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Bitcoin

It does the rounds every 4 years, I expect to read his latest plan for getting it back around the end of the year/early '25.
 
If the 'wallet' holding onto your BTC investment is a physical thing like a hard drive or computer that you have to guard/password protect/backup etc., then I'm not sure that is a particularly secure platform.
 
beammeup said:
I wonder if anyone here invests "successfully" in any form of Crypto?
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A buddy of mine threw beer money at Bitcoin years ago. He did not become fabulously wealthy, although he wishes now he put more in obv. Over the years it paid off the house, paid for an addition and the wifes car and a couple of nice vacations He is still a working stiff, but still has a bit tucked away.

I would say he made out ok on beer money.
 
mykel said:
A buddy of mine threw beer money at Bitcoin years ago. He did not become fabulously wealthy, although he wishes now he put more in obv. Over the years it paid off the house, paid for an addition and the wifes car and a couple of nice vacations He is still a working stiff, but still has a bit tucked away.

I would say he made out ok on beer money.
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How did he do that? How did he convert crypto into cash?
 
matthewr said:
I don't really follow this stuff any more, but people seem to me to be misunderstanding the BTC trade. The trade is not about holding it long enough to eventually make gazillions as BTC becomes the new world currency or whatever. The strat is taking some of the money that all the people who lose their life savings and/or house are paying out. The thing that is stopping most people making this trade is that, even in the world of finance, most people are not massive dicks.

ISTM that BTC can be thought of as a derviative where the underlying is not interst rates, government debt or even some future as yet undetermined real world use for BTC. The underlying is people losing their life savings. i.e. when the eleventy billion market crashes the money doesn't cease to exist it goes somewhere -- and the BTC trade is being the somewhere by taking profit along the way.

Which is why one suspects a largepart of the "somewhere" is the Russian mob and other people who have no issue with the being a massive dick thing.

IMHO the end game for BTC is energy costs. Let's be optimistic and assume that it's the energy requirements of AI that drive BTC to a hard zero rather than a climate catatrophe.

But, like I say, I mostly ignore this stuff these days so if someone can correct my logic here then please do.
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If energy becomes much more expensive will that not increase the value of those Bitcoin already mined ? And how will people pay their gas/electricity bills anyway... In any case AI requirements are 5-10 years away and climate catastrophe after that: plenty of time for Bitcoin to triple in value...
I think there is a large segment that don't trust the $ (ie US govt) with all their money. Risks of printing too many, political risk ie a Trump dictatorship, freeze your account for whatever reason, WW3, etc etc They are not all gangsters or money launderers.
 
wacko said:
If energy becomes much more expensive will that not increase the value of those Bitcoin already mined ? And how will people pay their gas/electricity bills anyway... In any case AI requirements are 5-10 years away and climate catastrophe after that: plenty of time for Bitcoin to triple in value...
I think there is a large segment that don't trust the $ (ie US govt) with all their money. Risks of printing too many, political risk ie a Trump dictatorship, freeze your account for whatever reason, WW3, etc etc They are not all gangsters or money launderers.
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AI shows generational developments every 6 months. Compelling new use cases emerge literally all the time and it will be massively disruptive across all human activities and industries. The *very obvious* potential for great utility and huge profits will attract vast amounts of money, resources and talent. AI is already building better tools for building AI. The pace of development is going to be exponential and will be shocking.

In contrast, BTC has no underlying value and no utility. It's based on two ideas:

1) Someone will eventually find a single useful, high value activity it can be used for, at which point the market will correct to price BTC based on that. Whatever utility arises would have to be transformative enough to justify the $tn market cap it keeps giving itself -- really clever ledgers that revolutionise, erm, accounting practices, say, is not going to cut it.

Given nobody has come up with anything so far and nobody has a remotely compelling suggestion the chances of this happening I think are very low. If you have excess capital and a high risk appetite then speculative investments in AI related companies and start ups looks way more attractive.

2) BTC's extreme price volatility means it can be traded for profit. Absent of 1) though it is a strict zero sum with no underlying and vol and profit comes entirely from people being willing to put money in and subsequently lose it. If you want to make a case for BTC you have to start with this and explain what it is and where the value that justifies it's price is and where the money is coming from.

