The Crypto Thread

This isn’t completely true, but I’ll accept your general premise. Based on its valuation in dollars, it’s made the number of dollars I have increase by a better rate than any standard investment vehicle would have this year. So I assume you would view that as a good thing?

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MIT disagrees with you, but I will be sure to trust Riverman logic over them given your excellent track record.

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On the other hand, while not foolproof, this article comes to the conclusion that 1/3 of all US currency in circulation is used for illegal activity. Why are you not crusading against cash?

“Right now, because Bitcoin is so opaque, you can hide your capital gains appreciation and save yourself a lot of capital gains tax,” she said, calling this “a huge subsidy to cryptocurrencies.”

For example, you could hold your cryptocurrency in an opaque account until you’re ready to send it from one account to another, thereby hiding the fact that you owned it for three years.

Stronger regulation could force people to pay capital gains tax up to the last owner who paid a capital gains tax. If individuals can’t show where they bought Bitcoin from, they will be held responsible for that entire three-year period. Making people accountable for where the money has been — not just when it came onto an exchange — would pressure investors to declare their holdings in a more honest way.

I’d be more supportive of crypto if they did this.

Pretty sure all of the crypto hate is just sour grapes from people who could have bought in early but didn’t. Which I totally get. I remember telling goofyballer he was a fool for not cashing out most of his btc in the 2017/18 run up and he was like, “lol no, hodling!”. Feels bad, man.

But yelling about how illogical and stupid it all is doesn’t seem to be making it go away. A lot of us remain deeply skeptical and cynical about it as well. I don’t own and invest crypto because I’ve been convinced it’s superior to anything. I do it because sometimes stupid things end up being wildly successful (e.g. Twitter). There are so many people throwing so much money and effort at all of this that something coming out of it seems far more likely than nothing.

And it’s not like the “real” economy (lol TSLA) is any less stupid than the crypto one. Everything’s awful everywhere. At least the crypto crowd manages to have fun during the end times.

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Personally, the MLM / pump and dump aspect bothers me the most with all the shitcoins and NFTs. I can’t open Twitter without being bombarded by cryptobros hyping up another Ponzi scheme with rocket emojis.

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This part is fair for the most part, but I would argue there are a small number of NFT projects that are doing some pretty cool things. I don’t and wouldn’t advise anyone to invest in any of the shitcoins. All of my investment is in essentially the blue chip equivalent of crypto and NFTs.

Mine is.

Well, probably a decent mix of sour grapes and cryptobros being legitimately the most annoying people on earth

My concern is all the cult-like dudes who have gone all-in Bitcoin based on terrible Libertaran memes. If this really is a classic asset bubble, there’s going to be a whole lot of human misery.

If they didn’t go all in on Bitcoin, they’d have gone all in on meme STONKS or something else. The type of people that go all in on a risky investment are going to go all in on something no matter what.

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bec he’s not mad at himself for missing a huge opportunity to make a bunch of money with cash this year

I guess part of the reason I don’t feel the appeal of crypto is that I have zero FOMO.

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I think crypto is unique in the amount of technical jargon and libertarian stick-it-to-the-man talk that’s used to disguise the fact that you’re still just hoping to sell your stuff to a bigger fool.

It is not an investment, it is speculation. The absolute fact that crypto is being pumped by the worst people in the world should give you pause. Maybe index funds are evil but the companies that comprise the S&P 500 make actual profits that are actually distributed to their owners.

If your investment thesis is exclusively “someone else will pay more for it later,” you’re doing something stupid.

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You could say exactly the same thing about the stock market and yet I assume you own stocks. Honestly your second point about someone paying more for it later is true about stocks also. That’s why people own them mostly. Very few people in 2021 are buying stocks because they value actually being a shareholder. It’s all about the return they make.

That’s just not true.

There is a freaking army of techbro fraudsters out there spouting off about cryptocurrency changing the world and implying if not outright saying it will take down governments and usher in an era of libertarian utopia where the (inevitably 20-40 year old males) will be able to do whatever they want in perpetuity.

Again, the stock market is comprised of businesses that make money. Crypto is just the new gold, but even more useless because you can’t even make it into a necklace. Note the near perfect overlap between gold bugs circa 2005 and crypto bros today.

Businesses that are also responsible for destroying the earth over the last century and more recently the insane level of economic inequality in the western world. Seems pretty noble.

I mean, ok? Capitalism being evil or whatever is a separate discussion.

Can’t believe this “conversation” is happening without acknowledging the massive amount of energy consumed by this nonsense not even counting the loss of parts/scarcity of the hardware. That alone should be disqualifying.

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It isn’t though. Every single argument you are making applies to your own portfolio. If you own the S&P 500 you own Tesla which is every bit as ridiculous as BTC or ETH if not orders of magnitude more so. You own oil companies which are actively destroying the planet. And on and on and on. There are very few corporations that aren’t evil af and many of them are outright criminal enterprises.

I’m not arguing crypto is noble btw. It is ridiculous imo. I’m just saying the entire world economy is a clown show at this point. This is an extension of that.

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