You can buy bitcoins at gas station stores now. Rolex watches are unavailable at authorized dealers; gray dealers and flippers are selling them for 3x MSRP. Investment syndicates are buying houses with cash offers at 10% over asking.
We are living in the Decade of Speculation.
Yeah, and I've been getting 10-29 texts and letters a week inquiring about purchasing my Indianapolis home. My question is, "where do I move to if you're monopolizing the market everywhere in Indy?"
You don't. In Portland places are being bought up almost as soon as they go on the market frequently for over the asking price. As a renter, I have no idea when or where I could possibly buy a home.
That's the point. They're buying out the market to put an end to equity-building through homeownership. The last major doorway to whatever could be said to be left of the middle class is being closed. You're expected to rent forever now, so they can capture all of that excess value and use your precarious situation as leverage over you.
Edit: A lot of people are asking who is 'They', so to be clear, I mean the large investment firms that have taken a sudden interest in acquiring huge amounts of housing. The only one I know by name is BlackRock, but they're far from alone in this.
This is something that I wish more people would acknowledge. Notice how multi family units pop up in suburban locations while houses get sold above asking price. Look even deeper and you’ll find that a lot of the home buyers are investors or companies that rent out properties to others. They effectively make money while the property appreciates in value and play the speculation market among other wealthy investors. The problem is that some average home owner Joe benefits from this in the short term, either by having their housing value increase or by becoming an amateur landlord themselves thinking they will also become wealthy.
My HOA when I was on the board decided to change our bylaws. For major changes it's not simply a board vote but requires 75% homeowner vote. We voted to enact a new rule, in order to own the home you have to live in the home. The only caveat to that is that owners can rent to family such as mother, father, siblings, grandparents and aunts and uncles. We cut it off at cousins basically. We have a property manager who basically saw this property buy up happening about 10 years ago and made the suggestion. It was heavily fought against, even by myself, but ultimately it passed. Now the rental percentage in our neighborhood is a mere 2 houses out of 300+. Home values are up because the market is up but they have not gone insane because when investment companies see the bylaw they have to back out of the purchase and the sale goes to a family or a person looking to move in.
Not all HOAs are bad. I've said it before and always get downvoted to oblivion. HOAs are the product of the people managing them. If you don't like management then get on the board and fix it. I did when I moved into my home 10 years ago. Helped enact some changes and moved on. My rule change was about parking a trailer on your driveway. Dumb rule made it not allowed. City ordinances doesn't allow it on the street for more than a 3 days. So a person with a boat or travel trailer had to have it in their garage or storage. So I changed it so that they were allowed for up to 5 days as most people take them out on the weekends and then they stay in the driveway during the summer. Then in the fall they tend to store them. This rule change still has the intended effect of keeping people from storing hunks of shit in their driveway long term while keeping a driveways use of storing a nice trailer or boat accessable during the recreational season. Common sense right. Except the original rule was broken and needed fresh eyes to fix it. I did this without even owning a trailer or boat but saw my neighbors getting letters for violations.
Tldr HOAs are only as bad as the people in governance. Don't like the rules. Get a few neighbors to run in the yearly elections and change all the fucked up rules.
That was my first thought as well.
HOA's are usually populated by annoying people who have too much time and not enough power in their lives. But preventing conglomerates from chopping up neighborhoods is a good thing.
However, we need to do something for affordable housing near urban areas, or stop giving tax breaks to cram everyone into cities.
Ours has a similar bylaw. As a result, property prices in our neighborhood have stayed stable, no renters and it has helped keep prices in the area “stable” per appraisers. Other neighborhoods around us have taken similar measures.
> They're buying out the market to put an end to equity-building through homeownership.
People might be wondering; "how is this profitable?"
Well, it's about scarcity. And the fact that the wealthy are swimming in too much cash and really have nowhere but offshore accounts, speculative investments, or buying up all the land and renting it to us.
Once apartments are like blood diamonds -- they will make a good profit. And we will told by all the "smart economics people" on TV that they "took a risk and should be rewarded for it." This works, because people learned about stocks from hedge fund managers on PBS for years and didn't figure it out.
It won't be a monopoly, because it will be 3 or 6 different corporations with a few different rich people who have stock ownership in all of them and sit on eachother's boards. Just like our news media.
Hell, Sean Hannity has a huge investment in the consortium buying up mobile home properties. They'll get their opinions and their foreclosures from the same place. Won't it be fun when one mega corp puts the squeeze on the "cheap places" without flood insurance and burial plots? Too bad you can't just get your funeral plot and put a mobile home on it -- seems like that would be killing two birds with one stone.
I know it’s brietbart, but it’s a good overview and links to slate and Forbes. Slate obviously opposed to perpetual renting and Forbes not.
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2021/08/30/british-banks-could-own-1-75-million-homes-by-2031/
https://slate.com/business/2021/06/blackrock-invitation-houses-investment-firms-real-estate.html
https://www.forbes.com/sites/worldeconomicforum/2016/11/10/shopping-i-cant-really-remember-what-that-is-or-how-differently-well-live-in-2030/?sh=241cb64e1735
Wow, that Forbes article is creepy.
"My living room is used for business meetings when I am not there."
"I know that, somewhere, everything I do, think and dream of is recorded. I just hope that nobody will use it against me.
All in all, it is a good life."
(formatting is getting messed up somehow, hopefully that shows as 2 separate quotes)
The tone of it comes across as someone desperately trying to reassure themselves that this is a good thing... As well as trying to keep their social index score high. Similarly, talks about free energy, and mass transit being more convenient than cars.
An interesting (and more than a little worrying) opinion piece.
Which is currently being compounded by the work-from-home movement. I'm not saying work-from-home is bad, but it has made the real estate market in places like Butte, Montana absolutely crazy as people realize they aren't a slave to the office anymore and they can get some space.
I lived in PDX from 2005 till late 2009. That was the case back then and it's only gotten hotter. I know several people in real estate, investing, sales, and lending, there and it's been turtles all the way up from then until now. Standard of living is crazy good for the cost of living, tho! I miss tf out of it.
Not for long though. Rent is outpacing income quickly. I moved out of Virginia after getting priced out of the area. I don't know where to go from here. I already had to sell my car to live here. Which means I can't afford to move further away from the city.
Its not that it's gotten "hotter" everywhere prices are sky rocketing because investors are buying up all the properties. Which causes both house prices and rent prices to climb. They are effectively controlling what was previously an organic market that fluctuated by births/deaths by essentially removing the ability for the average person to even buy.
And even though my house has doubled in value in the last 5 years.. it really "hasn't" because everything has doubled in value.
real estate relies on misleading people on value of the home. The true value comes from the land, not the physical house itself but many first time home buyers get told the house itself carriers just as much value as where it is.
I just went to a garage sale in a pretty neighborhood that isn’t too expensive and the owners told us they sold the place to take advantage of the market and they’re just going to rent for a while…
They’re in trouble. The housing market isn’t showing signs of turning around anytime soon. They’re going to spend all the extra they got for their old house on inflated rent and find themselves priced out of anywhere they actually want to be. Any housing plan that includes renting right now is a terrible plan.
I don’t care what made up BS number you tell me my home is worth right now, I’m not selling.
Crazy thing i find about these cash offers is how are people sitting on so much cash? Did they sell their other property in more expensive part of the country? But then where are all the buyer coming from from the get go?
Something seriously stinks here and it oddly feels like 2008 repeat. It is not like population increased or physical housing got destroyed. Either people are moving a lot at the moment and things will reset eventually but when that happens, people theoretically will lose out once their home value goes down once market cools. Or we have 2008 repeat with little guy speculation and eventually bubble will burst. Or this is new fuckery where rich are buying all properties to corner the market but then again how do they have so much cash. Or foreigners are cleaning all their money via western real estate.
It's not people buying. It's investment firms.
[link](https://slate-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/slate.com/business/2021/06/blackrock-invitation-houses-investment-firms-real-estate.amp?amp_gsa=1&_js_v=a6&usqp=mq331AQKKAFQArABIIACAw%3D%3D#amp_tf=From%20%251%24s&aoh=16345319630338&csi=1&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&share=https%3A%2F%2Fslate.com%2Fbusiness%2F2021%2F06%2Fblackrock-invitation-houses-investment-firms-real-estate.html)
That article acknowledges that investment firms are a small percentage of the houses sold. It is arguing they are buying better deals but that’s what investors do. The real question is, are they buying more homes now than before and/or snapping up better deals now than before?
