201–210 of 449 posts
Look I like Taleb, I read his books and they are insightful. But here he is just butthurt he hasn't invested early.
>> he is just butthurt he hasn't invested early Every single time a BTC supporter says this, they further prove that it’s a Ponzi scheme.
Stocks: * You buy them because they increase earnings and eventually produce dividends at a very high yield to your initial investment. * The company can issue shares suppressing the price. * The company can do stock buybacks, increasing the price. * Brokers can naked short, suppressing the price. Fiat currency * You need it to pay taxes and debts. * Endless Printing. Gold * Bought because of limited supply. * Supply…
> Stocks: you buy them because they increase earnings and eventually produce dividends at a very high yield to your initial investment. No, you buy them because you want to support good, non-nefarious companies with sound business models. (I know that’s idealistic, but focusing purely on speculative uses of stocks is another extreme and paints a very incomplete picture.)
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> None of them seem to have caught the eye of investors. That's the problem with this doublespeak, where people intentionally fool themselves into cognitive dissonance. The whole point of currency is not investment. It's the exact opposite of investment. Currency is intended to have stable value over time, because it's whole point is to serve as a unit of account, store value, and serve as a medium to exchange value…
Not to go into too much detail. But in a debt based system you have bonds and currency. A bond has the risk of not being repaid, speculators speculate in the likelihood of that and their individual decisions give a market price for that bond. Likewise bond may have repayment price-indexed and speculators then speculate indirectly in the currency's price stability. Point is that even with stable prices, there is plent…
Even if you feel the need to equate crypto-things to bonds, first you need to argue why buying, say, bitcoins can be argued as lending money to someone, which makes no sense whatsoever.
Cryptos are nothing more than speculation vehicle, and it's pretty obvious that they are massively used as a pump-and-dump scheme. The only point in time where cryptos played a relevant role as a currency was way back in the silk road times where cryptos were used with the expectation of laundring transactions. That usecases quickly went out the door ages ago.
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It’s a decentralized Ponzi scheme. It’s why Bitcoin owners are so aggressive in convincing others to buy Bitcoin.
I honestly never experienced that. Its not like any crypto investor is running around converting others.
It's an interesting time in the history of bitcoin as we are starting to see a move from small speculators (number go up) to institutions buying in (it's sensible to diversify 5% of your portfolio into crypoassets as they have historically high returns and low correlations).
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Economically it's much more like gold than a ponzi scheme: Gold: Asset that goes up and down in price according to demand. No central body controlling it. Some utility as jewelry though we could get by without that. Massive dollar and environmental cost from mining the stuff. Ponzi scheme: Fraud where insiders take money from investors and use it to pay other investors. Collapses and the fraudsters run off or go to j…
It’s a decentralized Ponzi scheme. It’s why Bitcoin owners are so aggressive in convincing others to buy Bitcoin.
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It’s a decentralized Ponzi scheme. It’s why Bitcoin owners are so aggressive in convincing others to buy Bitcoin.
I honestly never experienced that. Its not like any crypto investor is running around converting others.
I mean I wish I had listened because BTC was $50 a coin the first time someone tried to convince me to buy in.
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It’s a decentralized Ponzi scheme. It’s why Bitcoin owners are so aggressive in convincing others to buy Bitcoin.
While you can be tempted to define Bitcoin in that way, the Ponzi scheme definition doesn't apply [1]. As the parent comment: in Bitcoin no investor has the precise information of when to exit to defraud others. [1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/ponzischeme.asp
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If you want something inflationary, why not a basket of currencies via the traditional finance system? One reason I like Bitcoin is because it's a deflationary asset which makes it unique among most other assets. This site is overwhelmingly negative towards Bitcoin, but I feel like the negativity would only make sense if you had to make a binary decision to put most of your wealth in Bitcoin or none of it. Having jus…
IMO what’s neat about cryptocurrencies is that they are programmable money. This means you could build inflationary cash which inflates at a fixed, fair rate, in an open and transparent manner (Dogecoin did this, for example). Bitcoin has obviously failed at being what the whitepaper said it would be: “A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.” A fair and open inflationary currency might stand a better chance.
A currency's supply needs to increase/decrease in response to what's circulating at this moment in time. If the overall supply is increasing but everybody is squirrelling it away or deleveraging debt positions, then you're still going to have deflationary effects. Case in point, roughly 20% of USD was minted in the last year or so, with pretty much no inflation. Similarly with something like Bitcoin, if some event were to trigger a spending/selling spree (or a debt bubble were to form) then you would have inflationary effects.
What's needed is coordination to increase/decrease the supply as needed. That could be done with some kind of decentralised voting system. But I'm not sure it could react fast enough in a crisis, or be able to direct the action to the right parts of an economy to avoid the kind of damage that takes decades to undo.
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> Perhaps there is an argument to Bitcoin being a kind of "digital gold" even if it is all but useless as a currency. Gold is less useful than most people think: > In a 2012 paper entitled "The Golden Dilemma",[1] Claude Erb and Campbell Harvey examined some common assumptions about gold. First they looked at gold as an inflation hedge, analyzing gold returns from 1975 (the year the U.S. came off of the gold standard…
> I don't think most people would accept a shiny rock as anything special. Gold isn't being treated all that differently to the other period 6 or 11 elements. Although it does sometimes get randomly good tax treatment due to its history which keeps it entrenched as the first choice for a monetary metal. But fundamentally it is being sold at cost to mine + a margin, same as everything else. My memory is anything with…
I don't think this says anything about why the gold price is what it is. If gold suddenly gained lots of value then it would still be cost + margin, because new mines would open up in places where gold mining had previously been unprofitable.