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Shorting Bitcoin

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Re: Shorting Bitcoin

#161

Post by AmericanChopper »

midjji wrote: post #156
AmericanChopper wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a very bad thesis to trade options on. The author believes that BTC is overvalued, but if you look at their reasons for believing it’s overvalued, some of them could have applied to BTC at any point in time over the past several years, and the rest could have applied to BTC and any point in time since it’s creation. By buying puts on bitcoin (derivatives), they’re not only betting that they’re correct, but als…

Bitcoin, like tesla stock is better predicted by treating it as a religion than a rational investment. So how long are people going to believe a kid who said a god knocked her up to avoid getting stoned?

Would you be interested in placing a bet with me that the world gives up on religion before the end of the year? Bets are $200 each, and if there’s 0 religious people left by December 17, I’ll pay 3:1. Any takers?

Re: Shorting Bitcoin

#162

Post by vmception »

arcticbull wrote: post #60
vmception wrote: post #58

Someone that was predicted to own 5% (1mm) of all Bitcoins just died in Costa Rica I doubt they had a survivorship and secession plan for their bitcoins and I doubt Bitcoins become less scarce Shorting Microstrategy and Coinbase via puts are good ideas though. Microstrategy isnt overleveraged yet but its easy for them to be. Coinbase is just a share dump, thats the entire purpose of direct listings. This has nothing…

That is true, unless you believe that the scarcity isn't at all relevant to the price in your anticipated future state. After all, the sacks of garbage in my kitchen are scarce but you don't see people tripping over their shoelaces to pay $30,000 a piece.

I believe it is relevant as more bitcoin becomes distributed on bridges and in Defi protocols (see burned liquidity pool shares), on lightning and liquid, in longer dated “physical delivery” derivatives contracts and more

Re: Shorting Bitcoin

#163

Post by bhawks »

Paradigma11 wrote: post #151
colordrops wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is proof-of-stake a proven technology yet though? Has it been shown to function without loopholes or exploits?

Yes it is. There are PoS chains running for years without problems (Tezos..). https://viktorbunin.medium.com/proof-of-stakes-security-mode...

Tezos is amazing, it has upgraded itself entirely through on chain voting governance 6 times. No drama, no crazy rollouts.

Tezos smart contract ecosystem has grown to 10% of Ethereum and it's gas prices are pennies (and will continue to be).

Ah if the market was logical.

Re: Shorting Bitcoin

#164

Post by [deleted] »

anonporridge wrote: post #158
arcticbull wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C'mon now BTC certainly doesn't have (1) it's down 50% in the last month. I'd quibble with (2) because portability does imply a low cost of portability which compared to USD it does not have. (3) It has. (4) It has. (5) It definitely isn't broadly accepted and (6) it's not great at either, just look at what percentage of the coins have already been lost. 20-30% in a decade. Every random walk down the time line leads…

(1) If you think about the stability of your wealth on the scale of months, you're going to have a bad time regardless of what vehicles you store your money in.

[deleted]

Re: Shorting Bitcoin

#165

Post by midjji »

midjji wrote: post #87
breck wrote: post #43

I love this sort of thing. He’s making a bet, explains his reasoning, and does it in the open! That’s great. I disagree that there’s no tech here. IMO public ledgers that never sleep are far superior(thanks to the hard work of many people over the past decade), and their advantage over retail banking will only increase. My online banks keep getting worse, crypto keeps getting better. Think about this: banks are CLOSE…

Banks are bad because they charge to much, but they aren't that bad. What kind of unbelievably shitty bank doesn't provide 24-7 money transfers through a convenient phone app? Those transfers always take 0 time within the bank and have legally forced waiting periods between banks and between regions. The time may be legally required to be higher for certain scales of transactions, but they are generally as fast as th…

Another curious thing to note is that the legal requirements on transaction delays are mostly regarding wealth control, scams and ensuring its difficult to launder money. Strictly speaking, if bitcoin was treated as a currency, or even a publicly traded derivative, internationally a lot of them would apply to bitcoin. Bitcoin of course cannot obey these by design, but the more popular it gets, the more countries will try to enforce these, most recently china. That bitcoin is more vulnerable to state actors than people seem to think is pretty funny too. If china turned all its supercomputing clusters to bitcoin mining without building anything new, they might well become big enough to control the blockchain. If they made an investment in asics large enough to match just the recent baidu supercomputer, they would control the blockchain entirely. So good luck getting your assets out when they decide to really enforce their rules. Just kidding, this will only ever be approved when the officials in charge want to really own a lot of bitcoin^^. More realistically they would just simultaneously and long term kill every major exchange via hacking and ddos and asset freezes, but thats just because that would be cheaper.

Re: Shorting Bitcoin

#166

Post by keymone »

vmception wrote: post #159
keymone wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

becoming a billionaire most likely changes your perspective a lot. and he became billionaire 7 years ago. that's plenty of time to think of how to preserve bitcoins such that they aren't lost when one passes away. and since you say he was technical - well there are tehnical solutions to do that, multisigs, sharded keys, etc.

