Most people don't truly understand it though. I work with fairly intelligent people, and they still think it's imaginary internet money like steam dollars.
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Because, at the end of the day... it is.
Imagine there's a popular video game where players can very rarely discover a form of in-game gold while playing, which they are then able to trade amongst themselves. They all believe that this gold has value, and markets soon form where many players willingly trade USD and other real life currencies for the virtual in-game gold, which is strictly limited in supply because it's only rarely discovered in the game. The gold is, however, completely useless for any application outside of the game. It's just a virtual token that gets passed around by players, who excitedly convince themselves that their virtual gold will keep increasing in value and one day be recognized as the most valuable commodity in the world. This conviction becomes an article of faith among those who own virtual gold, and they unceasingly proselytize for it, hoping that by doing so they will encourage others to start playing the game, increasing the demand for gold and thereby the value of their personal stake, which they must inevitably unload on another buyer to actually profit from in the real world, given that the virtual gold only actually exists inside the game itself.
I've literally just described Bitcoin.
JayR
Heritage
- The recently introduced ETFs in the USA have had inflows that demolished ETF rollouts for any other asset in history.
- Adoption of BTC by the retail masses when compared to internet adoption puts BTC at approximately Internet 1997, but BTC's adoption is even faster in comparison.
- US Pension funds are beginning to buy BTC as a store of value.
- International banks are launching their own ETFs (Hong Kong and Australia recently)
- El Salvador has made BTC legal tender, Argentina looks to be interested in doing the same
- Other corporations (at least one in Japan) are adopting the MSTR BTC strategy as their reserve asset
- Investment firms are offering products that let you self-custody BTC in tax-deferred IRAs (I use Unchained)
The above are just off the top of my head - I'm sure there are other people interested in buying.
Demand is EXPLODING, but supply is capped. I'm a buyer.
JayR
Heritage
Due respect, this is just incorrect.
I think hoping the IRS won’t be able to detect “taxable events”, or that they would lack the power to collect taxes from those events is naïve investing par excellence, and goes beyond the typical HODL or “deal with the taxes when it is time to file” mentality. The debate whether or not a particular stock, crypto currency, or heck- even rare art, will be a wise place to invest seems like a moot point. You do you.
The idea is to pay less taxes, legally. This is possible, but only if a proper strategy is employed ahead of a sale (or transfer) of assets.
Many will research the topics that reinforce their current views, but how many of you have searched “crypto taxes” to learn about this? Seems like an awfully big risk to find out at the end of your investing journey rather than ahead of time.
The idea is to pay less taxes, legally. This is possible, but only if a proper strategy is employed ahead of a sale (or transfer) of assets.
Many will research the topics that reinforce their current views, but how many of you have searched “crypto taxes” to learn about this? Seems like an awfully big risk to find out at the end of your investing journey rather than ahead of time.
And how would you be able to discern this from the early adopters, which you claim I'm not part of, though I'm in it several years now.
I was hoping you wouldn't bring that up, not because it's not true, but because it's not an asset class. You basically said, "This needle in the haystack did better than BTC, one of a 100,000 stocks or more that you had to choose". While obviously it wasn't a total shot in the dark, your point is funny because it demonstrates how much you are grasping for straws. My point is made and is clear.
scorpion is so locked in to his adversarial stance here he's far more delusional than he claims I am re:BTC, and that is some high delusion. People are by and large clueless. Most of the people in the world don't have a high enough IQ to either bother with thinking about it or even have the capacity to understand it. I'm not making that up, it's literally how things are.
No you haven't. Dell computer, as I said, accepts BTC as payment as do thousands of other vendors around the world. I could go on about how silly your analogy is, but it would be a waste of time. Any critical thinker should know it's a retarded one. It leaves out first mover, scarcity, anonymity, pre-mining, etc. It's becoming more clear to me that you are very unaware of what you don't know.
As Jay said, and it really is as basic as what he's saying here, you ignore the thousands of companies that can't put BTC on their balance sheet, as of yet, for many fiduciary and administrative reasons. Those are by far the biggest money.
As I probably said pages ago, scorpion, you need to do at least 50 more hours of homework. You don't understand this asset or peripheral issues surrounding it. Period.
