Why This Is the Worst Crypto Winter Ever (bloomberg.com) 134
Bitcoin has fallen roughly 44% from its October peak, and while the drawdown isn't crypto's deepest ever on a percentage basis, Bloomberg's Odd Lots newsletter lays out a case that this is the industry's worst winter yet. The macro backdrop was supposed to favor Bitcoin: public confidence in the dollar is shaky, the Trump administration has been crypto-friendly, and fiat currencies are under perceived stress globally. Yet gold, not Bitcoin, has been the safe haven of choice.
The "we're so early" narrative is dead -- crypto ETFs exist, barriers to entry are zero, and the online community that once rallied holders through downturns has largely hollowed out. Institutional adoption arrived but hasn't lifted existing tokens like ETH or SOL; Wall Street cares about stablecoins and tokenization, not the coins themselves. AI is pulling both talent and miners toward data centers. Quantum computing advances threaten Bitcoin's encryption. And MicroStrategy and other Bitcoin treasury companies, once steady buyers during the bull run, are now large holders who may eventually become forced sellers.
The "we're so early" narrative is dead -- crypto ETFs exist, barriers to entry are zero, and the online community that once rallied holders through downturns has largely hollowed out. Institutional adoption arrived but hasn't lifted existing tokens like ETH or SOL; Wall Street cares about stablecoins and tokenization, not the coins themselves. AI is pulling both talent and miners toward data centers. Quantum computing advances threaten Bitcoin's encryption. And MicroStrategy and other Bitcoin treasury companies, once steady buyers during the bull run, are now large holders who may eventually become forced sellers.
Grifters moved on (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Grifters moved on (Score:5, Insightful)
It isn't just RAM. Speculation is now in overdrive in just about all markets. Pick one.....precious metals, betting on whether the Squeaker of the House has no balls (spoiler: he doesn't), the next election for dog catcher, etc. Too many people want quick riches without working for them. They see someone getting rewarded this way, so they figure they can do it too. See casinos as to why this not a life plan.
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But the "demand" for "AI" is entirely speculative and not even real, it is more of "build it and they will come, especially if we also corner the hardware market" kind of strategy. Except that "they will come" part isn't really happening.
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But the "demand" for "AI" is entirely speculative and not even real, it is more of "build it and they will come, especially if we also corner the hardware market" kind of strategy. Except that "they will come" part isn't really happening.
If AI companies facilitate pr0n like the early internet, "they will come".
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It isn't just RAM. Speculation is now in overdrive in just about all markets. Pick one.....precious metals, betting on whether the Squeaker of the House has no balls (spoiler: he doesn't), the next election for dog catcher, etc. Too many people want quick riches without working for them. They see someone getting rewarded this way, so they figure they can do it too. See casinos as to why this not a life plan.
You should be a +5 insightful.
And crypto is just one of the symptoms. People see the utterly tiny number of people at the very top and think that is somehow normal. That they will end up there. That it is just one move away.
Coupled with pop culture mentality, it really messes people up.
Crypto is a bit like gold. And people seem to not get that the buildup the peaks is just pecuniary input, at some point the selloff begins, and those controlling the selloff profit immensely at the start of the selloff.
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Silver is down pretty significantly, Gold is essentially flat, the stock market is a touch down over the same time period... Of course the USD in general is down a tad compared to Euro for the time period.
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Silver is down pretty significantly, Gold is essentially flat
What? The price of gold is up like 50% over the past 6 months. The price of silver has doubled (and peaked much higher than that). The dollar weakening contributes some to that if you're measuring in USD terms, but it hasn't weakened by that much.
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Whoops, the site I was using neglected to update the percentage when I changed the interval... So it said '6 months, down 0.29%' for silver but it meant for the day despite selecting for the 6 months... Guess I should verify a UI actually works like I would have expected rather than assuming asking for 6 months updates all the elements on the page...
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It is not just prices that are rising.
What actually is happening is that the dollar is falling like a stone since a year.
