Bitcoin and Crypto Thread

This is cope. Because Bitcoin is a public ledger, all transactions can be easily traced, and wallets can be blacklisted. Any Bitcoin held on exchanges can be seized/frozen. At best, you might be able to protect Bitcoin held in cold storage from confiscation. But you couldn't transact with it or convert it to fiat. And then there's always the old-fashioned wrench attack.
Firstly all serious bitcoiners self custody there bitcoin they never leave it on exchanges except for small amounts they may want to transact soon. And yes you can transact with bitcoin in a cold wallet even if the wallet address is blacklisted because there are enough bitcoin miners who don’t care about OFAC or whatever else and will process the transaction it might just take longer. How do you think people in Venezuela or Iran or Edward Snowden Snowden type of people transact. As for wrench attacks almost every asset is vulnerable to that in some form or another. It’s not unique to Bitcoin.

"Not true, gold was the first money and both a currency and store of value," may I remind you there were very good, practical reasons we switched over to paper "backed" by gold and then fractionalized.
That is because gold is difficult to transport over long distances hence the need for paper gold/fiat. If gold was easy to transport there would have been no reason for fiat to exist. Bitcoin generally takes at most an hour (for 6 block confirmations) to send anywhere across the world an a minimum of ten minutes (1 block confirmation).

And if it’s necessary to make transactions faster for micro transactions you can use something like lightning no need for fiat.

USD stablecoins serve this purpose much better than Bitcoin does, which is why there is huge demand for them. Look at the failed Bitcoin experiment in El Salvador to see how much demand for Bitcoin actually exists among normal people (almost none).
Yes because in El Salvador most people are too poor to have long term savings.
They only have short term savings for which US dollar stablecoins do the job quite well. Inflation is not too much of a problem if you are going to spend those stablecoins in the next 6 months so why deal with the risk/volatility of bitcoin or gold, etc?

If the country was richer and people had more long term savings Bitcoin adoption would be higher.
 
As for adoption, let’s be real. 95% of people will never have their own bitcoin. Maybe 99%. 50% of the population is dumber than average. That’s fine. Most people don’t know how money works, but they still use it. With products like STRC, bitcoin will, over time, morph the financial infrastructure from debt based to capital based.
 
Here is the AI answer regarding transacting blacklisted bitcoin:

Yes, blacklisted Bitcoin can still be transacted on the Bitcoin network itself, as the network is decentralized and cannot inherently block transactions
. However"blacklisting" usually means centralized entities (exchanges, payment processors) refuse to process those coins, making them difficult to convert to fiat currency.
Here is a detailed breakdown of how this works:

1. The Decentralized Network (On-Chain)
  • Irreversibility: Once a Bitcoin transaction is confirmed in a block, it cannot be reversed or stopped by any central authority, even if it is flagged as "dirty" or "blacklisted".
  • No Central Ban: No single entity can ban a specific address from sending or receiving Bitcoin. Miners generally do not censor transactions, meaning "tainted" coins can still move from wallet to wallet.
  • "Taint" Removal: While blockchain analysis can track coins, users can sometimes bypass this by moving funds through private, non-custodial wallets or using mixers (though this raises other red flags).

2. Centralized Intermediaries (Off-Ramp Problems)
The "blacklist" is effective primarily at centralized off-ramps like Coinbase, Binance, or Kraken.
  • Exchange Freezes: If you send blacklisted BTC to a regulated exchange, they will likely freeze the funds and, in some cases, require you to verify your identity and explain the source of the funds.
  • KYC/AML Risks: Once coins are identified as "tainted" (e.g., from a known theft or darknet market), they can be blacklisted by compliance systems, making them "unspendable" in the legitimate economy.
  • Sanctions: Addresses sanctioned by bodies like the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) are immediately restricted by reputable exchanges.

