BITCOIN

bugbyte_2

darren232002 said:

lozzy1965 said:

"store of wealth" so far not so good.

On what basis? I think its doing just fine...

On the basis that if you brought in at any time after the start of 2021 you will be up to 50% down. This weirdly matters to a lot of investors. If you think it is doing fine, by extension you must also believe BTC is currently undervalued (based on what?) and therefore a price correction will take place bringing it back to whatever you brought in at. You may well be right, but the market doesn't agree - it is the price it is because that is what the market is prepared to pay - and unlike everything else that's based purely on sentiment. You cant keep on pointing to a rally from March 2020 to March 2021 as some future prediction. What about the three years from Dec 17 where the price bottom fed? 

To be a store of wealth it would need to be stable and have roughly the same value in ten years time as it has today. BTC clearly and demonstrably is not in any way stable and its value in 10 years time would be a guess at best. Whats really interesting is if BTC was stable the 'I'm in it to get rich quick' group would disappear overnight. So what do you want? Stability and a store of value or current volatility with a possible go to the moon moment? You cant have both. 

Yes a few companies have it in their balance sheets, but don't equate that with any altruistic idealism. All PLC's have one goal only - and that is to make profits for their shareholders. Money has to be parked somewhere and if BTC fulfills that criteria, then so be it. If and when the  moment it does not money will shift elsewhere. Similarly, just because there is a Bitcoin mine running on Chicken Poo does not mean bit miners are green hippies. They will and can move to any location that provides cheap energy. If this is coal powered then the miners would not blink.

mooneysaver

Zola. said:

Why do you keep insisting on trying to derail a Bitcoin thread by talking about scam coins? Start your own Safe Moon thread please. 

Keep it on topic at least. This thread is for Bitcoin only. 

Right so building windmills in Gambia and releasing actual products (see Safemoon energy drinks: https://shop.helloenhance.com/products/safemoon-energy-drink-case) = scamcoin

Digital gold / inflation hedge which goes down in value when inflation rises = blue chip cryptocurrency?

Okay sir, I'll  take your word for it 

bugbyte_2

mooneysaver said:

Zola. said:

Why do you keep insisting on trying to derail a Bitcoin thread by talking about scam coins? Start your own Safe Moon thread please. 

Keep it on topic at least. This thread is for Bitcoin only. 

Right so building windmills in Gambia and releasing actual products (see Safemoon energy drinks: https://shop.helloenhance.com/products/safemoon-energy-drink-case) = scamcoin

Digital gold / inflation hedge which goes down in value when inflation rises = blue chip cryptocurrency?

Okay sir, I'll  take your word for it 

Thank you for the link, fascinating 'company' - no contact details and no company number, etc. Just give them money and it will all be good I am sure.

Favourite bit is their "collection of 10,000 Enhanced Apes NFTs—unique digital collectibles residing on the BSC blockchain.", complete with laser eyes (no passing off there then) available for only £242 each. 

BTW there is no Safemoon Energy Drink. That's what pre order means. If they get enough orders they will white label an existing product, or more likely just keep your money. Similarly there is no wind turbine in Gambia. If you can prove otherwise then brilliant!

User232002

bugbyte_2 said:

On the basis that if you brought in at any time after the start of 2021 you will be up to 50% down. 

This is an investing forum. I think its safe to say that measuring returns over a one year period for any asset or investment would be incredibly naive. The fact you want to compare returns over 12 months, but not over 2, 3, 4 or more is misguided at best and, more likely, just bias to fit your desired conclusion.

bugbyte_2 said:

This weirdly matters to a lot of investors.

Because they are weak, and this is what has got us in to this mess in the first place. The majority of people want to put their money in to a tracker and watch 'number go up.' The inability of participants, and probably the economy, to survive a drawdown due to the debt within the system has forced the feds hand. 

