Jim Rickards says somewhere that btc and eth ect. will be superseded by a deeper underlying system that the likes of IBM are developing.
Would in a currency crash the cryptos not be one of the little alternatives to ‘get out’ that still present themselves? At this moment it seems that even if they are ‘imaginary’, cryptos do provide certain ‘services’ (I think proven - and in addition possibly will open up significant new ones in the future - unproven) and align to principles that other resources do not necessarily offer. So I believe that at this moment there is real value in cryptos, possibly not justifying their current value though, I don’t know…
If some trust in cryptos can be maintained in case of a currency crash, even if only a very limited amount of resources would flow into the cryptos, they would still be exploding. But unless they can then be used for direct interactions that bypass the traditional paper stuff (i.e. crypto-to-crypto or crypto-to-real stuff), you’d still be stuck in the computer or with paper… In the end the key is what real stuff you can get for it… I suppose it all depends on what scenario(s) you think are most plausible on what decisions to take now.
Anyone know when Bitcoin Options start trading on retail brokerages like Ameritrade/Sccottrade?
Exceptionally interesting articles, which I need to read again fully to understand.
Although the South Seas & Tulip nature of the Bitcoin ascent is fascinating, two interesting and interrelated questions to me, which would be interesting to explore further, are:
- first, to what extent is the parabolic ascent of Bitcoin and its volatility consequent on the G7/G20 central banks' inability to control it through market intervention;
- second, to what extent is Bitcoin's ascent actually the start of hyperinflation of the West's currencies, as the wall of QE monies now finding another monetary class into which to descend?
Indeed the Chinese and Russian (and other) whalers are diving deep and looking for old captain Ahab. Possibly the only reason we risk blood and treasure is to protect the Petro Dollar. That is, the value of energy expressed in U.S. Federal Reserve Notes. Do a googlearch and you will now see stories about how blockchain/bitcoin will be used to buy/sell oil. Genie is out of the bag. The Petro Dollar is finito! So whether I have bitcoin cryptographs printed on a piece of 8 1/2 x 11 safely tucked away in … hey, hey, hey … or not. It will be what lies beneath most if not all transactions the way the U.S. Federal Reserve Note does today. Will this happen before events unfolding in our atmosphere make it mute is a different question. Speculate if you have the gambling disease but lets hope that somehow this tech can disintermediation the FM’res. Look’n at you Jamie.
No, this is not Max Kieser.
Some speak as if there is one side. Happy smiling faces everywhere. Where there is no conflict or disagreement and with any decent - they are left out of the system. The technology was BORN out of disregard for the status quo. IT WAS FREEDOM FIGHTERS escaping the exact kinds of scenarios where governments and those in authority try to impose their will. Jim Rickers is an idiot trying to sell books when he espouses this garbage. He preys on your fears because he expects none of us have done our homework.
Study of a moment the source of this technology. The freedom fighters that were HAL FINNY who was a cryptographic activist. His self-declared duty was to protect people like you from the exact nightmare scenario you blame on crypto. Some insult him and his achievements he did for us because they are uneducated and refused to actually learn there are two sides with many sharing the same concerns but actually doing something about it rather than just complaining and imagining without making an effort to even understand.
He was one of the people behind bitcoin creating it for people like you and me. He fought the big brother state. ADAM BACK who was threatened with imprisonment for trying to export code that would get past the right of the people to keep their transmissions secret from “the powers that be” - as he PRINTED the SECRET CODE DECRYPTION KEY ON HIS SHIRT - he refused to remove as he crossed national lines. He went to court and won the issue as a right to wear the number as a right to free speech. His actions were was an act of defiance for the right you enjoy every time you pull up a web browser that the US Military wouldn’t allow to be encrypted past 52 bits (Easily broken these days and a source of national security hacking). These things still happen today with Senator McCain trying to reign in our rights to privacy.
Without their fighting for your rights, there would be no commerce on the internet. There would be no internet in tyrant states with dictatorships. It is the reason we have HTTPS in your browser to scramble your messages that have any hope of not being eavesdropped at the first hop past your house. To this day, the military outlaws a NUMBER. They consider knowing or possessing A NUMBER to be munitions.
