I wonder if it's an age thing. I'm 20, I have quite little fear and I think most of my peers feel the same way. I'm planning to buy a Tesla the second they let me buy one with bitcoin and I 100% plan to daily drive autopilot on city streets when it's ready, I really can't picture any of my friends being like wtf turn that shit off.
Edit: Disregard, I thought it was self driving related not full robotaxi that shit is spooky. I'd do it but I'd let other ppl do it for a few months first.
Experience. Indirectly linked to age. When you have been driving for a number of years and have experienced how quickly and unexpectedly things can happen while driving, it's hard to completely put your life in the hands of an automated system.
I think it's more fundamental. I trust a computer more to react quickly to something unexpected than I trust myself to. Maybe I'm biased because I spend all day programming and poking at computers and almost none of it driving.
I'm in my early 30s, and yes I also trust a computer to react better than me in the situations it has been trained for. The problem is for situations outside of the the normal, which based on my experience I'd say is what causes most fatalities in road traffic accidents. The fact that these are closed systems doesn't inspire confidence either - I wonder whether regulations will change this later, to require third parties to evaluate the system.
If I were to buy a new car today, I'd for sure look for one that has some of the modern safety features like lane keeping and automatic emergency braking. Dynamic cruise control would be great for long journeys. But I wouldn't feel safe riding in a car with what Tesla calls 'autopilot' capabilities, or more complete self-driving like Waymo - although to be fair in a city due to lower speeds the risk of injury (to myself) is going to less than on a highway, so I'd actually say I'd feel safer in Waymo than a Tesla.
Dynamic/adaptive cruise control is a really nice safety feature which I use whenever I can. I guess the 'autopilot' capabilities is just another form of that, but I'd still be hesitant to be hands off and read a book.
Being behind the wheel of a car with "autopilot" is not quite the same as being stuck in the back seat of a self-driving car where you have no control over it at all.
I'd gladly drive a Tesla with autopilot, but wouldn't want to let it drive me while I lounge in the back seat.
I want to support businesses accepting BTC directly. Also, it's a good meme, buying a self driving car with magic internet money, it being a meme like that and sorta being a piece of the bit of history I care about is the only reason I feel like spending 50k+ on a car. I have an old ass car it works fine.
It's a question of trust. Tesla's software is proprietary and we don't know how well verified, either. Plus, it's AI driven. I regularly fill captchas wrong but I'd never get in a car that's had its training griefed.
What do you mean by "when it is ready" it sounds to me like you aren't ready to drive in a self driving car, and are part of that 86% I'm actually surprised that 14% think the auto cars are ready
> Another thing I wonder with bitcoin in particular is if everyone had bitcoin and no other currency, and something like COVID happened, what entity would provide liquidity in order to help those affected by a disaster?
What? It's not specific to the way you transact. Governments are providing liquidity, if the whole world used crypto they would do payouts the same way just in crypto. Perhaps I misunderstand the question.
Modern governments usually provide liquidity by simply printing money out of thin air and giving it to those who need it. This causes inflation potentially but is thought to be a fair trade for stimulus.
Perhaps parent meant useful with the caveat that "it also wont fuck up the climate, and assist in huge destruction and killing millions in the process of making me rich".
Which is so selfish of him. Why should the safety of billions matter over me becoming rich? /s
Me too. I'm looking into shorting it on Kraken but I am not quite sure how it would work because it would be delisted before it went to 0 possibly and I am not quite sure how that would work.
There is simply too much counter-party risk. If the wheels fall off the Tether bus, they're going to take Kraken down with it, and you just won't get paid. Plus you're going to have to post collateral for your short position, which simply opens you up to even more loss potential.
tr0lly seems to think the market is pricing in a 50% chance of a total systemic collapse on a 1 year time horizon by working backwards from the 2% per month contango on CME futures [1].
The argument there starts from bitcoin futures being worth more than bitcoin today. What's wrong with the simple explanation that people expect the price of bitcoin to rise?
This is actually covered in the write-up but the answer is arbitrage.
In a perfect world, I'd simply short-sell the future at a 2% premium over the spot price, then I'd buy a bitcoin on the open market. This pushes the price of Bitcoin up and the price of the future down. The gap closes to roughly zero, an I get 2% for my service.
The reason that people don't take the 20%/year arb is that they are taking arbs that pay more than 20%/year.
