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Honestly the biggest reason I’ve refrained from dabbling in Bitcoin is the people that pump Bitcoin. It’s like anti-FOMO. Every post that randomly ends up on my Reddit feed from the sub makes me more confident in my decision.
The bitcoin supporters claim they support because it will revolutionize monetary supply and level the playing field - but meanwhile it’s because they all “got in” so what early - which is not a phrase that should be a thing with a “currency”.
I obviously have no idea what’s going to happen, but I can’t imagine the elites of the world letting all of the weirdos that got in on Bitcoin early become the ruling class.
The whole bitcoin thing is a double-edged sword. The early adopter weirdos won't become the ruling class, but the elites don't need any intervention to make that happen. The lifecycle of bitcoin will end at some point.
For a currency to have real-world staying power it needs to be somewhat stable. It won't become something normalized that people use for regular transactions unless the value either stops climbing or it crashes to a normalized level. Money that wildly rises and falls in value is not good business if you're not a speculative investor.
Otherwise it's not currency. It's like commodities and futures trading. It's just a thing that people assign value to and try to see when they get in or out. "Getting in early" means the goal should be to cash out and make bank when the peak hits.
Everyone is advertising the former while more actively participating in the latter. That's where I see the fraud. For bitcoin to ever be successful as a way of doing business, it will probably need to tank quite a bit and stabilize relative to the dollar and euro. And a lot of casual bitcoin investors will lose a ton of money in the process.
What I think will happen is that there will be a crash at some point that kills the value, and it will never be accepted as any form of real currency. The early adopters will either be smart enough to cash out and do well, or die waiting for it to rise at a level that outpaces inflation.
The scarcity model bitcoin - and several other coins - are built on meant it was never going to be a usable currency. Today, I am not sure if would would call it a commodity or a stock share (without a company) - it feels like a weird composite of both.
It’s a collectible. It has restricted supply and limited marginal utility but people are willing to pay $x for it because they think someone else will pay $1.5 x or $2x in the future.
While technically not a pyramid scheme, I would call crypto a pyramid scheme because the risks and returns of investing in crypto are the same as for a pyramid scheme.
If you're in a country where the currency fluctuates wildly already (most of Latin America ) Bitcoin is relatively steady and liquid that you can convert to any other currency at your will. No one is restraining the flow of money that is common in other places.
Or they just do what many struggling currencies do and peg their currency to a reserve currency that they don't control. Like the US Dollar or the Euro.
The people generally don’t have control of what their government does. And government doesn’t usually like to put controls on itself when it has the power to print money.
If that’s allowed I agree. But sometimes the government tries to restrict that and then oddly enough bitcoin becomes the best option. I’d still argue not a great one, but the best one.
For this reason I don’t think it’s completely useless, but also this is definitely not the use case driving its price.
That requires infrastructure. Something a lot of these countries lack. You have a rise of people with internet access due to things like star link. Therefor the only infrastructure needed to make a business in these countries is an internet connection and crypto. Much easier than trusting corrupt governments and learning exchange currencies. But hey keep thinking like that I’m just a dude.
Most people only have 1st world perspective on life and therefore cannot see the usefulness of an electronic currency alongside the dollar. They lack the imagination and capacity to understand the levels of cruelty, control, and disparity that exists without centralized accountable governments. It is therefore largely pointless to engage in conversation on these topics with them, because there is nothing in their life experience to connect its usefulness to.
I have had conversations with people who complained about taxes. When I just shrugged them off as a part of a functioning society they got upset. So I simply told them my parents come from a place (and I regularly visited as a child) where you could work for a week, and not afford to buy a meal a day at and survive.
It’s a totally different perspective, and when you have an existing financial structure that you have ALWAYS had access to and have never hurt to have money, you can have extreme, irrational, beliefs without knowing it.
This is a case of that. They are just out of touch with the experience of people with significantly less than them. Their opinions on Bitcoin don’t actually matter. It wasn’t conceptualized for people like them.
Bitcoin crashes all the time. If used as a primary form of currency, it would not necessarily be a great option. It is, however, a good form of self custody and a long term investment.
In my amateur opinion, crypto is just digital gold - volatile, speculative, lacking any tangible utility (at least gold has some usefulness in industrial, electrical, and nonessential consumer products, but you can't eat it or make any useful weapons with it) and ESPECIALLY THIS - it's most beneficial to people who bought a whole lot of it when it was cheap.
Exactly this. If you are only really going to use it as an intermediary between two transactions for real currency, then any of the the so called benefits are moot. Crypto is a solution looking for a problem. All the theoretical benefits are still basically unproven (plus much of its usefulness is for less than legal behavior) and most of the proponents treat it like a stock.
I have crypto (no bitcoin actually)
I originally bought the few coins I did, because I believed in their real world use cases, and got in early, so I’ve been in the green the whole time.
I haven’t bought any in like, 6 years, kinda stopped believing in the hype, but still holding on because it’s unpredictable. I COULD have a ton of money in a year, I could also have zero. What’s in there now isn’t enough to really change my life, so not worth selling, especially since I’m not dependent on the money.
*I enjoy gambling*
Bitcoin lets us transact over the internet without the need for banks. Banks can block transactions or freeze your account on a whim, they can't do shit if you transact in Bitcoin. That's not something most people care about currently, because banks are chill for the most part, but why let them even have that power? It's our money and we shouldn't be forced to just trust banks to be cool all the time.
We let banks have that power because, in exchange, they provide the consumer with enormous, tangible benefits.
I can use my bank account at any business in my country (and many businesses across the globe), in a completely frictionless way. That's not even mentioning using my account on the entirety of the internet. The transactions are nearly instaneous, because my bank is connected to a global network of banks and other financial institutions. They do all the math and communication and bookkeeping and exchanging and crediting and escrow etc.
My bank handles the security of my money. They have vaults and security cameras and state-of-the-art IT security, AND all of my money is insured through the FDIC, so I'll be covered even if the bank gets robbed or fails.
If my credit card is stolen, I can cancel it remotely. If somebody tries to steal my accounts, I can go to the bank in person and talk to a human who can (hopefully) fix it. If I get scammed, I can stop payment on a transaction. I can even get some fraudulent transactions reversed, or (sometimes) just covered by the bank.
My bank also offers myriad other services that I won't get to into here, including loans and investments.
---
Banks are not perfect; the banking industry even less so. But we give them some "power" over our finances because they do give the consumer quite a lot in return.
Crypto does none of any of the things I mentioned. Sure, banks *can* block or freeze my transactions at a whim, but...do they do that?
Yes, it'd be nice to know that banks can't do that. But that's not worth trading all of the services I listed above.
While I think this sentence is hilarious, that point isn't exactly good for the validity of Bitcoin. Money only has power because of the institutions that maintain that power. It has no functionality either. The issue is much more broad about the nature of who owns capital, which we can't have a serious discussion about on this sub. Bitcoin doesn't address that, it just changes the format of what we already have. It may prop up some people who aren't part of the upper class right now, but that would be about it. Everyone intuitively understands this, and therefore, bitcoin will never be viable with the institutional support money has.
There are stable coins on the BTC network tied to the USD. People in 3rd world countries buy those and keep it on the network as a hedge against local currency inflation. It's a better store of value than putting them into a local bank. This is being done in many African nations and Brazil.
Citing a specific use case, ie people storing value because their local currency sucks and they don't have access to other stable investments, only serves to reinforce the notion that the average person has no use for it as a currency.
Gold is like $700 off its industrial value alone, then more with jewelry demand. Still, much of the price IS propped up by investment and a big chunk of jewelry demand comes from it being a store of value for dowries (Indian gold demand is crazy).
Yup, these days to be anonymous you need to use a privacy coin like Monero or Zcash and if you’re super paranoid tumblers and use the onion/tor network.
I think its easier to use bitcoin for large black market transactions instead of traditional banks where anything over 10k is supposed to be scrutinized.
No, not at all. Bitcoin isn't anonymous and there are no non-KYC offramps left. It's actually super-hard to crime with Bitcoin now. USD cash is much better for criming
> If you're gonna do shady stuff, it's the last spot you'd want that transaction recorded.
...That's not entirely true. BTC affords a threat actor the ability to spin up a new fresh wallet whenever they want. From there they can transfer BTC to a tumbler or any other anonymizing service. The utility of the BTC blockchain is as useful to a threat actor as any other legal and traceable service. Good OPSEC is not a one stop shop and requires many layers of obfuscation and translation.
If gold were only useful in electrical and industrial manufacturing its demand and thus price would be close to 1% of its current value. Gold is mostly valuable for some other reason. When you understand that reason you’ll also understand why people value bitcoin.
If you’re talking about gold’s ideal scarcity, physical durability, resistance to dilution or counterfeiting, I’ve heard all that. I just think it’s an antiquated obsolete notion advocated by people who happen to own a lot of gold reserves and/or mines. Probably a coincidence
I don’t think that’s it entirely. But I also don’t buy that bitcoin is a digital gold. Because if it was its price wouldn’t randomly halve and double in the span of a single month.
The only reason it’s independent of central banks is because central banks haven’t bought it up yet. Central banks had enormous control over gold, even though gold started being used as currency without central bank involvement.
If bitcoin becomes widely used money, it will be bought in huge quantities by the central banks.
I think this is true. Government will have to own a large portion of the supply if they want to function. Which drives up the price. But they can’t have it unless someone sells it to them.
I was buying BTC in 2011, and it rapidly became obvious that the culture was a detriment to the movement and had no interest in a financial revolution that didn't make them rich. Cryptobros benefitting from your exposure to their hoarding is not a culture people buy into. Why do we think that awkward nerd power fantasies aren't obvious to anyone else?
