Bitcoin

Bonsai Nut

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I personally like the idea of using it as secured capital on loans, borrowing against your resources while keeping it whole and free to appreciate in value...

Sure... if you can be 100% guaranteed that coins will appreciate in value indefinitely. Otherwise, sounds like an excellent way to lose all of your money - taking hard assets and moving their value into a volatile market with no underlying value. However I understand why hloders keep hyping it to friends and family - if they don't keep the hype going, the Ponzi scheme comes crashing down.

On this thread we seem to be arguing in circles. No one is ever going to convince me (or Warren Buffet, or numerous others) that coins are a reasonable 'investment' since they have no real utility other than anonymity, and no value other than whatever cash the last person in the Ponzi chain has deposited in them. They are fueled by greed - not market fundamentals. There is no question that Bitcoin will come to an end - it has to because it is based on a closed-end tech - the only question is when and how fast the fall will be.

And tell your friends if they are staying in a hotel in Ghana that doesn't take Visa, to find a better hotel.
 

Forsoothe!

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^ Absolutely. A paid off home has been an important asset to the average Joe for a hundred years for a couple reasons: It is a store of fairly liquid value in old age when you can no longer work for a wage, and after it's paid off you can save more and do that in conventional investments. Arriving at retirement with a mortgage is a sign of poor life choices and lousy money management. And don't tell me about IRA'a 401's, etc. They are luxuries that go with having a job and people have in the last couple years forgotten that we are facing a future where labor of all sorts is being replaced by AI and machines. The $15 minimum wage only accelerates that very, very negative trend. Add work-at-home and cities as such change radically for the smaller and less important. Every change in society in the last couple hundred years has reduced greatly the need for labor, and that ain't changing for the better in spite of a growing world population. A change is necessary.

Sooner or later there will be a stock market sell-off, and when that happens people sell whatever they can to raise money. That's when crypto will get a real test. It is fiat money. Fred's dollars, Joe's dollars, Elon's dollars, or not, with technical sounding names and no underlying value. This change is counter-productive

All of these things and more are connected like a spider web. I don't know what black swan will begin the cascade, but it's coming.

"If something can't continue, it won't" Herb Stein, 2012
 

wireme

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Thats what we could do in 2015, now we have NFT's, ERC's and trustless smart-contracts personally, I personally like the idea of using it as secured capital on loans, borrowing against your resources while keeping it whole and free to appreciate in value. Crypto and blockchains allow any individual to be the president of their own financial institution, recently a relative was going on a long trip to visit Ghana with a larger group but had a lot of trouble making a payment for lodging because it had to go through multiple payment providers (ie; Western union). It was a couple of days before it was known that payment had been recieved and not lost, taxed unfairly or stolen by any entity involved.

With any international transaction you have to deal with at least two financial institutions and the beauracracies, possible incompatibilities, and exchange rates. With Crypto you eliminate the need for some pencil-necked manager at your brick and mortar bank that he cannot fulfil your request.



With altcoins you really have to compare their performance vs. BTC, just like averaging a stock vs the S& P 500, you will notice that altcoin prices are inexorably linked to BTC. Take hbar for example, 10 billion coins were created already with a max of 50b its not decentralized so the primary stakeholders can potentially just make more when they are done selling off their organization's coins taking the investor money out (called a rug-pull) over and over. It so far seems almost identical to Ripple or XRP which was a project started by some of the largest banks in the US so they would have their own tool to handle long payments, it hasnt been a profitable investment for investors because the owners sold 10s of millions of dollars of coins frequently... whenever the price was high enough.

oh and why are the prices of Bitcoin, altcoins, and shitcoins linked? Because when they crash their coins value by selling off their stake they use the money to buy BTC.

Crypto is not a stock holding it does not make you a shareholder, large IBM sized corporations know they have to produce shareholder profits and they have one way to do it.
Thanks. Interesting perspective. I pulled cash out of Hbar today but was planning to put it back in if it drops.. How the value is determined is a mystery to me, all I know is it looks like the project will keep gaining transactions..The run is probably not over yet, I’ll try to be prepared for the rug pull😄.

Fobi and hbar both had a good run though, doubled on fobi so far and tripled on hbar. Only peanuts on hbar too, no big deal either way.
 

Starfox

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Well Coinbase is still throwing free crypto at me, another mining payment is imminent, Brave browser is pinging me token rewards for browsing the internet on multiple devices as is Presearch for using their search engine. All in all 100 euros worth of crypto in a couple of months with zero monetary investment aside from minimal electricity costs that we pay anyway.
Have a Helium miner on the way and not forgetting the in game playable NFT characters and loot from Blankos. Blockchain gaming is booming right now. It's pretty easy and free to get into crypto albeit not huge sums but it accumulates over time.

Are you an artist?
Get yourself on Opensea and sell your work and get paid in Crypto, especially if you already have a regular client base and website to shill to. NFTs are a billion dollar industry these days.
Honestly there are plenty of ways to get on board right now, the horse has well and truly bolted.
 

Forsoothe!

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Nothing is "free". That which is offered for "free" almost always has a price you wouldn't pay if you knew what it was. I don't understand how the creators of crypto make money by the creation these several (hundreds) of different ~currencies~, and I think if the proletariat knew, they would run like hell.
 

Forsoothe!

