361–370 of 670 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amazon is one of the largest companies on earth. How much has it paid in dividends? Netflix? Alibaba?
Once Amazon decides that the prospects for continuing to invest in growing their business are lower, they will start paying dividends. In the meantime Microsoft and Apple already do.
Of course I have a decent amount invested in these things, but it's not a huge deal, I got in long enough ago I'm still way up, just wish I stepped on the sidelines a few months ago instead of stubbornly staying in like I did the last two market cycles. But I never put in anything more than ~2% of my paycheck into it. I waste way more money on two or three takeout meals every week.
Even with these crashes, my piddly crypto purchases are still outperforming my 401k, and I'm putting about 7x times more into that every paycheck.
I hope it ALL goes away. I completely hate this space with every vested bone in my body. Even if it takes a huge recession to wipe these cryptobros and casino tokens out, I would be glad. Obviously would not like the collateral damage that this inflicts on all these so called small 'crypto investors' but as long as this triggers tight regulations to make these tokens, illegal, unusable and banned completely as to mak…
Regulation can’t come soon enough. These are risky assets at best. People are getting hurt. Just think how much real tech talent has been wasted on this pointless experiment. This could have gone into fintech, greentech, healthtech, proptech etc anything else really that creates real value.
I follow climate change for a while. Especially the co2 concentration in our air, wild fires, droughts etc. I'm looking forward to burning less resources for just hashes. I'm also getting tired of having the same fruitless discussions. There are a lot of people who have never thought about a ton of implications of crypto. Real issues are ignored, unknown, or just never even mentioned.
you do not understand or don't want to understand why those hashes are necessary. Are you okay with burning resources for running a bloated financial system or sponsoring "innovators" out of public money? Are you okay with the money you worked hard for to literally lose value due to inflation? Are you okay with a society where if we stop producing and consuming all but things we really need we will be rewarded with a financial crash?
It's a Macro crash. SP500 is down -%5 YTD. Meta -37%, Netflix -65%. Lots of pain spreading. You shouldn't gloat or be happy. Give it a couple of more months like this, and lots of the HN audience would be worried about layoffs. The security of your average software developer job is strongly tied to market cycles. If you want a place to direct your hate and bitterness, I would do it at the architects of the BOOM/BUSTS…
You're absolutely correct. The total ignorance of HN on all matters of finance is incredibly grating.
"Is anyone else " -> lots of upvotes and in-group people agreeing with each other.
It's basically just hating on an HN out group.
Good crypto/finance conversations HN on are unfortunately not possible. I just flag posts like this, they're just flame bait.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think that’s the point. Copper and most other commodities are productive under Buffet’s definition because you put them into pipes and other things. They are manufacturing inputs. Their price is set by the demand for the things that you make with them. Housing demand goes up => copper price goes up. Gold is used in manufacturing but not as much as it could be, because the price is set much higher by speculati…
So I suppose when Buffett purchased 130 million ounces of silver in 1998 he was thinking about the manufacturing inputs? I do think there is in fact a "productive use" for cyptocurrency, which is transacting on the dark web. It has been earnestly used as a currency in that context for a very long time... it's just that bitcoin boosters would rather not talk about it.
I strongly agree that dark-web transactions were the largest “productive” component of BTC, but I think the “BTC as payment mechanism” has a much lower equilibrium price than asset-based usages because you essentially buy to make a purchase, and then sell on the other side. So for $1B of transactions in a year you might only need $1M of currency (maybe it’s an order of magnitude higher if you don’t immediately sell your BTC on the receiving side) which would give a price of $0.05/BTC (assuming 21M BTC total). Fermi calculation here, I think this is a lower bound for $1B transactions. The real calc is a bit more involved and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was one or two OOM higher.
As you can see the dark web usecase settles on a much, much lower value for BTC than the current market price. You need $T/yr to be transacting in BTC, or folks to be holding a float in BTC because they are getting paid and plan to pay for things, to get a valuation in the $1000s. Which is fine, but supports the point I made above about the “productive use prices” being a much smaller fraction of current price than even gold’s.
I think DCA-ing into ~1% of net worth held in crypto over the next few weeks would be a pretty solid trade.
I feel bad for people losing money, but crypto has not lived up to its potential at all, remains a solution looking for a problem, and is an environmental disaster. I used to be a huge believer. Brian Armstrong gave me my first Bitcoin in 2011 at District in SOMA. Electricity was included in my rent so I bought 10 video cards and mined for about two years on 5 systems. At a company I founded, I use Bitcoin to pay for…
This is a great perspective and I largely agree with it. There needs to be a "return to sanity" market-wide. That said, regarding your perspective on crypto's limited utility, I just want to point out there's a crypto few folks have paid attention to which actually addresses your issues head-on: Nano is a feeless and PoW-less crypto which has been around for a few years and was started by one of the early contributor…