DarkRange55
I am Skynet
- Oct 15, 2023
- 1,855
I am familiar with it at a high level - right now it feels like a casino.
Worked in financial publishing for a sub of a public co covering crypto assets as an analyst. Also looked at with a wealth management team at a family office.
I don't believe crypto industry has legitimacy and don't see it viable longer term (regulators). IMO - Crypto is mostly a niche market for criminals and gamblers, not useful tech outside of some innovations. It's flawed tech not fit for mass adoption unless we want societal collapse rom avg joe's losing it all to hackers. If you haven't seen what an utter shit show it is in crypto/ DeFi browse https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ - billions hacked every month to funnel to foreign regimes.
Federal digital currency is 100% the next step in my opinion. It's all about efficiency and we effectively already have it from credit cards so consumer habits wouldn't change.
It would seem non-regulated crypto bull case is some distopian future where the government collapses…but if the government collapses there wouldn't be a regulated world wide web networks so the currency wouldn't work either.
Cryptocurrencies have become so tightly correlated with growth stocks particularly with tech stocks. People are thinking of crypto as a platform to run apps, execute smart contracts, different membership companies, ect - the umbrella is called Web3: (Web2 you can interact with the website), the platform is public and anybody can develop on it and anybody can interact with it. That's where a lot of the value lies in things other than Bitcoin. All these cryptos are like representations of a public computer that people can visit and carry their identities to each of these public computers.
Stable coins are interesting, these $1 coins, the idea of a safe haven. Some are completely backed by the amount of coins they have, some are algorithmically stable they can burn and mint and then the coins stay at $1 and then you can have hacks for exploits. But there are safe places to park money in crypto where it wont move against market forces.
I think 99% of coins will be worthless in 10 years
They are just cash grabs and copies and clones of each other. But CBDC's seem inevitable at some future point…
There may be 12,000 crytocurrencies but how many of them matter? I'd venture to say about 11,995 could disappear and no one except the poor souls who invested in them would know or care. Know how many car companies there were in the late 1800's? Almost 500. Everyone thought they could build cars. Everyone thinks they can invent a crypto that someone's going to care about or has some utility. By the early 1900's there were 250 car companies. By 1929 there were 44. Today there are 14 car conglomerates. The strong (as measured by sales and profitability) survive, the weak fail.
Charting the Number of Failed Crypto Coins, by Year (2013-2022)
The very definition of a commodity means that it does not have any knowledge component and technology is now at a stage that it quickly acts to increase supply. This may not have been true in the 1970's when we had increases in gold and oil prices because the technonomic medium of the world was not powerful and adaptable enough to respond to higher prices with increases in supply but now we are in that age. And it's no longer an age where anything that has anything that has a scarcity-based model can really rise a lot in price. That includes bitcoin because there are 12,000 other cryptocurrencies. Any inert commodity is a bet against technological progress. -- I think of a commodity is having to attributes:
1) widely produced and available
2) stuff produced by different suppliers is interchangeable.
I agree with the basic principles but not all of the details.
Holding a commodity is not strictly a bet against technological progress– it is a bet that growth in demand will outstrip technological progress in production (the current situation with lithium, for example).
This video is pretty good, but also doesn't talk about the benefit of having government levers to control against depressions etc
Bitcoin is separate from the government - How did crypto workout for the Canadian truckers? Governments are not going to allow a competing currency. You're going to go into a garage to get your car repaired and pay 1,000 BitCoins because of the price instability. It has to be converted to cash to buy other assets. It's not as liquid as currency, cash is the most liquid asset. You have to convert crypto into cash to use it.
The only reason crypto is still alive is because of the era of cheap money and dumb people.
There's money to be made there if you understand the greater fool theory and the BitCoin market. But as far as a long term asset, it doesn't produce cashflows. There's no way for me to use math and assess what I should pay for it. So intrinsically it's worth nothing to me. I think crypto will be around for a while like baseball cards.