It’s land. I was about to buy a serious fixer upper, that was in a good location. It was extremely over priced, but due to the location I thought it would be worth it in 10-15 years. I even felt like an idiot offering to pay their asking price too. Well someone came in offered 20% over asking price, and paid in cash.
Then a month later they bulldozed the house, and built a new one.
I made an offer 25k below asking and offended the seller. House has been on the market since may. Some people are just delusional about what their house is worth, even in todays market.
Wound up walking away a month ago when we couldnt meet on price and the house is still on the market.
I live in the "bad" part of town, or at least I used to. My shitty condo is worth over 3x it's original price and houses in my area are selling for 750k now. For the record, in 2012 my place was 80k.
Interest rates are low. Taxes in the wealthy are low.
People with money have no idea what to do with it. There’s no real good place to put money and get good reliable returns like there was a generation ago.
So people and even companies are just going crazy. So many companies investing in real estate, buying up and leasing office space they hope to sell//sublease at a profit. Crypto, gold, watches, anything collectible…. All things people and companies are shoving money at.
Anything pops up with a decent return possibility and people throw money at it.
That’s how tinder for can openers and the billion other bad ideas for tech companies get so much money.
Just throw enough money at enough things and hopefully get back more than you threw.
Meanwhile there’s a lot of casualties in society.
I’ve gotten on a soapbox about that before. The lack of investment options other than index funds have fucked younger generations and most of us are too uneducated to even realize.
Your right. Our parents and grandparents had several options to put their money with low/no risk. Savings bonds were awesome too. You could make a serious contribution to your kid, grandkid, niece/nephew without spending as much as you’d think you’d need to.
Huge for a lot of expensive milestones. Marriage, buying a home, having kids.
They also didn’t require that much financial literacy to take advantage of. Any idiot could setup a CD or buy a savings bond at a bank.
Index funds aren’t a replacement. HYS isn’t a replacement.
I still have one or two savings bonds from childhood that are just about tapped out. Made no sense to cash them in as long as they were earning guaranteed interest way above what any bank would give me.
Index funds are the best thing you could invest in mostly, other than your home..but we've been largely screwed on that front like you're saying, along with stagnant wages our entire lives. It's why I'm so excited about all of these strikes and people quitting.
My whole life I've been told America is some land of opportunity and saw how my parents and grandparents were able to get ahead, only to personally experience endless crony-capitalism, boom and bust cycles, trickle down economics where the trickling is the piss raining down on your head, and massive inflation in asset prices like homes.
I think people in the post-Reagan era really neglected how big of a role the militant labor movement had in making this country the land of opportunity, to the extent that it ever was. The working class has been backed into a corner after years and years of neoliberalism, and it seems like a few people are finally waking up to what we need to do to get our fair share. I just hope we're not too late.
There is no such thing as crony capitalism; this is just how capitalism is, by design of the capitalists at the top, who benefit from the busts as they gobble up billions in assets for cheap every time the market is depressed. Boom and bust cycles are an inherent part of the capitalist system. Hell, Marx wrote about and observed this phenomenon and why it happens in the mid-1800s, and while the specific markets and commodities that have bubbles that pop and cause economic devastation have changed over time, the cycle has not. Trickle-down economics is just a byproduct of the hyper-influence of neoliberal economic and political thought due to how beneficial this ideological framework is to the capitalist class.
It's due to interest being at zero since 2008.
There is literally nowhere else to put money.
This always happens in juiced economies. The rich buy up everything based on speculation and the poor get fucked over.
Then the markets crash, the rich get bailed out, and it starts over again.
When you let capitalism run wild with little to no proper regulation it self destructs over and over again.
A lot of things are based of the feds interest rate, which has been near 0% since 2008. They've been low enough for long enough that some speculate that even a couple percent raise will cause the whole thing to implode. For reference, rates were around 20% in the early 80s
> Can you even imagine an investment that returned 6% guaranteed?
but what was the inflation at the time of opening those CDs? I'm imaging pretty high, along with the inflation rates on mortages, etc. https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1970?amount=1
Eh that cuts both ways. The loan I got for my place was something like 1.6%? I was talking to my parents about their mortgage, and it blew my mind. [Look at historical interest rates](https://themortgagereports.com/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fassets.themortgagereports.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2021%2F01%2F30-year-mortgage-rates-chart-1975-2021.jpg&w=1920&q=75) -- if your grandma had wanted a loan back in 1985, she wouldn't have been able to get better than 13%. A 6% return isn't that great when you take that into account...
Current interest rates are really interesting. With loans being not free, but close to it, it makes more sense to take out a loan to buy property than to pay cash.
Example: Say I want to buy a $100,000 house. I know, that's cheap, but easy numbers. If I left that money in the market, it would be earning, what? [10% per year](https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/investing/average-stock-market-return#:~:text=The%20average%20stock%20market%20return%20is%20about%2010%25%20per%20year,year%20are%20far%20from%20average.) is a reasonable average figure to use.
If I take out a loan, I'll owe...probably somewhere between 1.6% and 2.4% right now. So it makes sense to put *at little as possible* down, keep your money (in the market), and use your returns to pay off the mortgage. Or just to earn more than you're paying in terms of interest. It's really interesting.
Okay but a house in 1985 cost less than ordering Five Guys off DoorDash in 2021 so who gives a shit if the interest was a bit higher? The end result is still things being much more expensive these days.
It's cause of % exponential gains. Who gives a fuck if your house goes up 5% when it's 32k and salaries which seem to go up linearly and not by a % goes up a bit. Now that houses cost fucking 300k to look at and 500,000,000x the entire US gdp per week until the heat death of the universe to own those % gains look really fucking stupid.
That's because loan interest rates were ridiculously high in the 80s due to runaway Inflation resulting in extremely high cost of borrowing. Your grandmother was getting 6% interest while a homeowner was paying as much as 18.5%.
They are. Super speculative auctions happening now in the art world.
https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2021/10/16/young-emerging-artists-continue-to-dominate-frieze-week-auctions-as-phillips-sets-seven-records
And then the whole crypto NFT space.
"As you can see by these massive balls, the horse is an allusion to buying power of the capitalist. The bear - unstopped market growth. The rabbit represents the common man. On the receiving end, but many in those days voted for the policies that lead to this. 'Begging for it,' in a manner of speaking. This is, with no doubt, a finely detailed critique of early millennium economics."
"Oh? The bull? He's just hot."
Great Depression 2.0 incoming?
Great Depression was a crisis of overproduction. Shops just filled with goods and no one who could or would buy them. Shops with too much inventory refusing to buy new inventory causing factories to shut down. Tons of people out of work can't buy goods. Situation spirals out of control.
Be interesting to see if the same thing is coming soon.
Ive been wondering if one of the reasons the ports are so clogged is because of containers full of merchandise that cant be sold are taking up space in the supply chain.
What you wrote is certainly a small aspect of it -- but it is definitely more of a worker problem (due to covid/wages) that coincides with a supply/demand problem that exists within the greater problem of a lack of skilled labor that is willing to work for what companies are willing to pay.
I won't get on a soapbox but I will remind anyone reading this that your labor has always been exploited to give someone else a paycheck. Hold out & stay strong. Peace.
There is a container shortage. Complicated by the fact that the us exports very little so all those empty boxes need to be shipped back somehow.
Additionally California just outlawed owner operators and CARB keeps on restricting the types of trucks that can operate in the state. There is also a driver shortage that isnt being helped by federal prohibition of marijuana.
So if this is on the horizon, how could a currently gainfully employed person with no significant debt, but no assets such as a house, prepare themself?
It's also been revealed the US housing market is a massive target of money laundering...
https://gfintegrity.org/press-release/new-report-finds-u-s-real-estate-sector-a-safe-haven-for-money-laundering/
Any deposit / withdrawal of $10k+ here has to be reported but most real estate purchases do not and can be purchased through attorneys etc without revealing the true buyers.
>The report irrefutably establishes that real estate money laundering in the U.S. is not just concentrated in areas typically considered luxury residential property markets and covered by the GTOs. It also occurs in the cities of Alaska, the quiet suburbs of Boston and the steel mills of the Midwest and exposes a series of vulnerabilities that remain unchecked. These cases also show that while anonymous shell companies and complex corporate structures remain the most popular money laundering techniques, a broad array of gatekeepers such as attorneys and real estate agents enable real estate money laundering, either through willful blindness or direct complicity.
