Posted on 02/26/2017 2:51:08 PM PST by blam
Bitcoin. I know you asked about tangible stuff, but there it is almost 1200, nipping at the heels of gold. The technical charts are crazy since it doesn’t have economic sentiment or some other stabilizer. But my own Bitcoins are doing well, only wish I could have bought more at the time.
I have lived up in the UP most of my life. I have talked to divers that claim that they have dived along the underwater cliffs in the big lake and have seen entire shelves of copper.
In the mines, back in the day, to find a mass of pure copper was a curse. It often took more to chip and break it apart to get it out of the mine than it was worth. They could not blast it apart, tried to use coal mining equipment, which would simply plug up, and found the only way to get it out was by hand. Matter of fact, the cost of mining up there is about twice what it costs to mine copper from ore.
BTW, one of the highest producing Gold mines in the USA was the Michigan mine near Ishpeming back in the day-1800s.
Large finds of silver were also mined. I logged on a large stretch of land that was owned by a silver company. I would bet that someday, some SOB company will renew the site for mining and use my GD ROADS I BUILT TO GET MY LOGS OUT! Man..what a chore logging that hole was. Either on rock cliffs 1500 feet high or up to your .... in mud in the valleys.
The decline in Copper prices has not stopped the scrappers from destroying vacant homes around here.
Every time Silver City closed a mine the economy of Farmington NM would crash. There were lots of steel fabrication and machine shops that did repair on mine equipment shipped in from Silver City.
As I revisited there back in 1986, there were caravans of people leaving the 4-Corners because the jobs had vanished.
Both steel fabrication shops I had worked for in the 1970s had also closed.
Metals and mining went through a monster bull run and then blew up something fierce about 6 yrs ago. The downturn has been very sharp and painful and decimated companies and even the entire area of emerging markets. We are now in a very sharp v shaped recovery for this segment.
I’m an RIA of 25 years. This is a dangerous space to play in. Never commit more than 2-6% of invested capital to stuff like this. For every one guy that makes money in exotics, there are 10-20 left holding the bag.
BITCOIN is pure BS.
If it’s meant to be a “currency” then it shouldn’t have the volatility of an “investment”.
Bitcoin claims to be a currency, but then acts like a thinly traded penny stock.
I cry foul...
You ever read any books by Gavin Menzies?
COCHISE COUNT next to NM has several more mines tha could still yeild lots of Copper.
No.
Mostly I read books by well-known archaeologists/anthropologists.
Every wind generator is full of copper.
With the Production Tax Credit, that industry is at full bore.
There is a ton of work ongoing around the country building/rebuilding our electrical grid.
Gavin Menzies wrote some books about N American History. I read his book 1431 and one other. After reading those books, I realized I’d been lied to my entire life about the History of the planet. It’s incredibly well sourced and an excellent read.
One of his books explains how folks from Europe had gotten into the great lakes, done mining in the area during the bronze age.
1431 chronicles a massive Chinese fleet that goes to Florence during the dark ages and brings all sorts of technological and agricultural information to Europe, and the premise is that is the thing that brought Europe out of the Dark Ages.
Fascinating read, probably as influential book in my life as I’ve ever read. Mind blower.
Other than a crypto failure, a convincing crypto or digital alternative, or the complete banning of Bitcoin there is little downside. The ECC crypto is fairly simple thus hard to find flaws, and the hashing which is more important for the chain is pretty solid SHA-2 (although SHA-1, there's no real relationship). The crypto alternatives have no compelling advantages, and digital alternatives are mainly extensions of banks which suffer from the centralization of authority.
That does sound somewhat familiar.
I've read Barry fell andGloria Farley
This I posted 15 years ago:
Meant to say SHA-1 is broken.
Close friend of mine was the Machine shop foreman at Kennecott Copper.
It of course was bought by Phelps Dodge.
Not everyone can work on Ukes
Look to Iron Ore pricing in China.
Basically copper is a stockpiling metal for the Chinese. If they are consuming more iron ore than the follow on is copper. The capacity of warehouses in Shanghai and London are increasing.
As China goes, so does copper. Central planners stockpile and liquidate, it’s all they know.
Could be a lead in for a slight recovery on the Mainland but they are having trouble with their current account and the impossible task of sterilizing the Yuan while manipulating interest rates. There’s a bunch of speculation mixed in so tread lightly.
Swing trading FCX has been better than working, for the last 6 months.
LOL, yeah....trust me...get your hands on some of the Menzies books. And in true freeper form, he’s universally loathed as an historical heretic!
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