Posted on 03/08/2024 7:37:13 AM PST by Enlightened1
BREAKING: #Bitcoin reaches new all-time high of $69,420
https://twitter.com/WatcherGuru/status/1766123788553404744
Crypto Prices
I am sure you have heard of the term Fractional Reserve Banking?
That’s our current Central Bank model that purchases most of our Treasury Bonds to keep things going. They purchase T-bonds by printing money out of thin air.
They print more dollars that in turn creates more inflation. So over time fiats purchasing power go down. For instance, the USD purchasing power has gone down 99% since the creation of the current Central Bank.
Yes there are only 21 million Bitcoins. When there is more demand for Bitcoin than supply. Bitcoin fractionalizes within the existing coins infinity. Thus, people have a fraction of a coin.
For instance, Bitcoin is $68,000. You don’t have to pay $68,000 to buy Bitcoin. You can buy $5 of a fraction of a Bitcoin. Sort of like buying a fraction of gold.
Holding the coins or even a fraction of Bitcoin becomes more valuable over time because there are less of them than gold.
It encourages saving. Even having .10 of a Bitcoin will become very valuable over time.
Bitcoin is a good hedge over inflation. Better than gold or silver.
Ah, so they add a bit after the decimal, as it were.
Prime number 2 is 10 in binary becomes 10.0 and 10.1
Prime number 3 is 11 in binary becomes 11.0 and 11.1
When it becomes necessary to double again you get two bits after the decimal.
There’s plenty of evidence that shows that the bitcoin ecosystem is largely fullproof when it comes to the weaknesses of fiat currency.
If it were faith, bitcoin detractors would be able to come up with coherent criticisms.
But they can’t.
All they can do is spout the same canards that have been repeated endlessly over the last seven or eight years, like “Greater Fool”, “Tulips”, “no inherent value”, and “Ponzi”.
Give me one example of a bitcoin criticism that doesn’t involve cutting and pasting catchphrases from someone else. What’s a criticism that you can come up with on your own?
All true, except for one thing: your first sentence. What backs it?
Bitcoin is a scarce digital commodity. It is not a backed-token like Stablecoins or commodity-backed coins. Any cryptocurrency that is backed by a real world commodity or currency inserts counterparty risk into the network, since you need to rely on someone to store and facilitate the exchange of said commodity.
A token backed by a currency exposes the token to the risk of the issuing bank and the government or central bank behind it.
There is no bitcoin issuer, and one not need any government permission or other means other than the Bitcoin network itself to facilitate trading of BTC.
The security of the Bitcoin network is backed by the laws of mathematics.
If you need a central bank or kleptocratic government to back your assets, then Bitcoin is not for you. Not everyone wants true financial sovereignty.
Yeah not sure what you are ding there?
Just know $5 of Bitcoin, currently valued at $68,549.79, is 0.00005791 of 1 Bitcoin
The above is your fraction of a Bitcoin.
It’s all done in binary though. Say there are 4 bitcoins.
2 = 010 in binary
3 = 011 in binary
5 = 101 in binary
7 = 111 in binary
First three bits would indicate the coin number then the next bits would indicate the fraction.
0100 would be half of the first bitcoin
0101 would be the other half.
0110 would be half of the second bitcoin
0111 would be the other half
Remaining halves:
1010, 1011, 1110, 1111
If necessary to split again add more bits.
What is it good for, other than the value of people place on it because of faith?
You can’t eat it. You can’t build something out of it. You can’t play with it. You can’t use it to get somewhere. It only has value because people give it value in their mind. Just like tulips.
Bitcoin allows anyone to store value in a decentralized global network. It also allows anyone, at any time, without any license or permission, to send value almost instantly across the globe to anyone else.
That in and of itself will always be valuable, and right now that value has a market cap of $1.3 trillion.
At its base utility, Bitcoin has no issuer, no counterpart risk, or intermediary, so it’s a public and secure network available to all and not controllable by any central government.
Its scarcity means that anyone in the world can own a small (or large) part of the network through fungible BTC tokens. That supply of tokens will never change, and as the demand for permissionless and borderless payments increases, so will the value of each token.
Bitcoin is a global payments network based on a digital asset that can store value with no hardware or cost is valuable, which is why it’s considered a digital commodity.
