Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

cointelegraph.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

771–780 of 1001 posts

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#771

Post by spaceman_2020 »

gigatexal wrote: post #627
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin didn’t go to zero with people buying it through shady exchanges operated out of tax havens, and you think Bitcoin will go to zero AFTER its available to every investor in the US through every finance app and is being sold by giant hedge funds?

cryptocurrencies are primarily a tool for grift, crime, other shady purposes. their existence is a net negative hence my hope bitcoin and with it the whole market for currencies to go to zero. but what about cash you might ask? cash has always been used for everything of course both good and bad but transporting millions of some fiat currency in a briefcase is a lot harder than stealing some wallet with monkey jpegs…

This is a very first world, privileged perspective. There are billions of people in the world who don't have access to stable local currencies or payment systems. I've personally hired people in Africa and Phillippines who prefer being paid in stablecoins than their local currencies (not that there is an easy way to pay them in their local currencies).

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#772

Post by npoc »

guappa wrote: post #694
npoc wrote: post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an abstraction of work. All sound money requires equivalent value work to produce. And the work done is stored as protective "walls" in the blockchain, one on top of each block, piled higher and higher as time goes on, to become impenetrable. It's quite beautiful.

It's literally doing busywork just to assign a value to the mining. It's beautiful if you're a business major who has no regard to real world.

What do think happens if you let people create money without doing the equivalent work?

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#774

Post by qwytw »

roenxi wrote: post #735
qwytw wrote: post #665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Russian troops kept advancing Did they? The war is in a stalemate. Militarily this isn't that different than the proxy wars of the Cold War EXCEPT Russia has suffered more casualties by a magnitude or two than the USSR did in Afghanistan or the US in Vietnam. For the Russian regime this war is now 100% an existential threat. For the US from an entirely a real-politik point of view, if the end goal is to defeat Russ…

> For the Russian regime this war is now 100% an existential threat. For everyone this war is an existential threat. It is unusual for governments that come in after a revolution to be more stable than their predecessors and any successor to Putin will still have the worlds largest nuclear weapons stockpile. There is an outside chance of a literal replay of Germany WWI -> WWII if the Russians collapse. Not to mention…

> There is an outside chance of a literal replay of Germany WWI -> WWII if the Russians collapse

True but "only" because Russia has nukes (you certainly have an extremely valid point about that). However despite WWI Germany was still one of the (or the) economically strongest powers in Europe and the whole world. Besides oil and other raw resources the Russian economy is a joke. Due to their demographic issues and the mass casualties in this war they wouldn't even have the manpower to pull off something even remotely similar to what Germany did. So their only tool they'll have left is "do what we want or we'll blow up the entire world" (and you can only get so far with that..)

> it's military looks a bit wheezy through all this

It it their military itself or rather their "soft"/diplomatic power? It doesn't really matter how strong your conventional army is if you and your opponents know that you won't/can't use it?

> in NATO's sphere of influence

Prior to 2014 Ukraine was certainly in Russia's sphere of influence. This whole thing started because Ukraine (mostly peacefully) was trying to leave it and US/NATO didn't really want to get involved that much into the whole situation until it was too late. So I'm not sure it's that clear cut.

> Bearing in mind we're talking about someone trading Bitcoin in a way they don't like. "this assumes USD hegemony is a distant memory. does bitcoin have the largest weapons cache and standing military in the history of humanity?" is just bunk. They don't have that sort of power these days.

I don't agree with the whole premise. The ability of the US to project military power these days is only somewhat tangentially related to its (and the Dollar's) global economic and financial dominance. They most certainly can more or less stop "trading Bitcoin in a way they don't like" without firing a shot it's just the the cost of doing that is not (yet) worth the effort. AFAIK China is not that eager to switch to bitcoin either (and without China, US, Europe and their allies you only have non particularly economically relevant third tier countries/economies left).

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#775

Post by killerstorm »

aurareturn wrote: post #310
killerstorm wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It provides an alternative to banks. Once you realize that banks are very fragile and abusive, just having this alternative is important. Banks can deny you access to your money on a whim. Compliance, glitch, failure, whatever. You can't use your money. You can't buy food. You can't pay rent. You can't buy tickets. You can't hire a lawyer. It's nice to have something which is based on completely different principles.

That’s a small fraction of BTC holders. The majority don’t care and leave their coins on exchanges, which act like banks but unregulated.

People can still choose different jurisdiction, or move when they want, etc, etc.

