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Coinbase mafia shows how tight a circle holds sway over Bitcoin

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Re: Coinbase mafia shows how tight a circle holds sway over Bitcoin

#211
post #184

This article is an example of the pure propaganda that 'mainstream financial media' participates in on-the-regular. Why that is I don't know. Symbiotic business interests I guess. It's not that the information is incorrect. It probably is and it does tell us something about some of the big players around Coinbase. But the whole bitcoin 'ecosystem' is essentially a collective criminal organization, with some players b…

> (interestingly since they signed this agreement ~10 days ago, they stopped issuing tether.)

I noticed this too and am very curious if they will ever do so again. If the Tether theory is true, the transparency terms of the settlement would seemingly make it legally risky for Tether to issue new tokens unless they were truly backed by US dollars.

We'll find out soon enough.

Re: Coinbase mafia shows how tight a circle holds sway over Bitcoin

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every store of value that has ever existed and will ever exist is just a game of speculation that it will continue to be valued when you're ready to withdraw your money to do things you've saved for. Gold was the best portable and fungible speculative bet for a very long time. Bonds are speculation that a country will continue to be productive and well managed enough to pay their debts without resorting to massive in…

Absolutely. Bitcoin is just of store of value that has some marginally better aspects than many other stores of value. It won't inflate aways like fiat. It requires no upkeep like buildings and other property. It requires less intuition and research than fine art. It is more portable and storable than gold. It is more readily accessible than most things. It is less dependent on products, market fit and changes, execu…

"It requires no upkeep like buildings and other property."

I suspect the physical footprint required to keep the Bitcoin network running is actually quite significant. Considering estimated power usage of all the "mining" operations.

Re: Coinbase mafia shows how tight a circle holds sway over Bitcoin

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every store of value that has ever existed and will ever exist is just a game of speculation that it will continue to be valued when you're ready to withdraw your money to do things you've saved for. Gold was the best portable and fungible speculative bet for a very long time. Bonds are speculation that a country will continue to be productive and well managed enough to pay their debts without resorting to massive in…

Absolutely. Bitcoin is just of store of value that has some marginally better aspects than many other stores of value. It won't inflate aways like fiat. It requires no upkeep like buildings and other property. It requires less intuition and research than fine art. It is more portable and storable than gold. It is more readily accessible than most things. It is less dependent on products, market fit and changes, execu…

Fiat can deflate, though rarely. Just look at '08/'09.

The inflation/deflation curve of US fiat has been much more predictable than BTC. You're statement "just another store of value" is almost a tautology, as any tangible or intangible item in the universe can potentially fit that definition. What matters for a useful currency is that it is a stable store of value.

As long as you admit that BTC is a speculative commodity rather than a currency, we're fine. But this isn't how it was marketed to all of us for the past 10 years. "coin" == "item of currency". Now the narrative has changed to "digital gold" because that's what's selling right now.

And you should further admit that for the past 10 years we've been promised a decentralized currency with lower transaction fees than mastercard/visa/escrow/forex-fees and faster transaction times, and none of those things have happened.

Re: Coinbase mafia shows how tight a circle holds sway over Bitcoin

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've made some excellent points here, mate, thanks.

They are pretty weak points. By his logic, when you join a company and work you are speculating that you will get paid a salary. At that point everything is speculation and nothing is certain. By writing this comment I am speculating that a HTTP call will be made that results in a database entry. Since humans are not perfect and never have complete information about a system they engage in speculation in every single…

Everything is speculation.

My ultimate point with the comment above, is that dismissing bitcoin as nothing more that a rampant speculative bubble is not a good argument against it.

Everything we value is a speculative bubble that can eventually pop if conditions that cause us to value it change. The bitcoin bubble can pop (and has many times) but so can the 'trust in the US government' bubble.

Re: Coinbase mafia shows how tight a circle holds sway over Bitcoin

#215
post #128

Fiat money works because government has a strong say in its creation and valuation, and govt. is elected by the people. Lobbying and other private interests aside, by and large, the system is still beholden to the opinions of the citizenry. Decentralized finance, while originally designed to give more power directly to the people (Nakamoto’s “one CPU one vote”), is now clearly shown to be beholden to an oligopoly of…

That’s strange because I see it essentially in reverse of that: To change the Bitcoin price, vote with your dollars, going long or shorting. You will materially impact the order book and resulting price. Other ways exist: starting a company like the ones mentioned in the article. In contrast, in federal elections you have a vanishingly small chance of casting a deciding vote between two participants in an actual olig…

And if you don't have dollars? No dollars, no votes? And the corollary: More dollars, more votes? Sounds like a plutocracy, don't you think?

