Kolek planning to go pro
Let me grab something to dry all the tears I'm shedding on behalf of criminals and greedy rubes who got burned in the Tulip Panic.
approaching ATH
A fairly long article from a harsh critic of crypto.https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/05/why-this-computer-scientist-says-all-cryptocurrency-should-die-in-a-fire/If you are pro-crypto, where is this guy wrong in your opinion?
Ethereum co-founder says every ‘average smallholder’ impacted by Terra’s stablecoin crash should be made whole, cites FDIC’s $250,000 as ‘precedent’https://fortune.com/2022/05/15/ethereum-founder-vitalik-buterin-terra-ust-stablecoin-investors-should-be-made-whole-fdic/The libertarians suddenly want the government to come to their rescue...but they probably still don't want any regulations.
So Bitcoin burns that much of the world’s electricity to be able to process somewhere between three to seven transactions per second across the entire world.
So we’ve seen waves come and go of companies saying “We’ll accept payments in Bitcoin.” They’re lying. Because they aren’t actually accepting payments in Bitcoin. They are using a service that allows them to price in dollars, presents Bitcoin to the customer, transfers the Bitcoin, turns it into dollars, and so the merchant is getting actual money. Which means if the system has to balance and you want to buy with Bitcoin and you don’t have Bitcoin, you have to convert dollars to Bitcoin. And this is, by design, a horribly expensive process, because Bitcoin and the cryptocurrencies are fundamentally incompatible with modern finance.
Well, there are classes of payments that the intermediaries don’t allow. The big ones are drug dealing, child sexual abuse material, and ransoms. As a consequence, the cryptocurrency actually used for payments is really only used seriously for: ransomware payments, where companies have to pay $10 million. Drug deals—drug dealers hate it, but it’s the only game in town. And we’ve had cases of websites selling child exploitation material paid with Bitcoin.
So it doesn’t work for payments. And it doesn’t work economically either. It’s effectively a giant self-assembled Ponzi scheme. You hear about people making money in Bitcoin or cryptocurrency. They only make money because some other sucker lost more. This is very different from the stock market.
Bahahahahhahahahah.... So now crypto is like the stock market, and not like money. Which one is it? Can I show up to Starbucks and ask to pay in Amazon stock? Again, Nick seems to be very fluid with his definitions. Can I buy British Sterling today for 1.25 dollars per, and then tomorrow sell the SAME British sterling for 1.35 dollar per? Could I do this with gold? Silver? Wheat? You know why this works? Because I've made money while some sucker lost more. What an absolute clown.
Also, I don't think you can deny crypto is far more volatile than major currencies. Isn't that hugely problematic if it is to be used as a currency? Wheat, silver, and gold don't hold themselves out as currency; sure, you can use silver or gold coins, but even then you have to convert them to dollars before you can use them at Pic-N-Save.
Re payments, to the point both you are Wags raise, where is bitcoin or any other crypto actually being used for real world transactions (not NFTs) beyond the illicit uses the author points out? And in how much volume? If you are telling me crypto is a store of value hedge like gold, I can sort of understand that. If you are telling me it is a currency, I remain unconvinced.
... and the most important thing is a remittance payment. Think of it like Western Union, but without the middle men jacking up the price.
So let me drill down on this one a bit. I can Venmo or Zelle pretty much anyone with near zero frictional cost. I can electronically move money back and forth between my bank and my brokerage, with the only cost being time since the transaction posts overnight.How is bitcoin better from a remittance perspective? Doesn't it have greater frictional costs? (I appreciate that WU has much higher costs as 1) it's for-profit, 2) it has fraud protection and money-laundering requirements to adhere to, and 3) WU transactions are reversible if there is fraud or error).
Prices of Bitcoin (and other crypto) going into the toilet.It's hurting not only individual investors but corporations that invested big too -- like Tesla, which bought an estimated $1.5B in early 2021, at what Bloomberg estimated an average price of $34,700.Still disappointed that Fidelity decided to start offering crypto to 401k investors, most of whom don't follow the market very closely. I have no horse in the crypto race -- never owned any and probably never will. But I know a lot of people who do, and I hope they get out of it whole. A lot of them have owned some since it was dirt cheap, but many have averaged up over the years and were still buying at well over $50K.
And how about Celcius, one of the largest crypto lending platforms, pausing all withdrawals this morning. And Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange, halting Bitcoin withdrawals for a spell.Isn't one of the supposed benefits of crypto that one can do what one wants with them pretty much any time without interference from government, the private sector, other individuals, etc? So if all of a sudden you lose access to the crypto you have spent tens of thousands of dollars (or more) buying, isn't that a pretty big problem?
Isn't one of the supposed benefits of crypto that one can do what one wants with them pretty much any time without interference from government, the private sector, other individuals, etc?