Apologies for the general APB, but I’m working on a story centering on the crypto/stablecoin world, and am interested in hearing from anyone who might have invested in recent years. I’m interested in good experiences, bad experiences, or even just insights from someone who works in a relevant field - I have a sharp learning curve on this one and would be glad to talk to anyone with a story to tell. If you’d like to write to me directly, I’m at reportingbytk@gmail.com.
Thanks to all, and please keep an eye out for this space. I’m also going to be announcing a Callin in the coming days.
I bought a lot of bitcoin and ether a few years ago. rode it up to the highs and down to where it is now. still hodling, with money that I don't need right now. still waiting to become a crypto millionaire! have no idea whether it'll go to a million or zero. Bought it on principle, because I hate the fiat system, which has made a lot of rich financial criminals and a lot of very poor people.
Bitcoin isn’t crypto. Crypto is the centralized cryptocurrency industry that sprang up around BTC. It’s full of scams and goes against pretty much every principle of the Bitcoin white paper. I’m a HODLer myself, to the moon!
Actually Bitcoin doesn’t have the centralized scammy actor concept that crypto does; BTC exchanges are not lenders (cf Celsius, who was lending against his own coins in a shameless arbitrage scheme that smells of Wall Street bank and has almost totally collapsed); and its blockchains are always filled with questionable options, like how Vitali backed up Ethereum’s blockchain to remove transactions he didn’t like. The differences are very very simple and obvious. Crypto enriches a central party. Bitcoin is decentralized and that is the entire point of it.
If you really think they are the same, you’re vulnerable to all manner of bad actors, thieves, con men, and investment bankers. Be very careful investing if you know so little, you could lose a lot to these creeps.
Yup. But this fact is hard for a lot of people to wrap their heads around. Cryptocurrencies are so scammy, it’s really hard for lots of people to consider that there is precisely one non-scammy cryptocurrency, even if that one is the first cryptocurrency. It requires a level of either trust, or a willingness to investigate dubious sounding claims. I suspect that the best we can do here is just patiently keep saying what you’ve just said here.
No of course not. I think this is a huge way that sh*tcoiners gain legitimacy (and backers). If you just take Do Kwan or Vitaly, you'll see very charismatic people who are able to go after vc money deftly and easily. So say you have this social skill plus a bit of second-rate coding ability - it wouldn't be that hard to build something that is ultimately a moneymaker for you and your investors, feed off the buzz of 'crypto,' sway some twenty-somethings into a get rich quick scheme where you invest pennies and reap dollars...it's almost too perfect. But it's 100% what those guys do.
What I find interesting is that the things of true value, that which without one cannot live are functioning ecosystems, clean water, air, and soil, are not valued and we will sacrifice them for whatever we consider money.
LOL! The topic is about humans ascribing "value" to things and that includes us devaluing that which is necessary for life to exist far below that which we invented out of our imagination, money, whether fiat currency or cryptocurrency.
Have your discussion about "gold guys" when the base of the food chain is too few to sustain life above as has been happening for the past few hundred years due to our extractive economies and is following a trend of population decline faster than that seen in the run-up to the Permian Extinction or even the smaller scale collapses experienced by the Maya.
I'm a financial advisor and my husband, against my advice, put about $50,000 of "emergency fund" money in stable coin that was at that time "guaranteeing" an 8% return and was "backed by the US Dollar." We argued. I told him nothing pegged to the USD could return 8% in a .5% interest rate world. I asked him where that 8% could possibly be coming from if the dollars he used to purchase the coins were staying in USD to back the coin. I explained to him that cryptocurrencies don't generate revenues or earn profits from which that outstanding return could be paid. I told him that if it looked to good to be true, it wasn't (true). Eventually he decided to listen and got out. This was months ago. When the collapse came, he thanked me.
We have the opposite conversation. My husband is a financial advisor at a large wire house. I spent a year begging him to invest in crypto with some of our money, just our account, and he remained an adamant “no.” He thinks it stupid to invest in such a huge market that has the volatility of a single 1-billion market cap tech company, except it’ll never pay dividends and governments can destroy it with the swipe of a pen.
I was still curious - curious George is my spirit animal - so I made sure it wasn’t violating any FINRA rules and invested a couple thousand on my PayPal and Venmo apps and in Coinbase. He laughed and said “go for it, amuse yourself, just don’t expect some big return.” I really hate it when he’s right. 😂
It is funny to watch - mostly because the money I put in is insignificant to our financial position. Within a couple months I was up 80%, then down like 50%, then up, then down, up a bit, down a lot. Right now I’m down 45% since inception (our brokerage account on the year is only down 4.5% and still up 18% over the same time period). 😂
If I want to gamble I’ll go to a casino where it’s more fun, so I won’t buy more, but it’s entertaining enough not to sell. Love the concept, but the execution is too unpredictable.
I assuming this was him staking USDC on a platform like Crypto dot com or similar? USDC actually seems to have the best footing among the stablecoins (unlike Tether, Dai, etc.)
what bothers you about Dai? It's an overcollateralized stablecoin backed by other cryptocurrencies, including USDC. Pretty much the only way Dai can fail is if USDC fails and pulls it down with them.
Right, but you have to trust the accounting of these projects/stablecoins is legit. That is hard to do when the business behind the largest stablecoin, Tether, refuses to be audited and I has been under investigation by the SEC and NY AG. If Tether is not fully backed it could make the LUNA collapse look like a mere tremor
The Bloomberg News video interviews with the leading lights of the Bitcoin craze all projected a peculiar "young, humorless genius" persona -- pretty convincingly. Intense dudes, discreetly yet unmistakably government skeptics. I can't square that with anything like a "guarantee" or reliance on a government backup. I took their whole point to be that they wanted nothing to do with risk insurance ... apart from secrecy -- which is patently inconsistent with any kind of risk pooling.
There's definitely a libertarian thing going on with crypto and they have a point. Our fiat currencies are more or less controlled by central banks most of which consciously try to depreciate their value slowly. The US Fed's target is 2% depreciation/year. So you can understand the desire to create a store of value that's not subject to that. If bitcoin or one of the others held value, rather than being wildly volatile, it would serve a real purpose. We just haven't seen that happen though. The stable coins were billed as the solution to that volatility problem but that hasn't been executed that well either. First of all, if you try to peg a coin to the dollar, then it's going to depreciate as the dollar depreciates. So you're not solving the original fiat currency/inflation problem. Then, to generate interest, they offered these absurd interest rates which, frankly, just look like a Ponzi scheme.
But as a short-term investment, do you think it’s worth it? Sell when the value rises and before it tumbles-type of thing? I’ve read and read and read about cryptocurrency and none of it makes sense to me. At all. And not in a,”I don’t understand what this is,” kinda way (although I don’t really understand what it is haha), but in more of a,”How is this really, truly working?” kinda way. Do you think, though, that buying some and then selling quickly when the value rises is worth the risk?
I'm in 'tech' and was an early adopter back when BTC was somewhere around 1700. I was in West LA when gangs of developers were just learning the development backend for ETH, as a database head I was interested in the immutability of blockchain which is of keen interest to anyone who understand financial audits. I also have decades of experience in enterprise software and lived through the original dotcom bubble. I was sitting next to a kid who threw $40K into ETH and didn't care a whit about the technology. Maybe ETH was worth $100? Never really followed it. I have attended 2 other crypto conferences in LA and they are a mixture of hype, fascinating tech, and sketchy speculators. When I finally attended a class for smart contracts, I found the programming language behind it far too juvenile to be taken seriously. In the end I made about 15x my investments, but it was always play money.
I remain interested in the blockchain itself and the problems of zero-trust that the technologies resolve, and having been a bonded developer for Wall Street firms, I understand that blockchain tech can yet revolutionize accounting, especially the ridiculous problems associated with the provenance of tranches of derivative investments bundled for sale with no institutional transparency. All financial institutions could improve their governance and auditability with such things like immutability in transactions. That does not change the market dynamics of the greater fool theory or the greed and hype possible with impenetrably dense code.
I still hold BTC, LTC, ALGO & ADA. on a variety of exchanges including Kraken and Coinbase. The majority of my funds are still in BTC in an offline hard wallet. None of this exceeds about 20% of my 401K. (now). My trading strategy with coins generally has been to place small bets on volatile (small cap) ones and convert them to BTC and LTC (large cap). I never intended to cash in before retirement.
I expect that brick & mortar 'old school' banks who are, let's say, SWIFT-dependent will FUD all crypto and will be incapable of building more secure algorithms and test them as well as BTC has proven, and the entire validity of the crypto-based financial instruments will always be considered with derision. That doesn't change the math. It also doesn't change the economy of the US in which the sins of 2008 have not been rectified, and will generate new schemes. While those who can will throw money & legislation at problems, it still won't change the math.
I'm pleased to see another knowledgeable investor who includes ADA and ALGO on the (extremely) short list of altcoins they are willing to hold. As a PhD student in cryptography I am impressed by the Cardano team's commitment to hard research as the basis for their implementations. Algorand is in a similar position, with some heavy hitters of the cryptography research world on their masthead.
Thank you. I am just a serious follower of current events, not a Bitcoin investor. My education is quite sound, and yet I find this subject very hard to grasp as a non-technical person. The depth of the complexity is surprising to me. I talk regularly to my Schwab guys about my 401k, but they're just dollar bill guys. I have come in search of understanding and found your post helpful.
So you dropped Ethereum, which is probably going to have the majority of Web3 built on it, because you dislike Solidity? But you are OK with investing in the totally useless shitcoin LTC, which has almost all of the drawbacks of BTC and almost none of its positives?
I like Rust. If and when whatever Solidity does is implemented in Rust, I'll trust backends built with that more. I distrust web developers and just about anything written in javascript or php or any number of lightweight, memory unsafe languages. ETH gas prices were ridiculous and the advantage of their distributed nature had not been overcome by their cost per transaction. Fine if all you care about are low-volume high latency systems. I do not. There is a divergence between the capitalization & value of a coin as an investment and the quality of the code behind them. My money is where my mouth is on ALGO. I like LTC for its liquidity.