> I think he was aware of technological solutions native to Bitcoin

sorry, i misread your comment.

Re: Shorting Bitcoin

#167

Post by ur-whale »

arcticbull wrote: post #71
rys wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was unsure and looked it up, so in case it helps someone else: the person that died in Costa Rica is Mircea Popescu.

Yes, and our friend Pomp left this delightful message on Twitter to mark his passing. > Mircea Popescu, a Bitcoin OG, has passed away. He likely owned quite a bit of bitcoin. We may never know how much or if they are lost forever, but reminds me Satoshi said: "Lost coins only make everyone else's coins worth slightly more. Think of it as a donation to everyone." Disgusting. [Edit] To be clear I'm reacting negatively…

> Disgusting

Weird to hear you say this. Many of your HN comments on Bitcoin demonstrate a rather collectivist take on crypto.

Yet this feature of Bitcoin (lost Bitcoin are effectively fairly shared among all participants) is probably the most "fair" feature of the system.

It'd sure help if you gave some sort of rationale.

Re: Shorting Bitcoin

#168

Post by WJW »

patricius wrote: post #110
Animats wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tether will work until the day comes when there is a net outflow from Tether. Then it will all come apart, because the backing assets aren't all there. Like Madoff's fund.

... or fractional reserve banking

Fractional reserve banks have the assets, just not in liquid enough form that all customers can withdraw their deposits at the same time. For example, some of it is loaned out to various businesses that buy industrial equipment with it, lets say an oven for a big bakery. Over the lifetime of the loan, they can use that equipment to make enough money to repay the money with interest but during the lifetime of the loan the value is 'locked up' in the oven and can't be withdrawn. A non-bankrupt fractional reserve bank always has enough assets but (during a bank run) not always enough liquid assets.

The allegations against Tether are that it is not backed by anything at all, not even illiquid assets. It has so far refused to provide any audited proof that it does and other means of trying to find out (such as reporting by trading desks in a sibling comment) also indicates that there does not seem to be enough money in the pot to redeem all the tokens for their fiat counterparts.

Re: Shorting Bitcoin

#169

Post by arcticbull »

ur-whale wrote: post #167
arcticbull wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and our friend Pomp left this delightful message on Twitter to mark his passing. > Mircea Popescu, a Bitcoin OG, has passed away. He likely owned quite a bit of bitcoin. We may never know how much or if they are lost forever, but reminds me Satoshi said: "Lost coins only make everyone else's coins worth slightly more. Think of it as a donation to everyone." Disgusting. [Edit] To be clear I'm reacting negatively…

> Disgusting Weird to hear you say this. Many of your HN comments on Bitcoin demonstrate a rather collectivist take on crypto. Yet this feature of Bitcoin (lost Bitcoin are effectively fairly shared among all participants) is probably the most "fair" feature of the system. It'd sure help if you gave some sort of rationale.

I'm sorry, I edited to clear up what I was referring to.

I was taken aback by Pomp choosing to comment on Mircea's life in terms of how his death would personally enrich him. I've edited to leave this note. I suspect he realized the optics himself as he has since deleted the tweet. To me it read as "Mircea died huh? Well good news, our bitcoin's more valuable now."

I've nothing against the mechanism Pomp was pointing out, per se, other than I suspect any random saunter down the time line results in all coins eventually lost. I'm also aware of the counter-argument that infinite divisibility mitigates this.

Thanks for calling out the lack of clarity.

Re: Shorting Bitcoin

#170

Post by ur-whale »

vmception wrote: post #113
ur-whale wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I doubt they had a survivorship and secession plan for their bitcoins You're speculating though. Any information to back that up?

Just general behavior of that person and their expectations at 41 years old. You would just add this to other assumptions about unmoved bitcoin, where over time you would look for the days destroyed the metric, aka how many bitcoins have remained unmoved for how long. It is decent news when old bitcoins are moved, and until that occurs they can be assumed to never move, especially when they are in version 1 addresses…

Mircea was (if he is indeed dead and isn't instead pulling a fast one) one profoundly odd bird [1], but he was most certainly not dumb.

He also lived a rather unusual life [2][3] and likelihood of some sort of trouble hitting him at some point were not insignificant.

Also, his death would be a perfect Mircea-type opportunity to create an "event" in the Bitcoin ecosystem. It's quite possible he wouldn't let something like that go to waste.

These taken together, I think assuming he hadn't planned anything in case of his demise is a bit of a stretch.

The only reason I could think of that he didn't was his profoundly individualistic take on life.

But then again, he had folks he cared about [4]

Also, the "old coins moved" metric argument isn't necessarily a good one: if there is a plan in case of his (alleged) death, it does not imply the coins will move right away (not that you even know on which addie they were stored in the first place).

Anyways, RIP Mircea, the world got quite more boring if you did indeed pass away.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210601004904/http://trilema.co...

[2] https://archive.md/9AvNW

[3] https://archive.md/wip/cJNKb

[4] http://thewhet.net/2021/06/goodnight-sweet-master/

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