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Cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, etc.)


surlybevo

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2 minutes ago, 52-80 said:

The token as economic value: I think this still has usecase in scenarios of high economic risk.  A local colleague is Russian national who's financially supporting her family back in Russia.  Since the war started, the traditional payment rails have been frozen.  She and her family, as non-politically exposed personnel, cannot transact with one-another.  Hyperinflation:  Turkey, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Argentina, etc.  If you can your hands on physical dollars (i.e. the world reserve currency), great.  If not, a bit of digital currency plus whatever other EUR, CHF, GBP, you can grab probably helps

The irony is that as Americans we have the most disposable income to speculate and therefore own the most bitcoin in the world, but we have the least intrinsic understanding of bitcoin’s value prop because of our relatively stable currency and rule of law. I think everyone here would agree that over time both of those things become less of a certainty, though. 

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19 minutes ago, Humble Beast said:

It’s worth exploring a leap forward in monetary technology.
 

Transferring value peer to peer around the world in seconds is an objective advancement. The Lightning network built on top of bitcoin allows that. You can send micropayments, stream payments. We don’t know what all can built with it.

I FX myself money between my accounts across borders.  Most of the time the wire clears in 2 business days .  (So if weekend...add a delay).

Once it didn't show up after a week.  I called the bank and they said 'sure we see it was sent, but we dont know more, you just have to wait'.  A wire being an actual instruction sent on a messaging system should be traceable... but not directly executable.  Money was debited from 1 account, but not credited to the other.  2 weeks later it finally 'bounced' back to the sending account without explanation.

Assuming on both ends I had a crypto exchange account (as I did with the bank), my risk exposure would be the solvency of exchanges*vol of crypto in the space of 1 minute.  Which is essentially negligible.  I could have transacted with crypto.

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52 minutes ago, 52-80 said:

I FX myself money between my accounts across borders.  Most of the time the wire clears in 2 business days .  (So if weekend...add a delay).

Once it didn't show up after a week.  I called the bank and they said 'sure we see it was sent, but we dont know more, you just have to wait'.  A wire being an actual instruction sent on a messaging system should be traceable... but not directly executable.  Money was debited from 1 account, but not credited to the other.  2 weeks later it finally 'bounced' back to the sending account without explanation.

Assuming on both ends I had a crypto exchange account (as I did with the bank), my risk exposure would be the solvency of exchanges*vol of crypto in the space of 1 minute.  Which is essentially negligible.  I could have transacted with crypto.

All right fine, I’ll bite.

I want to buy 1 Bitcoin.  Trade cash for 1 Bitcoin.  
 

Seriously, I can tolerate this amount going to $0. First step?  Open an account somewhere?

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29 minutes ago, CoTex said:

All right fine, I’ll bite.

I want to buy 1 Bitcoin.  Trade cash for 1 Bitcoin.  
 

Seriously, I can tolerate this amount going to $0. First step?  Open an account somewhere?

Not wholly dissimilar to buying an xbox.  You can buy it directly from an individual, or order it from a marketplace like Amazon and trust it will be delivered to you.

You will need to create a wallet, which is effectively a destination address to which only you have access.  You give cash to a person and asks that he transfers the sum of 1.0 Bitcoin to that wallet.  Within ~1mi the entire bitcoin network can confirm that a value of 1.0 Bitcoin is associated with that address.

Or you open an account with an exchange, kinda like an Amazon account, send USD to them and purchase a bitcoin with it.  They are now custodian of your bitcoin, until the moment you want/need to shift it under different custodianship.

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47 minutes ago, CoTex said:

All right fine, I’ll bite.

I want to buy 1 Bitcoin.  Trade cash for 1 Bitcoin.  
 

Seriously, I can tolerate this amount going to $0. First step?  Open an account somewhere?

Just to clarify, you want to buy one bitcoin. You want to pay cash directly to someone or you just mean you want to buy one?

 

Cash purchases are not the way people first typically jump In. If you want to simply buy one online, I would recommend a bitcoin only business given all the “crypto” contagion going on. Either directly through CashApp or the River financial app would be my choices. When I buy my drops in the bucket I just do Cashapp and transfer to cold storage from there. 

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13 minutes ago, Humble Beast said:

Just to clarify, you want to buy one bitcoin. You want to pay cash directly to someone or you just mean you want to buy one?

 

Cash purchases are not the way people first typically jump In. If you want to simply buy one online, I would recommend a bitcoin only business given all the “crypto” contagion going on. Either directly through CashApp or the River financial app would be my choices. When I buy my drops in the bucket I just do Cashapp and transfer to cold storage from there. 

Studying.  This should be interesting.

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17 minutes ago, Humble Beast said:

Here’s your daily wtf is this shit column on Sam. He wasn’t planning to save the world. It was all a scam. He’s already admitted it in leaked DMs. 

Yeah no shit lol. Effective altruism basically boiled down to the virtues of wealth and neolib economic policy, and backed by a baseline belief that YOU and YOU alone can be altruistic. 

I hadn't really heard of it until I heard of SBF, but it's pretty absurd

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47 minutes ago, Parliament said:

Patrick Boyle goes hard on the VC's who invested in FTX.  In short, they had so much money, they got sloppy.  Real sloppy.

 

This happens in EVERY economic cycle when there is SO much capital out there looking for places to park.  When you have $500k, you can park it in a piece of property.  When you have to find a place to put $500 million, you look for someplace to put it all….eventually leading you to put it in the bullshit investment vehicle of your era.  You participate in a huge LBO of a corn dog chain or some such insanity.  Or crypto.  Wanna park $1 billion?  Sam will help.