ETH still has an oracle problem. I trust the network of public Notaries working at FedEx and UPS more than I trust kid programmers. But I also trust Vinay Gupta of Matterium. I'm not itching to make a bundle in this market. I can and will be patient. There are other investment strategies in the world. Cool kids and bored apes can disappear and save the rest of us the oxygen.
I am genuinely puzzled by something you might explain to me. If ETH is the future of smart transactions, why would anyone invest in the token whose price increases? It seems to me that, like electricity, to leverage the future of appliances that run on it, the cost of acquiring the base resource should go down, and the production of it should go up.
How can you determine that Solidity is "far too juvenile" while also keeping your crypto on "various exchanges". I'm sorry but you don't seem qualified to make that assessment when you don't understand the basic concept of "Not Your Keys Not Your Coins"
The ESG flacks don't even need to go there. They already own the Woke and then Green. It's not as if a technical argument has any traction there. Nobody reads the prospectus, remember?
Ha, right. Leveraging flare gas and fluctuations in the grid is somehow NOT ESG; it's the exact opposite. The density of the ESG cult reminds me of the anti-gun crusaders (I don't own a gun) - the data are quite clear, we have a mental health treatment problem in the USA, a gun is simply a tool. Next? ban all cars, they kill a lot more people. Also, hospitals, they are highly correlated with death. The most highly regulated gun areas also have the highest gun crime/deaths. Meanwhile, Wyoming is the lowest, the least regulated. What's wrong with this picture?
Ever sent a wire transfer? I just sent one last week from the US to Mexico where my fiancee currently resides. It has still not arrived. I could have completed the transaction with crypto in 30 seconds. Sure, there are scams and worries about getting the digits right but the current system is broken and, shall we say, catering to the lowest common denominator.
Crypto allows people who have been unable to participate in financial markets to finally have a say, purchase goods otherwise not available to them, and diversify their assets away from self(name your country here)-inflicted political instability. And it took the free market to create it. I don't think it is going anywhere and we are still in the very early stages. Governments should not like it, it takes away a lot of their power.
I have invested disposable income into the crypto spaces, concentrating on blockchain/infrastructure coins and BTC/ETH--the top two are not the only chains out there.
And a side note: I don't see ETH going to proof of stake any time soon even though they keep touting the great "2.0!" -- all the miners will lose their gas fees which have been quite high lately.
I dunno. It's already been shown that the US can freeze (aka steal) any person or country's money through SWIFT whenever they choose. For all we know his wire transfer was intercepted by some narco-related LEA in the US ala civil asset forfeiture under the ruse that it was drug money.
it's not stealing when you own it. the USA owns the swift banking system. That's good for US citizens and bad for anyone trying to screw with us like Russia and/or China. I am not a global citizen, I'm an American!
Of course it's stealing. That's like saying the NYPD can simply board a subway train or bus and confiscate everyone's wallets because the City of New York owns them. LOL And SWIFT is dying, accelerated by the recent thefts of assets from Venezuela, Iran and then Russia and China. Nobody's going to ride a train if they know their property can be stolen by the state because the state owns the means of transportation. Just wait...
Kidding about what? I know all about the central banks and their plans. But that's not an argument against the FUKUS thievery using the system. SWIFT has been in place long before the advent of cryptocurrencies. SWIFT is 39 years old.
Next time use Wise for a wire transfer. I use it to send money from Europe to Philippines. Usually it arrives within 2 days. Wise has low fees and decent exchange rates.
There are people investing in Bitcoin because of the cypherpunk ethos of a money that isn't in control of any person, people, or organization. I am one of those people as I have realized anyone controlling issuance of money has near ultimate power.
Then there are the rest whom are investing not for a better future, but simply to make money. Unfortunately it seems most people have fallen into this trap. There have been and will continue to be an innumerable amount of scams which are attempting to trap these people. These scams will be constantly failing and causing hardship. The recent failure is just another in a long and ever-growing list.
You've touched on something that has made me reluctant to invest in any of these coins, including Bitcoin I agree the people/institutions who control the issuance of money have near ultimate/infinite power. My question is why would they allow the ascendance of a currency that might rival that power? D you expect they will co-opt this monetary protocol in the future?
You bring up a great point...here's the counterpoint. Royalty controlled the world...until it didn't. The rise of the "peasant" class was crushed until...it wasn't. Every now and then, the dam does break and civilization progresses against the will of those in control. Perhaps it will happen again with monetary policy. We will know soon enough.
Much like the scammers, it has been and will continue to be attempted.
The protocol was built for that battle. There is a reason why people think it's "slow" and "old." The reason is because it needs to be hyper-secure for this exact attack vector. Only time will tell on if Bitcoin makes it through that test. I happen to think it will make it but it won't be easy. There will likely be many times in the next decade that I will be biting my nails.
So far, it's the best chance humanity has had to wrestle the creation and control of money away from the historic "money-changers."
One other piece to add is the asymmetry of that bet. If Bitcoin does survive and you end up with a whole coin that would likely be enough for you and your kids to retire and do whatever you want.
If it doesn't make it, then you lost a small portion of those potential gains. To me this makes that bet a no-brainer.
There is Bitcoin and then there is everything else 'crypto'. If you have not read it already, I would recommend The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking (Saifedean Ammous) & Vijay Boyapati Essay: The Bullish Case for Bitcoin as starters. All other crypto will likely be more speculative/start up, regulated as securities.
As an investor in this stuff for a while now, I can't tell you how routine all of this seems. Bitcoin explodes by orders of multitude, people jump in, and then it collapses 50-60% and stays there for a while. This event is called "crypto winter". Then Bitcoin busts much higher. I've seen 2 such cycles myself and have been told by some old school investors who have seen it more times.
I also don't buy the idea that a short term selloff somehow negates a long term investment thesis like Gold 2.0
Bitcoin is being lumped into this mess but it’s weathering the crash well. Price dropped partly due to Do Kwon dumping tethers btc reserves in a desperate attempt to save the “stablecoin”.
Call me slow, but I have spent many hours in the last two years reading about cryptocurrency and still don't quite get it. A full-blown Matt Taibbi investigation of this obviously significant craze would be *extremely* valuable to me. I'm squicked by the weirdly intense paranoia I detect in the interviews I've read with its leading promoters.
Haha, yes...I am a BTC bro. I do like the idea of a decentralize store of wealth / mechanism to exchange currency as opposed to a centrally controlled "man behind the curtain" turning the levers on behalf of insiders. I'm not a fan of Proof of Stake VC pump and dump schemes.
Matt, I’d talk to Jimmy Song if you’d like a Bitcoiners perspective on why stablecoins and sh*tcoins/crypto don’t work. @jimmysong on Twitter. Also highly recommend Jameson Lopp @lopp has some good explanations, not to push BTC but it’s one way to learn why stablecoins are a scam.
Dropped an email. I work in crypto space and been an investor for 3 years. Stablecoins are inherently risky! They can be compromised, can lose its peg, block a user's transaction in said stablecoin, treasuries not verified, and non of this is FDIC insured.
Crypto is full of scams and VC pumps. Stick to BTC/ETH
I got an unexpected bonus at work and used some of it to buy Cardano, just for giggles. I didn't put all that much in, certainly not enough to cry about, but I'm also not giggling.
There are multiple sides of crypto. The emphasis right now is all on the financial market. That’s a powerful segment but the more important part is the concept of the immutable ledger and the influence that will have well beyond the financial world. This short term explosion is reminiscent of the dot com bust. The interwebs needed a reset to figure out what were truly viable markets and what is a fad. The same thing is happening here. This is gonna have several people running for the hills but there is a ton of opportunity right behind this implosion
What is the value of an immutable ledger? Almost all the value of a ledger is in its mutability?
There are so many use cases of blockchain technology that come down to "if you are a weirdo who hates databases here is a way to do it that is 500X more energy intensive and annoying! The big benefit is it allows you to work a database with a bunch of people you have zero trust in. And they can with a plurality of users co-opt the database and change its functioning" Sounds great, sign me up.
Literally any real world use case that is actually valuable, you will want to have a trusted party in charge, and once you have that, you immediately have easier solutions that already exist.
"Almost all the value of a ledger is in its mutability?"
Negative--a proper ledger is appended to, not rewritten. The past transactions are what is immutable.
There's really only one use case, and that is digital cash. The whole "blockchain" craze is just a desperate search for more applications of the structure behind Bitcoin, but there aren't any.
On the other hand, there are a lot of interesting applications for cryptography in general, and I think that much of what we call "blockchain" will eventually give way to an understanding of other architectures that use these innovative cryptographic techniques but aren't anything like Bitcoin.
We need an alternative to people like Justin Trudeau controlling the currency. Your fiat currency is one "state of emergency" away from disappearing. People have always wanted to own an asset that held value regardless of the government. that has been gold. Is bitcoin the next gold? Sure seems like it. It's a new technology that is still in process of early adaptation.
Justin Trudeau doesn't control anything. It's the Canadian government that controls the Canadian currency. Just like USD are the property of the United States Government. Voters control the governments. Now, are you starting to get how all of this works in reality? lol
Voters don't control the governments nearly to the extent that wealthy donors do. The wealthy donors have the most to gain from uncapped creation of fiat currency (The Cantillion Effect.)
Votes are what determine elections, not your fundraising total. If the electorate is too ignorant that make them vote against their own interests, that’s their own problem. No matter what democrats and socialists say, Rich people don’t cause every issue in the country. It’s the politicians on all sides that lie that are to blame. Corruption is the human condition that is never going to be solved.
I'm waiting for all of the world's fiat currencies to collapse before I buy an abandoned but functioning coal power plant and outfit it with several thousand Alienware Aurora R11s and commence mining operations...
The point of it being stored on multiple computers at once with no central institution to validate transactions means it is in fact decentralized. You can learn all about this basic fact of Bitcoin by reading the white paper. There’s even a diagram to illustrate it.
That's how it seemed to my 8-bit brain, so I didn't buy any, and that worked. I would be *very* interested if anyone wishes to dispute what you said. With facts and logic, I mean.
I’ve invested a few times in the crypto space. I’m now on the sidelines due to central banks starting to create their own Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC). I believe after regulations are instituted all cryptos will go to zero. Governments don’t want anonymous transactions and the creation of CBDC’s will never allow for that type of anonymity imo. Especially with the new global tax group announced that nobody has been talking about over the last year.