Take five minutes to understand the background of David Chaum, Another digital freedom fighter for the internet and your rights to privacy. Without his services, your life right now might be unrecognizable.
Privacy tokens like Monero that will be resistance to authority that keeps the common person at equal distance with the right to bare digital arms for protection. There are tokens to make switching from any of thousands into any other of thousands completely autonomously and in computer code. These things happen without money exchangers on the ground, and without borders. No apologies, no permission. Centralized currency is already obsolete. Fiat Currency is on its last stand.
Some keep pretending it isn’t happening. Every day is confirmation bias. They wast their time glorifying any bad news about crypto - because it makes them feel better - trying to ignore the truth. The world around them is changing and crypto is the method that is stealing the thunder from what they’ve waited and invested for. The role of PM was stolen from them. It sucks I know. Will you continue to ignore the truth? Time’s wasting. Did bitcoin just go up another thousand overnight? I’ve got some silver to sell you.
Mistaken for fiat is one of the first mistakes people make in gaining an understanding. Here’s what I wrote about that:
https://medium.com/@mreespublic/why-bitcoin-is-not-fiat-currency-c3d1996…
Cryptocurrencies like powerledger are changing everything - including the electrical grid. See microgrids now made possible because of crypto: https://web.powerledger.io/
To keep crypto safe from hackers, and lost passwords - there is a tool for that: https://www.ledgerwallet.com/
People can still trick and con you so it is still important to be educated. But these links will help you on your path to understanding.
Let’s face it. Crypto currencies are a hard topic to grasp. It is largely uncharted territory. There are land minds next to gold minds. We are in the wild wild west. I don’t think anybody would argue those points. I would not trust my 92 year old father with a digital hard wallet. There are many ways you can make a mistake by not using a copypaste function correct for example. There are fake websites - snake oil salesman, and a host of ways people will try to trick you out of it.
If you leave it with banks and exchanges, I don’t suspect we’ll have much better success trusting them with this form of money that we’ve had with any other form we’ve used for 5,000 years. It might not become mainstream for a decade. By them in might be waterdowned, and made as easy as sending an email on your iphone today. But - by then all the big money smart people will have made their fortunes.
You’ll get paved roads, instead of wagon wheel roads. You’ll get fancy smartphones when the pioneers in the field had to make due with walky-talky. You’ll have airconditioning while those that explored the uncharted territory and took the pains of learning through blood sweat, tears, pain, loss, errors, to actually find the treasures to be found.
Adventuring isn’t for everybody. Some want to be pampered and just be wealthy without needing to earn it themselves. Others want to be responsible for taking the hard road and earning the rewards for being first. It can be bloody and bruising going to the school of hard knocks. But if it were easy - everybody would be doing it. What kind of person do you identify with? Perhaps your hands are too soft, or your neck and backache. Maybe you’ve given up? Maybe you already think you know everything you need to know. At some point, all the new technology just doesn’t matter anymore. Right?
I would say for the vast majority of people - just wait. Wait until it’s handed to you gently. For your own good, by people that have earned the right to portion it out to you as they see fit. There are those that do and those that do not. For every go get-em - “die with your boots on” type of guy, there are a hundred that want to die peacefully in their bed without the need of a story to tell their children about the fight they made to get to the top. Those stories are for other people.
Perhaps you’re too old.
Or too distracted
Or too dumb
or too tired
or too discouraged, resentful, suspicious, doubtful, untrustful. We can think of a thousand reasons not to do something.
But.
We are fortunate to be alive during the great wealth transfer of the millinia. I tiny smiggen of life sliced in a way that we are allowed perhaps a decade or two in all of world history to be in the right place at the right time, with the right tools and the right education and being fortunate to have health and education and an open mind to actually make a life-change with a life-changing amount of wealth for not just ourselves, but for generations of our family that follow.
What will you do with that fortunate opportunity?
Ah shucks, it might be scary to be your own bank. Go watch history being made rather than taking part. It’s dangerous. There’s a rocking chair waiting somewhere for you right now.
Which one are you?
That’s my question.
