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U.S. Secret Service Launches Cryptocurrency Awareness Hub

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Re: U.S. Secret Service Launches Cryptocurrency Awareness Hub

#231

Post by lupire »

aqme28 wrote: post #127
throwaway4good wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, For example crypto.com offers 12% pa. on your USD account. https://crypto.com/eea/earn P/E just like normal company ...

What are you talking about? APY on a loan is not P/E.

They are saying that financially, P/E on a stock (really, E/P) you buy is the same as APY on a deposit/loan, since both are the return on invested capital, and you can cash out your principal later.

Oh course their are subtle details that cause volatility and risk of collpase based on how the company/bank/borrower uses the money you put in.

Re: U.S. Secret Service Launches Cryptocurrency Awareness Hub

#232

Post by lowdest »

mbesto wrote: post #172
nightski wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just one person's opinion, but even with PE ratios, profitability, or any financial statement you can read determining the value of a company's stock (not the same as the company itself) is almost as hard as bitcoin. If you can reliably price a stock based on any measure of company value then you could be very rich very fast. There is a reason they say don't stock pick just buy an index fund and hold.

> If you can reliably price a stock based on any measure of company value then you could be very rich very fast. What you're saying is already true and already is happening. The global financial services industry is a $20T industry. > There is a reason they say don't stock pick just buy an index fund and hold. Yes for the common retail person sure, but someone has to purchase stocks to put them into an index. Those a…

>Yes for the common retail person sure, but someone has to purchase stocks to put them into an index. Those are professionals who evaluate PE ratios, profitability, and financial statements.

This is not what an index is. You are describing a fund, but an index fund explicitly does not evaluate PE ratios, profitability, and financial statements, they buy everything in the index according to the market cap. Some proprietary indices are privately curated in the way you describe, but in common use the "index" means all of the companies, rather than a curated subset.

Re: U.S. Secret Service Launches Cryptocurrency Awareness Hub

#233

Post by [deleted] »

mbesto wrote: post #172
nightski wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just one person's opinion, but even with PE ratios, profitability, or any financial statement you can read determining the value of a company's stock (not the same as the company itself) is almost as hard as bitcoin. If you can reliably price a stock based on any measure of company value then you could be very rich very fast. There is a reason they say don't stock pick just buy an index fund and hold.

> If you can reliably price a stock based on any measure of company value then you could be very rich very fast. What you're saying is already true and already is happening. The global financial services industry is a $20T industry. > There is a reason they say don't stock pick just buy an index fund and hold. Yes for the common retail person sure, but someone has to purchase stocks to put them into an index. Those a…

[deleted]

Re: U.S. Secret Service Launches Cryptocurrency Awareness Hub

#234

Post by saul_goodman »

zhdc1 wrote: post #124
nrzd wrote: post #52

I’m blown away by how anti-crypto this discussion is. I hadn’t realized how negative the prevailing sentiment is on Hacker News. One argument seems to be that cryptocurrency is purely speculative, which is apparently a dirty word. What about the stock market? What about any kind of investment? If you truly believe that cryptocurrency is the basis for a superior economic system, isn’t it rational and wise to put some…

> I’m blown away by how anti-crypto this discussion is. I hadn’t realized how negative the prevailing sentiment is on Hacker News. The more I learn about crypto (which isn't a lot), the more I agree that digital currency is the way ahead. I'm not convinced that decentralized ledger-based crypto is going to win out in the long term. Let's be honest, is there any coin at the moment that you would trust as a stable stor…

I somewhat agree with your sentiment: the outcome is sort of the same but for different reasons.

> "but most central banks are good enough at keeping the rate of loss relatively constant"

The past two years clearly demonstrated central banks deliberately set the rate of annual inflation to a desired level in a much more directed way than anyone realized. At least for business as usual economies. Once you see inflation as a tax it starts to make more sense. But the end result is a "mostly" responsible entity in control of the inflation rate, so the sentiment is same: traditional fiat currencies will be more stable for a while to come, maby forever (when compared to crypto).

> "I'm not convinced that decentralized ledger-based crypto is going to win out in the long term"

Blockchain was designed to surpass the problems the pre-Bitcoin E-gold service hit: the government can always smite you by raiding your office and taking the servers. That's the sole problem Blockchain solves, nothing more. In that sense it's already proven itself as a successful technology. Otherwise, if you're a government-sanctioned entity there's no need to fool with Blockchain when rolling a CBDC: your main physical risks are terrorists and natural disasters, not smiting by a police raid.

> "especially if central banks make good on releasing digital currency"

It's coming, but it's not what people want it to be. The Fed is saying "we're not trying to kill off cash" while putting out open calls to investigate all the things they need to do in order to kill off cash. Another issue here that I don't see being talked about is that the very nature of stable-coins exposes these assets to the inflation rate that the asset is pegged to. This means it's getting taxed, and so it makes sense for the Fed to want to get into the crypto world from that standpoint.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/money-and-... https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/ifdp/files/ifdp1334.p...

The major danger with CBDC is that this is going to be used along with social credit scores. We just saw Canada lock bank accounts of anyone who donated to the trucker protest. These people are f#$%ed. Now imagine if they were locked out of using cash as well - even that emergency stash under the couch cushion would be useless to buy food. It's a nightmare situation and it's coming sooner than later. But again, governments and central banks don't need this level of power, governments have proven they will seize bank accounts of those they disagree with. But cash still allows people to move around these barriers. Once CBDC's roll out it's a very bleak outlook.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpNnTuK5JJU https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2021/12/30/mexico-plans-to-i...

