Not sure about Ponzi (which it probably is) - but I am looking at crypto as a "24/7 world-wide semi-legal horse-races". It is absolutely useless for 1st/2nd/3rd worlds. I can see its benefit for illegal activities - fair enough - but it's standing apart from the gambling potential. But by understanding that it is a gambling machine - I can make a "reasonable" choice, buy some token, sell it at a "small" profit of 10-…
> C'mon crypto, try to beat that :) Nano has instant transactions and 0 fees. Try to beat that.
Yeah, just like a MYSQL database :))
Now let's calculate how much I am going to pay to BUY crypto and SELL crypto in fees .
this is not an accurate portrayal of refugees. i can’t be bothered to look for a source atm, but the first wave of refugees out of syria that caused a panic in Europe were not poor, unskilled laborers - they were middle and upper class families who could afford plane tickets. It costs many thousands of dollars to cross borders illegally by the way, so you’re likely to exhaust your savings trying to escape whatever yo…
I wrote "'typical' refugees". No doubt monied folks need to migrate under duress as well, but they are absolutely a vanishing minority of worldwide refugee flows. > It costs many thousands of dollars to cross borders illegally by the way, so you’re likely to exhaust your savings trying to escape whatever you’re running from. ...and worse, often end up in debt along the way. Where is the room in that common situation…
I didn’t mean to suggest BTC was useful along the way, just had a kneejerk when I read the comment about penniless refugees. but by the time people are congregating in border camps i’m sure you’re right, the majority have less pennies than they’d like.
Does it really make sense to hold USD if your only goal is liquidity? Maybe if you need it immediately , but honestly stocks and some other investments can usually be sold with the money accessible in seconds (or you can use credit). Really what I feel the value prop is for cash is low volatility (aka security as you mentioned). With low inflation like we have seen in the past, risk adjusted it might be a better spot…
I don't think you can sell traditional investments like stocks in seconds unless it is within designated trading hours. Crypto you can trade 24/7, although fiat wires out to traditional bank accounts still operate within certain hours (at least in the US, maybe this is different elsewhere). I still hold a small amount of my portfolio in USD, even considering inflation, but this is because it's less volatile than cryp…
gold has no value to typical people. i can’t walk into a store and buy with gold. i can’t use gold for any purpose in day to day life. it’s an asset
> gold has no value to typical people. The whole point of an economy is that something has value if it's valuable to someone , not just the person who's holding it. I'm not going to use a chunk of gold for anything, but it has intrinsic uses that aren't tied to being an exchange of value. It can be used to make jewelry, electronics, food, and medical devices. In some of those applications, there is no substitute for…
Bitcoin is already valuable to someone, maybe not you, but someone (in fact, quite a lot of people). Many of the people that consider that Bitcoin has value don't care about gold at all, some do, some don't. By the way, these same people that don't care about gold also could give a shit less that gold can be made into jewelry (or anything else). Like you said, something has value because it's valuable to someone. I think what people need to accept is that Bitcoin, right now, is valuable to a lot of people. If the internet crashed, there's going to be much bigger problems, including accessing and transferring fiat currency. What people like about Bitcoin is that you can't print more of it without forking it, or creating your own new crypto with different rules (in contrast to potentially infinite printing and borrowing of USD). To create a viable alternative to Bitcoin (via fork or otherwise), you have to market and create the same level of trust, and convince everyone who trusts Bitcoin now to switch over.
"Bitcoin privacy" is a contradiction in terms, as has been repeatedly proven. You set up a scene of a refugee "storing their wealth in Bitcoin", but it begs the question: where are these refugees with substantial wealth they are looking to exfiltrate? Typical refugees are emigrating from locales where they were earning dollars per day. The use case of shielding hoarded wealth during a journey to a freer locale is a b…
>>>but it begs the question: where are these refugees with substantial wealth they are looking to exfiltrate? Typical refugees are emigrating from locales where they were earning dollars per day. The use case of shielding hoarded wealth during a journey to a freer locale is a blinkered fantasy. African migrants trying to cross the US southern border, on the low end. Airfare from West Africa isn't cheap. In this artic…
if it came down to that, depending on time, i think i would prefer to stitch 256 bit patterns into various articles of clothing before i stick any memory cards anywhere
> Long run? I think not. Gold hasn’t really risen over millenia, just stayed in a certain band. I said they expected it, not that it did. I know plenty of people who buy gold expecting it to appreciate. Whether or not it does appreciate is irrelevant. > Buffett made a good argument that you could either buy a giant gold cube and fondle it, or a large number of productive assets in the states and collect the revenues.…
> No he wasn't. If you invested all your money in the medieval equivalent of an index fund, it'd be worth far less today than if you had invested in gold. You can't just cherry pick the last century. This isn’t true. Gold has about kept the same value, adjusted for inflation. The economy grew enormously since medieval times. Anyone managing to keep reinvesting since then would be enormously rich.
> This isn’t true. Gold has about kept the same value, adjusted for inflation.
Yes, and how is the equity in your local shoemaker or blacksmith doing?
> The economy grew enormously since medieval times. Anyone managing to keep reinvesting since then would be enormously rich.
By "keep reinvesting" do you mean "always correctly escaping the industries that died into the ones that kept growing all the way up to the present"? Because if so, you're right. But that's not a particularly good way to think about how returns compound.
I got involved in bitcoin after being blackballed from the (US) financial world while for 2-3 months while I was "investigated" in the most dystopianly opaque way possible. One day I lost the ability to transact. A few months later I got it back. Had it not been for good friends who could cover my expenses, I could have easily ended up homeless. And the most shocking part of it all, was that I was merely collateral d…
> I don't hold bitcoin because I think it'll go up in value, I hold it because I don't want someone to tell me I can't pay rent because ... well they can't tell me why, because "sorry, I don't have access to that information" Well you certainly can't do that with Bitcoin unless your landlord has a similarly anarchocapitalist worldview. You'd have to cash it out at an exchange and pay the individual in question. This…
> This choke point would leave you similarly locked out.
Would it? People are willing to exchange USD for BTC. You can't control everything.
I got involved in bitcoin after being blackballed from the (US) financial world while for 2-3 months while I was "investigated" in the most dystopianly opaque way possible. One day I lost the ability to transact. A few months later I got it back. Had it not been for good friends who could cover my expenses, I could have easily ended up homeless. And the most shocking part of it all, was that I was merely collateral d…
Wouldn't that only work if you had places (like your landlord) taking Bitcoin off the blockchain directly for payment? Otherwise, transacting still requires the cooperation of intermediaries subject to sanctions. Maybe you can launder through a friend, but... it doesn't seem any easier.
Curious on why you'd use the word "launder" here. Exchanging currency privately with someone is not laundering.
> No he wasn't. If you invested all your money in the medieval equivalent of an index fund, it'd be worth far less today than if you had invested in gold. You can't just cherry pick the last century. This isn’t true. Gold has about kept the same value, adjusted for inflation. The economy grew enormously since medieval times. Anyone managing to keep reinvesting since then would be enormously rich.
> This isn’t true. Gold has about kept the same value, adjusted for inflation. Yes, and how is the equity in your local shoemaker or blacksmith doing? > The economy grew enormously since medieval times. Anyone managing to keep reinvesting since then would be enormously rich. By "keep reinvesting" do you mean "always correctly escaping the industries that died into the ones that kept growing all the way up to the pres…
You said the medieval equivalent of an index fund, which tracks the economy. The economy grew faster than gold.
Obviously there was no index fund, but no one in medieval times tried to get rich by buying gold and sitting on it. They used other methods.