Bitcoin is a claim on real wealth. A bitcoin is a claim on the operating bitcoin infrastructure, which itself is a claim on the properly functioning internet, your connectivity to it, and the functioning power grid. While the bitcoins themselves will survive any sort of internet outage (on the disk drives of all the servers), their utility is questionable if the outage persists. If your transaction can’t be verified, or if the worldwide internet ends up being fragmented for some reason, double-spending problems appear. Blah blah blah. Bottom line is, if you don’t have connectivity, you can’t execute transactions, and so your personal “realtime” utility from your bitcoins is zero.
A US dollar is a claim on the functioning US economy, the strength of the US military, as well as the open-ness of the US capital account. Of course, when the government (or the Fed) prints up more claims, that’s dilution for existing holders of claims. Bitcoin doesn’t have this problem. When it comes to discipline of new claims production, bitcoin can’t be beat.
However, both USD and bitcoin are still both just claims. They should not be mistaken for underlying real wealth. In bitcoin’s case, the “underlying real wealth” are the functioning servers, clients, and the fully-connected Internet. (We can debate if “the Internet” represents real wealth; I think it does, but it too is a derivative/depends on reliable power generation.)
But maybe that doesn’t matter. Maybe claims are all we need.
Ultimately that leads me back to my question: do molecules still matter? Houses, food, farms? And the portable molecules: gold? Or are digital claims the ultimate in what we should focus on?
See the log chart below of the gold/bitcoin ratio. Once again, its a LOG chart. A regular chart simply looks ridiculous, with the ratio being a flat line right at the bottom - looking exactly like the EKG of some patient that has died.
So right now, molecules just don’t matter. As in - they really, really don’t matter. Monthly RSI: 14, weekly RSI 19, daily RSI 21. That’s capitulation territory for molecules.
Me, I love tech. Its what I do. Bitcoin is tons of fun. I’m learning more and more about the details as time passes. I’ve worked in the networking field since the dawn of time. I have to constantly adapt. I’ll be writing python (or its successor language) from my rocking chair, quite possibly until I keel over dead. Why? Because for me, its just that much fun. It always has been, ever since I was a kid.
So, my question again: do molecules just not matter anymore? Should you sell your silver at $15.90, and buy bitcoin at $16,230?
Silver and bitcoin - that’s a fun one to compare. I own both. I have owned silver many years before bitcoin was a thing.
I bought silver under $10 in the 2000s. Bitcoin was technically born in 2009, but had no price until mid-way through 2010 when it was used to buy a pizza. No fiat or declaration. Doing the math for 10,000 bitcoin to buy $40 worth of pizza put the price at about one-quarter of a penny. It went several thousands of percent in the first bull run of its life lifting the value to 8 cents in weeks. As a full bitcoin is just another name for 100 million satoshis (units of value 8 decimals in) we could measure those 8 cents needing many leading zeros.
But we are looking at silver in its relation in US dollar terms. What can we trade them for as a currency. The can both act as unit of account and store of value. So we need something in relation we can buy with both so we can triangulate meaning.
Let’s use the standard median house price for the years both had established value. As they both have fluctuating prices throughout each year, I’ll look at December 31 of each year. The price of housing comes from the St Louis Fed https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPNHSUS
We will measure each in quantity of units required to purchase the house for each year - silver measured in troy ounces. Bitcoin measured in a full bitcoin. We can separate a troy oz into 33 grams, and bitcoin into 100 million sub units called 'satoshi’s as we can buy these in their equivalent portions but let’s stick to the full until as commonly know for ease.
| Year | Median US house price | SLV Price | BTC Price | SLV Needed | BTC needed |
| 2010 | $ 241,000.00 | 30.63 | $ 0.08 | 7,868.10 | 3,012,500.00 |
| 2011 | $ 218,600.00 | 28.18 | $ 4.25 | 7,757.27 | 51,435.29 |
| 2012 | $ 258,000.00 | 29.95 | $ 13.51 | 8,614.36 | 19,096.97 |
| 2013 | $ 275,500.00 | 19.5 | $ 757.00 | 14,128.21 | 363.94 |
| 2014 | $ 301,000.00 | 15.97 | $ 319.00 | 18,847.84 | 943.57 |
| 2015 | $ 297,000.00 | 13.82 | $ 430.00 | 21,490.59 | 690.70 |
| 2016 | $ 327,000.00 | 15.99 | $ 968.00 | 20,450.28 | 337.81 |
| 2017 | $ 312,800.00 | 15.95 | $ 16,940.00 | 19,611.29 | 18.47 |
The bitcoin I own is invisible. It exists everywhere and nowhere at once. and EVERYBODY wants to talk about it. I find people all over willing to sell their homes and cars for bitcoin. Bankers have wwhiteboardsand swat teams put together trying to figure out how they can cool it down. Central bankers are scratching their heads. Government officials are creating teams trying to harness its technology to make government more efficient. Speculators are having a hey-day. Millionaires from all walks of life are have become millionaires.
