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Former US SEC attorney: 'Get out of crypto platforms now'

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Re: Former US SEC attorney: 'Get out of crypto platforms now'

#361

Post by bandrami »

snapcaster wrote: post #318
lmm wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anyone who predicts Bitcoin's demise must explain precisely how and why its network would stop functioning. I've been saying for years that Bitcoin will go down like Second Life. Remember when there were news stories about Sony or whoever buys an island for X million dollars? And now... I mean it's still there (presumably), I don't think they've turned off the servers or anything, but no-one cares and it's obviousl…

Presumably you have been saying this for a while and been wrong so far. At what point would you change your mind?

If something -- anything -- other than meth and murder-for-hire contracts gets priced in Bitcoin I would stop saying it's a dead end.

Re: Former US SEC attorney: 'Get out of crypto platforms now'

#362

Post by lukeasrodgers »

slavboj wrote: post #266

"With traditional SEC-registered financial firms, the SEC has unlimited and instantaneous visibility into every aspect of operations." That is obvious horseshit.

Yes, this claim along with "I am 100% objective, independent and neutral" are bombastic and serve only to undermine his argument. He seems like a smart and reasonable person, and some of his other writing that I've just come across, e.g. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-sec-regulation-enforcemen..., is free of that type of extravagance, so it's unclear why he would make the claim you cite. Perhaps just the "Twitter tends to lower the quality of all discourse" factor.

Re: Former US SEC attorney: 'Get out of crypto platforms now'

#363

Post by bandrami »

tasuki wrote: post #353
__loam wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gold has intrinsic value as a commodity though. It's scarce, has industrial uses, and has aesthetic value to a lot of people. Bitcoin doesn't have that. Bitcoin has value entirely because people think it has value. As an inflation hedge it fuckin sucks because it follows the market. When the fed increased rates, bitcoin crashed. As a store of value, it's too volatile to really work well for that and small mistakes ca…

> Gold has intrinsic value as a commodity though. It's scarce, has industrial uses, and has aesthetic value to a lot of people. Yet this value is a small fraction of gold's trading price. How do you explain the current price of gold?

Gold, like stocks and real estate, trades at some multiple of book (with metals this ratio is generally between 0 and 1, with stocks it's generally greater than 1). In fact, looking at the P/B ratio is often one of the first things someone does when evaluating an investment. That ratio for bitcoin is infinite which is why it's not an "investment" in the usual sense of the word.

Re: Former US SEC attorney: 'Get out of crypto platforms now'

#364

Post by tasuki »

thworp wrote: post #106
cs702 wrote: post #58

Three highly speculative predictions: 1. The courts are more likely than not to rule that many crypto-assets -- but not all -- should be regulated as investments. It won't be fun for a lot of crypto traders. 2. Over time, the usual giant financial institutions are bound to become the dominant market makers in crypto-assets. In all likelihood, one of them will end up buying Coinbase. Those giant financial institutions…

Oh please, again with the "store of value" BS. I made an effort to look at the actual volume of bitcoin being traded in and out of the system (aka actual entries and exits, not just fraud-prone exchange swaps) in 2020 and I concluded that it's probably worse than most scam penny stocks in terms of liquidity. It's really hard to find any kind of reliable data though, but in the absence of that I had to conclude it was…

> It's really hard to find any kind of reliable data though, but in the absence of that I had to conclude it was just a gigantic scam.

Interesting! If I couldn't find reliable data, I'd have concluded that I didn't know.

Re: Former US SEC attorney: 'Get out of crypto platforms now'

#365

Post by MassPikeMike »

this_user wrote: post #119
cs702 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gold is pretty volatile too. Its price has gone up and down between 5x and 10x a few times in just the past century: https://www.macrotrends.net/1333/historical-gold-prices-100-... -- no one sane would call it stable. And yet, despite its volatility, gold has been used as a store of value for millennia .

That is exactly why most people no longer use gold as a store of value and are instead using currencies that are much more less volatile. Meanwhile, Bitcoin alone has an annual volatility that is about an order of magnitude larger than gold's, and it's even worse in every other crypto token. None of these things come even close to qualifying for being a store of value.

