Here's a statement of the obvious: The opinions expressed here are those of the participants, not those of the Mutual Fund Observer. We cannot vouch for the accuracy or appropriateness of any of it, though we do encourage civility and good humor.
On my experiment... I've opened a Coinbase account. I'm planning to use this exchange in the future as I look at adding some more BTC and Ether. Pure play money. Coinbase is just a much more efficent way of trading and purchasing vs. Paypal. I looked at Binance as well but there are certain territorial restrictions etc.
This Marketwatch story and commentary from Peter Thiel provides some insight into the China currency story and his thoughts on Bitcoin being a sharp tool against the US Dollar
What just happened? Is it the groundswell of vaccinations, the recent spring holidays, or the first breath of warm air that makes it feel like “we’re born again, there’s new grass on the field,” as John Fogerty said?
We’ve all got cabin fever, and not just because it’s been a long winter. The months since COVID-19 was first declared a global pandemic until now have been an eternity.
In ETF land, it’s been a long wait for a bitcoin fund — but one might be on the horizon. The same may not be true for rising rates: retirees and other income-seekers may have to wait longer. This week, we offer some coverage of both issues — how some industry heavy-hitters are thinking about cryptocurrencies, and how to work around the income issue.***
This thread maybe blowing up like bitcoin...??2000 views by month end
I hate to say it ... but I think crypto acceptance is accelerating for many reasons. My little experiment is up 25% since my first post here. My regret is that I didn’t take it seriously earlier. I’ve dismissed it for years.
My limited knowledge tells me BTC and Ethereum are the best two plays in crypto. Have read many stories that suggest the coinbase stock may be overvalued. It's an interesting way to play crypto - buying Coinbase IPO. Somewhat analagous of Buffett buying Barrick Gold vs. gold itself. For now, I'll stick with small (if not tiny) amounts of BTC and ETH until and unless I strike gold in crypto.
@johnN just in case you were wondering. If you sell all of your Bitcoin and exchange it for Dogecoin... IRS says it's a taxable event. Sorry. Like kind transfers only apply to real estate. Also adviseable to hold or HODL your crypto for longer than 1 year otherwise the tax man cometh as well. Cheers.
Speaking of Ponzi schemes, does it bother anyone that no one knows exactly who created bitcoin in the first place? Satoshi Nakamoto's true identity remains a mystery. So we have an anonymous piece of electronic code being bid up with no original provenance.
so...about 65% of bitcoin is mined in China...what can go wrong?
Also...heavy pollution is caused by this useless waste of energy "mining" these bitcoins
How soon do you think the US Govt will disallow bitcoin...which can be used for nefarious transactions etc
I'd rather throw monies at HD (Home Depot), MSFT (Microsoft), ACN (Accenture) etc stock where at least they are real companies...not based on fantasy BS
BLOK at least has real companies in it trying to profit off blockchain technology which is not the same as bitcoin as a currency. Yet those companies aren't cheap. Its largest holding MicroStrategy is up 500% in the past year and has a p-e ratio of 143. But I find blockchain technology a lot more interesting than bitcoin itself. Blockchain has many potential applications outside currency and bitcoin. Sadly, in Microstrategy's case, it looks like the only reason that it's up so much is it has acquired a lot of bitcoin, so it's kind of an overpriced shell. I bet many investors don't even really know what else the company does.
If you own MSSMX (I do) then you already own some crypto currency. The fund is up 26.82% this year and one of its top 10 largest holdings (4.5%) is Microstrategy.
And so do the funds: RYWAX MACGX MSSGX TRZIX and FSSNX ... lots of MSTR shares... and MSTR (I believe) their worth is 80% made up of bitcoin exposure which their average cost is around 23-25K and BTC is at 60K right now. Numbers are approximate.
If you’re anti Cathie Wood... feel free to skip this post. Otherwise, there’s a solid discussion of Coinbase and crypto ‘ Bitcoin going from 60K to 500K... around the 5:50 mark https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SU_YjT6KvT8
And for a special surprise... Reddit users mentioned an odd sound at 8:56 and 13:33<— Worth it. It’s a bit more than standard fee compression.
