The new US government has crypto-bros at its core and there will be use of the US Treasury to set up a "Bitcoin Strategic Reserve" that will be a way for the crypto-bros to milk the US economy to bail themselves out of the market before it dies.
Bitcoins are the most useless "asset" that there has ever been. At least beanie babies had some entertainment value and tulips look pretty.
Bitcoins and all the other nonsense contribute nothing to the world's real economy, it's entirely a mechanism for washing or moving fiat currency from one place to another.
It is used extensively in Asia entirely for that purpose, paying for drugs and gambling transfers.
For the actual economy it is useless and the entire "market" is just barely regulated gambling and entertainment.
> Bitcoins are the most useless "asset" that there has ever been. At least beanie babies had some entertainment value and tulips look pretty.
Hilariously, some people won't realize that your comment is almost entirely copy-pasta from a decade ago when Bitcoin cost less than $500. Thanks for the laughs though. Good memories.
Oh gosh. You're actually one of those people. Well, it's a pleasure to meet you!
And since you feel Bitcoin is useless (I'm leaving the door wide open for a retort filled with cognitive dissonance), please send me 21BTC for which I'll pay you $1000 immediately? My address is:
Is that still true in 2024? Now that fees are up, settlement time is longer, governments can trace coins, and KYC controls are popping up at exchanges?
> That the market can stay irrational longer than people can stay solvent is also true.
It's a myth that markets are irrational. It's a joke repeated amongst traders but fundamentally, we all know that markets simply aggregate all available information and reflect it in a price. A free market as a whole has rationality as its equilibrium: it's always telling you something true about the world.
To call the market irrational is a more humble claim than intended by those who quote it to aver that only they are rational, that is, it says: "I can't figure out what the market knows that I don't."
It means, "Those who couldn't hear the music assumed that those who were dancing were insane."
It's hard to take seriously an argument that recycles the tired trifecta of tropes "tulips, beanie babies and drug dealers".
I don't know if bitcoin will eventually become a low level store of value, or if the red hats now running US government will use it to reduce the nation's indebtedness, or if it will gradually fade away as people lose interest, or if it will crash and burn over a weekend.
But I am quite certain that the current system of government currencies, sanctions, repression and surveillance is unsustainable in the long run. One look at the stupendously large debt that can never be repaid should make it obvious that the current state cannot continue forever.
Nobody knows how long the long run is, but the fiat system has been flashing signals of stress and potential fracture for at least twenty years. Maybe governments and central banks can keep papering over its fault lines for another decade. But when a thing cannot continue forever, at some point it will stop.
Is bitcoin the replacement for the base layer? Or is it at least a way to preserve some wealth, outside the increasingly rickety nation-state-fiat system? Some mainstream finance leaders who manage trillions and are far smarter and better connected that I am, seem to think so.
I don't know, and you don't know, but there's more than enough evidence that there's something real here. It can't be easily dismissed as just beanie babies, tulips and drug dealers.
States are getting more sophisticated at tracing crypto coins.
And getting anything useful from them does depend on states not regulating them into obsolescence or black markets, with all the baggage those markets entail.
As for pettiness, I'm not the one promoting dubious benefits, nor am I invested in any coins or their downfall. Just concerned the whole thing is making the world worse: more gambling, more corruption, more scams, more wasted energy, more pollution, etc.
Bitcoins are the most useless "asset" that there has ever been. At least beanie babies had some entertainment value and tulips look pretty.
Bitcoins and all the other nonsense contribute nothing to the world's real economy, it's entirely a mechanism for washing or moving fiat currency from one place to another.
It is used extensively in Asia entirely for that purpose, paying for drugs and gambling transfers.
For the actual economy it is useless and the entire "market" is just barely regulated gambling and entertainment.