cryptocurrency and bitcoin

eskbanker

Scottex99 said:
Crypto/Blockchain isn't going anywhere  

Excellent diplomatic skills, finding a nicely ambiguous form of wording that both sides of the argument can agree with, each believing it supports their case!

Scottex99

haha, Freudian 

User232002

Linton said:

Let's consider BTC as a store of value.  One of the key features of Gold, which for some people outweighs all its disadvantages, such as volatility,  is that it is difficult to destroy and will survive the worst disasters barring the end of the world.  It is really the one thing that could be exchangeable for the basics of life in the event of a global apocalypse. Can BTC?  What happens if the power or just the communications networks go down?  Are your BTCs of any value? Would you be able to you sell them for a tin of beans?

I don't think you've really thought this through.

1. Humanity has nuclear weapons. If there is an apocalypse, you or I probably wont see it through. 
2. Definitely not the main reason people buy gold. Most gold is bought and stored by custodians. If the world goes full mad max, a paper claim on some gold in a vault thousands of miles away is worth precisely zero.
3. People have forgotten how brutal the world used to be. If by some miracle you survive and happen to have physical gold, an alpha chad isn't bartering with you for beans. Hes going to kill you with his friends and take it all anyway.

This is another strawman. I'm not buying Bitcoin because I want to survive an apocalypse. 

Linton said:

Out of interest, how do you bequeath your Bitcoins to your favourite grand-daughter? Perhaps it's easy, I dont know.  No problem with gold.

Numerous options/companies to do this. Takes some planning but hardly more than any estate planning should do. Its also not 'no problem' with gold if you have anything approaching a significant amount by the way. Way easier to leave a private key in a specific way than a pile of a heavy physical metal.

Linton said:

As to whether BTC has won the "store of value prize", dont you think that after only 13 years it is possibly a little early to make that judgement?  Come back in 50, 100 years and we will see.  Gold has millennia of history and is deeply embedded in cultures across the world.

I was referring to the crypto space. There were numerous coins competing with Bitcoin to become the the premier SoV 'coin' - they lost.

But to your point; the rate of progress of humanity is exponentially higher than it was thousands of years ago, which I believe exponentially reduces the amount of time required for something to be designated a 'success' or historically significant. If you doubt this, I would point out that (1) Bitcoins rate of user growth is faster than the internet, and (2) Nobody right now is saying "Well, email is great and all, but we've used horses, letters and mailmen for thousands of years so come back to me in 50 or 100 years and we will see whether this fad catches on." 

Linton said:
I dont own any gold, but I am finding it difficult to see why BTC has any advantages as a store of value.

The metrics on Bitcoin vs Gold are pretty unambiguous. Its not really something you can have an opinion on. Bitcoin is just objectively better. As I keep pointing out, the market has decided this (Gold vs Bitcoin inflows negatively correlated for a couple of years now I believe).

Linton said:

Why would I weant to send my stored wealth anywhere in the world in minutes?

This stuff really annoys me. It comes from a place of privilege. How lucky you are to not have had to consider the benefits of money free from a trusted third party and the interference they wield. What if your country suffers from hyper inflation? What if your government restricts payments to you on the basis of your beliefs? What if it has capital controls? Sanctions? The list is endless.

The reason I bought Bitcoin for the first time was because of border controls. I can memorise a few words and store my entire net worth in my head and walk across any border in the world.

User232002

IvanOpinion said:

I find these bitcoin threads quite comical. 
If anybody ever wants to see examples of confirmation bias they only need to read a bitcoin thread.

I don't think this is necessarily true of the more recent Bitcoiners. I think you've got a lot of technical people in the space that are used to assessing evidence on its merits. Sure, right now we have a specific conclusion on the question - but I think if it became apparent that the conclusion was flawed we would change our viewpoint. Part of the reason I continue to post here is because I believe exposing your views to counter arguments is the best way of making them robust. Well, that and the fact that I can't wait to come back in 2026 and sh1tpost when I'm right. But mainly, the former.

There are things that can stop Bitcoin, its just that nobody here has yet mentioned them.

Zola. said:

There's no need to be so tribal one way or the other. I invest in index funds, active funds, property and bitcoin. 

Agreed. I just think Bitcoin is the fastest horse right now. However, its also pretty clear that the S&P500 is becoming an 'up only' instrument and a lot of the arguments for Bitcoin can be applied to property too and that is certainly something that I'll be considering. 

tebbins said:

I do not know how to make educated guesses about the future returns of an asset with no intrinsic value, no reliable method of determining value, that relies entirely on the internet, other people being willing to buy it for me in future, and huge amounts of power, for an activity of no net economic utility to anyone.

I see you've gone full old man ranting at a cloud now. However, you can't keep restating points that have been argued against over and over again as if they are facts. I pointed out in the other thread how you can earn a return on your Bitcoin. I pointed out in the other thread that Bitcoins central premise is entirely about providing an economic benefit. I pointed out in the other thread the folly of the 'no intrinsic value' argument. 

Strangely, when provided with reasoned arguments you disappeared in to the ether, only to reappear on another thread with the same starting points. Its tiresome to keep repeating the same stuff to someone that doesn't have the capacity to adapt.

I look forward to 2026.

Nifty_Purse said:

Cryptocurrencies are only as sustainable as the computer systems they rely on especially the energy consumption of the computers/servers. The mining of these currencies uses huge amounts of electric. The safety/security of the currency increases the more computing takes place (more computers/servers and more difficult/complex puzzle/competition) that uses more and more electricity. 

Ultimately, no government is going to support such an energy intensive industry if it's impacting their power grid. 
So the question is: is it possible to reduce this energy consumption quickly?
Since Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft have been saying for years that they will change their data centres to renewable energy and have changed very little it doesn't look likely.