How exactly is that supposed to happen? Governments create their own nanny-coin and all the BTC investors just get in line? Dude. I’d try reading at least something about what Bitcoin is before you stake your future on that. If it works - and there’s no guarantee it will - Bitcoin is a complete antithesis to fiat money, not a precursor to it. Do you not see that at all,
Ok, let’s. Centralization is an aspect of fiat. It’s enforced by government control. Canada showed us their government believes it’s their money, not yours. They’ll try to win, and they certainly might. But there is no “might” without Bitcoin. Nothing else comes close to knocking over the power of government over money, which enriches them over us, every single day, forever and ever. Peace to you, it’s cute how you think central banks are good guys.
The FED controls the world money supply. If you think the US government is just going to cede control over all of that you really are making things up in your own head. We are about to fight WW3 over the world reserve currency issue.
This is exactly what I keep trying to tell you. If Bitcoin works the way it's supposed to, it won't matter what the government cedes or doesn't. It's subversive by nature.
I get that completely. the FED is never going to allow it. The United States currency is owned by the government, its not our money in any way, shape or form.
You really like to assume things. I never said any of that. You just made that up in your own head. That’s your problem. You’re too emotionally involved to be debating the topic.
No. I refute your point that centralization = individuals with a post about government and you call me emotional. Reality is the Canadian government seized money from their political opponents, but yeah, I’m just squawking. There’s a name for the logical fallacy, let me see if I can get my girl-brain smart enough to come up with it.
I never even said anything about you being a woman. Wow you really are paranoid of how people see you. I’m not going to get into a ideological argument. Have a nice day, Jen.
Matt. I “invested” 50k in bitcoin in the fall of 2019 at around $4,000 per. Sold next year for around $8,000 per bitcoin. Bought a new fishing boat with the proceeds and haven’t bought any since. IMO it’s a classic Ponzi and an unbelievable waste of energy to run all the mining computers.
As for stablecoins, you might investigate the assets these stablecoins pretend to have. The trouble is, there is no guarantee that the issuers have on hand the assets they say they do. Tether once claimed to have $69 billion in real currency to support that amount of its coin in circulation. Yet no one who went looking for the money was able to find any evidence of it. After being sued by the state of New York, the company revealed it had been loaning money from its reserves to prop up an affiliated cryptocurrency exchange that was hundreds of millions of dollars in the hole.
I suggest reading about the great Tulip mania of the Dutch Golden Age to gain an understanding of what can happen when something finds it’s true value in a hurry. Which is not to say that randomness can’t make you many crypto millions if you happen to get lucky before true value is found, but every blip in crypto is underpinned by anti-fiat fervour, which makes it’s true value awfully hard to pin down.
Might be time to get the dictionary out, Jen. Look up ‘canard’ and have a rethink, unless you’re convinced there was no tulip mania in 17c Holland? If you misread my comment, I did not imply that crypto currency’s have no role or value, just that they’re not priced like Big Mac’s.
No, I don’t want to argue with someone who missed my point entirely to argue about semantics. It really is ok. If you disagree, that’s more BTC for me.
Bottom line is that huge numbers of scams/centralized web3 nonsense are riding the coat tails of real decentralized tech innovation like Bitcoin. The fake stuff uses broken incomplete tech combined with centralized AWS services to create the appearance of a working decentralized ecosystem. There was a thread by @jack late last year that addressed this and some for the underlying tech problems. Luna/UST was obvious nonsense from the beginning- backed by bitcoin, WAT? USDC is generally considered the gold standard of backed stablecoin. I like Max Keiser for Bitcoin maxi content- try blockchain socialist, doomberg, and paris marx for skeptic content.
I’ve been buying and holding since 2013 when I first took an online course on bitcoin and blockchain. I’ve been steadily buying, diversifying into different projects, and reading the white papers for some of the more interesting ones as they come out, and following along with a lot of the drama This is the third of the 4 year bust cycles I’ve been through and I’m still buying through the next one. I’ve had a few bad experiences but it’s been overall a positive for me. I can definitely provide some historical/ technical background info
Yeah, I put like a total of 4k into various cryptos. I accept it's super volatile and have lost money due to the market going wherever it wishes seemingly. My mistake was staking etherium for etherium 2.0. Once you do that, you're locked in and can't pull your money away when the market turns sour because you're waiting for the network upgrade to cash out. You don't want to hang around too long with crypto. You wanna just buy low and sell high and then get out. I understand this is a precarious situation to be in. It's almost like gambling. If you want to invest for the long term, don't do crypto. The real money is in either making a coin and convincing people it's valuable, or by owning an exchange and reaping those sweet sweet fees.
A connected Wall Street trader told a co-worker of mine that you never want to be in a state of hope. You either know something other people don't (basically insider trading) or you make a market. Otherwise, it's a casino.
Given crypto's long term returns, buying and holding has been the best strategy. Some people sold Bitcoin at $250 because it was an all time high. Have an investment thesis and stick with it. If you like timing the market aka gambling, I feel like Vegas is a better venue for that. At least you get to sneak in snoring cocaine of stripper's tits.
First, I would have to consider snorting drugs off a stripper's tits to be a desirable outcome. Second, bitcoin and other cryptos being actually valuable and not having that value get deleted cyclically before restoring itself before again being deleted is recent to 2020 and there's no guarantee that it won't just crash down into a value substantially smaller than it currently holds. It would be like investing in a company that periodically implodes and recovers just in time for another implosion.
I'd say my main motivation for diving into crypto was the search for an 'escape hatch' from the FED's system of financial repression. I'm still waiting to see how the FED/SEC responds to this challenge to their monetary hegemony, and hopeful the independent crypto (not the Central Bank kind) will thrive. There is lots of great info out there on You-Tube, Medium, and in the Discord forums. Check out https://www.coindesk.com/ or Bankless (https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/) for more info.
I am a very low stakes investor in BTC and ETH: Hedging against the dollar and wondering where the bottom is as all the excess liquidity washes out from the Fed-driven quantitative easing bubble. Looking forward to your report!
You do realize that BTC goes down as the strength of the dollar increases. Until interest rate increases are over, Bitcoin is a suckers bet. USD doesn’t have the same volatility. It’s not a hedge.
Check out the SEC vs. Ripple lawsuit. Lots of evidence of corruption from former SEC officials and people associated with Ethereum in bringing the suit. Holders of the cryptocurrency XRP that is associated with Ripple filed suit to intervene in the lawsuit- represented by John Deaton. Deaton started @cryptolawus to document all case filings.
I bought some BTC/ETH/LTC back in 2017, when those were the only coins traded on Coinbase. About six months later I started trading across exchanges, and within another six months I was sitting on eight-figure hedged derivative positions despite my real net worth sitting in the low five figures. Had some wild swings over the next few years but mostly ended up ahead.
The IRS audited one of my tax returns which included a $4.5M 1099 from Coinbase as well as over 25,000 individual trades that I definitely did not report correctly. Ended up being a pretty funny story actually.
I've got an MBA but I'm also currently pursuing a PhD in cryptography, so I have a pretty good understanding of both the economic and technical sides of this area. My research advisor was recently approached about a proposal for grant funding from Algorand, which also turned into a rather funny story about the love/hate relationship that many academic cryptographers have developed with the "Crypto" space.
I and my significant other have a less than 0.25 bitcoin. We will probably never sell it unless we are in dire straights. If the bitcoin (small b) price gets into the millions, it will probably be because of hyperinflation and/or a collapse of the Dollar. Or, maybe it will even aid in a Dollar collapse.
I like Bitcoin (big B) mainly because it is an end run around the corrupt fractional reserve fiat banking system. It banks the unbanked.
Bitcoin maximalist here. I've bought it at 4K and I bought it at 50K. Current DCA is around 11K. It's been a best investment of my life in terms of ROI by far. But I believe it will only go higher as currency achieves its destiny and de-centralizes. I won't sell at any price and intend to give this as my inheritance in the digital form.
But yeah, investing in this sector will make you taste your blood. It felt a lot better at 65 than 28. But if you can stomach that kind of volatility, long term returns are attractive.
Stablecoins are a fraud. you want something tethered to US dollar? USD is not enough for you. So I would get out of all of it.
You had to have Bitcoin to shop on Silk Road. BTC was under $100 back then, but in a matter of weeks rose to $1100. I lost about 3 BTC in the MtGox theft and bankruptcy. The bankruptcy court is setting the value at $700.
I have some investment in crypto. Mainly Bitcoin and Ethereum, and small amounts in ADA and Litecoin.
There are two things I’m watching out for in this space – the introduction of a central bank digital currency (CBDC) from the Fed, and the Tether Stablecoin.
Tether has been known for years to be a scam and not actually pegged to the Dollar. It’s literally a bomb that can take damn near everything in this space to Zero. Imagine what you saw happen to Luna but vastly worse.
The thing is, I expect the Tether bomb to blow right after the Fed announces a CBDC. This will be a deliberate act of sabotage by the masters of the universe in the crypto space because it’ll essentially clear the field for the Fed’s CBDC.
So for all of you HODLers, as soon as they announce that, it’s time to finally sell.
Around this time, I‘s also bet that Congress will somehow find it in them to work together in a bipartisan manner and put in place severe restrictions on Cryptocurrencies, making it effectively inaccessible for 90%+ of Americans.
Fwiw I've found Chris Dixon of a16z and Michael Saylor have robust philosophies and holdings (their opinions carry weight) if you are looking for whales to talk to
Been dropping about a thousand a month split between Bitcoin and Ethereum for a little over a year. So far still slightly ahead of the game. The overall trend still looks good, if a lot more volatile than I anticipated. Buying below $40K looks like it will beat inflation long term, but I could (probably?) be wrong.
What is the underlying source of value for gold? What is the underlying source of value for USD? Faith. Same as Bitcoin. And everyone who has ever bought during crypto winter never regretted that decision.
Crypto currency is a scam. While any nation's fiat money is backed by that nation, crypto is nothing and has nothing backing it. It has "value" only as long as backers are willing to pump real money, that fiat currency that crypto backers find so offensive, into it. It's a f'ing joke.
