Cryptocurrencies

[Sweet]

7 hours ago, Paarslaars said:

 

 

 

 

Solving world hunger next... right.

[james22]

Why The Yuppie Elite Dismiss Bitcoin

 

https://www.citadel21.com/why-the-yuppie-elite-dismiss-bitcoin

[TwoCitiesCapital]

7 hours ago, Blake Hampton said:

You know, if this were a gold thread, I’d have a much easier time getting behind it all—though I still find the whole ideology to be sort of odd. Buffett is right when he talks about non-productive assets versus productive ones.

 

Munger summarized it best when he said, ”Bitcoin is worthless, artificial gold.”

This sucker is going to be worthless the second our economy has a real downturn.

 

 

Like 2020? or 2022? 

 

Or was it supposedly shutting down liquidity/higher rates that was supposed to kill Bitcoin? Like 2023/2024?

Edited February 3 by TwoCitiesCapital

[Fly]

8 hours ago, Dave86ch said:

An interesting development is USDt on Lightning through Taproot.

Lightning is far more scalable than anything else.

 

I'm glad to see this. Stablecoins on LN (and/or other BTC L2s) will be the nail in the coffin for shitcoins. 

[Blake Hampton]

2 hours ago, TwoCitiesCapital said:

Like 2020? or 2022? 

 

Or was it supposedly shutting down liquidity/higher rates that was supposed to kill Bitcoin? Like 2023/2024?

 

 

It was at $5,000 a coin during the 2020 cash crunch.

[Blake Hampton]

If the Fed hadn't done QE, Bitcoin would certainly be trading around $0.

[gfp]

Just now, Blake Hampton said:

If the Fed hadn't done QE, Bitcoin would certainly be trading around $0.

c'mon Blake, you are killing me with this idiotic QE stuff.  At least do some reading on the mechanics of what exactly "QE" and "QT" are.

 

If you are obsessed with money creation being a problem, focus on the fiscal.  

[Dalal.Holdings]

This might be a sign capital is leaving crypto broadly and Bitcoin is just the last holdout...

 

[TwoCitiesCapital]

19 minutes ago, Blake Hampton said:

If the Fed hadn't done QE, Bitcoin would certainly be trading around $0.

The Fed has been engaged in quantitative tightening since mid-2022. Bitcoin has gone from ~$40k at peak Fed balance sheet to $100k today. Where is the drop to 0 coming from again? And why would it be different than the last 30 months? 

[TwoCitiesCapital]

Just now, Dalal.Holdings said:

This might be a sign capital is leaving crypto broadly and Bitcoin is just the last holdout...

 

 

Perhaps. Is just another way of saying Bitcoin dominance is rising. It's right around 61% which isn't historically unprecedented. 

[Blake Hampton]

My point is that if the Fed hadn't bailed out the economy with liquidity, Bitcoin would've been the first asset to be worth pennies. This whole "cash is trash" argument is cute until people actually need cash. Then the situation becomes life or death.

[TwoCitiesCapital]

29 minutes ago, Blake Hampton said:

 

 

It was at $5,000 a coin during the 2020 cash crunch.

 

Yes. It was. And had traded at just $1,000 3-years prior.

 

So a 5x in 3-years, even after a 75% drawdown to COVID lows, is BTC going to zero? Even while the Fed was engaged in QT during 2018 and 2019?

 

It seems clear to me your "Fed Quantitative easing is the only thing keeping BTC above $0" model is broken - seeing as the last two times the Fed did QT, BTC was still significantly higher than 2-3 years prior. 

Edited February 3 by TwoCitiesCapital

[Paarslaars]

9 minutes ago, Blake Hampton said:

My point is that if the Fed hadn't bailed out the economy with liquidity, Bitcoin would've been the first asset to be worth pennies. This whole "cash is trash" argument is cute until people actually need cash. Then the situation becomes life or death.

You're not getting it. Liquidity wasn't the problem, QE is inflationary, people's savings get whiped out by all the money printing. This is why BTC will be succesful.