An additional reason, at some venues, is that the venue does not allow you to use 1 BTC to fully collateralize 1 short BTC future. At those venues, if you do this trade and the price of BTC goes up, you begin to pay interest to borrow dollars for your paper loss on the futures half of the trade.
Edit: for CME in particular, I don't know, but I sort of expect that you cannot post collateral in crypto.
If USDT implodes to $0 then you'll have nothing to pay back.
You can even deposit the USDC to, say, Yearn and cancel out your interest expense.
Of course, I do not expect USDT imploding anytime soon, so don't do this. Although it's often the preferred stablecoin to borrow because when it does implode, you will be lucky (assuming it goes under the peg).
Oh, this is perfect, I'm going to do this with 100k. Also, yeah it is shorting, but it's honestly less convoluted than how I have to do it on Kraken. + I get profits off staking.
Edit, did it with $500 as a test, I am arbitraging 0.5% as I took the tether I borrowed, turned it. into USDC and staked it. I am getting paid 0.5% to short Tether :O
But there is no lending/borrowing market or a decentralized exchange on Stellar. Besides, when you deposit USDC to Compound Finance you will earn interest plus COMP tokens that can cover your gas fees.
Anyways, there may be several competing options coming in the future, but Stellar is just not it.
All of the above exchange links that I've visited required account registration and login, which means that they are not decentralized. For the celsius, you have to download an app on your phone. Ewwww. Whatever. Claiming to be decentralized and then requiring signup is dishonest.
It looks like there is not not much liquidity. Also, the only type of exchange supported is "Limit Order", which is also cumbersome to use on a blockchain, and you would probably prefer Automated Market Maker (AMM) type exchanges once you experience them. (You can perform all the steps I've outlined in a single transaction for example)
Also, it looks like that all the assets on stellar are custodial. There are no non-custodial stablecoins for example.
> Claiming to be decentralized and then requiring signup is dishonest.
I find it hard to believe that you honestly don't understand the difference between an independently developed client and the decentralized exchange which it connects to.
> you would probably prefer Automated Market Maker (AMM)
See Kelp above.
> There are no non-custodial stablecoins
This subthread started with your recommendation of USDC, a custodial stablecoin...
…which, lest we forget, went live on Stellaräs decentralized exchange this month:
USDC was just an example, you can use non-custodial coins too. Looks like stellar only offers custodial.
Look, I get you. There is some degree of decentralization, although not fully decentralized. There's definitely a lot more smoke and mirrors there, especially when I need to register to these websites.
The other problem is that Stellars consensus protocol is not sufficiently decentralized.
Regular users may not care about that, which is fine. However, that's a crucial point for me.
> There is some degree of decentralization, although not fully decentralized.
Please stop spreading disinformation.
> There's definitely a lot more smoke and mirrors there, especially when I need to register to these websites.
Again: those are independently developed and managed web apps which provide a nice graphical user interface to Stellar's decentralized exchange.
You don't need to use them to access the exchange. If you do, the accounts you create with them are unrelated to the exchange; they are specific to those web apps, and serve obvious purposes like helping you keep track of your trades.
None of this is even remotely hard to understand for anyone who knows anything at all about the subject. That somebody who claims to be more than a regular user would fail to understand it is not credible.
Totally, just a minor quibble, they don't have audits, they have attestations. That's not the same thing, it's much less detailed. I'm not particularly worried about the existence of their backing assets, however, it's just worth noting.
I was referring to the Circle entity in the event of a wheels-come-off situation.
USDC is an example, it's not necessary that you use USDC, there are a few other currencies that can be used for collateral and swapped in to while you wait. Let's be clear: "Do not do this" means do not do this in whatever variation.
Why do you think Kraken would be in a position to pay you out if Tether goes under? Even the CME contract becomes sketchy when you’re talking about a meltdown at this scale—it’s priced off these exchanges. If they start experiencing edge case behaviour, prices could crash or multiply erratically.
If you want to play this, it would likely involve a more sophisticated bet on exposed public companies and/or credits, or a simple bet with a trusted counterparty.
Hence the 2% per month contango on a cash-settled futures contract which is practically unheard of.
In theory you should be able to arbitrage by purchasing a bitcoin and shorting the futures contract to collect that sweet 2% per month. However in a wheels-fall-off situation, the price at USDT-only and insolvent USD exchanges could approach infinity, and since your real-world broker won't take your BTC as collateral, they'll simply liquidate you.
Appears arbitrageurs are willing to leave 2% per month on the table to avoid being strung up in the event the wheels fall off.