In 2018, Bitcoin went down 85% and a large number of market participants just went 'Nah, we ain't selling.' No bailouts using taxpayer funds were needed. That's what a robust system looks like.

bugbyte_2 said:

If you think it is doing fine, by extension you must also believe BTC is currently undervalued (based on what?) and therefore a price correction will take place bringing it back to whatever you brought in at. You may well be right, but the market doesn't agree - it is the price it is because that is what the market is prepared to pay - and unlike everything else that's based purely on sentiment. You cant keep on pointing to a rally from March 2020 to March 2021 as some future prediction. What about the three years from Dec 17 where the price bottom fed? 

Err... I do believe that BTC is undervalued and I believe I've made about a hundred posts here describing exactly why. I'm currently up multiples on what I put in to BTC whilst the market is at something like + 40% over that time span, so yes; I would consider it a fairly comfy store of value and not something I plan on selling any time soon. The original plan was to buy and not touch it for at least 5 years. I have yet to see anything to make me want to deviate from that thesis.

Why is it that market price/action is relevant when its down, but irrelevant or speculation when its up? Seems hypocritical and irrational. If you want to believe market price is indicative of value, then this logic works both ways; so were BTC to get to a new ATH you would probably have to revisit your thesis. Of course, when that happens most will handwave it away to protect their own ego - which is why I continue to ask for actual meaningful predictions of things that you think BTC will never achieve. That way we can point and laugh when they come to pass.

Also, you can't say market price matters and then cherry pick and exclude certain time periods because you don't like the results of what the market did during that time. At least not if you want to come to rational conclusions. 

bugbyte_2 said:

To be a store of wealth it would need to be stable and have roughly the same value in ten years time as it has today. BTC clearly and demonstrably is not in any way stable and its value in 10 years time would be a guess at best. Whats really interesting is if BTC was stable the 'I'm in it to get rich quick' group would disappear overnight. So what do you want? Stability and a store of value or current volatility with a possible go to the moon moment? You cant have both. 

Nobody gets rich quick in Bitcoin. This is a silly trope. Those that think they will inevitably puke their position in times like this and only those that have a long time preference succeed. Which, again, is kinda the point. The bitcoin ecosystem should be more robust because it has longer term thinking.

And you absolutely can have both. Going from nothing to a ten, twenty or more trillion dollar asset class necessarily involves volatility. As an asset class matures and gets bigger, its moves will become less pronounced - this is borne out by data that shows BTC's volatility is decreasing over its lifetime. When Bitcoin gets to its end state, the volatility will be less than the S&P, but by that point it will simply be a pure SoV and not an investment. 

bugbyte_2 said:

Yes a few companies have it in their balance sheets, but don't equate that with any altruistic idealism. All PLC's have one goal only - and that is to make profits for their shareholders. Money has to be parked somewhere and if BTC fulfills that criteria, then so be it. If and when the  moment it does not money will shift elsewhere. Similarly, just because there is a Bitcoin mine running on Chicken Poo does not mean bit miners are green hippies. They will and can move to any location that provides cheap energy. If this is coal powered then the miners would not blink.

Thanks for making the exact point I have made many many times in this thread already; people are driven by their own incentives. Show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome.

The cheapest source of energy is the excess of renewable energy in places or times where it can not be consumed (ie. solar during the day or wind energy in the antarctic). Given that this is an undeniable truth of renewable energy, how do you think a Bitcoin miner is going to respond? Coal is expensive, which is why very few miners use it. What are the knock on affects of this for both the renewable energy usage of the network as a whole and the resources made available to build out renewable energy networks?

Meanwhile, in the fiat system, the fed is run by a group of people that printed stupendous amounts of money whilst denying inflation would occur, pumped the market to Everest, sold their shares at the absolute top due to 'conflict of interest' and then turned on the tightening. Whilst put in place by politicians who only care about promising X group Y amount of money to get re-elected every 4 years.

Incentives of one system promote sustainability, the incentives of the other...

[Deleted User]

darren232002 said:

bugbyte_2 said:

To be a store of wealth it would need to be stable and have roughly the same value in ten years time as it has today. BTC clearly and demonstrably is not in any way stable and its value in 10 years time would be a guess at best. Whats really interesting is if BTC was stable the 'I'm in it to get rich quick' group would disappear overnight. So what do you want? Stability and a store of value or current volatility with a possible go to the moon moment? You cant have both. 