Be careful what you wish for. Unless you're secretly Bezos or another of the billionaires' club, in a plutocracy you and I and countless others are just peons. At least in democracy you have a voice, regardless of your bank balance. Democracy may suck as a system, but it's definitely better than the alternatives :) I'll venture further and say those who say otherwise have either never actually lived in the alternative, or secretly harbour delusions of grandeur.

Re: Coinbase mafia shows how tight a circle holds sway over Bitcoin

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with this: there's a genuine difference between non-productive assets like bitcoin (and gold) and productive ones like companies. > Today the world’s gold stock is about 170,000 metric tons. If all of this gold were melded together, it would form a cube of about 68 feet per side. (Picture it fitting comfortably within a baseball infield.) At $1,750 per ounce – gold’s price as I write this – its value would…

Farmland is a speculation that we won't completely degrade the topsoil that makes it useful for agriculture. Exxon Mobile is a speculation that they'll be able to pivot their business out of carbon fuel long term. Even monster companies falter and fail. Exxon in particular is down 50% from its peak in 2014. Income generating assets are fantastic, but owning them requires work to constantly re-assess the landscape tha…

> Farmland is a speculation that we won't completely degrade the topsoil that makes it useful for agriculture.

That merely reduces the potential return, it doesn't eliminate the potential for return entirely, which is something Bitcoin suffers from.

>Exxon Mobile is a speculation that they'll be able to pivot their business out of carbon fuel long term. Even monster companies falter and fail. Exxon in particular is down 50% from its peak in 2014.

Or I can just buy their stock with the expectation that they pay dividends or engage in stock buyback programs that return value to investors. Bitcoin has no potential for returns.

>Income generating assets are fantastic, but owning them requires work to constantly re-assess the landscape that makes them capable of generating income.

The inability to generate a return reduces the potential for gains significantly.

>This is why people have started using passive index funds as savings accounts, which seems to be starting to distort the market

There are thousands of index funds using completely different strategies. I don't know how you expect that to distort the market. The reason why small retail investors should just stick with a standard index is that they simply do not have high enough capital and thus returns to justify spending money or time on complex analysis or engage in manual rebalancing of their portfolio which involves taxes and order fees. Index replicating ETF are just a cost saving strategy for small investors. If you believe that small investors are distorting the market then institutional funds would rejoice and take advantage of the greater volatility and deploy more capital because of the almost risk free return that such a "distortion" would bring with itself. Since the return of a managed fund exceeds the return of an algorithmic fund people would switch their strategy until both strategies have an equal return on investment.

>and has a lot of people worried that it will lead to a housing bubble like crash

If a lot of people are worried about a crash then why are they investing in a way that perpetuates a crash? They would have to blame themselves for their risky strategies. Stop getting interest only mortgages. Stop buying GME. Stop buying Bitcoin and so on.

>especially with Boomers withdrawing their retirement savings from the market while Millennials and Gen X might not earn enough to outpace the withdrawals. A demographic bomb.

You mean well deserved inflation and full employment? Who is going to shed a tear because of that? Are Millenials going to complain to Boomers that they gave them too many jobs and too much pay?

>Do we really want a world where doctors feel compelled to waste valuable time and attention playing the stock market game because a savings account doesn't even pretend to protect your money from inflation anymore? People from all walks of life with money to protect are increasingly riddled with anxiety that the wealth they've worked hard to save is getting washed out from under them, and it's making us all a neurotic mess of a society.

You can send your complaints to your central bank. They are following a pretty stupid strategy that is counterproductive to their own declared goals. It's pretty simple, if the supply side is saturated simply stimulate the demand side (fiscal policy). Supply and demand have to be kept in balance. It's pretty ironic how Bitcoin anti inflation warriors complain how inflation erodes savings yet they are eroding even faster in a low inflation economy.

Re: Coinbase mafia shows how tight a circle holds sway over Bitcoin

#217
post #42
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making it easier to speculate should in theory decrease volatility and make market manipulation harder, since having more speculators should mean that the price is driven to its fair value more quickly.