Now that mutual funds, retirement funds all a wall of money can just now begin to invest in it - many predictions from reputable predictors in the space call bitcoin at $40,000 each next year. That would put the estimated house at about 8.5 bitcoin - or near 20,000 ounces of silver.
So speaking of networking - one is electronic and fancy computer systems, and one is social. Social networks bring consensus. Human-relatable and agreeable networks of friends and family. Those over 70 might have a sense of nostalgia from when they were young and silver was an actual thing they could use to buy a bag of penny candy or shop the five and dime stores.
Most can’t get their kids interested in it because they can’t relate. Sure, it has industrial uses - but so does copper and zinc and that makes them about as excited - which is to say they aren’t interested. As I grow older and wiser it becomes easier to spot the patterns of life. One is up and coming with hopes and dreams, grown and excitement with a world of possibilities. One is a relic. I struggle to stay interested as I go visit the old boxes less frequently. My magnifying glass and books with holes ready to be filled with coins yet unfound.
I walk past the old coin store occasionally and see an older gentleman or couple in the quiet store from time to time. Only very rarely do I see a young person enter the forgotten store with the elderly owner. I guess it’s a sign of the times. They are moving on. The social networks of silver (and gold) are growing older and weaker each year. A lot of those social networks are getting shorted out as people fade away leaving only memories behind- for a while at least. Their loved ones will soon follow but the silver molecules will remain, dark, damp, and unappreciated. It claims the past.
Bitcoin is just a cryptocurrency. Who knows if it will live a long life. But it is made of energy which refuses to lie at rest. Its decedents are claiming the future.
I expect in my lifetime that a child will find it unbelievable that it once took more than one whole bitcoin to purchase a house. She might also find it equally unbelievable that people once were expected to use those old silver-colored round discs to actually pay for something.
Today an ounce of silver will claim 259,625 Satoshis flying around as measured electrons in a worldwide accounting book. How long before the silver is a claim on only 1,000 as the bitcoin price continues to soar? More importantly - will anybody still care?
The moment molecules don’t matter anymore we’re done for. Last I checked my kids were still built up of molecules, as was the food we grow and eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe, and the heat we need to survive has its source in molecules. I work with resilience, and one of the things that are often overlooked in that domain are the chains of dependency. As Dave indicates above, even cryptos ultimately depend on molecules (as unfashionable as they may have become).
I like certain aspects of what cryptos can do, part of their message, and a potential level of freedom they possibly can give (though I haven’t even scratched the surface to really understand the potentials cryptos have - or the threats they could bring). Based on discussions on PP I put some fiat into cryptos beginning of the year - the equivalent of an old bashed-up clunker - which now would be a more recent clunker with a funky stereo. So I’m pretty happy; it’ll never be ‘big’ what I’ll get out, but that’s OK, I feel (sideways) part of the movement. Cryptos (for me) will always be a mean that leads to ‘molecular’ ends. I’m uncomfortable with the seemingly in-baked tendency of society to always push further toward abstract ‘things’ while losing the bigger picture. This is part of what got us into this mess in the first place. I think a solid grounding in ‘molecules’ is key to our survival and well-being. Our vegetable garden will always be worth more to me then cryptos.
I understand that cryptos are potential game-changers, but let’s not separate this development from the ‘real world’…
I confess, while my code is grunging through the blockchain in the background, I’m doing everything I can to prod Mark into sending me that skeleton again. If bitcoin breaks out above 16,700 (bitstamp price) maybe he’ll finally give in and send it one more time. I want my skeleton, and I won’t stop provoking him until I get it! 