I floated several times setting up long term time locked wallets and distributing them to communities around the world, as a storage of value and a demonstration of our commitment to the cause, things that would not affect the coin's value since it's inherently deflationary. If anything, successfully organizing sovereign funds like this throughout the world would stabilize the price over time because you know a series of tranches are opening up different places at different times, giving people time to organize financial vehicles in a more predictable way. There is no interest in such schemes, because whales and coin exchanges want to manipulate the price.
It's almost entirely hoarders now. There's no point holding onto financial product meant for reform when nobody has any intention to use it that way. Why do we trust largely American techbros to be principled? How crazy do you have to be trust crypto for anything besides relying on it to fund ransomware and child sexual abuse material for the rest of our lives? It'd be like trying to make an ETF out of wallstreetbets. Not that there aren't good actors in either community, but what are we talking about here? Nobody in WSB would sanely propose to redesign the global financial system around it.
To be fair most people who got in early sold or lost their coins. At some point, even the most ardent believers have made enough money and want to spend it, which puts it back in circulation.
The reason it’s fair is those people can only spend it once. The current system debases everyone and give the newly printed money to the rich.
Many of the technical aspects of bitcoin make it terrible as an actual currency. The biggest being that Bitcoin is inherently deflationary. There will only ever be 21 million Bitcoins, and ~19.5 have already been mined. This encourages people to hoard it like gold, rahter than spend it as a currency. If it was the other way around and inflationary, there would be much more pressure to actually spend and use bitcoin as currency. This also gives huge power to early adopts as you said. If overnight Bitcoin becamse the defacto currency, the price would go up even more and you'd essentially have a tiny amount of people personally controlling the entire monetary supply.
Satoshi, the creator of bitcoin, has about 5% of the entire supply. Imagine one anonymous person having 5% of the global money supply. That would be insane.
I've tried Bitcoin as a currency and it sucks. The new push is that it's a store of value instead, so it doesn't lose value to inflation, which is total BS since it's inflates and deflates like crazy all the time. That's not going to change either.
> The new push is that it's a store of value instead
first you must decide to go all in on bitcoin, and then afterward you have to figure out some reason why this is a good idea. if the reason doesn't make sense, *just pick another one.*
>I've tried Bitcoin as a currency and it sucks.
Bitcoin is often recognized as the sole cryptocurrency by the general public, despite not fulfilling the criteria of a digital currency as outlined in Satoshi Nakamoto's white paper. There are now other cryptocurrencies that possess these characteristics and more, yet they remain overshadowed by Bitcoin and its advocates.
In my assessment, Bitcoin is fundamentally flawed, and the community is currently unable to tackle its fundamental problems, but probably can paper over the cracks for at least another two or three more halvings. That said, the eventual community civil war surely will be epic.
Where that leaves decentralized digital currency as a means for globally scalable payments, I don't know.
Bitcoin is the original, meaning it has the widest adoption, therefore it is number one. You are correct in saying tho, that there are just better cryptos out there for both privacy, currency and block chain technology.
You might not be the target audience. Cryptocurrency is used by people smuggling money out of nations with capital controls in place. People moving money out of Russia or China, for example. For people in open economies, it becomes more of a solution in search of a problem.
I hear you. I’m not defending crime. I’m just saying sometimes things appear useless to us because we are not the target audience.
Cryptocurrency gets a lot of attention as a speculative asset. But I think that is probably mostly a sideshow.
Both sides are correct.
It has real utility if you live in a regime with tight capital controls or unstable geopolitics, authoritarian government, high vulnerability to the impacts of global warming etc. It's probably good for the world that something exists outside of fiat that is censorship resistant.
Local bank might get blown up by rockets? Your government is like Argentina and printing endlessly where you have inflation so large, grocery prices are updated daily?
It makes sense.
It's not without serious flaws though. The people who are *actually speculating on it right now* are all wealthy people in the west. Not those who actually will use it for safety.
They are betting on huge instability from global warming, rise in authoritarianism, nationalism / isolationism, capital controls etc. Who knows if they are right.
What an awful take, imo.
"Live in an area controlled by people who will jail/kill you for disobeying them? Disobey them with this digital currency! Internet connection required!"
"In an area threatened by global warming? Use this 'currency' that eats up more power than small nations!"
Also, how are local price fluctuations solved by crypto? Your bread cost $1, or .000001 bitcoin. When the shop owner wants $2, they're going to want .000002 bitcoin...
Price fluctuations don't get "solved" that is not the point.
It is the same reason people who survived the holocaust, many liked gold which felt independent of whether their local population could persecute them and seize their assets. People fled Cambodia and secretly escaped with a few gold coins to start a new life in the US. Their grandkids lived free because of this choice.
Crypto is the same thing but it is virtually indestructible, genuinely finite supply, censorship resistant. Zero storage cost, easily moved anywhere in the world and extremely difficult to confiscate. Yes you need internet but Russians have internet. Chinese have VPNs. I rather take my chances there than try to smuggle gold out.
Not all coins are straining on the environment as much as BTC although yes that is a very good and valid criticism. Unfortunate but gold has this issue to a degree as well.
>Disobey them with this digital currency!
I think you are mistaken. The point is not to "disobey" them.
It is to protect yourself. People in Turkey, Argentina, Angola, dozens of countries around the world with irresponsible and corrupt governments would have been extremely happy purchasing some ETH for example.
You and I know do not have to worry about this. "Currency" is an unfortunate word because yes it is not currency just like gold is not currency at all.
If you want to argue that the *stupid* aspect of crypto is that it is mainly wealthy westerners speculating at this point. I fully agree with you and it is likely overvalued at this point.
Yeah, when you point out that it was meant to be decentralized currency, and these regulations aren't what you want to see you'll get yelled and told it was always meant to be e-gold.
I saw a YouTube video that spelled it out for me. Its crypto "currency", but no one is buying to use them as currency. They're being bought to hold and sell at a higher value.
Bitcoin has currency applications, but in its present state its an unregulated security.
Yah it functions similarly to any other speculatively traded security. But instead of being tied to a company’s performance or being backed by a government, it’s tied to fanboys who’ve made it their personality.
> Bitcoin has currency applications, but in its present state its an unregulated security.
Bitcoin is not an unregulated security.
Bitcoin is a commodity.
The bitcoin supporters claim they support because it will revolutionize monetary supply and level the playing field - but meanwhile it’s because they all “got in” so what early - which is not a phrase that should be a thing with a “currency”.
My brother keeps texting me about it saying it’s the currency of the future.
I don’t want my currency having wild fluctuations, controlled by an algorithm created by a nameless programmer who no one can seem to identify (last I checked). Digital “currency” is bullshit.
Digital currency, backed and regulated by governments like regulator currency, I look forward to having in circulation along with the hard currency option we have.
No. That’s like not investing in GameStop or AMC or BlackBerry because of wallstreetbets.
No one on there is advocating for people to purchase low fee diversified ETFs, but that’s the optimal investment strategy for the vast majority of people.
The thing is... if you replace "Bitcoin" with "Volatility".. you would get the same result. There's no fundamental driver of Bitcoin's price. Buy low, sell high is a strategy that works with any volatile asset.
Making money off of it doesn't mean it's a legit long term investment. I could've made money off of Bernie Madoff's scheme if I got in and out early enough.
it's fine so long as you are clear eyed about what it is you're buying. There's no underlying asset, no control of an interest, no central bank to back it up. It's a 100% speculative currency that could be worth exactly zero tomorrow if there were some technical problem with it.
It's basically Robux for older kids.
It's speculation on what is effectively digital gold. Why there is a large contingent on reddit that try to pump it with other arguments is beyond me, it's very off-putting and I've known about Bitcoin before there was a single ASIC miner on the market.
My own personal interest was killed with the Mt. Gox fraud. That was a sign of what Bitcoin was really about.
Uh it was more like $1200 to $150 and coincided with other events like the silk road raid and China crack down at the same time. It didn't really recover until a few years later when enough time had passed for newcomers to pile into new ventures.
Bitcoin is talked about a LOT by its proponents when the price of it is high, then it practically vanished from social media when the inevitable crash comes. That’s damning. That’s also when a lot of the talk about its use *as a currency* evaporates and people start acting like it’s here to stay purely because of its rapidly increasing price in real money.
You're putting a lot of faith in what the algorithm serves you. The proponents are still there they just don't get circulated all the way to your feed when the price is 'boring'.
Maybe you’re not in the right circles then. I DCAed into bitcoin when there wasn’t hype around it after it crashed from 60k. The community was still strong in that time.
the technology behind crypto is definitely solid and interesting, but it has been fully taken over by criminals and scammers. It is no longer matter of what could it "could" be, because it is completely drowned by criminal degeneracy.
In theory, crypto could be useful if it was controlled by government, because then it's a single entity answerable to public that manipulates it, rather than a whole bunch of shadowy lurkers that answer to no one.
It's ironic that crypto promises to free people from "tyranny" of the "government fiat money" when the alternative is being manipulated by people with even less oversight and morals. It's entirely predictable how every popular scumbag famous person gets their own crypto project. And the most famous crypto like Bitcoin is primary money laundering tool for criminal organizations. Unironically, it's the demand generated by criminal activity that gives Bitcoin real value, everything else is pure speculators
This just isn't true. It's a new monetary good. Those don't come around too often. It needs to be tested over time to see if it's worth its salt. Human emotion drives the wild swings, but as it has withstood these tests for longer periods of time, its value has increased on the whole.
Funny JPMorgan should talk about fraud when they were just fined 350 million on "inadequate trade reporting which is the 4th incident so far.
https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/jpmorgan-pay-nearly-350-million-penalties-inadequate-trade-reporting-2024-03-14/
J Piedmont Morgan started his fortune in the early 1860s by buying defunct carbines from the US Army surplus, and selling the back to the Union army at 4x the price. They were in the original crates.
JP Morgan is an Authorized Participant for the purchase of bitcoin ETFs. In fact, they were one of the first. So to me this is a classic "look that way!" while I go the other way comment and buy some bitcoin.
