TwoCitiesCapital

but not bussing them to poll stations - that's cheating!

I did it for ~6-years. The first 4-5 were great. I'd get really nice 1 bedroom apartments (or small 2- bedrooms) that were just barely affordable for me and flex one of the rooms into a guest room and the other room would be my own. Probably covered 80-100% of my rent most months for the 6-years and allowed me to keep both of my paychecks for discretionary savings/spending. I had great experiences with it until the city became hostile towards the service. That triggered some anxiety, some issues with different management companies, and etc. Ultimately, when I left NYC, I moved to a significantly lower CoL city and was 7-years into my career with raises/promotions/etc. Would be the same amount of work in the new city, but for significantly less money, and I didn't need the money as much. Ultimately, had a roommate in my condo for the first 2-years to offset the costs of furnishing the place and to help me pay-off the car I bought and then began living on my own.

Yes - with something like BTC - I prefer the self-custody route given the threat to government recklessness and potential abuse of sovereign power. We saw this with Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac which was purely political. We could see a concerted effort by the government, at some point, to prevent ownership of BTC and confiscation of assets. As time goes on, this threat diminishes some due to entrenched interests and widespread ownership of the asset, but you also have another year of inching closer to currency crisis with every dollar of debt added to the pile. I don't know how these two probabilities offset one another and am comfortable having the majority of my exposure OUTSIDE of government reach given the history with gold. That being said, there was a fire on the rooftop of my condo building in Nov 2023 and I did NOT grab my hardware wallet or seed phrase when exiting the building. And while most of my personal belongings survived, including the wallet, it was a wake-up call to the dangers of self-custody and I need to accept more responsibility to secure these assets as they grow as a proportion of my networth.

The primary concern is relying on a custodian to secure/hold your exposure. Unlike a stock, or a cash balance, that can be debited electronically in the event of an error - things with Bitcoin tend to be more permanent. If the custodian lose access to the hardware wallet, if the wallet becomes compromised and the crypto moves, etc. etc. etc. are permanent risks. The ETF issuers are probably insured against this, but how much? And what is the insurers ability to pay the claim if it happens right as BTC is spiking from $100k to $300k/coin? These are the same risks applied to you - accept probably lower as your wallet wouldn't necessarily be targeted like an ETF would be and there are fewer individuals involved with your wallet so fewer points of potential security breaches. The other complaint could be the fees - while 0.1 - 0.3% doesn't seem like a lot - it is paid out of the BTC balances that most holders would expect to be significantly higher in the future. For an asset measured on a log-chart, this is quite a bit more of a drag than for stocks Full Disclosure - I own both BTC directly as well as via ETF. Probably ~75/25 mix respectively.

"So this is how liberty dies. With a bunch of ignorant f*ck nuts shouting that he deserves a third term because his first one was 'stolen'." - Star Wars in some other universe Can you even imagine what uproar there would have been if Obama had tried this? 'Oh! Well that was different. He was black.' - a conservative somewhere in Florida

"he who controls ETH controls the world" "The US govt still controls monetary policy and fiscal policy" Those two statements are incompatible. Either the US has control on a decentralized ledger and there is no control of ETH.... Or the US government is a vassal to the ETH network and dependent on it to be able to issue securities. And even if the second isn't true, you can be damn sure the US government is concerned about an environment where it is...which is why ETH will NOT be the block chain of choice if the US government tokenizes its securities. There is 0 reason for the US government to rely upon a third party to provide the block chain for their securities to trade - at least as long as it's the reserve currency.

Maybe this will be the toppling of the Airbnb economy that people have been anticipating for awhile. Not sure how much revenue is int'l vs US - just that when I was a host in NYC it was a fair bit of both. Probably more depends on the locality. If suddenly you lose 20-30% of your bookings, can you still pay the mortgage on the property? How long does it take for you to have dump the property?

Which is precisely why the US government will not be issuing or endorsing treasuries/stablecoins on Ethereum. Tokenization =/= Ethereum blockchain. The US government will want control of its debt issuance, stablecoins, etc to control monetary policy, fiscal policy, and force those playing in our financial assets to act in our interest.

Who cares if it causes another lawsuit? That is the next administration's problem. This administration would get to spend the cash flow or take credit for having produced it. And what about this administrations approach to anything this time, or last time, suggests that they care about lawsuits/rule of law/doing things by the book/etc.?

Ones who's most successful business venture was selling the lie that they were good at business instead of actually being good at business

Lol Any effort would require "significant study"... Guess that studying wasn't done the first time around? I think we're getting the confirmation that this isn't a priority for Trump this time, just like it wasn't last time.

Therefore, control of Mainnet will become control of the Global Financial System - this will ignite the Ethereum Arms Race." This presupposes the global financial system will move to ETH. That doesn't have to happen and this is actually an argument against it happening...