3. Key Distinctions
  • Bitcoin vs. Stablecoins: A Bitcoin address cannot be "frozen" by a central authority, but a centralized stablecoin (like USDT) can be frozen by its issuer, rendering that specific asset untransferable.
  • Taint Spreading: While "dirty" coins can be used, they often taint any wallet they enter, meaning the entire balance of a wallet can become suspect.
  • P2P Transactions: Blacklisted Bitcoin can still be used in Peer-to-Peer (P2P) transactions, as these often bypass the strict chain-analysis checks of centralized exchanges.
    RedditReddit +4
In summary, blacklisted Bitcoin remains technically functional on the blockchain, but becomes economically isolated from the mainstream, regulated financial system.
 
Inflation is not a good thing, but deflation is even worse. It's like the difference between being overweight or starving to death. Currency is the lifeblood of the economy, and the economy is what keeps us all alive.
The whole point of market economies is to produce goods at increasingly better (deflated) prices. A people and their industriousness is the lifeblood of an economy. Just look around, currency isn't saving anyone in the USA. I don't know how you have lived for the last 50 years and seen what fiat has done, and deny this. The economy is killing us because the "currency" is so bad at this point, enabling the problems of usury to go unchecked, as elites are, and even rubbing our faces in it at this point in clown world.
Lack of speed/friction allows for increased security and fraud protection, which Bitcoin totally lacks.
huh, that makes no sense - no security for the BTC network?
This is also fairly meaningless.
Being able to audit what your government does, or what any other institution does, with money they claim is good or important, is meaningless? This is a good example of why we have a hard time communicating. You basically state that verification of money isn't useful. That's unfathomable to the honest statesman, and why the founders said gold and silver were money in the Constitution, by the way.
USD stablecoins serve this purpose much better than Bitcoin does, which is why there is huge demand for them. Look at the failed Bitcoin experiment in El Salvador to see how much demand for Bitcoin actually exists among normal people (almost none).
I'm not certain but pretty sure you're aware of the concepts of the mark and the "beast system" (getting ready for rollout). If not, just say so, that's fine. You don't see stablecoins, something programmable and which can be made out of thin air, to be literally what the desire is for the beast "currency"? While of course BTC (decentralized, not controlled) is the antithesis of that?
for one reason or another (there are many potential reasons) people are simply going to lose interest in Bitcoin and buy something else for store of value purposes.
I don't argue this because it's your feeling and your guess. We just disagree, as I don't see it is based on much but feelings (that's why you have to say "for one reason or another").
Fiat-based economies would wildly outcompete Bitcoin economies in terms of economic growth (if you assert otherwise, please explain why no current economy has a gold-based currency).
The opposite is true. You're just used to being part of government matrices, who of course benefit from fiat, that's why they introduced it. I'm pretty sure you know this, which is why I feel like you just make arguments that you don't even believe in, just to argue against BTC.
There is no widespread belief in Bitcoin, nor will there ever be.
A 2T asset is no widespread belief? No 2T asset has ever gone away, are you aware of that? Just asking.
“Deflation bad” is just Keynesian garbage fed to university students to justify money printing. Debtors get screwed when there’s deflation. Who is in the most debt, you ask? Governments and banks. Who then prints the debt into money in order to fund economists like Paul Krugman to gaslight you into thinking deflation is the end of the world? I wonder.
Do you deny his point? If you do, can you share a reason why the point isn't clear and obvious?
You can send your own money anywhere on earth and nothing stands in the way.
Is that not useful?
To include not siphoning 7% of your wealth per annum to pedo psychopaths in government and banking.
On this hang all the currencies and profits.
 
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Do you deny his point? If you do, can you share a reason why the point isn't clear and obvious?
Not all deflation is equal. Deflation in the 1800s and the very early 1900s that occurred on the classical (full) gold standard was the good type of deflation. Money supply was relatively stable and prices fell due to technological improvements allowing increased supply of goods and services. "debt deflation" which is caused by a financial crises (due to over-indebtedness) causing large amounts of borrowers to go broke (e.g. the great depression) is a different thing entirely as demand for goods and services get reduced as people lose their jobs and companies go bankrupt. Although the over-indebtedness in the first place is caused by the fiat system itself which is a debt based system.
 
