The Death Knell of Crypto!

[SharperDingaan]

You might find the below a very useful DD exercise 

 

Google the halving rate of BTC. Record the miner reward and date 50(inception), 25 (2012), 12.5 (2016), 6.25 (2020), 3.125 (2024). Google the price of BTC June 30, 2012, 2016, 2020, and TODAY.

 

Multiple the mining reward at each halving by the BTC price mid-way (June 30) through that year, divide by 100M to get the mining reward per Satoshi. Multiply by 5,000 to get a transactional cost (ie: 5,000 Satoshi for USD 2.50). Multiple by 100M to get to the mining value of 1 BTC. This is essentially a rough production BE estimate, 'cause were it to cost the miner more than this - he/she would stop mining to avoid incurring a loss.    

 

Interesting numbers keep showing up, as well as some implications around continuation of the halving process.

That 12-14x that rkbabang refers to, could even be conservative! 

 

SD

[no_free_lunch]

The thing that scares me about bitcoin is that transaction fees are not really increasing.  They are actually lower today than they were back during the first bubble in 2017/18.  In 2017 they were bouncing between $2-4 much of the time, with some spikes over $10.  Today, the average transaction fee is listed as $1.72.    I would expect transactions fees to steadily grind up if demand was increasing. 

 

https://www.blockchain.com/charts/fees-usd-per-transaction

 

To me it looks like people aren't really needing bitcoin that much.  Perhaps with all the crypto out there, there are just too many other options.  No real opinion on bitcoin, it's a neat idea and has certainly done well but trying to ascribe a value to it is impossible, imo.

Edited June 18, 2022 by no_free_lunch

[Spekulatius]

On 6/16/2022 at 7:28 AM, lnofeisone said:

Gold is the softest and most malleable of all metals so chiseling it will be very counterproductive. You could spool it and have increment markets and just cut piece when paying for coffee . This is probably the only absolute advantage that cryptocurrency has over gold is that it is divisible into whatever number you need. But the same thing could be said about any currency. Transporting gold might seem like a big deal but what gets overlooked (or taken for granted) lot of times is that there is a huge amount of infrastructure (think internet, utility, power generation) that is required to support the transport of crypto. 

 

Fun fact on gold softness, gold purity in the jewelry world is measured by kt. 24kt is 100% gold, 18kt is 18 gold: 6 other stuff, 14kt is 14 gold: 10 other stuff and so on. Other stuff controls physical properties (e.g., strength, color, etc.) You rarely see 24kt gold rings because they are too soft and can't withstand the daily wear and tear.

Great material for infrared reflectors, its a good electronic conductors when high durability is required. Does not oxidize at high temperatures, looks good as jewelry and has been used as a store of value for more than 5000 years (lindy pricinple). You can dig out 5000 year old gold coins and they are basically as good as new, but more valuable (because of collectors value).

 

One of the best critiques of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies comes from Taleb, he talks about an absorbing barrier. What that means is that crypto becomes more vulnerable when it is used less and hence becomes cheaper. Any cryptocurrencies has to deal with what he calls an “absorbing barrier” at which point a cryptocurrency may become useless as it falls in value. I think this partly explains why the volatility of all cryptocurrencies is so high. Ironically a cryptocurrency becomes less of a buy and more fragile as it falls in value, since there is no inherent value other than network usage to fall back on.

https://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/BTC-QF.pdf

Edited June 19, 2022 by Spekulatius

[SharperDingaan]

BTC as a payment method is just widely misunderstood ......

 

At the primary level you are paying for ability to make an anonymous payment - high security, high value, infrequent transactions, for less than the cost of money laundering. For these purposes a 50K transaction fee on a 10M payment is squat.

 

At the secondary (Lighting) level, the fee is divided by the size of the batch, and there is incentive to update just once/day.