The fact that you glean no value from it is irrelevant.
Bitcoin is now the scaffolding for exchange traded funds from the world’s largest financial institutions, is considered legal tender by a small, yet growing number of nations, and is an accepted form of payment by tens of thousands of merchants in the US alone.
Your dismissal of Bitcoin seems to be based on the tautology that “as soon as people don’t value it, it loses value.” But that isn’t an argument.
An argument would be some specific piece of evidence that at some specific, future time frame or epoch, mankind will not value Bitcoin, or borderless payments, or digital assets. This is true for any commodity if there’s a sufficient replacement or a halt to the need for the utility it provides.
But there is no evidence of any such thing.
Bitcoin allows anyone to store value in a decentralized global network. It also allows anyone, at any time, without any license or permission, to send value almost instantly across the globe to anyone else.
It’s possible that the value of crypto is based on a paradigm I don’t fully understand yet. I give you that. But that is because, before Crypto, all forms of wealth were based on something phisical - of intrinsic value - until Nexon severed the tie between the dollar and gold. And then we had fiat currency, that at least was based on countries who, with military and legal power, had incentive to preserve their value - until it all will collapse eventually.
The problem is that from my perspective I still see Crypto as weaker than Fiat, which was the weakest form of currency until Crypto came along. I just have a hard time getting over that. Add to that the belief that scarcity is also simply contrived. i.e. old slot cars are also scarce. But they are also not in demand. so scarcity only matters when something is in demand. And with something where its only value is as an investment, and then only based on faith in its value, that demand could dry up quite literally in a single day - or hour. Then scarcity would be irrelevant. After all, if there are only 11 of a particular widget, but only 10 people actually want one, it’s not scarce.
Hahah! My wife bought some bit coin to do business overseas, and had $67 unspent out of $200 worth. Forgot about it. She’s up to $4500 as of two days ago..
If it goes to astronomical highs. we pay off any lingering debts. With $67 dollars!
The PRC, which is the largest political entity in the world, and oversees the largest country and the second largest economy on Earth already tried that. The Chicoms banned all financial institutions from facilitating bitcoin trading and from holding any bitcoin on their own. Bitcoin exchanges and platforms were banned and shut down nearly six years ago.
In 2021 the Chinese banned all bitcoin trading and mining.
It barely made a dent in Bitcoin. Most the mining facilities moved to Kazakhstan within a few months, and when political turmoil engulf Kazakstan, most mining moved to the US.
The bitcoin ecosystem can essentially be uprooted on a whim if needed and moved elsewhere. And on top of that, China is STILL the second largest bitcoin mining hub in the world, even with a totalitarian police state enforcing the national ban.
How competent do you think every other government will be in banning it? Not very is the correct answer.
A crackdown on bitcoin by the US government simply isn't likely, but if it were to happen, the most likely form would take is a 6102 attack, which was the Executive Order that FDR used to seize gold and ban it from private use.
But gold did not cease to be a useful store of value and commodity simply because the US banned it.
It outlasted FDR, as bitcoin will outlast any tyrant, and there are some very simple steps you can take to protect yourself if a 6102 attack were to come.
But a 6102 attack will happen BECAUSE of bitcoin's value, not in spite of it.
Add to that the belief that scarcity is also simply contrived.
Your second paragraph is just repeated the tautology of "valuable things are valuable until they're not valuable", and I don't find this to be a compelling reason to doubt bitcoin.
The scarcity isn't contrived, it's built right into the code itself and can't be changed.
Right now, it is the most valuable digital asset in the world because of its potential. It is 9th most valuable asset of any type, and will likely overtake silver this month. It will probably be in the top 3 by the end of the year, and overtaking gold will likely come in the next 5-10 years, maybe sooner.
The bitcoin network has the potential to have entire sub-chains built on top of it, including card payment and cross-border payment networks (Lightning was just the beginning). SWIFT handles something like $50 trillion in funds transfers annually. If an off chain bitcoin network could overtake just 1% of that, you would see bitcoin be the most valuable asset in the world by a factor of 10x and beyond.
Understanding it requires retiring old ways of thinking about fiat, assets, and wealth, and trying to pigeonhole it into a financial system that is outdated by hundreds of years (compared to what's possible) is why so many people claim to not understand it.