Re: U.S. Secret Service Launches Cryptocurrency Awareness Hub

#235

Post by nightski »

willturman wrote: post #154
nightski wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just one person's opinion, but even with PE ratios, profitability, or any financial statement you can read determining the value of a company's stock (not the same as the company itself) is almost as hard as bitcoin. If you can reliably price a stock based on any measure of company value then you could be very rich very fast. There is a reason they say don't stock pick just buy an index fund and hold.

A share of stock is a fraction of the cash flow of a company. A share represents a tangible thing which can valued according to any number of mechanisms. Cryptocurrencies represent nothing but transactions and the ledger of those transactions (which they are exceedingly wasteful and clumsy at achieving).

You would be correct if the only thing that drove the price of a stock was current cash flows.

What you are leaving out is growth. Stock prices include expected growth of future profits which by no means is a science.

Not to mention all kinds of other things can affect a stock price such as global macroeconomic conditions, interest rates, etc...

Re: U.S. Secret Service Launches Cryptocurrency Awareness Hub

#236

Post by joelbondurant1 »

nrzd wrote: post #52

I’m blown away by how anti-crypto this discussion is. I hadn’t realized how negative the prevailing sentiment is on Hacker News. One argument seems to be that cryptocurrency is purely speculative, which is apparently a dirty word. What about the stock market? What about any kind of investment? If you truly believe that cryptocurrency is the basis for a superior economic system, isn’t it rational and wise to put some…

[dead]

Re: U.S. Secret Service Launches Cryptocurrency Awareness Hub

#237

Post by lupire »

bitxbitxbitcoin wrote: post #192
thatjoeoverthr wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Work isn’t value. It’s cost. It’s not crystallized; the capacity to do that work is spent and gone. If you mine and sell a bitcoin, your profit is the revenue -minus- that work. (Not anti-crypto, just contesting this point.)

Good point. I try to identify the work/value that goes behind the USD. All the manhours and energy put into civic duties (military, government, etc). Also largely in the past and similarly uncrystallized, but somehow people find it to be more cyrystalline.

You're right that a lot of waste is miscounted as value -- this is why GDP is not the same as quality of life (even ignoring uneven distribution or logarithmic utility functions.), and part of why "purchasing power parity" and "cost of living" is different in different places.

Re: U.S. Secret Service Launches Cryptocurrency Awareness Hub

#238

Post by dogman144 »

eric-hu wrote: post #226
dogman144 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, with an older financial background, the gold standard of P/E ratios were made up at one point as well. Financial statement analysis and GAAP are much softer indicators than gen pop tends to think. It comes out of a period before behavioral economics took hold, for instance. > guess at the "true" value of cryptocurrency How I do it is this: It's understood today that the Internet fundamentally cha…

Fascinating explanation (though I’m already bullish BTC). No counters but a question: What’s stopping BTC lightning from being the rails you pay a buddy for a beer on?

- Assuming it's A vs. B platform choices, then network effects: you'll actually have to get users to jump from Venmo, to LighteningMo. Hard stuff if there aren't compelling reasons

- Assuming LN is the infra that the Venmo of 2050 uses: I think you'd need a compelling reason for "Venmo" to drop (edit: or integrate LN into) their underlying infra, which is where I understand Plaid and inside baseball platforms b/t TX processors have very strong holds, and jump over to a blockchain stack.

- The volatility. It has to smooth out. I'm not going to be the next bitcoin pizza guy.

Re: U.S. Secret Service Launches Cryptocurrency Awareness Hub

#239

Post by vzcx »

mjburgess wrote: post #200

Despite other comments, I'm concerned there isnt enough anti-crypto here. Let's be clear: this is what a graph of the values of currencies looks like: https://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=GBP&to=USD&view=10Y . Micro-value adjustments up-and-down, and if you comapred to the price of bread, midly inflationary. This is what all (necessarily deflationary) crypto "currencies" look like: https://www.xe.com/currencychart…

Where did you acquire this point of view? You sound very certain, but I think you've got it completely backwards: You say bitcoin cannot be a currency because it is highly volatile, but I'd argue that it's just as true that Bitcoin has high volatility because it isn't in widespread use as a currency. I suppose they can both be true: it's a network bootstrapping problem. This is the future bitcoin long-term buyers are speculating on, that the network will succeed and become more widespread.

And though the network is small, people spend bitcoin all the time. You say this is irrational, and maybe it is in some very static model of economic action, but as we know, the real world is dynamic. That is, it has a time component, the future is unknowable and there are very few guarantees. It turns out, that at some point people tend to decide they would rather have something now than wait for later and potentially get it more cheaply. A man's gotta eat, and sometimes he wants to enjoy a few luxuries as well. People didn't stop trading things when there were "massively deflationary" commodity monies in the past, and I don't see why that would be different today.

In fact, the whole "deflation" bugaboo is only indirectly about price. The real core of the matter is credit: "deflation" acts like a higher interest rate, which makes life difficult for debtors. We can already create debt products linked to inflation, and I see no reason why that term can't have a negative sign next to it. This changes one's view of what investments look wise or not, but that is not necessarily a bad thing at all.

Re: U.S. Secret Service Launches Cryptocurrency Awareness Hub

#240

Post by tomc1985 »

convolvatron wrote: post #212
tomc1985 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I for one am surprised by the negative sentiment only because the tech industry seems to be all about it. Between the prevailing trend of rent-seeking subscriptions and shoving NFTs/blockchain into anything that some knucklehead thinks it will fit in, tech is very much becoming grift culture as the nerds get run over by sharks, business types, and crypto bros

that trend started 30 years ago

The running-over bit, sure, but I feel like this neofintech stuff is enabling a whole new cohort of grifters
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