BITCOIN

RogerIrvine

Scottex99 said:

RogerIrvine said:

Scottex99 said:

Money printer go brrrrrrr, inflation goes to 7% and you’re…. Surprised?

Not surprised inflation has gone to 7% but I am surprised that anyone would suggest expanding the money supply was the sole cause. QE started in 2008. Inflation took off after the pandemic affected the supply chain and labour market. 

Nothing wrong with being partial, of course, but does it go a bit further with some of you guys? Are you actually working as brokers for crypto?

Been due for a long time. You can't just print your way out of any economic trouble and bail out failed institutions without eventually having to pay the piper.
I'll leave you to your book. When you finish it, you will find the Fed still ready to take whatever measures necessary to promote the health of the economy and the stability of the financial system. Its statement of March 15 th 2020 is explicit about this undertaking. So, yes, they can "kick the can down the road" for another fourteen years if required. Because of the assets and power backing them. Bitcoin has neither, just hopes founded on game theory warmed-over monetarism. Tight monetary control has already repeatedly failed the world. Is that all you have to justify these outlandish claims?

I do work for a crypto firm actually but we already trade 100m+ monthly. So as Darren has already said, I'm not on here to convince you to somehow pump my bags by buying £500 of BTC

So you work for a crypto firm and your post before last attempted to conflate inflation with QE. Ok, I get the picture.

Scottex99

What outlandish claims? That printing 25% of all the dollars in the world last year was bound to make inflation go up? That’s less outlandish than claiming dollars are backed by Central Park

Cus

If bitcoin stayed around £30k (+/- 50%) for the next 10 years, i.e became a very stable gold alternative,  do you think that the top grad brains will be drawn to it, and would it be as successful in helping with monetary stability across a number of smaller countries?

Take away the hopes of massive financial gains etc and does its impact change? Is greed too much of a part of this? (not trolling, interested in people's perspective, particularly people employed in the industry.)

I suspect that the next few years it will be the attempt of the institutions to relieve the retail users of their bitcoin but at lower prices, and then once they have more control, the price will go up as they sell it back to retail at the higher price.  They do that with everything else 😁

Scottex99

Grads no but countries yes would be my guess.

But there's going to be thousands and thousands of ops for grads, whether that's devs, support, sales etc. People are going to want to get into the scene and will work for start ups, join DAOs and various other things.

Could play out like that but at this point it's completely normal for institutions to be looking at ways to give crypto exposure to their clients, you couldn't say that even 3 years ago

Zola.

https://twitter.com/APompliano/status/1482788748777644038?t=8hj_TWVhekKukQprPOLCAw&s=19

This guy gets it 

User232002

Cus said:

If bitcoin stayed around £30k (+/- 50%) for the next 10 years, i.e became a very stable gold alternative,  do you think that the top grad brains will be drawn to it, and would it be as successful in helping with monetary stability across a number of smaller countries?

Well, +/- 50% isn't very stable. For the grads, it really is about both the money (an entry smart contract programmer is on $100k minimum as a remote work gig, plus the alpha you get from being in this space) as well as the permissionless and idealistic nature of the work. Your typical grad job is 2-5 years of mind numbingly boring work with no real responsibility or autonomy whilst being subservient to someone that is probably incompetent and largely there because they are just 20 years older than you. In contrast, just this week someone created a decentralised copy of OpenSea (NFT trading platform currently valued at around $10-$15B by the equity market) with lower fees and with a token that takes all those fees and gives them back to the users of the platform. Further, there are plenty of anonymous people in this space which means its entirely meritocratic. If you have a cool idea, there are plenty of treasuries with billions giving out grants for people to build stuff and you can apply to them as an anonymous person with a cartoon ape as your profile picture - discrimination is lower, creativity goes up. Google attracted talent and became the company it is today partly because it offered awesome salaries and partly because it gave employees one day off a week to work on whatever they wanted; crypto is doing that on a colossal scale.

As to the stability, BTC for smaller countries is a double edged sword. Its not something that people should be putting money in to that they need in 1 or 2 years because they will just get washed out by the volatility and capitulate. However, its a great tool for pension funds who have long investment horizons and I think it probably eventually replaces bonds in some part of their 60/40 portfolio. Its been interesting to see that hedge funds have largely been moving in and out of BTC because they don;t really accept it yet, whereas the pension funds that have bought it tend to be more willing to be here for the longer term. For these countries though, USD stablecoins are a far better alternative than their own currencies and these are essentially enabled by things like BTC. 

Cus said:

Take away the hopes of massive financial gains etc and does its impact change? Is greed too much of a part of this? (not trolling, interested in people's perspective, particularly people employed in the industry.)

I can only speak for myself and what I see, but I don't see much greed in this space because of the projects I associate myself with. If you buy things like DOGE, SAFEMOON or SHIB then you're going to get pictures of rocket emoji's and number go up stuff, but generally BTC, ETH and many others seem more idealistic and wanting to build a better, fairer world. If we look at projects that do well, it tends to be because they have strong communities. I have been in NFT discord groups where all anyone cared about was the current price and these projects tend to completely disintegrate shortly after launch because the buyers just want an influencer to pump their bags so they can sell at a profit. When this doesn't happen, such a community turns on itself very quickly. In contrast, I joined a DAO a couple of weeks ago and I haven't seen a single post about price in the discord yet and people are just focused on building something. I imagine that will do very very well because the project will be owned by people that truly care about it rather than those that are looking to flip for a quick profit. 