This gets back to the "gambling vs investing" debate we had on the front page yesterday. What is the fair value of bitcoin? It will never provide dividends or other types of future cashflows, so that aspect of its fair value is zero. The remaining part is purely speculative in that it is based on what other people will pay for it. It is not at all clear to me that having more (relatively uninformed) speculators will…

If one were to assume that Bitcoin is a currency and its supply is fixed then the correction assumption is that the value of Bitcoin doesn't change. The expectation is that the dollar is losing value and thus you can exchange your Bitcoin for more dollars. However, this is missing that the maximum return would merely track inflation and thus Bitcoin is massively over performing which indicates immaturity of the asset or a bubble. Bitcoin has had so many bubbles it would be surprising if what we are currently experiencing is not a bubble.

Re: Coinbase mafia shows how tight a circle holds sway over Bitcoin

#218
post #72
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This gets back to the "gambling vs investing" debate we had on the front page yesterday. What is the fair value of bitcoin? It will never provide dividends or other types of future cashflows, so that aspect of its fair value is zero. The remaining part is purely speculative in that it is based on what other people will pay for it. It is not at all clear to me that having more (relatively uninformed) speculators will…

> What is the fair value of bitcoin? It will never provide dividends or other types of future cashflows, so that aspect of its fair value is zero. The remaining part is purely speculative in that it is based on what other people will pay for it. Do Swiss Franks pay dividends or other types of cashflows? If I have 50,000 CHF in a box in my cupboard, what value is it beyond a small amount of fuel to burn? At some point…

No, Swiss Franks do not pay dividends, that's why nobody is betting on the fact that Swiss Franks would be worth more in the future. Somehow owners of Bitcoin insist that it doesn't follow this simple rule and that it should net a return.

>At some point I will hope someone (perhaps someone in Switzerland) will exchange something I want for those pieces of paper.

The amount of businesses accepting Bitcoin as a means of payment is very small. The incentives to do so are almost nonexistent. Everyone is converting it back to a valuable currency, this is why the price of Bitcoin is highly volatile. There is no minimum demand for the currency. There is no economic system that is dependent on Bitcoin being less volatile.

The Swiss government creates minimum demand for the currency through taxation. The people living in Switzerland decide to adopt the currency and thus there is an economic system that needs the Swiss Frank to roughly maintain its value. Heck, small amounts of inflation are necessary because a currency that is generating a return is highly undesirable as a means of payment. Since it's losing value over time you are discouraged from using it as a store of value. The existence of an economy that is constantly exchanging currency for goods is thus ensured.

>On the other hand the Swiss Government could decide to make the money almost worthless, practically overnight (India did this with Rupees), by removing the main purpose of having the notes.

Yes and the beauty is that everyone would consider the currency worthless. With Bitcoin there would be extremists clinging to the belief that it would retain its value.

Re: Coinbase mafia shows how tight a circle holds sway over Bitcoin

#219
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually the ultimate reason why a note has value is that it can be used to settle tax bills and other debts, so you do not have to "hope" that someone out there will take it -- the government behind the money will take it from anyone who owes taxes, which is almost everyone who lives or does business in the country.

Hm, so what happens if a country issues some sort of currency in the form of loans/salaries/whatever but does not collect any tax (let’s say they sell natural resources to foreign countries and use that money to maintain their printing presses). Would the currency be worth nothing?

In that case you could run into the problem that your citizens mint/adopt a competing currency. That's a big problem that Bitcoin faces. There are lots of competitors so the insistence on Bitcoin being the ultimate store of value is unfounded.

Re: Coinbase mafia shows how tight a circle holds sway over Bitcoin

#220
post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assets similar to bitcoin are somewhat rare on the ground. Art, antiquities, maybe a few other things. (Precious metals are typically useful for other things.) Few people regard those assets as useful investments, in anything other than a diversification sense. No one regards them as economically productive.

I completely agree with these statements, except I think the intrinsic value of precious metals is exaggerated and Bitcoin also has functional value as a monetary technology (not generally in an important way for most first-worlders though).

Gold derives its store of value property from being an elemental shelling point. It's the best element to be used as a store of value. That property will not disappear in the future since it's based on the laws of physics. However, the exact price is obviously not guaranteed. Merely the ability to keep exchanging it in the future.
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