LOL get ready to eat your words... never say never. Especially when talking about a clear speculative bubble of an asset with no intrinsic value whatsoever.

This is completely wrong. You didn't understand the analogy. You omitted Mozart entirely.


If what you are saying is true then it doesn't even matter anyway. You're really grasping at straws here. $20.43 and 5 days is still insanely far beyond anything reasonable. Cue you asking for a specific number for time and fee that is reasonable... I'll answer you now - faster than the time I have to wait for a credit card to process at a store, and a lower fee than the net profit the CC companies make per transaction.


Wrong, risk of fraudulent bitcoin transactions is higher. Both credit cards and bitcoin come with the risk of someone stealing your credentials and pretending to be you u- the difference being that you will most likely be reimbursed by the credit card company in their case. Plus, they are getting better and better at automatically detecting fraud. PLUS, people can submit fraudulent bitcoin transactions without your info... it will just get rejected. It will take longer for it to be rejected than for a credit card transaction to be successfully submitted.

Also in regards to your RBF point... none of the major bitcoin wallets implement RBF and the majority of people don't know what it is.


The point is that a "third party" blockchain or centralized, non-trustless blockchain is pointless because it doesn't bring the benefit of decentralization and it far underperforms its direct competitor - a traditional database.


Bitcoin does not have a book value. To answer your question, see my response to your other quote. It has to be better than credit cards and banks to be worth anything.


They could be pushing up the value of their shares in the private market. Investors exchange shares of private companies all the time. Either way, regardless of whether or not that is the reason, this is not an indicator that private blockchains are useful any more than Jamie Dimon's comments on bitcoin are an indicator that it is a fraud.


What you are saying here is that the work in creating a crypto is convincing other people to give it value. The only reason they would give it value is if they think that other people will give it a higher value. I don't consider crypto to be a Ponzi Scheme but I can see why a lot of people do.

I'm not saying it's easy to go out and create a coin and get value for it, but it is being done consistently.


The fact that people NEED USD to pay their taxes and make every day purchases gives it value. If I have a dollar, I know with certainty that it won't be worthless tomorrow because the government requires citizens to use it to pay their taxes and debts... not Zimbabwean dollars, US Dollars. Yes, the value will fluctuate, but it will still have some value. I'm not saying USD is a good investment - it's definitely not.

You don't need to have a numeric way to measure two things against each other to say one is greater than the other. You don't need quantitative data to back every statement you make in your life. I can say that Mozart was more talented at writing and performing music than Kirk Cousins is at playing quarterback in the NFL and there is no way to measure this, but everyone would agree that it is true. It's not an unreasonable statement to make at all.


You really don't believe me? Transactions were costing insane amounts of money in November/December last year and taking weeks to process. They were stuck sitting in mem pools forever. Here is the ID, although I don't think there is any way you can see when I submitted it: 7345a9bc63c1532082414d1849ff908a18f4dbdc0859959197fa022c66a2dd3e


I never claimed they were settled, that is irrelevant. It just has to be confirmed for a credit card transaction... you can't just accept that a bitcoin transaction will be all set when it enters the mem pool... in the case of bitcoin, you NEED to wait for it to settle.

If you build a payment system on top of bitcoin then you are taking something decentralized and improving it by centralizing it. Coinbase can do instant transfers because they control all of the bitcoin and know all of their private keys are valid. You can't transfer into or out of Coinbase instantly. If you want all bitcoin payments to be controlled by a sytem like Coinbase then why even use bitcoin at all? What is the benefit of that over credit cards?

There is always a tradeoff between decentralization/trustlessness and speed/scalability. Nobody is SOLVING the pitfalls of crypto without sacrificing decentralization and trustlessness.


Your understanding of the purpose of bitcoin's creation is vague so allow me to clarify for you - it was created to replace fiat. I would make an argument here in support of this but honestly it doesn't really matter at this point.

The difference between bitcoin and mcdonalds is that mcdonalds has a book value. They have stores, inventory, etc. They also have sales, and earnings... income... bitcoin has none of that. It has no intrinsic value, which is why it cannot exist in this limbo state you described forever.


No, you are saying that Swift and others investing in private non-trustless blockchains means they have value. What about the dozens of important figures who have claimed that bitcoin is worthless? Just because somebody or some organization invests in something or says something doesn't mean they are right. That was the point of my SNAP example. Look at all the smart people who invested in Bear Stearns in 2007.

Your argument relies on others' opinions and is therefore weak. If you want to argue about the merits of blockchain as a distributed database versus, say, an actual distributed database, then I'm happy to have that conversation. I work with software and databases so I would be happy to help you understand why it is so much less efficient than something like Cassandra or even regular SQL databases.


This was a response to your argument that companies would not be looking into blockchain tech if it didn't have some large value it could bring.


Creating a new crypto and automatically assigning it value is exactly what is happening every day! Look at all the IPOs everywhere. This is literally what bitcoin is... creating value out of nothing. If it worked for bitcoin, eth, bch, ltc, iota, xrp, doge, etc... why would we think this will stop?

