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Bitcoin Looks Set for Longest Monthly Losing Streak Since 2018

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Re: Bitcoin Looks Set for Longest Monthly Losing Streak Since 2018

#51
post #17

Vibes guy here. I dabbled in Bitcoin for about a year, on the notion that if the world's overall financial system got degraded, more people would view Bitcoin holdings as a safe way to preserve value. Maybe better than owning physical gold. Why not get in early before the next stampede? But I was wrong about bitcoin > gold. It's worked the other way around. There's also persistent chatter that the supposedly uncracka…

The biggest problem with metals is the same as crypto - there's no fundamental underlying value like P/E or product announcements you can anchor the price to - so its free to fluctuate. How much of a problem that actually is we got to find out last Friday.

> there's no fundamental underlying value [...] its free to fluctuate

I don't understand this argument since that's how literally all markets work: the consensus is the current price. If we're talking about fundamentals then crypto isn't comparable to gold at all since 1) it's a physical, tangible, durable thing, and 2) has been used for centuries as a store of value.

Gold is easy to understand from a human perspective and doesn't require knowledge of a blockchain or anything tech related. You store it, secure it, and transport it like any other physical asset. Whereas something like Bitcoin involves seed phrases, blockchains, irreversible transactions, a public ledger, and it's all virtual. If your store of value is one mistake away from being lost to the void then it's not very good. I'll just finish with this: there is a reason that central banks have been loading up on gold recently in light of uncertainty and not crypto.

Re: Bitcoin Looks Set for Longest Monthly Losing Streak Since 2018

#52
post #47

Whether the price goes up or down from here, one notion has been sufficiently shattered over the last couple of years - that Bitcoin is a stable ~source~ store of value that acts has a hedge against inflation and currency control by governments. While assets like gold and silver have surged in the same time period due to political and economic uncertainty, as one may expect, Bitcoin has gone in the opposite direction…

> that Bitcoin is a stable source of value

no sane person could have ever held that notion - there is no underlying value.

Re: Bitcoin Looks Set for Longest Monthly Losing Streak Since 2018

#53
post #17

Vibes guy here. I dabbled in Bitcoin for about a year, on the notion that if the world's overall financial system got degraded, more people would view Bitcoin holdings as a safe way to preserve value. Maybe better than owning physical gold. Why not get in early before the next stampede? But I was wrong about bitcoin > gold. It's worked the other way around. There's also persistent chatter that the supposedly uncracka…

The biggest problem with metals is the same as crypto - there's no fundamental underlying value like P/E or product announcements you can anchor the price to - so its free to fluctuate. How much of a problem that actually is we got to find out last Friday.

Gold and silver, besides industrial uses, have been used both as currency and jewelry for a long time.

Re: Bitcoin Looks Set for Longest Monthly Losing Streak Since 2018

#54
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if that is the case. An insane amount of bitcoin has been dumped into the market by whales.

that's the perfect time to buy

Because the whales are dumbasses?

Re: Bitcoin Looks Set for Longest Monthly Losing Streak Since 2018

#55
post #17

Vibes guy here. I dabbled in Bitcoin for about a year, on the notion that if the world's overall financial system got degraded, more people would view Bitcoin holdings as a safe way to preserve value. Maybe better than owning physical gold. Why not get in early before the next stampede? But I was wrong about bitcoin > gold. It's worked the other way around. There's also persistent chatter that the supposedly uncracka…

Quantum computing is interesting to think about in the context of bitcoin. It would be technically feasible to upgrade the protocol to be quantum-secure (e.g. allow wallets to make an on-chain declaration of a new PQ pubkey, and after that point all transactions must be signed with the PQ keypair) - but getting everyone to coordinate on something like that would be challenging.

Re: Bitcoin Looks Set for Longest Monthly Losing Streak Since 2018

#56
post #47

Whether the price goes up or down from here, one notion has been sufficiently shattered over the last couple of years - that Bitcoin is a stable ~source~ store of value that acts has a hedge against inflation and currency control by governments. While assets like gold and silver have surged in the same time period due to political and economic uncertainty, as one may expect, Bitcoin has gone in the opposite direction…

> that Bitcoin is a stable source of value no sane person could have ever held that notion - there is no underlying value.

