Future of Bitcoin

Anyone know if you can buy bitcoin ETFs in Switzerland? Tried to buy IBIT through interactive brokers but it gives me a message saying “Clients from your country cannot open positions in crypto-related products”.

Maybe European ETNs? https://www.justetf.com/en/how-to/invest-in-bitcoin.html

It’s actually interesting to think about it with a game theory framework. If you are Qatar, is it worth mentioning your position or is it better to stack cheap in silent?

I hope it’s more sophisticated than that :sweat_smile: all we know is, it is in custody at coinbase.

Nothing, I can store the revenue of my work without money debasement. Inflation is theft. Increase in production goes to the people working and is not captured by the government.

It is a public ledger, you can probably check as I think he shared his address in the past.

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But the value of the product of our work often looses value over time. The house a worker has built will deteriorate and need new work with time. The sewer pipe I have sized will need to be resized as the population served by it increases or decreases, the software designed by a software engineer will get hacked or require updates in order to stay competitive with more recent ones…

With a deflationary currency, the value of past work increases with time, such that those who produced work earlier have access to way more capital than those who, for lack of being born earlier, get to produce their own work input later.

A deflationary currency incentivizes those who have it to sit on their money and not search to make productive use of it while an inflationary one encourages people to stay on top of their game, always improve the ways in which they provide value and find new ways to do it, in order to drive in more capital as the one already accumulated will loose value and have them being outcompeted by other more driven actors with time.

Deflation is theft of the future of future generations by the generations who come before them, and theft of the future of those who are not born into capital by those who have the means to transfer it to their heirs.

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Yep. Future generations will be very happy with the inflation we had with fiat… lol

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Are we not being had by the denominator again? A currency acting as a unit of account in balances and contracts shouldn’t have to much influence aside from overhead. If the unit of account gains 10% of value each year, why not just adjust all contracts by this number automatically?

We already do this kind of thing in the opposite case, where the unit of account loses value each year. Think of automatic salary raises, or indexing rent to inflation.

Typical debate between Austrian and keynesian economists. Low time preference vs. high time preference. Individualism vs. Collectivsm. Saving vs. Spending. Efficiency vs. Inefficiency, etc.

The fact that I get capital before younger people is not necessary an issue if the government does NOT intervene, and that’s because the free market is better at allocating capital and determining price. If the market is free, the capital is allocated efficiently and will favor long term innovation.

There is no basis in saying I will sit on my savings, I will just spend what I need when I need, resources will be reallocated, but it will not favor the declining industries or the ones who are no longer innovating (hence favoring the entrepreneurs). Let’s be efficient, there is no issue in promoting long term prosperity vs. inefficient government spending.

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As a deflationary currency can be used as a store of value, the reflexion gets changed a bit: if I store my Bitcoin instead of using it to get goods/services, the circulating supply of Bitcoin diminishes → for an equivalent need for good/supplies, the demand for Bitcoin would increase and so would its value.

This value increase affects:

  • the circulating supply, for which employers can adjust by adjusting salaries (I get paid less and less every year in currency units but the value of the currency I receive remains unchanged as each unit is worth more than it was the year prior). Up to here, everything is fine.

  • the currency I have stored away and isn’t circulating anymore. As the value of the currency units has increased, I need to use less of them to satisfy my needs and my ability to save more of it increases: the more stored capital I have, the higher my ability to store more. This already exists with inflationary currencies as the capital can be put to work to generate passive income but:

  1. in order to do so, the capital has to work and someone, somewhere, has to find a way to produce some kind of value out of it. I don’t work for the dividends I recieve but the company that distributes them has to find a way to generate them and attract capital toward it to do that.

  2. People who choose not to play the game and not invest their capital have their capital slowly loose value over time → new capital can outgrow older sitting capital: a skilled entrepreneur/worker can leverage the income they derive from their skills to have skills actually matter vs a big fat pile of capital deprived of any skill.

The current system is not perfect but inflationary currencies participate to the ability of people who are born without legacy capital to turn their skills into it.

A deflationary currency gives exponential weight to older capital that makes it very difficult to overcome with skills/smarts alone. The effect is not that marked at first but give it a few generations and entrenched wealth would become all but immovable, letting working/value producing people scrabble for what amount of the ever diminishing supply of circulating currency they can put their hands on while people with accumulated capital need but to spend a scrap of it to get an always increasing amount of lesser and lesser paid goods and services.