“Some of the great investors of our time, Stanley Druckenmiller, Paul Tudor Jones, are gold bulls. Many people, if they're not gold bulls, they at least believe that it's possible inflation comes back with the Fed gunning the money supply here, and with more fiscal stimulus. I think it's reasonable to own gold.
With respect to bitcoin...it's been a great month for bitcoin, but it's also been a great year, year to date, 3 years, 5 years, 10 years, and then inception, bitcoin's inception was 12 years ago, and it's been the single best performing asset category in every one of those periods. Not that it hasn't had a bad time, it went from nearly $20,000 down to the $3000-$4000 range, so it's been very volatile. But I think right now it's staying power gets better every day. I think the risks of bitcoin going to zero are much much lower than they've ever been before. And you're getting greater adoption. I mean, you know, MicroStrategy put half their cash, $400mm into bitcoin. Paypal announced that people can buy bitcoin. Square had blow out numbers yesterday due to their sales and demand for bitcoin. And the bitcoin story is very easy, which is that its supply demand it's it's economics, not 101, point 01, which is that bitcoin's supply is growing at about 2.5% per year, and the demand is growing faster than that. And there's gonna be a fixed number of them. So I think every major bank, every major investment bank, every major high net worth firm is gonna eventually have some exposure to bitcoin or what's like it.”
To me bitcoin's existence and popularity are in some respects an indication that capitalism is failing. It's supply and demand of something no one really needs and its scarcity is manufactured, not genuine scarcity, but an artificial one foisted upon us by its still anonymous fiat creator who said OK, I decree only this many bitcoin. This many electrons, this many zeroes and ones in someone's hard-drive. And saying well it's done well is the only validation people have for owning it. It becomes a tautology. It will do well because it has done well. And?? That sounds an awful lot like the greater fool to me, the ultimate in performance chasing.
Meanwhile there are people who can't pay their healthcare bills, have no food to eat, no homes. Somehow the free market hasn't solved their problems, hasn't provided these absolutely essential goods at a price they can afford. They face real world scarcity of those resources. The worst part is the immense amount of energy required to mine each new bitcoin, the artificiality of crypto, the incredible real world waste of energy to produce each new imaginary string of zeroes and ones on a planet facing a giant climate change threat.
At least gold you can wear, use it as fillings for your teeth. It's a good electrical conductor, ductile and pretty. But the fact hedge funds and real institutional investors are jumping on the bitcoin band wagon, are potentially putting it in pension plans for no other reason than it's done well is distressing. It's a way of saying capitalism serves no other function but as an end to itself, not as a system that produces things people genuinely need to eat, drink, be well, wear, drive or even to entertain themselves, more efficiently than other systems. We will spend immense amount of energy producing zeroes and ones that produce more zeroes and ones and more zeroes and ones via an increasingly elaborate blockchain, and we will pay increasing amounts for those empty lines of code because everyone else is willing to pay increasing amounts.
Bitcoin feeds upon itself with only one exception. If you see it as a way of fundamentally destroying nation states, their currencies and their central banking systems. If you think of it really as an artificial, virtual currency to replace the dollar and you like it simply because there is a limited, imaginary, completely arbitrary amount of bitcoin similar to gold--except gold is real, requires real mining--then it goes from simply being useless to diabolical. Then it's a libertarian chaos machine. It's their backdoor way of trying to impose a new gold standard at an incredible cost of real world energy to produce zeroes and ones. Meanwhile, so many struggle to get by, and bitcoin will not set them free.
Disclaimer: Cryptoassets is a tiny interest of mine in terms of investing but an area I want to learn more about solely for investment / profit purposes. I'm not an official defender of BTC or crypto. In the future, I think I'll leave rebuttals to experts or others better informed than I.
