251–260 of 382 posts
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It's backed by mathematics instead of a country. That doesn't make it better or worse, just different, and diversity is generally what people want in their portfolio.
It's not backed by mathematics any more than gold is backed by chemistry.
Making gold has always been the holy grail of chemistry. It's only valuable because chemistry says you can't make it easily.
Okay? And 1.5 trillion was wiped off of the US equity market.
Over the last month: VTSAX is down 9%, AMZN (hardest-hit Big 5) is down 16%, BTC is down 34%.
That's all the point of crypto-currencies, they need to go up and down to enable speculation. Pump and make it go up. Dump and it goes down. Someone is cashing the difference. A stable crypto-currency will not attract so much speculative investment.
A stable crypto-currency will not attract any investment. Crypto is useless for anything but money laundering and speculation.
There is no much point in arguing with a cult. This phenomenon will have to work its way through the susceptible demographic, meaning that the large majority of "speculators" will have transferred their disposable wealth to a minority of shrewd operators. The masses will subsequently be "seasoned", or immunized and will no longer participate, at best disappointed, disgusted and mildly embarrassed, at worst suffering…
I have no idea what future crypto prices will do, but you do realize that smart contracts allow people to bank, from their browser with nothing but a MetaMask extension, without a bank, right? There's heavy dose of speculation present in any emerging market, but crypto, especially its smart contract sector, is not just speculation.
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70% of Bitcoin holders bought in last year. A continuous stream of greater fools is necessary for its price to even remain at the current level Also, every ponzi scheme gives amazing returns, before it inevitably collapses. For example Madoff was able to give decent returns to his investors for 17 years! 'Number go up' is not a refutation of a ponzi scheme.
Yeah but with a Madoff/Ponzi scheme the thing collapses, Madoff goes to jail, it ends. Bitcoin seems more like other assets that don't make things, stuff like fiat money, gold, fine art and so on.
This comment is a great example of how little bitcoin enthusiasts tend to understand about investing. One of this things is very much not like the others.
"Fiat currency" is virtually never used as an investment asset. Even in the FOREX market you purchases pairs of currency rather than just a big pile of dollars. In your 401k when you want to go all "cash" you very often end up choosing investment vehicles that track cash.
The entire function of a currency is as a medium of exchange, it only has value in the process of exchanging. It makes no sense, at the individual investor level, to 'hold' dollars.
If you don't understand how a fiat currency differs from gold and fine art then you absolutely should not be "investing" in bitcoin.
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It's not useless though. It works just fine as a currency. It's just that nobody is using it. Like how Signal is more trustworthy than WhatsApp but nobody I know uses it so it doesn't matter.
Sadly currencies rely on network effects even more than instant messengers to be really useful. The fact that most people look at cryptocurrencies just like they were stocks and comparing against a buying/selling price in USD should be pretty clear. I know that people also invest in currencies and gain money on exchange fluctuations but it's more a "side effect" than the main purpose. With cryptocurrencies is the oth…
I also remember seeing at least one artist accepting XMR for cryptocurrency-related art. Plenty of people were spending XMR on that person.
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Yeah but with a Madoff/Ponzi scheme the thing collapses, Madoff goes to jail, it ends. Bitcoin seems more like other assets that don't make things, stuff like fiat money, gold, fine art and so on.
It literally is just fiat currency. Bitcoin is a way to make fiat currency independent of government.
Guess which governments have the most of both.
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The only difference in investing in currency than other asset classes is that the value of currencies is entirely relative to other currencies in ways other asset classes aren’t. In practice that doesn’t make a difference because all the mechanics are the same as any other form of investment decision.
First of all I should be convinced that cryptocurrencies are currencies and secondly I don’t see how this asset can be used by treasury to hold any cash for operational purposes. Besides I am not sure that is investing per se.
As far as whether treasury asset allocations are investing or not is largely in the eye of the beholder but companies very frequently prefer to hold “cash equivalents” beyond their immediate operational requirements. If a treasury buys us tbills that is both a traditional investment & a fx position (in that it’s a usd we are viewing preferentially over other currencies in our portfolio).
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If you own cryptocurrency, and its all gone down, you're invested and can do two things. You can keep hold of your assets, or you can sell. If you sell, you can decide to share such or not, but since you are no longer invested, there's no incentive to share such (and if you're part of a pump and dump scheme, you don't want people to lose trust so your incentive is to say HODL while doing otherwise). So it makes sense…
Bitcoin is probably the first Ponzi scheme where everyone in it knows it is a Ponzi scheme. So I agree with your take here.