• If all you are going to do is pay for coffee/pizza, you don't need this level of security, and could make the payment alternatively at a lot lower transaction cost - zero if using cash. Sure you could use BTC to pay this way, but this is obviously not the target market, as there is minimal utility. Zero value to BTC!
• However, if you live in a nation with CBDC, this is one of the very few scalable ways by which you CAN  pay for black market transactions when the CB is reducing cash in circulation in favor of CBDC. The real target market, and to whom this ability is worth a great deal.

Transaction demand is steadily increasing, and CBs around the world continue to work very hard to make it so!

It just isn't the demand you thought it was ...

 

SD

Edited June 19, 2022 by SharperDingaan

[Dave86ch]

https://twitter.com/FA_Touadera/status/1536821791062212615?t=92x2Dzc0d6bnY-mXg5i4Xw&s=19

[jfan]

@Spekulatius Thanks for Taleb's paper. I did quite enjoy his Antifragile book but, maybe its me, but his writing style is really verbose and meanders quite a bit. He is quite biased and makes very little attempt to offer a balanced critique. He also doesn't provide much evidence or data in his paper. 

 

A few highlights and thoughts from his paper:

 

1) "Earnings-free assets with no residual value are problematic to value." - this assumes this is a fad and will fade with time as people move onto something else.

 

2) The bitcoin ledger requires constant maintenance costs unlike gold which are minimal. - I'm not sure this is true. My understanding is that the public ledger is an open-source database that require no maintenance costs and that the costs are associated with transactions. Running a node especially a bitcoin node (to store the ledger) requires nothing more than a raspberry pi computer that costs $300 to make. Gold has substantial verification, storage/security, and transport costs. 

 

3) Absorbing threshold is an interesting physiologic concept and quite true with respect to human body. If the number of people interested in bitcoin falls to a small number (?? number), it still suggests that this community of individuals is still interested in Bitcoin as a currency/store of value/signalling virtue/etc. With 8 billion people in the world, if the Bitcoin community is very small and there are very few transactions on a public exchange, the value of the bitcoin is the marginal price that the last person is willing to pay for getting into this group. It could be argued that if the group is small, it would suggest that these are "true believers" and might have the religious fervor akin to a cult where their conviction is so high that price to get a membership in this situation could be very high. In that case, the absorbing threshold may not apply.

 

4) "The fundamental flaw and contradiction at the base of most cryptocurrencies is, as we saw, that the originators, miners, and maintainers of the system currently make their money from the inflation of their currencies rather than just from the volume of underlying transactions in them." - I think is a valid point. The transaction costs are currently 10-20% of the block reward. I don't have any data that suggests that the transaction fees (priced in USD or satoshis) are going up. In fact that transaction volumes seem to be going down over time. I wonder if this is related to the HODLING ethos that is being promoted.

 

5) Gold and Silver as inflation hedge commentary. I'm no expert. But here is a decent link to some charts are data on this subject. https://www.gold.org/goldhub/research/beyond-cpi-gold-as-a-strategic-inflation-hedge. Trying to get through the Hayek paper, it is equally a difficult read with periods of lucidity about what makes good money.

 

6) Bitcoin as a payment system. I recall reading the original bitcoin whitepaper and it did espoused the purpose was a peer-to-peer electronic cash system to be used as online payments. To @SharperDingaan point, this likely will service large value transactions vs small value transactions with requirements in layer 2 technology (eg Lightning network) with final settlement on the layer 1 blockchain analogous to daily banking vs global settlement processes. 

 

Overall, imo, his paper falls a bit short for me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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[Spekulatius]

@jfan I agree on Taleb style getting more verbose. His best book by far is his first “Fooled by randomness” and quite frankly, that’s all one needs to read rom him, as the rest does not add all that much value.

 

I think the idea off an absorbing barrier where a medium/system becomes less valuable and useful with decreasing usage introduces some fragility that is also inherent with other systems like social networks etc. In a way BTC is just that. Gold has the same issue and there were indeed times when gold was not useful,  but you could bury it in your yard  and dig it out a few years later and you would be good to go. This is basically the Lindy principle (the longer something lasts, the safer it becomes).