You present some good points. I've been a long term skeptic and even critic of crypto... That said, before you define bitcoin and crypto as the term imaginary (btw bitcoin mining is as "real" as mining for gold) ... Imagine this:
For the first time in history there is now a system where you can send "value" from one person to another or from point A to point B without the physical exchange of an item AND without using a 3rd party intermediary. The last part being the most important and intrinsic to the story of bitcoin/blockchain. There is no administrator that can be influenced. This is an electronic payment system that goes uncensored and payments are delivered without going through a financial institution and without the need to ID people further than a hashtag. Yet all of these transactions are visible and transparent to anyone on an open ledger.
"its supply and demand of something no one really needs and it's scarcity is manufactured" - the same could be said of gold and diamonds. Intrinsic value is a faulty concept. The value of something really comes down to the demand for it.
Re: Bitcoin and Energy required to mine. Is it less energy efficient than mining for gold or printing modern currencies/fiat? The vast majority of bitcoin is currently mined in areas of the world (CN) with an extremely low electric cost. Many of these miners are converting to geothermal and the CEO of Square notes that "eventually" BTC will be powered completely by clean energy or renewables. Here's the whitepaper on it: https://assets.ctfassets.net/2d5q1td6cyxq/5mRjc9X5LTXFFihIlTt7QK/e7bcba47217b60423a01a357e036105e/BCEI_White_Paper.pdf
The last paragraph 'Bitcoin feeds...' - I don't subscribe to that as the intention or intended purpose and outcome of BTC and I'd bet those CEOS and companies dumping 100's of millions into it subscribe to a different theory as well. Best investing fortunes to all!
https://theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/05/blockchain-of-command/528543/ In fact, the elimination of a "third party intermediary" from transactions is part of the libertarian fantasy. While that third party can include greedy banks, it can also include government regulators that ensure transactions are legitimate, not in illegal goods and appropriately taxed. Bitcoin and crypto initially were means for people to trade in illicit goods--see Silk Road--and to avoid paying taxes. That is evolving now with large institutional investors and regulator interest, but still problematic.
There is also this false notion of liberation and equal access to Bitcoin instead of Central Banks--the idea that anyone can have access to mining it and trading it. But what is happening in practice is very wealthy people and institutions are cornering the market in Bitcoin. About half of all Bitcoin is controlled by a few Chinese and Russian mining pools: https://fortune.com/2021/04/20/bitcoin-mining-coal-china-environment-pollution/. So basically instead of a democratically elected central government controlling currency, Bitcoin puts control in the hands of the wealthiest private enterprises, and potentially, hostile foreign governments. It's funny, but we live in the country with the world reserve currency. To actually celebrate Bitcoin's acscent is in a way celebrating the demise of the dollar.
And meanwhile there are alternatives from central banks gearing up that don't need to be a libertarian fantasy, yet could eliminate the need for for-profit banks as intermediaries and eliminate energy waste from paper currency. From the first FT article:
One of the most important potential innovations in the broad area of digital money is potentially the opposite of cryptocurrency: central bank digital money, perhaps as a substitute for cash and possibly as something more radical than that. Analysis at the IMF and the Bank of England demonstrates that we need to be clear about what central bank digital money is to achieve, how it relates to cash or bank deposits, and whether it could be a substitute for central bank reserves, which at present can only be owned by commercial banks.
Replacing cash with digital tokens of some kind would be relatively simple. It would mainly raise questions about the degree of anonymity of such replacements. Far more potentially revolutionary and destabilising possibilities would arise if the public at large were able to switch from deposits at commercial banks to absolutely safe accounts at the central bank. This radical idea has obvious attractions since it would remove the privileged access of one class of businesses, banks, to the monetary services of the state’s bank. But it would also transform (and surely destabilise) today’s monetary system, in which the state seeks to guarantee and regulate a money supply largely created by private banks and backed by private debts. Yet the revolutionary fact is that it would now be easy for everybody to hold an account at the central bank. Technology is eliminating the historic difficulties over such access.
