Crypto Currency Thread

[Behemoth]

Once again, you show how stuck you are in your job's valuation frameworks.

If you want a very rough analogy to how bitcoin's valuation progresses, consider the reasons the price of gold moves. That'll get you a bit closer. Clue: it has very very little to do with its industrial use.

[Condi]

So you don't actually have an answer then to any of the questions then? All you can do is throw something else into the mix? Its no longer a method of anonymous payment but a hedge against currency devaluation and a safe haven?


This is pointless. You have no answers to any questions other than posing new questions or saying I'm wrong without any evidence to back up your opinion.


See above evangelical Christian analogy.

[Behemoth]

Condi said:

So you don't actually have an answer then to any of the questions then? All you can do is throw something else into the mix? Its no longer a method of anonymous payment but a hedge against currency devaluation and a safe haven?


This is pointless. Its like banging your head against the wall but the wall is always moving. The evangelical Christian analogy has never been more apt, to understand this you have to leave behind logical thought and reasoning, and 'believe' in something you don't understand, and I have to accept what you say.


Please, actually try answering some question with answers rather than posing new questions. It does your argument no favors when you are unable to answer simple things.


Why should the price be different tomorrow?
What are you using to base your investment/trading decisions on?
How can you trade something you evidently can't explain rationally?

Sounds like you're getting a bit upset.

I gave you a clear pointer to valuation & I have long said that bitcoin is a hedge. An asymmetric punt with an extraordinary Sharpe ratio. I have long said that medium of exchange is a sideshow and comes much later.

I don't trade. I occasionally fiddle with a tiny amount of play money, mainly to understand what a typical day trader gets up to & understand the mechanisms behind HF trading bots & what have you. I don't pay much attention to it beyond that.

There are plenty of metrics to follow and base investment decisions on. But you'd have to step outside your boxes of ready made fundamentals and understand a bunch of new metrics like hash power, mining difficulty, supply halving, fee markets, stock to flow and so on. I very much doubt you're ready for all that.

[Condi]

Behemoth said:

Sounds like you're getting a bit upset.

I gave you a clear pointer to valuation & I have long said that bitcoin is a hedge. An asymmetric punt with an extraordinary Sharpe ratio. I have long said that medium of exchange is a sideshow and comes much later.

There are plenty of metrics to follow and base investment decisions on. But you'd have to step outside your boxes of ready made fundamentals and understand a bunch of new metrics like hash power, mining difficulty, supply halving, fee markets, stock to flow and so on. I very much doubt you're ready for all that.

Not upset at all. Maybe frustrated because you can't, or refuse, to give sensible answers.

You gave no pointer to valuation other than to look at the gold price. Gold has been a store of value since about 4000BC. It is used by governments all over the world as a store of sovereign wealth, and it is used in huge quantities in India to show off. Bitcoin is not gold, and vaguely saying that its valuation can be compared to gold is a cop out for anything more substantial. Bitcoin dropped 30% or so the other day. Gold didnt. Gold has been going up, bitcoin has been going down. The evidence doesn't support you.


Please, do explain. How does hash power, mining difficulty, supply halving and fee markets affect the price? What are these things, why do they change, who decides when they change, or what is an individual's response to them changing. Rather than giving vague ideas please be specific. I'm all ears. Educate and be positive, rather than being aloof and evangelical.

[Behemoth]

Far too novel & complex to cover in a forum post. If you're really interested, do some research.

Read a book or two:

https://www.lopp.net/bitcoin-information/books.htm...

This list of resources is generally pretty decent:

https://www.lopp.net/bitcoin-information.html

Once you've made some headway, you will better appreciate what these are indicating:

https://charts.woobull.com/

[Condi]

Behemoth said:

Far too novel & complex to cover in a forum post. If you're really interested, do some research.

Break it down, its only 4 variables. If you understand it you should be able to explain it simply.

Edited by Condi on Wednesday 8th April 13:57

[DonkeyApple]

p1stonhead said:

It won’t happen in my lifetime (and I’m 33) so no point worrying about it. It’ll either stay as it is as fringe ‘investment’ or lawmakers will ban it IMO.

The third option is that it finds a use and becomes regulated. Easier to regulate an asset that has a digital identity than it was to regulate cash.

Revolutionaries would just be left buying goods from non FATEF compliant countries.

[Behemoth]

Condi said:

Break it down, its only 4 variables. If you understand it you should be able to explain it simply.

Edited by Condi on Wednesday 8th April 13:57

Nope, there are way more. You need to do the research. I've offered you the plate, you now need to feed yourself. If you can't be arsed to dig a bit deeper, it's pretty easy to search by appending "effect on bitcoin price" to each term. Did you learn about oil or cable from a couple of forum posts?

