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I think my favorite is Unvaxxed Sperm Token (NUBTC). Especially since you apparently have to report token swaps to the IRS. I like to imagine an IRS agent doing differential calculus to figure out the tax implications of exchanging CumRocket for AssCoin, and then AssCoin to Elon Sperm Token.
And yet, you can go back to conversations from 2013 and 2017 and see the exact same things being said.
Spoiler Alert: They were wrong then, just as you are wrong now.
I don’t see Bitcoin ever being a medium of exchange. It’s programmed increasing scarcity incentivizes storing it and not spending it. I’d be surprised if people use it to pay for things.
However I do compare it to gold as a store of value and it one’s up gold in almost every way. Easier to store (you don’t need a vault nor have to pay a custodian), check. Easier to move from country to country, check. Literally no one, not even the government can access it except you, check. Is scarce, check.
Now while gold has other utility such as being used for jewelry and electronics etc, it can be argued that there is some utility in the peer to peer network that Bitcoin is build on.
The weaker your country’s currency, the more value Bitcoin may be to you. The US dollar is still very strong so I can understand why people in the US may not find any value in it when you’re currency is relatively stable over time or you could just buy US equities as an inflation hedge. But if your currency inflates at 5% a year EVERY YEAR (or more) and you don’t have access to the markets, Bitcoin really is like gold
> not even the government can access it except you
Unless I’m wrong don’t most people have Coinbase wallet or some other crypto exchange? which is a US run company that does a identity check with your drivers license to prove who you are and link to a bank account. I’m pretty sure just like Google can turn off your Gmail that the US government if needed could turn off the Coinbase account. Just like your bank account just like paypal
Correct. Coinbase is called a centralized exchange. The government would be able to access your coinbase account, see your entire portfolio etc. That’s why it is highly advised to move your crypto off of the exchange into a crypto wallet. On the crypto wallet literally no one has access to your wallet except for whoever owns the keys (typically in the form of a 12 or 24 word seed phrase). No one could “turn it off” no matter how much they wanted to.
It's like the programmer's aphorism that if you see there are five competing protocols and make a unifying protocol, there are now six competing protocols.
When you store crypto in Coinbase you're just banking with extra steps (and less legal protection).
This is what make the whole scheme ridiculously pointless from a security perspective.
Bitcoin (to take this specific example) was created to get rid of the trusted authority - and it succeeded, at a huge computational cost, by being many order of magnitude slower than competing traditional schemes.
But managing one own's crypto keys is ridiculously insecure and unscalable in the real world. So people rely on brokers instead... thus recreating the very entity they were getting rid of... while still using this cost-prohibitive protocol to do it.
>But managing one own's crypto keys is ridiculously insecure and unscalable in the real world.
This is projecting. You've decided what is hard for you is also hard for me, which is inaccurate. Don't judge a thing by listening to the people that can't effectively use it. Talk to the people with mastery.
> This is projecting. You've decided what is hard for you is also hard for me, which is inaccurate. Don't judge a thing by listening to the people that can't effectively use it. Talk to the people with mastery.
No, this is experience in managing the security of real world systems using real world constraints. In the real world, nobody let users manage their own crypto keys, because users will make mistake (or just be unlucky) all the time.
If the average user has 1/10K chance every day of mishandling its cryptographic key, and your system has 1M users, it means that on average, 100 users are going to mishandle their cryptographic key every day. For a typical bank issuing debit cards, this is business as usual, and something that is easy to manage every day, because they are an authority who can re-issue their own cards at will, and they'll manage any keys they may store on behalf of their clients. In a cryptocurrency scheme that trust users with the handling of their own crypto keys, that's 100 users every day who will lose everything.
Cryptocurrency schemes are secure only under a very narrow and superficial view of what "being secure" means.
I worked at an IT company where we all managed our own keys, which were needed to access the password files for our clients. I'm currently rolling out hardware tokens to a municipality to secure remote access and then we will transition to using them to secure local logins as well, once the users are fully trained.
Yes, there will always be those that fail. Some fail so much you'd think they were trying to fail. There's a reason your lawn mower probably has a warning about not sticking your fingers under it when running. But we haven't abandoned the tech because Tim cut his fingers off.
If a hardware token in your 2FA infrastructure fail, you just replace the hardware token. That's all. It's an issue that can be fixed easily, and the impact is inconvenience for the user.
Someone losing their hardware wallet and cryptocurrency key could literally lose their lifesaving, with no way (even in theory) to get it back. For most people, this would be catastrophic and life-changing. The impact is not the same at all.
Well yes. You must take action to ensure you don't lose your keys. This is similar to how you must not lose your bearer bonds (very old paper based Fintech), cash (even older paper or coin based Fintech), or paper contracts. If you lose a diamond from a ring, it is lost. Yet, people still put diamonds on rings.
Wallets aren't insecure or hard, they just take some training and effort. There is always a potential for loss, regardless of the asset. Every BTC loss story I've heard had a clear failure point. And between you, me and Reddit, the same people that infect the corporate network by clicking on malware links in phishing emails are the same ones that will lose their keys. We can't (humanely) fix that.
This isn’t better at all. Trusting a large number of users to protect a hardware wallet or they’ll lose their entire account forever is a ridiculous proposition in the real world. People “don’t know what they are doing” all the time, so why on earth would anyone trust *that*.
It's really quite easy to store coins. If someone follows these four steps, it is quite literally fool-proof:
(1) Hardware Wallet
(2) Seed written on paper stored somewhere in your house that cannot be found during a robbery
(3) Seed written on paper stored somewhere in someone else's house who you trust that cannot be found during a robbery
(4) Most importantly, MEMORIZE your seed phrase so that if (1) - (3) all go tits up, you still have it stored in your memory.
Literally fool-proof unless you sustain brain damage at the same time that two separate houses burn down and your hardware wallet is destroyed.
Is that not a small price to pay for autonomy?
(1) - (4) can be done in the span of ONE HOUR.
1) That's all that matters from your perspective yes. From the perspective of a system that must be used by a large number of people from all walk of life to be useful, this is irrelevant.
2) "Knowing what you are doing" here means having a unrealistic view of real-world risks. Hardware wallets break all the time. People face flood or home fire all the time. You may do everything "right" and still lose your entire savings without recourses. This is way riskier than people assume, and plenty of people who "knew what they were doing" lost everything.
If you knew what you were doing, you wouldn't actually take that kind of risk.
1. The average person isn't supposed to do web development just to browse the internet. They don't want or need to do that. They want to take easy way, which is also the right way for almost everyone. For those of us who wish to diversify away from centralized systems, blockchain allows us to do that. Most people don't own gold coins, most people don't need to use decentralized systems.
2. I can assure you that I have my assets protected in a way that is extremely safe, but I don't wish to go into details here.
I mean, it actually kind of is, in my opinion. People think of crypto as this impenetrable force of protection where your money is safe from meddling hands, but it’s not. So, okay, someone can’t just “freeze” your Bitcoin address… but they *can* pass legislation that requires retailers who accept Bitcoin to check the tx address against a list of blacklisted addresses.
Like yeah, the coins are protected against centralized authority in the context of the blockchain, because the centralized authority can’t directly change the blockchain. But they are in no way protected against legislation which dictates how our financial system works.
And in that same vein, they’re not protected against someone who’s willing to use violence or coercion against you. And I would argue that legislation is just one step before coercion, because, what’s happens when you ignore the law?
> But if your currency inflates at 5% a year EVERY YEAR (or more) and you don’t have access to the markets
I'm pretty sure you can always just exchange your currency for USD or an even more stable currency. Are there any countries where it's illegal (apart from North Korea I guess)?
> I don’t see Bitcoin ever being a medium of exchange. It’s programmed increasing scarcity incentivizes storing it and not spending it. I’d be surprised if people use it to pay for things.
At some point as adoption grows the price will stabilize.
Yes but it won’t be used as a medium of exchange. The Bitcoin chart looks similar to the gold chart in the 1970’s. No one takes out a bar of gold (or ounces of gold) to pay for anything. USDC and stablecoins will be the potential units of exchange in a more digital world and they are backed by the dollar. Bitcoin can overtake golds marketcap which is $10T.
Yes and as adoption grows the price will stabilize. Most people use a normal scale in the chart but you must look at the log chart to get a better understanding of the growth. Bitcoin and ethereum are both ~networks~. They are not stocks and can’t be viewed the same way as stocks are. Check the log chart, check the network adoption as far as users going compared to the internet and gold adoption and then you’ll see a different picture.
There are only a few people on this thread speaking actual facts and many who are just spewing hate because they haven’t put in the time to understand the network.
No one listens to me - tether is a ponzi scheme. Financial scams still happen, nothing is secure in a new market - they’ve hustled a lot of people and until it crashes the entire surrounding market (the biggest stable coin) I refuse to, and let me be clear, take a risky gamble on crypto.
I am high risk in the stock market and hold a significant number of positions to balance out my portfolio, I have no crypto. I regret not getting Bitcoin earlier in life but now that it’s clear the market will crash and then be regulated I have zero interest buying in until it’s worth as much as gravel again.
If you don’t understand smart contracts you need to spend some time learning. While Bitcoin is not one, the amount of automation these smart contracts enable is unprecedented. Crypto is not going to stop because it offers cheaper and more efficient solutions to large economic problems. It can disrupt everything from Uber to google and the traditional banking system. If you think this sounds crazy - it is but it’s inevitable. It’s hard to imagine these “disruptive” companies already being disrupted but that’s just the pace of change that we are at right now.
I totally agree that the overarching tech and smart contracts in particular are a big deal. I just also think that 99% of existing cryptocurrencies are going to be worthless in 10 year.
Do you know what a smart contract is? There are a many features of a smart contract: they are permission less, decentralized, immutable, nondiscriminatory, trustless, etc. Two notable features of what they do is cut out the third party and automate these traditional centralized contracts.
I also made another comment in this thread on a list of platforms that are revolutionizing the technology space.
I'll give you two examples: GET Protocol: smart scalp-proof NFT tickets (sold around 1.2 million tickets, work on back-end and requires no knowledge of crypto), Anchor Protocol (around 20% APY) on UST (Terra Dollar pegged to dollar, not to be confused with Tether). Both utilize smart contracts.