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Here we go kiddies... A Flock of Black Swans is escaping China and is about to shit all over the world. We talk bad about pyramid schemes but the economics of the world are eerily similar to one giant pyramid. Chairman Xi dons a Mao suit which suits his defensive thinking in a world that is about to deliver a comeuppance to the CCP. The commies don't understand why profits are important, and they don't understand the roll of goodwill in the marketplace either. They inflected the Wuhan virus on the world as their way of "sharing the wealth" after it escaped. They didn't want to be the only economy damaged and aren't smart enough to listen to their own scientists who have to know that there will always be a genetic trail of breadcrumbs to follow back to the origin. Add to that the kind of financing that accompanies red-hot economies like China, and Evergrande-type too-big-to-fail monsters emerge. Think about it: a million unfinished units! The CCP is going to have to cover this out of their diminishing pocketbook which means they will have call in some markers. The CCP has already ruined one of the finest economic jewels of the world, Hong Kong, and loose money from there has already escaped to the rest of the world. When the bankers involved with covering Evergrande's losses start selling assets to cover their asses, btc, et al will be among them and the cascade begins...
 

Bonsai Nut

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Coinbase opens down 20% on the day... down 76% YTD.

Two more stablecoins (USDD, USDN) lose their pegs to the dollar.

Bitcoin trading at 12 month low... off more than 50% from its high.

It's like watching a train crash in slow motion, except in this case the train has millions of individual retail crypto customers on it...
 

ShadyStump

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Coinbase opens down 20% on the day... down 76% YTD.

Two more stablecoins (USDD, USDN) lose their pegs to the dollar.

Bitcoin trading at 12 month low... off more than 50% from its high.

It's like watching a train crash in slow motion, except in this case the train has millions of individual retail crypto customers on it...
Well, folks could always just, ya know, SPEND the money instead pass it around like baseball cards.
Just a thought.

'Cause it WAS intended to be spent after all. I mean, it IS a currency, so it really only retains value if used as such. No PRACTICAL value; no monetary value.
 

Bonsai Nut

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Well, folks could always just, ya know, SPEND the money instead pass it around like baseball cards.
Just a thought.

'Cause it WAS intended to be spent after all. I mean, it IS a currency, so it really only retains value if used as such. No PRACTICAL value; no monetary value.
At least baseball cards you can look at, and if you enjoy baseball, they might provide some enjoyment.

Poor El Salvador. Literally and figuratively.
 

Wires_Guy_wires

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Great time to buy more.
Because when the actual economic markets are going to crash this fall.. We're in for a treat.
 

Njyamadori

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Great time to buy more.
Because when the actual economic markets are going to crash this fall.. We're in for a treat.
If your talking about Bitcoin and ethereum(or any blockchain backed crypto) then I would agree . However I really think everything else that was made for a joke or just not backed by a blockchain will plummet and possibly never reach a lot of value.
 

AlainK

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Money is the root of all evil...

😁

A well-tended garden is a source of food and pleasure. :)

We're having another heat wave here, but my tomatoes and othe plants are still healthy.

Parsley, dill, coriander,
That's what matter.
So said the old
Gardener.

(didn't write "matters" because it didn't rhyme)
 

AlainK

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Possibly Korean

Nie prawda ! To jest guwno, my friend 😁

When someone drop the "s" at the end of a third person indicative tense, he is probably French.

Even if he roll the "r" the way angloz do. Or the Irish (I must admit I likes the Norn Irish accent, with the sentences going upward. It's a bit like the equivalent of a Swiss accent in French)

Paul is 80, can you figure that ?


... See ?
 

AlainK

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MY English accent is THE WORST ONE...

NO, It's mine ! A mix between British/Irish/Scottish/Frrrench accent, and I learned English listening to Pete Seegher, the Doors, the Beatles, Leonard Cohen, etc. What a mess !

I remember when I was in Torkay (UK) and they asked me if I were from America, or in Maastricht where a principal from Cork told me I could be from Dublin, and a man in the railway café in Liverpool asking me "are you a Scot?".

But my English is very poor, I just pretend, though I used to have a very good ear and reproduce accents, in French or in English. But that is only for fun, I would never have trumped anyone.

My family upbringings forbade lying, stealing, making people lower, and that's what I transmitted to my sons. My parents made me an honest man. And it's not aout religion (oh, when I see what religions do...), it's just education, I think we don't need religion to be an honest person.
 

HorseloverFat

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NO, It's mine ! A mix between British/Irish/Scottish/Frrrench accent, and I learned English listening to Pete Seegher, the Doors, the Beatles, Leonard Cohen, etc. What a mess !

I remember when I was in Torkay (UK) and they asked me if I were from America, or in Maastricht where a principal from Cork told me I could be from Dublin, and a man in the railway café in Liverpool asking me "are you a Scot?".

But my English is very poor, I just pretend, though I used to have a very good ear and reproduce accents, in French or in English. But that is only for fun, I would never have trumped anyone.

My family upbringings forbade lying, stealing, making people lower, and that's what I transmitted to my sons. My parents made me an honest man. And it's not aout religion (oh, when I see what religions do...), it's just education, I think we don't need religion to be an honest person.
I understand, about your last portion ENTIRELY.

I was brought up in a 90's church cult...

And when I got to high school (public) there were so many things I didn't know.

Anything which could be used to argue against religion... simply was not taught..

I could fill MANY text boxes.. detailing my heartache and rage over such assaults on our collective unconscious.

🤓
 
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