The Bitcoin ETFs are already seeing outflows. What was supposed to be a huge deal that would, along with the halvening, push the price over 100k, has fallen flat. Everyone interested in owning Bitcoin already owns it.
A ridiculous talking point resting on the fallacy that Bitcoin is anything close to the internet in terms of its economic potential or mass appeal. It most certainly is not.
A few will dip their toes in the BTC water, sure. Most won't, and the ones who do will probably sell and be permanently scared away the next time BTC takes a big dive.
Banks will do anything to make money. As long as regulators allow, they are happy to charge a percentage fee on a Bitcoin ETF. It's no skin off their back, they aren't the ones who actually own the Bitcoin when it inevitably shits the bed.
No one in El Salvador actually uses BTC as currency, it's a meme. Even BTC's biggest proponents recognize how completely unsuitable the Bitcoin network is for actual use as a currency, which is why its now promoted as a store of value and energy instead.
I'm sure some dodgy CEOs are looking at the Saylor strategy, because it's actually quite brilliant from his perspective. The company issues debt to buy Bitcoin, which it then books as an asset on its balance sheet. The company then essentially acts as a proxy for Bitcoin itself, and when the price of Bitcoin is appreciating, the stock price does along with it. This entire thing is going to blow up catastrophically when the price sinks, however, and MSTR is forced to liquidate their BTC holdings to pay off their creditors. The irony is that Saylor, the world's preeminent Bitcoin advocate and largest holder, may end up destroying Bitcoin in this manner.
But he doesn't care, because he's already secured his bag via selling MSTR stock. Saylor has enriched himself by telling everyone to buy and HODL Bitcoin while he unloads his MSTR shares (which, remember, are Bitcoin proxies). The Bitcoin fanboys and true believers are far-too unsophisticated to realize what he's doing, which is why they'll be left holding the bag when it falls apart.
Then where is the price action? BTC has been stagnant for months, despite the fanfare of the ETF approval and the halvening.
Nothing wrong with buying a risk asset as long as you know what you're getting into and you've got an exit plan. But God help you if you drink the Kool-Aid and become a true believer like Blade Runner. Guys like him are going to get smoked.
Thanks for the laugh. This basically sums up the entirety of your position: namely, that you are just much smarter than me and every other Bitcoin critic, which is why you will end up exceptionally rich from your Bitcoin holdings and we will all be relegated to shining shoes (or something).
It's just really tiresome going back and forth with you on this, because you're so deep in the cult of Bitcoin at this point that you're incapable of anything even approaching objective analysis. You're basically the poster boy for the Dunning-Kruger effect, and due to your insane arrogance I'm not even going to feel bad when this all blows up and you lose your shirt. Hubris and greed of that sort is always punished harshly.
Some people were just born to hold the bag. You can always spot them because they:
1) Repeatedly tell you how stupid you are for not joining them
2) Have delusions of procuring great wealth for themselves while expending minimal if any effort
3) Are completely immune to reasonable critiques; utterly zealous in their belief in the scheme/cult
Do you even know the math on this? I'm quite sure you don't, so again, you're just shooting from the hip. I do because I invest in it and have forgotten more about risk management than you know. You're old and stodgy in your thinking; it's fine, just admit it.
I've posted extensively on this but you never ask questions about it, so you don't even know, yet you're trying to again act like I don't know what I'm dealing with. That's interesting, as I'm the one who has $ where his mouth is, and a lot of it at that.
Because I'm in a better position as a result of my seeing BTC for what it is, and early, doesn't mean you'll be shining shoes. That reminds me of zero sum leftist thinking, which shows us more about how you are emotional in your analysis and treatment of this subject.
Midwits always throw this out. You have absolutely no idea of how advanced I am in my field, or in life, etc. But you are maybe using probability, which I would think is reasonable. The problem is that in this case, you're dead wrong. And sadder, you don't even know it.
Let's move on to a different angle of this discussion. What are you going to do when proven wrong about BTC? Deny, or actually come clean and say you were wrong? It won't be long my friend. So soon it'll be much closer to
Sure, If I'm wrong about Bitcoin I'll admit it. But will you? According to your predictions going back a few years, we should have already been well over 100k by now.
Also, I'm curious if you would share the following, to give us a better idea of your Bitcoin exposure:
1) When did you first start buying Bitcoin? And have you been DCAing regularly ever since?
