GrayFox

What he asked isn't a silly question. The stock market has been parabolic since the last market crash. We've seen extreme levels of greed and it's finally starting to reverse to fear with numerous catalysts to cause a big move up/down. Telling people to go long in this market when there's catalysts like this is some pretty bad and irresponsible advice. I'm not saying to avoid investing now or to sell everything. But I think everyone should be aware that many stock prices are currently overvalued (even after this week) and there will better entry-points in the near future. Personally I like to find undervalued stocks to long, and overvalued stocks to short. I don't just go long just because stonks always go up. They are certainly times stonks go down too, which allows opportunists like me to trade trends in both directions.

If you are long on a short position against China, look at $YANG. It's a 3x leveraged ETF.

@GRHornCan you please elaborate on this? I'm not sure how you drew a connection between issues w/ Iran and the exchange rate for Bitcoin, especially since Iran prohibits the use of cryptocurrency: https://www.loc.gov/law/help/cryptocurrency/iran.php Also don't you think the rich would be hedging against economic/political uncertainty w/ actual Gold instead of something as volatile as cryptocurrency? It's probably easier and safer to buy large sums of gold than cryptocurrency. Also, the term "digital gold" for Bitcoin is misleading, I'm surprised I still see it around. If you didn't know, the term was mostly used by advocates of high transaction fees directly correlated to network congestion due scalability issues. Imagine miners charging $3 to make a $10 payment. They would advocate that Bitcoin can/should be used as a store of value instead of a widely used P2P payment system, which was not the original intention for Bitcoin. I once bought a website domain years ago using Bitcoin and was surprised to see my transaction fee would be a large fraction of the costs for the domain, but due to the anonymity it provided I was willing to make a donation to the crypto miners of China. Talk about "digital gold", "store of value" is counter productive and just sets back the adoption of this technology by businesses around the world, which keeps the real world value of it low.

I think you missed the point I was trying to make about crypto-currency. You don't buy a hamburger with your MSFT shares. You don't buy a BMW w/ gold. You spend cash on all of that. This idea is what I hold for cryptocurrency, whether people see it this way or not is a different story. Currency is a faith system that we all need to believe in for it to work, otherwise it's useless. It's pretty obvious everyone sees it differently, just like how people saw the ARPANET differently. Ideas and perspectives changes over time, and the same will occur for blockchain. Regarding the IRS, yes, I pay my gains taxes like most everyone else. I'm not expecting any leniency now or in the indefinite future, which is why I do my research into these things and cover my ass. But will they ever request all previous Bitcoin addresses? I think it's interesting to ask these types of questions, but you should come up with follow up questions too. For example on enforcement. Kind of like with the drug war, it's hard to enforce unrealistic policies. You should Look into what it means to be anonymous vs private. Depending on how you do it, your addresses can be anonymous, meaning pinning your identity to any Blockchain address is... Hard. Which is why enforcing anything with crypto is hard. Transactions can potentially occur between two anonymous parties. This is when you get into Blockchain forensics...

I first started using Cryptocurrency as a means of payment around 2016/2017. I would buy Steam games, Amazon items through the Purse.IO, pay friends back and gamble all with various cryptocurrencies. It was nice... Until I realized how much I would've "gained" if I just HODL'd. This is something common in the crypto sphere. For example one time I bought a phone in 2016/2017, something like a $400 value, when Bitcoin was around or less than $1k/BTC. It felt pretty crappy when BTC shot up to 19k in the next year or two. If I had not used Bitcoin for this purchase, my $400 would be worth nearly 20x the value. Huh. For years to come, I would see more and more people not use Cryptocurrency as a P2P payment system, but instead treating it as an equity or asset. How can something so volatile, yet so promising be treated like a commodity or an equity? My theory is greed and a misunderstanding of the underlying value provided by the tech and economics behind Bitcoin, Ethereum, Monero, etc. This causes cryptocurrencies across the board to be more undervalued than they already are. I hope people will eventually adopt crypto as a means of payment. That's probably the only way we will see the "exchange price" reflect the underlying value.