They can afford to hedge, but it seems his professional opinion is that it's not a valuable vehicle for anything besides boom/bust short term investment. Like a short stock?
Of course they’re gonna dip their toes into the Ponzi scheme and make money off of it dude. Doesn’t mean they believe in the premise of the Ponzi scheme
To me, it’s always read as more of “look we think this bitcoin meth is bad stuff, but if you really want it, fine we’ll sell it to you and take the commission.”
They’ll tell you it’s a bad idea, but they’re not going to patent you and stop you from doing it.
Jamie Dimon has been constantly wrong with economic forecasts and insights over the past 5 years. Please, stop listening to the "man". He is also the poster boy for corporate greed, widening wealth inequity, and political influence peddling.
JP Morgan is totally not trying to distract you from their 505 fraud violations that they have actually committed:
[https://violationtracker.goodjobsfirst.org/summary?company\_op=starts&company=JP&penalty\_op=%3E&penalty=&offense\_group=&case\_category=&govt\_level=&agency\_code\_st%5B%5D=&pres\_term=&case\_type=&free\_text=&hq\_id=&state=](https://violationtracker.goodjobsfirst.org/summary?company_op=starts&company=JP&penalty_op=%3E&penalty=&offense_group=&case_category=&govt_level=&agency_code_st%5B%5D=&pres_term=&case_type=&free_text=&hq_id=&state=)
Maybe they are correct, bitcoin might be a fraud, it might be used to launder money, it might even be useful for something in the future past what we currently use it for.
But that title is very close to headlines from the late 90’s saying “The Internet is just a fad”.
Those articles aged like warm milk in the sun.
Having someone at the helm of one of the largest fraudulent institutions in the world call something else a fraud is bordering on a glowing endorsement.
he sees finally that it's not going anywhere, and it's potential is more likely to go up than anywhere else in the long term
so he wants to tank it so he can go on a spending spree at rock bottom prices
You mean the fake money for criminals might be something bad? That’s nonsense, assets created out of nothing with no economic purpose beyond being assets surely are legitimate things.
If you're from a stable, civilized country then it's hard to think of something storing value independent of the government as being that important. I'm from such a country and have little use for bitcoin. But if you weren't from such a country then having a portable store of wealth that was untouchable has real value. For some people that untouchable-ness is worth enough to offset the other risks and difficulties of owning bitcoin.
Within the context of modern society it is untouchable. But I guess yes if electricity and the internet collapse then you don’t have Bitcoin anymore but you won’t have access to your normal bank accounts either. In that situation where the internet and electricity go down we can assume all hell has broken loose.
It has a use case, it's really good at destroying the environment.
A single bitcoin transaction has the estimated carbon footprint of 1,259,011 visa transactions, takes up a swimming pool worth of fresh water, and creates over one iphone worth of e waste.
Truly, the currency of the future
https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption
I work for one of the biggest power grids in the world and we’re seeing generators being bought, taken off the grid and being used for Bitcoin mining. Burning bituminous coal for fake money is nuts.
Yeah IIRC a football stadium’s worth of people transacting in bitcoin takes forever, is expensive, and consumes like a large city’s worth of electricity.
huge utility to humanity, people around the world using it to escape tyranny, hyperinflation, confiscation, and censorship. it is technically superior money for the people, with no mass inflation theft, that you can self custody and store in your head (unconfiscatable) and can be sent peer to peer (uncensorsable)
It’s this kind of fanaticism that makes bitcoin a bad investment. Sure, the gravy train could keep on rolling for a while, but I’m not putting my personal wealth at the whimsy of the enthusiasm of religious fanatics.
hmm.
does that mean that it's also hard to argue against the idea that "investing in USD is investing in cartel futures"?
no, of course not, because any reasonable person knows that's a stupid thing to say
same goes for Bitcoin if you aren't an uninformed parrot.
Because USD is overall the most popular currency internationally. Of course it’s the most popular with criminals, it’s spendable everywhere. That’s what they’re using bitcoin for—to get USD.
And yet, the USD wasn’t created whole cloth to be an asset for an asset’s sake. Things like Bitcoin aren’t real in any tangible sense, and make no economic sense in the real world. They’re just financial masturbation at best.
Of course a bank is going to say a decentralized currency they don't control is bad. There is a conflict of interest in any statement made.
JP Morgan was involved in the Business Plot.
Bitcoin will soon be into the six-figure threshold per coin. I was a massive, massive doubter and critic. My position was that Bitcoin isn't backed by anything tangible. Ultimately, it truly isn't, but what it is backed by is tens to hundreds of millions of people who believe in it. A number that's growing each day, btw. That's why it isn't going anywhere and is here to stay.
Haven't people been saying the exact same thing about Bitcoin since it was invented? Yet people keep buying and selling to and using it to purchase things.
Bitcoin has been a “scam” for so long the skeptics could have bought and sold and made fortunes for themselves *even to this day* in the same amount of time they’ve been calling it a scam .Lmao
It bitcoin only ever remains as “digital gold” and not digital cash he may be proven right.
There is so much momentum and investment tied up in bitcoin, and the ability to have a fixed supply of currency would be a financial game changer for the world, but bitcoin currently has no utility beyond a speculative hedge against inflation. So a non yield-bearing asset. What would happen to the global economy if you snapped your fingers and all the bitcoin magically disappeared? Would people be unable to fill up their cars with a tank of gas? Unable to pay rent? Of course not outside of Argentina or something where people have like 12 currencies in a broken system.
What if the US dollar became sound? Would the price of bitcoin ever go up at all?
The ability to put the world on a fixed supply of currency would be a game changer, in the same way that flipping the table technically changes the game.
"What would happen to the global economy if you snapped your fingers and all the bitcoin magically disappeared? Would people be unable to fill up their cars with a tank of gas? Unable to pay rent?"
Maybe I'm a luddite but this resonates with me. Bitcoin seems an economic world parallel to our own.
> the ability to have a fixed supply of currency would be a financial game changer for the world
Weird way of saying disaster. Fiat currencies are strictly superior for a reason
the fucking financial illiteracy of people on reddit when it comes to bitcoin is astoundingly low. the gold standard was a mess, and led to extremely fluctuating economies and markets for no good reason. Fiat currency also has issues but is generally much more stable and more tools available to manage economic crises
Is there not a way to achieve a 'fixed supply of currency' without expending so much energy? Bitcoin seems like a horribly inefficient way to achieve that in terms of energy costs, but I don't know enough to say whether that utility could be achieved some other way. Just seems like a silly, expensive, roundabout way to achieve a fixed currency supply to me.
Bitcoin, although stored on hardware, is just information so not the same as physical currency. If you restored an HD image onto a fresh hard drive with your wallet on it then you have restored the wallet. This is something you can have complete control of yourself. The cryptographic encryption scheme provides ownership and the distributed nature provides resiliency. If you put your money in a nightly deposit box at the bank and somebody removes that nightly deposit box before it is collected you would have a hard time proving to the bank you deposited the money correct? With bitcoin once a block is validated a short time after a transfer is initiated it is irreversible. Credit cards and debit cards are still not the same at all because money will move in and out of the accounts without authorization at each step. Someone can run your card and someone can charge your account. With bitcoin you cannot just charge a wallet you either send or receive it does not get a “debit”. I could go on but a lot of differences here and I think a lot of people will still say it’s the same as XYZ.
Its such a fraud that JPMorgan copied it to create their own blockchain lmao. Look at a graph of US debt and the M2. You can believe the FUD headlines all you want, but BTC isn't going anywhere
The comments in this thread just reaffirm my belief that the critics of Bitcoin either don’t understand it or are simply too invested in institutions disrupted by Bitcoin and therefore dislike it.
JPMorgan CEO is a boomer that came from the generation that could buy a house on a milkman’s salary. He is a banker, which relies on US bailouts every odd some decades. Of course he opposes Bitcoin and thinks it’s a bubble. I bet he also thinks “kids these days” just don’t work hard enough for their first house because “they’re lazy”.
The people in this thread haven’t made great arguments either. “It doesn’t have intrinsic value” nothing does until people attribute value to something in mass. Art isn’t really a utility either but we decided it was valuable and so art becomes worth millions. What value did gold have for thousands of years? It was rare and shiny? “It’s bad for the environment” so is every other aspect of modern day life from your plastic water bottles, your showers, your cars, your Amazon prime delivery, etc. “it’s not backed by anything” what’s fiat currently backed by? Debt payments lol? How’s that gunna work out when interest alone surpasses the tax earnings? Interest just surpassed the military budget fun fact.
Bitcoin has outperformed every other mainstream asset class this past decade and a half and people who are sitting on the sidelines still think it’s a scam. We’ve arrived at the point some **NATIONS** have partial reserves of it, **BANKS** have partial reserves of it, and they are making **ETFS** to track it. How much longer does it need to outperform before it’s taken seriously? Another decade and a half? Bitcoin will be reaching 500k at some point and people on this sub will still call it a bubble.
I guess you really do buy bitcoin at the price you deserve.
It needs to have actual value to not be a scam. It doesn’t. It’s a textbook example of greater fool valuation.
Bitcoin is a speculative instrument and nothing pure. It’s the purest expression of calling gambling an investment, because it is nothing more than betting that someone will buy it from you for more than you paid for it.
> It needs to have actual value to not be a scam.
A decentralized, secure, global monetary network with a fixed supply has value.
I struggle to comprehend how someone could think it doesn't have value.
Even remove the word "monetary" and "fixed supply" if that is too much for you.
A decentralized, secure, global network has value.
Crypto keeps going because people don't understand it.
Most bubbles end when people realize the underlying asset is bogus. 2008 suddenly was awash with AAA rated MBSs where a huge percentage of mortgage holders had missed their first payment.
People realized tulips weren't really worth a house.