2) Approximately what percentage of your net worth is in Bitcoin?
3) On a percentage basis, what are your gains so far?
Yes. It would mean the network lost favor for some reason. I see no reason to believe this and less so with every year it marches on and gets even greater adoption than when others were saying the exact same things you have been saying. It's been 15 years now, bro.
BTC and proxies are a significant % of my net worth. You can call it the Fred Krueger effect, lol. Look him up, he's a funny Stanford PhD in Mathematics who made 100s of millions in trading (bonds back in the day if I recall correctly) as a quant.
Government money has no constraint, no tether to the real world. More of it can be created at no cost, benefiting those in control, and robbing everyone else. It is digits on a screen that have residual value because the dollar network, created when it was a representation of gold, still exists and has value as a network. Government money is now computer game fake gold.
Bitcoin is controlled by no one. Every user consents to the rules. It is expensive to create, using energy ties this digital thing to the real world. It cannot be created without cost, just like real gold.
Which is better?
A) Money that someone controls, creates more of it while doing no work, to force you to work for it, and can change the rules? or
B) money that has rules that no one can change, and everyone follows?
as far as being completely useless, because Bitcoin isn’t widely accepted, you are putting the cart before the horse. Money needs to have value before people will want to use it as a medium of exchange. Bitcoin doesn’t have enough value to do that yet, nor is the infrastructure in place to.
Most fiat currencies aren’t widely accepted, except for the US dollar. Try spending any of 140 currencies outside of their own countries. They are completely worthless garbage.
BTC needs a banking layer to become a payment system in the way you are thinking.
A feature of many pyramid type schemes.
Fixed it for you.
All gamblers eventually do.
Yes, BTC is in large part a gambling cult based on greed, adrenaline rushes, and winning at all costs... a narcissist's wet dream.
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Government fiat is of course flawed in this regard, and can certainly be abused (as we are currently seeing). But just because fiat is flawed, it does not logically follow that Bitcoin is the solution, because Bitcoin is also seriously flawed in many ways. There is no such thing as a perfect form of money (there is no perfect anything in this world, after all). Gold, Bitcoin, fiat all have pros and cons about them. Your advocacy of Bitcoin seems to be driven more by idealism than greed, which is admirable, but I think this idealism is misplaced. Money is not actually a real thing in itself - it is a social fiction to which we all subscribe, it is essentially an economic lubricant that greatly facilitates transactions of all sorts, liberating mankind from a simple barter economy.
Money is just the means by which we render a fair accounting of the value created by exchanging goods and labor. Therefore this idea that, "If only we had some perfect kind of money, like Bitcoin, we would usher in a utopian society," is totally unrealistic. Because ultimately, it is not the mechanisms of fiat that do great injury and injustice to honest men, rather, it is the machinations of the dishonest men who control the levers of power. And I assure you that those men would, if Bitcoin ever truly threatened their system of control, either completely destroy and replace Bitcoin with some new form of fiat/CBDC, or else find a way to co-opt and take over Bitcoin, nullifying whatever virtues it possesses in the process.
The power to create money will ultimately always rest with the most powerful governments, aka those who can compel the collection of taxes and enforce legal tender laws. This is simply the way of the world, and we would all be wise to recognize that. Christ himself said that we are to render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's. There is no utopian form of money - Bitcoin or otherwise - that is powerful enough to overcome the prerogative of a powerful government to control its currency for its own ends. You may view Bitcoin as an "idea" or a "discovery", but the greater mass of humanity has no use for such abstraction in regards to money. They simply want something they can exchange for food and shelter. And that token will ultimately be whatever the most powerful government says it is. It can never be otherwise, because at the end of the day, the economic power to issue currency is among the foremost political powers of a sovereign nation. And to quote Mao, "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."
And Bitcoin has no gun with which to defend itself.
So everything you sell/exchange to another person for profit is a pyramid? Wrong. How many times do you all apply incorrect thinking to JUST BTC when it is the case for every other asset, and you don't apply it there. It's amazing how many times we have to correct this, and on its face is ignoring both reality and logic. Stop this now, it's akin to constantly lying.
No it's not. It is a network of value that solved problems previously thought impossible, in the digital realm. An historical discovery.
