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What Goldman Is Telling Big Money Clients About Bitcoin

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Re: What Goldman Is Telling Big Money Clients About Bitcoin

#81

Post by fullshark »

ericb wrote: post #75
fullshark wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is they will tank since their value is driven by speculation right now.

So far I believe cryptocurrency is one of, if the not the most, uncorrelated asset class. https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2016/06/02/4-reasons-...

Yeah cause it's going through wild price swings due to idiosyncratic factors (Mt Gox, "Civil War", Coinbase decreasing purchasing frictions etc) which are pretty orthogonal to the stock market.

Regardless I think the wild price ride crypto has been on this past year is primarily driven by speculation (and possibly market manipulation), and as such when the recession comes and investors face a liquidity crunch they will sell their BTC.

Re: What Goldman Is Telling Big Money Clients About Bitcoin

#82

Post by luckydude »

Animats wrote: post #25

Bear in mind that Goldman Sachs is now about making Goldman Sachs money. For well over a century, they were about making rich people richer and taking a cut. That's no longer the case, and their advice to their clients is no longer particularly good. It's now just usual sell-side broker "analysis". Read "Why I am Leaving Goldman Sachs."[1] A friend who was a Goldman Sachs client noticed this when, around 2011, they s…

I was a very small Goldman client for a while (they typically don't take people with less than $10M and I was way less than that). A buddy of mine got them to let me in as a client.

He had $110M with them and he thought that would be enough that they'd treat him well. Not the case, they tried to sell him crap. He thought, at the time, that you had to be worth $1B before you were "in the club". He was pretty disgusted and moved elsewhere.

I'm not really sure why anyone would want to be a Goldman client.

Re: What Goldman Is Telling Big Money Clients About Bitcoin

#83

Post by RandVal30142 »

keymone wrote: post #64
RandVal30142 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No seriously, show the transactions you consider to be spam. Classify them in some tangible way, then identify the users behind them. The specific claim was that it was from "Roger Ver and his cronies," not that a mempool backlog exists. Show the transactions you claim to be "spam," and identify the persons behind them. Go do it.

a simple glance on that graph with knowledge of notable events in bitcoin timeline screams that the "omg blocks full mempool gigantic" argument is fishy. i don't really care that i can't convince you without spending hours and hours satisfying your standard of evidence, i have better things to do.

>a simple glance

Show the damned transactions.

> with knowledge of notable events

The claim was very specific, show the damned transactions.

>i don't really care that i can't convince you

Because you can't show what the "spam" is let alone show who is "spamming."

Re: What Goldman Is Telling Big Money Clients About Bitcoin

#84

Post by tradersam »

RandVal30142 wrote: post #83
keymone wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a simple glance on that graph with knowledge of notable events in bitcoin timeline screams that the "omg blocks full mempool gigantic" argument is fishy. i don't really care that i can't convince you without spending hours and hours satisfying your standard of evidence, i have better things to do.

>a simple glance Show the damned transactions. > with knowledge of notable events The claim was very specific, show the damned transactions. >i don't really care that i can't convince you Because you can't show what the "spam" is let alone show who is "spamming."

I can't prove the transactions were Ver's anymore than I can prove some are yours.

But as keymone said, the timeline of events is fishy. How come they stop when the block size debate does, or Roger uses them as examples in post after post of why Core needed to be replaced because of this huge backlog. When, you can look at the transactions yourself, most are dust, and they peak when the debate does.

I can't prove it, sure. But myself and many others think this because it is logical, and it sounds like there is no changing your mind so we'll stop here.

Re: What Goldman Is Telling Big Money Clients About Bitcoin

#85

Post by justinzollars »

ericb wrote: post #75
fullshark wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is they will tank since their value is driven by speculation right now.

So far I believe cryptocurrency is one of, if the not the most, uncorrelated asset class. https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2016/06/02/4-reasons-...

But they seem to be correlated with one another - look at the similarity between ETC, BTC and LTC

Re: What Goldman Is Telling Big Money Clients About Bitcoin

#86

Post by mrb »

grey-area wrote: post #56
mrb wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main use cases for decentralization are: absolute control of your money, and censorship resistance. Think deeply about what this means. Most people have no idea. Just a few examples (typing on the phone): no company or system can accidentally/intentionally deny your transactions, no merchants can charge you against your will, harder for oppressive government to seize wallets of targeted citizens/organizations, et…

The problems with this vision are manifold. 1. Governments have laws backed by guns to prevent things they don't like (like transactions or investments escaping taxation). If you want to change the system of governance, that's fine, but a currency is not going to do it alone, because they will mandate control over your currency or ban it outright. You can't opt out of government. Perhaps we need a new form of governm…

1. Decentralized cryptos certainly do help evade oppressive authorities. It's easier to discover & seize a bank account than to discover & seize someone's memorized warpwallet password. Compare that to Chinese using VPNs to evade the GFW. Sure, the GFW is pretty good at blocking VPNs (see my experience: http://blog.zorinaq.com/my-experience-with-the-great-firewal...) but they certainly do help evade it.

2. I think your are being pedantic on the definition of "absolute". For all practical purposes, in the entire history of Bitcoin, its users have had absolute control over their money. There has never been a single documented event of a protocol change to block, or miners colluding to block a particular transaction (except obvious bugs like the 2010 int overflow where someone created X billion illegitimate bitcoins.)

3. Again, decentralized cryptos certainly do help evade censorship, compared to traditional centralized financial systems. A bank account is trivial to seize. A Bitcoin warpwallet, not so much.

4. No I don't assume that. I had more in mind the example of a user wanting to donate to wikileaks, and credit card companies deciding to block these transactions. Bitcoin prevents this from happening.