[Gregmal]

Oh fantastic! I love the “anything that’s ever had a drawdown is a risky bubble asset” declarations….as we insist the solution is to hold the one asset that over the past 100 years has done nothing but consistently ride the chart from top left to bottom right. 
 

However! I’ve heard of we quote Buffett enough, we can overcome the 100 year history of cash being trash.

[Vish_ram]

My only hope is that I keep stacking the sats when the likes of Blake start buying at $1M. When CoBF as a whole becomes bullish, the high alpha in BTC will be over. 

[james22]

 

[james22]

 

[Dave86ch]

8 hours ago, james22 said:

 

 

 

 

Edited February 4 by Dave86ch

[Fly]

5 hours ago, Dave86ch said:

 

 

 

 

Since Tether discontinued the Omni layer it makes sense they need to have a method of transferring USDt on a bitcoin layer. I'm sure Cantor will be happy to facilitate the financial plumbing behind it. 

 

This against the backdrop of withering L1s like ETH and it is clear that BTC is the only one with staying power. 

Edited February 4 by Fly

[jfan]

On 1/27/2025 at 3:09 PM, rkbabang said:

 

Basically because of regulations and KYC miners are starting to care more about compliance than profits and it has the potential to concentrate mining power in one mining pool (Foundry). When any miner or pool of miners has more than 50% hashrate they can do bad things (like double spend coins, or censor addresses from using Bitcoin, etc)

Just went back to some of Satoshi's emails (from the book of Satoshi). There was a couple pages on his thoughts of 51% attacks. 

 

"According to the "long tail" theory, the small, medium, and merely large farms (server) put together should add up to a lot more than the biggest zombie farm"

 

My interpretation here is that it would be more profitable for these smaller farms that knowing they can't pull a 51% attack, would merely comply to the bitcoin protocol to be profitable, and that it was his thought that there would be many more small server farms choosing this rather than do some complicit like double spend.

 

He further discusses that chain formation where different miners are forming various block templates (with transactions) that are occurring at the same time, where ultimately the proof-of-work (ie the longest chain), will be the valid chain, and all subsequent templates will be invalid. This process can take up to 1 hour to be immutable, but within that time transactions could be placed back into the mempool if they end up in the invalid chain.

 

With the transaction fees in place, there should be always some miner out there willing to incorporate transaction requests, but the question than goes back to whether they have enough computational power to solve SHA-256 puzzle. It would be then dependent on the long-tail of honest nodes running the system having proportionally more compute. 

 

This in turn is dependent on whether these miners are incentivized by bitcoin block fees. It seems to me that the incentive to join these mining pools might weight more heavily on having a steady stream of income in fiat dollars rather than earning bitcoin itself. 

 

It is not clear to me why any larger mining company would ever join a pool, and why a very small miner would need one if their electricity costs are de minimis. But perhaps, there are many more small miners with just a few 100+ TH/s ASIC miners that can't afford the ability to host their own mining equipment using these pools, where their incentive to be profitable in fiat terms rather than bitcoin terms. 

[Paarslaars]

White House crypto czar David Sacks says first priority is stablecoin legislation – NBC Chicago

 

Not a fan of all the stable coin talk but interesting to see them talking about a SBR seperate from the sovereign fund.

[Dave86ch]

19 hours ago, jfan said:

Just went back to some of Satoshi's emails (from the book of Satoshi). There was a couple pages on his thoughts of 51% attacks. 

 

"According to the "long tail" theory, the small, medium, and merely large farms (server) put together should add up to a lot more than the biggest zombie farm"

 

My interpretation here is that it would be more profitable for these smaller farms that knowing they can't pull a 51% attack, would merely comply to the bitcoin protocol to be profitable, and that it was his thought that there would be many more small server farms choosing this rather than do some complicit like double spend.

 

He further discusses that chain formation where different miners are forming various block templates (with transactions) that are occurring at the same time, where ultimately the proof-of-work (ie the longest chain), will be the valid chain, and all subsequent templates will be invalid. This process can take up to 1 hour to be immutable, but within that time transactions could be placed back into the mempool if they end up in the invalid chain.