On top of that oil/gas (energy in general) is rising. And those are in a huge deal paid in dollar.
Simple math, dollar drops 10%, oil rises 10%, this makes 20% in total.
The price rise in energy affects the whole supply chain. So it adds on every step.
And: energy suddenly got scarce because of AI and a stronger northern winter ... so you have three effects hitting on the same nail.
So, the o
Demand for money laundering dropped too (Score:2, Insightful)
This means a lot less effort is being put into money laundering
Re: Demand for money laundering dropped too (Score:3)
False. They are not convicted criminals. Someone who committed a crime still committed it whether they have gone to court about it or not. A murder doesn't become not a murder just because the murderer isn't brought to justice.
Re: Demand for money laundering dropped too (Score:2)
My opinion is that we should have signs which make sense even if you don't read the local language, especially since our country has no official language, but also like real countries do.
Re: Demand for money laundering dropped too (Score:2)
Are we talking about the same democratic party that always votes for more bombs to be dropped on children? The same one that helped create the DHS and kept voting to expand funding for ICE? Fuck them and you.
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So, tell us you have never listened to any news other than Faux Noise and truth social.
Btw, the so-called Somali fraud? It was run by a WHITE woman, American citizen, and about 100 people were involved.
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To call someone a murderer. you have to have proof he has murdered someone.
No, to call someone a murderer, I must believe he has murdered someone.
He could sue me for slander of course, but then we'd get into discovery.
Kind of like how chief pedo hasn't sued anyone for slander or libel for saying he's a child rapist.
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Still overvalued (Score:5, Insightful)
For those, like me, who are predicting The Meltdown, this is not it, it is just a bull trap.
Previously it was overvalued by 100%, it is still overvalued by 100%.
Re:Still overvalued (Score:5, Insightful)
Crypto culture is dying. It wasn't much of a culture to begin with, just a bunch of morons who were pumping thin air, but they were excited - they had dreams! They all hated wallstreet and institutions, which excluded them, or so they felt. They were going to show the world! Well, the world was impressed with the amount of money they poured into bitcon and their old enemies from the institiutions showed up and began to take over - and the whole thing became massively awash with husksters and lies and trainwrecks to the point that its synonomous with a scam now.
But the true belivers are going to hang on for the rest of their lives pumping crypto. The pumps may get smaller and smaller and the bags they hold may get heavier and heavier, but I don't think they'll give up until they're in the grave and their grandchildren will be wondering why they inhereted a quadrillion snotcoins. So I don't see a 100% destruction of bitcoin for at least a few decades.
Re:Still overvalued (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Still overvalued (Score:5, Insightful)
Scamming is so baked into crypto culture that crypto fans commonly blame the victims for being dumb enough to get caught up in a scam or having their wallet stolen, rather than blaming the criminal or organized the scam. The notion of scam protection (a key part of current financial systems, from credit card fraud rollbacks to bank account insurance) is entirely alien in the crypto world.
UNLESS:
The little guy in the crypto world can get scammed endlessly and it's their fault. But the whales, it's different rules for them. Take The DAO. When a bug led to them getting ripped off, they literally forked the ETH blockchain to make them whole again. Nobody will ever fork the blockchain for you, but they'll do it for the whales.
It's the existing economics dynamics, yet so vastly works. And it's a dystopian version of democracy as well - no longer "one person, one vote", but open oligarchy, where the more you own, the more voting power you have. Linearly, expressly, and proudly.
Re:Still overvalued (Score:4, Insightful)
Another thing is just the massive amount of Dunning-Kruger economics at their core. For example, bragging about how it's deflationary. You don't want a deflationary currency. Deflation, or even a lack of inflation, are economically harmful; it crushes your economy, as people don't want to spend. Economies are maximized by small, predictable, positive inflation. Too much or too little, and fluctuations in it, are harmful . Crypto people don't care about the fluctuations, and celebrate deflation.
