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There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble

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Re: There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble

#301

Post by arcticbull »

lamontcg wrote: post #251
jayd16 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Financial elites have been gambling for decades. They seem to be really upset that the plebs now can also do it. I really don't understand this sentiment, as if a professional gambler would not gladly gamble with novices...but putting that aside... I think the emphasis is more about how there's no other game in town that can compete, not that gambling is new. Interest rates are so low that there isn't a simple/safe…

The problem is that the economy is being driven by rent seeking behavior and cantillion effects. This is great for the elites, but at the same time they can see how the ground is starting to crumble. As "the plebs" start to gamble they're working to blame any future collapse on the irresponsibility of the crowd. Shrinking responsibility for the fact that this is the system that they have lobbied for and created and t…

Do you have any evidence at all for the economy being driven by cantillon effects? That is pretty much fringe economic voodoo.

Re: There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble

#302

Post by anonporridge »

DC1350 wrote: post #139
vsareto wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Skills around software and IT - not just developers. There might be a lot of churn within that industry, but if you can solve problems in those industries industry with any tools, you're going to be valuable. It might take longer to find a job depending on the current times and your own retraining speed, but it will be there in some form. Nothing is likely going to make all software and IT workers obsolete like autom…

I’d love to believe this, but dev and IT people are not paid exceptionally well in most of the world. That says to me that the high salaries are a consequence of social structures and the current economy, not that the skills are super valuable. It’s proximity to money that actually matters.

Also, you'd better believe that a tsunami of smart, motivated young people are coming through the education pipeline to pump up the labor supply for the IT/dev sector.

Maybe the demand will increase fast enough to keep salaries from dropping in real terms.

Re: There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble

#303

Post by dale_glass »

Ekaros wrote: post #121
avidphantasm wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“People haven’t been transacting in crypto basically at all” Exactly. When I did a deep dive on crypto currency a few years ago I wondered, what can the transaction rate be for proof of work schemes. Turned out it was less than a dozen per second across an entire network. I don’t think this has changed ( https://bitcoinvisuals.com/chain-tx-day ). How many transactions does Visa alone do?

I have for years heard about pressuring merchants to accept bitcoin or what ever currency and in the end the number of daily or even monthly users was most often laughably low. Not that there isn't some that move stuff, but that isn't really too many...

Crypto basically changed tracks in the last few years.

Initially it was supposed to be money, and so there was a lot of effort to drive adoption. You could buy games on Steam for BTC.

But then a thing happened: the value exploded, and new people started hearing about this amazing new asset growing in value. Crypto became not a coin, but a thing to hoard and sit on, waiting for the price to get higher still.

In this situation, using it as a money is stupid. That pizza somebody bought for 10000 BTC was a terrible loss to the buyer -- they could sell the 100BTC for $634 million today. They shouldn't have bought a pizza, they should have just kept their money in a wallet and done nothing at all with it for a decade.

Given that usage pattern, ability to process transactions doesn't matter. The ideal is one buy at the bottom, and one sell at the peak, possibly years apart. Fees don't really matter, because the transaction is enormous. Paying $5 to move $10 is ridiculous. Paying $5 to move $634 million is a rounding error.

And since Bitcoin was made to be deflationary this pattern of usage is more or less guaranteed. Using it as money is always silly because any newcomers to BTC increase demand and therefore the competition for the supply. And over time, some BTC gets lost, which adds to that as well.

Re: There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble

#304

Post by mercutio2 »

Ekaros wrote: post #131
JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did Visa create no value in society with plastic payment cards? If crypto is valueless, payment processors are valueless too. It's unfortunate that Visa gets a 2% tax on the economy, but the convenience of plastic or a public/private keypair unlocks more economic growth compared to a world with only paper cash.

2% is entirely up to local regulation. EU has capped it to 0.2% or 0.3%. Which I would guess that cash doesn't do too much better.

Interchange fees are a small fraction of credit card costs to merchants. The EU only capped interchange fees.