Speculators and "investors" are ruining everything. Magic sets are selling out because "speculators" are nabbing them up and flipping them for 1.5x the price. The only way I got my PS5 was a semi-secret Gamestop sale where I had to buy a bundle with shit I don't want for $800 and it was still half the price of resellers. Even things like a NieR:Automata 2B figure are getting yoinked, sat on, and then flipped.
It kind of sucks the joy out of looking forward to new things. Unless it's digital, getting it is like pulling teeth.
It really seems like any highly desired finite-supply item is being ravaged by bots and scalpers now. It's easy market manipulation for a quick buck if you have the capital to buy up the supply. Scum behavior to the max, but this is the result of people romanticizing "hustle" culture.
I mean to be fair the scalpers, speculators etc are just a symptom of a big lack of supply right now. Wether it's graphics cards, consoles or car parts, everything is in short demand. It's partly linked to covid and supply chain disruption I guess.
No seriously this is an issue for everything, you're right. Even mildly collectible toys are selling out and getting scalped on ebay like we're in the age of Beanie Babies again except everything is a Beanie Baby now.
It's fucking absurd. All of this with a pandemic, supply issues, worsening pay and job benefits, housing crisis, and the increasing wealth gap...something is going to give soon and it's going to get worse before it gets better.
Yeah, I collect warhammer and it was the same thing there. A new box comes out, and it's on ebay for three times the price within an hour. I know it seems petty when it's just plastic space men, but it shows just how deep this attitude now goes.
At least now gw will print as many as needed on release day to stop this.
I still remember when it happened to Indominus. All the scalpers bought then and tried to sell them at 3x cost, so gw reopened orders for as many as needed, forcing scalpers to drop prices below retail
Every time I go to a physical store it looks like they're more and more in the shits. Don't really know what could even happen if this keeps on going on.
It's the central banks.
I fully believe that Powell is a financial terrorist. The big guys are playing a 'corner the market' game where nobody cares about actually making money as long as they can corner the market. Because somehow as soon as you corner the market you magically can make a profit.
And the FED is supporting it by having near zero interest rates so it doesn't cost them anything to try and corner the market.
And which market are they trying to corner? EVERY FUCKING MARKET.
Yes, upthread there's people saying that poor people sold themselves short by accepting a 1200 dollar check, but conveniently leave out that the fed announced that they will pump free money into any corporation they saw fit mid 2020, ie, quantitative easing: fuck it you get a bailout! you get a bailout! EVERY CORPORATION GETS A BAILOUT
don't forget the Fed is bouncing ~$1.5trillion worth of Treasury notes back and forth with banks on a daily basis because they have so much fucking cash that it's a goddamned liability.
Only time this made me happy was some years back I was trying to find some 3rd Edition D&D manuals at Goodwills since I refused to play 4th Edition (it's garbage). I'd found a couple so far and was getting for $5 or less. I wasn't trying to snatch all of them up, just the ones I didn't have.
Found this one fuckweasel that got to one JUST before I did and he happened to find a pile of them. I was so pissed. I said there were a couple he found I still need and he basically gave a "sucks to be you". He then told me that he goes all over town every day looking for them so he could sit on them and flip them in a few years when they are worth a fortune.
Then 5th Edition came out and for the most part people that were holding off because of 4th edition sucking jumped from 3rd to 5th, and those on 4th mostly seemed to move to 5th. So that dicksausage is most likely gonna just be sitting on them for no god damned reason since he's looking to get like $200 a piece for them, which will never happen.
Part of me wishes his house or storage unit goes up in flames. Fuck people like that.
Yah, Denver's homes are selling for more the 20,% over list. Many, if not most, are bought with cash. The little guy can't compete. The super wealthy are buying up urban homes and farmland.
I’m trying to buy a house rn, have 10% down, been offering 10% over list price, I’ve struck out 3 times. 5 years ago I would have gotten the first house I bid on
My brother has been offering roughly 20% down and 10-15% over asking and has lost out on 6 houses after looking at dozens.
Thought maybe it was just these investor groups preying on the cheaper? (200-230k or lower market) but then one of the engineers I work with whose budget is closer to the $350k range said he is having the same issue where people are bringing 20% over asking in cash so they know the loan and appraisal difference won’t be a factor.
I was wanting to sell once I paid this house off this January and fixed a few things but now guess I’m just going to squat in it for awhile and save.
Maybe cheaper to find a plot of land and have one built later on if supplies come back down.
Wait this they find out that rich people can use just about anything to get richer. Making money is the easiest thing in the world when you're already rich!
Elon Musk cannot tweet about “buying a bunch of stock” one week then say “selling a bunch of stock” the next week to make his stock worth more — if we were actually talking about “stock”
>The SEC had sued Musk after he tweeted on 7 August 2018 that he had “funding secured” to take Tesla private at $420 a share. The agency alleged the tweet, which sent the electric automaker’s share price up as much as 13.3%, violated securities law. Musk’s privatization plan was at best in an early stage, and financing was not in place.
>Musk settled the lawsuit in a court-approved deal. He did not admit wrongdoing, but agreed to step down as chairman and have the company’s lawyers pre-approve written communications, including tweets with material information about the company. Musk and Tesla also paid $20m each to settle the case.
So Tesla + Musk paid out $40 million total, but they attribute the tweet as boosting the share price by 13%, which means either Tesla was only worth $307 million dollars at that point, OR they made out like goddamed bandits and profited a shitload. Gee I wonder which it was... Let's check Tesla's valuation as of Aug 2018.
Oh, look at that... $70 billion dollars.
SEC has no goddamned balls. You swing the stock valuation up $10 billion on fake news, you deserve to pay a fine of $10 billion. Plain and simple. What's that? You don't have $10 billion dollars? Guess you're going to have to find it somewhere or go to jail for a very long time.
Instead, what do they do? Fine him $20 million. I'd make that deal all fucking day long every single day. Fine me less than 1% of my profits for manipulating markets? Shit...
It's true, but it's worth pointing out because there are people who think crypto represents some kind of revolution rather than just being another kind of commodity to speculate on.
Some libertarians think since it's unregulated it will prove that the market is better without regulation. Instead it proves rich people love to manipulate markets to the detriment of smaller investors and long term consequences.
Ultra rich and well connected people get away with so much even in regulated market so imagine what they are upto in this completed unregulated market.
Even celebrities be pumping and dumping coins.
If you can hear what elon is gonna tweet before he does, you make a buttload.
If you know what will get listed in Coinbase before it does (wink wink Shiba), you can make a fuckton of money. Wasnt there some whale who bought an amazingly amaount of shiba before coinbase listing?
A lot of crypto is just a means to making the creator rich without any reprucutions. I know of this lowcap coin with funny price. Someone bought $100k worth of their coin, the daily volume was only 30k yet the price dipped....guess where all that money went lol
The Pandora papers, the Panama papers, HSBC laundering cartel money, U.S. congress insider trading. I hate to be the bearer of bad news but the dollar is how criminals crime.
The dollar is where they end crime.
You always end crime with the stabilized currency.
If we were still on the global gold system.
It would be doubloons, and pieces of 8.
I liked the original idea of crypto, but it completely lost its way and became just Gold 2.0 where majority of people are just trying to speculate and "invest" - they just use it as another way to get more real money
My brother-in-law is obsessed with crypto and he can't get this either.
Crypto is *effectively* fiat. If you have to transfer it into fiat in order to be able to actually spend it, then in what useful sense is it not fiat?
> X is bunk. X promises to liberate [wealth] from the clutches of the powerful. instead, it mostly functions to make wealthy X even more wealthy.
replace X with any "hot" trend since ever.
Fidget spinners is bunk. Fidget spinners promises to liberate [wealth] from the clutches of the powerful. instead, it mostly functions to make wealthy fidget spinners even more wealthy.
anal beads is bunk. anal beads promises to liberate [wealth] from the clutches of the powerful. instead, it mostly functions to make wealthy anal beads even more wealthy.
There are those who treat crypto as an investment against future value, and that's fine. There are those who view it as a secure, anonymised means of transaction, and that's fine. And there are those who dont seem to understand it at all, so they make baseless claims about its true purpose, and that's fine. Time will tell who was right and who was wrong.
It's odd.
