In the meantime: MicroStrategy at 408 usd, 495% ytd
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It’s only up 20% if you bought it when I did in 2000 
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Buying or creating art for cheap and selling it for a lot of money seems like a good way to launder money.
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I hear you (I’ll add that to my reading/listening list; thanks!).
My stance isn’t about defending the fiat system as ideal. I recognize its practicality and the progress it has enabled despite its flaws (it has many). I agree that many people suffer under the current system; I’m not (yet) convinced BTC is the silver bullet.
I’m generalizing, but most crypto bros are in it to make a buck and “freedom”, not some altruistic way of fixing the government/society.
BTC might work well for those of us fortunate enough to allocate resources toward it, but that doesn’t directly address the broader systemic issues affecting most people today. Like, there is only so much BTC being produced, and it is finite. If those who can’t afford it on the same scale as us (ex. citizens holding Venezuelan bolivar / Argentine peso / etc…) — won’t they be left behind, and will there still be a class war? Same goes for those Swiss who do not have any extra savings and are living paycheck-to-paycheck (like the poor guy who only made a 100% return because of expensive “waterdrop” from the other forum post here).
I think what you are referring to is the loss of the middle class — I personally think the only way to get to a more balanced wealth distribution is through taxation (progressive wealth taxes and likely more aggressive than they currently are in Switzerland, at least). My friends in other countries are surprised that Switzerland even has wealth taxes.
The only way all of that happens is if we vote to elect leaders that make it their mission to do so; but many are cynical with the illusion of choice and the money in politics
(like in the USA, where it’s essentially a 2-party system; I was sort of baffled the choices put out were between Trump and Biden initially).
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And on that note it would be very interesting if blockchain tech could make for transparent voting records while still maintaining a voter’s privacy (given all the voter fraud claims). Guess it needs to be fire-tested.
Could have even been useful in the Gore vs. Bush election too…
I gave up on politics, politicians and policies. My vote and political statement is only expressed in the holding of Bitcoin. Everything will evolve as it has to be.
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I don’t think we can say that it’s been through a crisis like the 2008 one. I’m talking about such global crises, where investors try to limit their losses and get out of the riskiest assets. My understanding of the current hype is that it’s still mostly speculation and nobody uses BTC as a store of value (unlike gold or maybe the Swiss frank) as its volatility prevents that. So I’d expect the money to flee it during the next global crisis, more so than e.g. stocks.
Most of us are probably there indirectly already because of indexes including companies such as MSTR (I think it’s in VT).
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I would argue COVID crash was similar to 2008. Plenty of people panic sold equities during COVID “to limit their losses”. Many others who were leveraged (in equities) where their brokers margin called their positions. BTC acted like a risk asset, and GOLD did as well (even if people sometimes think of them as a hedge to stock crashes).
I do agree with you that it’s still mostly speculation, which is why I don’t mind putting a small sized bet on it and seeing what happens.
That is exactly what already happened in the past 2 major drawdowns:
S&P COVID drawdown = -36%
BTC COVID drawdown = -66%
S&P 2022 drawdown = -27%
BTC 2022 drawdown = -77%
Again, to me this means they are correlated. It’s all about liquidity.
True - It’s 0.03% of the fund ($300 for every $1M in VT), negligible (and not your keys)
Definitely every risk asset crashed during Covid . And so did BTC. However the only difference between Covid crash and older crashes was that the pain was not prolonged. If the Covid crash was not mitigated by govt, everything would have collapsed for a very long time and we would have had bad time across asset classes except bonds maybe.
I think BTC holders have shown great resiliency over the years going through all the crashes.
I think there are two types of BTC holders
- those who actually are in long term. period. This group believes in BTC and have real faith. One can agree with them or not but it doesn’t matter.
- those who are just trying to trade it and most likely love the volatile nature because it brings opportunities to trade
Most likely people who will get burned in any severe crash wouldn’t be long term holders. Just like any other risk asset, most traders would lose money but some who would make money will make the headlines.
2022 bear was 9 months;
2020 bear was 1 month; (same money printing playbook as 2008)
2008 bear was just under 17 months;
I agree, bag holders become "HODL’ers. I’d only add that some might not have had real faith (rather hope, or they were down so much they just held).
The only real losers are the ones that capitulate during the crypto winters, and therefore haven’t been long term holders.
I posted the blackrock paper earlier, but the thread becomes monster…
60d correlation is not that high. Thats why there is significant diversification benefit in a multi asset portfolio
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No. Because they will need to spend it. Thats why fiat gets more concentrated over time, while bitcoin gets more evenly distributed over time.
Today the super rich dont have cash, actually they are mainly very in debt.
People with little savings who cannot invest in equities or real assets suffer, because they must have a cash buffer which continues to depreciate.
Just look empirically at countries with high inflation vs countries with very low inflation. Argentina basically destroyed itself from being the richest country in the world by too much government spent and loose monetary policy.
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I dont want to get political, but also we cannot leave this without facts and data.
If you look at the gini coefficients of countries this assumption is really not true.
But i suggest to focus only on bitcoin (not crypto) in this thread.
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In the meantime : Happy new All Time High 
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Well that’s assuming there’s no “final winter” that’d be a final period of stagnation at a low value. If the price of an asset keeps going through new ATH periodically, selling high and buying low is indeed a strategy for which you mostly pay the opportunity cost. But there’s no guarantee that this will last forever, in particular if countries end up with more regulation when it comes to cryptocurrencies, like China did, seemingly successfully. I don’t expect that to happen with the current hype, but I do think that’s a distinct possibility with the next crisis on the scale of the FTX one or bigger.
On average, the real loser is the average BTC investor, given that it has negative expected value (you get out what others put in, minus fees, since there’s no cashflow).
I don’t think there’s any evidence of that, actually I don’t think we can prove or disprove this. Maybe if all centralized exchanges had most of the BTC and would agree on publishing stats about this we could get an idea, but we’re far from there.
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I don’t think we can say average BTC investor is losing money.
Their average cost basis is 25K and price is 93K. So average person needs to be in profit if they are long term holders .
Of course some have 10,000X returns and some have 2% returns.
Countries like china are the best example why we need bitcoin as a censorship resistant means of pay.
Imagine the government can freeze your Cbdc currency when your social credit score get too low.
Scary!
I feel a bit like “Old man yelling at cloud” but anyway …
To my knowledge to this day the “Blockchain Oracle Problem” is still unsolved. I’d argue it’s impossible to solve but I’m happy to be proven wrong. Thus, somebody or something in the real world, that is corruptible, is going to judge whether you are a real person that gets a vote, or not.
This is almost meaningless. The only reason it’s not completely meaningless is “relatively” high fees incurred by sending around Bitcoins. But anyway, one address can hold BTC of multiple people (exchanges) and on the inverse people can have multiple addresses.
I wonder if this balance is something worth aiming for in and of itself. Do you not risk suppressing innovation with a progressive wealth tax and making everybody poorer? In the end you can’t eat money, it’s more like a mechanism to direct energy & attention towards what people find valuable and this kind of intervention might disturb those signals, leading to a misallocation of resources. You might improve the situation on paper while at the same time people are worse off in aggregate.
Enjoy your profits everybody.
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okay. So you are saying no one know the distribution of BTC by people… right?
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