Re: What Goldman Is Telling Big Money Clients About Bitcoin

#87

Post by grey-area »

mrb wrote: post #86
grey-area wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problems with this vision are manifold. 1. Governments have laws backed by guns to prevent things they don't like (like transactions or investments escaping taxation). If you want to change the system of governance, that's fine, but a currency is not going to do it alone, because they will mandate control over your currency or ban it outright. You can't opt out of government. Perhaps we need a new form of governm…

1. Decentralized cryptos certainly do help evade oppressive authorities. It's easier to discover & seize a bank account than to discover & seize someone's memorized warpwallet password. Compare that to Chinese using VPNs to evade the GFW. Sure, the GFW is pretty good at blocking VPNs (see my experience: http://blog.zorinaq.com/my-experience-with-the-great-firewal... ) but they certainly do help evade it. 2. I think y…

except obvious bugs like the 2010 int overflow where someone created X billion illegitimate bitcoins

QED. Also see the recent Bitcoin cash fork, and the severe volatility caused by the speculation in the currency, which is a problem for anyone holding it.

A Bitcoin warpwallet, not so much.

I disagree. If it lives on a server a warrant will force them to give it up, if it lives on your computer, a warrant will force you to give the physical computer up (which can then be destroyed or kept indefinitely). It is thus as trivial to seize as the places it is stored, and as your physical being is (pretty trivial).

No I don't assume that. I had more in mind the example of a user wanting to donate to wikileaks, and credit card companies deciding to block these transactions. Bitcoin prevents this from happening.

I agree it was useful for that, but mainly because laws have not caught up with reality. If this were a widespread problem there are of course lots of avenues governments could use to shut off the funds, not least simply outlawing bitcoin, wikileaks, or both. I'm not saying that to be pedantic, but to point out that you're using technology to solve a social/legal problem. It may work for a while if it is not widespread, but laws are enforceable even against unbeatable cryptography because everyone lives in physical space.

If you want true change in your relationship to government, bitcoin won't get you there, because though it seems superficially useful for avoiding government scrutiny, it doesn't address the fundamental problems with it.

Re: What Goldman Is Telling Big Money Clients About Bitcoin

#88

Post by soVeryTired »

runeks wrote: post #66
soVeryTired wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Currencies aren't backed by bonds.

Bonds comprise the vast majority of assets on the balance sheet of the central bank, so why not? When gold was the primary asset on the balance sheet of central banks, we said that their currency was backed by gold. So why isn’t it backed by bonds now, when they have replaced gold in this regard?

When the dollar was backed by gold, it was possible to go to the central bank and redeem a fixed number of dollars for a certain amount of gold. While central banks do hold bonds on their balance sheets, it is not true that an investor can convert a predetermined dollar amount into a bond at the central bank: bond prices are determined by the market.

Re: What Goldman Is Telling Big Money Clients About Bitcoin

#89

Post by nylonstrung »

canoebuilder wrote: post #80
nylonstrung wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gold is strictly an investment vehicle for all intents and purposes. The vast majority of its price is due to recognition as a store of value vs inherent utility. It doesn't require a 'mission' to have value- the fact enough of society (still a small minority which actually invests or knows the price) recognizes that others recognize it has value allows it to fulfill exactly this function

Doesn't gold's role as a store of value ultimately rest on it's underlying potential utility and it's material scarcity. Crypto currency is anything but scarce these days, certain brands of crypto may be more or less scarce, but gold is not separated from other elements by a brand name over-top of substantially similar functioning and composition.

Gold's value is ostensibly about it's utility but the price is completely disconnected from said utility. A massive amount of the supply is devoted to speculation and jewelry, which itself is a reflection of the arbitrary value and price vs any actual physical properties of it. In many ways its value is still a function of properties it had hundreds of years ago that made it eminently suitable for coinage and the belief networks have persisted.

If we weren't using gold in this way the price would indisputably be a fraction of what it is vs if the industrial applications stopped it would definitely still retail value.

Bitcoin is limited to 21M coins and we are at 19M of them. It is functionally more scarce than gold in that once we hit 21M that's it- we can't develop some new technology that unlocks more gold like asteroid mining.

Re: What Goldman Is Telling Big Money Clients About Bitcoin

#90

Post by mrb »

grey-area wrote: post #87
mrb wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Decentralized cryptos certainly do help evade oppressive authorities. It's easier to discover & seize a bank account than to discover & seize someone's memorized warpwallet password. Compare that to Chinese using VPNs to evade the GFW. Sure, the GFW is pretty good at blocking VPNs (see my experience: http://blog.zorinaq.com/my-experience-with-the-great-firewal... ) but they certainly do help evade it. 2. I think y…

except obvious bugs like the 2010 int overflow where someone created X billion illegitimate bitcoins QED. Also see the recent Bitcoin cash fork, and the severe volatility caused by the speculation in the currency, which is a problem for anyone holding it. A Bitcoin warpwallet, not so much. I disagree. If it lives on a server a warrant will force them to give it up, if it lives on your computer, a warrant will force y…

"QED"

Err, this bugfix doesn't show people don't have absolute control of their bitcoins.

"Also see the recent Bitcoin cash fork"

Still doesn't demonstrate that people don't have absolute control of their Bitcoins.

"the severe volatility"

Still doesn't demonstrate that people don't have absolute control of their Bitcoins.

You look ridiculous trying to argue Bitcoin doesn't give absolute control of one's money. That's the one thing Bitcoin does perfectly well and that is universally recognized.

"If it lives on a server"

The point of a warpwallet is that it doesn't live anywhere. It's a passphrase you memorize.

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