> In theory you should be able to arbitrage by purchasing a bitcoin and shorting the futures contract to collect that sweet 2% per month
Variation margin. Shorting the future requires you put up cash. If the price goes up, you have to put up more cash. One could hedge away part of this by holding Bitcoin and borrowing against it. But those lending channels are costly and not presently reliable.
TL; DR That 27% spread [1] includes more than just systemic risk.
Not entirely, right, shorting the future requires you put up margin. Current maintenance margin requirement is about $100,000 per contract, which covers 5 BTC, notionally $258,000.
Margin interest at the institutional level is 0.75% per year, so you're free to collateralize your position with something other than cash or bitcoin. You could have 1 short /BTCG1, collateralized by a portfolio of other investments, and buy BTC to cover at an exchange somewhere.
Yeah it's not risk free, but it's certainly not 27% per annum.
For stocks I agree, but here tether isn't ever going to go much above $1, right? So the downside of shorting is just that it ties up a lot of capital, right?
Counter-party risk is the issue. The only places you might be able to short for real dollars will require you post up collateral for your short. Then once the wheels fall off they'll declare bankruptcy and keep your collateral.
'declare bankruptcy' is optimistic. More likely is that they disappear completely/fake their own death in a weird jurisdiction/get killed by gangsters/go to prison for child porn, etc.
That means you’ll still be paying interest for whatever period you’re holding the position, which really isn’t that bad depending on the rates. However, not to detract from the thread I would think other concerns like market irrationality and delisting still applies.
Not just at settlement, if one of the index exchanges goes insolvent and the price of BTC goes parabolic, it may push your short position past your brokers assigned personal risk tolerance for your account and they'll liquidate you. You'll be right, but broke.
I don't think FTX has any policy on this matter other than that they will liquidate you if you are sufficiently under-collateralized. A move in the price of an unrelated asset would not cause you to be under-collateralized.
I'm referring to a real SEC regulated broker like InteractiveBrokers which allows you to buy and sell /BTCG1 futures. The price of the /BTCG1 future is calculated based on a blended average of the spot price at a bunch of other exchanges (the "Bitcoin Reference Rate" or, humorously, BRR).
The current maintenance margin for a /BTCG1 contract is 40%. You're required to have enough margin to cover 40% of the notional value of the contract which is 5 BTC, roughly $100,000.
Let's say you only have $200,000 of margin. A parabolic move towards infinity in the BRR due to insolvency in some of the exchanges involved in the calculation may double or triple the price of BTC. Further, the high volatility may increase the margin requirements beyond 40% and up towards 100%. This means you're going to get a margin call, and you either post collateral or get rekked.
I highly recommend not doing this - I was shocked to see this article because I'm surprised its _still_ rolling - 2 or 3 years ago I was in your spot, and I would have wasted a ton of money and acquired a much darker view of the world.
Much like TSLA, it'll be 10% of its size eventually, but who knows when or why, its teflon until it isn't.
Because Amazon has 1.2 million employees, $386.1 billion yearly revenue, and $20 billion yearly net income. Tesla has yearly revenue of $31.5 billion and net income of $721 million. Presumably people think that Tesla is priced for explosive growth, but Amazon has also been on a growth tear that shows no sign of stopping, so the basic premise that Tesla at less than 1/10th the revenue and 1/20th the net income is worth half as much as Amazon seems fishy.
You wouldn't have wasted much money. At one crypto venue, this trade costs you less than 1% per year to keep on and ties up only 5% of your collateral (assuming you are 1x short and don't push the "pay higher fees for more leverage" button)
I was briefly short USDT on Kraken but their fees for that were terrible, like 25% per annum. I'm not sure if there is a more reasonable way of doing it.
I'd think mostly that you could make free too good and everyone just uses that. But if everyone is using ur app, then you have a userbase and you could start monetizing them.
That's a valid analogy but also on a much longer time frame. Bitcoin increased in value orders of magnitude quicker than the value of land in the US. If somebody who bought a house 5 years ago was selling it for 100 times today, you bet your ass people would be mad.
Do they have any greater claim to being mad though? It makes you see it more clearly but I do not think it makes it worse. Besides, for most people they just were not alive when it was possible to claim land and nobody left them any. You could have seen crypto you just didn't, in most cases. I think that makes people more mad but once again I do not think it makes it more unjust, just the opposite.
Edit: Disregard, I thought it was self driving related not full robotaxi that shit is spooky. I'd do it but I'd let other ppl do it for a few months first.