What should happen is that the same ideas that surround crypto be applied to real fiat money so that transaction and transfer costs can be reduced from what they are due to profit seeking banks being in control. That would make sense, not this crypto nonsense.
Please forgive ... this is unrelated to Crypto. Rather, it relates to your Tweeted request for a novel-worthy story. We could not reply on Twitter for specific security reasons .
I believe I have a candidate story which corresponds to your specifications and likely personal interest.
Featuring:
RUSSIA: It involves an American businessman who arrived in Sobchak/Putin's Leningrad of 1990, by special invitation and migrated to Moscow (all during the time you also resided there).
PRAVDA: the American engineered the first contract for advertising with Lenin-founded, КПСС-owned Pravda. This relationship led to ....
KGB: The American befriended his undercover KGB interface at Pravda and after the August Putsch, proposed a meeting at Lubyanka, leading to an extraordinary business contract to to develop special projects with KGB, (approved by Primakov himself).
Project #1? The packaging of the long-classified Lee Harvey Oswald Moscow/Minsk surveillance files (into a Book). CIA? Not amused.
SOVIET PREMIER: the cachet of KGB enabled the American to also develop a relationship with Gorbachev's Premier Ryzhkov, for whom the American wrote a business plan for a major consulting group.
ASSASSINATION AT THE RADISSON: Remember Paul Tatum of Radisson Slavyanskaya? This American was one of Tatum's confidantes. Up until Tatum ran afoul of Luzhkov and the Chechens and was machine-gunned at Metro Kievskaya.
Intrigued? If yes, can share more on: games.end<AT>protonmail<DOT>com
I recommend reading Richard Maybury early warning report on this and many other subjects. basically, it seems a scam to me. unless you can actually make untraced digital transactions what is the advantage? i bought a small amount of bitcoin which is now only a fraction of the worth and had to report everything about it on taxes. if anyone knows a way to get around that, I'd like to know it.
- you could do a lot worse than check out Lex Fridman's interview with many of the major players in this field...including the head of Microstrategy and Vitalik Buterim (founder of Ethereum)
MBA, CFA, MS in Finance. I thought crypto was a scam until a couple of years ago when I was finally convinced about Bitcoin. After dipping my toes in with BTC I started trading other coins and NFT's for a year or so. I did make a good chuck of money in alt coins, but then lost all of those gains this year. After a couple of years I'm convinced that BTC is here to stay and not a bad long term inflation hedge, but the easy/quick money is gone. Everything else crypto is either a scam or similar to a moonshot angel investment.
I was a crypto journalist back in 2014. I did a few interviews, wrote a couple articles, and lost money in the Mt. Gox and Cryptsy debacles. Left crypto for a while, just watched from the sidelines, then returned in 2021.
My experience has been a mixed bag, but there's no denying that you can make a small fortune literally overnight with minimal amounts of work, so crypto is here as long as there is electricity.
You might look into the Cardano Ada project and that ecosystem. It's sometimes called a shitcoin, but it's not; lots of good mathematicians and programmers behind it. Unlike BTC and most others, it's not based on proof of work, in which 'mining' is heavily energy intensive; rather it's proof of stake, so coins are not mined but minted. Uses much less electricity. BTC has an obvious advantage in terms of scarcity, and I'm not heavily into any of them, but I did buy Ada when it started taking off and continue to buy this dip. As others have said, the whole crypto ecosystem has tended to follow BTC up and down and Ada is no different...so far.
Glad you're going to write a story here. The key is...there's Bitcoin...and then there's everything else. Once you realize that BTC is decentralized, the opposite of say, the Fed or all the venture backed cryptos that pre-mine to investors and then dump for a healthy profit on the public, just before they tank, you realize what's really going on. I dabbled briefly in Ethereum but got out...the centralized control is not attractive to me. To each his own.
The BTC story is both simple and complex. Most genius is simplicity and BTC and its second layer for small transactions, are a revelation and are one of the few modern developments that give me hope for honesty in monetary policy. I own BTC and GBTC (a fund that owns BTC for those that needed it in a retirement acct).
GBTC is another example of govt creating more problems than it solves. As a trust, it holds BTC but is less liquid because it can't yet be converted into an ETF...meanwhile, the govt HAS allowed futures as an ETF. How does that make sense? GBTC, until recently, was one of the few ways to easily add a small percentage of BTC into a retirement fund.
If you want to read a great, quick primer, I'd go for https://www.layeredmoney.com by Nik Bhatia. The historical summary of the various money layers and how they operate, and came to be is a useful primer to where we are now.
Finally, like any movement, there are both hucksters and true believers. My analogy here is the recent claims that those who refused the mrna vaccines are "anti-science" or "anti-vaccination" - no some of "us" are very healthy adults and realize that, using simple math, our chances of surviving covid/mild symptoms are better than getting a shot with highly questionable data. Most of us have been vaccinated many times for a variety of vaccines with long periods of testing. The data for vaccination in health adults and children is the opposite of compelling. Interesting note, Pfizer CEO allegedly is not vaccinated. Mmmm. Along with many employees. Makes you wonder, doesn't it?
Stablecoins is yet another rabbit hole but suffice to say this...just like banks, I believe stable coins need "sufficient" reserves/assets to back their activities. We know that even regulated banks don't have "sufficient" reserves without the fed's injections when the sh!t hits the fan. See 2008 when they appeared hat in hand, explaining how fed inaction would melt down the financial system (and their bonuses and properties on Long Island). Should have taken the Icelandic solution (let them collapse).
I wonder how many who follow Taibbi also know/pay attention to Yanis Varoufakis. Very different, (Varoufakis: "I'm a socialist..."), yet similar in important ways (that complete sentence: "I'm a socialist who hates socialists"). In short, they both think for themselves and--when they treat a topic seriously--back up what they say with evidence and logic that is hard to argue with on a sound basis. Their detractors tend to spout emotion, not reason.
Varoufakis' most recent lengthy treatment of crypto, NFTs, stablecoins, DAOs: They carry exactly the same problems as fiat money based on the gold standard or currency boards: a fundamental economic fallacy called "composition." They are already features of oligarchy, not tools to overthrow it. The technologies have utility only *after* a radical/revolutionary economic change.
"... just like gold, Bitcoin is eminently… abandonable (once it has done enormous damage). Put differently, either Bitcoin will never take over from fiat money or, if it does, it will cause huge unnecessary pain (before being abandoned)."
Found out about Bitcoin in 2016. When things started really popping in 2017 aped in. Clearly there was a lot of tension during crypto winter when I went down 50% but I was a true believer, sweated it out, and have never looked back. Can't wait for next 2 years, hoping to match performance of past two years.
I bought a lot of bitcoin and ether a few years ago. rode it up to the highs and down to where it is now. still hodling, with money that I don't need right now. still waiting to become a crypto millionaire! have no idea whether it'll go to a million or zero. Bought it on principle, because I hate the fiat system, which has made a lot of rich financial criminals and a lot of very poor people.
Bitcoin isn’t crypto. Crypto is the centralized cryptocurrency industry that sprang up around BTC. It’s full of scams and goes against pretty much every principle of the Bitcoin white paper. I’m a HODLer myself, to the moon!
Bitcoin is the ORIGINAL cryptocurrency. The "crypto" you refer to are what I and others call shitcoins.
I love shitcoins. As in, love it when someone else owns them.
Precisely!
Well said
Other people's experiences with crypto may affect you, especially in circumstances where a sovereign state become involved with them
as part of doing a number on the population. Remember Albania?
That wasn't crypto, it was a fake lottery or Ponzi scheme -- in other words not too far off.
See:
https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2022/02/26/el-salvador-bitcoin-tether-buys-itself-a-country-and-why-chivo-sucks/
https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2022/02/27/el-salvador-bitcoin-no-naked-day-trading-chivo-pets-bitcoin-italia-visits-astrocasino/
https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2022/04/20/el-salvador-bukele-goes-full-dictator-chivo-theft-bitcoin-towers/
What a bizarre comment. "Bitcoin isn't crypto". Of course it is.
Actually Bitcoin doesn’t have the centralized scammy actor concept that crypto does; BTC exchanges are not lenders (cf Celsius, who was lending against his own coins in a shameless arbitrage scheme that smells of Wall Street bank and has almost totally collapsed); and its blockchains are always filled with questionable options, like how Vitali backed up Ethereum’s blockchain to remove transactions he didn’t like. The differences are very very simple and obvious. Crypto enriches a central party. Bitcoin is decentralized and that is the entire point of it.
If you really think they are the same, you’re vulnerable to all manner of bad actors, thieves, con men, and investment bankers. Be very careful investing if you know so little, you could lose a lot to these creeps.
Yup. But this fact is hard for a lot of people to wrap their heads around. Cryptocurrencies are so scammy, it’s really hard for lots of people to consider that there is precisely one non-scammy cryptocurrency, even if that one is the first cryptocurrency. It requires a level of either trust, or a willingness to investigate dubious sounding claims. I suspect that the best we can do here is just patiently keep saying what you’ve just said here.
You’re my people. :) I completely agree.
There’s a massive difference between bitcoin and the numerous inferior copies of it.
You think the Blackrock risk department would let them put this much money into a digital asset and not know who created it and who under pins it?
No of course not. I think this is a huge way that sh*tcoiners gain legitimacy (and backers). If you just take Do Kwan or Vitaly, you'll see very charismatic people who are able to go after vc money deftly and easily. So say you have this social skill plus a bit of second-rate coding ability - it wouldn't be that hard to build something that is ultimately a moneymaker for you and your investors, feed off the buzz of 'crypto,' sway some twenty-somethings into a get rich quick scheme where you invest pennies and reap dollars...it's almost too perfect. But it's 100% what those guys do.
LOL! Bitcoin is precisely the same scam. A finite supply of nothing that are mined for the greater fools to pump their real fiat currency into.
"Real fiat." What even is that?
A physical bill or coin.
PS funny how the gold guys want the same thing, along with stocks and bonds, and nobody calls them scams. They’re always willing to take your dollars.
What I find interesting is that the things of true value, that which without one cannot live are functioning ecosystems, clean water, air, and soil, are not valued and we will sacrifice them for whatever we consider money.
Well, off-topic and has zero to do with what you just said about crypto and Bitcoin, but ok.