We started out with the Spanish dollar and it was private currency. In the beginning of the country there were banks that issued their own reserve notes. So you actually had to pay attention to where you were putting your money.
There's no cashflow analysis for crypto. The only cashflow in crypto is you get more fake coins. So you buy a coin, you put it in FTX and you get fake interest with the coin. Thats not cashflow. The dollar is backed by the richest and most powerful nation in the world. What is crypto backed by? Some dweeb in his garage.
I don't know how many other crypto firms and leaders need to fall. CZ, Phone Home, SBF how many other clowns and companies need to fall apart before people realize that cryptocurrency is a scam. They just want to get rich quick.
⁃ more volatile
⁃ USD is backed by big guns
⁃ Crypto's value is derived from nothing, unlocked through meaningless computations that don't have any correlations with work
⁃ Greater fool theory
⁃ More susceptible to manipulation because no regulations exist
⁃ DeFi is inefficient and cumbersome when processing data, maintaining blockchain consumes a lot of power, clunky building apps because it involves stringing together small programs, "gas fees"
⁃ Loans
⁃ No insurance (like FDIC)
⁃ Addressing security vulnerabilities is slow
Bank accounts are insured and the
can also take money back and forth
between banks.
The whole thing is an awesome experiment, but at the end of the day mg impression is it's a bet that someone else will pay more rather than an on something that provides intrinsic value. Nothing wrong with a bet, but it's a totally different game than I want to play.
An area that's highly speculative, no foundation for valuation. Take a company like Waste Management – you can dissect the balance sheet, understand what the business is, who's running it, opportunities for growth, competitors, cash flow and have an idea if they're making money or losing money. Attach a growth multiple on the earnings and come up with a somewhat fair valuation of the company. Different analysts will come up with different valuations but the general idea is consistent – given all that I know is this a company I want to invest in or not. The same can't be said for cryptos – there's no method of valuation.
Many broker/dealer still have place restrictions on the ability to offer cryptocurrencies to our clients.
Did the government stop dread pirate roberts from accessing crypto? How's he doing? He's the guy who started the Silk Road and he got busted because it turns out this stuff actually when the government want to get at people who are using it for doomsday scenario purposes that people suggest its useful for, it doesn't work that way.
These kind of scenarios are laid out to convince people purchase a speculative asset that has been bought in bulk for the most part by people who already had a ton of capital, a ton of money and they need the price to go up.
The dollar is fiat currency and everyone is participating in it and this is our financial system. So that's completely different than a finite number of BitCoins that are already in existence and are being held by a majority of people of capitalists who are trying to take your money.
A lot of alt coins were designed to be pump and dumps. Even BitCoin has whales that can move the market.
An asset that has no intrinsic value except for whats ascribed to it because its a speculative asset
It's an attempt to get around taxes and money laundering laws.
We're all going to trade with BitCoin and it's never going to get converted back to something that the government can take for taxes?
Its finite, its like a gold standard argument for currency. And thats what makes it ridiculous in the modern era. The original Satoshi white paper mentions that. The reason that we did away with the gold standard was because we needed the ability to print more money, thats just what society needs. There's zero percent chance that crypto is valuable for that fundamental reason.
Do quantum computers, make the Blockchain ungambable because the encryption can be cracked?
Not yet, but might happen to current blockchains.
On of my mentors who is a career serial generalist-inventor said:
"I proposed a crypto currency myself back in 1987 or 88 – I called the "coims" "useful units". But although I had the basic crypto idea, I didn't have the management infrastructure such as the block chain / mining, so it was not fully worked… Bitcoin is brilliant but an energy hog; I'm less familiar with the others. From what I know, my brother (hedge fund manager) has treated crypto like any other commodity – he's in for short periods when he sees an opportunity...
I called them "useful units", or "UU"s. I recently found a few of my notes from those days describing the properties that they needed to have, but I don't know if I kept the notes.
