Financial topics

[Higgenbotham]

Additionally, I do not argue that BTC "will succeed because other [smart, rich] people believe it". I never have.

Then cut out the name associations. You do a hugely outsized amount of it.

Saylor is an MIT guy, but he must be stupid like me, since he's in BTC towards a billion.

I've answered the value question many times, but surely you can't think that myself, Elon Musk, Michael Saylor are idiots. Whether you want to believe we are right or wrong, there is clearly a reason (or many) why we believe it has value.

Wanna get laughed at? Go tell someone that Saylor, Musk, Tudor Jones, O'Leary, Druckenmiller - you name him - bought BTC for the hell of it. Yeah, they did it just for fun. WTF are you guys serious?

I could find at least 10 more examples.

[aeden]

What would gann do.
https://1.bp.blogspot.com/_0jQx1USgNAc/ ... +chart.gif
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJ7W-nQ ... rt_radio=1

given the ror per greyscale = 1466.6 days per share
yea - went there as such to cover a coffee per day that just went up also.

[Higgenbotham]

They also then have to answer why rich, smart people would be involved at all if it is what they characterize it as - a tulip bubble or some other childish idea.

I've been over this multiple times.

You don't think rich, smart people were involved in the tulip bubble?

Rich, smart people have been doing bubbles for decades.

So when you see the billionaires and family offices like Tudor Jones and Druckenmiller getting involved in this, these are the guys who operated solely in the post 1971 bubble environment. They understand bubbles and they know what they are doing with regard to bubbles, but in my opinion that is all they know and they became billionaires solely because they are able to latch onto that kind of thinking (up or down).

Rich, smart people like Warren Buffett who didn't establish themselves in the bubble environment don't do bubbles. Buffett doesn't do Bitcoin. Neither does his partner, Charlie Munger, who calls Bitcoin "rat poison".

[Higgenbotham]

But if the quality of the "bad times coming" (I've never denied that this is a major possibility, or even likely, to be sure) is in a digital realm (that's what's happening) increasingly, you have some optionality that is outside of the world order that is repressing its people by controlling banks and currencies.

That's why I did an extensive assessment of the reasons the Texas power grid went down and why rolling blackouts weren't done, and have done ongoing assessments for decades prior. You didn't contribute to or comment on any of that.

[Higgenbotham]

BTC is tailor made for what central banks are doing to their people (if you want freedom) and an answer for social mistrust of governments around the world - it is literally the only thing that can keep them honest at this point (they've stacked gold and can set prices for it, if you haven't noticed). Those are the reasons why it succeeds.

There could have been a well constructed digital currency that could have been introduced 10 or so years ago that would have accomplished that. But Bitcoin won't because it has fundamental flaws that can't be rectified. I wish that weren't the case, but wishing doesn't change the reality.

[aeden]

Established under Families First Coronavirus Response Act passed by Congress in March, the Pandemic Electronic Benefits Transfer (P-EBT)
3.13 million people now enrolled if report is correct. Crash border spread rampant Covid, we have a P-EBT for that.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/fed ... elief-bill
This unholy alliance of unions and government is only going to accelerate the inevitable end of the empire.

[Higgenbotham]

It is untouchable by governments in its essence. They can do NOTHING about its value. They can alter fiat and even gold derivatives or pricing, and have, at their will.

Bitcoin has a price and that can be manipulated through the CME contract on the futures exchange, same as gold. Or it can be manipulated on the bitcoin exchanges by pumping the price with leverage. When the price is done being pumped, it will collapse, same as tulips. Tulips had value and they had a price.

[vincecate]

BTC is tailor made for what central banks are doing to their people (if you want freedom) and an answer for social mistrust of governments around the world - it is literally the only thing that can keep them honest at this point (they've stacked gold and can set prices for it, if you haven't noticed). Those are the reasons why it succeeds.

There could have been a well constructed digital currency that could have been introduced 10 or so years ago that would have accomplished that. But Bitcoin won't because it has fundamental flaws that can't be rectified. I wish that weren't the case, but wishing doesn't change the reality.

You have not made a solid case for your "fundamental flaws that can't be rectified" claim.

You said "it is like a commodity" and "it is more like an asset than a currency" but never really had anything like a "fundamental flaw that can't be rectified".

