What the hell is (a) bitcoin?

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IMADreamer
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Re: What the hell is (a) bitcoin?

Post by IMADreamer »

G. Keenan wrote:
January 24 22, 3:50 pm
P.S.

Bitcoin gets hailed as "digital gold" and therefore a good store of value because the supply is finite. I believe it's 21 million bitcoins?

So what happens when 21 million coins have been mined? Presumably they become even more valuable as a store of value? But gold at least has industrial uses in the actual world. We actually use gold to make stuff. So again, unless bitcoin gains vastly more real-world utility before 21 million coins are mined, the only thing sustaining its value at that point would be the collective consciousness of investors continuing to believe its worth something. Is there any precedent for an asset that has no actual use value, or extremely minimal use value, just staying valuable forever on hutzpah alone?

Does anyone foresee a world where we're buying a cup of coffee for .00000000001 Bitcoin?

This is madness.
I'm pretty invested in crypto but I really don't see it's utility. I'm in because it's pretty easy to see and follow the cycles of hype. So it's easy money. If there was anyone that didn't see this huge downturn coming back in the fall they probably are too much of an emotional investor or have drank too much of the kool aid to safely be in the space.

I still have several coins in my portfolio but I'm deep in the green on them still because I managed to get in early. I've long since cashed out all my original investment and a good deal of profit so I'm playing with house money. I'm not saying this to make myself seem awesome because I'm definitely not, but as I said the trends are pretty easy to spot. Head over to reddit and follow the crytpo sub. When those morons are shilling all the alt coins, talking about hodl (which alone shows the immaturity of the market), and saying everything is going to moon you know it's selling time. Basically last fall when the last big run up happened I started seeing "(some supposed expert) says Bitcoin to 100k by years end." When you start seeing that sort of thing pop up it's getting out time.

I want to believe there so thing out there that's going to do the banks in and make life better for the little man, but I don't see it in crypto any more. Hell the banks and big money are there manipulating the markets anyway. What will happen is a bunch of poor suckers like Superorganisms brother in law are going get to left holding the bag when all the big money is done.

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Re: What the hell is (a) bitcoin?

Post by AWvsCBsteeeerike3 »

Superorganism wrote:
January 22 22, 6:55 am
Superorganism wrote:
December 8 21, 2:43 pm
My brother who worked 60 hours a week the last 20 years pulled $20k of home equity out to buy an alt-coin last week. It’s now worth $4k and seems dead. Middle class guy with 3 young kids.

Crypto is driving people to bad places.
So this story got a lot worse.

This brother confided in our other brother and myself yesterday that he was in on the GameStop and AMC craze going back a year. Rode the wave, was up big at one point, but decided not to sell because “it’s gonna be the mother of all short squeezes!” However, this was after GameStop had their first squeeze and after AMC had their gamma squeeze. So he got in late, but greedily stayed in even after he was in the black. His Dollar cost average on AMC is like $32. AMC has been on a slow descent for six months, hit $16 yesterday. So yesterday he takes a $15,000 line of credit through Robinhood to bring his average down. “A Hail Mary.”

AMC immediately goes down and they’re already emailing him about margin call. So he liquidates a few of his blue chip stocks so he has liquidity to cover a call.

he goes on to reveal that his initial $35,000 position in AMC was funded by him cashing out an old 401(k). Which he ate fees on.

So he has $50,000 in AMC now. $15,000 of which is credit.

And his wife doesn’t know about it…

We asked him over and over again how could you do this? This is so out of character. The crypto, the AMC, the risk. He said he bought into the hype. He would sit on Reddit all day reading the subreddits for AMC and crypto. He was tired of working so many hours for the last 20+ years. He really believed the “hedge funds” were manipulating the market and were over exposed by naked shorts which would lead to AMC going up to at least $1000 per share when it inevitably squeezed.

So he’s down about 15,000 in AMC as of this morning. Down a lot more in crypto. But he’s rationalizing it. “if AMC doesn’t squeeze, the market is going to collapse. The hedge funds have billions of naked shares. The corruption runs deep. It won’t matter how much debt I have because the whole thing will collapse if they don’t cover.”

It’s like the economic equivalent of Qanon. I can’t say I have sympathy, for whatever reason.
Man, tough to read. It should be noted there are probably hundreds if not thousands of companies that have seen their value destroyed by naked shorting/fails to deliver.