Economies are also inherently unstable. You see this all the way back in even Roman times (there are cases where some minor trigger leads to some massive crash that ultimately had to be solved by the emperor stepping in and bailing out the economy). The economy moves so much faster nowadays (both goods and payments), and is thus inherently far less stable. It takes external stabilization which - while imperfect - still helps immensely vs. no stabilization at all. Yet the concept of anything like federal monetary policy enrages crypto people.
It's the worst way you could possibly run an economy, it's pure Dunning-Kruger economics, and yet these people want to run everything.
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Inflation of products happens hand-in-hand with inflation of wages.
What's not linked to inflation? DEBT. Which "the proletariat" drowns in. Inflation weakens debt.
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Also, crypto skeptics commonly blame victims for being dumb enough to get caught up in a scam or having their wallet stolen.
And I don't entirely blame them. Crypto was deliberately created to circumvent government regulations that protect traditional investors. This made it highly attractive for those who...want to avoid government regulations. You know, like scammers.
There are truly innocent people who get scammed, such as the elderly. But for the most part, crypto "investors" were all about unrealistic ga
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The Ponzi Scheme is dying? (Score:2)
hmm.....
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Might as well invest in tulips (Score:5, Insightful)
Crypto is useless. Do I really need to remind anyone that crypto is useless?
There is no specific need for bitcoin in the world, it's a solution looking for a problem.
If I had a bitcoin, I couldn't do anything with it other than sit on it and pray that it's worth more some day, but still, in order to derive concrete utility from it I would have to first get rid of it and convert to real money instead.
It's a very formidable waste of resources, akin to growing tulips instead of something useful.
You can't eat tulips. Well even with tulips they might be edible but you could probably grow a lot of potatoes for all the work you dedicate into cultivating a rare tulip.
Re:Might as well invest in tulips (Score:5, Insightful)
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Exactly. But many people seem to have an education so incredibly bad these days that they do not know or understand that basic fact.
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Yup, sure. But... just to play devil's advocate for a bit... this has been your position since years ago when BTC was at $1, right? So WHY THE FUCK should anyone listen to you?
Re:Might as well invest in tulips (Score:4, Insightful)
YOUR position has been that a tulip is just a flower but I was able to buy a fine house with 1 tulip bulb in 1636. So WHY THE FUCK should anyone listen to you?
Re:Might as well invest in tulips (Score:5, Insightful)
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In practice, that makes it useful for a lot of things, including payments that might get sanctioned like oil from Iran [fortune.com], or outright scams like ransomware (no citation needed since everyone here is aware of that).
And in the last few months, coinciding roughly with the drop in virtual currency prices (i
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Yeah, sanctions busting, online crime, black market sales, etc are the use case of cryptocurrency as a currency, rather than just as a collectible.
IMHO, one of the best-argued cases [wired.com] for Satoshi Nakamoto is Paul Le Roux [wikipedia.org] (a talented cryptography coder and an international crime lord), specifically to make it easier to accept payments and move money around in his criminal empire) (and the reason that Satoshi never spent his Bitcoin is that Le Roux was arrested and his computers seized)
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Lol, Wright should be near the absolute bottom of Satoshi candidates [wikipedia.org].
Re:Might as well invest in tulips (Score:5, Insightful)
Crypto is NOT useless, it is a currency where anyone can pay anyone,
A currency that fluctuates against FIAT currencies as much as crypto does at the speed it does is not useful as a method of payment which is why no legitimate companies or people with a functioning brain accept it as payment. Can I pay my rent with it? No. Can I buy my gas with it? No. Can I buy my grocery shopping with it? No. The only places it's accepted as payment for goods or services is for dodgy illegal stuff like drugs and kiddy porn on the dark web.
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Re: Might as well invest in tulips (Score:2)
BTC is statistically used only for speculation and crimes
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No it is useless, at least if we are talking Bitcoin specifically.