 

With the transaction fees in place, there should be always some miner out there willing to incorporate transaction requests, but the question than goes back to whether they have enough computational power to solve SHA-256 puzzle. It would be then dependent on the long-tail of honest nodes running the system having proportionally more compute. 

 

This in turn is dependent on whether these miners are incentivized by bitcoin block fees. It seems to me that the incentive to join these mining pools might weight more heavily on having a steady stream of income in fiat dollars rather than earning bitcoin itself. 

 

It is not clear to me why any larger mining company would ever join a pool, and why a very small miner would need one if their electricity costs are de minimis. But perhaps, there are many more small miners with just a few 100+ TH/s ASIC miners that can't afford the ability to host their own mining equipment using these pools, where their incentive to be profitable in fiat terms rather than bitcoin terms. 

Some pools distribute income to miners regularly based on their hashpower contribution, even when no block is mined.

This favors companies with large balance sheets that can withstand the non-deterministic reward distribution, which ultimately leads to centralization.

Hashcash-based eCash seems capable of creating a market that addresses this problem. Check out the Optech podcast I shared for more details.

 

 

Edited February 5 by Dave86ch

[Vish_ram]

On 2/3/2025 at 10:45 AM, james22 said:

Why The Yuppie Elite Dismiss Bitcoin

 

https://www.citadel21.com/why-the-yuppie-elite-dismiss-bitcoin

Thanks for sharing this.

Looking back being a MBA, I detested BTC. When I lost trust in the system due to uncontrollable deficits & reckless spending, subconsciously I had warmed up to it. 
the link perfectly explains this.

[james22]

 

2 hours ago, Vish_ram said:

I detested BTC. When I lost trust in the system due to uncontrollable deficits & reckless spending, subconsciously I had warmed up to it.

 

I think the trust angle is secondary to:

 

Bitcoin’s surface layer provides it with a subtle camouflage.  The first hour or two of learning about Bitcoin triggers a multitude of scam red flags. 

 

For the business and financial elite, who have honed their heuristic abilities for filtering out the deluge of noise they sift through on a daily basis in order to be effective in their professions, these red flags are a non-starter. 

 

For their entire adult lives, they have been reinforced to think within the box (often while calling it “out of the box thinking”).  The odds that a new piece of information comes along, for which an hour or two of investigation creates more confusion than answers and yields several red flags, but actually turns out to be an outstanding investment are vanishingly small. 

 

That’s what heuristics do - filter out the garbage based on a cursory investigation of substance.

[TwoCitiesCapital]

2 hours ago, Vish_ram said:

Thanks for sharing this.

Looking back being a MBA, I detested BTC. When I lost trust in the system due to uncontrollable deficits & reckless spending, subconsciously I had warmed up to it. 
the link perfectly explains this.

 

I think this is a decent framework, but I'm not sure it's all entirely based on faith in the system and belief in its success. 

 

I tend to think our system is doomed for failure, but not necessarily because central banks can't work or that there isn't a framework that could work. I think the primary tragic flaw is people forget the failures of the past and don't enforce discipline to prevent it from happening again. It's a death of a thousand cuts inching towards your doom over a few generations. 

 

I think you have to believe the system is broken AND/OR have a willingness to stand out from the pack. 

 

Hardcore/deep value interesting prepared me to buy what is unpopular and unloved and Bitcoin has been that basically its entire existence. It will change, and perhaps is starting to, but it took someone willing to look dumb and be different from their peers to buy it for the last 15-years. 

 

When it clicked for me, I did an immediate 180⁰ and bought that day. I didn't mind that meant I was the only one in my group of peers to own it. I didn't mind that my girlfriend  at the time didn't see much value in it. I didn't mind that I would now be grouped with "magic internet money moon boyz" or that men talking about their crypto portfolios is now a popular meme that paints a negative view of a population that now includes me. I have a willingness to stand apart and stand out and I find most people are more comfortable being wrong if it means they remain part of the pack. 

 

Edited February 5 by TwoCitiesCapital