I was only just a bit over 30 at the time, so I didn't write a white paper anything."
I consider a government-backed crypto currency to be the main threat to bitcoin.
The FCC approved a BitCoin ETF, though?
The FCC approves a lot of terrible, scammy stuff.
Who is Satoshi?
There was a Satoshi Nakamoto who worked for the NSA, and the hashing algorithm that bitcoin capitalizes on was created by the NSA, so yes, I think that is very plausible. The NSA *might* even have a fast way to solve that hashing in the inverse, and hence a way to control bitcoin as well as monitor it. Paul Le Roux?
Read my cousin's (economist and finance professor) colleague's blog on crypto -- steve checetti is a central banker, don't get sucked in
Some niche benefits:
- Cryptocurrency transactions can often be completed within minutes, eliminating the need for lengthy settlement processes of traditional banks or financial institutions. This is useful for cross-border transactions and instant payments.
- Cryptocurrency transactions typically have lower fees compared to traditional financial systems. This makes micropayments and cross-border transactions more cost-effective."
What do you think about blockchain technology just as an underlying technology? Not cryptos or NFT's.
I do not give much thought to NFTs or blockchain – they currently have too high a hype-to-reality ratio for my taste.
Bill Gates said, "there's some really good technology in terms of sharing data bases and verifying transactions that is talked about a blockchain." Otherwise he thinks that crypto is the greater fool theory.
The way bitcoin implements it, blockchain is a powerful but efficient way for a large number of people with computing resources to agree on something. I can see it being useful for tracking high-value items such as real estate, and probably patents.
Crypto is more centralized than fiat. Look at the wallets. Its like ten dudes control a massive amount of the wealth in crypto.
One of the issues with crypto is there is low barrier to entry to create a coin
I think if you're truly interested in the technology and believe in it, then look at investing in companies that are building the underlying blockchain technology and infrastructure.
Worked in financial publishing for a sub of a public co covering crypto assets as an analyst. Also looked at with a wealth management team at a family office.
I don't believe crypto industry has legitimacy and don't see it viable longer term (regulators). IMO - Crypto is mostly a niche market for criminals and gamblers, not useful tech outside of some innovations. It's flawed tech not fit for mass adoption unless we want societal collapse rom avg joe's losing it all to hackers. If you haven't seen what an utter shit show it is in crypto/ DeFi browse https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ - billions hacked every month to funnel to foreign regimes.
Federal digital currency is 100% the next step in my opinion. It's all about efficiency and we effectively already have it from credit cards so consumer habits wouldn't change.
It would seem non-regulated crypto bull case is some distopian future where the government collapses…but if the government collapses there wouldn't be a regulated world wide web networks so the currency wouldn't work either.
Cryptocurrencies have become so tightly correlated with growth stocks particularly with tech stocks. People are thinking of crypto as a platform to run apps, execute smart contracts, different membership companies, ect - the umbrella is called Web3: (Web2 you can interact with the website), the platform is public and anybody can develop on it and anybody can interact with it. That's where a lot of the value lies in things other than Bitcoin. All these cryptos are like representations of a public computer that people can visit and carry their identities to each of these public computers.
Stable coins are interesting, these $1 coins, the idea of a safe haven. Some are completely backed by the amount of coins they have, some are algorithmically stable they can burn and mint and then the coins stay at $1 and then you can have hacks for exploits. But there are safe places to park money in crypto where it wont move against market forces.
I think 99% of coins will be worthless in 10 years
They are just cash grabs and copies and clones of each other. But CBDC's seem inevitable at some future point…
There may be 12,000 crytocurrencies but how many of them matter? I'd venture to say about 11,995 could disappear and no one except the poor souls who invested in them would know or care. Know how many car companies there were in the late 1800's? Almost 500. Everyone thought they could build cars. Everyone thinks they can invent a crypto that someone's going to care about or has some utility. By the early 1900's there were 250 car companies. By 1929 there were 44. Today there are 14 car conglomerates. The strong (as measured by sales and profitability) survive, the weak fail.