Bitcoin specifically fails at everything it set out to do, other then perhaps resist political pressure to increase supply. It is to easy for a small number of actors to exert various types of control over the change, even just simple gatekeeping. It is far to slow and costly to do settlements so its right back to middlemen and batching transactions, complete with the usual financial games like float management etc, entities like exchanges
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No it is useless, at least if we are talking Bitcoin specifically.
One real sign that you are right about this is that the actual insiders chose to create a separate Trumpcoin, fully separate from Bitcoin when they wanted to use crypto for serious fraud. That is not a vote of confidence from people who actually have access to US government internal information.
Re: Might as well invest in tulips (Score:3)
It's not about confidence or lack thereof in shitcoin. It's about controlling the coin making it easier to do more fraud.
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Crypto is useful. It can get around international currency transfer limits, facilitate transactions into and out of sanctioned countries and ay for things that normally can't be legally traded. Essentially its use is to facilitate some sort of illegal transaction unable to be completed through the normal banking system. For this to be useful it simply has to have some value and be stable enough too not hugely change value while those transfer occur.
My theory on why China has had a significant crypto mining
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Crypto is useful. It can get around international currency transfer limits
It isn't useful for those because of how wild and how fast the swings can be. It had a 15% drop over 10hrs yesterday between 14:40 on Thursday and 00:15 Friday morning and it's still down 5% over the price yesterday. That's not useful as a currency.
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It isn't useful for those because of how wild and how fast the swings can be. It had a 15% drop over 10hrs yesterday between 14:40 on Thursday and 00:15 Friday morning and it's still down 5% over the price yesterday.
For a currency transfer even that rate of variability is not a problem. You can simply divide your currency transfer into tiny segments and immediately (no more than minutes) convert to and from the cryptocurrency.
That doesn't make sense, though, with Bitcoin because transaction costs are so high. Crypto can only have a chance of success once Bitcoin burns.
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Unlike fiat money, Bitcoin can not be debased by monetary inflation (printing money). Unlike your bank account, it can not be blocked or frozen. Unlike all other forms of payments, a Bitcoin payment does not depend on any third party to settle.
Bitcoin is not an investment, it is a money with properties that may not seem so relevant
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The primary use of Bitcoin is to have a money that no one can mess with. Unlike your bank account, it can not be blocked or frozen.
ROFLMAO. UK law enforcement in 2018 seized 61,000 BTC worth $5Bn [bbc.co.uk]. 5 months ago the US government seized 127,721 BTC worth more than $14bn (£10.5bn) [bbc.co.uk].
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Usually this happens because they don't have their own wallet, but use a service. If you use your own wallet, short of physically restraining you, they can't do squat.
Re: Might as well invest in tulips (Score:2)
Yes and governments historically famously cannot physically detain you. It never happens!
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I gave those bitches some pretexts. Bitches love pretexts.
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Bitcoin is not an investment, it is a money with properties that may not seem so relevant now, but could become so when the currency of your country collapses due to government meddling.
Exactly, Bitcoin is completely immune to major one-day drops in value.
What's that? It did what? Oh.
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Yes, but that's not beceause of *government* meddling. Well, not government meddling in the one specific way that crypto types believe governments meddle.
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If you are not in the US this *might* be a relevant consideration, if you are in the US and are not prepared like bug out bag ready headed strait for the airport have citizenship else were you can go the instant things start to get interesting, this is also irrelevant.
An actual dollar crisis, will make you bitcoin nearly useless here. It won't be a case of you can't buy this or that because nobody wants your dollars if only you had some more trust worthy bitcoin. It will be you can't buy this or that becaus
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Some tulips have edible petals. Not something you'd want to make a meal out of, but chefs will add them to salads and the like.
(I suspect there's still some of the toxic alkaloids in them, just not enough to be problematic)
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I couldn't do anything with it other than sit on it and pray that it's worth more some day, but still, in order to derive concrete utility from it I would have to first get rid of it and convert to real money instead.
According to your logic, all stock markets are equally as useless.
Seems we've been deluded for quite some time. Like a fucking century before shitcoin came along.
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According to your logic, all stock markets are equally as useless.