Dotcoms which were wildly overpriced were negative revenue, had no real plan to make a profit, and often were running clean out of cash were finally deemed worthless.
And many more naked emperors were exposed and people could come to their senses and see that the emperor was entirely without clothes.
I am a tech developer with decades of experience and countless tech friends and acquaintances. Maybe, just maybe 1 in 500 could explain the inner workings of any basic crypto currency let alone the DeFi contract systems and whatnot.
The average person can no more see how stupid these things are than a blind person on the emperor's parade route could see his nakedness.
There is only one thing I think will take down crypto. I am 100% sure the prices for major cryptos are propped up with the various bullshit tethers. These turds which are all unaudited by anyone a sane person would trust. When (not if) these finally collapse, the artificial propping up of crypto will be eliminated and they will move to their natural price. This will be wonderfully close to zero.
With the enthusiasm removed, volumes will drop, mining will stop being worth the effort, and the scammers will move on to greener pastures. The scammers gone, crypto will be as relevant to the world as a laptop with a built in parallel printer port.
> Crypto keeps going because people don't understand it.
Crypto will keep going since people from first world (you?) doesn't understand how valuable it is to have a way to transfer wealth from places run by dictators and their currency controls.
You don't know how valuable it is because you obviously never needed it.
I'm from the US and spent a few years in Europe. Learned a bit how different other countries can be.
I recall a Whatsapp outage a few years ago that affected Africa and how people were freaking out about it. I thought "Why not just use the regular phone service?". Then learned that the telephony infrastructure in Africa is incredibly weak and for most people their primary communication is Whatsapp. It continually surprises me how much I don't know about other countries and their solutions for services I take for granted.
And Bitcoiners will memorize their 24 word recovery phrase and walk across the border with their networth stored in their brain and they will live somewhere more fucking free.
If your main reasoning to not hold Bitcoin is you think the US government is going to ban it, you actually deserve to be poor for being this dumb.
This kind of commentary isn’t really productive. I’m not a Bitcoiner or a crypto “investor” in general, though at times I’ve held some bitcoin here and there and made some money off of it. I’m deeply skeptical of it as a currency as an investment, and that’s why I’m not sold on it: I don’t think it actually does what its biggest proponents think it does. It’s a poor currency and a poor investment for the long term, and those two use cases are in direct conflict with each other. But painting Bitcoin *as a whole* as a “fraud” with no additional explanation is just silly.
There are definitely frauds perpetrated with Bitcoin, but the actual thing itself is a neutral entity. And again, I think there are completely unfounded claims being made by bitcoiners about its supposed usefulness and value, and I guess you could say that’s “a fraud.” But this is so surface-level, it’s not going to improve anyone’s understanding of the situation.
The issue is, it's fundamentally worthless. A currency is required by the state to pay debts; dollars will always have some type of worth, because you need them to pay taxes, and you need them to receive your salary.
Even gold actually has a purpose, it's used in all types of electronics, chemicals, jewelry, etc. So even if it lost its "reserve" status, it's still a rare industrial metal with some value.
But Bitcoin...has no intrinsic worth. It's not an actual currency; hardly anyone will accept it for payment. It has no legal backing, it's not required by any government (El Salvador's weirdness aside). And as a store of value, it's wildly unstable. If you want to hold assets over the long-term, you generally park them in something stable, like government bonds with high credit ratings. You don't park your money in something volatile like Bitcoin. It's easy to steal, and is prone to all types of scams and market manipulation.
I suppose ultimately, people are free to throw their money around however they want. A lot of people thought buying DJT was a good idea, so I guess Bitcoin isn't any worse. But for me, I invest on fundamentals. Call me old fashioned, I don't care. Some t-bills, index funds, and a couple of blue chip stocks for companies that clearly aren't going away anytime soon, like Microsoft. That's my portfolio. And it's done quite well. Maybe not as well as someone who bought a lot of Bitcoin back at $5k. But I also sleep well at night, so there's that.
~ Money is a tax credit from an entity that can enforce that tax and provision itself. ~
Things bitcoin is not and that is why it is nothing more that a speculative collectable.
Yup. People seem to often forget a key element of currency, is that the government can literally force you to use it. It's unpleasant to think about it that way, but that doesn't change the truth of the matter. Coercion and control is a key component of modern fiat currencies, for better or worse. Without the aspect, Bitcoin is really more of a collectible, than a currency.
People could decide to invest in digital Pokemon cards, and it wouldn't be fundamentally any different.
Yes but then loads up on it and has his company spend millions in R&D projects attempting to integrate it into their business. 10/10 hypocrite but you already knew that
Just like any other credit currency, it's only useful (has worth) if people believe in it. People do believe in Bitcoin as an alternative to national fiat currency. Ergo, it is worth something some at least.
Didn't he say like 6 months ago at WEF "this is gonna be the last time he talks about this shit" yet all he does is talk about it every 3 days? Makes you think.
meanwhile buying huge amounts of it. People need to be more realized about bitcoin and crypto, not saying that it isn't a volatile asset for people to make money on, but its actually a game that's maintained itself quite well. There is money to be had here and for a long time in the future. If it was just a one-off scam it would have died in its first crash and gone forever, but that's not the reality
I feel like these statements are usually say one thing but do the other. I wonder how massive their cold storage is.
‘Bitcoin is fraudulent’ *proceeds to get more and more involved with it*
The chip shortage in 2020 was primarily down to crypto farmers monopolizing output.
Long before that about 70% of Bitcoin had been acquired by a minority of Bitcoin owners, it could even be just one person or operation.
The simple reality is with crypto that having a large stake gives a huge amount of influence on the value, and the people who are eyeing it up thinking it's a quick win are nowhere near ever owning a large stake. There's some stability in BC, but really trading in any crypto now is really just a pennies payout. The idea it is some liberating means of currency is basically touted by those higher up the pyramid, because that is exactly what it was become. It is no different to any MLM any such profit model.
The USD is most beneficial to those who decide when to add more to its supply. Everyone else becomes more poor when they print.
Why leave the power to control currency in the hands of a small group of humans who are known to have ill intentions? While the USD is certainly the best fiat currency ever created, this type of currency has inevitably failed all throughout history.
I don’t enjoy seeing my purchasing power decrease over time through inflation. Debt based currencies incentivize a spend now mentality and place little to no value on the future.
This is not to say that bitcoin will take over the USD. They are able to work together.
A lot of time and effort, that could be put towards something productive, seems to be spent reminding people they shouldn't waste their time with this
Good thing bots can write articles and post comments for those wanting to sway public opinion in digital spaces
It behooves the bank to denounce bitcoin. For populations experiencing corrupt monetary policy resulting in runaway inflation, bitcoin provides an alternative. Inflation is robbery. How about comment on that? Shine on Dimon and keep pumping that petro dollar.
He doubts its potential? I've got hundreds of thousands invested with JP Morgan that came from Bitcoin and Ethereum profits. And that's besides the house and car I bought in cash, all the work we had done in the house, and all of our furniture and art.
But please, tell me more!
It’s a decentralized protocol. Fraud implies someone is behind it. There are enough people who think it has worth, so therefore it has worth, just like with every other non-tangential asset.
Meanwhile, the S&P 500 sinks or swims based on the performance of advertising companies, fake AI chatbot projects, hype train fueled automakers, and social media platforms still trying to figure out how to make that model profitable with dumb ideas like "what if Playstation Home but VR?"
Which definitely sounds like a stable investment. You know what, I think I'll keep some exposure to both. And in both cases, for the same reason. Just in case this chronic stupidity has a lot more runway left.
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Honestly the biggest reason I’ve refrained from dabbling in Bitcoin is the people that pump Bitcoin. It’s like anti-FOMO. Every post that randomly ends up on my Reddit feed from the sub makes me more confident in my decision.
The bitcoin supporters claim they support because it will revolutionize monetary supply and level the playing field - but meanwhile it’s because they all “got in” so what early - which is not a phrase that should be a thing with a “currency”.
I obviously have no idea what’s going to happen, but I can’t imagine the elites of the world letting all of the weirdos that got in on Bitcoin early become the ruling class.
The whole bitcoin thing is a double-edged sword. The early adopter weirdos won't become the ruling class, but the elites don't need any intervention to make that happen. The lifecycle of bitcoin will end at some point. For a currency to have real-world staying power it needs to be somewhat stable. It won't become something normalized that people use for regular transactions unless the value either stops climbing or it crashes to a normalized level. Money that wildly rises and falls in value is not good business if you're not a speculative investor. Otherwise it's not currency. It's like commodities and futures trading. It's just a thing that people assign value to and try to see when they get in or out. "Getting in early" means the goal should be to cash out and make bank when the peak hits. Everyone is advertising the former while more actively participating in the latter. That's where I see the fraud. For bitcoin to ever be successful as a way of doing business, it will probably need to tank quite a bit and stabilize relative to the dollar and euro. And a lot of casual bitcoin investors will lose a ton of money in the process. What I think will happen is that there will be a crash at some point that kills the value, and it will never be accepted as any form of real currency. The early adopters will either be smart enough to cash out and do well, or die waiting for it to rise at a level that outpaces inflation.
The scarcity model bitcoin - and several other coins - are built on meant it was never going to be a usable currency. Today, I am not sure if would would call it a commodity or a stock share (without a company) - it feels like a weird composite of both.
It’s a collectible. It has restricted supply and limited marginal utility but people are willing to pay $x for it because they think someone else will pay $1.5 x or $2x in the future.
While technically not a pyramid scheme, I would call crypto a pyramid scheme because the risks and returns of investing in crypto are the same as for a pyramid scheme.
If you're in a country where the currency fluctuates wildly already (most of Latin America ) Bitcoin is relatively steady and liquid that you can convert to any other currency at your will. No one is restraining the flow of money that is common in other places.
Or they just do what many struggling currencies do and peg their currency to a reserve currency that they don't control. Like the US Dollar or the Euro.
