Shorting Bitcoin

"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." - John Maynard Keynes

Speculating on options based only on irrational pricing is a risky game. You could be waiting years for the correction to occur and it might never occur if the fundamentals change to make the price more rational.

You can increase your safety level with a known catalyst. In this case, it might be something like an SEC investigation into tether, but you'd have to decide on the timing, the probability that occurs, and how much it could ultimately decrease the related stock prices.

The arguments outlined are not particularly strong unless you are already predisposed to not liking Bitcoin (which is fine, not liking a particular security is a perfect reason not to invest in it - however it's a bad reason to bet against it)

1: BTC is not controlled by insiders. Sure it's a great headline but once you account for the fact that a BTC wallet owned by an exchange that pools large amount of customer funds is not the same as Alice's Ledger nano you will quickly realize that assets are actually reasonably disbursed across many parties. Eg: https://insights.glassnode.com/bitcoin-supply-distribution/

2: BTC by design will take around 10 minutes to confirm a transaction, further you will actually want 3-6 transactions to be really confident in finality. I agree, I am not waiting inline at the grocery for 60 minutes either. However dismissing layer 2 solution like lightening network deserves something better than handwaving. Lightening network works very well in my experience. Also I need to wait 5 days to transfer cash from my broker to my credit union, I wish I could use BTC. Finally wire fees are a trash fire.

3: Tether. Trading tether (or USDC or DAI) into fiat is quick and easy. Converting USDC to dollars is also easy. Yes tether is 'kinda suss' in a bank run scenario. USDC however is audited and regulated. I've seen papers both indicating that loose tether issuance distorts BTC prices and papers that cannot find a correlation. So this feels like a tossup (personally I hope all the fines and scrutiny on tether forces some house cleaning but I am not holding my breath)

4: lack of regulation. Regulation is not a cure all, Madoff pulled the wool over auditors eyes for years, no one was prepared for LTCM, regulators couldn't stop the 08 financial meltdown, and so on. BTC has no native ability for centralized control, however it also has 100% transaction transparency. That it extremely valuable. Finally centralized exchanges need to comply with local rules and regulations (have you seen the travel rule? That's some forceful regulation there).

5: is actually a repeat of 1 and 3. The insiders argument is overblown and turning stablecoin into fiat doesn't require 'good luck'. ( I am a very unlucky person but have done this multiple times myself).

6: PoW is ecologically unfriendly. Yes BTC energy usages should give pause. However it is only fair to talk about them in the context of the ecological effects of fiat money. Fiat printing is the way we have financed the last 20 years of war (whatever happened to war bonds??). If BTC underpinned our currency system there'd be a lot less room for environmentally destructive jingoism.

7: Libertarians are dumb so they must be wrong. Nothing to say here but ad hominem arguments don't seem effect asset prices.

I struggle to find arguments here that would give me conviction to say BTC will crash in 6 months. I am 99.9% convinced that Tim Bray doesn't like BTC as a financial instrument but that has no meaningful impact on BTCs price... (It is not like he's Elon Musk ;) - actually I think Elon's market moving mojo is all gone now)

They don't "just take" it, it gets lent out to them by your broker, who charges the shorter a fee for this. This fee (amongst other things) subsidizes your free account and low trading costs. For large investors it is possible to share in this income, though not via one of the currently popular retail brokers as far as I'm aware.

> Think about this: banks are CLOSED 77% of the time! Need to send a wire? 3/4 times bank will be closed

Physical branches, sure, but I don't know of any online service that has ever closed, in the UK at least...

We can send payments to other banks and they arrive almost instantly (or within 2 hours) any day of the week. For free.

This is why I wasn't that impressed when US friends were excited about instant transactions using BTC, when we've had this in our banking system for over a decade

You follow bitcoiners on twitter? That’s interesting

I would have assumed you had completely segregated yourself from them

Yeah I also believe the coins are lost and the principles of scarcity do apply, this is acknowledgeable with more tact than what Pomp chose to say, its an assumption that can just go unsaid