Not all. Some stocks still pay dividends.
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Crypto made the rich even richer. It's all a grift. Here's a detailed breakdown. https://archive.ph/NDMbH [archive.ph]
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I know a few people who actually did make *some* good money with bitcoin - they were geeks who had actually mined it early in the game - like pre-2010, when it was still computationally very cheap. They had basically ran that miner as a kind of fun little process in the background - same guys who had run things like Seti@Home or Folding@Home.
Then they had forgotten about the whole thing, and 5-10 years later noticed that the little toy is suddenly worth around 10000 USD/EUR per BTC. They sold at that point
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Oh I was following bitcoin from the early days when Gizmodo was actually worth reading. Had I bought $10 back then I'd be retired now.
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It is apparently useful for sex trafficking and terrorism financing???
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I had a guy propose to me once, pushing really hard, to move my website with its 500 users, to blockchain. He was so certain that blockchain was the future of the internet, but he couldn't name a single thing that blockchain could do for my website, that my website wasn't already doing.
Crypto is no different. Everything it can do, money can already do.
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> There is no specific need for bitcoin in the world, it's a solution looking for a problem.
lol, it literally solves 100% of everything that is mechanically wrong with modern society.
Bitcoin, or something much like it, is the standing Great Filter test of our species.
We either progress into the next level of economic organization with a sound money network of some kind, or we devolve into an eternal stagnation and death.
We cannot have an anti-merit civilization, that is contrary to the basic precepts of
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When you wake up and find your new (and only) digital fiat currency value swinging in the wind like shitcoin is right now?
It won't though and we already have the evidence. Most FIAT currency only exists electronically and FOREX trades can be executed 10,000 times faster than a BTC transaction. The reasons that they don't swing as wildly and as fast as crypto is because those currencies actually have functional use and are backed by governments and central banks.
No (Score:3)
The worst one will be when crapto gets a realistic value, namely zero. That is sure to happen sooner or later. This one here is just the worst one so far.
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I don't know if it will really happen. As PT Barnum said, there is a sucker born every minute.
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Well, maybe it will do what the benny sticks do: Stick around at very low valuation. But on the other hand, any transfers of crapto are expensive due to the "mining" and "consent" requirements. Hence things may simply grind to a halt with no transfers possible anymore.
Burning the planet for magic Internet beads (Score:5, Informative)
“A UNlinked study found that 67% of Bitcoin’s mining electricity in 2020–2021 came from fossil fuels, with coal alone providing about 45%, and mining emitted roughly 86 million tons of CO in that twoyear period.” ref [unu.edu]
“One analysis of U.S. mining found that just 34 large U.S. mines used 32.3 TWh in a single year (mid2022 to mid2023), 33% more than Los Angeles, with 85% of the extra electricity from fossil fuel plants.” ref [nih.gov]
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All spent playing "Guess The Magic Number!" over and over and over again.
Cause Bitcoin/crypto is based on nothing !!! (Score:3)
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How have these people not realized yet that Bitcoin moves opposite "reserve assets" like gold? Bitcoin surges during speculative market booms, and crashes when the market is full of fear. It's always been this way. It's the extreme opposite of a reserve asset. People buy Bitcoin on the idea of getting some huge market return. They flee when there's any signs of the market turning south (people needing to take money out / lack of new money flowing in) so that they're not left holding the bag and so they
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It's all just an idea at the end of the day.
Gold's value is just a shared delusion like any other token.
It's like belief in a god, it's power is proportional to the number of people who also believe.
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Jewelry demand is also intrinsic. The simple fact is that people like owning gold for reasons other than money. There may be trends for how much people desire to have gold stuff, but it has value beyond just as money.
Beyond intrinsic values, only a tiny fraction of Bitcoin investors are doing so because they have some notion that if the economy crashes, they'll be out buying their food with Bitcoin. It's purely a speculative temporary transaction - they put money in when they think it's going to go up an
Sentiment (Score:2)
Bitcoin is the worst invention of the 21st century (Score:3)
Bitcoin is "My little pony" economics and should be laughed at and that its followers need to be given embarrassing punishments.
