Relavent: https://www.btctimes.com/news/microstrategy-completes-650m-offering
Also relavent: https://www.btctimes.com/news/massmutual-buys-100m-worth-of-bitcoin
thenewgreen this is an answer to your question re institutional investors:
- In that case, it makes no sense to compare Bitcoin with altcoins like ETH and TRON. That’s like listing Chuck E. Cheese tokens on the Chicago Board of Trade. Bitcoin should be alongside corporate bonds, real estate investment trusts, gold, and 30-year Treasuries. The reason it’s not is because crypto exchanges don’t make money if people just buy and HODL.
Saylor takes an a extremely narrow view of Bitcoin that does not extend beyond the use of blockchain for anything but a scarce asset. This is the CEO of a company that just raised $650 million from the sale of 0.750% convertible notes to buy BTC.
Personally, I think Bitcoin is long-term unsustainable due to its security fee structure, as well as its environmental impact. I don't think that will prevent it from rallying to $100k and beyond, however.
I've seen some people telling scary stories about the emerging quantum computers, and their potential effect on cryptocurrencies. The short version is that it will be trivial to calculate any Bitcoin with a quantum computer, thereby making it easy to steal/decode and take as much as they want. With two different quantum computers having passed initial proof of concept and working in prototype stage, I figure we are 2-5 years from them reaching research-level stability, if not actual commercial products. Is the only thing protecting cryptocurrencies the complexity of decoding? Does quantum computing draw an end date in some way? My brain is not big enough to process this alone...
Quantum computing and BitcoinAll of the commonly-used public-key algorithms are broken by QC. This includes RSA, DSA, DH, and all forms of elliptic-curve cryptography. Public-key crypto that is secure against QC does exist, however.
It is, you just won't put in the work. Nobody puts in the work. Poof you have a quantum computer. You set it to mine bitcoin. Lookitthat it's hella faster than anything else. It earns its first bitcoin reward. Then its next. Then its next. Holy fuck we go from one new block every ten minutes to one every nine, every eight, every seven... what the fuck is happening? Before long Goobstercom is mining blocks every three minutes and nothing else can compete. It takes a couple feverish days of freaking out but 52 hours later, BTC forks into BTC and BTC-g, BTC-g being the chain that requires a six-month-old ASIC MAC address in order to access the blockchain. Things are controversial but 89% of miners follow BTC-g, while 9% stick with BTC because they are obstinate maximalists, 1% stick with BTC because they believe in the future and 1% stick with BTC because they went out and bought quantum computers and are trying to get in on the game. Meanwhile everyone who had BTC before the split has BTC and BTC-g and everyone is pissed off because they now need to get on the exchange and trade out their BTC for BTC-g and they also hate the new logo because it looks like it was commissioned on Fiverr six hours before the split (it was). A consensus protocol is never going to give you stability. That's not the point. None of this matters, by the way, with a switch to proof-of-stake - the hashing ceases to matter, the power consumption goes away and the network speeds up tremendously. But everyone will take one idea they don't understand - quantum computing - and cross it with another idea they don't understand - blockchain - and presume that because they didn't think of it, nobody thought of it and therefore we're all doomed. It's the tedious lovechild of Von Daniken Syndrome and the T-1000 fallacy.My brain is not big enough to process this alone...
I’ve never understood the mechanism behind bitcoin’s rise as an asset. Is it a currency? Then it’s value is in relation to other currencies by arbitrage which means small returns on small scales. Is it a commodity like gold? Then it’s value is when global currencies lose value and the global system slows down, but then it has to compete with gold as a form of exchange and maintain the technological infrastructure it needs to work at all. I don’t see the value and it makes me think it’s just a big Ponzi scheme, which is risky and requires a lot of attention as an investment. Personally I think that Bitcoin has been a successful subsidization for building huge data centers that will power our digital future, but I don’t think it will exist past that purpose.
Bitcoin has value simply because it has the qualities that enable people to attribute value to it. It is transferrable, scarce, somewhat fungible, and used by enough people. Paper currency is similar. The systems that create these qualities are very different between BTC and paper currency, but the product is similar. Of course, paper currencies fail. Bitcoin could too. As all that hardware is ASIC, I don't think they are useful beyond the walls, roof, and cooling systems.Personally I think that Bitcoin has been a successful subsidization for building huge data centers that will power our digital future, but I don’t think it will exist past that purpose.
How that description don't apply to tulip bulb? For what I heard BTC is used (as a currency) by criminals, period. for the first few month you could barely buy coffee, and now it is not even a thing So it is not a mean of exchange. Without that, it is not a currency Edit: But i'm not a theorist. My real question is: If I want to short BTC, what am I suppose to do? Sell Electricity?Bitcoin has the qualities that enable people to attribute value to it. It is transferrable, scarce, somewhat fungible, and used by enough people
Fund a Coinbase Pro account. Seriously. All this pearl-clutching and high dudgeon is ridiculous. "I can't buy coffee with it therefore it isn't a currency." Go to Starbuck's with a Krugerrand and tell me how that works out.
