so from next week allowed… ok
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Does anyone know why Tesla (Musk) transferred all 11,509 $BTC (now worth $773M) to 7 new wallets yesterday after 2 years of dormancy ? 
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up until now… pure speculations are floating around.
I bet on: either 1. he needs money (as he always does), and doing some btc backed loan stuff
or 2. moved to a custodian bank
… or donated to the trump campaign
… or started building the US strategic bitcoin reserves
… or plans to sell
… or changed to another custody provider
… or anything else really
Probably collateral for free loans (like saylor)
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Sure, gold has at least some inherent value but that value is basically an insignificant portion of the current value so in essence it is a moot point. Same with fiat, you can technically burn some paper for a tiny amount of heat (ignoring that it’s illegal in some places). BTC being digital can technically go to 0.00 but like I said I don’t consider this an actual argument.
This is not a fair argument. From your other comments down in thread I can see you understand BTC at least reasonably (maybe you have done more research since then) but this is like saying a Google Sheets spreadsheet is better than Bitcoin because you don’t have to spend almost no energy at all and you can do it much quicker which is completely missing the point. It’s not quite the If my grandmother had wheels she would have been a bike but it’s a very bad comparison.
There have been many BTC2. They still exist though they are not doing very well. The real reason is that for BTC to have value it needs adoption/consensus. BTC forks are created because of a disagreement in the parameters (like blocksize) and then (most) people dump it for the original because they agree with that. When changes to BTC happen without a disagreement, then they just happen, and no fork is created.
Other than the 21Million limit, isn’t this true of fiat as well? Current money is just some bits in some other (but centralized database). At some places you can exchange this for tokens made out of paper and metal, but this is also ending gradually.
I’m a BTC believer but it’s definitely mostly the second. Basically by definition but I don’t think that’s a bad thing. The underlying technology is valuable in itself but not economically because it is literally open source meaning it’s free. I guess the difference is that BTC supporters will argue that people have not just perceived but given it such value (because by using/buying BTC at such prices you are inherently confirming that value) because of the underlying technology and philosophy which is where it differs from fiat and gold which also have basically no inherent value (as I mentioned above)
In this real world and political systems which one do you really see as more feasible? An ad hoc revolution or a change in the current system. Because you argue that the current system is flawed and should (maybe will) be changed. I start to believe more and more that “The purpose of the system is what it does” so it is like that by design. Ask yourself who really benefits from the current system (especially when salaries keep losing power over time and must be “corrected”) and who has the power to change it. You will find that those two align very well.
Just throwing it out there that I’m a bitcoiner and very much NOT a libertarian or even right wing. But I agree that unfortunately that’s not the norm.
This thread goes back and forth with the times but based on the title I feel like it’s more about Bitcoin than “Should I have BTC in my investment portfolio”
IMO the whole BTC is worthless and only crazy people invest in it vs BTC will 100% moon and only ignorant people don’t invest it in, has already happened more than enough times and it is getting a bit stale.
Almost like it was designed to be like that!
That’s why it’s called mining. Because you don’t produce gold/BTC, you mine them from the existing amount.
So all you gotta do is make sure you move your BTC to a new wallet, “Not today, not tomorrow, but some day (not measured in centuries).”
What @Joe_Coconut is saying is that this is a non issue because you migrate BEFORE it becomes a possibility. The price of hacking the bitcoin network atm is completely known and quantifiable. and it is probably much higher than hacking any other institution in terms of cost/benefit.
The protocol will adopt this and yes, you will then have BTC + BTC quantum computing proof. If there’s no one that wants to keep using the old BTC then it will just be an update. This is how BTC already works today and is not even debatable, it’s just a fact.
That’s my reading backlog. Will this even post? In any case apologies for the ginourmous comment
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Thanks for the very reasoned summary. I did my masters thesis on crypto and was one of the first people to read Satoshi’s paper.
I was mesmerized by it and told everybody I could on the economics forums that I frequented at the time. Including one frequented by tinfoil hatters (it was a an economic collapse forum). Funny thing was, when bitcoin boomed from <$1 to $20 they complained to me saying “why didn’t you sell this to us more?!”
But I myself didn’t mine any bitcoin (no sellers back then). Even though my back of the envelope valued bitcoin at around $200k assuming it achieved status as a store of value alongside gold. This was around 2009/2010.
