowing real estate. Lots of people carry negative cost with their tenants while hoping for the capital cost of the house to eventually outstrip that loss. The funds obviously come from borrowing or some other side venture. So I guess the price of bitcoin is also critical for this and the question is if the price of bitcoin has some components independent of mining costs. Even its speculative or ideological value of people buying it would prop it up in the absence of profitable mining?

Do you guys calculate your returns before or after any withdrawals from your accounts to spend, or do you not live off your capital? I find it very different people who have a good side income/salary and invest surplus capital and those who are say retired and living off the surplus capital exclusively or for the most part in terms of how returns are calculated and what matters in terms of return thresholds.

can't a majority of miners delay your transaction long enough to make it effectively censored? also regarding wealth preservation, isn't geographical jurisdiction more useful than btc? For example, isn't it more useful to have a 2nd passport that lets you be at a certain place on the globe than to have bitcoin while you, the user of it, are stuck in one place and/or the person you want to trade with won't accept it?

And who has the lowest price of compute or will have it?

I noticed several days last month and this month that the semis go down while the saas and hyperscalers go up..it seems already the market sees the see-saw nature of this dynamic.

I wonder if Greg learned something and taking some lessons from the Japanese conglomerate houses which also have these interlocked conglomerate structures? I mean Alphabet is a conglomerate and now Brk owns part of that.

I doubt those folks will have money for long with that attitude. I mean holding cash is a road to the poor house eventually with all this inflation.

Sorry I was wrong, apparently the quote was about wired funds: " "As Treasury who carries out the sanctions we can see is we are now seeing the rats fleeing the ship because we can see millions, tens of millions of dollars being wired out of the country, snuck out of the country by the Iranian leadership," Bessent said in an interview with Newsmax. "So they are abandoning ship, and we are seeing it come into banks and financial institutions all over the world," the Treasury Secretary added." But I'm shocked Iranian elites and leaders have access to wire and bank accounts abroad. As for the crypto, it really makes one wonder if it is so confiscation proof for the good guys, it must be for the bad guys. I wonder if this will cause regulatory issues. Will the world allow bitcoin to exist in the hands of really nefarious actors? It seems even more confiscation proof than gold. you can bomb a gold bunker, can't really steal a btc seed so easily.

I don't know if this is an appropriate 'method' but what I do is take the average return for the SP500 and for cash, then I look at my portfolio and see what returns I have gotten above or below. If it is way above, I cut down on the assumption that excess returns are precisely hard to achieve because of tail events, among other issues like poor stock selection skill. If it is way below , I look to see if I have things like cash, gold, real world assets that could be useful in a crisis and tend to keep those. Although lately I would say most people are above the index. If you hold only the index, then I would shift the analysis to the % held in the index vs held in cash/gold/bitcoin. Risk is an invisible variable. That is precisely why people have very little patience with it - as they cannot see it immediately. Good investors probably hedge by purposely seeking uncorrelated or low return assets that preserve more than gain from the risks of this 'invisible tail-risk' hand which just can't be seen for long stretches. It then pounces just when you get overconfident lol.

I read a while back Bessent saying the regime was fleeing like rats and that they were seeing crypto movements abroad..I wonder if this is the mined Bitcoin..he also said it would be recovered and the regime wouldn't get to keep the crypto..I wonder how they can do that ?

Doesn't cash come from work, business? So it enters the pool of investable savings via creation of value by people's entrepreneurial and sales activity? But I guess because we have fractional reserve banking, it is not zero sum, someone's earnings are real gains somehow and the cash supply can expand to accommodate that. I never really understood how people getting paid somehow if the money supply expands only by inflation yet money can still be created. It's probably something to do with fractional reserve banking.

What competitive advantage does Berkshire have to grow/match the SP500? Cash is not really an advantage, cash is trash, everyone has it, otherwise they'd have nothing to invest. If you mean they are not 'fully invested' for decades, well anyone can also choose to have a 60-40 portfolio.

One of the greatest determinants of return (besides good luck) for any investor, including Berkshire is knowing when to run-off a business that is weak or is in structural decline or that technology is disintermediating and then repositioning that cash into the growth sectors. Philip Fischer was a big influence on Buffett and Munger because he espoused the idea of not just going for Ben Graham value style situations that may have a one-time pop but true growth stocks that can grow for a generation.. Brk has been around for 2-3 generations so you can't expect even some growth picks to keep up. That is why I really am interested to see if they invest in AI in a bear market. There are also assets that are 'forever' like real world energy infrastructure , but those tend to be slow growing and capital intensive and if it wasn't for the float leverage, I doubt it would be a good business to show 20% cagr over the years.

The stock has underperformed SP500 for 10 years. Abel says no dividend either. Is the Board doing things in the best interests? Is Abel really Able? All questions we don't know the answers to. Buffett didn't do very well the last decade either although the under performance was not huge it was somewhat significant. Does Brk have a purpose or mission? Should it be disbanded? Just sitting on a pile of cash is great if you are a truly great investor but if you're aiming for average, does it make sense not to allow individual investors to choose how to invest ? My concern is that Brk has a good CEO now but does it have a good Investor? Without that, things may crawl forward but we don't know if they can outperform or even match the SP500.