Charting the Number of Failed Crypto Coins, by Year (2013-2022)
The very definition of a commodity means that it does not have any knowledge component and technology is now at a stage that it quickly acts to increase supply. This may not have been true in the 1970's when we had increases in gold and oil prices because the technonomic medium of the world was not powerful and adaptable enough to respond to higher prices with increases in supply but now we are in that age. And it's no longer an age where anything that has anything that has a scarcity-based model can really rise a lot in price. That includes bitcoin because there are 12,000 other cryptocurrencies. Any inert commodity is a bet against technological progress. -- I think of a commodity is having to attributes:
1) widely produced and available
2) stuff produced by different suppliers is interchangeable.
I agree with the basic principles but not all of the details.
Holding a commodity is not strictly a bet against technological progress– it is a bet that growth in demand will outstrip technological progress in production (the current situation with lithium, for example).
This video is pretty good, but also doesn't talk about the benefit of having government levers to control against depressions etc
Bitcoin is separate from the government - How did crypto workout for the Canadian truckers? Governments are not going to allow a competing currency. You're going to go into a garage to get your car repaired and pay 1,000 BitCoins because of the price instability. It has to be converted to cash to buy other assets. It's not as liquid as currency, cash is the most liquid asset. You have to convert crypto into cash to use it.
The only reason crypto is still alive is because of the era of cheap money and dumb people.
There's money to be made there if you understand the greater fool theory and the BitCoin market. But as far as a long term asset, it doesn't produce cashflows. There's no way for me to use math and assess what I should pay for it. So intrinsically it's worth nothing to me. I think crypto will be around for a while like baseball cards.
We started out with the Spanish dollar and it was private currency. In the beginning of the country there were banks that issued their own reserve notes. So you actually had to pay attention to where you were putting your money.
There's no cashflow analysis for crypto. The only cashflow in crypto is you get more fake coins. So you buy a coin, you put it in FTX and you get fake interest with the coin. Thats not cashflow. The dollar is backed by the richest and most powerful nation in the world. What is crypto backed by? Some dweeb in his garage.
I don't know how many other crypto firms and leaders need to fall. CZ, Phone Home, SBF how many other clowns and companies need to fall apart before people realize that cryptocurrency is a scam. They just want to get rich quick.
⁃ more volatile
⁃ USD is backed by big guns
⁃ Crypto's value is derived from nothing, unlocked through meaningless computations that don't have any correlations with work
⁃ Greater fool theory
⁃ More susceptible to manipulation because no regulations exist
⁃ DeFi is inefficient and cumbersome when processing data, maintaining blockchain consumes a lot of power, clunky building apps because it involves stringing together small programs, "gas fees"
⁃ Loans
⁃ No insurance (like FDIC)
⁃ Addressing security vulnerabilities is slow
Bank accounts are insured and the
can also take money back and forth
between banks.
The whole thing is an awesome experiment, but at the end of the day mg impression is it's a bet that someone else will pay more rather than an on something that provides intrinsic value. Nothing wrong with a bet, but it's a totally different game than I want to play.
An area that's highly speculative, no foundation for valuation. Take a company like Waste Management – you can dissect the balance sheet, understand what the business is, who's running it, opportunities for growth, competitors, cash flow and have an idea if they're making money or losing money. Attach a growth multiple on the earnings and come up with a somewhat fair valuation of the company. Different analysts will come up with different valuations but the general idea is consistent – given all that I know is this a company I want to invest in or not. The same can't be said for cryptos – there's no method of valuation.
Many broker/dealer still have place restrictions on the ability to offer cryptocurrencies to our clients.