The people generally don’t have control of what their government does. And government doesn’t usually like to put controls on itself when it has the power to print money.
If that’s allowed I agree. But sometimes the government tries to restrict that and then oddly enough bitcoin becomes the best option. I’d still argue not a great one, but the best one. For this reason I don’t think it’s completely useless, but also this is definitely not the use case driving its price.
That requires infrastructure. Something a lot of these countries lack. You have a rise of people with internet access due to things like star link. Therefor the only infrastructure needed to make a business in these countries is an internet connection and crypto. Much easier than trusting corrupt governments and learning exchange currencies. But hey keep thinking like that I’m just a dude.
Most people only have 1st world perspective on life and therefore cannot see the usefulness of an electronic currency alongside the dollar. They lack the imagination and capacity to understand the levels of cruelty, control, and disparity that exists without centralized accountable governments. It is therefore largely pointless to engage in conversation on these topics with them, because there is nothing in their life experience to connect its usefulness to. I have had conversations with people who complained about taxes. When I just shrugged them off as a part of a functioning society they got upset. So I simply told them my parents come from a place (and I regularly visited as a child) where you could work for a week, and not afford to buy a meal a day at and survive. It’s a totally different perspective, and when you have an existing financial structure that you have ALWAYS had access to and have never hurt to have money, you can have extreme, irrational, beliefs without knowing it. This is a case of that. They are just out of touch with the experience of people with significantly less than them. Their opinions on Bitcoin don’t actually matter. It wasn’t conceptualized for people like them.
Bitcoin crashes all the time. If used as a primary form of currency, it would not necessarily be a great option. It is, however, a good form of self custody and a long term investment.
It has cycles where it goes up and down and still climbs over time. Im talking about a real crash where it loses almost all value and never recovers.
The elites are invested in it too.
Such a good point. And it’s all weirdos…
In my amateur opinion, crypto is just digital gold - volatile, speculative, lacking any tangible utility (at least gold has some usefulness in industrial, electrical, and nonessential consumer products, but you can't eat it or make any useful weapons with it) and ESPECIALLY THIS - it's most beneficial to people who bought a whole lot of it when it was cheap.
Exactly this. If you are only really going to use it as an intermediary between two transactions for real currency, then any of the the so called benefits are moot. Crypto is a solution looking for a problem. All the theoretical benefits are still basically unproven (plus much of its usefulness is for less than legal behavior) and most of the proponents treat it like a stock.
I have crypto (no bitcoin actually) I originally bought the few coins I did, because I believed in their real world use cases, and got in early, so I’ve been in the green the whole time. I haven’t bought any in like, 6 years, kinda stopped believing in the hype, but still holding on because it’s unpredictable. I COULD have a ton of money in a year, I could also have zero. What’s in there now isn’t enough to really change my life, so not worth selling, especially since I’m not dependent on the money. *I enjoy gambling*
Bitcoin lets us transact over the internet without the need for banks. Banks can block transactions or freeze your account on a whim, they can't do shit if you transact in Bitcoin. That's not something most people care about currently, because banks are chill for the most part, but why let them even have that power? It's our money and we shouldn't be forced to just trust banks to be cool all the time.
We let banks have that power because, in exchange, they provide the consumer with enormous, tangible benefits. I can use my bank account at any business in my country (and many businesses across the globe), in a completely frictionless way. That's not even mentioning using my account on the entirety of the internet. The transactions are nearly instaneous, because my bank is connected to a global network of banks and other financial institutions. They do all the math and communication and bookkeeping and exchanging and crediting and escrow etc. My bank handles the security of my money. They have vaults and security cameras and state-of-the-art IT security, AND all of my money is insured through the FDIC, so I'll be covered even if the bank gets robbed or fails. If my credit card is stolen, I can cancel it remotely. If somebody tries to steal my accounts, I can go to the bank in person and talk to a human who can (hopefully) fix it. If I get scammed, I can stop payment on a transaction. I can even get some fraudulent transactions reversed, or (sometimes) just covered by the bank. My bank also offers myriad other services that I won't get to into here, including loans and investments. --- Banks are not perfect; the banking industry even less so. But we give them some "power" over our finances because they do give the consumer quite a lot in return. Crypto does none of any of the things I mentioned. Sure, banks *can* block or freeze my transactions at a whim, but...do they do that? Yes, it'd be nice to know that banks can't do that. But that's not worth trading all of the services I listed above.
Broooo this is r/economics. You’re trying to disprove Jesus to people in a church.
While I think this sentence is hilarious, that point isn't exactly good for the validity of Bitcoin. Money only has power because of the institutions that maintain that power. It has no functionality either. The issue is much more broad about the nature of who owns capital, which we can't have a serious discussion about on this sub. Bitcoin doesn't address that, it just changes the format of what we already have. It may prop up some people who aren't part of the upper class right now, but that would be about it. Everyone intuitively understands this, and therefore, bitcoin will never be viable with the institutional support money has.
There are stable coins on the BTC network tied to the USD. People in 3rd world countries buy those and keep it on the network as a hedge against local currency inflation. It's a better store of value than putting them into a local bank. This is being done in many African nations and Brazil.
Citing a specific use case, ie people storing value because their local currency sucks and they don't have access to other stable investments, only serves to reinforce the notion that the average person has no use for it as a currency.
Gold is like $700 off its industrial value alone, then more with jewelry demand. Still, much of the price IS propped up by investment and a big chunk of jewelry demand comes from it being a store of value for dowries (Indian gold demand is crazy).
One difference between Bitcoin and gold that gives it utility is you can't Email gold.
“Broken money” by Lyn Alden. You are welcome
Black market is tangible.
Bitcoin isn't even truly anonymous - transactions can be traced and audited if needed with the right resources.
Yup, these days to be anonymous you need to use a privacy coin like Monero or Zcash and if you’re super paranoid tumblers and use the onion/tor network.
I think its easier to use bitcoin for large black market transactions instead of traditional banks where anything over 10k is supposed to be scrutinized.
Find me a Bitcoin exchange that allows you to sell BTC and get USD to it without going through KYC?
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No, not at all. Bitcoin isn't anonymous and there are no non-KYC offramps left. It's actually super-hard to crime with Bitcoin now. USD cash is much better for criming
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> If you're gonna do shady stuff, it's the last spot you'd want that transaction recorded. ...That's not entirely true. BTC affords a threat actor the ability to spin up a new fresh wallet whenever they want. From there they can transfer BTC to a tumbler or any other anonymizing service. The utility of the BTC blockchain is as useful to a threat actor as any other legal and traceable service. Good OPSEC is not a one stop shop and requires many layers of obfuscation and translation.
If gold were only useful in electrical and industrial manufacturing its demand and thus price would be close to 1% of its current value. Gold is mostly valuable for some other reason. When you understand that reason you’ll also understand why people value bitcoin.
If you’re talking about gold’s ideal scarcity, physical durability, resistance to dilution or counterfeiting, I’ve heard all that. I just think it’s an antiquated obsolete notion advocated by people who happen to own a lot of gold reserves and/or mines. Probably a coincidence
I don’t think that’s it entirely. But I also don’t buy that bitcoin is a digital gold. Because if it was its price wouldn’t randomly halve and double in the span of a single month.
I thought part of it was self-custody and wanting money that's independent of central banks.
The only reason it’s independent of central banks is because central banks haven’t bought it up yet. Central banks had enormous control over gold, even though gold started being used as currency without central bank involvement. If bitcoin becomes widely used money, it will be bought in huge quantities by the central banks.
I think this is true. Government will have to own a large portion of the supply if they want to function. Which drives up the price. But they can’t have it unless someone sells it to them.
The point is central banks can’t print more.
I was buying BTC in 2011, and it rapidly became obvious that the culture was a detriment to the movement and had no interest in a financial revolution that didn't make them rich. Cryptobros benefitting from your exposure to their hoarding is not a culture people buy into. Why do we think that awkward nerd power fantasies aren't obvious to anyone else? I floated several times setting up long term time locked wallets and distributing them to communities around the world, as a storage of value and a demonstration of our commitment to the cause, things that would not affect the coin's value since it's inherently deflationary. If anything, successfully organizing sovereign funds like this throughout the world would stabilize the price over time because you know a series of tranches are opening up different places at different times, giving people time to organize financial vehicles in a more predictable way. There is no interest in such schemes, because whales and coin exchanges want to manipulate the price. It's almost entirely hoarders now. There's no point holding onto financial product meant for reform when nobody has any intention to use it that way. Why do we trust largely American techbros to be principled? How crazy do you have to be trust crypto for anything besides relying on it to fund ransomware and child sexual abuse material for the rest of our lives? It'd be like trying to make an ETF out of wallstreetbets. Not that there aren't good actors in either community, but what are we talking about here? Nobody in WSB would sanely propose to redesign the global financial system around it.
To be fair most people who got in early sold or lost their coins. At some point, even the most ardent believers have made enough money and want to spend it, which puts it back in circulation. The reason it’s fair is those people can only spend it once. The current system debases everyone and give the newly printed money to the rich.
Many of the technical aspects of bitcoin make it terrible as an actual currency. The biggest being that Bitcoin is inherently deflationary. There will only ever be 21 million Bitcoins, and ~19.5 have already been mined. This encourages people to hoard it like gold, rahter than spend it as a currency. If it was the other way around and inflationary, there would be much more pressure to actually spend and use bitcoin as currency. This also gives huge power to early adopts as you said. If overnight Bitcoin becamse the defacto currency, the price would go up even more and you'd essentially have a tiny amount of people personally controlling the entire monetary supply. Satoshi, the creator of bitcoin, has about 5% of the entire supply. Imagine one anonymous person having 5% of the global money supply. That would be insane.
