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Bitcoin has made a new all-time high price

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Re: Bitcoin has made a new all-time high price

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compare it to gold or silver. It has very stable price for centuries or even millennia, when compared to daily salary of skilled worker.

> Compare it to gold or silver. It has very stable price for centuries or even millennia, when compared to daily salary of skilled worker. You have to show your work, without to resorting to "one ounce of gold buys a nice suit" kind of stuff.

But it kind of does. Salaries of workers in ancient China, Rome, medieval Europe... are well known.

Re: Bitcoin has made a new all-time high price

#222
post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Price of Bitcoin is mostly that speculation price + instead of material some mathematical properties. Mathematical properties don't provide economic value. The demand for bitcoin is almost all speculation, and a tiny bit is for purposes of making clandestine payments, paying ransoms, and such.

So, access to a permissionless SWIFT-like system from anywhere around the world has no economic value in your opinion? Go and ask people in African countries what it means to them.

I said _mathematical properties_ have no economic value.

Re: Bitcoin has made a new all-time high price

#223

Looks like it was ~65k in November of 2021, and at near the current value (~74k) earlier this year. On a >4 year scale, yes, it's slowly going up, but keep in mind that if you bought at the 65k peak of November 2021, it took 2 1/2 more years to get back to that value. When Bitcoin hit 20k for the first time, it took another 3 years to get back to that value after it crashed 70% in the months following the 20k peak. I…

It's never been easier to invest in "Bitcoin" thanks to the ETFs which have been greenlight by the SEC since early this year.

It's never been easier to "invest" in Bitcoin thanks to the ETFs which have been greenlight by the SEC since early this year.

FTFY.

Re: Bitcoin has made a new all-time high price

#224
post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They would need 300 million wrenches, one for each citizen. That leaves society in a much better position than letting them do it at scale with an sql query.

Are wrenches single-use, or are you allocating individual attackers per-citizen? In the case of a successful wrench attacker, how are the stolen funds recovered?

This is the classic time-money tradeoff. Theoretically you only need one wrench and one attacker—but even if she attacks 100 people a day it would take thousands of years to reach everyone. And word of the attacks would spread, so later victims would take steps to safeguard their money and the attacks would become ineffective.

To be maximally effective you'd need to mobilize enough attackers and enough windowless white vans to reach the entire populace within probably a day, so let's say 3 million attackers and 3 million white vans. That's when things start getting more expensive than the sql query.

Re: Bitcoin has made a new all-time high price

#225
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't Binance by far the most widely used exchange? I think that if you're unsure you need to study the topic so you can tell which "professionals" are professional con men.

> Isn't Binance by far the most widely used exchange? Ostensibly yes. But they're overseas, so what's your recourse if something goes wrong? If you wouldn't trust a random overseas Italian bank to handle your money, don't trust Binance either. > I think that if you're unsure you need to study the topic so you can tell which "professionals" are professional con men. To be clear I was referring to financial advisors fr…

I sure as fuck wouldn't trust a non-overseas bank to handle my money. Because I'm in Argentina, and although I'm stupid, I'm not that stupid. I have no idea where rel_ic is, but if they're in the US, they can't use Binance. If they're not in the US, it's quite likely that they'll want to use an overseas exchange for security reasons.

Using a cryptocurrency exchange isn't as risky as using a bank. You can fund your account with a small amount of bitcoin, exchange it to fiat, withdraw it, fund it with a 20% larger amount of bitcoin, and repeat the process a logarithmic number of times until all your money is changed. You don't have to leave your money in it for a long period of time, risking things like bank failure and getting locked out, and if the exchange decides to steal from you, it only gets a small amount of the total you're changing. It doesn't know in advance which transaction is the last, so it can't just wait until the last transaction to rip you off.

I agree with your recommendation to hire a financial advisor from the traditional financial sector, but they may not be familiar with this kind of situation, and some of them are professional con men as well, to a lesser or greater extent.

Re: Bitcoin has made a new all-time high price

#226
post #11

So I suppose people must use it all the time to buy goods and services. Right?

this isn't why people buy Bitcoin. they buy it b/c they don't have confidence in the power of the US dollar or want to hedge their bets. It's the equivalent of gold, that is people turn to it when they think shit may hit the fan but it doesn't have the downsides of physically holding gold.

> they buy it b/c they don't have confidence in the power of the US dollar or want to hedge their bets

no; they buy it b/c they're attracted by the fantasy of a 100x return like some people got in the past. there are no solid correlation patterns with the USD or other currencies/ stocks, unlike, say, gold

Re: Bitcoin has made a new all-time high price

#227
post #49

It has in dollar terms but it still hasn't on an inflation adjusted basis. One bitcoin today has less purchasing power than at its peak in November 2021. The dollar has lost about 12.5% since then so the true all time high would be around $79250.

This depends on one's consumer preferences. The CPI includes depreciating items that does not scale with income, like healthcare , cars, clothes, and food. Someone with a net worth of millions of dollars incurs likely a smaller opportunity cost. But I agree despite the hype Bitcoin's returns are still poor and easily surpassed by the S&P 500.

This being Bitcoin, the best price reference would probably be the cost of energy. How many megawatts of energy could one Bitcoin buy at that November 2021 peak, and how many could one Bitcoin buy now?

Re: Bitcoin has made a new all-time high price

#228
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The deflation of a currency is when the currency gets more expensive, not cheaper. It's true that other goods get cheaper when measured in that currency. But what we're discussing here is whether, and how, the continued deflation of Bitcoin discourages its use as a medium of exchange, not whether some hypothetical deflation of the dollar would discourage the use of other goods such as memory cards and Bitcoin as a me…

> The deflation of a currency is when the currency gets more expensive, not cheaper. This is a perversion of the economic definition of inflation and deflation. Inflation is the rate of change of prices.

These are two different ways of looking at the same thing, but the crucial issue here is the direction of inflation: inflation is when prices, measured in the currency in question, go up, not down. That is to say, the value of the currency, measured in terms of any given good, goes down, not up. jsbg was getting this backwards, and your comment isn't helpful in clarifying their confused thinking.

Historically speaking, the "printing too much paper money" definition of "inflation", which is more or less what you're saying is "a perversion of the economic definition of inflation", preceded the "general increase in prices" definition you're talking about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation#Classical_economics

Re: Bitcoin has made a new all-time high price

#229

Soon this will all collapse, reaching all time highs isn't a good thing. Pyramid scheme at best, ponzi scheme at worst. I still don't know any use case for this other than speculation and people aren't even using it in the real world.

Would be interested in hearing how you came to these conclusions, considering that none of your assertions have matched to reality as of yet.

> Soon this will all collapse, reaching all time highs isn't a good thing.

Why would the price collapse? Seems like BTC is getting mainstream adoption wit BTC ETFs. Even BlackRock's CEO seems to be pro-BTC, [1] which only increase price + demand.

> Pyramid scheme at best, ponzi scheme at worst.

Technically, every investing market is a ponzi scheme.

> I still don't know any use case for this other than speculation and people aren't even using it in the real world.

It has certainly found a use in the black market.

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/blackrock-larry-fink-called-1...

Re: Bitcoin has made a new all-time high price

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://mitsloan.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2022-06/Bitcoin... > illegal transactions, scams and gambling together make up less than 3% of volume.

How? Any proof?

Did you read the paper? I'm not going to hold your hand.
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