251–260 of 371 posts
The whole Tethers thing scares me the most: https://twitter.com/Bitfinexed/status/953398351889944576 There's $5B worth.
Tether performs public service of "quantitative easing" :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The concepts are easy to separate: Investment is symbiotic, Speculation is parasitic. Having clear concepts is more important when the real-world examples are complicated.
How is speculation parasitic?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Holy Shit, are they just trying to print out tethers out of thin air right now to pump Bitcoin? That's the line I often see on Twitter / Reddit and usually gets a lot of upvotes, despite being irrational, with no proof to back it up. As bitcoin falls, the demand for Tethers goes up. To keep Tethers pegged to, say, $1 USD, they need issue more to meet the demand, which would be a more rational explanation why more w…
> As bitcoin falls, the demand for Tethers goes up. Or maybe people want USD, but the exchange forces them to go through Tether to get there. So there'll be a brief demand for Tethers, then a big selloff of Tether for USD.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just like with dot com burst, it doesnt mean someone will turn the lights off forever. Just like the internet eventually got mainstream and websites are being bought and sold for billions these days, same way BitCoin will never be at 0,001 cent with nobody touch it with a long stick.
Sure, if you cherry pick. What ever happened to the supposed value of "hot" domain names? Right, we got search, and got used to typing in weird strings, and stopped caring about owning car.com or whatever.
Skyrocketed in value from hundreds of dollars in the mid-late 90's to tens/hundreds of thousands of dollars today?
Not sure that's the point you were trying to make though :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is speculation parasitic?
Speculators seek to extract alpha without regard to the overall health of the instrument. Shorting is just as good as going long, so far as you make a profit.
Regardless, what defines speculation is not parasitism, it's uncertainty. And there's uncertainty in any investment as well. That's why there's no clear line between the two.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is the P/E ratio of Bitcoin? There is none. So there is no rational basis for any price. $1 is as valid as $1 million. There is no traditional way to analyze this investment and figure out its real worth. To the limited extent that Bitcoin helps Chinese citizens out-maneuver the capital controls that the Chinese government has tried to enforce, then it could be analyzed as a shadow of the Chinese currency, but s…
What's the "rational basis" for a specific value of the P/E ratio? There are many stocks that belong to companies that have no mechanisms in place nor could they be reasonably expected to introduce mechanisms to directly return profits to shareholders. These stocks have the same form of "intrinsic value" as gold or Bitcoin: whatever the hell the next person is willing to pay for it. Pretending that an underlying asse…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, but a 1000% higher likelihood is close to meaningless if we’re talking about extremely tiny fractions in absolute terms. For example, a substance that increases your baseline risk of some type of cancer from 0.000003% to 0.00003% is basically imperceptible in a population of 300M people. That’s 90 incidents instead of 9 incidents out of the entire United States. You don’t have to tell me exact figures for how m…
Your analysis is wrong. Startups and crypto investments can be seen as bets and a 10x increase in favor of you is a lot. And you are not taking into account the effort factor: startups are hard while storing some cryptoassets works even when you sleep. Not saying this will work forever, just saying that many people found it lucky to enjoy the momentum.
So you think a 1000% increase in likelihood to win the lottery is meaningful?
I’m not saying a 1000% increase is insignificant relatively speaking. I’m saying that in the absolute context, it can be essentially meaningless. Which circles back to my point: you should add an absolute context to your numbers instead of just saying you know more cryptocurrency millionaires than startup millionaires.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Speculators seek to extract alpha without regard to the overall health of the instrument. Shorting is just as good as going long, so far as you make a profit.
That doesn't mean they're parasitic. To show they're parasitic, you'd have to describe how they hurt the company. Regardless, what defines speculation is not parasitism, it's uncertainty. And there's uncertainty in any investment as well. That's why there's no clear line between the two.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That doesn't mean they're parasitic. To show they're parasitic, you'd have to describe how they hurt the company. Regardless, what defines speculation is not parasitism, it's uncertainty. And there's uncertainty in any investment as well. That's why there's no clear line between the two.
I disagree. I have made a clear delineation in the semantic content of my definitions, while you continue to attempt to confuse the issue.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Comparing gold with Bitcoin is weird. People invest in gold because its values is very stable, obviously Bitcoin's isn't :-)
Gold is highly volatile.
BTC and Gold in one graph: http://static5.businessinsider.com/image/59975b50f1a85079738...
I'd say in this comparison gold is the stable option.