Not all deflation is equal. Deflation in the 1800s and the very early 1900s that occurred on the classical (full) gold standard was the good type of deflation. Money supply was relatively stable and prices fell due to technological improvements allowing increased supply of goods and services. "debt deflation" which is caused by a financial crises (due to over-indebtedness) causing large amounts of borrowers to go broke (e.g. the great depression) is a different thing entirely as demand for goods and services get reduced as people lose their jobs and companies go bankrupt. Although the over-indebtedness in the first place is caused by the fiat system itself which is a debt based system.
exactly...with inflationary fiat, buying non-productive assets is better than holding fiat. That's why Blackstone owns all the houses, and the Zoomer 20 something never had any hope of raising a family... The zoomer is now a black pilled gooner smoking and playing fortnite.

With bitcoin, non-productive assets fall to the value of their utility. 5 year mortgages make sense, but 30 year do not. Owning 10 houses and being a section 8 slum lord is no longer a retirement plan. People start having more babies when they can own a house, rather than rent it from private equity shareholders.
 
exactly...with inflationary fiat, buying non-productive assets is better than holding fiat. That's why Blackstone owns all the houses, and the Zoomer 20 something never had any hope of raising a family... The zoomer is now a black pilled gooner smoking and playing fortnite.
This is why we find takes like scorpion's disingenuous. Fiat leads to this precise moment (YOU ARE HERE on the map) where it clearly is against any lifeblood argument he is making. It's actually choking 80% of the population. Old people holding all the assets and corporations alongside them. Sad. Slave status for most of the rest of the people.
With bitcoin, non-productive assets fall to the value of their utility.
Yes, it is important to point this out yet again.

Especially when you realize that by far the biggest cost of living currently is housing/renting.
 
You all have ably pointed out the flaws of fiat. No one claims the system is perfect. However, you failed to make a compelling case that a Bitcoin-based economy would be superior to what we have now. Basically just, "Trust me bro, all prices will deflate, everything will get cheaper, every guy will have a house and a girlfriend. Even the grass will start growing greener!" There's a lot of promises being made, but very little in the way of discussing the actual day-to-day mechanics of how a Bitcoin standard would address the needs of highly complex economies.

In general, you all display a failure to appreciate this complexity. I'm reminded of the people during COVID who cavalierly advocated for shutting down the entire economy, as if it was just a light switch you could simply turn on and off at will without consequence. Unfortunately, those idiotic shutdowns are still reverberating through the economy six years later, because it turns out the economy is massively complex in a way that literally no one can fully understand. And currency lies at the heart of the economy. The utter hubris you all display in thinking you have everything figured out in this regard is both laughable and appalling.

The best analogy to describe Bitcoin maxis is Marxist-Leninist communists. Not in the sense that they share similarities in their views, but rather in their cult-like, almost religious zeal for their particular ideology, which in both cases is thoroughly utopian in nature. The communist and the Bitcoin maxi both presume to have identified the sole, overarching evil haunting the world: capitalism in the case of the former, fiat currency for the latter. Adherents of each faith assure us that mankind will be ushered into a golden age if only this particular boogeyman is relegated to the dustbin of history. They both fall back on a lot of untested theory to make their arguments (back to "trust me bro").

Well, the communists ended up getting a chance to put their theories into action, and it didn't go so well for them. Turns out they weren't as smart as they thought they were. They didn't have it all figured out, and millions of people ended up dying as a result. Their hubris and zeal blinded them to the obvious shortfalls of their thinking. When I see Bitcoin maxis gleefully advocating for the total overturning of the monetary system (the same monetary system underpinning the economy that supports billions of lives) I can't help but shake my head at the similarities.

I suppose there is nothing new under the sun, as Ecclesiastes said. Men will always be filled with hubris, greed and foolishness, and in their zealous ambitions will often become the agents of their own destruction.
 