I have a coworker who swears my general statement that "tariffs are bad for all parties involved" is first order thinking and obviously overlooks that potential that tariffs can go lower in response to higher tariffs. He says my model of "tariffs are bad" is far to simplistic ...while entirely ignoring the second order thinking of what it is to be an unreliable trade partner, and unreliable military partner, and unreliable ally. Especially is it relates to the issuer of the world reserve currency which depends entirely upon those things... Maybe my approach is too generalized - but so far has proven true. And maybe what he views as second order thinking is just first order thinking when compared to other larger topics being the dominant military power and economy. The same man who didn't know people used to the term 'groceries' doesn't know how much cars cost? Yup. That tracks. The 'billionaire' savior of the common man!

Oh for sure! But being associated with white nationalism is far more damaging to your brand in one direction than being open/accepting to alternative lifestyles is in the other - even if you feel in some cases it was forced virtue signaling.

Radical, lunatics, illegal when it's the left/independents boycotting a Tesla. Totally reasonable, legal, and responsible for the right to have done the same with Disney.

2-days before the top. Down 8% from the top. Do we go another 10-12% ?

I trust Fairfax is buying on my behalf - would want a larger pullback to allocate additional capital of my own to it. Was surprised to see the -5% activity today after the recent earnings report was so strong.

It is. The yields are fake/inflated (either via promo or bull market speculation), paid in tokens that will typically drop 90% in value and rarely recover, and then the protocols shut down OR payments normalize after you've borne all of the losses. Aave and Curv are both dApps that I've used in the past - both seem reasonably sound and have existed for a long time without rug pulling anyone. But, they pay low rates as a result. Often lower than money market. And despite being seemingly legit from a protocol perspective, there have still been investors who have lost money via exploits in the mechanisms that control how these decentralized platforms run. So these have lower counterparty risk, but pay rates below money market for a significantly higher execution risk if you cannot audit the code. I staked both Curv and Aave for ~1-year before giving up and moving to lower risk/higher return opportunities. I suggest most do the same.

The real reason is to keep USD on-chain for immediate deployment into other crypto assets without the standard 3-5 business day delay trying to get money to ACH to a crypto broker/dealer to get it back into the eco system. Additionally, there are some benefits like remittance payments being cheaper, money being sent faster, or individuals in emerging countries with less stable currencies finding ways to access and save in the more stable USD without the need for a banking relationship/permission from their bank/risk of government confiscation/etc. Plenty of people globally have legit reasons for wanting to hold the USD without needing it to pay them interest.

They do - otherwise the stable coin would be regulated as security via the SEC with the expectation of profit and the pass through of interest.

This whole calculator is horseshit because it ignores the fact of what happens to the price the moment the US starts accumulating with the intent of getting to 500k or 1 million BTC. The current deficit is basically the size of BTCs whole market cap. Assuming the US govt could buy 100% of BTC today, it would offer 1-year of borrowing and basically be useless thereafter because now there is no network. Any significant buying by the US government would drive the price up enormously before they could acquire a stake large enough to matter to the debt or deficit even if BTC 10x or 100x from here.

Probably quite small because they don't' have armies at their disposal - but it's not because wealth/power is better concentrated with them or that they wouldn't be doing similar things if they DID have armies at their disposal (which is a natural outcome to them having more resources than nation states). Just look at the Wagner Group and its involvement in Russia's military engagements - that was a private billionaire with his own army and was hardly doing good with it. Imagine a world with Wagner groups all over instead of state backed militaries - I can easily see a path for Democide to be significantly higher and wider spread as soon as these gang wars erupt over turf disputes and etc as the lines won't be clearly drawn or internationally recognized like sovereign borders are. I won't speak for other governments, but as soon as the US populace is fed up with our military bombing brown babies overseas and giving our young men PTSD - our numbers would drop. But as it stands now, neither Republicans nor Democrats have a differentiated view on foreign policy, meddling in other countries affairs, nor a high bar for military engagement so we continue to bully others with our military might instead of more diplomatic means.

What is more disingenuous is that there's been a group of people in this thread talking for awhile about governments adopting it and they were told it was only "shit hole countries" that were considering it and that the US would NEVER do anything of the sort. Probably the same people who said it wouldn't get an ETF approval, or that companies would never adopt it on balance sheet, or that 20k in 2018 was the penultimate top to a super bubble. And yet... Here we are. With it progressing in adoption as Bitcoin proponents have said it would for years - and people nitpicking it the whole way up with "well, it's not 100% what you said" or "now you NEED the US gov't for your thesis" while missing the entire ride to 100k, 500k, and beyond.

We already have that with some of centibillionaires as is. I'm not actually sure that is an outcome I want seeing how those handful have behaved.

I'm pretty sure it's right. Obviously GLD doesn't go back to the 1970s, but from its inception in 2004 to today GLD is up 500+% compared to the SPY's ~380%. So is absolutely true over the last 21. Would need to find either gold futures or gold bullion history going back to the mid-80s, but am pretty confident it has kept up. People seem to have this fantasy that the S&P 500 is the only asset class that provides worthwhile returns (or stocks in general). I'm pretty sure long-duration bonds were outperforming the S&P 500 on a rolling 30-year basis until 2022 when they basically logged their worst year ever. Over long time frames, different asset classes do excellently and often outperform stocks over extended periods.