I always wonder how an opinion piece from WSJ or the economist can change the direction(few billion $) of the market to some extent. Especially in these markets which are partly running on mass hysteria.
Is Bitcoin a Bubble? Economists Say ‘Yes’
161–170 of 238 posts
Re: Is Bitcoin a Bubble? Economists Say ‘Yes’
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree. As soon as anyone starts comparing crypto currencies and Bitcoin to tulips I tune out. It is a sign that they clearly do not understand what they are talking about.
Totally right. Tulips were a tangible asset with intrinsic value.
You gave a good laugh thanks
Re: Is Bitcoin a Bubble? Economists Say ‘Yes’
#163Both the founder and lead dev of Ethereum and Litecoin think they are both significantly overvalued. Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum): https://mobile.twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/94085013791... Charlie Lee (Litecoin): https://twitter.com/SatoshiLite/status/940353265585160192 I've been bullish on crypto past few years but it's gone too far. I've flipped to bear until the tech catches up.
Vitalik thinks it's overvalued compared to what it can do today , but that just means the market is confident that it will be able to do much more later.
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Re: Is Bitcoin a Bubble? Economists Say ‘Yes’
#164Did you guys see this thread on Twitter a couple of days ago? https://twitter.com/TedOnPrivacy/status/940588631709896704 Have you had similar problems selling bitcoin? EDIT: saw -> see
I've always wondered this. Even if you have $10k USD worth of BTC, you still need to find someone to buy it? What if you wanted to cash out $100k or $500k? At that point you need legal contracts, escrows, 3rd party verification, etc..
Re: Is Bitcoin a Bubble? Economists Say ‘Yes’
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
>If there's 1 thing I've learned in the past 2 years, it's that experts can be deadly wrong (Trump being president, Brexit). Be very careful with those conclusions. In both cases the predictions were that the elections were very close. Trump winning the presidency when the best models we had gave him a 30% chance is not a failing of prediction at all.
Taleb wrote at long on the election models. TL;DR: A proper statistical analysis should have given around even odds (50:50), not 98:2. "So back to the mechanism of the model, Taleb imposes a no-arbitrage condition (borrowed from options pricing) to impose time-varying consistency on the Brier score. This is a similar concept to financial options, where you can go bankrupt or make money even before the final event. In…
People should be cautious when citing Taleb as an absolute authority. He envisions himself as an anti-intellectual, and doesn't mind talking out of his rear. I enjoyed his book Fooled by Randomness, but he repeatedly bashed "journalists" throughout---maybe an early indicator of the "fake news" movement even among those who should know better.
Anyone who proposed 98% certainty was ridiculous and should not be taken seriously either (there could be exceptions but I don't think so). It amounts to beating up a strawman.
But I just don't understand what that quoted paragraph means and how it proves that it was 50% or anything else. A forecast should go bankrupt before it gets to the final event, what? Dynamic time constraints meaning what exactly? I'm genuinely curious.
Maybe Taleb is just an intellectual god that my puny intellect will never completely understand, and I should just take him at his word, and I'm sure he would agree. But I remain skeptical of people who display open contempt for people (I used to follow him on Twitter) who require a better explanation to understand what they're saying.
Re: Is Bitcoin a Bubble? Economists Say ‘Yes’
#166Seems to me international fiat currencies are the bigger, more pressing bubbles. But what do I know? How many people know about QE, NIRP, or PPT?
Fiat currencies are still reasonably stable compared to actual goods right now. I know that can and has changed in the past (pre/post WWII germany), but at the moment, they are not in a bubble. Not at the same level that bitcoin is, anyway.
How do I know this? Well, because I can still get a gallon of milk or loaf of bread for ~$3. If I put that $3 into bitcoin, I'd get some fraction of a coin (roughly 0.0001). Which is all well and good until the bubble bursts, and suddenly milk is worth 0.1 bitcoins. Did milk suddenly become 1000x more valuable? No, bitcoin lost value.