In general, you all display a failure to appreciate this complexity. I'm reminded of the people during COVID who cavalierly advocated for shutting down the entire economy, as if it was just a light switch you could simply turn on and off at will without consequence. Unfortunately, those idiotic shutdowns are still reverberating through the economy six years later, because it turns out the economy is massively complex in a way that literally no one can fully understand. And currency lies at the heart of the economy. The utter hubris you all display in thinking you have everything figured out in this regard is both laughable and appalling.
What enabled the shutdown and economic meddling? Government...that derives 90% of its power from usury theft.
This isn't just about currency. Without such a powerful state apparatus, there would have been no lockdowns or economic damage from a flu.

Bitcoin does not destroy the state overnight. In fact fiat will destroy it, just as it has throughout history. This time, though, we have one chance to rebuild from the ashes, on granite, instead of on sand.

We don't need anyone to "manage the economy"...no central bank, no government agencies... that's just a slave mindset that most people have, that we just need the right leader....yes the economy is complex, far too complex to be controlled from the top-down (as we've seen)
 
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Government created the virus itself, then the parasite class profited handsomely from the "vaccine", with again, BILLIONS of printed dollars, stolen from everyone that they decimated first with the virus, then with the vaccine!

At this point, I would be fine with a nuclear holocaust, if it meant burning the parasites from their towers and freeing humanity. A great flood for the 21st century.

But hopefully, a kinetic flood isn't necessary. Maybe the flood happens mostly in cyberspace, with energy and computers.
 
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where does the yield come from??? Gemini Earn, for example - the risk is very high for such a low yield. STRC is the real "stablecoin" 8x overcollaterlized, non-rehypothecated and a 9% yield. Its more collateralized than a bank deposit - vs putting a stablecoin into a yield ponzi for a paltry 8% hoping to get out before the rugpull

Any new opinion about STRC? They say it’s collateralized. I have $250k in a money market paying me paltry 3.6%. If their reserves are sustainable for 2.5 years, I wouldn’t mind leaving my money there for 1 year.

Any insight?
 
Any new opinion about STRC? They say it’s collateralized. I have $250k in a money market paying me paltry 3.6%. If their reserves are sustainable for 2.5 years, I wouldn’t mind leaving my money there for 1 year.

Any insight?


Just the cash reserves are 18 months of divedends...the bitcoin reserve is like 70 years assuming a 0% bitcoin annual rate of return.

Strategy's total liquid assets are larger than Lloyd's of London insurance.

The market does not understand bitcoin. STRC pays 11%
Olive Garden (parent company) junk bonds pay 6%

$60 billion in assets -- not market cap....assets

In gold terms about 320 tons. Thats the amount of gold that countries like the UK and Saudia Arabia hold.

All of Strategy's bitcoin is unencumbered...meaning no matter what the price of bitcoin is, there is no "margin call"

I also forgot...no tax: the dividend is considered "return of capital" 11% free and clear over 10 years.
 
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There's a lot of promises being made, but very little in the way of discussing the actual day-to-day mechanics of how a Bitcoin standard would address the needs of highly complex economies.
I won't speak for others, but I haven't made any promises. I have just stated that sound money is quite obviously better than broken money. And we KNOW fiat is broken money and we KNOW it will fail. It's very rare that someone can say with 100% certainty that he knows things, right?
Adherents of each faith assure us that mankind will be ushered into a golden age if only this particular boogeyman is relegated to the dustbin of history. They both fall back on a lot of untested theory to make their arguments (back to "trust me bro").
I've never even made this claim. If you listen to Jeff Booth, even he says that the BTC network will be fine unless it gets derivative-ized.
When I see Bitcoin maxis gleefully advocating for the total overturning of the monetary system (the same monetary system underpinning the economy that supports billions of lives) I can't help but shake my head at the similarities.
This monetary system doesn't support anything but stealing of labor, scorpion. That's our point. Everything about our government, culture, society, and money is debased. It seems like you have a hard time admitting that.