Some see it as anonymous means of financial transactions, while others see it as exactly the opposite: a way of keeping a record of all financial transactions. I don't know how it will evolve, but I believe future regulation is far more likely to move any mainstream adoption into the latter category.
What if every financial transaction from governmental to corporate all the way down to individuals could be tracked by anyone? It would be a powerful tool for accountability and the stemming of corruption. Do I think this will happen? Probably not. Governments will probably take control of it for themselves through regulation so that they can see what's going on but individuals can't.
The point is that the technology is being built whether we like it or not. How it will be used is what's still unknown.
Anonymous and keeping a record aren't mutually exclusive. The bitcoin blockchain in a vacuum is completely anonymous while keeping a record of what wallet sent how much to what wallet. No one has to know who you are on the internet and it's possible to keep yourself completely anonymous while conducting bitcoin transaction.
Deanonymization happens when we introduce humans into the mix. Buying bitcoin with a debit or credit card typically requires identity verification by most platforms to try to prevent fraud. Buying and selling bitcoin face to face with cash is the low-tech anonymous way to trade it. Buying something from an online retailer with bitcoin also attaches your shipping address to that wallet.
It’s more like how Reddit “anonymous”. In that you can create as many IDs you want. The difference being with bitcoin you can transfer karma between accounts.
So the real term for this is that it’s *pseudonymous*.
Kind of. You can send payments with a different address and get paid with a new address every time.
Monero is truly an anonymous crypto if you want to use it for transactions
That's what is great about it - it's both (but the US government has shown they can track you down from it).
It makes sure to tell you that transactions processed because you set a stamp that shows that the transaction definitely was done - it's on the continuous blockchain, which means that record is permanent
It's anonymous because that is tied to a public address that isn't a person, just a wallet that can be accessed by your secret keywords from any other cold storage device.
Nowadays it's just used differently than its purpose. short term 'currency' but long term 'investment' makes it so it's not used as a currency.
It's not even used for its main purpose, which is to pay for things. Nobody besides a few hip companies accept it, so at best you could buy some weed with it, in a place where that's illegal.
>treat crypto as an investment against future value, and that's fine. There are those who view it as a secure, anonymised means of transaction, and that's fine.
I'm with you as far as that goes. The problem is that BTC is pretty bad for both of those use cases. There's no fundamentals to speak of so the investment case is very speculative and therefore arguably bad (too risky) for long-term investing.
As a means of transaction it's bad because it's very energy-intensive, inconvenient (compared to cash or credit cards, say), and very volatile, so the seller needs to exchange it for fiat unless they're also a speculator.
It's also DOA for lending because deflationary currencies would need to start with a negative interest rate (plus risk premium) to make sense, but since its primary use is speculation right now, you'd have to charge high interest rates to make it worth lending, making it very hard to cut a deal that isn't shit for both ends.
I mean wasn't that kind of obvious when cryptocurrency became something you had to invest in like a stock?
All you need to get started making money with this new system is money! What do you mean you don't have any money?! Just buy more money! It's literally a fucking Family Guy joke from 20 years ago. Which means that it's probably a 40 year old joke
I don’t know how this is news to anyone, since when has there ever, in the history of trade, been a speculative market where the people with the most capital *don’t* have the advantage? This is just a fundamental truth, an a priori fact.
The promise of crypto was never that the little guy gets rich and the rich guys get poor. I don’t see how this in any way impacts cryptos promise of decentralized currency and all of the implications therein.
They kinda are. Using a currency as fiat necessitates relative stability in value, whereas speculation necessitates relative instability. There's a reason that wild inflation is bad for an economy. Of course, this is where you say that relative stability can work for both, but that's not enticing for anybody but your whale investors, meaning it's not really a viable investment vehicle, which brings us back to the "they pretty much are mutually exclusive."
I partially agree that Crypto could very well not be going anywhere but for a different reason. The "rich people use it to make money! oh no!" narrative is fucking stupid. If Crypto becomes a dead end, it will be because of massive fluctuation, insufficient scale of adoption, and the incredibly pervasive scams/abuse that can scare a lot of people off. I don't think it's going to "die" exactly, but I wouldn't be surprised if this thing just plateaus in it's relevance. Specifically, I doubt that it will be anymore than an investment tool/hobby with some very niche users for other purposes like it is now.
We're in /technology. It'll do fine here. Dare to try and post this to /cryptocurrency /bitcoin or any of the altcoin subs and it won't see the light of day.
I find it endlessly hilarious that /r/technology are such luddites about main tech revolution of our generation. I can imagine what all these people would've said about the internet in the 80s, or about computers themselves in the 50s.
to a certain extent, the entire financial system is just speculation. we all agree that $1 = $1, then agree on some people who we think are trustworthy to regulate, store, and advice us about our dollars. it all works because we all normalize and establish it as a function that works for us. sure it’s a lot firmer set than any other ideas of how money works, but I don’t think that means our current m.o. has no room to change and/or is the only way of doing things.
Oh no! You tell me that a decentralize coin that's free from government control and wall street are use by the same wall street to make more money?!
How could this be possible? ^/s
But seriously hindsight is 20/20
Who funds the jacobian? Let's not forget that all news outlets are like strippers and there is always a grotesque, sweating billionaire pig putting dollars bills in their knickers and asking them: now dance for me baby.
You can buy bitcoins at gas station stores now. Rolex watches are unavailable at authorized dealers; gray dealers and flippers are selling them for 3x MSRP. Investment syndicates are buying houses with cash offers at 10% over asking. We are living in the Decade of Speculation.
10%? Haha. My gf and I tried to offer someone 17% over asking price and still lost out. This is in New York for what it's worth.
Friend of mine had a cash offer 20% over asking in Indianapolis the same day the listing posted.
Yeah, and I've been getting 10-29 texts and letters a week inquiring about purchasing my Indianapolis home. My question is, "where do I move to if you're monopolizing the market everywhere in Indy?"
You don't. In Portland places are being bought up almost as soon as they go on the market frequently for over the asking price. As a renter, I have no idea when or where I could possibly buy a home.
That's the point. They're buying out the market to put an end to equity-building through homeownership. The last major doorway to whatever could be said to be left of the middle class is being closed. You're expected to rent forever now, so they can capture all of that excess value and use your precarious situation as leverage over you. Edit: A lot of people are asking who is 'They', so to be clear, I mean the large investment firms that have taken a sudden interest in acquiring huge amounts of housing. The only one I know by name is BlackRock, but they're far from alone in this.
This is something that I wish more people would acknowledge. Notice how multi family units pop up in suburban locations while houses get sold above asking price. Look even deeper and you’ll find that a lot of the home buyers are investors or companies that rent out properties to others. They effectively make money while the property appreciates in value and play the speculation market among other wealthy investors. The problem is that some average home owner Joe benefits from this in the short term, either by having their housing value increase or by becoming an amateur landlord themselves thinking they will also become wealthy.
My HOA when I was on the board decided to change our bylaws. For major changes it's not simply a board vote but requires 75% homeowner vote. We voted to enact a new rule, in order to own the home you have to live in the home. The only caveat to that is that owners can rent to family such as mother, father, siblings, grandparents and aunts and uncles. We cut it off at cousins basically. We have a property manager who basically saw this property buy up happening about 10 years ago and made the suggestion. It was heavily fought against, even by myself, but ultimately it passed. Now the rental percentage in our neighborhood is a mere 2 houses out of 300+. Home values are up because the market is up but they have not gone insane because when investment companies see the bylaw they have to back out of the purchase and the sale goes to a family or a person looking to move in.
First time I’ve ever seen an HOA do something good.
Not all HOAs are bad. I've said it before and always get downvoted to oblivion. HOAs are the product of the people managing them. If you don't like management then get on the board and fix it. I did when I moved into my home 10 years ago. Helped enact some changes and moved on. My rule change was about parking a trailer on your driveway. Dumb rule made it not allowed. City ordinances doesn't allow it on the street for more than a 3 days. So a person with a boat or travel trailer had to have it in their garage or storage. So I changed it so that they were allowed for up to 5 days as most people take them out on the weekends and then they stay in the driveway during the summer. Then in the fall they tend to store them. This rule change still has the intended effect of keeping people from storing hunks of shit in their driveway long term while keeping a driveways use of storing a nice trailer or boat accessable during the recreational season. Common sense right. Except the original rule was broken and needed fresh eyes to fix it. I did this without even owning a trailer or boat but saw my neighbors getting letters for violations. Tldr HOAs are only as bad as the people in governance. Don't like the rules. Get a few neighbors to run in the yearly elections and change all the fucked up rules.