Our reason why BTC is the solution has nothing to do with just fiat being flawed. It was created, in large part, however because fiat is flawed. Big difference. You make claims like the last sentence all the time, and I was waiting for you to say how it's flawed, but you never do. That's because you just make up conclusions in your head, and don't ever actually tell people why. I presume because you think governments have guns (for now) that somehow justifies your conclusion that is otherwise unsupported. As if governments last, just like fiat. You conveniently forget that all the time. Books were banned forever by the guys with the guns after the printing press, right? LOL, nope. If you looked into the reason why, maybe you'd learn something or open your mind to real thinking.
Wrong again. The only thing you'll be able to do is argue this to a technicality of the weakened .gov still having a currency, but that's not what you are saying.
Man, you haven't learned anything or haven't been outside the United States. I think it's worse than I thought the more I read these responses.
It doesn't need one. Have you even read about the idea of decentralization at all?
If one wanted to buy some BTC and just hold it for a bit what is the most simple way to do it.?
I'm not a BTC fan boy by any means but I've bought a fair bit of gold recently and now I'd like to invest/gamble some spare cash elsewhere.
Suggestions on any other alternative investments you're doing would also be welcome (assuming it doesn't stink up the thread)
I'm not a BTC fan boy by any means but I've bought a fair bit of gold recently and now I'd like to invest/gamble some spare cash elsewhere.
Suggestions on any other alternative investments you're doing would also be welcome (assuming it doesn't stink up the thread)
Will Bitcoin change the global financial system and usher in a libertarian utopia? Highly unlikely.
Will Bitcoin continue to be a high performing - while volatile - asset that will trend upwards in cycles? Highly likely, until I see any evidence to the contrary.
If we get to the end of 2025 and it hasn't yet crossed 100k USD at any point by then, then Scorpion will have a point about it running out of steam. Pointless discussing it until this cycle has peaked, which it almost certainly (can't say 100%) hasn't. Both sides are entrenched in their positions and ego won't allow them to budge an inch.
Will Bitcoin continue to be a high performing - while volatile - asset that will trend upwards in cycles? Highly likely, until I see any evidence to the contrary.
If we get to the end of 2025 and it hasn't yet crossed 100k USD at any point by then, then Scorpion will have a point about it running out of steam. Pointless discussing it until this cycle has peaked, which it almost certainly (can't say 100%) hasn't. Both sides are entrenched in their positions and ego won't allow them to budge an inch.
Most of the anti-Bitcoin posters I’m guessing are older or possibly boomers. They sure sound like it. That’s not a surprise considering that generation was all about me, me, me, and can’t fathom someone younger than them has made and continues to make more money with a better performing asset. How could they? Like I told a poster through PM, there is no reason to continue arguing, just laugh your way to the bank.
It’s not like someone had to put everything into Bitcoin either (of course if they did they’d be way ahead) unless someone wanted to take a big risk. I’m sure the guys studying bitcoin own most other asset classes too.
Bitcoin has a been a part of my saving strategy for a while, the guys who missed out are just salty.
It’s not like someone had to put everything into Bitcoin either (of course if they did they’d be way ahead) unless someone wanted to take a big risk. I’m sure the guys studying bitcoin own most other asset classes too.
Bitcoin has a been a part of my saving strategy for a while, the guys who missed out are just salty.
I'd buy a proxy. At this moment I'd buy BITX, which is a 2x leveraged ETF. I'd hold for a year and pay the cap gains, then take the cash. If it does dip (I don't see it, but possible) even more, just buy more and lower your average price.
Yes, of course they are. Anyone that well studied, to know something like BTC the way I or chance vought etc talk about it, has studied the financial system extensively for years. While we might be overexposed from a traditional point of view, or higher risk because we have higher conviction, I would argue a minute number of us would have just BTC as our whole portfolio.
The two biggest reasons people are anti-BTC are age/crystallized thinking (another forum member coined this term) and envy from missing out. Think of the silly covid days, you could have had BTC around 5k at that time, and it's now 12-15x that. That's not that long ago, and not anywhere near the first adopters who made the millions or billions. But where else are you getting 10x in fairly predictable cycles?
And we're about to see something like that again. It's like people don't see math, beyond not understanding what's actually going on, or don't like high performing assets = money.