What People Won't Tell You About Crytpo Currency

[Unknown]

I'm invested in a few coins/tokens. I'll post back about them in a year, and let you know how they went.

 

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[Rem]

Crypto is not for everyone.

^^ That's my contribution to this thread.

 

[CryptO]

Crypto is not for everyone.

Clearly not

 

[MJ DeMarco]

Some opinions from those entrenched in the world of finance...

As expected, most of them are against it, including Buffett and Bogle.

‘Fraud.’ ‘Not willing to pooh-pooh.’ A list of what Wall Street CEOs have said about bitcoin

 

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[Coalission]

Some opinions from those entrenched in the world of finance...

As expected, most of them are against it, including Buffett and Bogle.

‘Fraud.’ ‘Not willing to pooh-pooh.’ A list of what Wall Street CEOs have said about bitcoin

 

[ernesto50]

Some opinions from those entrenched in the world of finance...

As expected, most of them are against it, including Buffett and Bogle.

‘Fraud.’ ‘Not willing to pooh-pooh.’ A list of what Wall Street CEOs have said about bitcoin

I find it funny that crypto-enemies are always bringing Buffett as their main gun. Folks, Buffett has literally not invested in any technology company in the last 20 years except in Apple, and that has just happened recently. While I have huge respect for Buffett, technology is not his forte.

 

[ernesto50]

Thomas Edison said that electricity (A/C current) would never be adopted by anyone...

Charlie Chaplan called cinema a fad...

Jimmy Connors said that wooden tennis racquets would never be replaced...

Bill Gates downplayed the impact that the Internet would have on the world...

Steve Balmer said the iPhone would never get any market share...

Just goes to prove that even the smartest and most successful people -- the best in their industry -- can sometimes have trouble imagining a future that's fundamentally different from the past.

And according to the book "Digital Gold" Bill Gates was also not a fan of Bitcoin until recently. He was downplaying Bitcoin in the same way until someone showed him the true potential. And yeah like you said, JScott, the downplaying of certain technologies cost Microsoft dearly (a struggle they were not able to recover from so far IMO).

 

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[Johnny Bravo]

Apologies for dredging up this old thread, but I thought I might add a new perspective.

According to the most estimates, somewhere around 2 billion (with a B) people are "unbanked." These people have no access to bank accounts. As you can imagine, this severely limits access to credit and the ability to improve their position in life. Similarly, a very large portion of society has poor access to secure and stable records of life events. Birth, death, transfer of assets, etc.

These two aspects alone are easily solved by distributed ledger technology. (And conveniently destroy the immoral claim.)

There are many companies which are currently in the process of launching mesh networks. Whether terrestrial or satellite, these will couple with the massively expanding trend of smart phone adoption. Most of the globe's population has or will have access to internet within a short period.

Cryptocurrencies and DLT will allow the poorest of the world to enter into the global economy and MASSIVELY increase global wealth.

What's not to love about it?

 

[Maxboost]

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6r04gfWfRkE


Can someone refute these arguments point by point?

His argument is very sound and based on basic economic theory and past historical data. He also goes into detail what will most likely happen in this highly unregulated market.

In short, how does everyone know they are not getting played by multi billionaire hedge fund managers who are artificially inflating the price? What will you do when central banks shut down bitcoin like pokerstars on black friday?

Still learning about crypto but I am leaning towards not investing in crypto...yet. I'm willing to change my mind.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cuvpd0EwtHw&t=4s


I've been watching debates and I've come to the conclusion that people who do not like bitcoin bring up better arguments.

 

[Johnny Bravo]

Can someone refute these arguments point by point?

For full disclosure, I think Jim Rickards is a scam artist. Every bit of information he puts out is essentially an attempt to get you to purchase something from him. He claims to be an adherent of Austrian economics, but his actual advice seems often to fall outside the realm of the school. Rant complete.

On to the refutation!

1) “It’s a utility token for criminals, terrorists, money launderers, tax evaders.”

I find it interesting that this is even considered a legitimate claim. I can personally round up hundreds of individuals who do NOT fit into this category who use crypto on a daily basis. In fact, a cursory exploration into the exploding market will reveal thousands upon thousands of people who are truly attempting to make this world a better place. How? By circumventing the bullshit shoved down our throats by the entrenched powers that be. (I would have thought more people on this forum would like this aspect.)

As @MJ DeMarco points out in Unscripted , ask yourself why people like Jim Rickards and Peter Schiff are so adamant that only criminals use cryptocurrencies? What incentive could there possibly be? Hint: Look at how they make their money.

2) “It’s clearly a bubble. It looks like the second biggest bubble in history after tulip mania.”