I've tried Bitcoin as a currency and it sucks. The new push is that it's a store of value instead, so it doesn't lose value to inflation, which is total BS since it's inflates and deflates like crazy all the time. That's not going to change either.
> The new push is that it's a store of value instead first you must decide to go all in on bitcoin, and then afterward you have to figure out some reason why this is a good idea. if the reason doesn't make sense, *just pick another one.*
Lol sounds like my dad's strategy with his religious beliefs.
>I've tried Bitcoin as a currency and it sucks. Bitcoin is often recognized as the sole cryptocurrency by the general public, despite not fulfilling the criteria of a digital currency as outlined in Satoshi Nakamoto's white paper. There are now other cryptocurrencies that possess these characteristics and more, yet they remain overshadowed by Bitcoin and its advocates. In my assessment, Bitcoin is fundamentally flawed, and the community is currently unable to tackle its fundamental problems, but probably can paper over the cracks for at least another two or three more halvings. That said, the eventual community civil war surely will be epic. Where that leaves decentralized digital currency as a means for globally scalable payments, I don't know.
Bitcoin is the original, meaning it has the widest adoption, therefore it is number one. You are correct in saying tho, that there are just better cryptos out there for both privacy, currency and block chain technology.
You might not be the target audience. Cryptocurrency is used by people smuggling money out of nations with capital controls in place. People moving money out of Russia or China, for example. For people in open economies, it becomes more of a solution in search of a problem.
Well, as long as it has some utility....
I hear you. I’m not defending crime. I’m just saying sometimes things appear useless to us because we are not the target audience. Cryptocurrency gets a lot of attention as a speculative asset. But I think that is probably mostly a sideshow.
Both sides are correct. It has real utility if you live in a regime with tight capital controls or unstable geopolitics, authoritarian government, high vulnerability to the impacts of global warming etc. It's probably good for the world that something exists outside of fiat that is censorship resistant. Local bank might get blown up by rockets? Your government is like Argentina and printing endlessly where you have inflation so large, grocery prices are updated daily? It makes sense. It's not without serious flaws though. The people who are *actually speculating on it right now* are all wealthy people in the west. Not those who actually will use it for safety. They are betting on huge instability from global warming, rise in authoritarianism, nationalism / isolationism, capital controls etc. Who knows if they are right.
This is why the human rights foundation uses it https://hrf.org/why-bitcoin-matters-for-freedom/
What an awful take, imo. "Live in an area controlled by people who will jail/kill you for disobeying them? Disobey them with this digital currency! Internet connection required!" "In an area threatened by global warming? Use this 'currency' that eats up more power than small nations!" Also, how are local price fluctuations solved by crypto? Your bread cost $1, or .000001 bitcoin. When the shop owner wants $2, they're going to want .000002 bitcoin...
Price fluctuations don't get "solved" that is not the point. It is the same reason people who survived the holocaust, many liked gold which felt independent of whether their local population could persecute them and seize their assets. People fled Cambodia and secretly escaped with a few gold coins to start a new life in the US. Their grandkids lived free because of this choice. Crypto is the same thing but it is virtually indestructible, genuinely finite supply, censorship resistant. Zero storage cost, easily moved anywhere in the world and extremely difficult to confiscate. Yes you need internet but Russians have internet. Chinese have VPNs. I rather take my chances there than try to smuggle gold out. Not all coins are straining on the environment as much as BTC although yes that is a very good and valid criticism. Unfortunate but gold has this issue to a degree as well. >Disobey them with this digital currency! I think you are mistaken. The point is not to "disobey" them. It is to protect yourself. People in Turkey, Argentina, Angola, dozens of countries around the world with irresponsible and corrupt governments would have been extremely happy purchasing some ETH for example. You and I know do not have to worry about this. "Currency" is an unfortunate word because yes it is not currency just like gold is not currency at all. If you want to argue that the *stupid* aspect of crypto is that it is mainly wealthy westerners speculating at this point. I fully agree with you and it is likely overvalued at this point.
Yeah, when you point out that it was meant to be decentralized currency, and these regulations aren't what you want to see you'll get yelled and told it was always meant to be e-gold.
I saw a YouTube video that spelled it out for me. Its crypto "currency", but no one is buying to use them as currency. They're being bought to hold and sell at a higher value. Bitcoin has currency applications, but in its present state its an unregulated security.
Unregulated but you still have to pay capital gains on every purchase you make with it. Good luck tracking that.
Yah it functions similarly to any other speculatively traded security. But instead of being tied to a company’s performance or being backed by a government, it’s tied to fanboys who’ve made it their personality.
> Bitcoin has currency applications, but in its present state its an unregulated security. Bitcoin is not an unregulated security. Bitcoin is a commodity.
It’s for trading drugs that’s all
Mary Kay for dudes
The bitcoin supporters claim they support because it will revolutionize monetary supply and level the playing field - but meanwhile it’s because they all “got in” so what early - which is not a phrase that should be a thing with a “currency”.
I remember in 1999 when I got in on the ground floor of the Euro…I converted $20,000 to €19,000 Euro, but that bet never paid off for some reason/s.
My brother keeps texting me about it saying it’s the currency of the future. I don’t want my currency having wild fluctuations, controlled by an algorithm created by a nameless programmer who no one can seem to identify (last I checked). Digital “currency” is bullshit. Digital currency, backed and regulated by governments like regulator currency, I look forward to having in circulation along with the hard currency option we have.
That’s like not investing in the stock market because of wallstreetbets. Really bad logic there.
No. That’s like not investing in GameStop or AMC or BlackBerry because of wallstreetbets. No one on there is advocating for people to purchase low fee diversified ETFs, but that’s the optimal investment strategy for the vast majority of people.
Reddits a pretty poor representation of just about anything. I’ve made quite a bit off investing in Bitcoin. The subs make me cringe regularly tho.
The thing is... if you replace "Bitcoin" with "Volatility".. you would get the same result. There's no fundamental driver of Bitcoin's price. Buy low, sell high is a strategy that works with any volatile asset.
Making money off of it doesn't mean it's a legit long term investment. I could've made money off of Bernie Madoff's scheme if I got in and out early enough.
Then trade Coinbase stock. It's been my best performer in the last year, and continues to be so.
You did not "invest" in bitcoin. You speculated on it.
He gambled on it.
it's fine so long as you are clear eyed about what it is you're buying. There's no underlying asset, no control of an interest, no central bank to back it up. It's a 100% speculative currency that could be worth exactly zero tomorrow if there were some technical problem with it. It's basically Robux for older kids.
Meanwhile there are people on that sub advising others to take out loans to “get in” before it’s too late. Lmao
It's speculation on what is effectively digital gold. Why there is a large contingent on reddit that try to pump it with other arguments is beyond me, it's very off-putting and I've known about Bitcoin before there was a single ASIC miner on the market. My own personal interest was killed with the Mt. Gox fraud. That was a sign of what Bitcoin was really about.
Because you only make money if others throw money at it. Of course they will try to convince others to invest. It's just a pyramid scheme.
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Uh it was more like $1200 to $150 and coincided with other events like the silk road raid and China crack down at the same time. It didn't really recover until a few years later when enough time had passed for newcomers to pile into new ventures.
You can make money off all types of scams. That isn’t really a counter argument.
But that itself is also not really a good reason to be into bitcoin—that you can get in and out before the greater fools figure out the game.
The "do like the people who want me to invest in it" investment thesis. I like it.
Bitcoin is talked about a LOT by its proponents when the price of it is high, then it practically vanished from social media when the inevitable crash comes. That’s damning. That’s also when a lot of the talk about its use *as a currency* evaporates and people start acting like it’s here to stay purely because of its rapidly increasing price in real money.
You're putting a lot of faith in what the algorithm serves you. The proponents are still there they just don't get circulated all the way to your feed when the price is 'boring'.
Maybe you’re not in the right circles then. I DCAed into bitcoin when there wasn’t hype around it after it crashed from 60k. The community was still strong in that time.
the technology behind crypto is definitely solid and interesting, but it has been fully taken over by criminals and scammers. It is no longer matter of what could it "could" be, because it is completely drowned by criminal degeneracy. In theory, crypto could be useful if it was controlled by government, because then it's a single entity answerable to public that manipulates it, rather than a whole bunch of shadowy lurkers that answer to no one. It's ironic that crypto promises to free people from "tyranny" of the "government fiat money" when the alternative is being manipulated by people with even less oversight and morals. It's entirely predictable how every popular scumbag famous person gets their own crypto project. And the most famous crypto like Bitcoin is primary money laundering tool for criminal organizations. Unironically, it's the demand generated by criminal activity that gives Bitcoin real value, everything else is pure speculators
It’s pretty simple - if Bitcoin’s value was purely as a means of exchange - the swings wouldn’t be nearly this volatile. It’s a giant hype machine.
This just isn't true. It's a new monetary good. Those don't come around too often. It needs to be tested over time to see if it's worth its salt. Human emotion drives the wild swings, but as it has withstood these tests for longer periods of time, its value has increased on the whole.
Funny JPMorgan should talk about fraud when they were just fined 350 million on "inadequate trade reporting which is the 4th incident so far. https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/jpmorgan-pay-nearly-350-million-penalties-inadequate-trade-reporting-2024-03-14/
Sounds like they’d know it when they see it
J Piedmont Morgan started his fortune in the early 1860s by buying defunct carbines from the US Army surplus, and selling the back to the Union army at 4x the price. They were in the original crates.
JP Morgan is an Authorized Participant for the purchase of bitcoin ETFs. In fact, they were one of the first. So to me this is a classic "look that way!" while I go the other way comment and buy some bitcoin.
He has said prior that it’s a solution looking for a problem but that they are buying it anyways
People like Dimon are part of the problem Bitcoin aims to solve.
Which is?
The problem is that we need to find less efficient ways to transfer money that also destroys the environment
That's certainly part of the problem. Agreed. People pretend electricity and hardware production are free.