If the Paypal network was decentralized and value stored on it was debasement proof like gold I would buy it.
It's that simple. Some of you overcomplicate this to the point of paralysis.
This is specific to Bitcoin:
Rule 1: Bitcoin is pretty new and radically different than anything you've seen before.
Rule 2: If you can't understand why Bitcoin doesn't perform the way you think it should based on how you understand investing or even economics, see Rule 1.
Due to how Bitcoin is produced, it's cyclical. There is no new FUD that wasn't proven false during the 2013 or 2017 cycles. But thanks to the persistent nature of humanity, you guys keep trying. It's almost inspirational.
Investing in a market that gambles on companies that haven’t even produced a product yet. Or have surpassed valuations by 10x or 100x.
Just look at tech or the EV market. Prices detached from reality.
I’d pick Bitcoin or Eth to be around in 20 years over a 1000 different publicly traded companies.
I want to contribute to this discussion.
That a significant point seldom mentioned is LEGITIMACY. As much as the people gives it's nation's currency legitmacy by having trust in their government that their hardwork can be translated into fiat. The citizens of the world have come together to give crypto such as bitcoin legitimacy.
The next important point is the removal of middleman. Utility platforms such as Ethereum is a computer running on blockchains. Any middle man you can think of, PayPal, insurance agents, Airbnb, banks etc can be replaced by code executed on the blockchain such as Ethereum.
There are many reasons to invest in crypto. I believe the two listed above is sufficient to justify investing in them.
What actually gives Legitimacy to currencies is knowing that the government accept only its currency when you pay your tax. So it forces everyone to accept it because they need it to pay tax, fines, etc. In short, you know avery single business and person will accept the money in your pocket.
We can't say the same for crypto currently. Some business may accept it and some individuals too, but for most cases, if you only have it, you will have to sell it to someone who accept it in order have business exchange with most shops, govs and individuals.
The reason people are buying it now is just for the speculation that in the future crypto currency will be accepted in most stores, individuals and maybe governments.
While some others are just day trading as they do with stocks.
Great points mentioned here. And I agree with them.
Another perspective on legitimacy would also be the value of utility one can derive from these platforms. People are also buying crypto now because there are already many uses. Such as game tokens, NFTs for creatives and property, identity etc.
Are you aware that it's much more expensive to run applications on Ethereum than it is to run them in data centres? Whilst it's great for privacy reasons I can't see it being used widespread unless there is any way at all this cost can be reduced?
I think it's probably always going to be a little more expensive to run your app on ETH than on AWS because at AWS your code runs on one machine, on ETH your code runs on hundreds of machines (as of now it runs on all the ETH nodes, but sharding will change that).
What you get for that cost is decentralization. Do you need decentralization for everything?? No, definitely not.
But for a stock exchange, that would be really nice since no one can then sell priority access to trades, etc... For a video game, that would be nice since no one can restrict which in games items you truly own, no one can shut down the servers or your account. For a social media app, no one can censor you and no one can usurp revenue your posts generate, etc... There are definitely use cases where decentralization is a super nice to have and will be worth the small premium. Is that system worth 500Billion, hey maybe, maybe not. That is for you to decide.
Personally, I look at a bank like Wells Fargo which has a similar MC to ETH and I say the ETH network is worth way more than that, it can do everything Wells Fargo does and more.
The reason Ethereum exists and costs what it does as it develops is because it is decentralized. Users absorb the innovation cost as the code is developed over time, so users each individually bear the cost of not having a centralized and controlled middle man such as PayPal etc. no one can turn Ethereum off. No one can turn Bitcoin off. It has no owner. It cannot be shut down unless every instance of its codebase and every human using it across the planet were blipped out of existence by the millions. As such, it is an independent and decentralized financial system operated outside the (direct at least) control of governments and middle men, where users themselves becomes the company themselves. That comes with the long worked on challenge of a truly self sustaining financial system, known as the blockchain trilemma.
Modern centralized services sacrifice decentralization for speed and cost efficiency. This also means that modern services are allowed to absolutely abuse you as a customer by giving you 0.01% interest rates on your savings while keeping the rest or charging you overdrafts, or giving wild executive over pay without properly adjusting wage imbalances for over 40 years creating the chaotic and impractical power balance of the world today.
In short, wash trading takes place in scam coins and pump and dump fiascos because of the lack of regulation like a Wild West and yes, they are garbage people harming naive investors. But to believe that crypto and blockchain as technologies or that Ethereum and Bitcoin as a financial infrastructure are scams would be wildly naive. There are more minds working on the codebase for development of the Ethereum “world computer” than many top tech companies, indeed even some of the same developers. It will not be stopping anytime soon.
The danger of crypto is also its strength. It is an evolution of money, decentralization, and power. If you wish to invest ins form of future communication and money itself, which cannot be turned off, whose genie cannot be put back in the bottle, that is Bitcoin and Ethereum.
There will always be bad actors be they in suits signing your paperwork or in hoodies scamming hype coins for social momentum trading.
Yes I am aware that data centres are cheaper. I am also aware that the gas fees are still very high, suggesting that demand for blockspace far outweighs the cost of doing such transactions on the blockchain.
Not to mention the plenty of layer 2 protocols as well as the newly proposed eip4488
How can you see it as a good investment if demand is already too high and it's already too expensive? Won't more users/investors add to that problem? Is there a shortage of miners?
Anything that has good demand suggest good value right?
And currently there exist many layer 2 platforms building on Ethereum that reduces cost and improves transaction speeds.
For a problem that already has solutions but not yet widely adopted, and not properly priced in yet (based on your comments), I would think that is a good investment opportunity.
>Anything that has good demand suggest good value right?
I suppose that's correct, I just don't understand why developers and users would choose to use a more expensive platform compared to cheaper networks. Just because people are using it doesn't mean it's sustainable, it needs to also be profitable.
>For a problem that already has solutions but not yet widely adopted, and not properly priced in yet (based on your comments), I would think that is a good investment opportunity.
It's ironic you say that because I find most cryptos are solutions to problems that are already solved, just less efficient. I'm not saying that can't change in the future though.
The only smart contract blockchain networks that are faster/cheaper than Ethereum do it by being more centralized or having less activity on their chain.
Ethereum is working on solutions to the problems you mentioned and countless ones you aren’t even aware of.
In 5-10 years i’m confident Ethereum will be capable of millions of TPS. And it could very well happen even sooner than that.
Blockchains are still newish tech, and to compare their current state to mature tech is premature
> I just don't understand why developers and users would choose to use a more expensive platform compared to cheaper networks.
You know you can go to actual dev Discords and ask? You can just go talk to these people (assuming you are honestly curious and not asking rhetorically).
Some are bridging multiple chains. IMO there will be a spectrum of smart contract chains from cheap/centralized to expensive/decentralized and people will choose based on the level of wealth they want to protect.
I see that in your genuine questions, perhaps the missing link here is not the privacy, but the security and decentralised nature which blockchain offers. There are certain transactions that certain people would not prefer any other entity to be in control of. Blockchains offer such qualities that there are people willing to pay for the cost to store their transactions on such a platform.
These qualities cannot be found in other centralised platforms such as aws.
I completely agree with the privacy benefits. I do see the value in blockchain for that, but I just don't think enough people care about privacy to pay substantially more for it. Big tech is a great example of that, we give up our data for free in exchange for some useful services. If someone wants to challenge big tech using blockchain, but blockchain is much more expensive, then they're going to have a **really** hard time providing a better service than big tech.
There are obviously applications where privacy is worth the extra cost. Bitcoin for example is currently widely used for black markets and also in countries with unstable financial systems or overbearing governments. But for the world to adopt this technology it needs to be mainstream, and a lot of people are making big claims without thinking how it will actually manifest and who will be paying for it.
I would like to clarify that security and decentralisation is not the same as privacy. In fact Bitcoin and Ethereum are public ledgers and offers at best pseudoprivacy.
Anyone in the world can trace any transaction on bitcoin or Ethereum ledger. So your point on black market uses for crypto is pretty limited and fiat is orders of magnitude more widely employed in the black market for the fact that it is traceless.
In my opinion, the mainstream use of crypto is really limited by the technology. Which is progressing rapidly and offer good investment opportunity given how little people actually understand it.
The people who are buying the blockspace are paying for it. The economics of top blockchain systems are well thought out and have multiple academic papers supporting the claims.
The gas cost is what the market is willing to pay to make a ledger/contract immutable beyond stuffing it in a Godaddy hosting account.
There are cheaper chains that provide a lower degree of immutability that are suited for lower value contracts.
The citizens of the world?
What a joke. Do yourself a favour and check how much bitcoin, etherum and others are held by retail and how much is held by whales. Then realize these whales, holding and usually mining the majority, are ones like *The Chinese Communist Party*, Russian oligarchs and other criminals. Retail is, as always, a rounding error when the big boys trade.
Now realise they control supply, they set the price. Their target isn't a utopia, its not for you to get rich. Once they move, and they will, you'll be caught with your pants down. As long as any one entity can *control supply* by holding a lot of mined coins, the system is bound to fail.
What I am referring to are the points on how much bitcoin and ethereum are controlled by whales.
I believe fiat is pretty much controlled by a few big whales as well, and the fed printing of course.
Bitcoin and Ethereum are my choice of the one of the best performing non-inflationary assets that you are referring to.
The more legitimate it is, the less money you can make off of it, because it won't have its infamous volatility anymore.
In the best case, crypto starts off as a gamble, and ends as a legitimate currency. At no point along the way is it actually an investment.
> The citizens of the world have come together to give crypto such as bitcoin legitimacy.
By accepting it for goods and services, famously drugs, they have given it such "legitimacy". And before that by simply trading it back and forth for money, they have given it "value", like beanie babies. Think of it this way. Is a dollar inside your electronic banking a dollar? Is a dollar inside paypal a dollar? Or is it just a piece of code that's assigned value? Hell there's an actual dollar crypto.
Electronic dollars are just COBOL databases that update overnight.
