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S&P Dow Jones Indices to launch cryptocurrency indexes in 2021

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Re: S&P Dow Jones Indices to launch cryptocurrency indexes in 2021

#291

Someone please explain this to me: How is any cryptocurrency even considered an investment vehicle? I would classify myself as Boglehead and I believe in the fundamentals of investing in stocks because in all it's technicality (and given the buy-and-hold strategy), you are investing in a business by owning a part of it which naturally means that you will and do get the returns on it, both in terms of profits (dividen…

The world's first global, decentralized, transparent, immutable ledger has come into existence. And you can own a piece of it by owning Bitcoin. Who knows what it will be used for, but it will be used.

Drugs, the answer is(and was) drugs.

Re: S&P Dow Jones Indices to launch cryptocurrency indexes in 2021

#292

I’m enjoying sitting on the sidelines and watching people “invest” in a digital “currency” that you cannot spend, does not produce cash flow, and whose values are determined by other shmucks buying it from previous shmucks. What a time to be alive. No wonder the S&P 500 CAPE ratio is beyond the 1929 high. No one has any idea of what the intrinsic value is of anything. Investing in companies that don’t make a profit,…

Wait until you hear about gold index funds/trusts....

Anyway, the reason you buy it is so you don't need to manage the security.

Both Binance and Circle Pay ended United States operations causing my friends to either move their Bitcoin or they didn't and had it sold at 3k/coin and can get it from their states "lost money".

Re: S&P Dow Jones Indices to launch cryptocurrency indexes in 2021

#293

I’m enjoying sitting on the sidelines and watching people “invest” in a digital “currency” that you cannot spend, does not produce cash flow, and whose values are determined by other shmucks buying it from previous shmucks. What a time to be alive. No wonder the S&P 500 CAPE ratio is beyond the 1929 high. No one has any idea of what the intrinsic value is of anything. Investing in companies that don’t make a profit,…

If the value of a cryptocurrency is dependent on the community of the faithful, it's possible to "start the engines of faith", and keep it going for a long time. Fine art has been a large component of generational wealth in the West for the past six centuries. Of course, art has value as aesthetic objects; the same can be said for the potential use of cryptocurrency, however nebulous it may be. Religions, too, demand faith and, once they get started, often have staying power on the order of centuries.

Re: S&P Dow Jones Indices to launch cryptocurrency indexes in 2021

#294
post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ETH for instance is used for fees in the decentralized economy (e.g. p2p lending/borrowing/investing/marketplaces). If demand for fees in the ethereum economy outpaces supply, the price is likely to rise. https://cryptofees.info/ Aside: If I issue equity in my company, I'd do it directly on a decentralized network like Ethereum > IPO. I'd prefer to not have an underwriter like goldman sachs take 3%+ & manipulate reta…

I think your phrasing of "demand for fees" is kinda weird. Since it really comes down to "demand for validators" or "demand for compute resources on the ETH network." ETH's fundamental value is that it's the only form of payment accepted to use the eth network. It can and does have secondary value as a medium of exchange but that's what's at the bottom and the reason you need ETH opposed to something else.

Agree that demand for network compute/validation is more accurate than 'demand for fees'. My error.

Re: S&P Dow Jones Indices to launch cryptocurrency indexes in 2021

#295

I’m enjoying sitting on the sidelines and watching people “invest” in a digital “currency” that you cannot spend, does not produce cash flow, and whose values are determined by other shmucks buying it from previous shmucks. What a time to be alive. No wonder the S&P 500 CAPE ratio is beyond the 1929 high. No one has any idea of what the intrinsic value is of anything. Investing in companies that don’t make a profit,…

Although digital asset prices are not a good proxy for their utility, there are plenty of utility for enough people and that expands and the addressable market expands.