As a currency it is basically useless. It's commodity money and has all the problems that come with that. It also lacks all of the benefits of modern money that we use to manage developed economies and, to some extent, deal with economic problems. If you really think BTC has a currency usage then you might as well be in favour of the gold standard because as an alternative to modern, fiat money it would work in a very similar way.

If you want a hedge against the $ and a potential future Trump authoritarian regime and the collapse of western democracy then I would suggest for normal people your domestic currency (where all your assets and liabilities are) and for wealthy people a hard commodity that doesn't suffer massive volatility and has a long history of spiking when shit goes bad. Gold is the obvious example.
 
wacko said:
I think there is a large segment that don't trust the $ (ie US govt) with all their money. Risks of printing too many, political risk ie a Trump dictatorship, freeze your account for whatever reason, WW3, etc etc They are not all gangsters or money launderers.
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This is still the bit I don't get. If someone really thinks society is about to collapse why would they rely on a currency that needs a reliable communications infrastructure and large amounts of energy to be used. Surely they'd be better off burying a trunk of shiny coins in the garden.
 
In the run up to 2008 I used to sometimes follow Max Keiser after stumbling across his show on Resonance FM. It was kind of interesting to get an alternative take on things and the BBC even gave him a show at one point.

Eventually I realised the world hadn't ended after all and he didn't really have much insight - his shows were just him repeating the same schtick that everyone should buy as much gold as possible because the End Times were just around the corner.

Out of morbid curiosity I just checked his twitter feed for the first time in 15 years. He sig now says he is the 'High Priest of Bitcoin' and he's moving to El Salvador.

*sigh*
 
wacko said:
^^^ with Nvidia up 255% in a year I think we missed that boat too...
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That rather proves my point. NVIDIA (and other companies in related technologies) has gone up because they have made major innovations that both drive their business and, specifically, boost the AI sphere which is going to generate all these transformative changes in multiple industries. Since their Ampere generation they have boosted raw TFLOPS about 1000x. So 1000x in 8 years compared to peak Moore's Law in the PC revolution era of about 10x over 5 years and then 100x over 10.

Their last generation (Hopper) is the basis of a lot of AI progress in the GPT-4 era and they used that AI gen to drive chip design in building their new generation (Blackwell) which is a 30x performance leap over Hopper with has a 25x cost and energy reduction. They also have coming this generation or next generational advances in lithography (designing the masks used to make the chips) which looks set to keep this exponential, virtuous circle growth going.

Hence 255%.

This all might of course go wrong, hit some roadblock (technical problems or regulatory changes) and the price drops. But unlike BTC there is a there, there that people can explain and talk about and it's not just "this is really cool I bet someone will think of something really amazing it can be used for at some point".
 
mykel said:
A buddy of mine threw beer money at Bitcoin years ago. He did not become fabulously wealthy, although he wishes now he put more in obv. Over the years it paid off the house, paid for an addition and the wifes car and a couple of nice vacations He is still a working stiff, but still has a bit tucked away.

I would say he made out ok on beer money.
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Did he effectively convert the bitcoins back in cash, or is he only talking about the Bitcoin's progression, and his virtual gains ? In which case he hasn't made a penny yet.

At my few attempts with shares, I managed several times to sell on the exact day of the all-time low, just like the institutional investors expected me to :cool: and I am way not the only one very good at this. Not touched any shares for the last 15 years now.
 
Cheese said:
Did he effectively convert the bitcoins back in cash, or is he only talking about the Bitcoin's progression, and his virtual gains ? In which case he hasn't made a penny yet.

At my few attempts with shares, I managed several times to sell on the exact day of the all-time low, just like the institutional investors expected me to :cool: and I am way not the only one very good at this. Not touched any shares for the last 15 years now.
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Cashed out. He goes to work every day and gets his hands dirty. As a regular working stiff, he does not play at the level where you can just move pots of cash around.
 
paulfromcamden said:
A Bitcoin security that doesn't actually own any Bitcoin. Yay! Sign me up!
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It's not different from any other ETN so I don't think that is an issue. It's more that normally the ETN represents an underlying and kind of the point of BTC is that there is no underlying.

I think it's also worth saying that these reason this has been created is because a) traders can see a sizeable market with easy profits and they hate leaving money on the table and b) exchanges always want new instruments as they make their money on trade volume and fees. An ETN just makes it easier and more secure to take this profit and fees.
 
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