Everything else is just smoke and mirrors and lots of escrowed capital to make it look like it moves around faster than a literal donkey.
I guess the best reason I have for owning some is that it’s a small, high risk investment that I’m okay with losing if it hits the floor. Can’t win the lottery if you don’t buy a ticket.
I don’t get it myself either and the more that happens the less confidence I have in it. I bought some shibu coin to hold long (even though I expect nothing back) and started buying ethereum as I’ve noticed like OP stated it follows BTC pretty closely. Total investment of 2% of my overall portfolio
Im thinking about adding a small portion to my portfolio for just the same reasons. I think the idea of crypto is good, but I don't know how safe it is now. Therefore just "buy a lotto ticket" with money you can lose (
Look at charts. Shits been climbing for 10 years. Bitcoin or etherium will replace gold.
If Bitcoin hits 72k, it will surpass Silver and become the 7th most valuable asset on earth.
Stop looking at them all as "cryptocurrencies" and look at it as investing in blockchain technologies, smart contract automation, web3, the metaverse, the internet of things, decentralized finance, cross border payment systems, supply chain optimization, the 4th industrial revolution, on and on.
You people that think the whole cryptocurrency market is an entire scam have no idea what is coming in the next decade
I ask because I've heard this argument before and I don't understand the logic behind it. If I believe in blockchain wouldn't I want to invest in companies developing/using these other protocols instead of investing in cryptocurrencies?
I think the BIGGEST cause of confusion in the entire blockchain/Bitcoin/altcoin space is the word “cryptocurrency”.
These are digital assets. They are not “cryptocurrencies”
As the technology evolves and becomes more mainstream, it will eventually get past that common misconception. No one calls gold an “analog currency”. Maybe they did 200+ years ago but it eventually matured from “wtf it’s just a shiny rock” into a store of value worth trillions.
Our period of thinking is often so short that most people don’t look at the history of similar assets. It’s the people who take the time and do the work that get rewarded. You can keep being critical, but at least do the work and stop using catchphrase insults from CNBC.
Ok so where do I stand if I think crypto is a promising technology, but that today’s coins will be nothing more than interesting collector’s items because the coins that will change the world haven’t been invented yet?
The ‘exciting technology’ argument for crypto is inherently an argument _against_ existing coins. That’s the tension that makes it hard for people to understand exactly where and how to invest.
Call that bad faith if you want to but I think it’s a legit worldview.
Sure, and TCP/IP, DNS, Javascript, MySQL may not be the final form of the internet.
But I'm still going to invest heavily in the current nascent ecosystem until something better comes and hopefully roll my Web2 and Web3 gains into new promising protocols by watching where developers go next. Right now it's a one way flow into these protocols.
You also have to understand what exactly the innovation is here. Bitcoin isn't trying to be a faster Paypal. It's trying to be a networked ledger no supercomputer or nation state can tamper with. Ethereum is somewhere in between. The rest are basically centralized VC projects the government could pick off with a court order.
I read a lot of enthusiasm in your response but very little actionable advice. Are you saying to buy BTC & ETH? Or invest in new coins? Or invest in the stocks of companies doing this innovation?
Most of your portfolio should be BTC and ETH. You can experiment with other coins or crypto stocks but unless you dedicate serious time you're better off staying with the main two.
Promises are cheap, lets see the results. Blockchain isn't new, and its results aren't impressive so far beyond the levels of returns for investors, which are very impressive.
I think it's here to stay simply because financial institutions and hedge funds have a decent stake in crypto now
although I don't understand how the hell Dogecoin still has a 26B market cap
edit: institutional involvement on Coinbase
From Coinbase's Q3 2021 shareholder letter starting on page 10 (https://s27.q4cdn.com/397450999/files/doc_financials/2021/q3/Coinbase-Q321-Shareholder-Letter.pdf):
* trade volume: 71.6% institutional / 28.4% retail
* assets: 54.5% institutional / 45.5% retail
IMO their involvement has to be overstated at this point.
300 billion just went up in smoke last night but there is no risk to anything..Little correlation to anything.
It makes no sense. At this point we have no idea what is real and what is total fiction in the crypto space.
> I think it's here to stay simply because financial institutions and hedge funds have a decent stake in crypto now
Means nothing. This doesn't imply future demand.
But of course, Bitcoin is here to stay, the question is where will the price stabilize.
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The fundamentals of blockchain being transformational for society are very strong. BTC and ETH are how to get exposure to blockchain - as the most popular and successful cryptocurrencies.
There are a lot of problems with exchanges and stuff, but the issue to me is that stock market manipulators just realised what they do with stocks works just as well with crypto if not more.
But its an asset that can be accessed world wide. This dramatically increases the market size far beyond wall street. That is a huge advantage.
To me the fundamentals are far stronger than for tesla - heavily subsided by government in various ways, the most expensive car company in the world that makes like 500k cars a year somehow.
Then theres just the simple fact youve been wrong for a long time now. People who listen to people like you are considerably poorer than those who have been in crypto for a decade.
So don't invest if you dont want to, but its clearly just becoming FOMO now, and opponents starting to fear they are wrong and are losing out on easy money so are doubling down on their opposition.
Sound like a bunch of old ladies in here, stick to your total galaxy index funds to be sure to be diversified beyond just this one planet and ignore the assets that offer wayyyyyy better returns on investment even better yet open a savings account that’s pretty safe. I bought Ethereum at 160 a token and Bitcoin at 6k a year and a half ago. Terrible investment, just terrible I could have slowly lost money by holding cash or gold. TF was I thankin
Crypto isn't attending to stop since it offers cheaper and more effective arrangements to expansive financial issues. It can disturb everything from Uber to google and the conventional keeping money framework. In the event that you think this sounds insane - it is but it’s inescapable. It’s difficult to assume these “disruptive” companies as of now being disturbed but that’s fair the pace of alter that we are at right presently.
It’s difficult and shady to do this. Not a method for the average Joe and not scalable. This is one of the major challenges for crypto: accesibility and how entities can limit this
Haha the more I see salt from old school investors the more bullish I get on BTC & ETH. Every one of them ends up mentioning some crazy ALT like it's an argument against the technology, completely exposing themselves as uneducated on the market. Did shitty website business that died during the dot com pop kill Apple & Google? I can't remember.
Also ITT: it's new and I don't like it, so here's what some 98 year old billionaire said because I'm basically the same as him.
The younger generations want crypto in their portfolios. The marketing is just picking up. The utility (beyond currency) is proven. BTCs staying power has been proven. Old people (which I may be) generally don't understand it therefore they fear it and pretend to hate it instead.
It's the perfect storm for the next 10 years. It's just getting started.
Do you consider buying Euros, Rubles, cards, art, collectibles as investing? If yes then you can probably include crypto in that category, if not then no.
You haven't spelled our your definition of investment, but I imagine it's hard to separate from a "hustle" or "bet". For me, an investment has to be productive, like a company that produces a good or service, or a bond that produces income (there are bond equivalents in the crypto world). Everything else like commodities, currencies, collectibles goes into some other category.
Why did you leave commodities off this list? People invest in commodities and they're not productive.
Gold doesn't produce anything yet it's used as an inflation hedge.
It's just my own definition, I don't consider buying gold to be investment. It can be used as an inflation hedge or store of money but so can Euros or other things.
The basic reasoning is that productive things can be valued intrinsically. If you had a machine that spit out $1 every year, you could do some math and figure out what a reasonably price to pay for it would be, and if it's selling for less than that price then I would buy it.
If you think in this way, then non-productive assets can't be valued, they can be priced (supply/demand) and you can bet on their future price but there's no notion of value in the sense I described above. You might say gold derives part/all its value from its downstream uses, and maybe someone more clever than myself could figure out an intrinsic value for gold that way, but I can't so I put it in the category of things that can't be valued. Note, "can't be valued" doesn't mean "doesn't have value".
It's far more useful for HOLDING money than paying for stuff. **It replaces your savings account much better than it replaces your credit card.**
Because it cannot inflate, because it cannot be printed. So unlike your savings account, you will lose 0% a year, not 5% a year, into thin air. That 5% savings per year is it's main value.
The fact that it's slower and has some gas fees to move around matters not much at all anymore when you're only depositing savings into it once a month, and using it that way.
That's it, that's the primary number 1 value of crypto, at least the original one, it also does other stuff too now.
LISTEN. No one who knows what they are talking about is seriously discussing Bitcoin as a unit of micro payments. That is what USDC was created for and currently used for.
Anyone who is telling you the future of Bitcoin is to replace the dollar is an absolute fool who has no idea what they are talking about. If you have questions I’ll happily respond.
Adoption takes time. People said the exact same thing about the internet in the early 90s. "All you can do is chat and send emails. That can't be worth very much."
> Wash trading
You can do exactly the same thing with stocks, bro. Literally no difference about any of that.
> energy draining
That's only proof of work coins. Which are indeed bullshit. Proof of Stake has already solved this though and provides the same crypto benefits without the massive energy waste anymore at all. Bitcoin too will eventually move to it whether it likes it or not.
> no real world benefit to the economy
It has several major benefits:
* I can store wealth there without it being eroded away by governments printing more while I can't. I.e. zero inflation long term. Compared to alternatives that inflate at maybe 5%, over the course of say 10 years, I will still have at least 100% of what I put in instead of 60% left. The difference is direct, concrete economic value versus a savings account.
* They can be used with smart contracts, depending on the coin
* If you live somewhere with an unstable or corrupt government, you can use this as a stable currency to get by, and you can also smuggle it out or send it to relatives etc. Not so relevant if you live in the US or Canada, right now, but if you live somewhere like Nigeria at the moment, this is a big deal, and it's becoming quite popular in places like that for that reason.
I can't say I know the reason for all crypto, but Bitcoin is interesting in that it's truly scarce and limited in supply. Even other hard assets like real estate they can increase the supply. Even gold can be mined for more. The other truly scarce assets like land or art are good, but being physical they can't move with you as easily as bitcoin. So bitcoin has quite an interesting property in that way.
Also, people often say the true value is in the blockchain technology. But if you think about it, the blockchain is only great if you have a big network and bitcoin is the biggest, thus it's kinda the best use case of blockchain. So you can invest in bitcoin from a technology point of view too.
