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Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger on crypto in 2018

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Re: Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger on crypto in 2018

#151
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people have already lost a lot of money speculating on crypto since 2018, because of volatility, fraud, and exchanges that turned out to have spent all their customers money. Cherry picking a specific period where you would have made a lot of money is easy in hindsight, especially since I'm pretty sure the big crash is yet to come. (I'm not sure enough to bet on a crash, but sure enough to go nowhere close t…

Its not "Cherry picking" the video is from 2018 and obviously you would compare to the current price. Also the whole "people have already lost a lot of money" argument is totally pointless since you do not think the people who made money are relevant so why should the people who lost money be? If all of crypto is totally useless as people here keep saying then its a zero sum game and no money is lost at all it just m…

You picked two currencies that happened to have a big difference in value at these two points in time.

You are ignoring that a lot of people who bought BTC in 2018 sold it again in 2019 as it lost 50% of its value. Nobody could predict that the value would spike again a few years later, and crash again, and spike again, and crash again.

You are ignoring all the people who bought BTC at 40000 and are wondering if they should sell it at 60% loss now, or wait for it to rebound.

You are ignoring all the people who lost their money because the exchange that they used turned out to be a pyramid scheme.

You are ignoring all the people who bought altcoins that fizzled out, or that bought into the NFT craze or any of the other crazy schemes that crypto shills came up with.

That's why I am saying you are cherry picking.

Re: Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger on crypto in 2018

#152
post #88
post #32

I've always found this excerpt from a Doomberg article sums the whole thing up nicely: > We distinctly recall drawing two circles on a piece of paper. In the circle on the left, we wrote "Real Economy"; while in the circle on the right we wrote "Crypto Universe". We drew two pipes between the circles - one flowing into the crypto universe and the other flowing back to the real economy - and labeled both pipes with fi…

Isn't that true of anything that doesn't include the fed? I mean unless you can print money, you can't change the amount of fiat in any subset of the economy. You can still add value though which would be evident by more people wanting a piece of whatever pie there is, driving more fiat into the subset and/or creating paper gains which is a sort of money in itself, but this is true for crypto as well. For example, I…

In this case its a utility thing. The casino example is a good one. It 'produces' entertainment. Google produces email and search services and eyeballs for ads. What's does crypto produce? Early on in crypto my answer would have been 'nothing' but it turned out I was wrong. It does a couple of things:

- circumvents capital controls

- allows easier transfer of funds between different countries

- allows anonymous money transfers

- allows storage of value (at least until the prices drop) of money outside regulated financial intuitions.

Interestingly, the utility cases for crypto are all ways to get around existing laws and regulations. The thing is that all these laws and regulations were developed for a reason (chesterson's fence), which is to curb fraud, crime, extortion, theft, etc. Eventually the laws will catch up to crypto, and when they do crypto won't have utility.

Re: Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger on crypto in 2018

#153
post #3

Too bad that what they are talking about is not crypto just regular tradfi ponzi schemers who happen to have chosen crypto for their next scam.

Unfortunately if you take away ponzi schemes and money laundering there's not much left of the crypto market.

Unfortunately you know nothing about crypto.

Re: Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger on crypto in 2018

#155
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>crypto >ponzi schemers Literally the same.

Not really. You forgot about money laundering

Even the US Treasury said that crypto is not ideal for money laundering and the amount of money laundering happening in the space is miniscule.

Re: Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger on crypto in 2018

#156
post #3

Too bad that what they are talking about is not crypto just regular tradfi ponzi schemers who happen to have chosen crypto for their next scam.

Eh, I feel like you are being intellectually lazy and are falling into the "No True Scotsman" fallacy.

Eh I feel that you're dumb

Re: Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger on crypto in 2018

#157
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not "Cherry picking" the video is from 2018 and obviously you would compare to the current price. Also the whole "people have already lost a lot of money" argument is totally pointless since you do not think the people who made money are relevant so why should the people who lost money be? If all of crypto is totally useless as people here keep saying then its a zero sum game and no money is lost at all it just m…

You picked two currencies that happened to have a big difference in value at these two points in time. You are ignoring that a lot of people who bought BTC in 2018 sold it again in 2019 as it lost 50% of its value. Nobody could predict that the value would spike again a few years later, and crash again, and spike again, and crash again. You are ignoring all the people who bought BTC at 40000 and are wondering if they…

It wasn't even my post.

People who do stupid decisions are at fault that has nothing to do with the picked time points.