The concepts of bitcoin of easy to understand, and I could explain it to you in 10 minutes with a pencil and notepad and some back and forth.
It looks like we’re going to have to agree to disagree. I understand that you feel pretty strongly about this and you’re willing to put a lot of time into your argument. But for me it’s more something I’m just casually interested in and I’m just waiting for the day when I can say,”I told you so.”
But I could be wrong. After all, I’ve never played the stock market because I see that as gambling as well. So it just goes against my personality type and my sensibilities about risk. I actually hope for the sake of those that are really tied into it that I am wrong. Time will tell. I think it’s already lasted longer than tulips did, right?😁
Based on the price right now, you could buy 119,000 tulips. And those are the 60 gram tulips...not the crappy 40 gram ones you get at the gas station.
Thats up from 105,000 tulips last week.
16 years. If you study and follow the arguments, you’ll find that anti-bitcoin partisans have been lying. They always lie or mislead, either out of ignorance or loyalty to shiny rocks and paper, or because they’re trying to quell the market while they buy it up on their own.
All the worst type of horrible Deep State MMTs are against it too. When Gates, Munger, and Buffet are on one side, I don’t even need to know what the argument is; I’m son the other side, since I’m against the forces of evil.
My new tagline should be Bitcoin : 1 - Charley Munger: 0.
But digital assets and digital money are here, and they’re not really new. It just took decades to figure out how to do it, and another decade to mainstream it.
But pick your best bitcoin criticism and put it on a short time horizon, simply as a test. You’ll find that 100% of the time, the anti-bitcoin forces are proven wrong. This isn’t a prediction, but a verified fact based on historical track records.
Anti-bitcoiners are batting .000.
I don’t really follow the “anti-bitcoin partisans”. I just use my own common sense coupled with my understanding of the history of the creation of money and past boondogles.
I’m not “against” it, per se. I just can’t make it make sense, when coupled with my understanding of human nature and history. I have a friend that has been a HUGE proponent for a very long time. He’s never sold any, and I know he was into it at least 13 years ago. But if he’s never sold any, it means he is not yet reaping the benefits - in the same way that if you have ten million dollars worth of Microsoft stock, but have never sold any, you have not yet “realized” its value.
This isn't really how wealth is recognized, legally or philosophically.
If he's sitting on substantial bitcoin holdings (bitcoin being the most liquid asset available, above all precious metals and equities), why does he need to sell them to "reap benefits'?
Having tremendous liquid wealth available for a later date or retirement may have substantial effects on his daily life; how he saves, how he spends, how he borrows (perhaps he's offering up the bitcoin as collateral for loans), how his mind works when he goes to sleep, knowing his financial future is secure.
Dumping valuable assets into hyperinflationary paper trash and/or spending lavishly is not my idea of wealth or realizing value.
It has value only if you’re trying to get a loan against it - or when you cash it out.
If I have an ounce of gold, and it’s worth $2,000 an ounce. I’ve basically got $2000. But I don’t really have any money until I sell it. Until then, it’s potential value.
Same with bitcoin. Same with stocks. And really, same with any fiat money. Anything you hold as any sort of investment only has value when you liquidate it. And the value at that time might be a lot less than at the current time. Or more, of course.
This is simply untrue. I guess you’ve never run up against the AMT, or calculated your net worth.
The whole idea that the only value one has is whatever cash you have in your bank account is simply not the way anyone on Earth calculates value or wealth.
If government paper is how you measure your financial value or wealth, no one can stop you from thinking that way (nor do I desire to talk you out of it). But this is your own highly subjective methodology that no one in the world uses.
USD and other fiat currencies are objectively the worst way to calculate your wealth considering that cash is highly inflationary, probably into double digit percentage points if our treasury leaders were truthful. So, the value at that time might be a lot less than at the current time is actually guaranteed for cash, whereas just about every popular and reliable asset or commodity enjoys the OPPOSITE status.
If you think that USD in your bank account is a safe way to preserve value, all I can offer is a foreboding Good Luck.
I think we’re talking about two different things. I’m talking about the concept of someone saying the stock market tanked today and I lost $10,000. No, you didn’t lose a sense unless you sold today.
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