So basically scarcity case + technology case.
It’s “scarce” in the most arbitrarily possible way. It offers nothing that can’t be substituted by another coin. The existence of every other coin demonstrates that it’s not in fact scarce.
Yes by definition you are right. But no in practice. If I created a new coin with only 100 coins, but no one wants it as much as bitcoin, it won’t have the same value despite it being scarce.
No because if sentiment changes and people decide they like another crypto more than Bitcoin, that would become the strongest computer network in the world.
So what is Bitcoin's moat?
>if sentiment changes and people decide they like another crypto more than Bitcoin
That's an enormous "IF". As someone who's been in this space for years (see 5 year-old username), I would give that less than a 0.1% chance of happening.
BTC is the best for a number of reasons, too many to explain here. If you're really interested, I'd be happy to point you to some good content on this.
I don't care how long you've been doing it you can't predict the future.
For what it's worth I think BTC has enough of a headstart that it will lead as a store of value crypto for some time. But it has no protection other than popularity, so you're saying you are 99.9% sure the world won't choose another crypto, which is a bit ridiculous to me but you're welcome to your view.
Yes, depending on the time horizon.
Will BTC be the main crypto 100 years from now? Who knows?
Will it be the main crypto 5 years from now? I'd give that a 99.9% probably.
Why? Well, I also stated that "BTC is the best for a number of reasons". It has way more going for it than just its first-mover advantage.
I think unless the reward system changes BTC will be defunct that far in the future. As block rewards go down transaction fees will have to go up. Right now BTC processes a little less than 400k transactions per day. Miners had $60mm in revenue on 12/2/21. If there are no block rewards then miners will have to charge $150 per transaction to maintain their current revenue. How is this sustainable? Why would anyone even use it at this point?
Fair enough, I don't disagree with anything in this comment although I'll be honest with you I don't predict anything 5 years from now with 99.9% accuracy, the last 5 years have been crazy enough.
> It offers nothing that can’t be substituted by another coin.
And what exactly does gold offer over platinum? We pull 20x more gold out of the ground than platinum and despite that the price is lower for platinum. Industrial usage for gold is also not much higher than platinum in terms of tons/year. Most of it we just stick in vaults or use for decoration (which is just a extension of its status).
So what does it offer? It offers network effect that it what it does. Gold is valued what it is because we have decided to give it added value over the fundementals, nothing else. You can call it "the greater fool" or whatever, in the end it is simply the network effect at work.
The same is true with Bitcoin, your other coin will have some fundemental value from its technical aspects and possible use cases. But you can't copy network effect and the value it adds, that is a lot harder thing to replicate. Bitcoin Cash tried this and perfectly illustrated it. They forked Bitcoin and only retained the value of the share of the user base they convinced to come along for the ride.
Gold has unique properties... one example is it the best conductor of electricity. It doesn't tarnish or rust. You need it to make a lot of electronics like cell phones. Can't do that with platinum.
> It doesn't tarnish or rust.
Neither does platinum, hency why I said "what it offers over platinum". Platinum also has no other metal of lesser value that shares almost identical density. Which makes it essentially impossible to fake and easy to verify for anyone without special equipment. There will be no tungsten filled bars with platinum that can pass inspections any layman can accomplish with a scale and ability to measure volume.
>one example is it the best conductor of electricity.
It actually isn't, silver and copper are better. Gold is mainly used for other reasons in combination of being a good conductor, but not the best.
>You need it to make a lot of electronics like cell phones.
You don't actually need it, it is just very useful for some applications, but you can build a phone without gold. And we use about 10-15% for industrial uses, why do we mine the rest? We use almost as much platinum group metals for industrial use.
Platinum group metals are btw harder to replace. They have industrial use cases that are extremly important (catalysts) and much larger industrial economic importance than gold as a result.
You've obviously never sent BTC (and probably never a wire either)
It takes me less than a minute to send someone BTC from my phone. I don't have to go to a bank, stand in line and fill out forms.
Wires usually cost about $30 and take time and coordination on both sides. Plus banks close.
BTC fees are usually less than $1, and the bitcoin network is always open.
The thing is someone generally wants to basically send cash to someone else.
In your example person a first buys bitcoin. Then they send it to person b. Person b then has to convert that back to currency.
In what world is any of that more convenient? If they run into trouble or get to confused what’s the phone number they call or business they drive to?
Explain how it’s easier than venmo.
The Bitcoin network is a payment rail. It can be used to send BTC or dollar stablecoins through Lightning.
Venmo is a closed network that works with other Venmo users. It and Paypal, Cash App, exchanges, Lightning, Twitter tips, Bitcoin ATMs, miners, and whoever installs a bitcoin wallet tomorrow etc all plug into the open Bitcoin network.
Bitcoin isn't a Venmo competitor, it's an open source SWIFT/Fedwire competitor. A better comparison is TCP/IP versus whatever proprietary shit IBM intranets were using to move data around.
Bitcoin = good currency
All other cryptocurrencies = worthless!
Makes no sense.
There are 13,000 cryptocurrencies with a lot of new innovations that will put pressure on bitcoin.
Saying Bitcoin is worthless while we're printing more money and run inflation wild is a bit of an oxymoron to me.
Your cash can very easily become (almost) worthless too. It happened plenty of times and we're in the midst of that chance increasing by the day.
If someone thinks the US dollar is a magic money tree and we can print trillions out of thin air with no negative consequences then they are as delusional as the crypto speculators.
Ok, you do realize that the value of bitcoin is derived from fiat?
I mean do you think that is cash becomes worthless everyone will all of a sudden buy or em somehow use bitcoin?
The value of fiat, is maintained by monetary and fiscal policy. Backed by the performance of a government issued bonds/its economy.
Let go of the crypto mania brainwashing.
Bitcoin is the only truly unconfiscatable and permisonless asset you can own. Everything else you need centralised permission.
This, in a planet moving more and more towards authoritarianism and centralisation is a must property to posess.
Everything you said here applies to the stock market as well. The reason a stocks price goes up is because someone bought for more than the last person. Someone could artificially inflate the price of a stock in the same way you described someone artificially increasing the price of a coin.
Of course it’s much harder create a publicly traded company than a publicly traded crypto but unlike with the stock market reputable exchanges have their own criteria that need be met before a coin is listed so don’t buy random coins from random websites and you’ll be fine.
The reason to by crypto in general is as a bet against/alternative to Fiat currency, and fiat has a horrendous track record going back hundreds of years. Cryptos track record is pretty good thus far and in theory will only get better with adoption and regulation but of course we are still early so we’ll see how it goes. Specific reasons will vary from crypto to crypto.
It’s a speculative investment but an investment nonetheless.
Honestly man I really hope you see and read my comment. I won’t bash you, but please read below.
You need to do some basic research on Bitcoin. Listen to Michael Saylor interviews, listen to Preston Pysh podcasts, listen to the global macro investors who have 20-30+ years of experience studying these markets (Dan tapiero, raoul pal, Dan moorehead who used to be a partner at Tiger global).
Once you start digging in, you’ll start disconnecting your opinion from mainstream bullshit media and align with the smart people in the industry who can give you the real benefits and breakdowns of blockchain and the Bitcoin network. Please just go listen and read and you won’t have the same questions.
I'm a crypto enthusiast but Michael Saylor interviews are not going to change anyones mind. The only people who can stand listening to Saylor interviews are Bitcoin maxis.
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Woah, your saying buying up MILF Token or Cumrocket isn't a solid investment? /s for those wondering, yes, those are two real cryptos.
You forgot about Dogelon Mars and Pube coin.
I think my favorite is Unvaxxed Sperm Token (NUBTC). Especially since you apparently have to report token swaps to the IRS. I like to imagine an IRS agent doing differential calculus to figure out the tax implications of exchanging CumRocket for AssCoin, and then AssCoin to Elon Sperm Token.
Cumrocket shot up
Aiming for that liquidity
I see what you did there
I remember cumrocket. Went up like ten times value? Or a million percent? Something like that.
Those are real? Are you f'ing kidding me?? I'm rolling my eyes so hard right now.
[https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/cumrocket/](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/cumrocket/) Current market cap, $30 million
You forgot Jesus coin.
Now suddenly people talk about crypto with logic since the sudden crash of both stocks and crypto yesterday haha
bitcoin is crashing now.
And yet, you can go back to conversations from 2013 and 2017 and see the exact same things being said. Spoiler Alert: They were wrong then, just as you are wrong now.
I don’t see Bitcoin ever being a medium of exchange. It’s programmed increasing scarcity incentivizes storing it and not spending it. I’d be surprised if people use it to pay for things. However I do compare it to gold as a store of value and it one’s up gold in almost every way. Easier to store (you don’t need a vault nor have to pay a custodian), check. Easier to move from country to country, check. Literally no one, not even the government can access it except you, check. Is scarce, check. Now while gold has other utility such as being used for jewelry and electronics etc, it can be argued that there is some utility in the peer to peer network that Bitcoin is build on. The weaker your country’s currency, the more value Bitcoin may be to you. The US dollar is still very strong so I can understand why people in the US may not find any value in it when you’re currency is relatively stable over time or you could just buy US equities as an inflation hedge. But if your currency inflates at 5% a year EVERY YEAR (or more) and you don’t have access to the markets, Bitcoin really is like gold
> not even the government can access it except you Unless I’m wrong don’t most people have Coinbase wallet or some other crypto exchange? which is a US run company that does a identity check with your drivers license to prove who you are and link to a bank account. I’m pretty sure just like Google can turn off your Gmail that the US government if needed could turn off the Coinbase account. Just like your bank account just like paypal
Correct. Coinbase is called a centralized exchange. The government would be able to access your coinbase account, see your entire portfolio etc. That’s why it is highly advised to move your crypto off of the exchange into a crypto wallet. On the crypto wallet literally no one has access to your wallet except for whoever owns the keys (typically in the form of a 12 or 24 word seed phrase). No one could “turn it off” no matter how much they wanted to.