Ahh… the good ol’ tulip mania strawman. He kindly goes on to list a handful of bubbles and claims Bitcoin is “bigger than all of them” without offering one single shred of evidence. Why again is it our job to refute his baseless claim?

I cashed out of Bitcoin when it reached $16,000 because it was clearly evident that “dumb” money had entered the market and was rapidly driving up the market from euphoria alone. The vast majority of people dumping money into the market knew virtually nothing about cryptocurrencies other than the fact that it was “easy money!” I pocketed a ton of cash and bought again after the correction.

How is this different than any other market? Sure, the volatility is pretty wicked at times, but we’re talking about a technology that is less than ten years old. Dot com bubble anyone? I find that most people who despise crypto/DLT simply see it as a get rich quick scheme.

3) “There’s pretty good evidence that there’s a lot of fraud going on.”

Another baseless claim. Have you noticed that he’s simply making statements without any evidence to back them up?

Is Bitcoin manipulated? Heck yeah. (Though not as much as Ripple.) I have made transactions in other coins and watched in amazement as the ticker bounced from my purchase/sale alone. Do you know how tiny this market is? A $100,000 transaction can make some pretty massive changes in the ticker. Late 2016 into early 2017 many people began to hear of this new thing called “crypto” and started dumping in money. Wherever you find money you’ll find sharks. Is this any different in any other market in the global economy? A few ICOs were complete scams. A few investors resorted to the classic pump and dump technique. But guess what? This happens under the auspices of the SEC too. How many times do we see stories of traders, businesses, and other scams making the front page of the news for defrauding investors? Um, constantly. So much for his precious regulation. So the real question is whether or not there is more fraud in the crypto market. I would say not, but I won’t claim that as fact (unlike this blowhard).

4) “Imagine you and I are Bitcoin miners… We just traded back and forth all day.”

This statement alone shows how ignorant he is. You either sell outside of the exchanges in a P2P transaction and, therefore, have no effect whatsoever on current price, or you sell on an exchange and are one tiny fish in a big sea of fishes trying to change the direction of the school. Bitcoin currently has a volume exceeding $8 billion over a 24 hour period. You can certainly manipulate a market as small as that if you are a crypto whale, but “you and I” as Bitcoin miners aren’t doing squat to this market selling a single Bitcoin back and forth.

5) He then goes on a long diatribe about mining and electricity and hitting a wall.

This is the closest to reality he gets. Proof-of-Work is a horrible method of authentication and just about everyone knows it. Almost every coin/token is changing to Proof-of-Stake or another method.

6) Gold is better than Bitcoin because it’s super old. (Paraphrasing)

So… does this mean a horse is better transportation than a jetliner? He claims Bitcoin won’t perform well in a panic. Interestingly, cryptocurrencies are currently being used in many locations around the world in place of fiat currencies and Jim’s precious gold buggery precisely because of uncertainty in the contemporary markets. I would argue that there is an awful lot of evidence suggesting that many people will flee to cryptocurrencies because they are inherently more stable than anything centrally controlled (e.g. fiat currencies and precious metals).

7) Some people are tax evaders so Bitcoin is bad.

Seriously? This guy is hurting my brain.

The video with Peter Schiff is almost 30 minutes long. I don’t have the time nor the inclination to go through his nonsense too.

If you have specific questions I would be happy to give you my opinion.

Hope this helps a bit!

 

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[jmusic]

After like 1k CPUs of commodity hardware like what Facebook, Google, etc run off of it becomes powerful enough to calculate at the speed necessary. The limitations are heat dissipation/cooling and electricity availability.

Yet another non-truth spouted as fact.

"commodity hardware like what Facebook, Google run off of..." In their beginnings, that was true, however they are now both so large that they can get CUSTOM versions of Intel processors made, and even custom server rack designs.

Google server racks shown at 3:20.

The Facebook Special: How Intel Builds Custom Chips for Giants of the Web

Open Compute Project - Wikipedia

 

[Guest92dX]

There are only two things that are for sure true:

People who like crypto will like it.

People who don't won't.

I don't care either way. I'm still against them being used as currency.

I have been persuaded by other crypto enthusiasts that the real value is in business applications. It seems that the balanced enthusiasts who care about it aren't interested in the currency aspects.

I can agree with that.

I don't agree with the get rich easy mentality that's out there for this stuff. That's why I made the points I made. Take away the booming price of the coins and 90% of mainstream interest goes away.

I'm not interested in the bandwagon. I have been persuaded to it's general value.