Nobody gets rich quick in Bitcoin. This is a silly trope. Those that think they will inevitably puke their position in times like this and only those that have a long time preference succeed. Which, again, is kinda the point. The bitcoin ecosystem should be more robust because it has longer term thinking.

And you absolutely can have both. Going from nothing to a ten, twenty or more trillion dollar asset class necessarily involves volatility. As an asset class matures and gets bigger, its moves will become less pronounced - this is borne out by data that shows BTC's volatility is decreasing over its lifetime. When Bitcoin gets to its end state, the volatility will be less than the S&P, but by that point it will simply be a pure SoV and not an investment. 

The only reason most people are interested in Bitcoin is that the price spiked and it made hundreds of thousands of people exceptionally rich very quickly, which in turn generated a wave of interest from other people who also wanted to get rich quickly. Suggesting that nobody gets rich quickly from Bitcoin and that only those with a long term strategy succeed is just incredibly odd given that context.

Malthusian

Deleted_User said: The only reason most people are interested in Bitcoin is that the price spiked and it made hundreds of thousands of people exceptionally rich very quickly, which in turn generated a wave of interest from other people who also wanted to get rich quickly.

Very few people have got exceptionally rich from Bitcoin. When the price first pumped from its Silk Road level in 2017, a typical lucky hodler had a few thousand invested at most. When the price pumped that turned into high five figures, low six figures if they were lucky. Nice to have, but not "retire to the Caribbean" money.

Most bitcoin "fortunes" disappeared on flash new cars and the ICO boom (the 2017 version of the recent NFT fad). (And why wouldn't you buy a flash car when your Bitcoin has just pumped 30x in the space of a year or two and your remaining $40,000 will become a multi-million dollar fortune within the next decade?)

The majority of people who claim today to be early (pre 2017) Bitcoin investors are con artists or mere fantasists. (Example)

darren232002 said: Its not always about you, dear.

No it isn't, but in this case it seemed to be about nobody at all. So I thought I would investigate the cause of your confusion as to why people who aren't here weren't falling over themselves to propose falsifiable predictions that Bitcoin could smash to smithereens on its march to $400,000 and beyond.

People aren't buying Bitcoin to get rich, they are buying it because its a fairer system.

See, this is why we still keep indulging in the same circular arguments for 200 pages. Because it occasionally results in comedy like this.

Naturally someone who believes they are entitled to a much higher wealth bracket and sees no way of getting there other than winning the lottery will consider it "fair" that Bitcoin should make them rich. The rest of the world (who would have to fund those riches) will see it differently.

FCA research and these threads confirm that people in the West (where the unavailability of a stable currency is, unlike in prisons and El Salvador, not an issue) buy Bitcoin for one reason, to get rich quick.

There is nothing "fair" about having your accumulated wealth go up and down at random.

Reaper

darren232002 said:

People aren't buying Bitcoin to get rich, they are buying it because its a fairer system.

This is obviously false. If you don't want to get rich then stablecoins actually go some way to fulfilling the role of a fair, cheap, currency. Unlike Bitcoin which people only buy because it went up in price spectacularly in the past, and people are desperately hoping will do so again. Stablecoins are (almost) currency, Bitcoin is gambling.

Zola.

https://www.coindesk.com/layer2/2022/03/09/americas-quiet-default/

Interesting article. 

RolandFlagg

This is Andreas Antonopoulous, one of the foremost experts on Bitcoin.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6kJfvuNqtg&ab_channel=WIREDUK

People who talk about Bitcoin without knowing anything about it, or just look at the price should watch as many of his videos as possible to learn why Bitcoin is so important.

I find it amazing that in 2022 there are some people that still don't get it, but I suppose when electricity was invented some people complained that it was useless because we already had candles.

Same goes for Cars (We already have horse drawn carriages)
Email (We have the postal system)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXIaILHl7Rg&t=230s&ab_channel=aantonop

People don't get it until they do.....unless they never do...but their kids and grandkids will.

RolandFlagg

Bitcoin vs Bulls*it (from 2017)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMEOKDVXlUo&ab_channel=aantonop