If I’m really pushy, maybe he’ll even post a picture of a dusty, moldy box of silver coins. [Mark: you just know you want to!]
You read his article. Doesn’t it feel right to you? I mean - I feel like that grandfather with dusty old gold and silver, an old has-been, behind the times.
We should all sell our dusty, moldy, reeking-of-decay gold and silver and swap them for shiny new invisible bitcoin, nowhere, yet everywhere, a handful of bits in a ledger residing in a collection of servers on the Internet.
Seriously. I feel the pull to do this. Bitcoin is exciting. Everyone is talking about it! His argument resonates on an emotional level. It is persuasive. [Most likely, something similar has been said on websites around the world by a collection of bitcoin whales.] Given how emotion tends to drive the herd, what does that say about where we are in this particular cycle?
So forget buy-low-sell-high. That’s grandpa’s mind-set, sitting in his rocking chair, thinking about “business cycles” and other ancient belief systems that no longer apply to the modern age. You don’t want to be a fossil! You want to be young, dynamic, a kid again, willing to jump into bitcoin at $16,500 because its sure to go to $40,000 due to a wall of money about to hit it from pension funds who are eager to cash in on bitcoin’s rise.
Your takeaway today: molecules are for Grandpa!
As a trader, you need to interpret your emotions properly rather than being led by them.
I can just feel the low coming. Can’t you? But first, we need as many goldbugs as possible to capitulate. They need to bail out here at the ratio-lows. They need to give up on gold, swap it for bitcoin, here at $1250/$16,500. They need to swap 13 ounces of gold for one bitcoin.
You do feel like capitulating, right? I sure hope so. That’s what lows feel like. The more of us that feel like that poor, deluded, ancient, behind-the-times grandpa, the happier I become. Once the goldbugs sell, that will mark the low.
Armstrong calls that “the slingshot move.”
Yeeeeh, I got promoted from a (digital) bronze to a (digital) silver member 
They have the wisdom to know where to fish, where to find mushrooms, and when to say ‘drop it, it’s not important’. Would have wanted to have had more time with my grandfathers, so much more to learn… I hope with time to grow into a grandpa myself to whom (grand)children will turn for some wise words or mental support, work in progress 
. Besides molecules and bits, there are other things that give depth to life, wisdom, meaningful connection…
I like Taleb’s view (from ‘Antifragile’): ‘For the perishable, every additional day in its life translates into a shorter additional life expectancy. For the nonperishable, every additional day may imply a longer life expectancy’, i.e. if it has weathered and survived serious stuff being thrown at it, it probably is pretty resilient (though Taleb doesn’t seem to like the term). The ‘molecular’ world has proven itself to be quite ‘antifragile’. The jury is still out on cryptos…
Remember that advertisement? I’ve been thinking along the same line with regards to the wall of pension money hitting the shore. Why not use (more) taxpayer money? It would require (perhaps) some additional tweaks to either version of the Pension Rehabilitation Trust Fund bill (H.R.4444 or S.2147), in my opinion, to make it happen; specifically, this section (in H.R.4444):
(A) IN GENERAL.—The loan received under subsection (a) shall be used to purchase annuity contracts which meet the requirements of subparagraph (B) or to implement a portfolio described in subparagraph (C) (or a combination of the two) to provide the benefits described in paragraph (1).
(B) ANNUITY CONTRACT REQUIREMENTS.—The annuity contracts purchased under subparagraph (A) shall be issued by an insurance company which is licensed to do business under the laws of any State and which is rated A or better by a nationally recognized statistical rating organization, and the purchase of such contracts shall meet all applicable fiduciary standards under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974.
(i) IN GENERAL.—A portfolio described in this subparagraph is—
(I) a cash matching portfolio or duration matching portfolio consisting of investment grade (as rated by a nationally recognized statistical rating organization) fixed income investments, including United States dollar-denominated public or private debt obligations issued or guaranteed by the United States or a foreign issuer, which are tradeable in United States currency and are issued at fixed or zero coupon rates; or
(II) any other portfolio prescribed by the Secretary of the Treasury in regulations which has a similar risk profile to the portfolios described in subclause (I) and is equally protective of the interests of participants and beneficiaries.
