What’s your target?
Considering there are close to 20k altcoins, I feel the btc dominance measure to be really misleading nowadays
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60 - 70% - the crypto space needs indeed to wash out a looot of worthless sh*coin-projects
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Bear markets = bullshit cleanup
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After suspending all customer withdrawals last month, crypto lender Celsius Network filed for bankruptcy on Wednesday. Now, its 1.7 million customers are left wondering when and if they’ll get their money back.
It’s not looking good. The company owes $4.7 billion to its customers (and has $5.5 billion in total liabilities), but its current assets are only worth $4.3 billion—down from $25 billion in October. Most of those assets are tied up in bitcoin-mining rigs and other crypto projects; Celsius said it has just $167 million of cash on hand.
Bankruptcy court proceedings could take years, and Celsius has reminded customers that they could be considered “unsecured creditors”—a classification that would put them low on the priority list to get repaid. They would “have no earmarked rights to any funds or anything,” James Van Horn, a partner at Barnes & Thornburg in Washington, told Reuters.
Zoom out: The implosion of crypto companies who owe customers billions is a new phenomenon, and the decisions courts make regarding repayment will set a precedent. That precedent could be applied pretty widely, because crypto firms are falling like college students when “Tubthumping” comes on: Celsius was the third major crypto company to file for bankruptcy in the past two weeks.—JW
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Though then you’re not investing but rather speculating on price. It’s like keeping gold in a safe: it won’t multiply and produce other useful assets.
The concept behind the semantics actually matters but I see your point. Enjoy your evening/night.
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But then, in such a scenario, what would even be the point of crypto? If you are going to trust intermediaries, might as well use regular fiat currencies, with reserve currencies as a fall back.
You can’t have your cake and eat it. Either cryptos are there to remove the need for trust from financial transactions, and it is facing a lot of challenges but may have some use, or it is just another way to transfer funds and enforce contracts while still relying on trusted intermediaries, and then it is far from the most efficient way to do so.
Either cryptos have a use, or they are a fad. I’m all for arguing for their use but please stop pretending being a fad has an intrinsic use. Getting more valuable because more people put value into it driving even more people to put value into it is the exact way Sam Bankman-Fried described yield farming, and also the exact definition of a pyramid scheme. We’re way past that, schemers have had their time, now, please, start making some sense (not speaking for true cryptos advocates like @Oliv who actually make some sense when laying out their arguments).
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In your scenario, you need an internet connection and a relationship with a trusted intermediary. That is not much different from needing a relationship with a bank, which could be a foreign one. If autocratic governments can prevent the second one to be effective, they can take action against the first in much the same way.
Maybe I’m blind but I fail to see how someone who would have access to a regulated crypto exchange couldn’t have access to USD (or another reserve currency).
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The kind of passive income that celsius was providing?
He said it’s the traditional financial system that’s ripping people off by taking their deposits, using them to make money, and then claiming it can only pay tiny interest rates. “Somebody is lying,” Mashinsky said. “Either the bank is lying or Celsius is lying.”
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Speculation can have other components in it. I can speculate on products that have some sort of returns by betting that they’ll develop a new functionality, or get some regulatory approval that will boost their returns without the returning money coming from the new people signing into the scheme.
Pyramid schemes are a kind of speculation that is doomed to fail from the start: it relies on an ever growing flow of new money to pay “returns” to the previous participants. Cryptos can fall in one or the other bucket depending on our outlook on them. I fail to see where actual returns would come from in your proposal.
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If you want something, you have to put something. What is the difficulty of writing down in a piece of paper a seed phrase and store in two different physical places (your home and that of your parents for instance).
I cannot accept people saying cryptos are complicated while doing FIRE with ETFs is WAY way way more complicated.
Find a reputable broker, find the tax matters and do them, check fees, learn all the things about ETFs, learn about difference between those and bonds, learn about indices, what is Vanguard?, What is TER?, distributing? picking up the ones you want or you think you want, rebalance portfolios, etc.
