I mean in that sense so is the normal stock market....
It is not. Dividends, stock buybacks and the value of voting rights change the situation. Trading some stocks might still be a negative-sum game, but not all. However, all cryptocurrencies are.
Alphabet Inc. Class C stock has no voting rights and has never paid a dividend. On average buyers of this stock still made money, because the stock price kept going up. The last person to hold it owns a valuable asset that is generating a lot of cash, so they are also doing well and probably won't have any trouble selling it for a profit.
Btw there are cryptocurrencies who pay out staking rewards.
If there are two people, and one bitcoin in the world, and one person buys the bitcoin for $1 and sells it to the other person for $2, who has lost money?
Up to now, the second person is $2 short.
They are $2 short but own one bitcoin that might be worth $50,000 to someone else.
If I buy a car for $20,000 I'm $20,000 short but I also own a car.
It is not. Dividends, stock buybacks and the value of voting rights change the situation. Trading some stocks might still be a negative-sum game, but not all. However, all cryptocurrencies are.
Alphabet Inc. Class C stock has no voting rights and has never paid a dividend. On average buyers of this stock still made money, because the stock price kept going up. The last person to hold it owns a valuable asset that is generating a lot of cash, so they are also doing well and probably won't have any trouble selling it for a profit. Btw there are cryptocurrencies who pay out staking rewards.
Even if a cryptocurrency pays out staking rewards, you still have a negative-sum game, because all of those rewards come from other people buying in.
Help me out here. I know nothing about cryptocurrency, but as something in limited supply that is exchanged for money it seems that on average people could earn money as long as the price keeps rising. Say there are four people in the crypto market. Joe buys crypto for $50, sells it to Steve for $75, who sells it to Sarah for $100, who sells it to Dale for $125, who holds it. Three people have earned $25 each (minus…
You already stated it yourself: He has lost $125, until he sells. That is an average negative. Money in: $50+$75+$100+$125 Money out: $50+$75+$100-3*fees You can continue this chain indefinitely, and the missing final term will get smaller and smaller in relation to the total. The limit of (money out - money in) / transactions goes to simply minus the average cost of the fees. So, a net negative.
I was responding to the proposition that people will, on average, lose money trading crypto. I guess it depends on what you're averaging over, but I took it to mean people, not money, and in that interpretation people could on average earn money.
> If the relationship is going to be that minimally frangible, people will hesitate to relocate to a company town at great impact to their family, only to repeat every time a shadow crosses some book. Most tech jobs are not in single-company towns, they are in tech hubs, which have a large number of alternative employers.
Is this technically true? Is there data on this? Just speaking for myself as a resident of Ohio, there are plenty of tech jobs between Cincinnati, Dayton, Columbus, and Cleveland. Not as many as in the tech hubs, but there are forty-seven states that aren't California, New York, or Washington.
There are, indeed, forty-seven states that aren't California, New York, or Washington, but California's economy alone is bigger than the economies of the 25 smallest states (plus DC) combined.
You already stated it yourself: He has lost $125, until he sells. That is an average negative. Money in: $50+$75+$100+$125 Money out: $50+$75+$100-3*fees You can continue this chain indefinitely, and the missing final term will get smaller and smaller in relation to the total. The limit of (money out - money in) / transactions goes to simply minus the average cost of the fees. So, a net negative.
I was responding to the proposition that people will, on average, lose money trading crypto. I guess it depends on what you're averaging over, but I took it to mean people , not money, and in that interpretation people could on average earn money.
The average of the sum of money gained or lost by each individual person is negative.
Whether a larger number of people gain any amount money than those that lose any amount of money is less easy to analyse, but, given that a person can only lose 100% of their money (not taking into account massively unwise loans people might take out, for simplicity) but some people do gain much more than 100%, it is likely that average person has lost or will lose money.
I was responding to the proposition that people will, on average, lose money trading crypto. I guess it depends on what you're averaging over, but I took it to mean people , not money, and in that interpretation people could on average earn money.
The average of the sum of money gained or lost by each individual person is negative. Whether a larger number of people gain any amount money than those that lose any amount of money is less easy to analyse, but, given that a person can only lose 100% of their money (not taking into account massively unwise loans people might take out, for simplicity) but some people do gain much more than 100%, it is likely that ave…
> given that a person can only lose 100% of their money [...] but some people do gain much more than 100%, it is likely that average person has lost or will lose money.
But with a long enough time horizon and generally rising prices, we can make the probability of any one person losing money as close as we want to zero. For a given unit of crypto only the last person in its chain of buyers loses money, left holding it when prices finally drop.
The average of the sum of money gained or lost by each individual person is negative. Whether a larger number of people gain any amount money than those that lose any amount of money is less easy to analyse, but, given that a person can only lose 100% of their money (not taking into account massively unwise loans people might take out, for simplicity) but some people do gain much more than 100%, it is likely that ave…
> given that a person can only lose 100% of their money [...] but some people do gain much more than 100%, it is likely that average person has lost or will lose money. But with a long enough time horizon and generally rising prices, we can make the probability of any one person losing money as close as we want to zero. For a given unit of crypto only the last person in its chain of buyers loses money, left holding i…
That seems to privilege dollars as more "real" than crypto in some way. Or is the point that between quotes in an illiquid market, everything is worthless?
Both of these are true, but not necessary for the argument. "One bitcoin in the world traded once" is an extreme edge case where the normally negligible factors dominate the calculation. Consider instead that there is one bitcoin, that one hundred people sell to each other in a long chain, for varying prices, playing a small fee each time. If you add up the cash inflow and outflows, you will get a net negative per pe…
>If you add up the cash inflow and outflows, you will get a net negative per person equal to the average fee paid
If no theft was involved, then you can't have a net negative number for total cash flows, can you? The fees went somewhere.