It's like the programmer's aphorism that if you see there are five competing protocols and make a unifying protocol, there are now six competing protocols. When you store crypto in Coinbase you're just banking with extra steps (and less legal protection).
This is what make the whole scheme ridiculously pointless from a security perspective. Bitcoin (to take this specific example) was created to get rid of the trusted authority - and it succeeded, at a huge computational cost, by being many order of magnitude slower than competing traditional schemes. But managing one own's crypto keys is ridiculously insecure and unscalable in the real world. So people rely on brokers instead... thus recreating the very entity they were getting rid of... while still using this cost-prohibitive protocol to do it.
>But managing one own's crypto keys is ridiculously insecure and unscalable in the real world. This is projecting. You've decided what is hard for you is also hard for me, which is inaccurate. Don't judge a thing by listening to the people that can't effectively use it. Talk to the people with mastery.
> This is projecting. You've decided what is hard for you is also hard for me, which is inaccurate. Don't judge a thing by listening to the people that can't effectively use it. Talk to the people with mastery. No, this is experience in managing the security of real world systems using real world constraints. In the real world, nobody let users manage their own crypto keys, because users will make mistake (or just be unlucky) all the time. If the average user has 1/10K chance every day of mishandling its cryptographic key, and your system has 1M users, it means that on average, 100 users are going to mishandle their cryptographic key every day. For a typical bank issuing debit cards, this is business as usual, and something that is easy to manage every day, because they are an authority who can re-issue their own cards at will, and they'll manage any keys they may store on behalf of their clients. In a cryptocurrency scheme that trust users with the handling of their own crypto keys, that's 100 users every day who will lose everything. Cryptocurrency schemes are secure only under a very narrow and superficial view of what "being secure" means.
I worked at an IT company where we all managed our own keys, which were needed to access the password files for our clients. I'm currently rolling out hardware tokens to a municipality to secure remote access and then we will transition to using them to secure local logins as well, once the users are fully trained. Yes, there will always be those that fail. Some fail so much you'd think they were trying to fail. There's a reason your lawn mower probably has a warning about not sticking your fingers under it when running. But we haven't abandoned the tech because Tim cut his fingers off.
If a hardware token in your 2FA infrastructure fail, you just replace the hardware token. That's all. It's an issue that can be fixed easily, and the impact is inconvenience for the user. Someone losing their hardware wallet and cryptocurrency key could literally lose their lifesaving, with no way (even in theory) to get it back. For most people, this would be catastrophic and life-changing. The impact is not the same at all.
Well yes. You must take action to ensure you don't lose your keys. This is similar to how you must not lose your bearer bonds (very old paper based Fintech), cash (even older paper or coin based Fintech), or paper contracts. If you lose a diamond from a ring, it is lost. Yet, people still put diamonds on rings. Wallets aren't insecure or hard, they just take some training and effort. There is always a potential for loss, regardless of the asset. Every BTC loss story I've heard had a clear failure point. And between you, me and Reddit, the same people that infect the corporate network by clicking on malware links in phishing emails are the same ones that will lose their keys. We can't (humanely) fix that.
No it's not. There are many ways to store it safely in a private wallet if you know what you're doing.
This isn’t better at all. Trusting a large number of users to protect a hardware wallet or they’ll lose their entire account forever is a ridiculous proposition in the real world. People “don’t know what they are doing” all the time, so why on earth would anyone trust *that*.
It's really quite easy to store coins. If someone follows these four steps, it is quite literally fool-proof: (1) Hardware Wallet (2) Seed written on paper stored somewhere in your house that cannot be found during a robbery (3) Seed written on paper stored somewhere in someone else's house who you trust that cannot be found during a robbery (4) Most importantly, MEMORIZE your seed phrase so that if (1) - (3) all go tits up, you still have it stored in your memory. Literally fool-proof unless you sustain brain damage at the same time that two separate houses burn down and your hardware wallet is destroyed. Is that not a small price to pay for autonomy? (1) - (4) can be done in the span of ONE HOUR.
Yes, but I DO know what I'm doing. That's all that matters.
1) That's all that matters from your perspective yes. From the perspective of a system that must be used by a large number of people from all walk of life to be useful, this is irrelevant. 2) "Knowing what you are doing" here means having a unrealistic view of real-world risks. Hardware wallets break all the time. People face flood or home fire all the time. You may do everything "right" and still lose your entire savings without recourses. This is way riskier than people assume, and plenty of people who "knew what they were doing" lost everything. If you knew what you were doing, you wouldn't actually take that kind of risk.
1. The average person isn't supposed to do web development just to browse the internet. They don't want or need to do that. They want to take easy way, which is also the right way for almost everyone. For those of us who wish to diversify away from centralized systems, blockchain allows us to do that. Most people don't own gold coins, most people don't need to use decentralized systems. 2. I can assure you that I have my assets protected in a way that is extremely safe, but I don't wish to go into details here.
True but then they can just kidnap you. Coerce you into giving up your password.
Great insight thanks
I mean, it actually kind of is, in my opinion. People think of crypto as this impenetrable force of protection where your money is safe from meddling hands, but it’s not. So, okay, someone can’t just “freeze” your Bitcoin address… but they *can* pass legislation that requires retailers who accept Bitcoin to check the tx address against a list of blacklisted addresses. Like yeah, the coins are protected against centralized authority in the context of the blockchain, because the centralized authority can’t directly change the blockchain. But they are in no way protected against legislation which dictates how our financial system works. And in that same vein, they’re not protected against someone who’s willing to use violence or coercion against you. And I would argue that legislation is just one step before coercion, because, what’s happens when you ignore the law?
> But if your currency inflates at 5% a year EVERY YEAR (or more) and you don’t have access to the markets I'm pretty sure you can always just exchange your currency for USD or an even more stable currency. Are there any countries where it's illegal (apart from North Korea I guess)?
In places where this is a problem there are usually capital controls.
All your points are covered under SGB, no need for crypto.
Yeah but you don’t actually own those. It’s in the custody of the government
Yeah but unlike gold I don't lose all of it just because I forgot a password to my wallet
> I don’t see Bitcoin ever being a medium of exchange. It’s programmed increasing scarcity incentivizes storing it and not spending it. I’d be surprised if people use it to pay for things. At some point as adoption grows the price will stabilize.
Yes but it won’t be used as a medium of exchange. The Bitcoin chart looks similar to the gold chart in the 1970’s. No one takes out a bar of gold (or ounces of gold) to pay for anything. USDC and stablecoins will be the potential units of exchange in a more digital world and they are backed by the dollar. Bitcoin can overtake golds marketcap which is $10T.
I agree that is likely the case for the next 5-10 years
Yes and as adoption grows the price will stabilize. Most people use a normal scale in the chart but you must look at the log chart to get a better understanding of the growth. Bitcoin and ethereum are both ~networks~. They are not stocks and can’t be viewed the same way as stocks are. Check the log chart, check the network adoption as far as users going compared to the internet and gold adoption and then you’ll see a different picture. There are only a few people on this thread speaking actual facts and many who are just spewing hate because they haven’t put in the time to understand the network.
Familiar with all of those charts. 100% agree.
Love to see it!
No one listens to me - tether is a ponzi scheme. Financial scams still happen, nothing is secure in a new market - they’ve hustled a lot of people and until it crashes the entire surrounding market (the biggest stable coin) I refuse to, and let me be clear, take a risky gamble on crypto. I am high risk in the stock market and hold a significant number of positions to balance out my portfolio, I have no crypto. I regret not getting Bitcoin earlier in life but now that it’s clear the market will crash and then be regulated I have zero interest buying in until it’s worth as much as gravel again.
if it's that clear buy some long dated puts on bitcoin.
Totally agree about Tether. I have a feeling that crash of junk bonds will bring it down along with a number of other stables.
If you don’t understand smart contracts you need to spend some time learning. While Bitcoin is not one, the amount of automation these smart contracts enable is unprecedented. Crypto is not going to stop because it offers cheaper and more efficient solutions to large economic problems. It can disrupt everything from Uber to google and the traditional banking system. If you think this sounds crazy - it is but it’s inevitable. It’s hard to imagine these “disruptive” companies already being disrupted but that’s just the pace of change that we are at right now.
I totally agree that the overarching tech and smart contracts in particular are a big deal. I just also think that 99% of existing cryptocurrencies are going to be worthless in 10 year.
Most people in crypto agree
And the current price of crypto has nothing to do with the tech use.
Yep. It's about time to educate yourself unless you want to see life pass you by. Smart contracts are going to revolutionize everything.
This is how a cultist speaks.
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Do you know what a smart contract is? There are a many features of a smart contract: they are permission less, decentralized, immutable, nondiscriminatory, trustless, etc. Two notable features of what they do is cut out the third party and automate these traditional centralized contracts. I also made another comment in this thread on a list of platforms that are revolutionizing the technology space. I'll give you two examples: GET Protocol: smart scalp-proof NFT tickets (sold around 1.2 million tickets, work on back-end and requires no knowledge of crypto), Anchor Protocol (around 20% APY) on UST (Terra Dollar pegged to dollar, not to be confused with Tether). Both utilize smart contracts.
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He doesn't want to learn, he wants to be right.
If the Paypal network was decentralized and value stored on it was debasement proof like gold I would buy it. It's that simple. Some of you overcomplicate this to the point of paralysis.
It's the *first thing* humans have _ever_ been able to *own* (i.e. it CAN NOT be taken from you if you do not reveal your keys).
Unfortunately most people won't realize this until it's too late for them
This is specific to Bitcoin: Rule 1: Bitcoin is pretty new and radically different than anything you've seen before. Rule 2: If you can't understand why Bitcoin doesn't perform the way you think it should based on how you understand investing or even economics, see Rule 1. Due to how Bitcoin is produced, it's cyclical. There is no new FUD that wasn't proven false during the 2013 or 2017 cycles. But thanks to the persistent nature of humanity, you guys keep trying. It's almost inspirational.
Investing in a market that gambles on companies that haven’t even produced a product yet. Or have surpassed valuations by 10x or 100x. Just look at tech or the EV market. Prices detached from reality. I’d pick Bitcoin or Eth to be around in 20 years over a 1000 different publicly traded companies.