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From BI.  Miami

Requests for $50,000 tables and bottle service for top-shelf liquor at the city's hottest venues are drying up, according to a new report from the Financial Times. The scene has become so bleak that Andrea Vimercati, director of food and beverage at Moxy Hotel group, told the outlet that high-rolling crypto regulars have "completely disappeared." 

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1 hour ago, midtown said:

BlockFi files for bankruptcy

Dj Khaled Mtv Emas GIF by 2020 MTV EMA

This was telegraphed when they stopped withdrawals last week (2 weeks ago?) due to FTX.

I can't imagine anyone trusting these companies anymore with their coins, but if you use any custodian, it's should be a requirement that they're transparent on where they get their funds. Of course, until recently saying the coins were at FTX would have been considered a positive.

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The thing to take from this is that BitCoin as an investment (and not as a cool technology/form of payment that is widely used and that would make it useless as an investment) depends on a pretty apocalyptic scenario that means most people in the world get royally screwed. It’s a short jump from “cagey prophet who sees what’s coming and prepares” to “sociopath who is trying to make this happen,” but let’s assume that most of the crypto-bros are the former.

The thing is, it has to be the SWEET SPOT of financial crashes. It’s gotta be world wide, there can’t be some sober, staid country that escapes with good currency that people will flock to. But if you overshoot, you’re in a world where international digital commerce is laughable and you really should have exchanged your bitcoins for bullets, food buckets, and a bio-diesel murder mobile when you had the chance. 
 

It’s a hell of a bet, really. 

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8 minutes ago, 956 Worldwide said:

The thing to take from this is that BitCoin as an investment (and not as a cool technology/form of payment that is widely used and that would make it useless as an investment) depends on a pretty apocalyptic scenario that means most people in the world get royally screwed. It’s a short jump from “cagey prophet who sees what’s coming and prepares” to “sociopath who is trying to make this happen,” but let’s assume that most of the crypto-bros are the former.

The thing is, it has to be the SWEET SPOT of financial crashes. It’s gotta be world wide, there can’t be some sober, staid country that escapes with good currency that people will flock to. But if you overshoot, you’re in a world where international digital commerce is laughable and you really should have exchanged your bitcoins for bullets, food buckets, and a bio-diesel murder mobile when you had the chance. 
 

It’s a hell of a bet, really. 

This is incorrect. 
 

First of all, I’m not aware of any historical scenario where we’ve seen a good monetized in such a short time. So predicting how it unfolds is guessing. 
 

I think what happens over the medium term is bitcoin will demonetize gold. It’s superior to gold as a scarce asset. The global gold market is about $9T I believe. So that is a decent target to start with and it’s not a murder mobile situation. 
 

Bigger picture, we are nearing the end of a global debt supercycle. These have typically ended with a reshuffling of the existing financial system. The dollar’s reserve currency status will be at risk. That’s not me wishing for it, it’s just being realistic and aware of historical patterns. Is there a chance that at the time people will opt for a currency that is not dependent on government or central bank control? I think it’s a potential outcome. Erosion in public trust is an ongoing process. Is it likely? Probably not. I don’t have all my eggs in this basket. It’s a hedge. 
 

A reordering of the global financial system will be turbulent but doesn’t have to be a prepper’s dream. 

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4 hours ago, Humble Beast said:

This is incorrect. 
 

First of all, I’m not aware of any historical scenario where we’ve seen a good monetized in such a short time. So predicting how it unfolds is guessing. 
 

I think what happens over the medium term is bitcoin will demonetize gold. It’s superior to gold as a scarce asset. The global gold market is about $9T I believe. So that is a decent target to start with and it’s not a murder mobile situation. 
 

Bigger picture, we are nearing the end of a global debt supercycle. These have typically ended with a reshuffling of the existing financial system. The dollar’s reserve currency status will be at risk. That’s not me wishing for it, it’s just being realistic and aware of historical patterns. Is there a chance that at the time people will opt for a currency that is not dependent on government or central bank control? I think it’s a potential outcome. Erosion in public trust is an ongoing process. Is it likely? Probably not. I don’t have all my eggs in this basket. It’s a hedge. 
 

A reordering of the global financial system will be turbulent but doesn’t have to be a prepper’s dream. 

still playing the sweet tones of the symphony, as the ship settles lower in the north atlantic   

 

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6 minutes ago, SquishMitten said:

Us 'mericans can't hold anything in Binance anymore, right? Or has that changed?

No idea.  Can't imagine why.  The whole space has always operated in a gray area, and as long as the operator sets up some shell office and pretends to do some KYC it's probably kosher on paper.

It's been a pattern of one company bailing out another, to preserve/prop the assets that would otherwise poison their own books.  It just smells like Binance is the last domino in the chain. 

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Love this paragraph from WSJ. 
 

Tra­di­tional fi­nance had lit­tle in­cen­tive to build con­nec­tions to crypto be­cause, un­like gov­ern­ment bonds or mort­gages or com­mer­cial loans or even de­riv­a­tives, crypto played no role in the real econ­omy. It’s largely been shunned as a means of pay­ment ex­cept where un­trace­abil­ity is para­mount, such as money laun­der­ing and ran­somware. Much-hyped crypto in­no­va­tions such as sta­ble­coins and DeFi, a sort of au­to­mated ex­change, mostly fa­cil­i­tate spec­u­la­tion in crypto rather than use­ful eco­nomic ac­tiv­ity.

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5 hours ago, midtown said:

Another small exchange down today.  BitFront.    Really?  

Crypto bro1: lets make money on these suckers.   Like something that is a total front but with bitcoin

Crypto bro2.  We can call it BitFront

Crypto bro1:  Perfect.  Nobodys going to know

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9STeegpxSb0

 

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