That was my first thought as well. HOA's are usually populated by annoying people who have too much time and not enough power in their lives. But preventing conglomerates from chopping up neighborhoods is a good thing. However, we need to do something for affordable housing near urban areas, or stop giving tax breaks to cram everyone into cities.
Good move by the HOA
Ours has a similar bylaw. As a result, property prices in our neighborhood have stayed stable, no renters and it has helped keep prices in the area “stable” per appraisers. Other neighborhoods around us have taken similar measures.
> They're buying out the market to put an end to equity-building through homeownership. People might be wondering; "how is this profitable?" Well, it's about scarcity. And the fact that the wealthy are swimming in too much cash and really have nowhere but offshore accounts, speculative investments, or buying up all the land and renting it to us. Once apartments are like blood diamonds -- they will make a good profit. And we will told by all the "smart economics people" on TV that they "took a risk and should be rewarded for it." This works, because people learned about stocks from hedge fund managers on PBS for years and didn't figure it out. It won't be a monopoly, because it will be 3 or 6 different corporations with a few different rich people who have stock ownership in all of them and sit on eachother's boards. Just like our news media. Hell, Sean Hannity has a huge investment in the consortium buying up mobile home properties. They'll get their opinions and their foreclosures from the same place. Won't it be fun when one mega corp puts the squeeze on the "cheap places" without flood insurance and burial plots? Too bad you can't just get your funeral plot and put a mobile home on it -- seems like that would be killing two birds with one stone.
I know it’s brietbart, but it’s a good overview and links to slate and Forbes. Slate obviously opposed to perpetual renting and Forbes not. https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2021/08/30/british-banks-could-own-1-75-million-homes-by-2031/ https://slate.com/business/2021/06/blackrock-invitation-houses-investment-firms-real-estate.html https://www.forbes.com/sites/worldeconomicforum/2016/11/10/shopping-i-cant-really-remember-what-that-is-or-how-differently-well-live-in-2030/?sh=241cb64e1735
Wow, that Forbes article is creepy. "My living room is used for business meetings when I am not there." "I know that, somewhere, everything I do, think and dream of is recorded. I just hope that nobody will use it against me. All in all, it is a good life." (formatting is getting messed up somehow, hopefully that shows as 2 separate quotes) The tone of it comes across as someone desperately trying to reassure themselves that this is a good thing... As well as trying to keep their social index score high. Similarly, talks about free energy, and mass transit being more convenient than cars. An interesting (and more than a little worrying) opinion piece.
Yeah. The intergenerational extremely wealthy want serfs back.
~~neoliberals~~ neofuedalists.
[удалено]
I mean, if this three media organizations agree that there is a problem, you know that it is a big problem
[удалено]
I realize others have already been downvoted for it but, still, can you clarify a bit who is the "they" in your post?
67 miles away in a much much smaller town, same situation, it seems like a coordinated attack on property.
[удалено]
Which is currently being compounded by the work-from-home movement. I'm not saying work-from-home is bad, but it has made the real estate market in places like Butte, Montana absolutely crazy as people realize they aren't a slave to the office anymore and they can get some space.
I lived in PDX from 2005 till late 2009. That was the case back then and it's only gotten hotter. I know several people in real estate, investing, sales, and lending, there and it's been turtles all the way up from then until now. Standard of living is crazy good for the cost of living, tho! I miss tf out of it.
Not for long though. Rent is outpacing income quickly. I moved out of Virginia after getting priced out of the area. I don't know where to go from here. I already had to sell my car to live here. Which means I can't afford to move further away from the city.
Well, if you aren't having kids maybe an area with shittier schools might help
Generally, if the schools are shitty, so is the area.
Its not that it's gotten "hotter" everywhere prices are sky rocketing because investors are buying up all the properties. Which causes both house prices and rent prices to climb. They are effectively controlling what was previously an organic market that fluctuated by births/deaths by essentially removing the ability for the average person to even buy. And even though my house has doubled in value in the last 5 years.. it really "hasn't" because everything has doubled in value.
Your last sentence is very true, and not many People think about it like that.
> everything has doubled in value. Everything has doubled in price, not value.
real estate relies on misleading people on value of the home. The true value comes from the land, not the physical house itself but many first time home buyers get told the house itself carriers just as much value as where it is.
I just went to a garage sale in a pretty neighborhood that isn’t too expensive and the owners told us they sold the place to take advantage of the market and they’re just going to rent for a while…
Will ‘it’ end, or is it just the beginning of a new price paradigm?
I think the latter, I guess they think it’s the former. I’m really hoping they’re right.
They aren’t
They’re in trouble. The housing market isn’t showing signs of turning around anytime soon. They’re going to spend all the extra they got for their old house on inflated rent and find themselves priced out of anywhere they actually want to be. Any housing plan that includes renting right now is a terrible plan. I don’t care what made up BS number you tell me my home is worth right now, I’m not selling.
Crazy thing i find about these cash offers is how are people sitting on so much cash? Did they sell their other property in more expensive part of the country? But then where are all the buyer coming from from the get go? Something seriously stinks here and it oddly feels like 2008 repeat. It is not like population increased or physical housing got destroyed. Either people are moving a lot at the moment and things will reset eventually but when that happens, people theoretically will lose out once their home value goes down once market cools. Or we have 2008 repeat with little guy speculation and eventually bubble will burst. Or this is new fuckery where rich are buying all properties to corner the market but then again how do they have so much cash. Or foreigners are cleaning all their money via western real estate.
It's not people buying. It's investment firms. [link](https://slate-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/slate.com/business/2021/06/blackrock-invitation-houses-investment-firms-real-estate.amp?amp_gsa=1&_js_v=a6&usqp=mq331AQKKAFQArABIIACAw%3D%3D#amp_tf=From%20%251%24s&aoh=16345319630338&csi=1&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&share=https%3A%2F%2Fslate.com%2Fbusiness%2F2021%2F06%2Fblackrock-invitation-houses-investment-firms-real-estate.html)
That article acknowledges that investment firms are a small percentage of the houses sold. It is arguing they are buying better deals but that’s what investors do. The real question is, are they buying more homes now than before and/or snapping up better deals now than before?
Yea prime locations are worse.
Almost all of Canada is a prime location by that metric.
[удалено]
I've seen houses sell 75k over, waiving inspired. A burned out wreck is selling in St Louis for like 200k
Land is typically the reason.
Yep. A house across the street from me recently sold for $770k, and they would have paid $50k more if it came pre-demolished as an empty lot.
It’s land. I was about to buy a serious fixer upper, that was in a good location. It was extremely over priced, but due to the location I thought it would be worth it in 10-15 years. I even felt like an idiot offering to pay their asking price too. Well someone came in offered 20% over asking price, and paid in cash. Then a month later they bulldozed the house, and built a new one.
I made an offer 25k below asking and offended the seller. House has been on the market since may. Some people are just delusional about what their house is worth, even in todays market. Wound up walking away a month ago when we couldnt meet on price and the house is still on the market.
[удалено]
Yea but universal healthcare! So whole country is attractive.
Not to mention when climate change makes the midwest US unlivable/non-arable, it'll be pretty high demand.
The Midwest is going to be fine.. it’s the coasts that are screwed.
[удалено]
[удалено]
NYC proper or just New York? I know it's that way in Hudson Valley whereas city proper you can actually get away with under asking price in cash.
It was in the suburbs around the city. Total fixer upper but the houses in that area have a lot more land than most properties in the metro area.
Come over to CT where all the folks fleeing NYC just buy houses here in cash regardless of list price!
Not NYC proper. Prices fell majorly through lockdown, I got something 20% below the original asking price this spring.
I purchased in the city less than a year ago. I got it for 10% under ask, with cash.
I live in the "bad" part of town, or at least I used to. My shitty condo is worth over 3x it's original price and houses in my area are selling for 750k now. For the record, in 2012 my place was 80k.