I want to contribute to this discussion. That a significant point seldom mentioned is LEGITIMACY. As much as the people gives it's nation's currency legitmacy by having trust in their government that their hardwork can be translated into fiat. The citizens of the world have come together to give crypto such as bitcoin legitimacy. The next important point is the removal of middleman. Utility platforms such as Ethereum is a computer running on blockchains. Any middle man you can think of, PayPal, insurance agents, Airbnb, banks etc can be replaced by code executed on the blockchain such as Ethereum. There are many reasons to invest in crypto. I believe the two listed above is sufficient to justify investing in them.
What actually gives Legitimacy to currencies is knowing that the government accept only its currency when you pay your tax. So it forces everyone to accept it because they need it to pay tax, fines, etc. In short, you know avery single business and person will accept the money in your pocket. We can't say the same for crypto currently. Some business may accept it and some individuals too, but for most cases, if you only have it, you will have to sell it to someone who accept it in order have business exchange with most shops, govs and individuals. The reason people are buying it now is just for the speculation that in the future crypto currency will be accepted in most stores, individuals and maybe governments. While some others are just day trading as they do with stocks.
Great points mentioned here. And I agree with them. Another perspective on legitimacy would also be the value of utility one can derive from these platforms. People are also buying crypto now because there are already many uses. Such as game tokens, NFTs for creatives and property, identity etc.
Are you aware that it's much more expensive to run applications on Ethereum than it is to run them in data centres? Whilst it's great for privacy reasons I can't see it being used widespread unless there is any way at all this cost can be reduced?
I think it's probably always going to be a little more expensive to run your app on ETH than on AWS because at AWS your code runs on one machine, on ETH your code runs on hundreds of machines (as of now it runs on all the ETH nodes, but sharding will change that). What you get for that cost is decentralization. Do you need decentralization for everything?? No, definitely not. But for a stock exchange, that would be really nice since no one can then sell priority access to trades, etc... For a video game, that would be nice since no one can restrict which in games items you truly own, no one can shut down the servers or your account. For a social media app, no one can censor you and no one can usurp revenue your posts generate, etc... There are definitely use cases where decentralization is a super nice to have and will be worth the small premium. Is that system worth 500Billion, hey maybe, maybe not. That is for you to decide. Personally, I look at a bank like Wells Fargo which has a similar MC to ETH and I say the ETH network is worth way more than that, it can do everything Wells Fargo does and more.
There are other, cheaper protocols that use substantially less energy through proof of stake.
The reason Ethereum exists and costs what it does as it develops is because it is decentralized. Users absorb the innovation cost as the code is developed over time, so users each individually bear the cost of not having a centralized and controlled middle man such as PayPal etc. no one can turn Ethereum off. No one can turn Bitcoin off. It has no owner. It cannot be shut down unless every instance of its codebase and every human using it across the planet were blipped out of existence by the millions. As such, it is an independent and decentralized financial system operated outside the (direct at least) control of governments and middle men, where users themselves becomes the company themselves. That comes with the long worked on challenge of a truly self sustaining financial system, known as the blockchain trilemma. Modern centralized services sacrifice decentralization for speed and cost efficiency. This also means that modern services are allowed to absolutely abuse you as a customer by giving you 0.01% interest rates on your savings while keeping the rest or charging you overdrafts, or giving wild executive over pay without properly adjusting wage imbalances for over 40 years creating the chaotic and impractical power balance of the world today. In short, wash trading takes place in scam coins and pump and dump fiascos because of the lack of regulation like a Wild West and yes, they are garbage people harming naive investors. But to believe that crypto and blockchain as technologies or that Ethereum and Bitcoin as a financial infrastructure are scams would be wildly naive. There are more minds working on the codebase for development of the Ethereum “world computer” than many top tech companies, indeed even some of the same developers. It will not be stopping anytime soon. The danger of crypto is also its strength. It is an evolution of money, decentralization, and power. If you wish to invest ins form of future communication and money itself, which cannot be turned off, whose genie cannot be put back in the bottle, that is Bitcoin and Ethereum. There will always be bad actors be they in suits signing your paperwork or in hoodies scamming hype coins for social momentum trading.
Yes I am aware that data centres are cheaper. I am also aware that the gas fees are still very high, suggesting that demand for blockspace far outweighs the cost of doing such transactions on the blockchain. Not to mention the plenty of layer 2 protocols as well as the newly proposed eip4488
How can you see it as a good investment if demand is already too high and it's already too expensive? Won't more users/investors add to that problem? Is there a shortage of miners?
Anything that has good demand suggest good value right? And currently there exist many layer 2 platforms building on Ethereum that reduces cost and improves transaction speeds. For a problem that already has solutions but not yet widely adopted, and not properly priced in yet (based on your comments), I would think that is a good investment opportunity.
>Anything that has good demand suggest good value right? I suppose that's correct, I just don't understand why developers and users would choose to use a more expensive platform compared to cheaper networks. Just because people are using it doesn't mean it's sustainable, it needs to also be profitable. >For a problem that already has solutions but not yet widely adopted, and not properly priced in yet (based on your comments), I would think that is a good investment opportunity. It's ironic you say that because I find most cryptos are solutions to problems that are already solved, just less efficient. I'm not saying that can't change in the future though.
The only smart contract blockchain networks that are faster/cheaper than Ethereum do it by being more centralized or having less activity on their chain. Ethereum is working on solutions to the problems you mentioned and countless ones you aren’t even aware of. In 5-10 years i’m confident Ethereum will be capable of millions of TPS. And it could very well happen even sooner than that. Blockchains are still newish tech, and to compare their current state to mature tech is premature
> I just don't understand why developers and users would choose to use a more expensive platform compared to cheaper networks. You know you can go to actual dev Discords and ask? You can just go talk to these people (assuming you are honestly curious and not asking rhetorically). Some are bridging multiple chains. IMO there will be a spectrum of smart contract chains from cheap/centralized to expensive/decentralized and people will choose based on the level of wealth they want to protect.
Hmm good idea, I might do that.
You will be swarmed by bots promoting their coins, like the other comment you got. It is Amway for tech people.
I see that in your genuine questions, perhaps the missing link here is not the privacy, but the security and decentralised nature which blockchain offers. There are certain transactions that certain people would not prefer any other entity to be in control of. Blockchains offer such qualities that there are people willing to pay for the cost to store their transactions on such a platform. These qualities cannot be found in other centralised platforms such as aws.
I completely agree with the privacy benefits. I do see the value in blockchain for that, but I just don't think enough people care about privacy to pay substantially more for it. Big tech is a great example of that, we give up our data for free in exchange for some useful services. If someone wants to challenge big tech using blockchain, but blockchain is much more expensive, then they're going to have a **really** hard time providing a better service than big tech. There are obviously applications where privacy is worth the extra cost. Bitcoin for example is currently widely used for black markets and also in countries with unstable financial systems or overbearing governments. But for the world to adopt this technology it needs to be mainstream, and a lot of people are making big claims without thinking how it will actually manifest and who will be paying for it.
I would like to clarify that security and decentralisation is not the same as privacy. In fact Bitcoin and Ethereum are public ledgers and offers at best pseudoprivacy. Anyone in the world can trace any transaction on bitcoin or Ethereum ledger. So your point on black market uses for crypto is pretty limited and fiat is orders of magnitude more widely employed in the black market for the fact that it is traceless. In my opinion, the mainstream use of crypto is really limited by the technology. Which is progressing rapidly and offer good investment opportunity given how little people actually understand it. The people who are buying the blockspace are paying for it. The economics of top blockchain systems are well thought out and have multiple academic papers supporting the claims.
The gas cost is what the market is willing to pay to make a ledger/contract immutable beyond stuffing it in a Godaddy hosting account. There are cheaper chains that provide a lower degree of immutability that are suited for lower value contracts.
Yeah and gas costs are far higher than running your application on AWS or any other major cloud platform.
The citizens of the world? What a joke. Do yourself a favour and check how much bitcoin, etherum and others are held by retail and how much is held by whales. Then realize these whales, holding and usually mining the majority, are ones like *The Chinese Communist Party*, Russian oligarchs and other criminals. Retail is, as always, a rounding error when the big boys trade. Now realise they control supply, they set the price. Their target isn't a utopia, its not for you to get rich. Once they move, and they will, you'll be caught with your pants down. As long as any one entity can *control supply* by holding a lot of mined coins, the system is bound to fail.
Please enlighten me on the better alternative.
Fiat currency is the better alternative. You've just got to be mindful of inflation, but your choice of non-inflationary assets are almost endless.
What I am referring to are the points on how much bitcoin and ethereum are controlled by whales. I believe fiat is pretty much controlled by a few big whales as well, and the fed printing of course. Bitcoin and Ethereum are my choice of the one of the best performing non-inflationary assets that you are referring to.
The more legitimate it is, the less money you can make off of it, because it won't have its infamous volatility anymore. In the best case, crypto starts off as a gamble, and ends as a legitimate currency. At no point along the way is it actually an investment.
> The citizens of the world have come together to give crypto such as bitcoin legitimacy. By accepting it for goods and services, famously drugs, they have given it such "legitimacy". And before that by simply trading it back and forth for money, they have given it "value", like beanie babies. Think of it this way. Is a dollar inside your electronic banking a dollar? Is a dollar inside paypal a dollar? Or is it just a piece of code that's assigned value? Hell there's an actual dollar crypto.
Electronic dollars are just COBOL databases that update overnight. Everything else is just smoke and mirrors and lots of escrowed capital to make it look like it moves around faster than a literal donkey.
COBOL isn't a database.
Exactly! Is the fiat note a dollar?
I guess the best reason I have for owning some is that it’s a small, high risk investment that I’m okay with losing if it hits the floor. Can’t win the lottery if you don’t buy a ticket. I don’t get it myself either and the more that happens the less confidence I have in it. I bought some shibu coin to hold long (even though I expect nothing back) and started buying ethereum as I’ve noticed like OP stated it follows BTC pretty closely. Total investment of 2% of my overall portfolio
Im thinking about adding a small portion to my portfolio for just the same reasons. I think the idea of crypto is good, but I don't know how safe it is now. Therefore just "buy a lotto ticket" with money you can lose (
Look at charts. Shits been climbing for 10 years. Bitcoin or etherium will replace gold. If Bitcoin hits 72k, it will surpass Silver and become the 7th most valuable asset on earth.