LOL! The topic is about humans ascribing "value" to things and that includes us devaluing that which is necessary for life to exist far below that which we invented out of our imagination, money, whether fiat currency or cryptocurrency.
Have your discussion about "gold guys" when the base of the food chain is too few to sustain life above as has been happening for the past few hundred years due to our extractive economies and is following a trend of population decline faster than that seen in the run-up to the Permian Extinction or even the smaller scale collapses experienced by the Maya.
Whew, thanks, nobody’s ever said that to me before and you’ve surely saved me from financial ruin. LOL!
Of course. One Bitcoin is worth one Bitcoin. Or there's always the pizza!
The Bitcoin pizza is worth $302,006,271 today. (+2% from yesterday)
I'm a financial advisor and my husband, against my advice, put about $50,000 of "emergency fund" money in stable coin that was at that time "guaranteeing" an 8% return and was "backed by the US Dollar." We argued. I told him nothing pegged to the USD could return 8% in a .5% interest rate world. I asked him where that 8% could possibly be coming from if the dollars he used to purchase the coins were staying in USD to back the coin. I explained to him that cryptocurrencies don't generate revenues or earn profits from which that outstanding return could be paid. I told him that if it looked to good to be true, it wasn't (true). Eventually he decided to listen and got out. This was months ago. When the collapse came, he thanked me.
We have the opposite conversation. My husband is a financial advisor at a large wire house. I spent a year begging him to invest in crypto with some of our money, just our account, and he remained an adamant “no.” He thinks it stupid to invest in such a huge market that has the volatility of a single 1-billion market cap tech company, except it’ll never pay dividends and governments can destroy it with the swipe of a pen.
I was still curious - curious George is my spirit animal - so I made sure it wasn’t violating any FINRA rules and invested a couple thousand on my PayPal and Venmo apps and in Coinbase. He laughed and said “go for it, amuse yourself, just don’t expect some big return.” I really hate it when he’s right. 😂
It is funny to watch - mostly because the money I put in is insignificant to our financial position. Within a couple months I was up 80%, then down like 50%, then up, then down, up a bit, down a lot. Right now I’m down 45% since inception (our brokerage account on the year is only down 4.5% and still up 18% over the same time period). 😂
If I want to gamble I’ll go to a casino where it’s more fun, so I won’t buy more, but it’s entertaining enough not to sell. Love the concept, but the execution is too unpredictable.
I assuming this was him staking USDC on a platform like Crypto dot com or similar? USDC actually seems to have the best footing among the stablecoins (unlike Tether, Dai, etc.)
what bothers you about Dai? It's an overcollateralized stablecoin backed by other cryptocurrencies, including USDC. Pretty much the only way Dai can fail is if USDC fails and pulls it down with them.
An "overcollateralized stablecoin back by other cryptocurrencies"- in other words a house of cards.
Right, but you have to trust the accounting of these projects/stablecoins is legit. That is hard to do when the business behind the largest stablecoin, Tether, refuses to be audited and I has been under investigation by the SEC and NY AG. If Tether is not fully backed it could make the LUNA collapse look like a mere tremor
wise
The Bloomberg News video interviews with the leading lights of the Bitcoin craze all projected a peculiar "young, humorless genius" persona -- pretty convincingly. Intense dudes, discreetly yet unmistakably government skeptics. I can't square that with anything like a "guarantee" or reliance on a government backup. I took their whole point to be that they wanted nothing to do with risk insurance ... apart from secrecy -- which is patently inconsistent with any kind of risk pooling.
There's definitely a libertarian thing going on with crypto and they have a point. Our fiat currencies are more or less controlled by central banks most of which consciously try to depreciate their value slowly. The US Fed's target is 2% depreciation/year. So you can understand the desire to create a store of value that's not subject to that. If bitcoin or one of the others held value, rather than being wildly volatile, it would serve a real purpose. We just haven't seen that happen though. The stable coins were billed as the solution to that volatility problem but that hasn't been executed that well either. First of all, if you try to peg a coin to the dollar, then it's going to depreciate as the dollar depreciates. So you're not solving the original fiat currency/inflation problem. Then, to generate interest, they offered these absurd interest rates which, frankly, just look like a Ponzi scheme.
But as a short-term investment, do you think it’s worth it? Sell when the value rises and before it tumbles-type of thing? I’ve read and read and read about cryptocurrency and none of it makes sense to me. At all. And not in a,”I don’t understand what this is,” kinda way (although I don’t really understand what it is haha), but in more of a,”How is this really, truly working?” kinda way. Do you think, though, that buying some and then selling quickly when the value rises is worth the risk?
I'm in 'tech' and was an early adopter back when BTC was somewhere around 1700. I was in West LA when gangs of developers were just learning the development backend for ETH, as a database head I was interested in the immutability of blockchain which is of keen interest to anyone who understand financial audits. I also have decades of experience in enterprise software and lived through the original dotcom bubble. I was sitting next to a kid who threw $40K into ETH and didn't care a whit about the technology. Maybe ETH was worth $100? Never really followed it. I have attended 2 other crypto conferences in LA and they are a mixture of hype, fascinating tech, and sketchy speculators. When I finally attended a class for smart contracts, I found the programming language behind it far too juvenile to be taken seriously. In the end I made about 15x my investments, but it was always play money.
I remain interested in the blockchain itself and the problems of zero-trust that the technologies resolve, and having been a bonded developer for Wall Street firms, I understand that blockchain tech can yet revolutionize accounting, especially the ridiculous problems associated with the provenance of tranches of derivative investments bundled for sale with no institutional transparency. All financial institutions could improve their governance and auditability with such things like immutability in transactions. That does not change the market dynamics of the greater fool theory or the greed and hype possible with impenetrably dense code.
I still hold BTC, LTC, ALGO & ADA. on a variety of exchanges including Kraken and Coinbase. The majority of my funds are still in BTC in an offline hard wallet. None of this exceeds about 20% of my 401K. (now). My trading strategy with coins generally has been to place small bets on volatile (small cap) ones and convert them to BTC and LTC (large cap). I never intended to cash in before retirement.
I expect that brick & mortar 'old school' banks who are, let's say, SWIFT-dependent will FUD all crypto and will be incapable of building more secure algorithms and test them as well as BTC has proven, and the entire validity of the crypto-based financial instruments will always be considered with derision. That doesn't change the math. It also doesn't change the economy of the US in which the sins of 2008 have not been rectified, and will generate new schemes. While those who can will throw money & legislation at problems, it still won't change the math.
I'm pleased to see another knowledgeable investor who includes ADA and ALGO on the (extremely) short list of altcoins they are willing to hold. As a PhD student in cryptography I am impressed by the Cardano team's commitment to hard research as the basis for their implementations. Algorand is in a similar position, with some heavy hitters of the cryptography research world on their masthead.
Thank you. I am just a serious follower of current events, not a Bitcoin investor. My education is quite sound, and yet I find this subject very hard to grasp as a non-technical person. The depth of the complexity is surprising to me. I talk regularly to my Schwab guys about my 401k, but they're just dollar bill guys. I have come in search of understanding and found your post helpful.
I’d strongly say forget about Bitcoin or any crypto in your 401k for the foreseeable future. Maybe buy some Microstrategy.
Just start stacking Bitcoin with whatever dollars you can spare out of your budget. Now’s a good time to start.
I’d also say to buy 5x as much physical gold as you buy Bitcoin. If you don’t hold it, you don’t own it.
So you dropped Ethereum, which is probably going to have the majority of Web3 built on it, because you dislike Solidity? But you are OK with investing in the totally useless shitcoin LTC, which has almost all of the drawbacks of BTC and almost none of its positives?
I like Rust. If and when whatever Solidity does is implemented in Rust, I'll trust backends built with that more. I distrust web developers and just about anything written in javascript or php or any number of lightweight, memory unsafe languages. ETH gas prices were ridiculous and the advantage of their distributed nature had not been overcome by their cost per transaction. Fine if all you care about are low-volume high latency systems. I do not. There is a divergence between the capitalization & value of a coin as an investment and the quality of the code behind them. My money is where my mouth is on ALGO. I like LTC for its liquidity.
ETH still has an oracle problem. I trust the network of public Notaries working at FedEx and UPS more than I trust kid programmers. But I also trust Vinay Gupta of Matterium. I'm not itching to make a bundle in this market. I can and will be patient. There are other investment strategies in the world. Cool kids and bored apes can disappear and save the rest of us the oxygen.
I am genuinely puzzled by something you might explain to me. If ETH is the future of smart transactions, why would anyone invest in the token whose price increases? It seems to me that, like electricity, to leverage the future of appliances that run on it, the cost of acquiring the base resource should go down, and the production of it should go up.
Awesome comment and also username.
How can you determine that Solidity is "far too juvenile" while also keeping your crypto on "various exchanges". I'm sorry but you don't seem qualified to make that assessment when you don't understand the basic concept of "Not Your Keys Not Your Coins"
I'll make you a deal. You tell me what year you were born in, and I'll tell you what programming language I was developing in at the time.
So part of the banking ESG attack on proof of work BTC mining is that they’re just jealous that they are screwed and can’t recreate Bitcoin?
The ESG flacks don't even need to go there. They already own the Woke and then Green. It's not as if a technical argument has any traction there. Nobody reads the prospectus, remember?
Ha, right. Leveraging flare gas and fluctuations in the grid is somehow NOT ESG; it's the exact opposite. The density of the ESG cult reminds me of the anti-gun crusaders (I don't own a gun) - the data are quite clear, we have a mental health treatment problem in the USA, a gun is simply a tool. Next? ban all cars, they kill a lot more people. Also, hospitals, they are highly correlated with death. The most highly regulated gun areas also have the highest gun crime/deaths. Meanwhile, Wyoming is the lowest, the least regulated. What's wrong with this picture?
Ever sent a wire transfer? I just sent one last week from the US to Mexico where my fiancee currently resides. It has still not arrived. I could have completed the transaction with crypto in 30 seconds. Sure, there are scams and worries about getting the digits right but the current system is broken and, shall we say, catering to the lowest common denominator.
Crypto allows people who have been unable to participate in financial markets to finally have a say, purchase goods otherwise not available to them, and diversify their assets away from self(name your country here)-inflicted political instability. And it took the free market to create it. I don't think it is going anywhere and we are still in the very early stages. Governments should not like it, it takes away a lot of their power.