Pardon the snark, but sounds like a fancy gift card rather than a revolution in currency. Last time I used BTC was to buy LSD off the Silk Road 10 years ago. After that the rest I converted into dollars so I could pay the rent in college, made 80 bucks off the price swing.
I own zero BTC. I think. No, I believe I have some fraction of BTC left in Coinbase. At the time it was a rounding error, now it's probably worth a couple pizzas. My BTC holdings were never worth more than like $700, and that's back when that was like 3 BTC. But I also don't pretend that the idea of a blockchain is irrelevant because it makes me mad.
Yeah...I don’t think there enough lengths I could make to thank people like mk, insomniasexx, and kleinbl00 for all the crypto discussions years ago when ETH was just breaking into news cycles. Fundamentally altered the course of my life.
I’m sorry, I still don’t get it. I don’t dispute blockchain is valuable technology and here to stay, but I set my eyes on Bitcoin specifically as an unknown factor. Is it meant sit in vaults, like gold? Or is it meant to transact regularly, like a currency? I don’t think you can have both at the same time and it be a stable investment vehicle with better returns than real asset classes. Per the hardware question, the building and energy management systems are valuable, probably more so than the chips. Chips fail, hard drives fail, and like the Argo they are remade, the result of which has been a market created that supports developing these chips for miners, trains professionals in the maintenance of these data centers and chip fabrication, and identifies geographies amenable to cheap high volume data processing. Regardless, to speak of the specific chips, they can serve institutional backed crypto currencies performing similar operations. I just can’t shake the feeling Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme
It's meant to launder money. I say that in all seriousness. Piketty burned an entire chapter in Capital in the 21st Century determining the size of the black market and estimated it at 50% of the white market. If 10% of black market transactions are executed in bitcoin, Bitcoin's market cap would be 70 trillion dollars. There are 18b bitcoin in circulation with a market cap of $430b. There can never be more than 21b BTC. We're looking squarely at Drake's Equation here: we have a stack of bullshit factors that give us a scientific number but "ponzi scheme" or not there's a fair amount of runway even if you presume BTC will never be anything but thermonuclearly illegal. "Stable investment vehicle" is a relative term. No matter how you define it, though, it certainly doesn't apply to Bitcoin at the moment. "Real asset classes" is also a relative term. There was a time when ETFs weren't "real asset classes." The 401(k) is an accidentally-discovered tax loophole. Pets.com is a cautionary tale; Chewy.com has a $43b market cap doing the exact same fucking thing 20 years later. You're effectively saying "it must be bad since I don't understand it, and since it must be bad I don't have to understand it." mk can talk at length about crypto. So can I. Been there, done that. But you're never going to get more than a beatdown when your basic approach to the discussion is "this is stupid and illegal, and everyone involved in it is a stupid criminal." I've been called a stupid criminal by accountants, financial planners and immediate family members for owning crypto so if I want someone to berate me for making money I can get that job done by far more important opinions than yours.Is it meant sit in vaults, like gold? Or is it meant to transact regularly, like a currency?
I don’t think you can have both at the same time and it be a stable investment vehicle with better returns than real asset classes.
Bitcoin is a bearer instrument. You likely know that term as "bearer bonds" and know "bearer bonds" because Hans Gruber seized Nakatomi Plaza exclusively so he could steal them. A "bearer instrument" is a document or object that says "whoever is holding this document or instrument is also holding 100 shares of Enron stock" or whatever. 1 share of the LA County Public Library renovation bond. 1 share of Big Brother & The Holding Company Inc. When I incorporated the first time my lovely $700 package included 100 shares of common stock. I gave one to a buddy which served to complicate my taxes so I had to ask it back. It was worth negative money. I bought ETH at 50 cents; theoretically, that one share entitles him to 1% of the ETH I'd bought. It will not surprise you that municipalities and enforcement agencies frown on bearer instruments because they're portable wealth for purposes of tax evasion and smuggling. It will also not surprise you to learn that tax and accounting practice treats crypto of all kinds as an intangible. Intangibles can have value. You have no problem with this. If I offered you a 1% share in the rights to the Happy Birthday song in 2015 for $1m you would have jumped at the chance. That song made Warner Chappell something like $70m a year. By 2016, however, credible evidence that Warner Chappell never owned it, the song slipped into public domain, and now your ownership would be worthless. 70% of the Bitcoin miners in the world are in China. They store portable value on the black market for Chinese citizens of means. Every dollar's worth of Bitcoin ties up a real dollar, and most of the people who buy it don't sell it. This makes it the opposite of a Ponzi scheme whereby the people who buy in early subsist off of selling product to people who buy in late. You can be mad at Bitcoin because it doesn't adhere to your morals or your understanding or your chosen worldview but one thing all cryptohaters have in common is a studied, practiced and vehement insistence that their unexamined worldview is the proper model for something they don't want to understand. Kodak's marketcap is $750m right now. They haven't made anything for a decade. Earlier this year they were going to make vaccines. Last year they were going to be a cryptocurrency company. yet you can buy that shit with your IRA.