 

[MitchC]

The problem I have with bitcoin is that the idea of it being a decentralised currency and limited in number and by mining difficulty is amazing, yet everyone is investing in it to make more fiat currency, as a currency bitcoin is unusable it is so slow to do a transaction. If someone could make a website where you store your coins there and instantly trade them with minimal fees and they don’t actually move the coins because they hold everyone’s coins that would be good, but it would just be too easy to scam and defeat the purpose. I think that was the idea of bitconnect? Which ended this way? Maybe tainting that idea for a while. Yes I know there are other coins that are fixing this issue but they aren’t bitcoin so why are people investing in bitcoin?

Also he has an incredibly good point about what an absolute waste of resources and how much mining coins destroys the environment.

As you can probably tell I haven’t done a lot of research and done care to, aside from the 2 points above being enough to put me off it violates control and entry.

I think this thread is important to see both sides so those are mine, as uninformed as I may be this discussion is far more valuable than listening to a bunch of people convincing others to buy in because it’s going to the moon.

 

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[jmusic]

For the record, I do actually agree with many of the OP's points. Environmentally destructive, check. Speculative bubble, not store of value, check.

My stance: While the party lasts it's a great way to get quality computer equipment to pay for purchase costs and hopefully eventually earn money. I have ~$6K in servers mining altcoins and earning me $600/mo after power. If the party ends there's other stuff I can do with them too.

I considered scaling up (colo in a data center) but the profitability took a major hit early this month and made me nervous about signing a 12m commitment.

 

[Maxboost]

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKMpLFCbLz4


I just watched a fascinating interview with Jordan Belfort and he trashes Bitcoin and more importantly gives reasons WHY.

The more you look into the arguments for and against Bitcoin, the more interesting it gets.

 

[Maxboost]

Given that Belfort is barred from securities trading (and likely would avoid crypto even if it's technically not yet defined as a security), it shouldn't surprise anyone that he would take a contrarian view of crypto and other speculative investment asset classes.

He makes most of his money these days by speaking and selling books -- what do you think will generate more interest (and money) for him: Positive view of crypto or contrarian?

There is too much conflict of interest to trust anything he has to say on trading securities or similar asset classes.

I don't think you addressed any of his arguments or if you watched the interview. Just paraphrasing the interview, if Jordan was 25 years old today he would be the wolf of Bitcoin and he would readily admit that.

I've noticed a theme with bitcoin defenders and that is, attack the messenger not the message.

 

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[Coalission]

I've noticed a theme with bitcoin defenders and that is, attack the messenger not the message.

Why are you giving homework? If I post a 40 minute video from someone refuting everything in your video, are you going to watch it and break it down point by point, or do you only watch things that fit your narrative and reinforce your existing belief?

The onus is on you to prove blockchain/cryptocurrency is doomed, not the other way around, and one video by a bonafide scam artist with some sales skills is not enough to convince me, sorry. Can we hear from Bernie Madoff instead?

 

[Johnny Bravo]

I just watched a fascinating interview with Jordan Belfort and he trashes Bitcoin and more importantly gives reasons WHY.

The more you look into the arguments for and against Bitcoin, the more interesting it gets.

I think you are cherry picking.

His very first statement on Bitcoin: "That's why I've come out - not against Bitcoin per se (mumble) - I don't think Bitcoin's a scam. But there's scams being perpetrated around Bitcoin that are very dangerous for people that don't know better."

Not "trashing" by any means.

He then goes on to say that the technology is "beautiful" and believes that major banks will utilize it (and perhaps nations?) as well as other financial organizations because of its efficiency and security. If anything, Belfort exudes excitement and respect for blockchain technology.

However, he misses the point (though he very briefly touched the surface).

Bitcoin was developed specifically as a trustless financial alternative. The entire chain of events leading to its development had very strong anarchist undertones and motives. A large portion of the DLT crowd could care less whether or not governments will "allow" their use because the technology is rapidly exceeding the ability for states to prevent their use. According to the IMF, roughly half of the world's workers are employed in the black market. They predicted a few years ago that this number will increase to two-thirds by 2020. As of 2009, the black market was already the second largest market in the world, just barely behind the US.

Do you seriously believe that roughly half the world (or more) will care in the slightest what any government thinks they should or should not use for trade?

 

[GoGetter24]

Given that Belfort is barred from securities trading (and likely would avoid crypto even if it's technically not yet defined as a security), it shouldn't surprise anyone that he would take a contrarian view of crypto and other speculative investment asset classes.

This tendency among pro crypto people to discredit the person rather than rebut (unless forced by pointing this out) is filling no one with confidence.

It's logical that if cryptocurrency was valuable based on reasons, rather than fad, pro crypto people would help their investments most by explaining and rebutting logically.

If it's just a fad, popular at the moment, that wouldn't be true. Logical fallacies like appeal to authority, ad hominem, correlation implies causation, selection bias, more passion means more truth, etc, would be more effective due to popularity being a lower common denominator than reason.

 

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