I have invested disposable income into the crypto spaces, concentrating on blockchain/infrastructure coins and BTC/ETH--the top two are not the only chains out there.
And a side note: I don't see ETH going to proof of stake any time soon even though they keep touting the great "2.0!" -- all the miners will lose their gas fees which have been quite high lately.
Stay frosty...and diversified!
Yep, anyone that says there isn't a use case is living comfortably in their bubble.
"...I have invested disposable income into the crypto spaces..."
Yes, you have.
Lol...Assumptions!
That sounds like a problem with Mexican banks. They’ve already stated that they will be creating their own CBDC in 2025. That will clear up the issue.
I dunno. It's already been shown that the US can freeze (aka steal) any person or country's money through SWIFT whenever they choose. For all we know his wire transfer was intercepted by some narco-related LEA in the US ala civil asset forfeiture under the ruse that it was drug money.
it's not stealing when you own it. the USA owns the swift banking system. That's good for US citizens and bad for anyone trying to screw with us like Russia and/or China. I am not a global citizen, I'm an American!
Of course it's stealing. That's like saying the NYPD can simply board a subway train or bus and confiscate everyone's wallets because the City of New York owns them. LOL And SWIFT is dying, accelerated by the recent thefts of assets from Venezuela, Iran and then Russia and China. Nobody's going to ride a train if they know their property can be stolen by the state because the state owns the means of transportation. Just wait...
you're really kidding right? The swift system is being set up for digital currencies. The FED will create a CBDC for USD by 2024 on blockchain. Then all transactions will never be anonymous. Thats the future, just wait.... https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/swift-network-to-begin-exploring-cross-border-cbdc-payments
Kidding about what? I know all about the central banks and their plans. But that's not an argument against the FUKUS thievery using the system. SWIFT has been in place long before the advent of cryptocurrencies. SWIFT is 39 years old.
Thats setting everything up for the new minimum global tax agreement designed by the FED to be put in place for the entire world. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/11/global-minimum-tax-rate-deal-signed-countries/
Next time use Wise for a wire transfer. I use it to send money from Europe to Philippines. Usually it arrives within 2 days. Wise has low fees and decent exchange rates.
Never heard of it and will check it out, thanks!
There are people investing in Bitcoin because of the cypherpunk ethos of a money that isn't in control of any person, people, or organization. I am one of those people as I have realized anyone controlling issuance of money has near ultimate power.
Then there are the rest whom are investing not for a better future, but simply to make money. Unfortunately it seems most people have fallen into this trap. There have been and will continue to be an innumerable amount of scams which are attempting to trap these people. These scams will be constantly failing and causing hardship. The recent failure is just another in a long and ever-growing list.
You've touched on something that has made me reluctant to invest in any of these coins, including Bitcoin I agree the people/institutions who control the issuance of money have near ultimate/infinite power. My question is why would they allow the ascendance of a currency that might rival that power? D you expect they will co-opt this monetary protocol in the future?
You bring up a great point...here's the counterpoint. Royalty controlled the world...until it didn't. The rise of the "peasant" class was crushed until...it wasn't. Every now and then, the dam does break and civilization progresses against the will of those in control. Perhaps it will happen again with monetary policy. We will know soon enough.
Much like the scammers, it has been and will continue to be attempted.
The protocol was built for that battle. There is a reason why people think it's "slow" and "old." The reason is because it needs to be hyper-secure for this exact attack vector. Only time will tell on if Bitcoin makes it through that test. I happen to think it will make it but it won't be easy. There will likely be many times in the next decade that I will be biting my nails.
So far, it's the best chance humanity has had to wrestle the creation and control of money away from the historic "money-changers."
One other piece to add is the asymmetry of that bet. If Bitcoin does survive and you end up with a whole coin that would likely be enough for you and your kids to retire and do whatever you want.
If it doesn't make it, then you lost a small portion of those potential gains. To me this makes that bet a no-brainer.
Sweet Who reference bro. PS: People Forget
Nomenclature correction: Bitcoin and Shitcoins are the correct words.
There is Bitcoin and then there is everything else 'crypto'. If you have not read it already, I would recommend The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking (Saifedean Ammous) & Vijay Boyapati Essay: The Bullish Case for Bitcoin as starters. All other crypto will likely be more speculative/start up, regulated as securities.
Bitcoin has no future as a retail currency and the last few months have really taken the air out of the Gold 2.0 narrative.
As an investor in this stuff for a while now, I can't tell you how routine all of this seems. Bitcoin explodes by orders of multitude, people jump in, and then it collapses 50-60% and stays there for a while. This event is called "crypto winter". Then Bitcoin busts much higher. I've seen 2 such cycles myself and have been told by some old school investors who have seen it more times.
I also don't buy the idea that a short term selloff somehow negates a long term investment thesis like Gold 2.0
Not sure how you can make that assertion when BTCs overall market Is small and volatility is high. I think it’s digital property
Check out Lyn Alden’s excellent post mortem on the crypto crash.
https://www.lynalden.com/digital-alchemy/
Bitcoin is being lumped into this mess but it’s weathering the crash well. Price dropped partly due to Do Kwon dumping tethers btc reserves in a desperate attempt to save the “stablecoin”.
Right. The market always throws out the baby with the bath water. Shit coins are being filtered out and Bitcoin will take off again.
Call me slow, but I have spent many hours in the last two years reading about cryptocurrency and still don't quite get it. A full-blown Matt Taibbi investigation of this obviously significant craze would be *extremely* valuable to me. I'm squicked by the weirdly intense paranoia I detect in the interviews I've read with its leading promoters.
Michael Saylor has a free crypto course
Ponzi? Fraud? Money laundering?
Ah yes, the inevitable generalization. Was scanning for the first to cry ponzi.
Wasn't really a "cry." More of a "stage whisper" at this point. But you go crypto bro!
Haha, yes...I am a BTC bro. I do like the idea of a decentralize store of wealth / mechanism to exchange currency as opposed to a centrally controlled "man behind the curtain" turning the levers on behalf of insiders. I'm not a fan of Proof of Stake VC pump and dump schemes.
Matt, I’d talk to Jimmy Song if you’d like a Bitcoiners perspective on why stablecoins and sh*tcoins/crypto don’t work. @jimmysong on Twitter. Also highly recommend Jameson Lopp @lopp has some good explanations, not to push BTC but it’s one way to learn why stablecoins are a scam.
I agree, he would be a good chat.
Good point.
Dropped an email. I work in crypto space and been an investor for 3 years. Stablecoins are inherently risky! They can be compromised, can lose its peg, block a user's transaction in said stablecoin, treasuries not verified, and non of this is FDIC insured.
Crypto is full of scams and VC pumps. Stick to BTC/ETH
Although I've dabbled in ETH, I'd even steer clear of ETH...I think second layer BTC has potential to mute ETH switch to POS.
I got an unexpected bonus at work and used some of it to buy Cardano, just for giggles. I didn't put all that much in, certainly not enough to cry about, but I'm also not giggling.
HODL. You'll be fine. Don't panic, barring major world events or government sabotage, it should be at $5 by 2025.
There are multiple sides of crypto. The emphasis right now is all on the financial market. That’s a powerful segment but the more important part is the concept of the immutable ledger and the influence that will have well beyond the financial world. This short term explosion is reminiscent of the dot com bust. The interwebs needed a reset to figure out what were truly viable markets and what is a fad. The same thing is happening here. This is gonna have several people running for the hills but there is a ton of opportunity right behind this implosion
What is the value of an immutable ledger? Almost all the value of a ledger is in its mutability?
There are so many use cases of blockchain technology that come down to "if you are a weirdo who hates databases here is a way to do it that is 500X more energy intensive and annoying! The big benefit is it allows you to work a database with a bunch of people you have zero trust in. And they can with a plurality of users co-opt the database and change its functioning" Sounds great, sign me up.
Literally any real world use case that is actually valuable, you will want to have a trusted party in charge, and once you have that, you immediately have easier solutions that already exist.
You just told the whole story. That's all there is. Blockchain is a nonexistent solution to nonexistent problems.
Blockchain is what all of the CBDC’s will be built upon. Anonymity is never going to be a thing in investing.
"Almost all the value of a ledger is in its mutability?"
Negative--a proper ledger is appended to, not rewritten. The past transactions are what is immutable.
There's really only one use case, and that is digital cash. The whole "blockchain" craze is just a desperate search for more applications of the structure behind Bitcoin, but there aren't any.
On the other hand, there are a lot of interesting applications for cryptography in general, and I think that much of what we call "blockchain" will eventually give way to an understanding of other architectures that use these innovative cryptographic techniques but aren't anything like Bitcoin.
In the real actual world use cases there are approximately a million reasons you will want to rewrite parts of a ledger.
We need an alternative to people like Justin Trudeau controlling the currency. Your fiat currency is one "state of emergency" away from disappearing. People have always wanted to own an asset that held value regardless of the government. that has been gold. Is bitcoin the next gold? Sure seems like it. It's a new technology that is still in process of early adaptation.
Justin Trudeau doesn't control anything. It's the Canadian government that controls the Canadian currency. Just like USD are the property of the United States Government. Voters control the governments. Now, are you starting to get how all of this works in reality? lol
Voters don't control the governments nearly to the extent that wealthy donors do. The wealthy donors have the most to gain from uncapped creation of fiat currency (The Cantillion Effect.)
Votes are what determine elections, not your fundraising total. If the electorate is too ignorant that make them vote against their own interests, that’s their own problem. No matter what democrats and socialists say, Rich people don’t cause every issue in the country. It’s the politicians on all sides that lie that are to blame. Corruption is the human condition that is never going to be solved.
Pitchforks help.
I'm waiting for all of the world's fiat currencies to collapse before I buy an abandoned but functioning coal power plant and outfit it with several thousand Alienware Aurora R11s and commence mining operations...
...until then, no.
Perfect summary of why Bitcoin exists.
The ledger is the key to decentralization.
Only if you overlook the fact that the ledger is not decentralized.
