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Will Bitcoin Make a Good Investment?

beth.technology

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Re: Will Bitcoin Make a Good Investment?

#121

Post by icebraining »

pmiller2 wrote: post #119
icebraining wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since nobody claimed it did, you're attacking a strawman.

Pay attention, because you’ll miss it if you don’t up your game, apparently. “Hodler” doesn’t make money here. She loses. Losing $0 is superior to losing $X for any X > 0.

Hodler will obviously only make the trade when the spread is larger than the transaction costs. The question is why would Alice and Bob be willing to pay, but the reality is that some are. Whether it be by pure foolishness or because your theory is simply incomplete.

Re: Will Bitcoin Make a Good Investment?

#122

Post by pmiller2 »

mopsi wrote: post #113
pmiller2 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you spot the effect of the Cyprus bailout on the value of the EUR in this chart? https://www.fx-exchange.com/currencyimages/2013/eur/the-year... What happened immediately after that?

If you sold a house for 300k the month before and then government confiscated a third of it, I doubt the value of EUR was of much consolation. Had the 300k been held in cryptocurrencies, the government would've been powerless to seize a part of it.

I thought that was still responding to the stability of the Euro. You’re right that if I had 300k EUR in a single, uninsured bank account, the government could confiscate it. That still doesn’t address the fact that BTC can be confiscated, as I pointed out previously.

You could have also taken the prudent measure of not having that much money in a single bank account.

Re: Will Bitcoin Make a Good Investment?

#123

Post by ziddoap »

pmiller2 wrote: post #117
ziddoap wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's odd that if something doesn't have an advantage over something else that it's immediately useless. I also don't know where you think I said that BTC is superior? Something doesn't need to be superior to have a use. Why do you keep moving the goalposts? First, it's completely useless. Now it might have a use, but if it's not superior it might as well be useless. Oh, and now it has to be legal (in the USA? Mexico?…

No, the goal posts are right where you last saw them; your field goal was just blocked. I am saying that USD is strictly superior to BTC for all legitimate/legal use cases. If you want to hide assets or buy cocaine, BTC might be better, sure. But, otherwise it’s like comparing a 1980s computer to one from today. What use does a 35 year old PC have today other than as a museum piece? You are, in fact, the one who’s be…

I never said BTC was superior, in any way, in any form. I never said BTC was a replacement for USD. I never said BTC was going to replace any fiat currency. I never said that BTC is suprior than USD for legal purposes.

Literally, the only thing I said was that BTC has a use, some people obviously think it has value, and semantically it falls under the definition of invest.

How you managed to drag me into an argument about the legality of BTC and how it's superior to USD - all things I never said or claimed - is actually really astonishing.

>No, the goal posts are right where you last saw them; your field goal was just blocked.

That was one of the funniest things I've read all day (sincerely), so thanks for that.

I would just comment that you started with:

>You said people were arguing BTC had no use. I’m asking what I can use it for?

And ended with

>I am saying that USD is strictly superior to BTC for all legitimate/legal use cases. If you want to hide assets or buy cocaine, BTC might be better, sure. But, otherwise it’s like comparing a 1980s computer to one from today.

If that's you "blocking", cool. We have different opinions on what the phrase "moving the goal posts" is, I guess.

>As for “legal,” you know damn well what it means: can I be prosecuted successfully for what I’m about to do? If not, it’s legal.

Laws are different in different countries. What you can be successfully prosecuted in one country for is completely legal in others.

Re: Will Bitcoin Make a Good Investment?

#124

Post by tim333 »

Lordarminius wrote: post #74
tim333 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also as Warren Buffett put it: "It’s a gambling device… there’s been a lot of frauds connected with it. There’s been disappearances, so there’s a lot lost on it. Bitcoin hasn’t produced anything." But it's a good gambling device and people like to gamble. I both think it's kind of nuts and hold a few bitcoins.

Warren Buffet is biased and ignorant. I'd give an arm to hear what he said about Google, FB and other dotcoms when he passed on investing in the 2000's

He's always used to say he didn't understand tech and was sticking to things he understood. Which has served him well though he now is invested in Apple and regrets missing Amazon.

Re: Will Bitcoin Make a Good Investment?

#125

Post by mopsi »

pmiller2 wrote: post #122
mopsi wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you sold a house for 300k the month before and then government confiscated a third of it, I doubt the value of EUR was of much consolation. Had the 300k been held in cryptocurrencies, the government would've been powerless to seize a part of it.

I thought that was still responding to the stability of the Euro. You’re right that if I had 300k EUR in a single, uninsured bank account, the government could confiscate it. That still doesn’t address the fact that BTC can be confiscated, as I pointed out previously. You could have also taken the prudent measure of not having that much money in a single bank account.

> That still doesn’t address the fact that BTC can be confiscated, as I pointed out previously.

No, it cannot. No government can issue an order to seize 47.5% of everything over 10 BTC (ca 100k EUR) from a list of accounts. Third parties cannot freeze cryptocurrency accounts or rewrite their balances. That's the major innovation of distributed ledgers (blockchain).

This is a fundamental difference compared to traditional banking where account balances are just fields in a writable database.