USD has intrinsic value because every person and organization in the US is required by law to accept it as payment for debt. It is legally guaranteed value by the US government. I would argue that this is intrinsic value. This differs from bitcoin, which nobody is required to accept anywhere.

BTW I don't believe in bitcoin but I would NEVER short it. It is too volatile. I'm not arguing that it will fall in the short term, I'm arguing that it will fall in the long term. I'm not going to pay margin interest until bitcoin dies, which could be several years or more. However, if it were available I would happily buy PUT options expiring in like, 5 years or so... that way risk is limited, as opposed to short selling where risk is unlimited.

What are you talking about? That concept doesn't make any sense. Decentralization is a concept, not an asset. It doesn't have a quantitative value. If that is really what you are asking then your question has no answer.

I had never even heard of Aliexpress but the problem you are describing is most likely not an issue with the credit card. Either way, your evidence is completely anecdotal. The last bitcoin transaction I made took 8 days and cost $40.

Speed/cost may be performing better for crypto recently, but 10 minutes is still WAY too slow. If I go into a store to buy something, I'm not going to wait 10 minutes for the payment to process. Furthermore, the costs for bitcoin transactions are higher than credit card costs to vendors for reasonably small transactions. This problem will only become larger as mining becomes more difficult and fees rise. For bitcoin to be worth anything, it needs to be able to scale to thousands of times its current size, and it is running into major hurdles way before even coming remotely close to that point.


Your argument is that private blockchains must be valuable otherwise people wouldn't be spending money and looking into it. That argument is horribly flawed. Go read the last few Snapchat earnings reports and tell me that Snapchat Spectacles are valuable. They spent a ton of money on it and then gave up when it fell flat on its face.

One reason I can give you for many companies to be looking into blockchain is that simply saying the word "blockchain" in public will cause a company's stock price to go flying to stupidly high levels. Look at Long Island Blockchain, formerly Long Island Iced Tea. They are an iced tea distributer based on long island and their business has NOTHING to do with blockchain. They announced that they would look into blockchain technology and changed their name, and all of a sudden their stock price surges to wildly irrational levels.

And just to add, the bottom line really is that more and more crypto can be created infinitely, and none of them ever have any intrinsic value (yes, the USD DOES have intrinsic value). The crypto space is infinitely inflationary for this reason, and IMO will eventually fail. It is only getting so much attention because it is new and people made a lot of money. This is not anything remotely like the internet.

It means that the only "pro" of crypto over, for example, Visa or Mastercard or Venmo or any other means of transferring money/value is the fact that it is decentralized. You don't have to trust anyone, whereas with Venmo, you're giving a company control of your funds. The cost of crypto vs these systems is that it is WAYYYY slower, not scalable, more expensive in many cases, and requires the use of a massive network that consumes stupid amounts of energy even when it is less than 1% of the size it would need to achieve the dream of replacing fiat currency. It's just not worth it.


Actually it is right and you pretty much just admitted it. A centralized and non-trustless blockchain like the one you are describing is completely pointless. You are better off using a database, which would be WAY faster and WAY fewer computational resources.


Cryptocurrencies are more overhyped than blockchain technology itself. The two ideas are commonly viewed as if they aren't coupled together even though they are. I'm not saying it makes sense.

I could not agree with this author more. Blockchain technology itself is overhyped. The benefit of decentralization is not nearly large enough to outweigh the massive costs. Furthermore, blockchain technology necessarily requires cryptocurrency, which is something people seem to overlook or not understand. Without some kind of digital token, there is no way to incentivize miners. Betting on blockchain is the same as betting on crypto, and crypto is even more overhyped than blockchain technology itself.

I don't think there will be a lot of signs to tell you when a dip is coming. It might be caused by news, which can be random, or it might just happen randomly because the pool of new bitcoin investors is drying up. If you are going to make a bitcoin trade, you should base it on fundamentals and make it a long term trade.

"Guys, day trading works, trust me! I'm a multi millionaire and I consistently outperform the market by day trading! I can't prove it but you should all be impressed!"

Okay buddy.

First of all you talk about capitalizing on short term volatility like it is easy to do, and like people are capable of doing it consistently. When you buy an asset with the intent of trading it intra-day, how do you know it is going to go up and not down? You can lose money as easily as you gain it. There is no way to accurately predict price movements on this small of a scale CONSISTENTLY. Day traders will lose just as often as they win over a long enough period of time, and because of fees, this will end up putting them on the losing side overall.

Also, profit earned is NOT all that counts. If I am day trading in the stock market and earning 8% ROI in a year, but the S&P500 returns 12%, all of my work figuring out what to sell and buy and when, was just a waste because I could make more profit by just holding an index fund. Same with bitcoin - if you day traded bitcoin in 2017 and made a 200% return, you have failed because you would have made more money by just holding bitcoin. All of that day trading not only failed to help you make money, but it resulted in a massive amount of wasted time and wasted potential profit.