When Mr. Roubini (aka Dr. Doom and a fierce critic of all things crypto) wrote that piece for project syndicate, Bitcoin was $6,300 per coin. It's now around $57,000. Blockchain has the potential to disrupt banking in a similar way in which mobile phones did to the telephone pole. I just don't agree with the liberterian fantasy slant... but yes I do agree that central banks could provide alternatives that eliminate intemediaries and reduce energy ... but why didn't they? It's no coincidence that blockchain/bitcoin was launched approximately 6 weeks after the financial crisis.
All that said, I'm not very interested in the idealogy of blockchain. At present, it doesn't violate a moral code of mine. I just want to profit from investments in it. So far, so good.
Newsweek just published a story that 46M Americans own Bitcoin.
In this interview Michael Saylor talks about anti Bitcoin comedian Bill Maher, Bitcoin energy use and its effect on the environment, Bitcoin as the new “bond” and his view on BTC funds/ETF: I found it to be a worthwhile interview if your slightly interested in crypto.
Made my first forray into anything crypto-related, buying a bunch of BFARF at $5 at the opem before it closed up nicely. Just got approved to list on the NASDAQ the other day, so I expect it will pop given retail interest and make for some nice cap gains once the ticker changes. This is a total spec play on my part -- the company is a Canadian-based crypto miner that looks pretty decent vs its peers, so ... we'll see what happens.
I don't own any cryptocurrency and think the proliferation of 'exchanges' is too crowded a field to figure out who's got an edge. But this 'mining' company at least I understand a bit and feel it's useful on the 'back end' of the crypto mania -- eg, crypto infrastructure -- and seems one of the better ones at that.
Comments
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/weve-reached-a-tipping-point-on-bitcoin-adoption-fidelitys-tom-jessop-says-11617847910
On my experiment... I've opened a Coinbase account. I'm planning to use this exchange in the future as I look at adding some more BTC and Ether. Pure play money. Coinbase is just a much more efficent way of trading and purchasing vs. Paypal. I looked at Binance as well but there are certain territorial restrictions etc.
@royal4 - as you suggested... China launching their own digital currency. https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-creates-its-own-digital-currency-a-first-for-major-economy-11617634118
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/china-may-be-using-bitcoin-as-financial-weapon-against-u-s-says-peter-thiel-11617837743
Bitcoin etf
ETF Wrap: Crypto edition
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/etf-wrap-crypto-edition-11617893999
What just happened?
Is it the groundswell of vaccinations, the recent spring holidays, or the first breath of warm air that makes it feel like “we’re born again, there’s new grass on the field,” as John Fogerty said?
We’ve all got cabin fever, and not just because it’s been a long winter. The months since COVID-19 was first declared a global pandemic until now have been an eternity.
In ETF land, it’s been a long wait for a bitcoin fund — but one might be on the horizon. The same may not be true for rising rates: retirees and other income-seekers may have to wait longer. This week, we offer some coverage of both issues — how some industry heavy-hitters are thinking about cryptocurrencies, and how to work around the income issue.***
This thread maybe blowing up like bitcoin...??2000 views by month end
A nice primer for new investors in crypto: https://www.marketwatch.com/video/what-you-need-to-know-before-investing-in-crypto/EB6C438A-53F5-4A2F-8055-58D5644CD587.html
https://www.businessinsider.com/dogecoin-price-today-record-high-market-capitalization-doge-meme-cryptocurrency-2021-4?amp
Going off the roof
Buy more???
Don't let train leave station /left behind...don't be last one leaving train
80% up...my gosh
Thx so much...gtk...don't want uncle Sam sending any more love letters than they have to..kind regards
Also...heavy pollution is caused by this useless waste of energy "mining" these bitcoins
How soon do you think the US Govt will disallow bitcoin...which can be used for nefarious transactions etc
I'd rather throw monies at HD (Home Depot), MSFT (Microsoft), ACN (Accenture) etc stock where at least they are real companies...not based on fantasy BS
Whatever, Good Luck to all,
Baseball Fan
And so do the funds: RYWAX MACGX MSSGX TRZIX and FSSNX ... lots of MSTR shares... and MSTR (I believe) their worth is 80% made up of bitcoin exposure which their average cost is around 23-25K and BTC is at 60K right now. Numbers are approximate.