At best, they can seize private keys that control accounts, but to achieve that, they must confiscate personal devices (phones, tablets, computers) and examine each of them with forensic tools. This is not viable on a large scale, especially when considering that private keys are easy to hide with plausible deniability (using encryption, steganography, memorization, etc).

News stories about "confiscated" cryptocurrency are nothing more than private keys found on seized computers. No-one can take control over any account by any other means.

Re: Will Bitcoin Make a Good Investment?

#126

Post by pmiller2 »

icebraining wrote: post #121
pmiller2 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pay attention, because you’ll miss it if you don’t up your game, apparently. “Hodler” doesn’t make money here. She loses. Losing $0 is superior to losing $X for any X > 0.

Hodler will obviously only make the trade when the spread is larger than the transaction costs. The question is why would Alice and Bob be willing to pay, but the reality is that some are. Whether it be by pure foolishness or because your theory is simply incomplete.

Well, if it’s pure foolishness, there’s a name for the way that Hodler makes money: a Ponzi scheme. Where is my theory incomplete?

Re: Will Bitcoin Make a Good Investment?

#127

Post by pmiller2 »

mopsi wrote: post #125
pmiller2 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought that was still responding to the stability of the Euro. You’re right that if I had 300k EUR in a single, uninsured bank account, the government could confiscate it. That still doesn’t address the fact that BTC can be confiscated, as I pointed out previously. You could have also taken the prudent measure of not having that much money in a single bank account.

> That still doesn’t address the fact that BTC can be confiscated, as I pointed out previously. No, it cannot. No government can issue an order to seize 47.5% of everything over 10 BTC (ca 100k EUR) from a list of accounts. Third parties cannot freeze cryptocurrency accounts or rewrite their balances. That's the major innovation of distributed ledgers (blockchain). This is a fundamental difference compared to traditi…

> No-one can take control over any account by any other means.

I see. I suppose if the US government orders, say, Coinbase, to turn over control of someone’s account, they won’t do it? You have an example of that happening, right?

Re: Will Bitcoin Make a Good Investment?

#128

Post by pmiller2 »

icebraining wrote: post #116
pmiller2 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Should” is not a moral judgement. Substitute the word “logically,” if you want. What can you buy with BTC besides drugs and the occasional coffee at a Silicon Valley coffee shop? How does that compare to what you can buy with USD? Call me when you can buy a house with BTC reliably.

Are you saying nothing has value unless it can be directly and reliably used to buy houses? If you're saying "BTC is less useful than some other currencies", then I don't disagree, but then you should have said that in the first place, rather than motte-and-baileying.

Nice straw man. I’m saying it’s value is equal to its utility for facilitating transactions, and there’s nothing worthwhile you can buy with it. If I can’t buy a pizza, a bus ticket, a TV, a house, a car, a beer, or dinner with it, then what good is it?

Re: Will Bitcoin Make a Good Investment?

#129

Post by simonsarris »

sedeki wrote: post #5
pmiller2 wrote: post #3

Not one word here about why BTC should be worth anything at all. Who cares if someone spent time and electricity to mine it? The USD is, along with every other major, government-backed currency, already an almost 100% digital currency. I don’t see any advantage there. In fact, BTC has the disadvantage of no major government backing it. If nobody is required to accept it, and I can’t do anything with it otherwise, wha…

What exactly does it mean when people say that a currency is backed by a government? ”Backed” to me implies, e.g., redeemable for gold which is clearly not the case for the US dollar. Is it that the government issue bonds denominated in that currency? But that has nothing to do with the money supply per se...? Please explain.

> What exactly does it mean when people say that a currency is backed by a government?

I think the de facto meaning of backed, despite what people say about gold/silver/etc is actually this:

American dollars have value because the US Government taxes things, like land, and if you do not pay those taxes they will send you mean letters (trust me) before resorting to other means (trust Al Capone). You pay these taxes in US dollars. You just having dollars does not make them valuable. And dollars are not valuable because they are backed by gold or silver or sea shells. What makes dollars valuable is that the government wants them back.

From something I wrote a while ago about why being "backed" is important: https://medium.com/@simon.sarris/the-guns-of-bitcoin-1f77930...

Re: Will Bitcoin Make a Good Investment?

#130

Post by mopsi »

pmiller2 wrote: post #127
mopsi wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That still doesn’t address the fact that BTC can be confiscated, as I pointed out previously. No, it cannot. No government can issue an order to seize 47.5% of everything over 10 BTC (ca 100k EUR) from a list of accounts. Third parties cannot freeze cryptocurrency accounts or rewrite their balances. That's the major innovation of distributed ledgers (blockchain). This is a fundamental difference compared to traditi…

> No-one can take control over any account by any other means. I see. I suppose if the US government orders, say, Coinbase, to turn over control of someone’s account, they won’t do it? You have an example of that happening, right?

Coinbase has no control over any cryptocurrency accounts besides their own.

Each cryptocurrency user generates a private key that becomes a wallet and is used to sign transactions. These signed transactions are then broadcast to the internet for balance keeping nodes to keep track of. They do it in a globally distributed manner (no central entity) and earn rewards for their work (like collecting a tiny fraction of the transaction as a fee).

The private key is never disclosed to anyone.

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