As chance and I have said, it will take time for BTC to make its inroads and place in the economy. Isn't that a measured approach? We seem to also be agreeing that it is a difficult thing for most to see, which will relatively slow its adoption, perhaps compared to what we previously would have thought or hoped. But hard times will make people see it faster. They tend to do that, you know? ;)
 


Just the cash reserves are 18 months of divedends...the bitcoin reserve is like 70 years assuming a 0% bitcoin annual rate of return.

Strategy's total liquid assets are larger than Lloyd's of London insurance.

The market does not understand bitcoin. STRC pays 11%
Olive Garden (parent company) junk bonds pay 6%

$60 billion in assets -- not market cap....assets

In gold terms about 320 tons. Thats the amount of gold that countries like the UK and Saudia Arabia hold.

All of Strategy's bitcoin is unencumbered...meaning no matter what the price of bitcoin is, there is no "margin call"

I also forgot...no tax: the dividend is considered "return of capital" 11% free and clear over 10 years.


I watched the video yesterday. First time hearing about STRC.

Saylor expects BTC to return long term 30%/y. STRC will pay you 11.25%/y dividend and pocket the difference.
Right now they have $4.4 as collateral for every dollar there:

Risk is BTC crashing. You'll lose your pants.
BTC going up means your dividend is safe.

What about volatility in STRC? Can I buy during ex-dividend to collect the dividend instead of holding the asset? Looking at a chart, it reached lows of $90 (NOV-12th to NOV-20th).
I will look for options as insurance.
 
I watched the video yesterday. First time hearing about STRC.

Saylor expects BTC to return long term 30%/y. STRC will pay you 11.25%/y dividend and pocket the difference.
Right now they have $4.4 as collateral for every dollar there:

Risk is BTC crashing. You'll lose your pants.
No. It doesn’t matter what BTC does, that’s the whole point. Create an asset as close to cash (0 volatility) as possible, using a variable dividend.
BTC going up means your dividend is safe.
It’s a short term cash equivalent, so I’m assuming you care about getting the principal back, not the dividend. They can pay the dividends for years with just the $2 billion cash pile.
What about volatility in STRC? Can I buy during ex-dividend to collect the dividend instead of holding the asset? Looking at a chart, it reached lows of $90 (NOV-12th to NOV-20th).
I will look for options as insurance.
I think the volatility dampens to a much tighter range, $99-$101 is the goal.
This thing is only a few months old! I think as it grows in size it will hit the target volatility.
The market is already pretty big trading volume, so the ex dividend prices are already arbed out from what I’ve heard on podcasts.

Options I think are unnecessary. This is paying way more interest than it should because:
To people who don’t understand Bitcoin, it seems risky…but most people who understand Bitcoin, would rather have 100% Bitcoin.
But over time, when it gets some age on it, more market actors will buy it once they see just how well capitalized it is.

Phong Le said Bitcoin would need to go down to $8,000 and stay there for 5 years, before Strategy would be at any real risk. In 2022 everyone was calling for the collapse of MSTR…never happened either,
 
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Risk is BTC crashing. You'll lose your pants.
BTC going up means your dividend is safe.

What about volatility in STRC? Can I buy during ex-dividend to collect the dividend instead of holding the asset? Looking at a chart, it reached lows of $90 (NOV-12th to NOV-20th).
I will look for options as insurance.
It could drop in the interim to .97 or something when we go from ~70 back to 58k or something, with some worries, but that'll be the bottom. If you want a buffer, just buy it after April. We're bottoming in the next ~ 8 weeks.
 
Gold has returned north of 25% over the past couple of years, so I am thinking of starting a company called GoldStrategy. I will issue shares (GSTR) and use the money raised by these shares to buy gold. I won't do anything with the gold, I just plan to hold it indefinitely while it appreciates in value. My investors will thus own this gold indirectly through owning shares of GSTR.

To buy additional gold, I will then issue preferred shares called StrikeGold (STKG), which will pay an annual 10% dividend. Since my gold does not actually generate any USD yield, the money to pay the STKG dividend will have to come from issuing additional STKG shares, or by issuing common shares of GSTR. As long as gold continues to appreciate in price, I should be able to continue attracting investors to buy my GSTR and STKG shares, allowing me to keep buying more and more gold, which itself is continually appreciating in value. This is known as the "infinite money glitch", although critics are quick to label it a Ponzi scheme.