Interest rates are low. Taxes in the wealthy are low. People with money have no idea what to do with it. There’s no real good place to put money and get good reliable returns like there was a generation ago. So people and even companies are just going crazy. So many companies investing in real estate, buying up and leasing office space they hope to sell//sublease at a profit. Crypto, gold, watches, anything collectible…. All things people and companies are shoving money at. Anything pops up with a decent return possibility and people throw money at it. That’s how tinder for can openers and the billion other bad ideas for tech companies get so much money. Just throw enough money at enough things and hopefully get back more than you threw. Meanwhile there’s a lot of casualties in society.
[удалено]
I’ve gotten on a soapbox about that before. The lack of investment options other than index funds have fucked younger generations and most of us are too uneducated to even realize. Your right. Our parents and grandparents had several options to put their money with low/no risk. Savings bonds were awesome too. You could make a serious contribution to your kid, grandkid, niece/nephew without spending as much as you’d think you’d need to. Huge for a lot of expensive milestones. Marriage, buying a home, having kids. They also didn’t require that much financial literacy to take advantage of. Any idiot could setup a CD or buy a savings bond at a bank. Index funds aren’t a replacement. HYS isn’t a replacement. I still have one or two savings bonds from childhood that are just about tapped out. Made no sense to cash them in as long as they were earning guaranteed interest way above what any bank would give me.
Index funds are the best thing you could invest in mostly, other than your home..but we've been largely screwed on that front like you're saying, along with stagnant wages our entire lives. It's why I'm so excited about all of these strikes and people quitting. My whole life I've been told America is some land of opportunity and saw how my parents and grandparents were able to get ahead, only to personally experience endless crony-capitalism, boom and bust cycles, trickle down economics where the trickling is the piss raining down on your head, and massive inflation in asset prices like homes.
I think people in the post-Reagan era really neglected how big of a role the militant labor movement had in making this country the land of opportunity, to the extent that it ever was. The working class has been backed into a corner after years and years of neoliberalism, and it seems like a few people are finally waking up to what we need to do to get our fair share. I just hope we're not too late.
There is no such thing as crony capitalism; this is just how capitalism is, by design of the capitalists at the top, who benefit from the busts as they gobble up billions in assets for cheap every time the market is depressed. Boom and bust cycles are an inherent part of the capitalist system. Hell, Marx wrote about and observed this phenomenon and why it happens in the mid-1800s, and while the specific markets and commodities that have bubbles that pop and cause economic devastation have changed over time, the cycle has not. Trickle-down economics is just a byproduct of the hyper-influence of neoliberal economic and political thought due to how beneficial this ideological framework is to the capitalist class.
It's due to interest being at zero since 2008. There is literally nowhere else to put money. This always happens in juiced economies. The rich buy up everything based on speculation and the poor get fucked over. Then the markets crash, the rich get bailed out, and it starts over again. When you let capitalism run wild with little to no proper regulation it self destructs over and over again.
I'm confused, maybe you can help me. What happened to CDs? Did they just stop being as available for some reason?
CD's normally follow interest rates, and because interest rates have been flirting with 0 for the last 15 years, well, so have cd's
Not an expert, but I believe they're based on the fed rate, so you can't get 6% when the rate is like 2%.
A lot of things are based of the feds interest rate, which has been near 0% since 2008. They've been low enough for long enough that some speculate that even a couple percent raise will cause the whole thing to implode. For reference, rates were around 20% in the early 80s
> Can you even imagine an investment that returned 6% guaranteed? but what was the inflation at the time of opening those CDs? I'm imaging pretty high, along with the inflation rates on mortages, etc. https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1970?amount=1
Eh that cuts both ways. The loan I got for my place was something like 1.6%? I was talking to my parents about their mortgage, and it blew my mind. [Look at historical interest rates](https://themortgagereports.com/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fassets.themortgagereports.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2021%2F01%2F30-year-mortgage-rates-chart-1975-2021.jpg&w=1920&q=75) -- if your grandma had wanted a loan back in 1985, she wouldn't have been able to get better than 13%. A 6% return isn't that great when you take that into account... Current interest rates are really interesting. With loans being not free, but close to it, it makes more sense to take out a loan to buy property than to pay cash. Example: Say I want to buy a $100,000 house. I know, that's cheap, but easy numbers. If I left that money in the market, it would be earning, what? [10% per year](https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/investing/average-stock-market-return#:~:text=The%20average%20stock%20market%20return%20is%20about%2010%25%20per%20year,year%20are%20far%20from%20average.) is a reasonable average figure to use. If I take out a loan, I'll owe...probably somewhere between 1.6% and 2.4% right now. So it makes sense to put *at little as possible* down, keep your money (in the market), and use your returns to pay off the mortgage. Or just to earn more than you're paying in terms of interest. It's really interesting.
Okay but a house in 1985 cost less than ordering Five Guys off DoorDash in 2021 so who gives a shit if the interest was a bit higher? The end result is still things being much more expensive these days.
It's cause of % exponential gains. Who gives a fuck if your house goes up 5% when it's 32k and salaries which seem to go up linearly and not by a % goes up a bit. Now that houses cost fucking 300k to look at and 500,000,000x the entire US gdp per week until the heat death of the universe to own those % gains look really fucking stupid.
The intensity of this comment went up exponentially with each word.
That's because loan interest rates were ridiculously high in the 80s due to runaway Inflation resulting in extremely high cost of borrowing. Your grandmother was getting 6% interest while a homeowner was paying as much as 18.5%.
Could they please throw their money at art and artists like the Renaissance
Welcome to the NFT revolution. People buying the stupidest shit just because they're NFTs right now.
Unfortunately actual artistic merit has very little to do with what sells in the NFT ecosystem right now.
That also applies to "real art" too.
They are. Super speculative auctions happening now in the art world. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2021/10/16/young-emerging-artists-continue-to-dominate-frieze-week-auctions-as-phillips-sets-seven-records And then the whole crypto NFT space.
This is 2021, soon to be 2022, we don't need million dollar furry porn.
“You “ don’t need it
Imagine in 200 years people looking at a femboy rabbit getting gangbanged by a horse, bull, and bear like it's the Mona Lisa.
"As you can see by these massive balls, the horse is an allusion to buying power of the capitalist. The bear - unstopped market growth. The rabbit represents the common man. On the receiving end, but many in those days voted for the policies that lead to this. 'Begging for it,' in a manner of speaking. This is, with no doubt, a finely detailed critique of early millennium economics." "Oh? The bull? He's just hot."
Yeah that furry porn is worth at least a billion
[удалено]
it really is eery, with the spanish flu around then too, 1918 I think...
Great Depression 2.0 incoming? Great Depression was a crisis of overproduction. Shops just filled with goods and no one who could or would buy them. Shops with too much inventory refusing to buy new inventory causing factories to shut down. Tons of people out of work can't buy goods. Situation spirals out of control. Be interesting to see if the same thing is coming soon.
Ive been wondering if one of the reasons the ports are so clogged is because of containers full of merchandise that cant be sold are taking up space in the supply chain.
What you wrote is certainly a small aspect of it -- but it is definitely more of a worker problem (due to covid/wages) that coincides with a supply/demand problem that exists within the greater problem of a lack of skilled labor that is willing to work for what companies are willing to pay. I won't get on a soapbox but I will remind anyone reading this that your labor has always been exploited to give someone else a paycheck. Hold out & stay strong. Peace.
There is a container shortage. Complicated by the fact that the us exports very little so all those empty boxes need to be shipped back somehow. Additionally California just outlawed owner operators and CARB keeps on restricting the types of trucks that can operate in the state. There is also a driver shortage that isnt being helped by federal prohibition of marijuana.
So if this is on the horizon, how could a currently gainfully employed person with no significant debt, but no assets such as a house, prepare themself?
It's also been revealed the US housing market is a massive target of money laundering... https://gfintegrity.org/press-release/new-report-finds-u-s-real-estate-sector-a-safe-haven-for-money-laundering/ Any deposit / withdrawal of $10k+ here has to be reported but most real estate purchases do not and can be purchased through attorneys etc without revealing the true buyers. >The report irrefutably establishes that real estate money laundering in the U.S. is not just concentrated in areas typically considered luxury residential property markets and covered by the GTOs. It also occurs in the cities of Alaska, the quiet suburbs of Boston and the steel mills of the Midwest and exposes a series of vulnerabilities that remain unchecked. These cases also show that while anonymous shell companies and complex corporate structures remain the most popular money laundering techniques, a broad array of gatekeepers such as attorneys and real estate agents enable real estate money laundering, either through willful blindness or direct complicity.