Crypto businesses are very lucrative so don’t be too busy asking why when you should be asking how

Re: S&P Dow Jones Indices to launch cryptocurrency indexes in 2021

#296
post #15

Coinbase used to have an Index Fund weighted by market cap. Launced in 2018[0], it was shut down just a couple of months later[1]. From the articles at the time, it seems that the major reason for the shut down was that the market was going down, and all investors saw losses (because it was 2018 in crypto). Maybe they will resurrect this idea now that the market is going up. [0]: https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-in…

That raises a good question: so, there are crypto indices now. How do you buy the index? In other words, who is going to securitize cryptocurrencies? Until there's a way for someone to login to a brokerage account and buy, say, ticker symbol CRYPT, I don't see where having an index maintained by a company is all that useful.

There have been many attempts to create ETFs for Bitcoin, most famously https://coin-etf.com/. They've all been denied by the SEC so far. But an index like this is likely a step toward SEC acceptance.

Re: S&P Dow Jones Indices to launch cryptocurrency indexes in 2021

#297

>> 550 of the top traded coins, This is all I needed to know. The markets are complete fiction these days. We are awash in bullshit investments with zero underlying value.

There is around 4,000 scam token sales going on right now. Sorry I mean 4,000 innovations and technical experiments in pump and dumps.

and 1,984 dead scam coins

https://deadcoins.com/

Re: S&P Dow Jones Indices to launch cryptocurrency indexes in 2021

#298

>> 550 of the top traded coins, This is all I needed to know. The markets are complete fiction these days. We are awash in bullshit investments with zero underlying value.

S&P is known for making indices of hundreds of names, Russell is known for expanding that concept to thousands

Its a little late, being the year 2020, to just notice that there are hundreds (and thousands) of digital assets with markets and communities, to validate your preexisting opinion

About a half decade late

Re: S&P Dow Jones Indices to launch cryptocurrency indexes in 2021

#299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the consensus mechanism makes it prohibitively difficult to change This is a cultural property of the community, not an intrinsic property of bitcoin. If Satoshi signed a PGP message with a compelling call to alter the scarcity it would likely happen; maybe you disagree, but the point is that it's very possible to change the scarcity because it's a distributed computer program.

The fact that it's a "cultural property of the community" doesn't make it easy to change. Bitcoin is not just "a computer program", it is a program and a blockchain. The same program with a different blockchain is not Bitcoin (there are plenty of those out there). Adding more supply to the Bitcoin blockchain would require large numbers of people to work against their own interests, decimating the value of their own i…

The point is that the scarcity can be trivially changed if certain people decide that it should, which isn't true for things that exist in the real world like gold. Norms shift over time and your suggestion that it's unlikely to change is your opinion based on cultural analysis, not something that can be proven to be true even in principle.

> It would be much, much more difficult to change than e.g. the supply of dollars or euros which are considered scarce enough by most of the world

This thread is about gold not fiat money, obviously the scarcity of fiat money can change, that's the whole point of fiat money.

Re: S&P Dow Jones Indices to launch cryptocurrency indexes in 2021

#300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no better indication of a bubble then people telling you that you're the crazy one for questioning it. I remember people telling me I was crazy for not buying a house in 2007, and crazy for not trading tech stocks in 1999. I'm not sure that's a good indicator with so many counter examples: the internet, large touch screen phones, Cloud in the earlier days, etc. We truly have no idea what the future if Cryp…

Bitcoin has been around for about a decade now. It didn’t take anywhere near that long for the internet, large touch screen phones, the cloud, etc. to really catch on. And for every technological advance met with skepticism that eventually succeeded, there are orders of magnitude more that crashed and burned (e.g., the segway, 3D televisions, HD DVD, and countless others)

> Bitcoin has been around for about a decade now. It didn’t take anywhere near that long for the internet

That's not true, as is obvious with only basic fact checking. Apart from it not being obvious what you mean by "internet" (does ARPANET count?), the internet proper saw its first commercial access providers appear in 1989[1] and it certainly was nowhere near popular in 1999 as it is now. In fact, I would say the change from that period is almost fundamental. Remember, 56k modems were popular back then and a very small part of the world's population had internet access.

My point is, this certainly fits into the larger picture of where Bitcoin is right now. It's vastly more popular then 10 years ago, because now my plumber and barber ask me about it, it is regularly talked about in the news and there are almost no countries without laws enacted as a response to it.

[1]: https://www.rogerclarke.com/II/OzI04.html#CIAP

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