And for a special surprise... Reddit users mentioned an odd sound at 8:56 and 13:33<— Worth it. It’s a bit more than standard fee compression.
Maybe good buy DODECOIN ARKK now...unclear if need to keep buying In 2022 or 23
Crypto etf surpassed gld
https://www.kitco.com/news/2021-04-15/GLD-vs-GBTC-Grayscale-Bitcoin-Trust-to-surpass-world-s-largest-commodity-ETF.html
Maybe been buying wrong vehicle the whole time..Maybe add more GBTC
“Some of the great investors of our time, Stanley Druckenmiller, Paul Tudor Jones, are gold bulls. Many people, if they're not gold bulls, they at least believe that it's possible inflation comes back with the Fed gunning the money supply here, and with more fiscal stimulus. I think it's reasonable to own gold.
With respect to bitcoin...it's been a great month for bitcoin, but it's also been a great year, year to date, 3 years, 5 years, 10 years, and then inception, bitcoin's inception was 12 years ago, and it's been the single best performing asset category in every one of those periods. Not that it hasn't had a bad time, it went from nearly $20,000 down to the $3000-$4000 range, so it's been very volatile. But I think right now it's staying power gets better every day. I think the risks of bitcoin going to zero are much much lower than they've ever been before. And you're getting greater adoption. I mean, you know, MicroStrategy put half their cash, $400mm into bitcoin. Paypal announced that people can buy bitcoin. Square had blow out numbers yesterday due to their sales and demand for bitcoin. And the bitcoin story is very easy, which is that its supply demand it's it's economics, not 101, point 01, which is that bitcoin's supply is growing at about 2.5% per year, and the demand is growing faster than that. And there's gonna be a fixed number of them. So I think every major bank, every major investment bank, every major high net worth firm is gonna eventually have some exposure to bitcoin or what's like it.”
6 Nov 2020
Meanwhile there are people who can't pay their healthcare bills, have no food to eat, no homes. Somehow the free market hasn't solved their problems, hasn't provided these absolutely essential goods at a price they can afford. They face real world scarcity of those resources. The worst part is the immense amount of energy required to mine each new bitcoin, the artificiality of crypto, the incredible real world waste of energy to produce each new imaginary string of zeroes and ones on a planet facing a giant climate change threat.
At least gold you can wear, use it as fillings for your teeth. It's a good electrical conductor, ductile and pretty. But the fact hedge funds and real institutional investors are jumping on the bitcoin band wagon, are potentially putting it in pension plans for no other reason than it's done well is distressing. It's a way of saying capitalism serves no other function but as an end to itself, not as a system that produces things people genuinely need to eat, drink, be well, wear, drive or even to entertain themselves, more efficiently than other systems. We will spend immense amount of energy producing zeroes and ones that produce more zeroes and ones and more zeroes and ones via an increasingly elaborate blockchain, and we will pay increasing amounts for those empty lines of code because everyone else is willing to pay increasing amounts.
Bitcoin feeds upon itself with only one exception. If you see it as a way of fundamentally destroying nation states, their currencies and their central banking systems. If you think of it really as an artificial, virtual currency to replace the dollar and you like it simply because there is a limited, imaginary, completely arbitrary amount of bitcoin similar to gold--except gold is real, requires real mining--then it goes from simply being useless to diabolical. Then it's a libertarian chaos machine. It's their backdoor way of trying to impose a new gold standard at an incredible cost of real world energy to produce zeroes and ones. Meanwhile, so many struggle to get by, and bitcoin will not set them free.