To think amc or GameStop had to go through a real reckoning / short squeeze was understandable for the uninitiated. But never likely to happen. The games not fair.

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Re: What the hell is (a) bitcoin?

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AdmiralKird wrote:
January 22 22, 6:46 pm
Took me a few sittings to make it through all 2+ hours of that, but well worth it. Very interesting. Also made me feel like a techno dinosaur. I did not realize that there was such an online community of crypto/NFT truthers who are just convinced it is the future of finance come hell or high water. His breakdown of their belief system and emotional motivations for putting their money into these scams jives perfectly with the sentiment @Superorganism describes his brother having.

Ironically, YouTube showed me an ad for FTX on this video in which a bunch of Gen Z BIPOC people are sitting around looking hip and asking each other "is it finally time we take the jump into crypto?" It's super obvious who these exchanges are targeting with the angle that crypto will be the little guy's revenge on Wall St, when the whole enterprise is in fact Wall St. and Silicon Valley running yet another financial hustle.

What's going on with the stable coins seems like a massive fraud.

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G. Keenan
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Re: What the hell is (a) bitcoin?

Post by G. Keenan »

A question on deflation re crypto. The video @AdmiralKird posted says that crypto is designed to be deflationary because the total number of coins is capped.

But if a crypto coin can be infinitely divided into fractional shares, what's the difference between deflation and inflation at that point? With actual cash it would seem like deflation can only go so low, presumably bottoming out at 1 cent because you cant get smaller than 1 penny, no? But with a virtual currency what's to stop the number of zeros after a decimal point from going on forever?

Maybe it doesn't matter. Just a hypothetical curiosity.

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Re: What the hell is (a) bitcoin?

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With physical currency, the available denominations tend to adjust with inflation. You see that both on the high end with new larger notes being issued but also the withdrawal of lower valued coins:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Withdra ... tion_coins

I’m not sure there are any examples of BTC style hyper-deflations with traditional currencies, but if there were, I imagine you’d just introduce some new units for like one billionth or whatever.

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Re: What the hell is (a) bitcoin?

Post by G. Keenan »

Arthur Dent wrote:
January 26 22, 11:06 am
With physical currency, the available denominations tend to adjust with inflation. You see that both on the high end with new larger notes being issued but also the withdrawal of lower valued coins:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Withdra ... tion_coins

I’m not sure there are any examples of BTC style hyper-deflations with traditional currencies, but if there were, I imagine you’d just introduce some new units for like one billionth or whatever.
In that case I guess at least crypto avoids the hassle of a central bank needing to talk about and vote on issuing ever-smaller denominations.

Still, it will be confusing in our Web 3.0 blockchain techno utopia to have to think about something costing .00052 BTC or whatever.

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Re: What the hell is (a) bitcoin?

Post by Arthur Dent »

Should reintroduce old British style units like shilling and farthing to handle that problem. 0.00052 could be one bitfarthing.

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G. Keenan
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Re: What the hell is (a) bitcoin?

Post by G. Keenan »

Arthur Dent wrote:
January 26 22, 12:05 pm
Should reintroduce old British style units like shilling and farthing to handle that problem. 0.00052 could be one bitfarthing.
In the future you'll pay your electric bill with a meme.

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G. Keenan
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Re: What the hell is (a) bitcoin?

Post by G. Keenan »

I can't get over that video kird posted. It just blows my mind that people are paying hundreds, thousands, of real dollars to buy NFTs from entities that only exist as a reddit thread or a twitter account.

I will email 100 GRB stable coins to the first person who Venmo's me $100 US Dollars.

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Re: What the hell is (a) bitcoin?

Post by G. Keenan »

I'll try to stop spamming the bitcoin thread after this:

Picasso’s descendants to sell more than 1,000 NFTs linked to never-before-seen ceramic work

LOLOLOLOLOLOL
Purchasers will not own the Picasso ceramic or own the rights to images depicting it: They will be buying digital tokens of which there are limited copies, which the artist’s heirs are hoping will accrue value in their own right.
So they are going to auction 1,000 different pictures of a bowl that they will still own and people will pay money to have one of the "special" pictures of that bowl that is uniquely theirs, even though anyone can right click and save as and then just replicate it endlessly with no consequences whatsoever.

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