BITCOIN

Qyburn

IvanOpinion said:

Now now children, learn to play nicely.

Fair enough. I think the point has been made and anyone who's bothered can quickly research for themselves. Hopefully someone will realise that misquoting a tertiary source "from memory" is a poor way to try to make a point.

Malthusian

I found it very illuminating. In one version of the story Frau Miggens walks into her bank to find that all her fiat currency has been rugpulled ("nobody will accept the Krone anymore"). In the real story she walks into her bank to find that nobody will accept her fiat currency... except to give her a different fiat currency that has a different name and fewer zeroes, which she can then exchange for goods and services as before. 

And also her currency lost 75% of its value against the Swiss franc. No duh, it was Austria in the 1920s. What she could have done to avoid that loss is put that money in gold or industrial shares in the first place, as she belatedly did after the second meeting. (Wouldn't be a great solution in today's era, but in early 20th century Austria you probably had to take what real assets you could get. Bear in mind that her own bank manager advised her to break the law by buying Swiss francs.) What's not clear is why it would have been a better idea for her to find some bros solving mathematical puzzles on an abacus and buy their receipts for the solved puzzles, as per the premise of this thread.

silvercue

Aegis said:

silvercue said:

2024 is gearing up to be a great year for crypto.  FED Dovish, interest rate drops expected, halving, Spot ETFs

Bitcoin up 150% already this year and only just starting to gear up.  My biggest bag, ADA, is up 150% in last 3 months.

On top of the ludicrous APRs I am getting yield farming.   Looking good.

My stock portfolio is up 49% YTD, but dwarfed by my Crypto gains.

Funny to see the crypto bashers still spend all of their time in a thread for a product they are not interested in investing in!   

Someone who bought a winning lottery ticket would be showing gains that dwarf your crypto gains. Doesn't make it a good investment, just means that they got lucky. And in fact, it's a very similar concept, in that both are zero sum games at best, so any gains that one person sees must eventually be offset by losses incurred by someone else (or multiple someone elses).

What a ridiculous analogy.  Winning the lottery is millions to one.  99.99999% or players are losers.  

BTC outperforms gold, SPX, NASDAQ regularly.  It has massively outperformed them over the last 5 years, 10 years....

silvercue

Funny how the Trolls who have no interest in investing in Bitcoin STILL spend more time in the thread than any other.

User232002

Qyburn said:

Fair enough. I think the point has been made and anyone who's bothered can quickly research for themselves. Hopefully someone will realise that misquoting a tertiary source "from memory" is a poor way to try to make a point.

Misquoting was not the not the original criticism. You said it was made up. It isn't.

Malthusian said:

I found it very illuminating. In one version of the story Frau Miggens walks into her bank to find that all her fiat currency has been rugpulled ("nobody will accept the Krone anymore"). In the real story she walks into her bank to find that nobody will accept her fiat currency... except to give her a different fiat currency that has a different name and fewer zeroes, which she can then exchange for goods and services as before. 

Let me break this down for you. There were 6 years between your two sentences.

In 1918, nobody would take her fiat currency anymore.
In 1925, a failed state replaced its made up currency with another made up currency, although by that point it could only buy a fraction of a percent of the goods and services it originally bought in 1918.

Malthusian said:

What's not clear is why it would have been a better idea for her to find some bros solving mathematical puzzles on an abacus and buy their receipts for the solved puzzles, as per the premise of this thread.

The Krone was to CHF / GBP / USD in 1920 what fiat currencies will be to Bitcoin this decade. The truth is that Bitcoin isn't going up, your fiat currency is going down.

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I came across a couple of lectures given by John Nash a few months ago on the idea of asymptotically ideal money. Has a lot of the ideas relevant to Bitcoin, including money being a technology, Gold being an approximate solution but not an ideal one and how systems of monies might compete. Would recommend reading to anyone interested, particularly given his background.

Aegis

silvercue said:

Aegis said:

silvercue said:

2024 is gearing up to be a great year for crypto.  FED Dovish, interest rate drops expected, halving, Spot ETFs

Bitcoin up 150% already this year and only just starting to gear up.  My biggest bag, ADA, is up 150% in last 3 months.

On top of the ludicrous APRs I am getting yield farming.   Looking good.

My stock portfolio is up 49% YTD, but dwarfed by my Crypto gains.

Funny to see the crypto bashers still spend all of their time in a thread for a product they are not interested in investing in!   