Cus said:

I suspect that the next few years it will be the attempt of the institutions to relieve the retail users of their bitcoin but at lower prices, and then once they have more control, the price will go up as they sell it back to retail at the higher price.  They do that with everything else 😁

I agree with this. I definitely think the final stage is when banks and such are selling BTC linked savings accounts or such to the retail class that spent 20 years saying that BTC was a ponzi. 

Zola.

darren232002 said:

Cus said:

If bitcoin stayed around £30k (+/- 50%) for the next 10 years, i.e became a very stable gold alternative,  do you think that the top grad brains will be drawn to it, and would it be as successful in helping with monetary stability across a number of smaller countries?

Well, +/- 50% isn't very stable. For the grads, it really is about both the money (an entry smart contract programmer is on $100k minimum as a remote work gig, plus the alpha you get from being in this space) as well as the permissionless and idealistic nature of the work. Your typical grad job is 2-5 years of mind numbingly boring work with no real responsibility or autonomy whilst being subservient to someone that is probably incompetent and largely there because they are just 20 years older than you. In contrast, just this week someone created a decentralised copy of OpenSea (NFT trading platform currently valued at around $10-$15B by the equity market) with lower fees and with a token that takes all those fees and gives them back to the users of the platform. Further, there are plenty of anonymous people in this space which means its entirely meritocratic. If you have a cool idea, there are plenty of treasuries with billions giving out grants for people to build stuff and you can apply to them as an anonymous person with a cartoon ape as your profile picture - discrimination is lower, creativity goes up. Google attracted talent and became the company it is today partly because it offered awesome salaries and partly because it gave employees one day off a week to work on whatever they wanted; crypto is doing that on a colossal scale.

As to the stability, BTC for smaller countries is a double edged sword. Its not something that people should be putting money in to that they need in 1 or 2 years because they will just get washed out by the volatility and capitulate. However, its a great tool for pension funds who have long investment horizons and I think it probably eventually replaces bonds in some part of their 60/40 portfolio. Its been interesting to see that hedge funds have largely been moving in and out of BTC because they don;t really accept it yet, whereas the pension funds that have bought it tend to be more willing to be here for the longer term. For these countries though, USD stablecoins are a far better alternative than their own currencies and these are essentially enabled by things like BTC. 

Cus said:

Take away the hopes of massive financial gains etc and does its impact change? Is greed too much of a part of this? (not trolling, interested in people's perspective, particularly people employed in the industry.)

I can only speak for myself and what I see, but I don't see much greed in this space because of the projects I associate myself with. If you buy things like DOGE, SAFEMOON or SHIB then you're going to get pictures of rocket emoji's and number go up stuff, but generally BTC, ETH and many others seem more idealistic and wanting to build a better, fairer world. If we look at projects that do well, it tends to be because they have strong communities. I have been in NFT discord groups where all anyone cared about was the current price and these projects tend to completely disintegrate shortly after launch because the buyers just want an influencer to pump their bags so they can sell at a profit. When this doesn't happen, such a community turns on itself very quickly. In contrast, I joined a DAO a couple of weeks ago and I haven't seen a single post about price in the discord yet and people are just focused on building something. I imagine that will do very very well because the project will be owned by people that truly care about it rather than those that are looking to flip for a quick profit. 

Cus said:

I suspect that the next few years it will be the attempt of the institutions to relieve the retail users of their bitcoin but at lower prices, and then once they have more control, the price will go up as they sell it back to retail at the higher price.  They do that with everything else 😁

I agree with this. I definitely think the final stage is when banks and such are selling BTC linked savings accounts or such to the retail class that spent 20 years saying that BTC was a ponzi. 

A really good point sir.

Linkedin says Bitcoin and crypto jobs grew 395% in 2021 - 3x the tech industry...

Zola.

https://www.cityam.com/crypto-company-bitmex-makes-bid-for-one-of-germanys-oldest-banks/

Bitmex buying up one of Germany's largest and oldest banks, presumably for Bitcoin custodial services. 

Aegis

AlexBacker said:

guys, is it a good time to buy btc?

Great question, and one you should ask before buying any investment.  The question is of course otherwise translates as "will the value likely be higher when I come to sell?"  If your research convinces you that the answer is "yes", then it can be a good time for a purchase, if the answer is "no" then it doesn't seem like a good idea unless you have some other reason to invest (e.g. with shares you might be buying for a high dividend).  As such, the questions you need to think about are "why will the price increase?", "where will the increase in value come from?", "why aren't more people buying now, what do they know that I perhaps don't?", "why has the price dropped recently?" and my favourite "is the current price representative of fair value?"

My opinion is that there's no reason for me to buy bitcoin other than the fact that it historically has performed well.  I struggle to identify the rationale behind the change in value between now, the all-time high and, say, 5 years ago.  If you can find out any reason other than mania, I'd genuinely love to hear it, but I remain concerned that this is just another example of tulip mania.  If you haven't heard of that before, it's worth looking up.

Scottex99

Mania isn’t going to last for 12 years is it? And if it’s true mania once it crashes hard which BTC has done multiple times, it’s not going to recover and make new highs, every time.

I bought some this morning but I buy it all the time. From an ATH of $69k, buying the dip looks like a decent idea. But not with money you can’t afford to lose, you may wake up tomorrow and you’ve lost 30% of your investment, not financial advice yada yada