Hindsight is 20/20. That bitcoin is a store of value has been talked about for a very long time when other blockchains overtook it in terms of functionality. People’s memories are short so I am sure it will be touted as such again in a couple years.

Re: Bitcoin Looks Set for Longest Monthly Losing Streak Since 2018

#57
post #44
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can easily trade gold until someone can force it from you. The amount of gold you can realistically conceal is less than a year of your salary.

A year of my salary is between 1lbs to 2lbs of gold at current prices. Hiding a few pounds of something isn't very difficult, I do it every Christmas.

It might be worth considering why drug deals are always portrayed as a high stakes, dangerous event (it's because to do the sale, the physical products have to all be in one well known place where everybody knows both the place and time).

Re: Bitcoin Looks Set for Longest Monthly Losing Streak Since 2018

#58
post #17

Vibes guy here. I dabbled in Bitcoin for about a year, on the notion that if the world's overall financial system got degraded, more people would view Bitcoin holdings as a safe way to preserve value. Maybe better than owning physical gold. Why not get in early before the next stampede? But I was wrong about bitcoin > gold. It's worked the other way around. There's also persistent chatter that the supposedly uncracka…

You can easily trade gold today. You can easily trade gold if ww3 starts to the goons pressganging people into dying in the trenches so they take your bitcoin hoarding neighbor instead. You can easily trade gold after a nuclear apocalypse to your local warlord so you get access to non-irradiated food. Gold is a pretty, shiny rock and rich people like pretty, shiny things so they can display their superiority to no-go…

> Gold is a pretty, shiny rock and rich people like pretty, shiny things so they can display their superiority to no-gold-having proles. Just about everybody on the planet knows gold is highly valuable.

But isn't this all based on belief? What if you break the spell? During the Dutch Tulip Mania you could've replaced "gold" with "tulip" and changed a few adjectives and it was the same until the spell broke... I don't see the difference to Bitcoin, GME, or TSLA, "I'm going to hoard this because tomorrow (for an infinite amount of tomorrows) someone else will want to buy it at a higher price!".

Yeah yeah yeah, gold can also be used for technology (e.g. as a non-reactive metal), but copper is useful in technology too...

Sheep is probably a better thing to own. You can eat it, or you can take its wool to make clothes to keep yourself warm. You can't eat gold.

Re: Bitcoin Looks Set for Longest Monthly Losing Streak Since 2018

#59
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest problem with metals is the same as crypto - there's no fundamental underlying value like P/E or product announcements you can anchor the price to - so its free to fluctuate. How much of a problem that actually is we got to find out last Friday.

A large fraction of gold mined every year is used for its material properties in industrial and electronic applications. That presents a very real floor on price. If good was suddenly worth 1/10th as much we would use it in far more industrial applications thus driving up the price. Similarly mining would slow down from the current ~3,000 tons annually again driving the price up. Gold is currently priced way above th…

> A large fraction of gold mined every year is used for its material properties in industrial and electronic applications.

I thought that was less than 10%. That's a very low floor! (That said, gold is sound money)

Re: Bitcoin Looks Set for Longest Monthly Losing Streak Since 2018

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can easily trade gold today. You can easily trade gold if ww3 starts to the goons pressganging people into dying in the trenches so they take your bitcoin hoarding neighbor instead. You can easily trade gold after a nuclear apocalypse to your local warlord so you get access to non-irradiated food. Gold is a pretty, shiny rock and rich people like pretty, shiny things so they can display their superiority to no-go…

> Gold is a pretty, shiny rock and rich people like pretty, shiny things so they can display their superiority to no-gold-having proles. Just about everybody on the planet knows gold is highly valuable. But isn't this all based on belief? What if you break the spell? During the Dutch Tulip Mania you could've replaced "gold" with "tulip" and changed a few adjectives and it was the same until the spell broke... I don't…

Gold has been used as a store of value for bascially all of recorded human civilization.

Sheep get sick and die, and you have to feed them.

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