The point of it being stored on multiple computers at once with no central institution to validate transactions means it is in fact decentralized. You can learn all about this basic fact of Bitcoin by reading the white paper. There’s even a diagram to illustrate it.
Even a diagram? Well, I stand corrected then.
😂 awesome, but sorry, I’m actually wrong! There’s a terrible diagram in 4) proof of work, and an explanation in 5) network.
That's how it seemed to my 8-bit brain, so I didn't buy any, and that worked. I would be *very* interested if anyone wishes to dispute what you said. With facts and logic, I mean.
I’ve invested a few times in the crypto space. I’m now on the sidelines due to central banks starting to create their own Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC). I believe after regulations are instituted all cryptos will go to zero. Governments don’t want anonymous transactions and the creation of CBDC’s will never allow for that type of anonymity imo. Especially with the new global tax group announced that nobody has been talking about over the last year.
Agree. Crypto is in competition with Government and Fiat currency. They can and will crush it at their pleasure. BTW it is in no way an “investment”
It’s all a Ponzi scheme. Central banks control everything and will never cede control over their fiscal policies
BTC is not anonymous.
if thats what your intentions are, it sure can be anonymous.
It is pseudonymous.
How exactly is that supposed to happen? Governments create their own nanny-coin and all the BTC investors just get in line? Dude. I’d try reading at least something about what Bitcoin is before you stake your future on that. If it works - and there’s no guarantee it will - Bitcoin is a complete antithesis to fiat money, not a precursor to it. Do you not see that at all,
It’s cute how you think individuals have control over central banks. I have done my research and have determined the central bankers will win. Most of you crypto lovers ignore reality. I think that it’s you that needs to do some more research. Ill leave it at that. https://reclaimthenet.org/swift-begins-preparing-for-centrally-controlled-digital-currencies/
Ok, let’s. Centralization is an aspect of fiat. It’s enforced by government control. Canada showed us their government believes it’s their money, not yours. They’ll try to win, and they certainly might. But there is no “might” without Bitcoin. Nothing else comes close to knocking over the power of government over money, which enriches them over us, every single day, forever and ever. Peace to you, it’s cute how you think central banks are good guys.
The FED controls the world money supply. If you think the US government is just going to cede control over all of that you really are making things up in your own head. We are about to fight WW3 over the world reserve currency issue.
George Washington & e pluribus unum vs. troops of smirking, cigar-smoking chimps?
This is exactly what I keep trying to tell you. If Bitcoin works the way it's supposed to, it won't matter what the government cedes or doesn't. It's subversive by nature.
I get that completely. the FED is never going to allow it. The United States currency is owned by the government, its not our money in any way, shape or form.
You really like to assume things. I never said any of that. You just made that up in your own head. That’s your problem. You’re too emotionally involved to be debating the topic.
No. I refute your point that centralization = individuals with a post about government and you call me emotional. Reality is the Canadian government seized money from their political opponents, but yeah, I’m just squawking. There’s a name for the logical fallacy, let me see if I can get my girl-brain smart enough to come up with it.
I never even said anything about you being a woman. Wow you really are paranoid of how people see you. I’m not going to get into a ideological argument. Have a nice day, Jen.
Matt. I “invested” 50k in bitcoin in the fall of 2019 at around $4,000 per. Sold next year for around $8,000 per bitcoin. Bought a new fishing boat with the proceeds and haven’t bought any since. IMO it’s a classic Ponzi and an unbelievable waste of energy to run all the mining computers.
Cheers, Jay Bee
As for stablecoins, you might investigate the assets these stablecoins pretend to have. The trouble is, there is no guarantee that the issuers have on hand the assets they say they do. Tether once claimed to have $69 billion in real currency to support that amount of its coin in circulation. Yet no one who went looking for the money was able to find any evidence of it. After being sued by the state of New York, the company revealed it had been loaning money from its reserves to prop up an affiliated cryptocurrency exchange that was hundreds of millions of dollars in the hole.
All crypto-coins should just be called by one name: The Barnum, because there is s sucker born every minute.
I suggest reading about the great Tulip mania of the Dutch Golden Age to gain an understanding of what can happen when something finds it’s true value in a hurry. Which is not to say that randomness can’t make you many crypto millions if you happen to get lucky before true value is found, but every blip in crypto is underpinned by anti-fiat fervour, which makes it’s true value awfully hard to pin down.
I didn’t realize the old tulip-craze canard was still being used. I bet you had Blockbuster stock in 2000, too.
Might be time to get the dictionary out, Jen. Look up ‘canard’ and have a rethink, unless you’re convinced there was no tulip mania in 17c Holland? If you misread my comment, I did not imply that crypto currency’s have no role or value, just that they’re not priced like Big Mac’s.
Ok.
Jen is promoting Bitcoin like a preacher spreads the word of Jesus. Don’t think about the facts, it’s all about the word. Lol
No, I don’t want to argue with someone who missed my point entirely to argue about semantics. It really is ok. If you disagree, that’s more BTC for me.
Ok I’ll be thinking of you when they get regulated by the FED and EU, then go to zero.
Sorry about all the it’s that should be its- its 0500 here and my keyboard is a clown
Bottom line is that huge numbers of scams/centralized web3 nonsense are riding the coat tails of real decentralized tech innovation like Bitcoin. The fake stuff uses broken incomplete tech combined with centralized AWS services to create the appearance of a working decentralized ecosystem. There was a thread by @jack late last year that addressed this and some for the underlying tech problems. Luna/UST was obvious nonsense from the beginning- backed by bitcoin, WAT? USDC is generally considered the gold standard of backed stablecoin. I like Max Keiser for Bitcoin maxi content- try blockchain socialist, doomberg, and paris marx for skeptic content.
Luna was plain old arbitrage in action, the same Wall Street scam we already know and love.
I’ve been buying and holding since 2013 when I first took an online course on bitcoin and blockchain. I’ve been steadily buying, diversifying into different projects, and reading the white papers for some of the more interesting ones as they come out, and following along with a lot of the drama This is the third of the 4 year bust cycles I’ve been through and I’m still buying through the next one. I’ve had a few bad experiences but it’s been overall a positive for me. I can definitely provide some historical/ technical background info
Yeah, I put like a total of 4k into various cryptos. I accept it's super volatile and have lost money due to the market going wherever it wishes seemingly. My mistake was staking etherium for etherium 2.0. Once you do that, you're locked in and can't pull your money away when the market turns sour because you're waiting for the network upgrade to cash out. You don't want to hang around too long with crypto. You wanna just buy low and sell high and then get out. I understand this is a precarious situation to be in. It's almost like gambling. If you want to invest for the long term, don't do crypto. The real money is in either making a coin and convincing people it's valuable, or by owning an exchange and reaping those sweet sweet fees.
A connected Wall Street trader told a co-worker of mine that you never want to be in a state of hope. You either know something other people don't (basically insider trading) or you make a market. Otherwise, it's a casino.
Given crypto's long term returns, buying and holding has been the best strategy. Some people sold Bitcoin at $250 because it was an all time high. Have an investment thesis and stick with it. If you like timing the market aka gambling, I feel like Vegas is a better venue for that. At least you get to sneak in snoring cocaine of stripper's tits.
First, I would have to consider snorting drugs off a stripper's tits to be a desirable outcome. Second, bitcoin and other cryptos being actually valuable and not having that value get deleted cyclically before restoring itself before again being deleted is recent to 2020 and there's no guarantee that it won't just crash down into a value substantially smaller than it currently holds. It would be like investing in a company that periodically implodes and recovers just in time for another implosion.
Your mistake was “various cryptos” everything is a security except btc
I didn't buy indexes. I bought the coins directly.
Thats's my point. Every crypto except BTC is essentially a security. I'm not talking about buying indexes or proxy stocks like Microstrategy
What is your definition of a security and how is bitcoin not a security but etherium is?
It's about time you did this. Track down Bitfinex’ed on Twitter https://twitter.com/Bitfinexed
I'd say my main motivation for diving into crypto was the search for an 'escape hatch' from the FED's system of financial repression. I'm still waiting to see how the FED/SEC responds to this challenge to their monetary hegemony, and hopeful the independent crypto (not the Central Bank kind) will thrive. There is lots of great info out there on You-Tube, Medium, and in the Discord forums. Check out https://www.coindesk.com/ or Bankless (https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/) for more info.
I am a very low stakes investor in BTC and ETH: Hedging against the dollar and wondering where the bottom is as all the excess liquidity washes out from the Fed-driven quantitative easing bubble. Looking forward to your report!
Not a “hedge”.
You do realize that BTC goes down as the strength of the dollar increases. Until interest rate increases are over, Bitcoin is a suckers bet. USD doesn’t have the same volatility. It’s not a hedge.
Check out the SEC vs. Ripple lawsuit. Lots of evidence of corruption from former SEC officials and people associated with Ethereum in bringing the suit. Holders of the cryptocurrency XRP that is associated with Ripple filed suit to intervene in the lawsuit- represented by John Deaton. Deaton started @cryptolawus to document all case filings.
How do you know if someone is into crypto?
Don’t worry they’ll tell you.
I bought some BTC/ETH/LTC back in 2017, when those were the only coins traded on Coinbase. About six months later I started trading across exchanges, and within another six months I was sitting on eight-figure hedged derivative positions despite my real net worth sitting in the low five figures. Had some wild swings over the next few years but mostly ended up ahead.
The IRS audited one of my tax returns which included a $4.5M 1099 from Coinbase as well as over 25,000 individual trades that I definitely did not report correctly. Ended up being a pretty funny story actually.
I've got an MBA but I'm also currently pursuing a PhD in cryptography, so I have a pretty good understanding of both the economic and technical sides of this area. My research advisor was recently approached about a proposal for grant funding from Algorand, which also turned into a rather funny story about the love/hate relationship that many academic cryptographers have developed with the "Crypto" space.
I and my significant other have a less than 0.25 bitcoin. We will probably never sell it unless we are in dire straights. If the bitcoin (small b) price gets into the millions, it will probably be because of hyperinflation and/or a collapse of the Dollar. Or, maybe it will even aid in a Dollar collapse.
I like Bitcoin (big B) mainly because it is an end run around the corrupt fractional reserve fiat banking system. It banks the unbanked.
