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S&P Dow Jones Indices to launch cryptocurrency indexes in 2021

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Re: S&P Dow Jones Indices to launch cryptocurrency indexes in 2021

#161

Someone please explain this to me: How is any cryptocurrency even considered an investment vehicle? I would classify myself as Boglehead and I believe in the fundamentals of investing in stocks because in all it's technicality (and given the buy-and-hold strategy), you are investing in a business by owning a part of it which naturally means that you will and do get the returns on it, both in terms of profits (dividen…

Imagine your bought the rights to a tree that would later be turned into thousands of $100 bills.

Bitcoin is a speculative bet that it will become a popular global currency. The idea is eventually you will be able to use the bitcoin as currency once it scales up.

Re: S&P Dow Jones Indices to launch cryptocurrency indexes in 2021

#162

this + the entry of tesla within S&P + the destruction of small businesses is the perfect recipe for chaos and years of reviving 2008 era

Could you elaborate? We're definitely in an accelerated-transition period w/ an uptick in inequality, if that's what you mean.

Covid hits, Fed and US govt. unleash trillions of dollars of easy money for corporations and the stock market bubbles up to record all time highs in record time. This is unprecedented. The largest transfer of wealth program continues on and we continue to have a 9/11 worth of deaths at an alarmingly increasing frequency. Unemployment is high, food lines are staggeringly long, small businesses are cracking, and we don't support people to stay home: more stimulus money going directly to the lower socioeconomic classes is absolutely needed to help them stay home and stay safe.

So the markets are totally decoupled from the economy. Reality is gonna hit that someday and then, only then, will we see the panic go through Congress once again as they pass all kinds of amazing bills that while they do in the name of helping the little guy, it mostly provides protection to all these zombie corporations that need another dose of easy money to stay alive. So we throw away all this capital and keep the transfer wealth program alive that sucks the future out of the younger generations to keep the shareholders happy.

Socialize the losses, privatize the profits. It feels like we're about to reach a tipping point. The number of scammers, grifters, conmen is too damn high, even the president is one. What's happening?

Re: S&P Dow Jones Indices to launch cryptocurrency indexes in 2021

#163

Someone please explain this to me: How is any cryptocurrency even considered an investment vehicle? I would classify myself as Boglehead and I believe in the fundamentals of investing in stocks because in all it's technicality (and given the buy-and-hold strategy), you are investing in a business by owning a part of it which naturally means that you will and do get the returns on it, both in terms of profits (dividen…

For the same reason gold is an "investment." It's a store of value and a hedge against government controlled currencies such as the US Dollar.

Re: S&P Dow Jones Indices to launch cryptocurrency indexes in 2021

#164

Someone please explain this to me: How is any cryptocurrency even considered an investment vehicle? I would classify myself as Boglehead and I believe in the fundamentals of investing in stocks because in all it's technicality (and given the buy-and-hold strategy), you are investing in a business by owning a part of it which naturally means that you will and do get the returns on it, both in terms of profits (dividen…

I want to believe it's an investment myself, but haven't been able to-- and by sitting it out we've of course lost a lot of money in forgone gains. Where I get stuck, and maybe someone could help me here-- generally, you don't have to try to hard to imagine a future with cryptocurrency being more useful then it is today. That is, it is more valuable. BUT, why should that mean that its price should be higher? It's lik…

the value of something like bitcoin is generally going to be related to the value of the network. if you can envision it being more useful in the future, consider what the function is, and what it means for the value of the network as a whole.

some examples to explain what i'm saying, not necessarily what i think will happen per se

bitcoin replaces, or at least augments, gold as a "store of value inflation hedge" - in theory it should be a great inflation hedge. there are a limited number of bitcoin, 21 million max, but we keep printing trillions and trillions of new dollars. gold also doesn't do anything productive, it just sits there and acts as a hedge on inflation.

in this scenario, the market cap of gold is something like 8 trillion. if bitcoin takes some of this job, it's market cap must get a lot bigger. functionally, we have 8 trillion "dollars" of wealth that are currently stored in gold. if we wanted to "store" 8 trillion "dollars" of wealth in bitcoin, we can't currently. the entire market cap of bitcoin is only a few hundred billion. For it to be an inflation hedge on the scale of gold, the price has to rise tremendously.

this same calculation can be done for whatever potential usefulness you come up with. Like if you think it can replace the USD as a reserve currency for setting international oil trades, the market cap of bitcoin has to get exponentially bigger just to handle the scale of those markets.

now, i don't think it's likely to become the world's reserve currency, certainly not anytime soon, but if it were you can see where it would have to have more value to be able to do so. I do think it is a great inflation hedge, and I think lots of money managers are going to start recommending to client to put 1-3-5% of their portfolios into bitcoin as a hedge. That's happening right now. IF that goes mainstream, the market cap of bitcoin HAS to go up significantly to handle all that new demand, given that the supply is capped.