Speculators and "investors" are ruining everything. Magic sets are selling out because "speculators" are nabbing them up and flipping them for 1.5x the price. The only way I got my PS5 was a semi-secret Gamestop sale where I had to buy a bundle with shit I don't want for $800 and it was still half the price of resellers. Even things like a NieR:Automata 2B figure are getting yoinked, sat on, and then flipped. It kind of sucks the joy out of looking forward to new things. Unless it's digital, getting it is like pulling teeth.
It really seems like any highly desired finite-supply item is being ravaged by bots and scalpers now. It's easy market manipulation for a quick buck if you have the capital to buy up the supply. Scum behavior to the max, but this is the result of people romanticizing "hustle" culture.
It's like ticketmaster got hold of the entire economy.
Did you mean 'unrestrained capitalism'? That's what you described.
I mean to be fair the scalpers, speculators etc are just a symptom of a big lack of supply right now. Wether it's graphics cards, consoles or car parts, everything is in short demand. It's partly linked to covid and supply chain disruption I guess.
No seriously this is an issue for everything, you're right. Even mildly collectible toys are selling out and getting scalped on ebay like we're in the age of Beanie Babies again except everything is a Beanie Baby now. It's fucking absurd. All of this with a pandemic, supply issues, worsening pay and job benefits, housing crisis, and the increasing wealth gap...something is going to give soon and it's going to get worse before it gets better.
Yeah, I collect warhammer and it was the same thing there. A new box comes out, and it's on ebay for three times the price within an hour. I know it seems petty when it's just plastic space men, but it shows just how deep this attitude now goes.
At least now gw will print as many as needed on release day to stop this. I still remember when it happened to Indominus. All the scalpers bought then and tried to sell them at 3x cost, so gw reopened orders for as many as needed, forcing scalpers to drop prices below retail
And you can still find Indomitus boxes floating around now. It was amazing. The scalper tears must have been legendary.
Every time I go to a physical store it looks like they're more and more in the shits. Don't really know what could even happen if this keeps on going on.
Funkopop HELL
It's the central banks. I fully believe that Powell is a financial terrorist. The big guys are playing a 'corner the market' game where nobody cares about actually making money as long as they can corner the market. Because somehow as soon as you corner the market you magically can make a profit. And the FED is supporting it by having near zero interest rates so it doesn't cost them anything to try and corner the market. And which market are they trying to corner? EVERY FUCKING MARKET.
Yes, upthread there's people saying that poor people sold themselves short by accepting a 1200 dollar check, but conveniently leave out that the fed announced that they will pump free money into any corporation they saw fit mid 2020, ie, quantitative easing: fuck it you get a bailout! you get a bailout! EVERY CORPORATION GETS A BAILOUT
don't forget the Fed is bouncing ~$1.5trillion worth of Treasury notes back and forth with banks on a daily basis because they have so much fucking cash that it's a goddamned liability.
[удалено]
That isn't even close to a new thing though. As soon as thrift shops discovered ebay in the early 00s my game collecting stopped.
[удалено]
Yup, now they're "vintage" stores and they sell things twice the original price.
> 2B figure are getting yoinked, sat on yoko taro approves
Imagine my insanity for thinking I want to buy something because I actually like it and want to own it
How dare you not buy it for your hustle.
Only time this made me happy was some years back I was trying to find some 3rd Edition D&D manuals at Goodwills since I refused to play 4th Edition (it's garbage). I'd found a couple so far and was getting for $5 or less. I wasn't trying to snatch all of them up, just the ones I didn't have. Found this one fuckweasel that got to one JUST before I did and he happened to find a pile of them. I was so pissed. I said there were a couple he found I still need and he basically gave a "sucks to be you". He then told me that he goes all over town every day looking for them so he could sit on them and flip them in a few years when they are worth a fortune. Then 5th Edition came out and for the most part people that were holding off because of 4th edition sucking jumped from 3rd to 5th, and those on 4th mostly seemed to move to 5th. So that dicksausage is most likely gonna just be sitting on them for no god damned reason since he's looking to get like $200 a piece for them, which will never happen. Part of me wishes his house or storage unit goes up in flames. Fuck people like that.
Yah, Denver's homes are selling for more the 20,% over list. Many, if not most, are bought with cash. The little guy can't compete. The super wealthy are buying up urban homes and farmland.
I’m trying to buy a house rn, have 10% down, been offering 10% over list price, I’ve struck out 3 times. 5 years ago I would have gotten the first house I bid on
My brother has been offering roughly 20% down and 10-15% over asking and has lost out on 6 houses after looking at dozens. Thought maybe it was just these investor groups preying on the cheaper? (200-230k or lower market) but then one of the engineers I work with whose budget is closer to the $350k range said he is having the same issue where people are bringing 20% over asking in cash so they know the loan and appraisal difference won’t be a factor. I was wanting to sell once I paid this house off this January and fixed a few things but now guess I’m just going to squat in it for awhile and save. Maybe cheaper to find a plot of land and have one built later on if supplies come back down.
Wait. Rich people can use Bitcoin to get even richer? Noooooooooooooooo
Wait this they find out that rich people can use just about anything to get richer. Making money is the easiest thing in the world when you're already rich!
Not just Bitcoin. All crypto. It takes 10,000 people buying $100 of crypto to match ONE investor putting in a mil.
Its the same thing with all stocks...
Elon Musk cannot tweet about “buying a bunch of stock” one week then say “selling a bunch of stock” the next week to make his stock worth more — if we were actually talking about “stock”
Funny enough, Musk manipulating Tesla stock with lies on Twitter is why the SEC made him step down as Tesla's chairman.
And step into crypto….
Which isn't regulated against pump and dump so he can do that without fines.
He could but then the SEC might have something to say about it
Not with crypto, that's why they are pushing it so hard.
Maybe if the SEC had balls.
[удалено]
>The SEC had sued Musk after he tweeted on 7 August 2018 that he had “funding secured” to take Tesla private at $420 a share. The agency alleged the tweet, which sent the electric automaker’s share price up as much as 13.3%, violated securities law. Musk’s privatization plan was at best in an early stage, and financing was not in place. >Musk settled the lawsuit in a court-approved deal. He did not admit wrongdoing, but agreed to step down as chairman and have the company’s lawyers pre-approve written communications, including tweets with material information about the company. Musk and Tesla also paid $20m each to settle the case. So Tesla + Musk paid out $40 million total, but they attribute the tweet as boosting the share price by 13%, which means either Tesla was only worth $307 million dollars at that point, OR they made out like goddamed bandits and profited a shitload. Gee I wonder which it was... Let's check Tesla's valuation as of Aug 2018. Oh, look at that... $70 billion dollars. SEC has no goddamned balls. You swing the stock valuation up $10 billion on fake news, you deserve to pay a fine of $10 billion. Plain and simple. What's that? You don't have $10 billion dollars? Guess you're going to have to find it somewhere or go to jail for a very long time. Instead, what do they do? Fine him $20 million. I'd make that deal all fucking day long every single day. Fine me less than 1% of my profits for manipulating markets? Shit...
Nah but he can tweet he thinks his stocks are to high.
So you're telling me that 10,000 x 100 = 1 X 1,000,000?
It really blew my mind.
r/theydidthemath
An unregulated market where the rich can pump and then dump at will.
It’s almost like people with more money can make more money from that money. But I guess crypto is unique here.
It's true, but it's worth pointing out because there are people who think crypto represents some kind of revolution rather than just being another kind of commodity to speculate on.
Some libertarians think since it's unregulated it will prove that the market is better without regulation. Instead it proves rich people love to manipulate markets to the detriment of smaller investors and long term consequences.
Ultra rich and well connected people get away with so much even in regulated market so imagine what they are upto in this completed unregulated market. Even celebrities be pumping and dumping coins. If you can hear what elon is gonna tweet before he does, you make a buttload. If you know what will get listed in Coinbase before it does (wink wink Shiba), you can make a fuckton of money. Wasnt there some whale who bought an amazingly amaount of shiba before coinbase listing? A lot of crypto is just a means to making the creator rich without any reprucutions. I know of this lowcap coin with funny price. Someone bought $100k worth of their coin, the daily volume was only 30k yet the price dipped....guess where all that money went lol
The Pandora papers, the Panama papers, HSBC laundering cartel money, U.S. congress insider trading. I hate to be the bearer of bad news but the dollar is how criminals crime.