The beauty is that all the hands that fondle the fund stream get their vig. What's not to like? If things don't work out too well, there is always the "forgiveness" part [section (e) Loan Default].
(refer to https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/4444/)
I have ridden that rocketship of “exponential price increase euphoria” before and been crushed.
So I won’t be participating in this one. Goes High or low. Doesn’t matter. I’m sitting this one out.
However, after some semblance of stability returns, I will follow CHS, DaveF, The Saker, Raul Meijer’s general suggestion that cryptos can be useful in commerce and keep a crypto account open for transactions. Won’t store much money there, though.
And I feel comfortable sitting on the sidelines and missing out should it go much higher.
Dennis is using an old logical fallacy of setting up a straw man defense. He must be new to these parts because I get quite an enjoyment of calling these out and making one feel a bit silly for trying these dumb tactics. The basics of straw man.
From Wikipedia: A straw man is a common form of argument and is an informal fallacy based on giving the impression of refuting an opponent’s argument, while refuting an argument that was not presented by that opponent.[1] One who engages in this fallacy is said to be “attacking a straw man”.
He presents these laws and formal declarations not based on anything I said or suggested. It’s often used by unintelligent people trying to confuse the facts and build a case for no argument based on completely unrelated topics. But our audience is much smarter than that. So I supposed he has more success trying tactics like this on Hip Hop Forums. Go get giggy with it.
My grandpa was an excellent man with a lot of good idea and a heart of gold. He was full of sage advice. He often said “By the Great Horn Spoon!” when I would tell him some new thing I had discovered as a child. Nobody else I knew used that expression. I loved him for it. It was "our thing’. I could count on it all through my teenage years.
One bit of advice he told me in all seriousness while taking my hand he would look me in the eyes and remind me that it wasn’t the things he did that he regretted. It was the things he didn’t do. Because he was scared, or it was new, and he wasn’t confident. He just didn’t want to make a mistake. In the process, he led a very conservative and unremarkable life. There’s nothing wrong with that. This could describe - by far, most people in life. But with regret. What could have been. We can all look back and find moments of decision - where making a different choice would have likely lead to amazing adventures, or opportunity for wealth. But we were risk adverse.
As many of you know, I teach community classes on this technology. I haven’t made a dime doing it. In my class, I volunteered on Saturday I met a great older gentleman of 70 years old. He was still bustling even helping me carry my equipment to my car. He told me that he decided to take law classes at the age of 51. By 54 he had spent the happiest three years of his life not being the same realtor that he had spent his life. But he found out the hard way that there weren’t any job openings for a 54-year-old lawyer with no experience that would pay near enough to sustain his lifestyle.
But here he was - front row learning about the world of blockchains. Soaking in every world but obviously confused at times and I took the time to repeat sections until the light bulb went off. I told him that it’s a rinse and repeat kind of thing. But this was one I admired. Living life on his terms - continuing to progress and not missing new opportunities. In our conversations after class, he realized I’m a never-ending student of life as well. The things I learned from him… exciting times are ahead.
So what would I tell my grandpa about spending his retirement account on crypto? The same thing I told my 92 year old father. Use the money you wouldn’t lose sleep over - and are comfortable loosing if it just doesn’t work out. Then, let somebody experience and trusted help you.
You got me there, as in confused. Not quite sure where I was referring to grandpa and bitcoin but thanks for your response.
Mark, I’m really not sure who you were responding to. Dennis said nothing about Grandpa. Or bitcoin.
Hint: you were probably responding to me. I’m Dave, not Dennis. And you were the one that started talking about rocking chairs. I just took what you said, owned it, and moved it a bit further down the road.
If there was an explicit response to something I said in all that text you wrote in your latest response (absent your using the wrong name), I’m missing it completely.
Simple question.
Would you tell Grandpa to buy bitcoin here, now, at $16,500?
Or would you tell him to wait for a better entry point?
I want my skeleton! Now!!
Regarding waiting for a pullback for an entry point, just a question. They said that about gold 5 years ago and it dropped and languished at $1200 since then due to naked shorting. Since the banks will have the same shorting mechanism in place for bitcoin, is it possible that bitcoin will never go back up because they can provide an infinite amount of naked futures?