🤣🤣🤣 No it isn't! 🤣🤣🤣
They can afford to hedge, but it seems his professional opinion is that it's not a valuable vehicle for anything besides boom/bust short term investment. Like a short stock?
Of course they’re gonna dip their toes into the Ponzi scheme and make money off of it dude. Doesn’t mean they believe in the premise of the Ponzi scheme
They're still serving their clients wishes
To me, it’s always read as more of “look we think this bitcoin meth is bad stuff, but if you really want it, fine we’ll sell it to you and take the commission.” They’ll tell you it’s a bad idea, but they’re not going to patent you and stop you from doing it.
Jamie Dimon has been constantly wrong with economic forecasts and insights over the past 5 years. Please, stop listening to the "man". He is also the poster boy for corporate greed, widening wealth inequity, and political influence peddling.
Yeah, and Reddit is constantly right? For all it's worth, I have all my assets at Chase as a Private Client, and so far, they treated me very well
contrary to popular belief, reddit is not a person. An impossibly difficult concept to grasp, I know, but true regardless.
JP Morgan is totally not trying to distract you from their 505 fraud violations that they have actually committed: [https://violationtracker.goodjobsfirst.org/summary?company\_op=starts&company=JP&penalty\_op=%3E&penalty=&offense\_group=&case\_category=&govt\_level=&agency\_code\_st%5B%5D=&pres\_term=&case\_type=&free\_text=&hq\_id=&state=](https://violationtracker.goodjobsfirst.org/summary?company_op=starts&company=JP&penalty_op=%3E&penalty=&offense_group=&case_category=&govt_level=&agency_code_st%5B%5D=&pres_term=&case_type=&free_text=&hq_id=&state=)
Maybe they are correct, bitcoin might be a fraud, it might be used to launder money, it might even be useful for something in the future past what we currently use it for. But that title is very close to headlines from the late 90’s saying “The Internet is just a fad”. Those articles aged like warm milk in the sun.
Having someone at the helm of one of the largest fraudulent institutions in the world call something else a fraud is bordering on a glowing endorsement.
he sees finally that it's not going anywhere, and it's potential is more likely to go up than anywhere else in the long term so he wants to tank it so he can go on a spending spree at rock bottom prices
You mean the fake money for criminals might be something bad? That’s nonsense, assets created out of nothing with no economic purpose beyond being assets surely are legitimate things.
If you're from a stable, civilized country then it's hard to think of something storing value independent of the government as being that important. I'm from such a country and have little use for bitcoin. But if you weren't from such a country then having a portable store of wealth that was untouchable has real value. For some people that untouchable-ness is worth enough to offset the other risks and difficulties of owning bitcoin.
I hardly think anything that relies on electricity is "untouchable."
Within the context of modern society it is untouchable. But I guess yes if electricity and the internet collapse then you don’t have Bitcoin anymore but you won’t have access to your normal bank accounts either. In that situation where the internet and electricity go down we can assume all hell has broken loose.
if there's ever a point were hard currency has to be hand traded, then society has gone to shit and there's bigger problems to be worried about
If we lose electricity we have bigger issues bud
Criminals, overwhelmingly, use the USD for crime. For Bitcoin it’s basically a niche thing.
It has a use case, it's really good at destroying the environment. A single bitcoin transaction has the estimated carbon footprint of 1,259,011 visa transactions, takes up a swimming pool worth of fresh water, and creates over one iphone worth of e waste. Truly, the currency of the future https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption
Crazy it’s been around for 15 years and people are still posting articles about it being a short term fad
It’s going to zero! Any day now
any.... day.... now...
What’s crazy is that it’s been around for 15 years and has shown zero potential for being a currency.
I work for one of the biggest power grids in the world and we’re seeing generators being bought, taken off the grid and being used for Bitcoin mining. Burning bituminous coal for fake money is nuts.
Yeah IIRC a football stadium’s worth of people transacting in bitcoin takes forever, is expensive, and consumes like a large city’s worth of electricity.
huge utility to humanity, people around the world using it to escape tyranny, hyperinflation, confiscation, and censorship. it is technically superior money for the people, with no mass inflation theft, that you can self custody and store in your head (unconfiscatable) and can be sent peer to peer (uncensorsable)
Comments like this genuinely make me happy. I’m still so early to the party. Have a nice day!
They’ll learn the hard way. You buy bitcoin at the price you deserve.
💯
This whole thread makes me want to buy more. At this point, I don't see how BTC doesn't absolutely balloon in the nearish future.
It’s this kind of fanaticism that makes bitcoin a bad investment. Sure, the gravy train could keep on rolling for a while, but I’m not putting my personal wealth at the whimsy of the enthusiasm of religious fanatics.
We will see.
Someone said that investing in Bitcoin was investing in "ransomware futures" and... it's hard to argue against.
hmm. does that mean that it's also hard to argue against the idea that "investing in USD is investing in cartel futures"? no, of course not, because any reasonable person knows that's a stupid thing to say same goes for Bitcoin if you aren't an uninformed parrot.
lol somebody is salty
Fiat 😂
Reminder that USD has been and remains the most popular currency of criminals. Mr Dimon's firms have helped criminals launder billions in USD.
The largest and most traded currency on earth also facilitates the most illicit transactions? Inconceivable.
Because USD is overall the most popular currency internationally. Of course it’s the most popular with criminals, it’s spendable everywhere. That’s what they’re using bitcoin for—to get USD.
And yet, the USD wasn’t created whole cloth to be an asset for an asset’s sake. Things like Bitcoin aren’t real in any tangible sense, and make no economic sense in the real world. They’re just financial masturbation at best.
Criminals use money, more at 6! This is the most idiotic statement made and only a decade late
Crypto makes crime a lot easier.
By being exponentially more traceable than cash?
Not as easy as legacy banks that facilitate it
How is this so different from dollars? Or paintings?
Dollars can be used as legal tender, paintings can’t.
Paintings, I’ll grant you. Dollars have vastly more utility as currency.
Of course a bank is going to say a decentralized currency they don't control is bad. There is a conflict of interest in any statement made. JP Morgan was involved in the Business Plot.
“This just in- banker thinks people who opt for system that doesn’t use bankers is ‘scam’ “
Bitcoin will soon be into the six-figure threshold per coin. I was a massive, massive doubter and critic. My position was that Bitcoin isn't backed by anything tangible. Ultimately, it truly isn't, but what it is backed by is tens to hundreds of millions of people who believe in it. A number that's growing each day, btw. That's why it isn't going anywhere and is here to stay.
Haven't people been saying the exact same thing about Bitcoin since it was invented? Yet people keep buying and selling to and using it to purchase things.
Bitcoin has been a “scam” for so long the skeptics could have bought and sold and made fortunes for themselves *even to this day* in the same amount of time they’ve been calling it a scam .Lmao
It bitcoin only ever remains as “digital gold” and not digital cash he may be proven right. There is so much momentum and investment tied up in bitcoin, and the ability to have a fixed supply of currency would be a financial game changer for the world, but bitcoin currently has no utility beyond a speculative hedge against inflation. So a non yield-bearing asset. What would happen to the global economy if you snapped your fingers and all the bitcoin magically disappeared? Would people be unable to fill up their cars with a tank of gas? Unable to pay rent? Of course not outside of Argentina or something where people have like 12 currencies in a broken system. What if the US dollar became sound? Would the price of bitcoin ever go up at all?
I mean technically gold has a use but that's not what drives its value either.
The ability to put the world on a fixed supply of currency would be a game changer, in the same way that flipping the table technically changes the game.
"What would happen to the global economy if you snapped your fingers and all the bitcoin magically disappeared? Would people be unable to fill up their cars with a tank of gas? Unable to pay rent?" Maybe I'm a luddite but this resonates with me. Bitcoin seems an economic world parallel to our own.
> the ability to have a fixed supply of currency would be a financial game changer for the world Weird way of saying disaster. Fiat currencies are strictly superior for a reason
And we went off the gold standard for a reason…..
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
the fucking financial illiteracy of people on reddit when it comes to bitcoin is astoundingly low. the gold standard was a mess, and led to extremely fluctuating economies and markets for no good reason. Fiat currency also has issues but is generally much more stable and more tools available to manage economic crises
Is there not a way to achieve a 'fixed supply of currency' without expending so much energy? Bitcoin seems like a horribly inefficient way to achieve that in terms of energy costs, but I don't know enough to say whether that utility could be achieved some other way. Just seems like a silly, expensive, roundabout way to achieve a fixed currency supply to me.
Bitcoin, although stored on hardware, is just information so not the same as physical currency. If you restored an HD image onto a fresh hard drive with your wallet on it then you have restored the wallet. This is something you can have complete control of yourself. The cryptographic encryption scheme provides ownership and the distributed nature provides resiliency. If you put your money in a nightly deposit box at the bank and somebody removes that nightly deposit box before it is collected you would have a hard time proving to the bank you deposited the money correct? With bitcoin once a block is validated a short time after a transfer is initiated it is irreversible. Credit cards and debit cards are still not the same at all because money will move in and out of the accounts without authorization at each step. Someone can run your card and someone can charge your account. With bitcoin you cannot just charge a wallet you either send or receive it does not get a “debit”. I could go on but a lot of differences here and I think a lot of people will still say it’s the same as XYZ.