The only risk with my plan will be if investors decide they are no longer interested in buying my GSTR shares. This might occur if the price of gold stops increasing for awhile. If I am unable to issue new shares of GSTR, I will be forced to issue new preferred shares, these with an even more attractive dividend yield. I will call these UltraGold (ULTG) and they will carry an astonishing 25% dividend. Of course, I will have no way of paying this dividend except by using the money I received from selling the original shares. In other words, I will sell a share of ULTG for $100, then use $10 of it to pay my STRKG dividend, and $25 to pay my ULTG dividend. I'm then left with $65 to buy more gold. Then when next year rolls around, I have to come up with another $35 to pay my dividends, so I have to sell more shares, incurring more dividend obligations and/or diluting my GSTR shareholders. Eventually, I will get myself in real trouble by having more obligations than I can pay. I will then be forced to liquidate all of my gold on the open market. And since I own more gold than anyone on the planet, the price of gold will tank.

Everything I wrote above exactly describes Strategy, except with gold in place of Bitcoin. The company is a Ponzi scheme and a ticking time bomb, and as chance vought himself admitted, anyone who understands and believes in Bitcoin would rather just own Bitcoin directly anyway. Michael Saylor rolled the dice on Bitcoin as a last resort to save his flailing SaaS company, and it's kept them afloat thus far. But eventually the music is going to stop for Strategy, and the fallout will be brutal for its shareholders, including the preferred shareholders (which, by the way, anyone considering buying STRC or their other preferreds should be aware that those dividends are completely discretionary and can be cancelled by management at any time, an eventuality that would tank the stock price. These are NOT risk-free products on the level of a money market account - which is what they are misleadingly being sold as - and could implode in price very quickly if investors lose confidence in Strategy. Caveat emptor to the max with this company.
 
As long as gold continues to appreciate in price
Yes, that's the catch. I don't think the market would have many participants that believe gold will continue its run at your cherry picked timeframe rate. There is a reason why Schiff always talks about post 2000 and not 2011-2021 (0 return). Again, I'm not against gold, I just know what it is, and what it isn't. I also know that it's been around a long time and already paper controlled. Worse than that, it's centralized, and has been and has to be.
The company is a Ponzi scheme and a ticking time bomb, and as chance vought himself admitted, anyone who understands and believes in Bitcoin would rather just own Bitcoin directly anyway.
There are reasons to buy MSTR just as there are reasons to buy "paper" gold products. As Mr. Cardone says, can you just go somewhere and plop a $10M gold bar on the table and get paid?

Nope.

Can you do that with $10M of BTC? Instantly.

No utility, right?
 
There are reasons to buy MSTR just as there are reasons to buy "paper" gold products. As Mr. Cardone says, can you just go somewhere and plop a $10M gold bar on the table and get paid?

Nope.

Can you do that with $10M of BTC? Instantly.

No utility, right?
How can the Bitcoin network itself be an argument for buying MSTR? If Bitcoin has all these wonderful properties, why would I buy MSTR shares, which just give me more overhead expense as well as dilution risk? To anyone who fully believes in Bitcoin, Strategy's offerings should be totally unattractive. And if you don't believe in Bitcoin (and thus don't believe that it's price will continually appreciate into infinity) then why would you want to buy products backed by Bitcoin to begin with?

I basically see Strategy as the Coyote from the Roadrunner cartoons, who would run off the side of a cliff and float in mid-air...until he looked down. The bottom could fall out of this company at any moment, because it functionally has no reason to exist. Its common shares will be continually diluted and its preferreds are blatant Ponzi products. At some point investors are going to wake up and realize they've gotten into bed with a total pig of a company, and the stampede for the exits will be legendary. What happens after that to price of Bitcoin also won't be good for HODLers.
 
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