What are people holding? (Score:2)
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I'm just going for large-dividend stocks and buying/holding. Toss it in a DRIP, and just walk off. I don't watch the market. I just walk off. Alternatively, index funds. Let people who know more than I figure out where to stick stuff.
I wish the US could start selling "innovation bonds". Like war bonds, except aimed at money for PARC/Bell Labs style research to make new stuff, even if it isn't immediately marketable.
Re:What are people holding? (Score:4, Interesting)
The TL/DR, boring stuff. If you want to hedge against a potential market implosion, stagflation, etc. you want to be in boring consumer staples, durable goods, and basic services. Even better if the companies are heavily indebted.
For example, picture a company that has $1B income on sales of essential after COGS but $900M in debt repayments. $100M profit and a lot of risk = low valuation. Then stagflation hits, and the economy racks up a total of 10% inflation. The company sells just as much volume (they're essential goods), but now they're $1,1B in sales due to inflation. But their debt repayments remain $900M, since it's based on a fixed amount of dollars. Now they have $200M profit and a lot less risk = high valuation. And since as a general rule inflation doesn't go into reverse, this is a 2x permanent boost to the company's profits.
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Another thing you can do is sell covered calls or do options spreads on index funds. In general it's poor advice to take an overall bearish position on broader markets (the long term trends are strongly upwards, and net downtrends are rare), but it can be quite reasonable to sell off your potential upside. For example, if a given index is at $1000, maybe instead of just buying shares at $1000 each, you also write $1150-strike options (each covering 100x shares) against the shares you buy, using the extra
Re: What are people holding? (Score:2)
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/se... [stlouisfed.org]
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Answer: diversify.
40% domestic stock, 20% international stock, 40% fixed income is an example mix for non-cash investments for an adult.
Avoid precious metals, crypto, etc. Too unpredictable.
You might not get rich, but you may have a decent life.
Almost 20 years after their inception (Score:4, Insightful)
HODL (Score:2)
HOLD THE DOOR
Be brave
Don't sell bro, please bro.
You have to keep pumping it (Score:2)
and nobody want's to pump it at the moment. If you were smart enough to stay out of bitcoin then pat yourself on the back. If you weren't then you need to realize that BTC is only valued to what 1) the number of people who invest in it 2) their belief of what they think the price will be.
BTC has proven to not be 1) A safe haven for inflation 2) an alternative to gold (it has proven to be a way to move money)
So if you are comfortable with an investment product that the value cannot be predicted, then go for
I still say (Score:2)
Stablecoins sounds like a polite term for that which must be shoveled before putting down fresh hay.
Of course (Score:2)
Let's see, cryptocurrency is *so* years old. Got to get with the scam, er, plan, it's NFTs, no, now it's AI will throw everyone out of work.
Until the economy goes thud, which is starting. (Check the new unemployment numbers for Jan)
Buying stability (Score:2)
Bitcoin isn't stable. It's just another fiat currency borne out of someone who wanted to make a currency.
That's why the rush to stability has everyone turning to gold. Gold is not a fiat currency - well it is, but it is a useful somewhat rare metal that also looks pretty. You can have your money in gold, and while it can be hard to store and move around (it's heavy), it's there and useful enough that the bottom won't drop out of it.
With the US dollar being so shaky thanks to Trump thinking "being unpredicta
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it isn't that BTC is changing value... it is the dollar weakening and becoming TP versus the yuan.
You do get that if that were the story, BTC would be *up* versus the USD right? The fact it is down against the USD by 42% means whatever weakening the dollar experienced, BTC experienced 42% *more* devaluation...
oh look the pedo protectors are here (Score:2)
The pedo protectors are here to make the world safe for child-raping billionaires by modding down facts
Re: oh look the pedo protectors are here (Score:2)
Let's stop Attacking pedophiles - Ted Cruz