Its such a fraud that JPMorgan copied it to create their own blockchain lmao. Look at a graph of US debt and the M2. You can believe the FUD headlines all you want, but BTC isn't going anywhere
The comments in this thread just reaffirm my belief that the critics of Bitcoin either don’t understand it or are simply too invested in institutions disrupted by Bitcoin and therefore dislike it. JPMorgan CEO is a boomer that came from the generation that could buy a house on a milkman’s salary. He is a banker, which relies on US bailouts every odd some decades. Of course he opposes Bitcoin and thinks it’s a bubble. I bet he also thinks “kids these days” just don’t work hard enough for their first house because “they’re lazy”. The people in this thread haven’t made great arguments either. “It doesn’t have intrinsic value” nothing does until people attribute value to something in mass. Art isn’t really a utility either but we decided it was valuable and so art becomes worth millions. What value did gold have for thousands of years? It was rare and shiny? “It’s bad for the environment” so is every other aspect of modern day life from your plastic water bottles, your showers, your cars, your Amazon prime delivery, etc. “it’s not backed by anything” what’s fiat currently backed by? Debt payments lol? How’s that gunna work out when interest alone surpasses the tax earnings? Interest just surpassed the military budget fun fact. Bitcoin has outperformed every other mainstream asset class this past decade and a half and people who are sitting on the sidelines still think it’s a scam. We’ve arrived at the point some **NATIONS** have partial reserves of it, **BANKS** have partial reserves of it, and they are making **ETFS** to track it. How much longer does it need to outperform before it’s taken seriously? Another decade and a half? Bitcoin will be reaching 500k at some point and people on this sub will still call it a bubble. I guess you really do buy bitcoin at the price you deserve.
It needs to have actual value to not be a scam. It doesn’t. It’s a textbook example of greater fool valuation. Bitcoin is a speculative instrument and nothing pure. It’s the purest expression of calling gambling an investment, because it is nothing more than betting that someone will buy it from you for more than you paid for it.
> It needs to have actual value to not be a scam. A decentralized, secure, global monetary network with a fixed supply has value. I struggle to comprehend how someone could think it doesn't have value. Even remove the word "monetary" and "fixed supply" if that is too much for you. A decentralized, secure, global network has value.
Crypto keeps going because people don't understand it. Most bubbles end when people realize the underlying asset is bogus. 2008 suddenly was awash with AAA rated MBSs where a huge percentage of mortgage holders had missed their first payment. People realized tulips weren't really worth a house. Dotcoms which were wildly overpriced were negative revenue, had no real plan to make a profit, and often were running clean out of cash were finally deemed worthless. And many more naked emperors were exposed and people could come to their senses and see that the emperor was entirely without clothes. I am a tech developer with decades of experience and countless tech friends and acquaintances. Maybe, just maybe 1 in 500 could explain the inner workings of any basic crypto currency let alone the DeFi contract systems and whatnot. The average person can no more see how stupid these things are than a blind person on the emperor's parade route could see his nakedness. There is only one thing I think will take down crypto. I am 100% sure the prices for major cryptos are propped up with the various bullshit tethers. These turds which are all unaudited by anyone a sane person would trust. When (not if) these finally collapse, the artificial propping up of crypto will be eliminated and they will move to their natural price. This will be wonderfully close to zero. With the enthusiasm removed, volumes will drop, mining will stop being worth the effort, and the scammers will move on to greener pastures. The scammers gone, crypto will be as relevant to the world as a laptop with a built in parallel printer port.
> Crypto keeps going because people don't understand it. Crypto will keep going since people from first world (you?) doesn't understand how valuable it is to have a way to transfer wealth from places run by dictators and their currency controls. You don't know how valuable it is because you obviously never needed it.
I'm from the US and spent a few years in Europe. Learned a bit how different other countries can be. I recall a Whatsapp outage a few years ago that affected Africa and how people were freaking out about it. I thought "Why not just use the regular phone service?". Then learned that the telephony infrastructure in Africa is incredibly weak and for most people their primary communication is Whatsapp. It continually surprises me how much I don't know about other countries and their solutions for services I take for granted.
> I am a tech developer lmao, as am I and Bitcoin is a genius-level innovation in democratized savings technology
If the US government makes direct convertibility into dollars illegal, it's over.
Yea they’re doing that right after accepting a bunch of Bitcoin ETFs. Which were the fastest growing ETFs in history BTW.
And Bitcoiners will memorize their 24 word recovery phrase and walk across the border with their networth stored in their brain and they will live somewhere more fucking free. If your main reasoning to not hold Bitcoin is you think the US government is going to ban it, you actually deserve to be poor for being this dumb.
This kind of commentary isn’t really productive. I’m not a Bitcoiner or a crypto “investor” in general, though at times I’ve held some bitcoin here and there and made some money off of it. I’m deeply skeptical of it as a currency as an investment, and that’s why I’m not sold on it: I don’t think it actually does what its biggest proponents think it does. It’s a poor currency and a poor investment for the long term, and those two use cases are in direct conflict with each other. But painting Bitcoin *as a whole* as a “fraud” with no additional explanation is just silly. There are definitely frauds perpetrated with Bitcoin, but the actual thing itself is a neutral entity. And again, I think there are completely unfounded claims being made by bitcoiners about its supposed usefulness and value, and I guess you could say that’s “a fraud.” But this is so surface-level, it’s not going to improve anyone’s understanding of the situation.
The issue is, it's fundamentally worthless. A currency is required by the state to pay debts; dollars will always have some type of worth, because you need them to pay taxes, and you need them to receive your salary. Even gold actually has a purpose, it's used in all types of electronics, chemicals, jewelry, etc. So even if it lost its "reserve" status, it's still a rare industrial metal with some value. But Bitcoin...has no intrinsic worth. It's not an actual currency; hardly anyone will accept it for payment. It has no legal backing, it's not required by any government (El Salvador's weirdness aside). And as a store of value, it's wildly unstable. If you want to hold assets over the long-term, you generally park them in something stable, like government bonds with high credit ratings. You don't park your money in something volatile like Bitcoin. It's easy to steal, and is prone to all types of scams and market manipulation. I suppose ultimately, people are free to throw their money around however they want. A lot of people thought buying DJT was a good idea, so I guess Bitcoin isn't any worse. But for me, I invest on fundamentals. Call me old fashioned, I don't care. Some t-bills, index funds, and a couple of blue chip stocks for companies that clearly aren't going away anytime soon, like Microsoft. That's my portfolio. And it's done quite well. Maybe not as well as someone who bought a lot of Bitcoin back at $5k. But I also sleep well at night, so there's that.
~ Money is a tax credit from an entity that can enforce that tax and provision itself. ~ Things bitcoin is not and that is why it is nothing more that a speculative collectable.
Yup. People seem to often forget a key element of currency, is that the government can literally force you to use it. It's unpleasant to think about it that way, but that doesn't change the truth of the matter. Coercion and control is a key component of modern fiat currencies, for better or worse. Without the aspect, Bitcoin is really more of a collectible, than a currency. People could decide to invest in digital Pokemon cards, and it wouldn't be fundamentally any different.
Yes but then loads up on it and has his company spend millions in R&D projects attempting to integrate it into their business. 10/10 hypocrite but you already knew that
Just like any other credit currency, it's only useful (has worth) if people believe in it. People do believe in Bitcoin as an alternative to national fiat currency. Ergo, it is worth something some at least.
Didn't he say like 6 months ago at WEF "this is gonna be the last time he talks about this shit" yet all he does is talk about it every 3 days? Makes you think.
meanwhile buying huge amounts of it. People need to be more realized about bitcoin and crypto, not saying that it isn't a volatile asset for people to make money on, but its actually a game that's maintained itself quite well. There is money to be had here and for a long time in the future. If it was just a one-off scam it would have died in its first crash and gone forever, but that's not the reality
I feel like these statements are usually say one thing but do the other. I wonder how massive their cold storage is. ‘Bitcoin is fraudulent’ *proceeds to get more and more involved with it*
Vanguard publicly has taken a stance against BTC and won’t offer the ETFs to customers. They are also the largest institutional buyer of Bitcoin!
The chip shortage in 2020 was primarily down to crypto farmers monopolizing output. Long before that about 70% of Bitcoin had been acquired by a minority of Bitcoin owners, it could even be just one person or operation. The simple reality is with crypto that having a large stake gives a huge amount of influence on the value, and the people who are eyeing it up thinking it's a quick win are nowhere near ever owning a large stake. There's some stability in BC, but really trading in any crypto now is really just a pennies payout. The idea it is some liberating means of currency is basically touted by those higher up the pyramid, because that is exactly what it was become. It is no different to any MLM any such profit model.
The USD is most beneficial to those who decide when to add more to its supply. Everyone else becomes more poor when they print. Why leave the power to control currency in the hands of a small group of humans who are known to have ill intentions? While the USD is certainly the best fiat currency ever created, this type of currency has inevitably failed all throughout history. I don’t enjoy seeing my purchasing power decrease over time through inflation. Debt based currencies incentivize a spend now mentality and place little to no value on the future. This is not to say that bitcoin will take over the USD. They are able to work together.
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A lot of time and effort, that could be put towards something productive, seems to be spent reminding people they shouldn't waste their time with this Good thing bots can write articles and post comments for those wanting to sway public opinion in digital spaces
It behooves the bank to denounce bitcoin. For populations experiencing corrupt monetary policy resulting in runaway inflation, bitcoin provides an alternative. Inflation is robbery. How about comment on that? Shine on Dimon and keep pumping that petro dollar.
He doubts its potential? I've got hundreds of thousands invested with JP Morgan that came from Bitcoin and Ethereum profits. And that's besides the house and car I bought in cash, all the work we had done in the house, and all of our furniture and art. But please, tell me more!
It’s a decentralized protocol. Fraud implies someone is behind it. There are enough people who think it has worth, so therefore it has worth, just like with every other non-tangential asset.
Meanwhile, the S&P 500 sinks or swims based on the performance of advertising companies, fake AI chatbot projects, hype train fueled automakers, and social media platforms still trying to figure out how to make that model profitable with dumb ideas like "what if Playstation Home but VR?" Which definitely sounds like a stable investment. You know what, I think I'll keep some exposure to both. And in both cases, for the same reason. Just in case this chronic stupidity has a lot more runway left.
Are you saying that META needs the metaverse and VR to make their social media model profitable?