[Condi]

Behemoth said:

Nope, there are way more. You need to do the research. I've offered you the plate, you now need to feed yourself. If you can't be arsed to dig a bit deeper, it's pretty easy to search by appending "effect on bitcoin price" to each term. Did you learn about oil or cable from a couple of forum posts?

So you can't explain and can't even be bothered to try and explain it.

Great, thanks.

Funny how you berate me for 'not being arsed' yet you're the one telling me I don't understand it and yet can't be arsed to even explain the basics. Anyone would think you don't actually know yourself and prefer to sit in some aloof mystical world. The comparisons with religion are uncanny. Continue shilling your coins; this 'store of value' you bang on about isn't much use if it can fall 30% in one day!

Edited by Condi on Wednesday 8th April 14:44

[Benbay001]

Behemoth said:

If you're really interested, do some research.

Read a book or two:

https://www.lopp.net/bitcoin-information/books.htm...

There is a world of difference between typing out a few lines on a forum and reading a couple books.

[Behemoth]

To paraphrase your response to another thread here just now, if you literally google and click the first result then you'll see.

You're close to becoming a time wasting troll and I'm not going to spoon feed you however many ad hominems you try and throw. You're clearly far more interested in that than finding out how bitcoin works.

[Condi]

Behemoth said:

To paraphrase your response to another thread here just now, if you literally google and click the first result then you'll see.

You're close to becoming a time wasting troll and I'm not going to spoon feed you however many ad hominems you try and throw. You're clearly far more interested in that than finding out how bitcoin works.

You can't spoon feed because you can't explain how it works in a simple way. The complexity and the ignorance is what sells the idea. A bit like magic, once people understand it they can form their own opinion and see all the holes in it. Once the illusion is shattered people will understand they are paying thousands of pounds for something utterly worthless and that terrifies you because you have money invested in something deep down at least part of you knows to be nonsense.

I would LOVE someone to explain it to me. Go back through this thread and that is literally all I've wanted. In simple terms, explain how it works and what advantages it brings to average Joe's over the current banking system. Not one person has been able to do that in a way which stands up to scrutiny.

[dimots]

Condi said:

You can't spoon feed because you can't explain how it works in a simple way. The complexity and the ignorance is what sells the idea. A bit like magic, once people understand it they can form their own opinion and see all the holes in it. Once the illusion is shattered people will understand they are paying thousands of pounds for something utterly worthless and that terrifies you because you have money invested in something deep down at least part of you knows to be nonsense.

I would LOVE someone to explain it to me. Go back through this thread and that is literally all I've wanted. In simple terms, explain how it works and what advantages it brings to average Joe's over the current banking system. Not one person has been able to do that in a way which stands up to scrutiny.

Forget the banking system. There's your simple advantage. You don't need banks.

[DonkeyApple]

dimots said:

Forget the banking system. There's your simple advantage. You don't need banks.

Why? How does a crypto do away with the need for banks?

[anonymous-user]

Here is my attempt to explain a couple of things about how it works that, for me, made the investment case for my current (very small as a proportion of my overall portfolio and happy to lose all the money I put in it) holding

These two things may well not be enough to convince someone to look into it further for themselves and it is certainly not intended to act as advice or any encouragement to invest

1. the transaction is proof. Once the transaction has happened, that's it. It is done. Unlike, say, gold, where you need to be sure that the bar you received is gold (not, say, tungsten) and that it is good deliverable. Let alone worrying about carting it from one side of the world to the other and storing it.

2. the ledger is distributed, public and immutable (so far). There is no need for a trusted (using the word loosely) third party. The decentralised nature of the ledger means that transactions can be peer to peer and that every transaction is recorded and verified by many independent participants who are each individually rewarded for doing so. There is no reliance on "the bank" to verify or make the transaction. Moreover, the ledger is public and every transaction can be tracked from the moment every coin was mined to wherever it is now.

I think these two things, plus some other stuff will be able to be combined at some point to make a use case for btc. I don't know if that will be store of value or something else that no one has even thought of yet. I am also perfectly happy if I am wrong and there is no use case ever and the whole thing blows up taking my invested money with it

Scarcity is worth a mention, but hey ho meh really.

Finally, I was impressed by the game theory elements attached to mining / fees / halvings etc. that are outlined in the original whitepaper (before you put 1p in bitcoin, you must read that surely!?!?!) and it is a pleasure to see them playing out.