And regarding your comment about not always being right about future growth... it's true that you won't always be right, but you can be right the majority of the time. You can certainly be right MUCH more often than day traders. If you put in the time/effort/research for long term investing, you can get to a point where the only time you are wrong about the long term prospects of a company is pretty much when some unpredictable catastrophe happens, or some information is being deliberately kept hidden.


Day trading by definition does not involve looking at the long term value of an asset, because the long term value has zero impact on the price within a given day. Take Snapchat for example, which had some great days after its IPO, spiking from $17 to $27 per share, even though long term it is a garbage company.

Rofl show some proof. This is 100% a lie. You are claiming that for every dollar you invested in 2013, you now have $10,000. I don't think you understand the claim you just made. It's like saying you can run 100 meters in half the time of Usain Bolt. It's laughable.

You are incredibly wrong here and very misguided. Day trading absolutely is gambling. It is gambling because it is luck based and not based on any type of valid research or methodology. Strategies for trading assets intra-day by looking at charts do not lead to consistently outperforming the market over the long term, and there are tons of studies and data out there that show this. Almost no day traders consistently beat the market in which they are trading as a whole.

Other trading strategies are often not gambling. Long term investing is the furthest thing from gambling that you can do. Buying an asset because you see value in it and believe it will appreciate over time is the most consistent way to make money. Even trading over 1-4 month periods or so (which is most of what I do) is far from gambling because it is not luck-based but rather based on understanding the fundamentals of the asset and the market in which it is traded.


What statistic are you talking about that suggests the best trading strategy would be capitalizing on both short term volatility and long term growth? It sounds like you are just saying the best way to trade is sell at the top of every peak and buy at the bottom of every dip. This is not realistic.

You're overall understanding of day trading (which is 100% gambling) is very flawed. Sure there is short term volatility that comes with opportunity to make money, but nobody has the information to consistently profit off of that volatility. It is essentially random noise in a larger, less random pattern.

People who expect to see Bitcoin soar the way it has in the past are going to be disappointed. The crypto market is fundamentally different now. Bitcoin is mainstream and the number of new potential buyers has decreased dramatically. Furthermore, there is tons of competition among alt coins. It is now just as easy for anyone to buy any of the crypto offered on Coinbase, so why would they choose Bitcoin given its well-known technical issues?

I won't be surprised if bitcoin continues up for a little bit, but the days of 10x returns are over. There have never been fewer reasons to buy bitcoin than now.

This price looks good right now, obviously, but you have to be careful. It is likely that in a year or so, the price will be far below $6k due to Bitcoin's major fundamental problems and competition among alt coins, not to mention government crackdowns.

Very interesting post. I did not know about a lot of the aspects of the LN that you have mentioned here, and I think that is probably the case for many of the others here on this forum. It seems like the LN solves some problems while creating others.

The biggest mistake that day traders make (especially crypto day traders) is believing that they have an edge over everyone else because of the charts they look at. The biggest mistake is not believing that day trading is 100% gambling, because that is exactly what it is. The only way to consistently make money over the long term is to invest based on value and fundamentals.

IMO this is a selling opportunity. If you really feel that you want to be involved in crypto then I would research alt coins and create a diverse portfolio, putting either nothing into bitcoin at all or at most, a very small, speculative position. I don't see why bitcoin warrants the highest market cap in crypto when it has technical shortcomings that have been solved by many other cryptocurrencies. First to market does not mean ultimately coming out on top, as has been proven over and over again.

People making these predictions are just being logical. They are looking at the fundamentals of bitcoin and seeing major problems. They are looking at the chart and seeing a CLEAR picture of a bubble that has burst and is currently collapsing. If you start a "campaign" to get people to make poor and irrational financial decisions such as investing in bitcoin, then you are most likely going to cause harm to anyone who listens to you.

1. Bitcoin can't scale, to the point that it will never be usable as a currency
2. Bitcoin is too unstable and volatile to be a store of value
3. There is tons of serious competition among alt coins, which did not exist in the past
4. Governments are cracking down on crypto

Why on earth would you look at these facts and still think bitcoin is a good buy? Nobody would think that, except for someone who already owns bitcoin and has likely lost a lot of money over the past month or so.

You could not be more wrong or delusional. There are other, far superior cryptocurrencies out there if you really feel like crypto is the future (which I strongly disagree with). Bitcoin and the crypto space is fundamentally WAY different than it was in 2013, or even than it was in 2016/early 2017. There is competition among alt coins that did not exist in any significant capacity previously, and bitcoin's show-stopping scalability problems have come to light. Why on earth is bitcoin worth anything at all when there are far better options out there?

Yes please, let's revisit this in 2020.

People talk about not losing money until you sell, but it's a double edged sword. That same logic implies that you haven't gained any money until you liquidate your position either. Honestly the best way to look at it is that when the price goes up, you make money... and when the price goes down, you lose money. Your gains/losses can change constantly, but selling will cause that to stop, effectively locking in whatever gains or losses you have.

Just because you plan to wait a long time before selling bitcoin doesn't mean you have not lost money over the past month or so. Everyone who owns bitcoin has been losing money recently.

That's what the Patriots said and look what happened to them