>Nobody could predict....

Except that thousandth of people did and still does at least the people who are informed. Some day the up and down will end as it gets weaker every wave, its very much predictable.

BTC cycles have been ~4 year slightly growing a bit over time. If someone just randomly expect it to be just 1 year and then sells at -50%, its entirely their fault. To do that you have to be stupid twice once to buy without any knowledge about what they buy and then again after they spend a year not educating themself. No one cheated them, no one defrauded them, no one tricked them into anything. Its 100% voluntary stupidity.

>That's why I am saying you are cherry picking.

I'm not, it wasn't my post, I just pointed out that the times aren't picked by the author but by the release time of the video. He didn't cherry pick a best case point in time either, in fact the video was made after the second large crash in 2018 and the price comparison to now (presumably also after the second large crash in this cycle) It seems very reasonable to point out that the price is still higher now than back then. In fact if you compare 2 points in time 4 years apart that it p much the perfect unbiased pick since the cycled go 4 years.

Re: Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger on crypto in 2018

#158
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its irrelevant how much it will cost in the end. Moving fiat inside the same currency space is rather trivial, its just balances on a server in the end. Moving currencies across borders between different jurisdictions and currencies that is actually where the problems start and thus this is not cheap and not fast. People already use crypto as a bridge currency today to transfer "functioning currency" aka fiat. If you…

People do this since many years now circumventing banks and payment providers who would take a huge fee. Take an individual case and add up all the end to end fees associated with doing this. Most likely, they are still huge. A lot of these people aren't really saving much money compared to traditional banking. They're doing this for convenience because they can't easily get a bank account or don't want one because t…

You can exchange USD to crypto with a spread of 0.1% (which statistically will be in your favor at least sometimes).

Transfer is dirt cheap if you dont use the known high fee blockchains like BTC/ETH. A realistic fee is less then 1 cent per Tx. Then crypt back to fiat same thing 0.1% spread.

Lets assume a worst case and you loose 0.5% for the 2 exchanges and 1 cent for the fee.

So for 100 USD send that would mean 99.49 USD is revived

For comparison moneygram's cheapest option for 100 USD to MXN would cost $2 fee (debit card fees not included and the exchange rate (spread) is unknown they give you whatever they want but certainly not anything better than 0.1%) So $102 send and less than $100 will be received and it takes up to 2 business days while the crypto solution takes minutes.

Worst case example is still 4+ times cheaper while completely ignoring the exchange rate because you cant know in advance. And there are way more exotic currencies than MXN which makes the exchange more expensive. Not for crypto tho. If there is a market you get the real market exchange rate as is.

The global remittance market moves billions with double digit growth yearly. If just a tiny fraction of all people use crypto for this (and they do) their saving sum up to millions.

Re: Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger on crypto in 2018

#159
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what can you do with Mexican Peso if you are in Europe? Can you buy Food? Drugs? Probably not. Does it matter if you bought it solely to speculate on its value? Clearly it does not. If you bought Mexican Peso yesterday and sell it today for a profit then that's it. Why would you care about what it is good for? The whole point of speculating with assets is to make profit from price movements. Now replace Mexican Pe…

You can certainly purchase from a Mexican exporter if you're in Europe with pesos. > If you bought Mexican Peso yesterday and sell it today for a profit then that's it. Why would you care about what it is good for? The whole point of speculating with assets is to make profit from price movements. I mean, funnily enough, I've heard this sort of reasoning: > And now all of a sudden everyone's like, wow, people just dec…

I read like halve of it. No arguments could be found and very annoying to read. I dont care about your personal liking and disliking I only care about rational argumentation. If you are so sure that everything in crypto is worthless then bet on it. If you dont do that you are lying to yourself and you argent actually so sure.

Also utility tokens exist with actual use case not "crypto" as the product. You seem misinformed, its not 2015 anymore, big banks use crypto nowadays its not going away its gong to be regulated and become an essential part of the financial system.

Re: Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger on crypto in 2018

#160
post #76

It is wrong to assume that crypto is broken if it doesn't have a high value in some arbitrary currency like the USD. Crypto works just as well even if the price 0. It will still process transactions, still create new blocks, and it will still have a use for someone somewhere, even non-financial.

All mainstream cryptocurrencies rely on the high cost of attacking the network to ensure consistency. If the price is 0, there’s little incentive to participate (mine, validate etc), reducing the cost to attack the network, resulting in the entire network becoming useless.

Counterpoint, the Goerli network is not useless.
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