Someone who bought a winning lottery ticket would be showing gains that dwarf your crypto gains. Doesn't make it a good investment, just means that they got lucky. And in fact, it's a very similar concept, in that both are zero sum games at best, so any gains that one person sees must eventually be offset by losses incurred by someone else (or multiple someone elses).

What a ridiculous analogy.  Winning the lottery is millions to one.  99.99999% or players are losers.  

BTC outperforms gold, SPX, NASDAQ regularly.  It has massively outperformed them over the last 5 years, 10 years....

The fact that you think it's a ridiculous analogy shows that you do not understand what a zero sum game is.

Aegis

silvercue said:

Funny how the Trolls who have no interest in investing in Bitcoin STILL spend more time in the thread than any other.

It's fascinating to me to see people caught up in a wholly irrational mania making statements about investments that are entirely nonsensical, and the fact that I am providing an alternative view means that anyone looking into the thread can see both the proponents and the sceptics without needing to do any further research if they don't want to.

MacPingu1986

User232002 said:

Currently up about 3x on the capital I deployed in to crypto this year and all I did was buy a handful of assets and wait.

Would very much like to thank these mythical multiple other people that contributed to my wealth in this zero sum game. Very generous of them.

Cheers.

Nothing mythical... as many many other posters have commented - buying cryptocurrency, or any currency, or gold, or fine art, or wine, as an investment is a zero sum game because its value is only based on the ability to sell it onto someone else at a later date - for what you hope will be a higher price. The asset doesn't "do" anything itself. You buy it, store it, and hope that someone in the future will pay you more than you paid for it.

When you dispose of your assets to crystalise your gain - that's because you've sold the assets to someone else. Your gain directly and only comes from someone else paying more - it can't come from anywhere else. It's zero-sum trading so those gains have to come from other making losses whether now, or in the future.

This is a money saving board so the relative safety of an asset class is important, as is it's ability to benefit the majority of investors rather than a lucky well timed few.  This is particularly important when various pro-crypto posters are constantly pumping up how others should invest in crypto whilst ignoring (or at the very least quickly glossing over) how risky it is for the vast majority.

Whilst you've made a substantial gain so far, my own experiences with cryptocurrency (not bitcoin) resulted in over an 80% loss. Fortunately it was only a very small part of my savings and investments but many others have faired far worse and as its zero sum without others making losses you *can't* make your gains.

silvercue

Aegis said:

silvercue said:

Aegis said:

silvercue said:

2024 is gearing up to be a great year for crypto.  FED Dovish, interest rate drops expected, halving, Spot ETFs

Bitcoin up 150% already this year and only just starting to gear up.  My biggest bag, ADA, is up 150% in last 3 months.

On top of the ludicrous APRs I am getting yield farming.   Looking good.

My stock portfolio is up 49% YTD, but dwarfed by my Crypto gains.

Funny to see the crypto bashers still spend all of their time in a thread for a product they are not interested in investing in!   

Someone who bought a winning lottery ticket would be showing gains that dwarf your crypto gains. Doesn't make it a good investment, just means that they got lucky. And in fact, it's a very similar concept, in that both are zero sum games at best, so any gains that one person sees must eventually be offset by losses incurred by someone else (or multiple someone elses).

What a ridiculous analogy.  Winning the lottery is millions to one.  99.99999% or players are losers.  

BTC outperforms gold, SPX, NASDAQ regularly.  It has massively outperformed them over the last 5 years, 10 years....

The fact that you think it's a ridiculous analogy shows that you do not understand what a zero sum game is.

If you buy Bitcoin you have a speculative asset you can keep or sell.  It gains or loses value as supply v demand does its thing, in the same way Stocks appreciate and depreciate in value as supply v demand does its thing there.

Not much like gambling on the lottery at 45 million to one odds or more.   

If you think crypto has no value, or is too risky or whatever - good for you.   Most investments carry risk.    if it is not for you, great.   

zagfles

silvercue said:

Funny how the Trolls who have no interest in investing in Bitcoin STILL spend more time in the thread than any other.

Trolls?? Seriously? Read the OP 

"Is investing in Bitcoin really worth it or is it all just a scam ?". This thread is about whether it's worth investing in Bitcoin OR NOT. So both sides are the argument are wanted. 

"more time in this thread that any other" I've got 20,000 posts on MSE and maybe a dozen on crypto, others seem similar.  

You want an echo chamber where you only get one side of the argument? Tough, you won't get it here.