 

So I own a little gold as an inflation hedge but overall I stick with stuff that has cash flows that can be valued. BTC is probably big enough that it won’t go through and absorbing barrier, but I think something like Dogecoin and many more of those coins probably and maybe even Ethereum which it’s functionality as a transaction medium does not turn out to be what the bulls think it will.

 

 

[SharperDingaan]

BTC has fallen through the USD 20,000 'barrier' and fell to USD 18,097 06/19 at 5:41 AM.

What do you think happens on Monday when the media starts reporting it? and on Tuesday when the US comes back from holiday 

 

And should some pegs break again ......

 

SD 

Edited June 19, 2022 by SharperDingaan

[Spekulatius]

Why is $20k a fundamental barrier? Which fundamentals are we talking about? Did crypto rebound because Musk was pumping dodge coin on Sunday morning 2AM? 

[SharperDingaan]

USD 20,000 is roughly the 2017 peak. A price decline convincingly below this, that stays there for a while, shakes out all the gains of the last 4+ years. New financing rounds close off, industry job losses accelerate .... and should a black swan show up, the next layers of technical support are very much lower.

 

If I'm holding BTC puts or short BTC futures, I have strong incentive to break the pegs.

Many of the pegs have already broken at much higher prices, and have had to be supported since. That support gets progressively more brittle as prices continue to decline. Hedge settlements go to the banker, and the allowable margin % goes down as the magnitude of the unrealized MTM hedge gain goes up.   

 

At an unrealized MTM hedge gain of 50M, maybe the allowable loan is 50% (25M) - but at 100M it gets cut back to 40% (40M) as it has become too risky. The MTM doubled, but it now supports 10M less debt (40-2*25), so boys ... put up additional capital - or watch the pile fail. Brittle.

 

Putting lipstick on the pig, doesn't change the reality .... 

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/international-business/us-business/article-crypto-industry-fears-contagion-as-bitcoin-slips-under-20000/

 

SD     

Edited June 20, 2022 by SharperDingaan

[Xerxes]

So all it took was the Fed chairman waiving  his hand, and the phantom was turned into a shade of itself …

[Spekulatius]

https://twitter.com/RammityCap/status/1529931356758609921?s=20&t=RYjTZFbIYL6i79fPl3vluw

[jfan]

1 hour ago, Spekulatius said:

https://twitter.com/RammityCap/status/1529931356758609921?s=20&t=RYjTZFbIYL6i79fPl3vluw

That clip is hilarious. I was rolling over laughing and fell off my chair.

[Spekulatius]

this is what the crypto version of Ocean Eleven will look like:

 

[rkbabang]

15 minutes ago, Spekulatius said:

this is what the crypto version of Ocean Eleven will look like:

 

 

That was great until the end "coming never".  WTF, I wanted to see that movie!

[jfan]

I've attached a very recent report on the vulnerabilities of Blockchain especially as it relates to Bitcoin and Ethereum. Alot of it is quite technical and my grasp is a bit limited. However some salient points to consider.

 

@Spekulatius keep these movies coming...

62af6c641a672b3329b9a480_Unintended_Centralities_in_Distributed_Ledgers.pdf

[fareastwarriors]

7 hours ago, rkbabang said:

 

That was great until the end "coming never".  WTF, I wanted to see that movie!

Right? It's looks great.

The story writes itself. Just use real life. 

 

 

[Spekulatius]

5 hours ago, fareastwarriors said:

Right? It's looks great.

The story writes itself. Just use real life. 

 

 

This should have a shot at becoming a real movie. Maybe some scout takes notice,

[Xerxes]

Time to resurrect this thread.

 

Bill Miller became a billionaire on the back of his personal wealth tied to shares of Amazon and Bitcoin/Crypto. He is a one of a kind investor, and this type of drawdown is part of the journey.

 

Still, I like a follow up podcast with him.

This was from May 2022.

 

T

 

[Xerxes]

Just in time.

 

Bill Miller just answered my question:

 

Bill Miller Is Still Bullish on Bitcoin—and a Lot More | Barron's (barrons.com)