What happens when these currency mines cannot access sufficient electricity?

Drivel. I've already posted about this at length in the Bitcoin thread. Game theory incentivises miners to set up around renewable energy providers (they have cheap electricity that they can't store very well, so will sell it cheaply). Also uses way less energy than the current global financial system, so turning off wall street and putting everything on the blockchain would be a net emissions reduction.

To the bolded, in 2017 we were told that by 2021 Bitcoin would consume the entire worlds supply of electricity. My lights are still on and the Bitcoin network is still running.

Cus said:

Firstly, I think people using the word crypto and bundling it all together is as incorrect as bundling buying Dow futures derivatives versus investing in us treasuries. People don't appreciate the nuances.

I completely agree. I've been careful in certain replies to use the words 'tokens' rather than 'coins' or 'currencies.' Its hard though, because a lot of newbies believe every cryptoasset is some form of coin and don't appreciate that some behave like equity in a stock or as voting rights / board seats in a company. Because they don't understand these different use cases, I struggle with whether to actually talk about these. People here are still arguing that Bitcoin has no value because its just a hexadecimal number, so they are way behind debating the mechanics of SUSHI vs UNI vs CAKE or something like that.

Cus said:

I worry that a lot of young people may get burnt in the next year or two, and I worry that when younger people finally only see it as store of value and not expect rapid price rises then it may crash to a realistic level. If bitcoin went to $10mn each, would people sell? I think that selling into fiat contradicts the whole idea.

Definitely correct, but honestly what can they expect if they buy a 'coin' because it has a picture of a dog on it? Nobody here is suggesting to invest in the tail end of the crypto stuff so that's not on us.

As to the second point, theres a lovely Matrix meme about selling your Bitcoins for millions someday and 'not having to.' Right now you can get a loan against your BTC in 15 minutes, paying less interest than a loan from traditional finance, with no AML or KYC stuff. History shows you that wealth is built not by selling assets, but by holding appreciating assets and borrowing against them.

At points in the future I may be net short on BTC, but I won't be selling my BTC to do that.

Cus said:

But blockchain, crypto payments in the metaverse etc etc are concepts that are going to dominate the near future.

Literally NFI what the metaverse is and I'm convinced nobody else does either. That said, a poster on here made a comment about Enron the other day and I came across something I found interesting. Blockbuster had a deal with Enron (who had bought up a lot of the broadband cable being laid in the late 90s) for a movie streaming service. At the time, people thought this deal was 'pie in the sky' thinking, and when the highest speed is ADSL and only 5% of the population has that - that's probably a fair assessment. They weren't wrong though; Netflix shows they were just a decade or so too early.

So yeah, the metaverse probably is a thing. DeFi obviously too. But we are miles off from those right now I think. Lets get sound money sorted first.

Zola.

Darren, you are the MVP mate.

HCIMbtw

Zola. said:

Darren, you are the MVP mate.

Honestly Darren out here with da vinci levels of crypto knowledge and foresight.. and i'm here chewing on crayons almost to lazy to set up DCA for ETH/BTC in coinbase pro

tebbins

Zola. said:

Darren, you are the MVP mate.

HCIMbtw said:

Zola. said:

Darren, you are the MVP mate.

Honestly Darren out here with da vinci levels of crypto knowledge and foresight.. and i'm here chewing on crayons almost to lazy to set up DCA for ETH/BTC in coinbase pro

I do enjoy a good tickle 😆

Scottex99

HCIMbtw said:

Zola. said:

Darren, you are the MVP mate.

Honestly Darren out here with da vinci levels of crypto knowledge and foresight.. and i'm here chewing on crayons almost to lazy to set up DCA for ETH/BTC in coinbase pro

Haha, 💯 

Ps. It’s probably PCA for you 😼

User232002

HCIMbtw said:

Zola. said:

Darren, you are the MVP mate.

Honestly Darren out here with da vinci levels of crypto knowledge and foresight.. and i'm here chewing on crayons almost to lazy to set up DCA for ETH/BTC in coinbase pro

I'm grateful for the kind words, but I'm really not. I feel like an absolute moron when I speak to my friends who work FT in this space.

My friends told me about Bitcoin in 2011. At the time, exchanges didn't exist so you had to Paypal funds to a miner to buy. I resolved to buy a couple of hundred dollars worth and forget about it, but the transaction didn't go through for some reason and I never went back and completed it. I bought Bitcoin for the first time in 2013 or 14 for $250 and sold it a month later. In 2016/7 I believed Bitcoin was flawed. I was looking at buying a bored ape when they were 0.5 - 1 ETH in April or May but thought spending $1500 on a jpg was nonsense. They are now worth $120k+ minimum. I haven't used a bridge yet. I own a bag of ALGO that I haven't moved off CB because I'm lazy (bought at low levels, would not encourage buying this at current levels).

So plenty of missed opportunities along the way. The next few months might get a little crazy, but there will probably be some form of blow off top followed by a long consolidation period (even with institutions in the game, I think this happens even if its perhaps to a lesser extent). The real wealth is built in that period by sticking around when everyone gets bored and goes home for a couple of years.

Adyinvestment

darren232002 said:

The next few months might get a little crazy, but there will probably be some form of blow off top followed by a long consolidation period (even with institutions in the game, I think this happens even if its perhaps to a lesser extent). The real wealth is built in that period by sticking around when everyone gets bored and goes home for a couple of years.

You have just described by future crypto ideal scenario and what I am basing my crypto investing around - I hope we are right.

Large wealth can be made from a bear market.