Re: S&P Dow Jones Indices to launch cryptocurrency indexes in 2021

#165

Someone please explain this to me: How is any cryptocurrency even considered an investment vehicle? I would classify myself as Boglehead and I believe in the fundamentals of investing in stocks because in all it's technicality (and given the buy-and-hold strategy), you are investing in a business by owning a part of it which naturally means that you will and do get the returns on it, both in terms of profits (dividen…

It is exactly the same as you trading Currency-A in exchange for Currency-B.

Re: S&P Dow Jones Indices to launch cryptocurrency indexes in 2021

#166

I've been dabbling in crypto since the lockdown (all red, but I've had fun) and this space is like the wild west early days of the internet, with even more scammers. We're past the heady ICO days but now, all the scams have moved to Uniswap. And I might be guilty of being elitist, but I rarely, if ever, see founders with A+ tier credentials (Ivy league education, FAANG/Investment banking/Mckinsey et al) starting cryp…

The claim about people with "A+ credentials" not working in crypto is off base. Look at the founders of crypto companies from top-tier VCs like a16z: https://a16z.com/crypto/#vertical-landing-portfolio

I should have been more clear: new crypto projects rarely have pedigreed founders anymore.

Re: S&P Dow Jones Indices to launch cryptocurrency indexes in 2021

#167
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's analogous to investing money in USD or GBP before those countries were given a license to print as many USD and GBP as they wanted. Before then (1931 for the pound and 1933 for the dollar, though they maintained de-facto parity with gold until 1971), dollars and pounds were considered good investments. That's why we had bank runs: people thought their money would be safer under their mattress, and preferred to o…

The supply of capital-B Bitcoin is 21M, but at any time, anyone can create Bitcoin2, which is an exact clone of Bitcoin but with a fresh chain. Any Bitcoin2 token has exactly the same utility as a Bitcoin token in principle - the only difference is that, for now at least, lots of people are mining Bitcoin and no one is mining Bitcoin2. If there comes a day when a lot of people think there should be 42M bitcoins, inst…

yes but the beauty is that, due to the lack of a central authority, the game theory of the situation virtually ensures that no one would ever do that — that is, take bitcoin2 seriously

Re: S&P Dow Jones Indices to launch cryptocurrency indexes in 2021

#168

I've been dabbling in crypto since the lockdown (all red, but I've had fun) and this space is like the wild west early days of the internet, with even more scammers. We're past the heady ICO days but now, all the scams have moved to Uniswap. And I might be guilty of being elitist, but I rarely, if ever, see founders with A+ tier credentials (Ivy league education, FAANG/Investment banking/Mckinsey et al) starting cryp…

>And I might be guilty of being elitist, but I rarely, if ever, see founders with A+ tier credentials (Ivy league education, FAANG/Investment banking/Mckinsey et al) starting crypto businesses. Spoiler: majority of good engineers never worked at big tech companies or went to ivy league schools. Also, investment banking isn't exactly a shining beacon of trust.

I agree. But it is a signal, especially in a field filled with as much noise as crypto. When all you have to go by is a whitepaper and a website, past performance of the founders becomes important.

Re: S&P Dow Jones Indices to launch cryptocurrency indexes in 2021

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is fixed at 21M but technically, this can be changed through an Economic Majority [0][1]. [0] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Economic_majority [1] https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/3945/how-could-t...

What does this concept of Economic Majority look like of we consider it for the US Dollar, rather than btc?

economic majority for the USD is the Federal Reserve Board

Re: S&P Dow Jones Indices to launch cryptocurrency indexes in 2021

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SWIFT gpi can't compete with Ripple on a number of important issues. Ripple transfers don't pass through multiple banks and the actual value of the XRP is transferred, not just the data (of the SWIFT ledger). > Banks can and do move billions instantly We're not just talking about banks, and if I open my own bank tomorrow I can't use SWIFT the same day (the way I can with Ripple), I have no relationships with correspo…

I think what the grandparent post is trying to make clear is that there is no technical impediment to moving money instantly as some others have claimed here. It isn't that the amazing technology of blockchain has allowed us to achieve this for the first time. The reality is that this completely unregulated space is allowing people to sidestep a bunch of regulation and thus move money faster. If crypto becomes an iss…

> there is no technical impediment to moving money instantly as some others have claimed here

Yes, there are quite a few where crypto has an undeniable advantage, I listed a couple.

> has allowed us to achieve this for the first time

That is wrong, we have never been able to use the improvements to the 45+ y/o SWIFT network (Ripple creates) that we can today.

> Regulate crypto such that it isn't an issue anymore

How will you require correspondent banking when 200+ banks are already side-stepping it?

> make the existing monetary systems move money more quickly

How would you make SWIFT settle accounts more quickly?

How would you remove the incredibly high prices on traditional wire transfers?

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