Did the government stop dread pirate roberts from accessing crypto? How's he doing? He's the guy who started the Silk Road and he got busted because it turns out this stuff actually when the government want to get at people who are using it for doomsday scenario purposes that people suggest its useful for, it doesn't work that way.
These kind of scenarios are laid out to convince people purchase a speculative asset that has been bought in bulk for the most part by people who already had a ton of capital, a ton of money and they need the price to go up.
The dollar is fiat currency and everyone is participating in it and this is our financial system. So that's completely different than a finite number of BitCoins that are already in existence and are being held by a majority of people of capitalists who are trying to take your money.
A lot of alt coins were designed to be pump and dumps. Even BitCoin has whales that can move the market.
What Is a Crypto Whale and How Do They Affect Crypto Markets?
Cryptocurrency wallets that hold a large amount of cryptocurrency are called crypto whales. These whales can influence cryptocurrency valuations.
www.investopedia.com
An asset that has no intrinsic value except for whats ascribed to it because its a speculative asset
It's an attempt to get around taxes and money laundering laws.
We're all going to trade with BitCoin and it's never going to get converted back to something that the government can take for taxes?
Its finite, its like a gold standard argument for currency. And thats what makes it ridiculous in the modern era. The original Satoshi white paper mentions that. The reason that we did away with the gold standard was because we needed the ability to print more money, thats just what society needs. There's zero percent chance that crypto is valuable for that fundamental reason.
Do quantum computers, make the Blockchain ungambable because the encryption can be cracked?
Not yet, but might happen to current blockchains.
On of my mentors who is a career serial generalist-inventor said:
"I proposed a crypto currency myself back in 1987 or 88 – I called the "coims" "useful units". But although I had the basic crypto idea, I didn't have the management infrastructure such as the block chain / mining, so it was not fully worked… Bitcoin is brilliant but an energy hog; I'm less familiar with the others. From what I know, my brother (hedge fund manager) has treated crypto like any other commodity – he's in for short periods when he sees an opportunity...
I called them "useful units", or "UU"s. I recently found a few of my notes from those days describing the properties that they needed to have, but I don't know if I kept the notes.
I was only just a bit over 30 at the time, so I didn't write a white paper anything."
I consider a government-backed crypto currency to be the main threat to bitcoin.
The FCC approved a BitCoin ETF, though?
The FCC approves a lot of terrible, scammy stuff.
Who is Satoshi?
There was a Satoshi Nakamoto who worked for the NSA, and the hashing algorithm that bitcoin capitalizes on was created by the NSA, so yes, I think that is very plausible. The NSA *might* even have a fast way to solve that hashing in the inverse, and hence a way to control bitcoin as well as monitor it. Paul Le Roux?
Read my cousin's (economist and finance professor) colleague's blog on crypto -- steve checetti is a central banker, don't get sucked in
Some niche benefits:
- Cryptocurrency transactions can often be completed within minutes, eliminating the need for lengthy settlement processes of traditional banks or financial institutions. This is useful for cross-border transactions and instant payments.
- Cryptocurrency transactions typically have lower fees compared to traditional financial systems. This makes micropayments and cross-border transactions more cost-effective."
What do you think about blockchain technology just as an underlying technology? Not cryptos or NFT's.
I do not give much thought to NFTs or blockchain – they currently have too high a hype-to-reality ratio for my taste.
Bill Gates said, "there's some really good technology in terms of sharing data bases and verifying transactions that is talked about a blockchain." Otherwise he thinks that crypto is the greater fool theory.
The way bitcoin implements it, blockchain is a powerful but efficient way for a large number of people with computing resources to agree on something. I can see it being useful for tracking high-value items such as real estate, and probably patents.
Crypto is more centralized than fiat. Look at the wallets. Its like ten dudes control a massive amount of the wealth in crypto.
One of the issues with crypto is there is low barrier to entry to create a coin
I think if you're truly interested in the technology and believe in it, then look at investing in companies that are building the underlying blockchain technology and infrastructure.
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