Edited by anonymous-user on Wednesday 8th April 18:04

[anonymous-user]

DonkeyApple said:

Why? How does a crypto do away with the need for banks?

this is similar to the scarcity argument to me. sort of hey ho meh

it could eliminate the need for a bank to be involved in many transactions: peer to peer secure and trusted network and all that

but that isn't the only things that banks do of course and I can see no route to btc giving someone a mortgage, or a loan to buy a car, or conducting a flotation of a company on the stock market etc. etc. or many of the other things that banks do

[Condi]

dimots said:

Forget the banking system. There's your simple advantage. You don't need banks.

Does Bitcoin offer a savings account which pays interest? (no)
Does Bitcoin offer £85k government protection? (no)
Does Bitcoin offer a mortgage product? (no)
Does Bitcoin offer tax efficient investments like ISAs? (no)
Does Bitcoin provide me with a credit card? (no)
Does that non existent credit card have section 7 protection? (no)
Can I pay my salary into a Bitcoin account? (no)
Will Bitcoin refund my losses if the account is hacked? (Lol.) (no)

The only part it replaces is the ability to transfer money between people. Western Union do the same.

Banks are good, banks are useful. Banks are far more than just somewhere to deposit money. Some of the services above might be undertaken by other firms over time. Someone could lend Bitcoin in return for interest, for example, but how is that different to the current system? You've just replaced a bank dealing in £ with a bank dealing in Bitcoin.

[dimots]

Condi said:

Does Bitcoin offer a savings account which pays interest? (no)
Does Bitcoin offer £85k government protection? (no)
Does Bitcoin offer a mortgage product? (no)
Does Bitcoin offer tax efficient investments like ISAs? (no)
Does Bitcoin provide me with a credit card? (no)
Does that non existent credit card have section 7 protection? (no)
Can I pay my salary into a Bitcoin account? (no)
Will Bitcoin refund my losses if the account is hacked? (Lol.) (no)

The only part it replaces is the ability to transfer money between people. Western Union do the same.

Banks are good, banks are useful. Banks are far more than just somewhere to deposit money. Some of the services above might be undertaken by other firms over time. Someone could lend Bitcoin in return for interest, for example, but how is that different to the current system? You've just replaced a bank dealing in £ with a bank dealing in Bitcoin.

I didn't say it will replace banks, I said you don't NEED banks. It's digital cash. You don't need banks or governments to create it. You don't need banks to spend it.

That's where it starts. It's very simple. You wanted simple.

[anonymous-user]

Condi said:

Does Bitcoin offer a savings account which pays interest? (no)
Does Bitcoin offer £85k government protection? (no)
Does Bitcoin offer a mortgage product? (no)
Does Bitcoin offer tax efficient investments like ISAs? (no)
Does Bitcoin provide me with a credit card? (no)
Does that non existent credit card have section 7 protection? (no)
Can I pay my salary into a Bitcoin account? (no)
Will Bitcoin refund my losses if the account is hacked? (Lol.) (no)

The only part it replaces is the ability to transfer money between people. Western Union do the same.

Banks are good, banks are useful. Banks are far more than just somewhere to deposit money. Some of the services above might be undertaken by other firms over time. Someone could lend Bitcoin in return for interest, for example, but how is that different to the current system? You've just replaced a bank dealing in £ with a bank dealing in Bitcoin.

There is an important difference. In a system such as the GBP / UK, banks create money and there isn't an upper limit on how much money can be created.

In the bitcoin system that is not possible: miners create coins and when the ceiling number is reached, that's it. There are no more. Of course each coin is divisible, but the maximum number of whole coins is capped at 21m

Whether you think that is important or not is a wholly separate question / debate, but it is very different from currencies such as the £$€

[Condi]

dimots said:

I didn't say it will replace banks, I said you don't NEED banks. It's digital cash. You don't need banks or governments to create it. You don't need banks to spend it.

That's where it starts. It's very simple. You wanted simple.

Ok, so how is this an advantage? You could get by without a bank account today, if you wanted. Get paid in cash, spend cash.

JPJPJP said:

There is an important difference. In a system such as the GBP / UK, banks create money and there isn't an upper limit on how much money can be created.

In the bitcoin system that is not possible: miners create coins and when the ceiling number is reached, that's it. There are no more. Of course each coin is divisible, but the maximum number of whole coins is capped at 21m

Whether you think that is important or not is a wholly separate question / debate, but it is very different from currencies such as the £$€

Understood. Inflation is caused by the printing of money, in theory impossible with something capped at 21m coins. So what is the advantage of this? Traditional economics says that some level of inflation is desirable, and deflation is bad for the economy because nobody spends.

Edited by Condi on Wednesday 8th April 21:22