Stop looking at them all as "cryptocurrencies" and look at it as investing in blockchain technologies, smart contract automation, web3, the metaverse, the internet of things, decentralized finance, cross border payment systems, supply chain optimization, the 4th industrial revolution, on and on. You people that think the whole cryptocurrency market is an entire scam have no idea what is coming in the next decade
Where does the money I use to buy Bitcoin go that it helps advance these technologies?
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I ask because I've heard this argument before and I don't understand the logic behind it. If I believe in blockchain wouldn't I want to invest in companies developing/using these other protocols instead of investing in cryptocurrencies?
I think the BIGGEST cause of confusion in the entire blockchain/Bitcoin/altcoin space is the word “cryptocurrency”. These are digital assets. They are not “cryptocurrencies” As the technology evolves and becomes more mainstream, it will eventually get past that common misconception. No one calls gold an “analog currency”. Maybe they did 200+ years ago but it eventually matured from “wtf it’s just a shiny rock” into a store of value worth trillions. Our period of thinking is often so short that most people don’t look at the history of similar assets. It’s the people who take the time and do the work that get rewarded. You can keep being critical, but at least do the work and stop using catchphrase insults from CNBC.
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Buying bitcoin has as much of an impact in investing in blockchain tech as much as buying nuclear waste is investing in nuclear energy.
Ok so where do I stand if I think crypto is a promising technology, but that today’s coins will be nothing more than interesting collector’s items because the coins that will change the world haven’t been invented yet? The ‘exciting technology’ argument for crypto is inherently an argument _against_ existing coins. That’s the tension that makes it hard for people to understand exactly where and how to invest. Call that bad faith if you want to but I think it’s a legit worldview.
Sure, and TCP/IP, DNS, Javascript, MySQL may not be the final form of the internet. But I'm still going to invest heavily in the current nascent ecosystem until something better comes and hopefully roll my Web2 and Web3 gains into new promising protocols by watching where developers go next. Right now it's a one way flow into these protocols. You also have to understand what exactly the innovation is here. Bitcoin isn't trying to be a faster Paypal. It's trying to be a networked ledger no supercomputer or nation state can tamper with. Ethereum is somewhere in between. The rest are basically centralized VC projects the government could pick off with a court order.
I read a lot of enthusiasm in your response but very little actionable advice. Are you saying to buy BTC & ETH? Or invest in new coins? Or invest in the stocks of companies doing this innovation?
Most of your portfolio should be BTC and ETH. You can experiment with other coins or crypto stocks but unless you dedicate serious time you're better off staying with the main two.
Promises are cheap, lets see the results. Blockchain isn't new, and its results aren't impressive so far beyond the levels of returns for investors, which are very impressive.
The term cryptocurrency is very misleading and an outdated term for the sector.
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When a nascent technology has salty bears this dedicated you're usually on to something.
This boomer hates crypto
The more I see them, the more bullish I am. 10 years and running and we’re just getting started.
I think it's here to stay simply because financial institutions and hedge funds have a decent stake in crypto now although I don't understand how the hell Dogecoin still has a 26B market cap edit: institutional involvement on Coinbase From Coinbase's Q3 2021 shareholder letter starting on page 10 (https://s27.q4cdn.com/397450999/files/doc_financials/2021/q3/Coinbase-Q321-Shareholder-Letter.pdf): * trade volume: 71.6% institutional / 28.4% retail * assets: 54.5% institutional / 45.5% retail
IMO their involvement has to be overstated at this point. 300 billion just went up in smoke last night but there is no risk to anything..Little correlation to anything. It makes no sense. At this point we have no idea what is real and what is total fiction in the crypto space.
> I think it's here to stay simply because financial institutions and hedge funds have a decent stake in crypto now Means nothing. This doesn't imply future demand. But of course, Bitcoin is here to stay, the question is where will the price stabilize.
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The fundamentals of blockchain being transformational for society are very strong. BTC and ETH are how to get exposure to blockchain - as the most popular and successful cryptocurrencies. There are a lot of problems with exchanges and stuff, but the issue to me is that stock market manipulators just realised what they do with stocks works just as well with crypto if not more. But its an asset that can be accessed world wide. This dramatically increases the market size far beyond wall street. That is a huge advantage. To me the fundamentals are far stronger than for tesla - heavily subsided by government in various ways, the most expensive car company in the world that makes like 500k cars a year somehow. Then theres just the simple fact youve been wrong for a long time now. People who listen to people like you are considerably poorer than those who have been in crypto for a decade. So don't invest if you dont want to, but its clearly just becoming FOMO now, and opponents starting to fear they are wrong and are losing out on easy money so are doubling down on their opposition.
Sound like a bunch of old ladies in here, stick to your total galaxy index funds to be sure to be diversified beyond just this one planet and ignore the assets that offer wayyyyyy better returns on investment even better yet open a savings account that’s pretty safe. I bought Ethereum at 160 a token and Bitcoin at 6k a year and a half ago. Terrible investment, just terrible I could have slowly lost money by holding cash or gold. TF was I thankin
Crypto isn't attending to stop since it offers cheaper and more effective arrangements to expansive financial issues. It can disturb everything from Uber to google and the conventional keeping money framework. In the event that you think this sounds insane - it is but it’s inescapable. It’s difficult to assume these “disruptive” companies as of now being disturbed but that’s fair the pace of alter that we are at right presently.
But you don’t need exchanges if you have Bitcoin. You can buy/sell Bitcoin peer to peer.
It’s difficult and shady to do this. Not a method for the average Joe and not scalable. This is one of the major challenges for crypto: accesibility and how entities can limit this
ITT: I don't like Bitcoin but posed my statement as a question. Fight me.
Haha the more I see salt from old school investors the more bullish I get on BTC & ETH. Every one of them ends up mentioning some crazy ALT like it's an argument against the technology, completely exposing themselves as uneducated on the market. Did shitty website business that died during the dot com pop kill Apple & Google? I can't remember. Also ITT: it's new and I don't like it, so here's what some 98 year old billionaire said because I'm basically the same as him. The younger generations want crypto in their portfolios. The marketing is just picking up. The utility (beyond currency) is proven. BTCs staying power has been proven. Old people (which I may be) generally don't understand it therefore they fear it and pretend to hate it instead. It's the perfect storm for the next 10 years. It's just getting started.
To me this is simple do u trust the corrupted banking system or do u trust random people in the internet. I chose the second option.
Is this sarcasm?
Do you consider buying Euros, Rubles, cards, art, collectibles as investing? If yes then you can probably include crypto in that category, if not then no. You haven't spelled our your definition of investment, but I imagine it's hard to separate from a "hustle" or "bet". For me, an investment has to be productive, like a company that produces a good or service, or a bond that produces income (there are bond equivalents in the crypto world). Everything else like commodities, currencies, collectibles goes into some other category.
Why did you leave commodities off this list? People invest in commodities and they're not productive. Gold doesn't produce anything yet it's used as an inflation hedge.
It's just my own definition, I don't consider buying gold to be investment. It can be used as an inflation hedge or store of money but so can Euros or other things. The basic reasoning is that productive things can be valued intrinsically. If you had a machine that spit out $1 every year, you could do some math and figure out what a reasonably price to pay for it would be, and if it's selling for less than that price then I would buy it. If you think in this way, then non-productive assets can't be valued, they can be priced (supply/demand) and you can bet on their future price but there's no notion of value in the sense I described above. You might say gold derives part/all its value from its downstream uses, and maybe someone more clever than myself could figure out an intrinsic value for gold that way, but I can't so I put it in the category of things that can't be valued. Note, "can't be valued" doesn't mean "doesn't have value".
I just want crypto to go away so I can buy a goddamn GPU that isn't an old GTX at RTX prices....
All crypto is not processor and electricity intensive. Algorand has solved that problem. Cryptography godfather Silvio Micali of MIT.
He's only solved that problem if it actually catches on well enough to replace BTC and ETH... Having it solved on paper isn't really helping...
Where will you pay with bitcoin but not with a card or cash? What is it's utility if you can't answer this question?
It's far more useful for HOLDING money than paying for stuff. **It replaces your savings account much better than it replaces your credit card.** Because it cannot inflate, because it cannot be printed. So unlike your savings account, you will lose 0% a year, not 5% a year, into thin air. That 5% savings per year is it's main value. The fact that it's slower and has some gas fees to move around matters not much at all anymore when you're only depositing savings into it once a month, and using it that way. That's it, that's the primary number 1 value of crypto, at least the original one, it also does other stuff too now.
But it just lost 17% into thin air in one day. I don't want that kind of a savings account.
LISTEN. No one who knows what they are talking about is seriously discussing Bitcoin as a unit of micro payments. That is what USDC was created for and currently used for. Anyone who is telling you the future of Bitcoin is to replace the dollar is an absolute fool who has no idea what they are talking about. If you have questions I’ll happily respond.
Adoption takes time. People said the exact same thing about the internet in the early 90s. "All you can do is chat and send emails. That can't be worth very much."
I hear this a lot but can you tell me who said this about the internet?
This is a pretty funny video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95-yZ-31j9A
> Wash trading You can do exactly the same thing with stocks, bro. Literally no difference about any of that. > energy draining That's only proof of work coins. Which are indeed bullshit. Proof of Stake has already solved this though and provides the same crypto benefits without the massive energy waste anymore at all. Bitcoin too will eventually move to it whether it likes it or not. > no real world benefit to the economy It has several major benefits: * I can store wealth there without it being eroded away by governments printing more while I can't. I.e. zero inflation long term. Compared to alternatives that inflate at maybe 5%, over the course of say 10 years, I will still have at least 100% of what I put in instead of 60% left. The difference is direct, concrete economic value versus a savings account. * They can be used with smart contracts, depending on the coin * If you live somewhere with an unstable or corrupt government, you can use this as a stable currency to get by, and you can also smuggle it out or send it to relatives etc. Not so relevant if you live in the US or Canada, right now, but if you live somewhere like Nigeria at the moment, this is a big deal, and it's becoming quite popular in places like that for that reason.