"Most people no longer use gold as a store of value" may be true wherever you are, but not universally. The Times of India, for example, estimates than Indian households hold gold estimated at about 40% of annual GDP, and half of all households have purchased gold in the last two years.

Re: Former US SEC attorney: 'Get out of crypto platforms now'

#366

Post by kdragon »

Seattle3503 wrote: post #352
chromatin wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Partially disagree: the Lightning Network [1] facilitates almost instantaneous micro and small transactions which can later settle in aggregate to the Bitcoin base layer. I've used this to purchase goods both online and in person seamlessly. Custodial solutions (trust another party to hold your funds, like a bank) are turnkey. Right now the truly non-custodial solutions (i.e., run your own lightning node) are definit…

What do you buy with the lighting network? I've always wanted to try it.

You can use it as currency on stacker.news

You can tip people on the nostr protocol. stats are on zaplife.lol

you can tip musicians on wavlake

there's a Minecraft server called satlantis where it is used as a currency

there's a lot of plugins you can use to build your own lightning enabled apps on lnbits

the space is still young so a lot of software is beta, but there's plenty to play with

check out the plebdev course on udemy if you want to dive into lightning development

Re: Former US SEC attorney: 'Get out of crypto platforms now'

#367

Post by bandrami »

mrguyorama wrote: post #205
username332211 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not seemingly impossible, it's scientifically proven that the general public can't know when the price of Bitcoin will collapse. And it has nothing to do with the general public being stupid and any of that bullshit. It's called the efficient market hypothesis. If it was known that the price of Bitcoin will collapse on the 7th of June 2025, every owner would have sold their Bitcoins on the 6th of June. But then…

The efficient market "Hypothesis" (is it even testable?) presupposes a rational market, doesn't it? Real life markets are not rational, by definition. Humans are not rational actors.

I remember being annoyed on the 2nd day of Econ class when the prof mentioned that empirically we know human preference graphs can be cyclic but we have to pretend that's not true for any micro to work at all.

Re: Former US SEC attorney: 'Get out of crypto platforms now'

#368

Post by bandrami »

throwme_123 wrote: post #257
otoburb wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> If this sounds far-fetched, consider that many smart and smart-sounding people have predicted Bitcoin's demise, and so far all have been utterly wrong Bernie Madoff pulled off one of the largest (literal Ponzi) scams and evidently stated that he started in the 1990s for a run of just over 15 years until being arrested in 2008, although some investigators thought that his fraudulent activities started as far back a…

Wow. Both parent and grand-parent seem wrong. GP: Bitcoiner, dooming everything else. Parent: Anti-crypto (the majority here), up to the point on comparing Bitcoin (which might be a bubble, that's not the point here) to a Ponzi (that it is not: Supply is fixed, there is no new deposits paying previous depositors).

> there is no new deposits paying previous depositors

Huh? Every time somebody buys a coin with fiat that's a new deposit paying a previous depositor.

Re: Former US SEC attorney: 'Get out of crypto platforms now'

#369

Post by girvo »

bandrami wrote: post #361
snapcaster wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably you have been saying this for a while and been wrong so far. At what point would you change your mind?

If something -- anything -- other than meth and murder-for-hire contracts gets priced in Bitcoin I would stop saying it's a dead end.

Meth/other drugs in general being purchasable via Bitcoin has value though. You and I might not find that useful or moral, but we shouldn’t pretend the drug market is a small or insignificant one either.

Re: Former US SEC attorney: 'Get out of crypto platforms now'

#370

Post by Semaphor »

uLogMicheal wrote: post #63
Semaphor wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know, I’m relatively certain securities laws do not affect me.

US securities law effects all US citizens. In current state, they act as a moat for the most profitable investments in society. People claim that securities laws are there to prevent grandmas from getting scammed, but grandmas (and many others) still get scammed on the daily. I would rather them lose $5,000 from investing into a high profit potential startup that could 1000x, instead of a call center in a distant cou…

> all US citizens

Yes.

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