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Billionaire Mike Novogratz says 10% of his money is in Bitcoin and Ether

money.cnn.com

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Re: Billionaire Mike Novogratz says 10% of his money is in Bitcoin and Ether

#71

Post by robbiep »

bergie wrote: post #26
Mahn wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because Bitcoin is still today too cumbersome to be used for anything other than speculation and drugs. No one goes to the grocery store thinking "gosh, I sure wish I could transfer some money to an exchange, buy some BTC, set up a wallet, transfer the BTC, wait for confirmations, scan a QR code to pay, and wait for confirmations again to pay for my groceries". The only people that want this are early early ad…

In my neighborhood there are bars that accept Bitcoin. I've paid several dinners with my Android BTC wallet. Quite convenient in a city where you usually can only pay with cash...

Quick question - from someone who hasn't looked at bitcion since it was between 10c and $5 - since your transaction doesn't clear until the block propagates how they handle double spends?

Re: Billionaire Mike Novogratz says 10% of his money is in Bitcoin and Ether

#72

Post by atemerev »

MichaelBurge wrote: post #65
atemerev wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially when your and their opinions on taxable assets differ.

Oppressive governments are essentially the only good reason to use bitcoin, since the usual financial system is far more efficient at storing and transmitting money. He's either evading taxes or speculating.

Even generally non-oppressive governments make errors, and it happens more often that you'd think (and suing might be prohibitively expensive, untimely, or not an option at all).

Re: Billionaire Mike Novogratz says 10% of his money is in Bitcoin and Ether

#73

Post by tboyd47 »

chc wrote: post #57
tboyd47 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is accurate. The main use case for Bitcoin seems to be remittances and savings for the rich and middle-class in countries with unstable currencies, not grocery store payments. Compared to USD, it's cumbersome and expensive, but compared to gold or Western Union, it's clearly better.

Do you really believe more Bitcoin is used for this than evading the law?

Do you have any data that prove me wrong?

Re: Billionaire Mike Novogratz says 10% of his money is in Bitcoin and Ether

#76

Post by rdiddly »

xapata wrote: post #10

> [Novogratz] recalls that Buterin, ... showed up late, which struck him as shocking -- and a bit ballsy. He figured it was worth paying attention to Buterin. The lesson is to be impolite? I think I saw this in an episode of Silicon Valley.

...and in Office Space, where the hero's indifference gets him a promotion

Re: Billionaire Mike Novogratz says 10% of his money is in Bitcoin and Ether

#77

Post by oculusthrift »

fny wrote: post #70
roymurdock wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Idealistic view: BTC is used to create peer-to-peer marketplaces (OpenBazaar [1]) and the underlying blockchain tech can be used to implement smart contracts that can automate systems and remove humans from the loop (Samsung/IBM ADEPT [2], Filament [3]). Realistic view: BTC is used as a speculative hedge, and to evade currency controls in China. [1] https://openbazaar.org/ [2] http://rethinkresearch.biz/articles/ibm-…

Can someone explain why it's a good idea to use blockchains for IoT? The example they give is of a smart washer checking to see whether the washer is under warranty when it detects a part is about to fail... but why on Earth would a blockchain be better than any old database maintained by the company? Why on Earth use a distributed ledger?

in theory the block chain can be trusted by both parties whereas the company could modify it or be malicious.....

in practice you're correct because acting maliciously would make the company lose customers and potentially get sued

Re: Billionaire Mike Novogratz says 10% of his money is in Bitcoin and Ether

#78

Post by nugget »

xapata wrote: post #10

> [Novogratz] recalls that Buterin, ... showed up late, which struck him as shocking -- and a bit ballsy. He figured it was worth paying attention to Buterin. The lesson is to be impolite? I think I saw this in an episode of Silicon Valley.

You can tell Buterin is really smart (and focused) within a few minutes of talking to him about Ethereum. He showed up a few minutes late to an event I helped coordinate. Given his personality, I just assumed he had been off somewhere lost in his thoughts or finishing some critical task; it would never cross my mind that he took the event less seriously or meant to be impolite.

Re: Billionaire Mike Novogratz says 10% of his money is in Bitcoin and Ether

#79

Post by jeremyt »

The people in this thread hating on crypto are missing the point.

Complaining that you can't go into CVS and buy something with Bitcoin right now is like complaining that all you can do with the Internet is send "electronic mail", which nobody reads, in 1990, or like complaining that Facebook is nothing but a glorified campus directory in 2006.

The truth is, you can't buy things with Bitcoin at CVS because the technology isn't there yet. Right now, Bitcoin is suitable to be digital gold, but with a much higher possibility of return because it's a new asset.

In a couple of years, the addition of the lightning network on top of the Bitcoin network will enable you to buy things at CVS.

Right now, buying Bitcoin is like making an angel investment.

Re: Billionaire Mike Novogratz says 10% of his money is in Bitcoin and Ether

#80

Post by mrb »

Pxtl wrote: post #62
mrb wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" Novogratz says he bought Ether when it was trading for about $1. Today it's worth over $48. " He is worth ~$2B. Assuming he put 0.2% (only $4M) in Ethereum during the crowd sale, 3 years later Ethereum appreciates 48× and represents 10% of his net worth. Of course he says he is also invested into Bitcoin, not only into Ethereum. Say he purchased only $2M of ETH, that's 3300 BTC as of the crowd sale's initial phase…

I don't know much aboute Etherium but wouldn't he be owner of a substantial fraction of the blockchain at that point? If so, he can't sell it without tanking the value so hard he'd never be able to get a decent fraction of its "worth".

Selling ~7M ETH is easy without affecting the markets too much. Kraken and Poloniex each do an average weekly volume of 3M ETH on the ETH/BTC pair: https://cryptowat.ch/poloniex/ethbtc/1w If he spread the sale over 10 weeks he would only increase their weekly volume by 10%.

That's not even talking about alternate ways to transfer his wealth out of ETH (eg. approaching his billionaire friend: "how about you sell me that mansion for 100k ETH?")

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