On top of that guess what would happen with your money if the broker you chose would go bankrupt.
Seriously? A hardware wallet is up and running in minutes. A software wallet like MyCrypto or Wasabi takes 5 minutes to get up and running.
If someone has the knowledge to invest in ETFs, he can learn the basic crypto things in a few days.
Edit: I am referring to a scenario where you are not planning to put all your life savings on a crypto wallet. That is absurd unless you plan to speculate.
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You are supposed to write it in a way that it doesn’t look like a BTC seed phrase man. You are not going to put it in an envelope “THIS IS MY BTC WALLET SEED PHRASE”.
Btw, you still need your password besides the passphrase.
The latest interviews of Ben Felix with Rational Reminder are eyes opening.
It is worth listening.
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You can go seedless as well if you choose a multisig, it works pretty well but I understand it is not for everyone. That’s why the news that postfinance will offer custody to their clients is quite important, it will help many
Hardware wallets aren’t as safe as you think:
That said, I have one and I wasn’t hacked, worked flawlessly. But I found it difficult to think of a way to store the seed backup. In the end I figured out some scheme with nested KeePass databases that nobody would figure out (I wouldn’t share this if I still had any cryptos). But if I would’ve died, it would’ve been lost.
If physical access becomes a possibility, it’s not particularly secure. So, I guess the idea would be to have some spending wallet on your phone with limited funds and than go to your safe deposit box to recharge from the hardware wallet every so often.
At that point, why not just use a bank account with FDIC / FINMA protection for the spending wallet? The effect of inflation will be minimal on low amounts for a short period of time.
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One easy option is Dropbox/GoogleDrive/iCloud + Cryptomator. Point and click. You choose a strong password for the cloud and a different one for the Cryptomator and AES256 does the rest.
Then a copy always on your computer + the one in the cloud.
Why spending money on a hardware wallet?
But yeah, there are problems : If you die. If you forget the password, etc. As you said, it is not to put your whole life savings in there, not right now at least.
For me cryptos are a last-resort option if CBDCs become tyrannical. And for that the ways to use and operate them is not that complicated.
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Sure. I agree. But that’s the whole point of crypto isn’t it? If you want traditional banking, you already have it.
It is going to be better than waking up one day and:
- See how your currency adds two trailing 0’s every few weeks/months like Zimbabwe
- See how the government steals your money from the bank (Cyprus)
- Go for a weekend to the country side and wake up on monday seeing you cannot retire more than a few dozen bucks per day (Argentina)
- Go for a weekend to hike in a volcano and come back on monday seeing your whole economy has been dollarized (Ecuador)
- Have the courage and dignity to denounce highest establishment crimes and be cut-off from any kind of income source (Snowden, Asange)
- Seeing that one day you are not “a good citizen” and a bureucrat freezes all your CBDC. No way to pay for anything not even groceries. Not even a way to pay back to someone that buys them for you. (China in the near future? Europe maybe by 2035 or 2040?)
- Etc. etc.
Then you realize spending a few days learning the basics of crypto and how to manage/safely store your wallet is the highest return investment you can make.
Long life to cryptocoins!
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Also, unfortunately for BTC, its transactions are traceable. So you may have your money, but cannot use it.
No inflation protection, no store of value, no currency, no anonymity = no use case.
Also: Nothing can or will ever exist independently from society, so society’s organizations (governments, groups, corporations etc.) will always get you in the end, if they want to. Also, there will always be taxes to pay in society in some form, whether governments exist or not.
Still, I’m fascinated by how fascinated crypto bros are with this new finance toy.
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Bitcoin is unconfiscable, and their value is backed up on this attribute. Instead cash, gold, stocks, cars… are potentially confiscable.
Also Bitcoin can be bought in P2P exchange without KYC, ie. https://hodlhodl.com
What is the best bitcoin exchange (with KYC) in Switzerland? Maybe lykke, swissquote…?
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