You present some good points. I've been a long term skeptic and even critic of crypto... That said, before you define bitcoin and crypto as the term imaginary (btw bitcoin mining is as "real" as mining for gold) ... Imagine this:
For the first time in history there is now a system where you can send "value" from one person to another or from point A to point B without the physical exchange of an item AND without using a 3rd party intermediary. The last part being the most important and intrinsic to the story of bitcoin/blockchain. There is no administrator that can be influenced. This is an electronic payment system that goes uncensored and payments are delivered without going through a financial institution and without the need to ID people further than a hashtag. Yet all of these transactions are visible and transparent to anyone on an open ledger.
"its supply and demand of something no one really needs and it's scarcity is manufactured" - the same could be said of gold and diamonds. Intrinsic value is a faulty concept. The value of something really comes down to the demand for it.
Re: Bitcoin and Energy required to mine. Is it less energy efficient than mining for gold or printing modern currencies/fiat? The vast majority of bitcoin is currently mined in areas of the world (CN) with an extremely low electric cost. Many of these miners are converting to geothermal and the CEO of Square notes that "eventually" BTC will be powered completely by clean energy or renewables. Here's the whitepaper on it: https://assets.ctfassets.net/2d5q1td6cyxq/5mRjc9X5LTXFFihIlTt7QK/e7bcba47217b60423a01a357e036105e/BCEI_White_Paper.pdf
The last paragraph 'Bitcoin feeds...' - I don't subscribe to that as the intention or intended purpose and outcome of BTC and I'd bet those CEOS and companies dumping 100's of millions into it subscribe to a different theory as well. Best investing fortunes to all!
https://ft.com/content/eeeacd7c-2e0e-11e9-ba00-0251022932c8
https://marketwatch.com/story/roubini-calls-out-the-big-blockchain-lie-2018-10-17
https://theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/05/blockchain-of-command/528543/
In fact, the elimination of a "third party intermediary" from transactions is part of the libertarian fantasy. While that third party can include greedy banks, it can also include government regulators that ensure transactions are legitimate, not in illegal goods and appropriately taxed. Bitcoin and crypto initially were means for people to trade in illicit goods--see Silk Road--and to avoid paying taxes. That is evolving now with large institutional investors and regulator interest, but still problematic.
There is also this false notion of liberation and equal access to Bitcoin instead of Central Banks--the idea that anyone can have access to mining it and trading it. But what is happening in practice is very wealthy people and institutions are cornering the market in Bitcoin. About half of all Bitcoin is controlled by a few Chinese and Russian mining pools: https://fortune.com/2021/04/20/bitcoin-mining-coal-china-environment-pollution/. So basically instead of a democratically elected central government controlling currency, Bitcoin puts control in the hands of the wealthiest private enterprises, and potentially, hostile foreign governments. It's funny, but we live in the country with the world reserve currency. To actually celebrate Bitcoin's acscent is in a way celebrating the demise of the dollar.
And meanwhile there are alternatives from central banks gearing up that don't need to be a libertarian fantasy, yet could eliminate the need for for-profit banks as intermediaries and eliminate energy waste from paper currency. From the first FT article:
All that said, I'm not very interested in the idealogy of blockchain. At present, it doesn't violate a moral code of mine. I just want to profit from investments in it. So far, so good.
Article, regarding the closure of this organization.
I also recalled this from 2 years ago in Canada and locked out investors. I have not performed a follow-up.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/cryptocurrency-bitcoin-ethereum-xrp-dogecoin-joe-biden-capital-tax-gain-075447840.html
The drop is due to the desire to raise the capital gains tax?
Hmmm... it has nothing to do with.... the 1.55 billion in bitcoin options that expire today?
I may wait just a little longer or by EOD to add to my tiny position.
In this interview Michael Saylor talks about anti Bitcoin comedian Bill Maher, Bitcoin energy use and its effect on the environment, Bitcoin as the new “bond” and his view on BTC funds/ETF:
I don't own any cryptocurrency and think the proliferation of 'exchanges' is too crowded a field to figure out who's got an edge. But this 'mining' company at least I understand a bit and feel it's useful on the 'back end' of the crypto mania -- eg, crypto infrastructure -- and seems one of the better ones at that.