Re: There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble

#305

Post by solosoyokaze »

paulpauper wrote: post #24
tcbawo wrote: post #8

Money is stored wealth, the ability to buy goods and services in the future. The problem seems to be that we live in a time of societal upheaval. The future of stored wealth becomes cloudier and more uncertain the further you go out in time. So, what is the best place to store wealth? Will my wealth be eroded by inflation? Will the companies I invest in become obsolete by technology or market-manipulating nation stat…

My answer to these questions and other unknowns about the fed, fiscal policy, America and its role in the world, the economy etc. is that the future will be a lot like the present, but more so. So extent the current trends into the future. Sure, things sometimes change, even dramatically such as the fall of the USSR or 911, but we are living in a steady-state world in which the underling trends do not change. Inflati…

The current trend is record breaking wealth inequality. We already have rampant inflation in the form of housing, education and health care costs. It's an unsustainable situation near its breaking point.

Re: There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble

#306

Post by xyzzy123 »

solosoyokaze wrote: post #300
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heard of a wealthy family that had managed to maintain their wealth in Europe across multiple generations, through lots of war, upheaval, regime change, and so on. Their formula was "one third gold, one third art, one third land". You could lose any piece of it in any upheaval, but you wouldn't be likely to lose all of it.

Their formula was being wealthy enough to float above war, upheaval, regime change and so on. If they were wealthy enough, they probably triggered some of that and capitalized on war profiteering.

I don't like this comment, but I can't put my finger on why exactly.

I think it's the drive-by, reflexive assignment of guilt, while knowing nothing of the circumstances.

This strikes me as the opposite of thinking. What you said might be true, it might not, what have you added to the world?

Re: There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble

#307

Post by ameister14 »

mrfox321 wrote: post #264
ameister14 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I really don't understand this sentiment, as if a professional gambler would not gladly gamble with novices... There are a few cases I can think of immediately where this applies - gambling with novices in Blackjack, for example, is not ideal. They'll screw up the flow of cards and can cause your math to go haywire. The same happens with Hold-em or Omaha Poker - you want people to have enough skill to play the game…

Your blackjack outcome is independent of other player's decisions. This is a statistical fallacy.

>Your blackjack outcome is independent of other player's decisions.

>This is a statistical fallacy.

Yes, "Your blackjack outcome is independent of other player's decision" IS a statistical fallacy. You're correct.

It's pretty easy to prove this.

Is the number of cards in play finite? Yes. Can other people at the table get more cards than they begin with? Yes.

If someone can impact the number of cards left in the deck, wouldn't they have the potential to change your outcome?

Re: There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble

#308

Post by jariel »

jasode wrote: post #77
XorNot wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crypto is exploding because people are looking to get rich via speculation, that's it. There's a wealth of uninformed investors and they're all hearing stories about crypto millionaires and how much it went up and FOMO narratives about it. People haven't been transacting in crypto basically at all - it's not even a blip in the popular discussion about it, except as a flimsy justification for why its value is not tuli…

>Crypto is exploding because people are looking to get rich via speculation, that's it. No, that isn't just it. Like other assets, there can be multiple narratives that explain cryptocurrencies rising prices. Yes, pure speculation is one of them. But another reason for some is deliberately shifting wealth from an asset ($USD, euro, bolivar, etc) they believe is deteriorating . E.g. a multi-billionaire like Ray Dalio…

XorNot is essentically correct.

Crypto is a 'get rich quick' speculative behaviour, driven by multiple narratives as you say, but those are effectively just narratives used to validate the participation.

Amway's 'narrative' was that you could 'help' your neighbours by selling them cleaning products.

But really it was a pyramid scheme.

There are some questions around the Fed and monetary dilution etc, but BTC is not the answer.

And of course currency was never meant to be a 'long term holding'.

Literally by design, we build at minimum a tiny bit of dilution into our currency, that's 'part of the plan' so don't hold it, hold something else.

Re: There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble

#309

Post by kart23 »

real-dino wrote: post #71

GME is actually quite a solid gamble, and could lead to what people are referring to as the MOASS. https://iamnotafinancialadvisor.com/DD/GME/og/GMEv14.pdf It hasn't alreadys been like this, but everything has been turned into overdrive. Where people were talking about 10% returns on investments, people are getting 1000% returns on investment. There is some bubble going on at the moment with the repo-market, hyper in…

Why doesn't gamestop just sell back a ton of stock? They repurchased >100 Million shares in 2019 for dirt cheap. I saw the news about the share selloff, but a paltry 3.5M shares isn't what I was expecting, and thats part of the reason I was extremely skeptical about GME, why wouldn't the company simply sell directly to the shorts so that they could cover?

https://ycharts.com/companies/GME/stock_buyback

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