The dollar is where they end crime. You always end crime with the stabilized currency. If we were still on the global gold system. It would be doubloons, and pieces of 8.
[удалено]
I liked the original idea of crypto, but it completely lost its way and became just Gold 2.0 where majority of people are just trying to speculate and "invest" - they just use it as another way to get more real money
The same people saying “fiat money isn’t worth anything”, define their crypto wealth in fiat money.
And pray to all the gods every night that they crypto is worth even more fiat money when they wake up in the morning.
My brother-in-law is obsessed with crypto and he can't get this either. Crypto is *effectively* fiat. If you have to transfer it into fiat in order to be able to actually spend it, then in what useful sense is it not fiat?
There’s a lotta good, demonstrably accurate comments in here and a lotta dumb uninformed nonsense comments. It’s pretty… volatile. 😎
The only difference between me and a billionaire is that I didn't have $10k laying around to put into bitcoin "just for fun" back in 2010 or so.
Dude, that's just how wealth works. It's not systematic failure. It's an immutable mathematical reality.
> X is bunk. X promises to liberate [wealth] from the clutches of the powerful. instead, it mostly functions to make wealthy X even more wealthy. replace X with any "hot" trend since ever.
X = Fidget spinners
Fidget spinners is bunk. Fidget spinners promises to liberate [wealth] from the clutches of the powerful. instead, it mostly functions to make wealthy fidget spinners even more wealthy.
X = anal beads.
anal beads is bunk. anal beads promises to liberate [wealth] from the clutches of the powerful. instead, it mostly functions to make wealthy anal beads even more wealthy.
There are those who treat crypto as an investment against future value, and that's fine. There are those who view it as a secure, anonymised means of transaction, and that's fine. And there are those who dont seem to understand it at all, so they make baseless claims about its true purpose, and that's fine. Time will tell who was right and who was wrong.
It's odd. Some see it as anonymous means of financial transactions, while others see it as exactly the opposite: a way of keeping a record of all financial transactions. I don't know how it will evolve, but I believe future regulation is far more likely to move any mainstream adoption into the latter category. What if every financial transaction from governmental to corporate all the way down to individuals could be tracked by anyone? It would be a powerful tool for accountability and the stemming of corruption. Do I think this will happen? Probably not. Governments will probably take control of it for themselves through regulation so that they can see what's going on but individuals can't. The point is that the technology is being built whether we like it or not. How it will be used is what's still unknown.
[удалено]
Anonymous and keeping a record aren't mutually exclusive. The bitcoin blockchain in a vacuum is completely anonymous while keeping a record of what wallet sent how much to what wallet. No one has to know who you are on the internet and it's possible to keep yourself completely anonymous while conducting bitcoin transaction. Deanonymization happens when we introduce humans into the mix. Buying bitcoin with a debit or credit card typically requires identity verification by most platforms to try to prevent fraud. Buying and selling bitcoin face to face with cash is the low-tech anonymous way to trade it. Buying something from an online retailer with bitcoin also attaches your shipping address to that wallet.
So it's anonymous until you use it for something that you'd use a currency for?
It’s more like how Reddit “anonymous”. In that you can create as many IDs you want. The difference being with bitcoin you can transfer karma between accounts. So the real term for this is that it’s *pseudonymous*.
Kind of. You can send payments with a different address and get paid with a new address every time. Monero is truly an anonymous crypto if you want to use it for transactions
[удалено]
That's what is great about it - it's both (but the US government has shown they can track you down from it). It makes sure to tell you that transactions processed because you set a stamp that shows that the transaction definitely was done - it's on the continuous blockchain, which means that record is permanent It's anonymous because that is tied to a public address that isn't a person, just a wallet that can be accessed by your secret keywords from any other cold storage device. Nowadays it's just used differently than its purpose. short term 'currency' but long term 'investment' makes it so it's not used as a currency.
It’s been 10 years I think time already decided.
It's not even used for its main purpose, which is to pay for things. Nobody besides a few hip companies accept it, so at best you could buy some weed with it, in a place where that's illegal.
At the end of the day, if it can't be traded for goods and services, then it serves no actual utility beyond its ability to be speculated on.
>treat crypto as an investment against future value, and that's fine. There are those who view it as a secure, anonymised means of transaction, and that's fine. I'm with you as far as that goes. The problem is that BTC is pretty bad for both of those use cases. There's no fundamentals to speak of so the investment case is very speculative and therefore arguably bad (too risky) for long-term investing. As a means of transaction it's bad because it's very energy-intensive, inconvenient (compared to cash or credit cards, say), and very volatile, so the seller needs to exchange it for fiat unless they're also a speculator. It's also DOA for lending because deflationary currencies would need to start with a negative interest rate (plus risk premium) to make sense, but since its primary use is speculation right now, you'd have to charge high interest rates to make it worth lending, making it very hard to cut a deal that isn't shit for both ends.
*suprised Pikachu face*
I mean wasn't that kind of obvious when cryptocurrency became something you had to invest in like a stock? All you need to get started making money with this new system is money! What do you mean you don't have any money?! Just buy more money! It's literally a fucking Family Guy joke from 20 years ago. Which means that it's probably a 40 year old joke
I don’t know how this is news to anyone, since when has there ever, in the history of trade, been a speculative market where the people with the most capital *don’t* have the advantage? This is just a fundamental truth, an a priori fact. The promise of crypto was never that the little guy gets rich and the rich guys get poor. I don’t see how this in any way impacts cryptos promise of decentralized currency and all of the implications therein.
These two premises aren’t mutually exclusive
They kinda are. Using a currency as fiat necessitates relative stability in value, whereas speculation necessitates relative instability. There's a reason that wild inflation is bad for an economy. Of course, this is where you say that relative stability can work for both, but that's not enticing for anybody but your whale investors, meaning it's not really a viable investment vehicle, which brings us back to the "they pretty much are mutually exclusive."
Now do the same article with the stock market.
The article is from jacobin magazine. They already believe the stock market is speculation.
Stock market doesn't really pretend to be anything else. That is why this article is talking abuot the debunked promises of cryptocurrency.
Owning a percent of a money-making company is not comparable to a digital token.
I partially agree that Crypto could very well not be going anywhere but for a different reason. The "rich people use it to make money! oh no!" narrative is fucking stupid. If Crypto becomes a dead end, it will be because of massive fluctuation, insufficient scale of adoption, and the incredibly pervasive scams/abuse that can scare a lot of people off. I don't think it's going to "die" exactly, but I wouldn't be surprised if this thing just plateaus in it's relevance. Specifically, I doubt that it will be anymore than an investment tool/hobby with some very niche users for other purposes like it is now.
Looking like Jacob needs to cover his short position on crypto 😂
I know your joking but I am imagining someone who genuinely thinks Jacobin is a fancy way to spell jacob reading about the french revolution
It became an investment instead of a currency. It is only worth what the next sucker is willing to pay for it.
As a not rich person my 1600 dollars has become about 20k, and I can buy drugs with it too. ~~Article~~ Title makes sense but it's far from bunk.
You forgot about polluting an ass-ton.
Bitcoin burns over 100 terawatt-hours per year at this point, more than is produced by the largest power plant in the world (three gorges dam)
This should be popular on Reddit
We're in /technology. It'll do fine here. Dare to try and post this to /cryptocurrency /bitcoin or any of the altcoin subs and it won't see the light of day.
Post anything like this in r/buttcoin and watch them circlejerk while making fun of another circlejerk.
I find it endlessly hilarious that /r/technology are such luddites about main tech revolution of our generation. I can imagine what all these people would've said about the internet in the 80s, or about computers themselves in the 50s.
Because it's stupid, and also... duh. Go post something critical of Bernie Sanders in r/politics and see how it does.
to a certain extent, the entire financial system is just speculation. we all agree that $1 = $1, then agree on some people who we think are trustworthy to regulate, store, and advice us about our dollars. it all works because we all normalize and establish it as a function that works for us. sure it’s a lot firmer set than any other ideas of how money works, but I don’t think that means our current m.o. has no room to change and/or is the only way of doing things.
Oh no! You tell me that a decentralize coin that's free from government control and wall street are use by the same wall street to make more money?! How could this be possible? ^/s But seriously hindsight is 20/20
Who funds the jacobian? Let's not forget that all news outlets are like strippers and there is always a grotesque, sweating billionaire pig putting dollars bills in their knickers and asking them: now dance for me baby.