I highly recommend this guy: https://www.youtube.com/c/aantonop
Bitcoin maximalist here. I've bought it at 4K and I bought it at 50K. Current DCA is around 11K. It's been a best investment of my life in terms of ROI by far. But I believe it will only go higher as currency achieves its destiny and de-centralizes. I won't sell at any price and intend to give this as my inheritance in the digital form.
But yeah, investing in this sector will make you taste your blood. It felt a lot better at 65 than 28. But if you can stomach that kind of volatility, long term returns are attractive.
Stablecoins are a fraud. you want something tethered to US dollar? USD is not enough for you. So I would get out of all of it.
You had to have Bitcoin to shop on Silk Road. BTC was under $100 back then, but in a matter of weeks rose to $1100. I lost about 3 BTC in the MtGox theft and bankruptcy. The bankruptcy court is setting the value at $700.
I have some investment in crypto. Mainly Bitcoin and Ethereum, and small amounts in ADA and Litecoin.
There are two things I’m watching out for in this space – the introduction of a central bank digital currency (CBDC) from the Fed, and the Tether Stablecoin.
Tether has been known for years to be a scam and not actually pegged to the Dollar. It’s literally a bomb that can take damn near everything in this space to Zero. Imagine what you saw happen to Luna but vastly worse.
The thing is, I expect the Tether bomb to blow right after the Fed announces a CBDC. This will be a deliberate act of sabotage by the masters of the universe in the crypto space because it’ll essentially clear the field for the Fed’s CBDC.
So for all of you HODLers, as soon as they announce that, it’s time to finally sell.
Around this time, I‘s also bet that Congress will somehow find it in them to work together in a bipartisan manner and put in place severe restrictions on Cryptocurrencies, making it effectively inaccessible for 90%+ of Americans.
Fwiw I've found Chris Dixon of a16z and Michael Saylor have robust philosophies and holdings (their opinions carry weight) if you are looking for whales to talk to
Been dropping about a thousand a month split between Bitcoin and Ethereum for a little over a year. So far still slightly ahead of the game. The overall trend still looks good, if a lot more volatile than I anticipated. Buying below $40K looks like it will beat inflation long term, but I could (probably?) be wrong.
Why? Can you explain why "buying below $40K looks like it will beat inflation long term"? What is the underlying source of value?
What is the underlying source of value for gold? What is the underlying source of value for USD? Faith. Same as Bitcoin. And everyone who has ever bought during crypto winter never regretted that decision.
Human stupidity?
I'd recommend reaching out to @BennettTomlin for generally well-researched critical takes on the industry.
article by Martin Armstrong explains Crypto and what to expect https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/world-news/cryptocurrency/can-cryptocurrencies-survive-wwiii/
Thank you for sharing, Mike!
well well well. how are all of those cryptos / stable coins working out for all of the crypto Ponzi scheme lovers? lmao
I would love to hear a story about it because I really don’t get it
Crypto currency is a scam. While any nation's fiat money is backed by that nation, crypto is nothing and has nothing backing it. It has "value" only as long as backers are willing to pump real money, that fiat currency that crypto backers find so offensive, into it. It's a f'ing joke.
What should happen is that the same ideas that surround crypto be applied to real fiat money so that transaction and transfer costs can be reduced from what they are due to profit seeking banks being in control. That would make sense, not this crypto nonsense.
Attn: Matt
Please forgive ... this is unrelated to Crypto. Rather, it relates to your Tweeted request for a novel-worthy story. We could not reply on Twitter for specific security reasons .
I believe I have a candidate story which corresponds to your specifications and likely personal interest.
Featuring:
RUSSIA: It involves an American businessman who arrived in Sobchak/Putin's Leningrad of 1990, by special invitation and migrated to Moscow (all during the time you also resided there).
PRAVDA: the American engineered the first contract for advertising with Lenin-founded, КПСС-owned Pravda. This relationship led to ....
KGB: The American befriended his undercover KGB interface at Pravda and after the August Putsch, proposed a meeting at Lubyanka, leading to an extraordinary business contract to to develop special projects with KGB, (approved by Primakov himself).
Project #1? The packaging of the long-classified Lee Harvey Oswald Moscow/Minsk surveillance files (into a Book). CIA? Not amused.
SOVIET PREMIER: the cachet of KGB enabled the American to also develop a relationship with Gorbachev's Premier Ryzhkov, for whom the American wrote a business plan for a major consulting group.
ASSASSINATION AT THE RADISSON: Remember Paul Tatum of Radisson Slavyanskaya? This American was one of Tatum's confidantes. Up until Tatum ran afoul of Luzhkov and the Chechens and was machine-gunned at Metro Kievskaya.
Intrigued? If yes, can share more on: games.end<AT>protonmail<DOT>com
I recommend reading Richard Maybury early warning report on this and many other subjects. basically, it seems a scam to me. unless you can actually make untraced digital transactions what is the advantage? i bought a small amount of bitcoin which is now only a fraction of the worth and had to report everything about it on taxes. if anyone knows a way to get around that, I'd like to know it.
- you could do a lot worse than check out Lex Fridman's interview with many of the major players in this field...including the head of Microstrategy and Vitalik Buterim (founder of Ethereum)
MBA, CFA, MS in Finance. I thought crypto was a scam until a couple of years ago when I was finally convinced about Bitcoin. After dipping my toes in with BTC I started trading other coins and NFT's for a year or so. I did make a good chuck of money in alt coins, but then lost all of those gains this year. After a couple of years I'm convinced that BTC is here to stay and not a bad long term inflation hedge, but the easy/quick money is gone. Everything else crypto is either a scam or similar to a moonshot angel investment.
I was a crypto journalist back in 2014. I did a few interviews, wrote a couple articles, and lost money in the Mt. Gox and Cryptsy debacles. Left crypto for a while, just watched from the sidelines, then returned in 2021.
My experience has been a mixed bag, but there's no denying that you can make a small fortune literally overnight with minimal amounts of work, so crypto is here as long as there is electricity.
You might look into the Cardano Ada project and that ecosystem. It's sometimes called a shitcoin, but it's not; lots of good mathematicians and programmers behind it. Unlike BTC and most others, it's not based on proof of work, in which 'mining' is heavily energy intensive; rather it's proof of stake, so coins are not mined but minted. Uses much less electricity. BTC has an obvious advantage in terms of scarcity, and I'm not heavily into any of them, but I did buy Ada when it started taking off and continue to buy this dip. As others have said, the whole crypto ecosystem has tended to follow BTC up and down and Ada is no different...so far.
I bought when the price was 260. Sold after it fell from 20k in 2018 because I didn't and still don't believe in its fundementals.
Please look into these questions if you get the chance:
- how can and will blockchain be used in the future (central bank digital currency, audit and surveilance)?
- can an immutable blockchain ever respect privacy?
Thanks for looking into the topic!!
Glad you're going to write a story here. The key is...there's Bitcoin...and then there's everything else. Once you realize that BTC is decentralized, the opposite of say, the Fed or all the venture backed cryptos that pre-mine to investors and then dump for a healthy profit on the public, just before they tank, you realize what's really going on. I dabbled briefly in Ethereum but got out...the centralized control is not attractive to me. To each his own.
The BTC story is both simple and complex. Most genius is simplicity and BTC and its second layer for small transactions, are a revelation and are one of the few modern developments that give me hope for honesty in monetary policy. I own BTC and GBTC (a fund that owns BTC for those that needed it in a retirement acct).
GBTC is another example of govt creating more problems than it solves. As a trust, it holds BTC but is less liquid because it can't yet be converted into an ETF...meanwhile, the govt HAS allowed futures as an ETF. How does that make sense? GBTC, until recently, was one of the few ways to easily add a small percentage of BTC into a retirement fund.
If you want to read a great, quick primer, I'd go for https://www.layeredmoney.com by Nik Bhatia. The historical summary of the various money layers and how they operate, and came to be is a useful primer to where we are now.
Finally, like any movement, there are both hucksters and true believers. My analogy here is the recent claims that those who refused the mrna vaccines are "anti-science" or "anti-vaccination" - no some of "us" are very healthy adults and realize that, using simple math, our chances of surviving covid/mild symptoms are better than getting a shot with highly questionable data. Most of us have been vaccinated many times for a variety of vaccines with long periods of testing. The data for vaccination in health adults and children is the opposite of compelling. Interesting note, Pfizer CEO allegedly is not vaccinated. Mmmm. Along with many employees. Makes you wonder, doesn't it?
Stablecoins is yet another rabbit hole but suffice to say this...just like banks, I believe stable coins need "sufficient" reserves/assets to back their activities. We know that even regulated banks don't have "sufficient" reserves without the fed's injections when the sh!t hits the fan. See 2008 when they appeared hat in hand, explaining how fed inaction would melt down the financial system (and their bonuses and properties on Long Island). Should have taken the Icelandic solution (let them collapse).
I wonder how many who follow Taibbi also know/pay attention to Yanis Varoufakis. Very different, (Varoufakis: "I'm a socialist..."), yet similar in important ways (that complete sentence: "I'm a socialist who hates socialists"). In short, they both think for themselves and--when they treat a topic seriously--back up what they say with evidence and logic that is hard to argue with on a sound basis. Their detractors tend to spout emotion, not reason.
Varoufakis' most recent lengthy treatment of crypto, NFTs, stablecoins, DAOs: They carry exactly the same problems as fiat money based on the gold standard or currency boards: a fundamental economic fallacy called "composition." They are already features of oligarchy, not tools to overthrow it. The technologies have utility only *after* a radical/revolutionary economic change.
"... just like gold, Bitcoin is eminently… abandonable (once it has done enormous damage). Put differently, either Bitcoin will never take over from fiat money or, if it does, it will cause huge unnecessary pain (before being abandoned)."
https://www.reddit.com/r/yanisvaroufakis/comments/uo4uud/yanis_varoufakis_on_crypto_the_left_and/
Found out about Bitcoin in 2016. When things started really popping in 2017 aped in. Clearly there was a lot of tension during crypto winter when I went down 50% but I was a true believer, sweated it out, and have never looked back. Can't wait for next 2 years, hoping to match performance of past two years.
Bitcoin is unique. This is very important to understand.
Wondering who is going to be the Woodward and Bernstein of Covidgate? Matt???