It might surprise you, but it's way easier to open an exchange account than a bank account.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#776

Post by TrackerFF »

ur-whale wrote: post #714
TrackerFF wrote: post #658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no underlying value. No intrinsic value. The value is purely a function of speculative demand. And while previously people anticipated the demand would go up "organically" because of actual real-world usage, you know to pay for stuff and such, that hasn't really materialized in the way we hoped. How many actually use BTC for things like that? At its BEST it has usage to purchase other coins - but that's abou…

> No intrinsic value The rest of your long rant is basically useless, because the last 2 words above have strictly no meaning when put together

If you invest in a company that produces disinfectants, during a pandemic, you can reasonably assume that there's both demand, and that the value of the company is a function of their ability to produce disinfectant, how much inventory they have etc. - in fact, this can be measured / inferred through their financial reporting.

Likewise, if you invest in a pharma company that produces insulin, and there's a insulin shortage, same principle applies.

Or maybe you want to invest in some heavy machinery company, so naturally the valuation depends on how much their assets are worth. And how much they're making off their services in sales.

In any case, for all the above, there is some base value - some intrinsic value, which is possible to calculate.

Hell, even gold is predictable. If there's physical demand for gold (which there is), you can come up with how much physical gold is needed, at minimum.

But how do you calculate that for, say, bitcoin? I'm having a hard time coming up with anything. I can't point to any application which would require people to strictly use bitcoin, and thus driving up demand. No policies that require people to pay with bitcoin.

I guess one could argue that the hardware needed to mine bitcoin has a value, which could set some minimum for what miners are willing to sell BTC for - but otherwise it seems to be only supply and demand. It is the "demand" part which I find difficult.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#777

Post by [deleted] »

RandomLensman wrote: post #748
npoc wrote: post #630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that they can never stop you custodying the bitcoin yourself. Bitcoin won't become "quaint" - it will always sit there as the hardest money mankind has ever seen (and likely ever will). If they try and create tokens that don't represent bitcoin i.e. creating them out of thin air, then they will go down in value relative to bitcoin, just as we are seeing with fiat currencies and people will move thei…

When push came to shove, pretty much all money (and assets) dropped hard in value vs stuff that is critically needed. Hardness of money is really only situational. Really hard money does not exist that is why things like productive assets are where wealth goes - not into other non-productive monies. For example, equity is already used as money at times (M&A, salaries).

[deleted]

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#778

Post by iraqmtpizza »

pavlov wrote: post #578
zubairq wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually a huge amount of Bitcoin that people bought from large institutions over the last 5 - 10 years was already not on the blockchain. (1) a customer would go to an exchange’s website and purchase 1 Bitcoin (2) the exchange would add 1 to an internal counter representing the Bitcoin balance for that customer on their internal SQL database (3) the exchange would use / trade that money sent by the customer to try t…

The popularity of these scammy exchanges despite the massive red flags shows that this is actually what customers want. They don't want the theoretical advantages of permissionless blockchains and private keys, they just want penny stocks that trade 24/7 and are called "crypto" because it sounds cool. So institutions will take advantage of that desire for convenience and work with regulators to turn "crypto" into jus…

Or maybe it's just that they aren't illiterate and know that US taxes must be paid in USD by law. If you want to call not going to federal prison "convenience" then make that argument explicitly instead of dancing around it.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#779

Post by xur17 »

Gareth321 wrote: post #729
herbst wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I very highly doubt that trading ETFs has lower fees than Bitcoin. As monetary system Bitcoin, even more crypto in general, is still the one and only method to move money internationally in realtime with very low fees.

Yeah, ARKB, for example, charges 0.75% management fee. Meaning they charge that every year on total holdings. So the ETF is clearly more expensive than simply holding BTC. I think OP believes this will lead to lower BTC fees due to lower volume.

It depends on what time horizon. Transaction fees are changed every time the bitcoin moves - the management fee is charged 1x / year.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#780

Post by killerstorm »

reaperman wrote: post #304
killerstorm wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It provides an alternative to banks. Once you realize that banks are very fragile and abusive, just having this alternative is important. Banks can deny you access to your money on a whim. Compliance, glitch, failure, whatever. You can't use your money. You can't buy food. You can't pay rent. You can't buy tickets. You can't hire a lawyer. It's nice to have something which is based on completely different principles.

I think you'll be amazed at the extent to which BTC will be able to be controlled by strong central governments. I'd be shocked if in ten years there's not granular control over which wallets contain "tainted" bitcoin and cannot be converted to fiat except through actual money laundering. There's been a lot of consolidation of the exchanges in USA, tons of KYC controls in place now, and old-school options like localb…

Well, it's been 15 years.

The question is more like: Are OK with government control?

Reminder - regulators reviewed SVB reports and found them adequate. Then apparently people found it's insolvent. Does it look adequate?

Do you like a system if bank can become insolvent if people withdraw their money?

That's presumably one of most competent countries in the world.

Post reply on HN