Why did I not mine any?
- I was an idiot
- I kinda thought “well, the government will step in to ban it”
- I didn’t know as much as I do now and looked at things too simplisticly
- I talked myself out of it (see above) or into inaction (this is a subconscious bias I now actively watch)
- I wasn’t really focussed on making money back then. Just enjoying life
- Mostly, I was an idiot
However, I’m still not 100% convinced about bitcoin. I think bitcoin couldn’t have asked for a better start coming right after the global financial crises and seeing perfect conditions for adoption in various countries in subsequent years due to the economic conditions. Even now, where we may face monetary debasement and inflation from years of pumping money into the system and kicking the can down the road since the 2000 dotcom bust.
My 200k valuation was based on bitcoin achieving store of value status. And recent wins on the ETF front have helped. However, currently it doesn’t trade as a store of value. It currently trades as a speculative asset.
Now, this might not be unexpected given the maturity and unequal distribution of bitcoin. But along with the relatively short and untested history, I prefer actual gold and commodities as a store of value.
BTW, thanks for the grandma/bike link. It cracks me up every time!
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I was a bit worried that I commented something wrong about bitcoin as I got so many responses 
Now I realised it was just a backlog from your side
BTW. Next week is Lugano’s PlanB forum. I think there should be still tickets left. Last year it was great…
yea sorry for the spam to you and maybe other users. I tried to avoid it by gathering it into a single comment but perhaps that didn’t work. I also wasn’t always disagreeing, somethings just offering context or a different POV
No, not at all.
Fiat is supported by the credibility of the government and central bank which is quite a strong reassurance in the short to mid term and if you are in CH or USA for example.
That still doesn’t give it inherent value.
The original quote:
Imagine we all just woke up after sleeping for 20 years. And someone told us that nowadays people are paying more money to buy a string of characters than food, vacations, entertainment and everything else they can buy.
There’s plenty of dead currencies out there and things like hyperinflation which is the other side of the coin (no pun intended). By being controlled by central entities then they are at the mercy of such entities and their value can be manipulated/influences. It’s all a construct in the end.
Land, food, houses and other objects do have inherent value. They can still depreciate economically but there’s always some usefulness in it. That’s not the case with fiat because it is literally a token which by definition is just a representation of something else.
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My point was that fiat it is backed by more than a string of characters (you argued it was the same )
It is backed by trust in the government to manage the currency. In CH we know - more or less- what the currency will be worth in a month’s time.
If you don’t trust the government to manage the currency (Argentina, Turkey,…) then above is not true
yes, on avarage less
So long as inflation is a small and predictable amount like 2% per year then it does the job as a store of value
(see arguments about “why is deflation worse than inflation” )
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The US has value as you need it to pay taxes that would otherwise have your belongings taken away from you and have you incarcerated. Therefore, having dollars has quite a lot of value to many people.
yep, keynes stuff… well, I’m on team deflation.
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And Bitcoin is backed by more than a string of characters.
So I didn’t argue that. I argued that in the end you are storing your value in digital bits whether you buy fiat or Bitcoin. Obviously they are backed by very different things
If the time frame is one month…
I’d argue that it very much doesn’t. It doesn’t do an awful job, it just does a “slightly bad” job. which is why plain fiat is not really used as a store of value.
That doesn’t really make any sense. People also have to pay taxes in Zimbabwean dollars and Turkish Lira for the same reasons you mentioned. That doesn’t make them valuable currencies, quite the contrary.
In any case people are confusing the topic. It all started because it was argued that Bitcoin has no inherent value, unlike gold (which has some inherent value but very little compared to it’s current/attributed value). However the same is true for fiat. The currency and tokens of that currency have no inherent value at all. They are just that, tokens, that represent value and can be exchanged as such.
If I grab a piece of paper that costs nothing, and write a contract to give you 10k CHF, the paper didn’t suddenly become inherently more valuable. The paper is just a token of the legally binding document, the social construct and legal systems that can “enforce” it and whatever it was that I agreed in exchange for that paper. Tomorrow I disappear and suddenly that paper is still paper, but the value it represents is gone.
2 impactful news the last few hours:
- BRICS will allow cryptocurrency investments
- SEC allows Option Trading on Spot Bitcoin ETFs
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