That is exactly it, indeed. Our individual existence will end with time. If all we value is the limited amount of time we personally get to spend on this Earth (or elsewhere as time goes), then yes, deflation is good, gimme all of it and please, pretty please, make it start at a point in time where I already have some capital accumulated and not too much before that.

If we care about the bigger picture, then humanity will survive our personal existence and that has to be taken into consideration.

The current market is efficient-ish because people have an incentive to trade, in part because money looses value over time. The inflationary currency is an integral part to keeping the market efficient.

Inflation reduces the value of present assets. Past inflation bears almost no bearing on my current ability to use my work and skills to build for myself a desirable situation in society. I don’t fret the high inflation levels of the 60s-70s at all (I would have if I had lived then).

Deflation reduces the value of future assets. Future generations will feel that.

Btc at any. Eth not sure. Im out of cash :grinning:

It was alluded to above that shareholders investing in a pharma company (for example) would expect excess cash to be invested in Pharmaceuticals activities or used to pay down debts, or share buy backs. Shareholders would not be happy if management invest in non pharma activities, nor gold, therefore not BTC either

Of course if you believe BTC is the ultimate asset like Saylor says, it is somehow guaranteed to go up over time, then there is an argument to do what you say…

I’m not sure I fully agree. Yes in principle and in theory what you said is correct. In practice I have my doubts.

In real life what happens is that your salary is always fighting an uphill battle that is masked by “raises” that barely cover inflation rates and sometimes not at all. Not to mention the fact that people become more productive in general over time because they earn more experience and because productivity increases overall. This last one especially is almost always not reflected, hence why there are so many billionaires.

And then yes with an deflationary currency people with already a ton of money can just use it to make more money. This isn’t really any different from today. Yes they are “forced” to invest it but at the same time this isn’t really something that is available to those with less means. Not only do they have a much smaller leverage they also cannot handle nearly as much risk. Because even if long term investing is considered safe, short term it isn’t.

So with a deflationary currency at least everyone gets to benefit from it in a safe way. And investing means that you have to beat the baseline. So maybe only actually useful investments and businesses are made, less consumerism and we can at least slow down the environmental catastrophe that is our current capitalist society.

And before it is mentioned that people would just stop buying almost everything because in 1 year it will be worth 1-2% more. When has that happened? Because currently most if not all consumer purchases are far cheaper down the line. I’m sure you can get a really good price for an iPhone 6s atm, far below any possible deflation rate. In the end people will buy their phones, their food and their holidays. Maybe a slight reduction will occur? But as mentioned before I don’t see that as a bad thing.

I now hold all my crypto at Kraken. The only exchange that never got hacked and is run by competent well known people of the industry.

2FA (Google Authenticator) for login and withdrawing assets each seperate. Global settings lock (GSL) enabled with 3 days. No crypto addresses registered, only my bank account for withdrawing CHF.

I guess this is as safe as an exchange can be?

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Kraken is fine for accumulating from CHF bank account. Just remember: not your keys not your coins. When the value increases you may consider taking it off the exchange (at least a big chunk).

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I should have invested more than 600.- in this dip lol.

It’s all within normal fluctuations for Bitcoin. If it was interesting to buy at 55 kCHF, it should be interesting to buy at 60 kCHF. :wink:

(Not saying it was interesting to buy at that price, just that the difference isn’t meaningful.)

I hear you, the current monetary system is far from perfect. I just think it gives more of a fighting chance for actually linking rewards with skills than a deflationary one would.

0.05M or 0.06M doesn’t matter!

All the big trading platform are very save, until some black swan event happens. Having those coins on a cold wallet at home also has some risks - but different ones. When I used my wallet just recently (used it at the last wave in 2021), my heart pounded if the wallet still works, if I do remember my passwords, if those passwords weren’t hacked… everything has risks at the end. :wink:

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Totally. I moved around 30% to swissquote from cold wallet to avoid a loose it all event.

Just never lose your seed words :sweat_smile:
I use an offline keepass db file just for the seed phrases. And physically on paper.

Btw. test the seed e.g. on a random desktop wallet on a desinfected, firewalled computer.

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