Bitcoin/Lightning has such low overhead costs (pennies per transaction), so fast (like 2 seconds), and "off blockchain" so it is more private, and no limit on the number of transactions per second, that it has become fantastic technology and currency. Saying it has fatal flaws, without being able to clearly state any, does not make it so.

Bitcoin/Lightning is not everywhere yet but people will move to it as the fees for "on blockchain" transactions go up. So as needed, users will switch. I have it on my new ATM and will be encouraging users to use wallets that support Lightning by giving lower costs when they do. So maybe "ease of use" and "users have not switched yet" arguments can be made, but those will fall with time. Before the Segwit change and Lightning you could claim that Bitcoin had a fundamental limit in the number of transactions it could handle per hour but with Lightning that is no longer the case. This flaw, and the resulting "high cost of on blockchain transactions" has been fixed with Lightning and "off blockchain transactions" It is a wonderful thing. Really.

Cool Breeze is right that Bitcoin is a much more honest and fair currency than the dollar, where they can print trillions more whenever they want. People playing with Bitcoin can't be cheated in the way those holding dollars can. Over time more and more will move to the fair game.

Lets try this another way. What do you think a well constructed digital currency must be able to do that Bitcoin/Lightning can not do?

There are thousands of other digital currencies and yet Bitcoin still has like 60% of the total value of all crypto coins. If there was some fundamental flaw in Bitcoin (which in 2016 you could argue) then it would be much lower percentage and dropping (which it was). But since the SegWit change it has been gaining market dominance. This makes it seem like the market recognizes that it is no longer fundamentally flawed.

[aeden]

https://www.trademoneta.com/russian-int ... accines-2/
marsha marsha marsha again

[Higgenbotham]

BTC is tailor made for what central banks are doing to their people (if you want freedom) and an answer for social mistrust of governments around the world - it is literally the only thing that can keep them honest at this point (they've stacked gold and can set prices for it, if you haven't noticed). Those are the reasons why it succeeds.

There could have been a well constructed digital currency that could have been introduced 10 or so years ago that would have accomplished that. But Bitcoin won't because it has fundamental flaws that can't be rectified. I wish that weren't the case, but wishing doesn't change the reality.

You have not made a solid case for your "fundamental flaws that can't be rectified" claim.

You said "it is like a commodity" and "it is more like an asset than a currency" but never really had anything like a "fundamental flaw that can't be rectified".

Bitcoin/Lightning has such low overhead costs (pennies per transaction), so fast (like 2 seconds), and "off blockchain" so it is more private, and no limit on the number of transactions per second, that it has become fantastic technology and currency. Saying it has fatal flaws, without being able to clearly state any, does not make it so.

Bitcoin isn't structured as a currency, but an asset. For a Bitcoin based system to have a currency, there has to be something on the other side of it. And I've argued there have to be multiple linked "somethings" on the other side of it to make it work in a complex industrial or information age monetary system. You can send an asset or a currency over the wires or Internet from one place to another. I mentioned goldmoney before, which I think was the first asset based system to accomplish this (like you can't wire corn but now you could move gold from place to place instantly, in theory, barring other problems). So you can wire dollars (currency) or Bitcoin (asset), but that doesn't say that Bitcoin can be a monetary system by itself. It could have been a component of a trial monetary system if introduced in that way.

Now that Bitcoin has made its way into the system as an asset and is being treated as an asset, that makes things even harder to reverse. Now there are futures contracts on the CME for Bitcoin and it's down the rabbit hole of being manipulated as just another bubble asset far detached from its true value at present (the value you are ascribing to it), and that process can't be reversed.

If you wire assets around and stop using currency, you have an agricultural age money system. It's not appropriate for an industrial age or information age economic system. It's not complex enough. I would posit (perhaps incorrectly) that what will result from that is a collapse back to an agricultural age economy if a system like that is used. Also, I think if that happens, the surpluses will disappear and there will be no need for commodity money until the system reconstitutes itself. So Bitcoin would go away at that point.

That's what my long post to you the other day restates in a different way.

Sorry, I thought you were done above.

Reading the rest of what you wrote, it never was a technical issue with Bitcoin in terms of its speed or ease of use. I never said that because it could easily be fixed. It's a structural issue in how Bitcoin was structured and introduced as part of an system that is solely asset based and is a mismatch for a complex economy.