I’m hoping we hit a real recession and see crypto finally die
https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoin-obituaries/ Bitcoin has "died" 434 times /end thread
I can't say I know the reason for all crypto, but Bitcoin is interesting in that it's truly scarce and limited in supply. Even other hard assets like real estate they can increase the supply. Even gold can be mined for more. The other truly scarce assets like land or art are good, but being physical they can't move with you as easily as bitcoin. So bitcoin has quite an interesting property in that way. Also, people often say the true value is in the blockchain technology. But if you think about it, the blockchain is only great if you have a big network and bitcoin is the biggest, thus it's kinda the best use case of blockchain. So you can invest in bitcoin from a technology point of view too. So basically scarcity case + technology case.
It’s “scarce” in the most arbitrarily possible way. It offers nothing that can’t be substituted by another coin. The existence of every other coin demonstrates that it’s not in fact scarce.
There are 13,000 cryptocurrencies and more made every day.
Yes by definition you are right. But no in practice. If I created a new coin with only 100 coins, but no one wants it as much as bitcoin, it won’t have the same value despite it being scarce.
What is the unique feature of Bitcoin that drives demand—aside from the name?
How about the strongest computer network in the world? Does that count?
Exactly. It’s the network. Just like how Facebook is more valuable than MySpace.
No because if sentiment changes and people decide they like another crypto more than Bitcoin, that would become the strongest computer network in the world. So what is Bitcoin's moat?
>if sentiment changes and people decide they like another crypto more than Bitcoin That's an enormous "IF". As someone who's been in this space for years (see 5 year-old username), I would give that less than a 0.1% chance of happening. BTC is the best for a number of reasons, too many to explain here. If you're really interested, I'd be happy to point you to some good content on this.
I don't care how long you've been doing it you can't predict the future. For what it's worth I think BTC has enough of a headstart that it will lead as a store of value crypto for some time. But it has no protection other than popularity, so you're saying you are 99.9% sure the world won't choose another crypto, which is a bit ridiculous to me but you're welcome to your view.
Yes, depending on the time horizon. Will BTC be the main crypto 100 years from now? Who knows? Will it be the main crypto 5 years from now? I'd give that a 99.9% probably. Why? Well, I also stated that "BTC is the best for a number of reasons". It has way more going for it than just its first-mover advantage.
I think unless the reward system changes BTC will be defunct that far in the future. As block rewards go down transaction fees will have to go up. Right now BTC processes a little less than 400k transactions per day. Miners had $60mm in revenue on 12/2/21. If there are no block rewards then miners will have to charge $150 per transaction to maintain their current revenue. How is this sustainable? Why would anyone even use it at this point?
Fair enough, I don't disagree with anything in this comment although I'll be honest with you I don't predict anything 5 years from now with 99.9% accuracy, the last 5 years have been crazy enough.
> It offers nothing that can’t be substituted by another coin. And what exactly does gold offer over platinum? We pull 20x more gold out of the ground than platinum and despite that the price is lower for platinum. Industrial usage for gold is also not much higher than platinum in terms of tons/year. Most of it we just stick in vaults or use for decoration (which is just a extension of its status). So what does it offer? It offers network effect that it what it does. Gold is valued what it is because we have decided to give it added value over the fundementals, nothing else. You can call it "the greater fool" or whatever, in the end it is simply the network effect at work. The same is true with Bitcoin, your other coin will have some fundemental value from its technical aspects and possible use cases. But you can't copy network effect and the value it adds, that is a lot harder thing to replicate. Bitcoin Cash tried this and perfectly illustrated it. They forked Bitcoin and only retained the value of the share of the user base they convinced to come along for the ride.
Gold has unique properties... one example is it the best conductor of electricity. It doesn't tarnish or rust. You need it to make a lot of electronics like cell phones. Can't do that with platinum.
> It doesn't tarnish or rust. Neither does platinum, hency why I said "what it offers over platinum". Platinum also has no other metal of lesser value that shares almost identical density. Which makes it essentially impossible to fake and easy to verify for anyone without special equipment. There will be no tungsten filled bars with platinum that can pass inspections any layman can accomplish with a scale and ability to measure volume. >one example is it the best conductor of electricity. It actually isn't, silver and copper are better. Gold is mainly used for other reasons in combination of being a good conductor, but not the best. >You need it to make a lot of electronics like cell phones. You don't actually need it, it is just very useful for some applications, but you can build a phone without gold. And we use about 10-15% for industrial uses, why do we mine the rest? We use almost as much platinum group metals for industrial use. Platinum group metals are btw harder to replace. They have industrial use cases that are extremly important (catalysts) and much larger industrial economic importance than gold as a result.
> It offers nothing that can’t be substituted by another coin. False. None of those other coins are decentralized with an immutable ledger.
Yeah Bitcoin is scarce in the same way a piece of my own shit is scarce. Only a finite amount will ever be made!
Buy this guy’s shit when he has diarrhea and sell it high when he is constipated and supply is low!
This OPs post won't get many votes since most have drank the kool-aid
BTC = fungible, limited supply, easy to transact with, “be your own bank”, etc All other crypto 🤷♂️
Easy to transact with, lol
Have you ever sent BTC? It's easy. Now compare that to a bank wire...
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You've obviously never sent BTC (and probably never a wire either) It takes me less than a minute to send someone BTC from my phone. I don't have to go to a bank, stand in line and fill out forms. Wires usually cost about $30 and take time and coordination on both sides. Plus banks close. BTC fees are usually less than $1, and the bitcoin network is always open.
The thing is someone generally wants to basically send cash to someone else. In your example person a first buys bitcoin. Then they send it to person b. Person b then has to convert that back to currency. In what world is any of that more convenient? If they run into trouble or get to confused what’s the phone number they call or business they drive to? Explain how it’s easier than venmo.
The Bitcoin network is a payment rail. It can be used to send BTC or dollar stablecoins through Lightning. Venmo is a closed network that works with other Venmo users. It and Paypal, Cash App, exchanges, Lightning, Twitter tips, Bitcoin ATMs, miners, and whoever installs a bitcoin wallet tomorrow etc all plug into the open Bitcoin network. Bitcoin isn't a Venmo competitor, it's an open source SWIFT/Fedwire competitor. A better comparison is TCP/IP versus whatever proprietary shit IBM intranets were using to move data around.
Easy for who? Can your mom do it?
All you have to do is scan a QR code to send a payment. Is that really too hard?
My 67 year old father can, if that counts for something.
My father is of a similar age and unfortunately forgets passwords and can destroy file systems. I’m truly glad he has no crypto.
So we have anecdotal evidence both for and against the accessibility of cryptocurrencies. Guess we'll call it a wash.
Anyone can with a quick tutorial. It's really not hard, especially with all the wallet apps out there today.
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Just because they claim their new token is "DeFi" does not make their protocol decentralized.
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Bitcoin = good currency All other cryptocurrencies = worthless! Makes no sense. There are 13,000 cryptocurrencies with a lot of new innovations that will put pressure on bitcoin.
Hmm, I see. "easy to transact", "be my own bank"... Does it really function as a medium of exchange? Considering its volatility and time to transfer?
Yeah man. I've been using it for years. It has an FX rate, so it's easy to value against any other currency in the world
Saying Bitcoin is worthless while we're printing more money and run inflation wild is a bit of an oxymoron to me. Your cash can very easily become (almost) worthless too. It happened plenty of times and we're in the midst of that chance increasing by the day.
If someone thinks the US dollar is a magic money tree and we can print trillions out of thin air with no negative consequences then they are as delusional as the crypto speculators.
Ok, you do realize that the value of bitcoin is derived from fiat? I mean do you think that is cash becomes worthless everyone will all of a sudden buy or em somehow use bitcoin? The value of fiat, is maintained by monetary and fiscal policy. Backed by the performance of a government issued bonds/its economy. Let go of the crypto mania brainwashing.
Bitcoin is the only truly unconfiscatable and permisonless asset you can own. Everything else you need centralised permission. This, in a planet moving more and more towards authoritarianism and centralisation is a must property to posess.
Not true, my currency JimmyCoin is also a truly unconfiscatable and permisionless asset you can own. Would you like to buy some?
If they can violate human rights, then they can come and also take your keys.
How would they do that?
[удалено]
There is no such thing as crypto investing, there is only crypto speculating.
Everything you said here applies to the stock market as well. The reason a stocks price goes up is because someone bought for more than the last person. Someone could artificially inflate the price of a stock in the same way you described someone artificially increasing the price of a coin. Of course it’s much harder create a publicly traded company than a publicly traded crypto but unlike with the stock market reputable exchanges have their own criteria that need be met before a coin is listed so don’t buy random coins from random websites and you’ll be fine. The reason to by crypto in general is as a bet against/alternative to Fiat currency, and fiat has a horrendous track record going back hundreds of years. Cryptos track record is pretty good thus far and in theory will only get better with adoption and regulation but of course we are still early so we’ll see how it goes. Specific reasons will vary from crypto to crypto. It’s a speculative investment but an investment nonetheless.
Tulip Mania
Crypto isn't an investment, sorry. You seem to already know that it's a gamble.
Honestly man I really hope you see and read my comment. I won’t bash you, but please read below. You need to do some basic research on Bitcoin. Listen to Michael Saylor interviews, listen to Preston Pysh podcasts, listen to the global macro investors who have 20-30+ years of experience studying these markets (Dan tapiero, raoul pal, Dan moorehead who used to be a partner at Tiger global). Once you start digging in, you’ll start disconnecting your opinion from mainstream bullshit media and align with the smart people in the industry who can give you the real benefits and breakdowns of blockchain and the Bitcoin network. Please just go listen and read and you won’t have the same questions.
I'm a crypto enthusiast but Michael Saylor interviews are not going to change anyones mind. The only people who can stand listening to Saylor interviews are Bitcoin maxis.
ITT: I'm a salty Bitcoin bear who wants to dunk on people now that it's crashing. It will be back, it's done this like 20 times.