This is something I don't understand about people who say they "cashed out of fiat currency". Fiat currency is still what everything is valued by. The value of a gallon is milk is relatively stable. Compared to this, fiat fluctuates a little, and bitcoin is a drunk on a rollercoaster.
Which, if you consider fiat currencies to be a bubble, would make me even more concerned for bitcoin as it is a bubble within a bubble.
Re: Is Bitcoin a Bubble? Economists Say ‘Yes’
#167Both the founder and lead dev of Ethereum and Litecoin think they are both significantly overvalued. Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum): https://mobile.twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/94085013791... Charlie Lee (Litecoin): https://twitter.com/SatoshiLite/status/940353265585160192 I've been bullish on crypto past few years but it's gone too far. I've flipped to bear until the tech catches up.
I was just reviewing the avg tx fee on major coins. Micropayments aren't possible on any widely accepted coin. BTC has hit 20 USD a tx (albeit without segwit). It's looking a little rough. Might be time for a draw back. EDIT: I was pulling together the avg tx fees from https://bitinfocharts.com/ $BTC: 24.4 USD $ETH: 1.07 USD $BCH: 0.17 USD $LTC: 0.632 USD $DASH: 0.62 USD $XMR: 5.49 USD My other thoughts on the subjec…
And then there's RiaBlocks which looks the most promising currently. I hope it gets a rigorous security review though. IOTA, Byteball, Steem, BitShares etc. don't really cut it IMO. Cardano also has reasonable plans for scalability.
Re: Is Bitcoin a Bubble? Economists Say ‘Yes’
#168It is still pioneers and early adopters time, people seeing bitcoin as the first possible single currency for the entire planet. We will see how it goes when the masses and legislators come. Utopian it is not anymore and even technically feasible nowadays, so we will have attempts.
My grandma bought some Bitcoin last week and she doesn’t even use the internet. Friends who are not tech-savvy are talking about Bitcoin often. It most definitely is not still “pioneers and early adopters time”—that idea seems to be Bitcoin propaganda aimed at potential new Bitcoin buyers on the margin.
This sounds like the Joe Kennedy Shoe Shine story.
Re: Is Bitcoin a Bubble? Economists Say ‘Yes’
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
>If there's 1 thing I've learned in the past 2 years, it's that experts can be deadly wrong (Trump being president, Brexit). Be very careful with those conclusions. In both cases the predictions were that the elections were very close. Trump winning the presidency when the best models we had gave him a 30% chance is not a failing of prediction at all.
> Trump winning the presidency when the best models we had gave him a 30% chance is not a failing of prediction at all. How accurate the "best models" were isn't really relevant to the accuracy of the predictions of experts as a whole. The media was running that Clinton had a 98% chance of winning the morning of the race.
The media were not running on data.
The data gave her 70%. We're in the 30% of universes where Trump won.
In this scenario, you might argue, these are just talking heads. But they are not being asked for a view in order to look popular on TV, they're looking at data and interpreting it in a way that they are happy to be professionally accountable for.
Wisdom of crowds in the context of talking heads shooting the odds on a media out is not going to be as accurate as wisdom of crowds for economists being asked about economic issues.
So, you know, be careful where you're drawing lines here.
Re: Is Bitcoin a Bubble? Economists Say ‘Yes’
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most of the time Ethereum is less than a penny for a simple value transfer, and it does more than twice as many transactions per day as Bitcoin. It's also pretty easy to implement simple payment channels: http://www.blunderingcode.com/a-lightning-network-in-two-pag...
I was just pulling up avg tx fees. I realize that tx cost on ETH varies highly, do you have a preferred site to tell what contracts are economically viable for what amounts? For instance I would be happy to buy a cryptokitty or two at the ~1 USD price range, but if the tx fees are ~1 USD then it's obviously a no go.
For ETH, https://ethgasstation.info has not let me down.