[theluckycountry]

Some people are slow learners. Take heart, it's still very early, and you are still welcome.

Welcome to buy into a ponzi scheme near the top. No thanks. That's what all the hodlers want, more hodlers to join the club and push the price up because without new blood the price goes down. That's the classic giveaway with a ponzi BTW. You never hear gold investors attempting to lure new investors in, gold websites sure, but individual investors know their gains are not based on that but on the appreciation of the asset over time, like good farmland. But you are no doubt right in the assumption that most early hodlers sold out around some prior peak.

The world is littered with the wreckage of get-rich-quick schemes and BC is no higher now than it was in 2021 so what's with the big ramp? It could just as easily plummet from here as it could go up. The previous up-cycles mean nothing, there was no logic to them, just fear and greed. Dogecoin has gone from 8c to 17c and you'd swear it was raining dollar bills over on the reddit sub. They are so gullible. Even babydoge coin is up, from 0.0000000007 to 0.0000000024 or some such nonsense.

"Doge needs to break the .20-.23 resistance and then we will see it fly to .5 real quick" That's what passes for financial analysis over there. Throw in a meme of elon musk (their God) and you have 50 comments, six months ago it was 2 comments. Kids full of hopium playing with their mobile phones.

The BC space is little different but the BS sounds more intelligent because typically more educated and wealthier people bought into it during the last big pump of 22. But it's all nonsense, trading virtual money tokens back and forth with no real world effects other than the outrageous electricity bill. And whose paying that? Who's paying for 1% of the globes electricity supply? The hodlers of course, who else.

The miners pay for the energy use directly, but the whole network pays indirectly. As @AndrewChow described, the miners provide a service to the network. They secure the ledger and provide the transaction ordering necessary for users to converge on a shared ground-truth. In exchange for this public service, the miners are reimbursed via block rewards.

... It is financed via monetary supply inflation and thus a levy on all holders of bitcoins.

You ask how this cost can be paid without anyone losing money. There is no such thing as a free lunch: the Bitcoin ecosystem pays an on-going maintenance cost for the network to continue running. There is no guarantee that the value of the overall Bitcoin ecosystem is stable or increases.

https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/quest ... of-bitcoin

So everyone who buys bitcoin is paying this bill and everyone who hodls it too.

Then there is the purely speculative mining

Texas was gasping for electricity. Winter Storm Uri had knocked out power plants across the state, leaving tens of thousands of homes in icy darkness. By the end of Feb. 14, 2021, nearly 40 people had died, some from the freezing cold.

Meanwhile, in the husk of a onetime aluminum smelting plant an hour outside of Austin, row upon row of computers were using enough electricity to power about 6,500 homes as they raced to earn Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency.

The computers were performing trillions of calculations per second, hunting for an elusive combination of numbers that Bitcoin’s algorithm would accept. About every 10 minutes, a computer somewhere guesses correctly and wins a small number of Bitcoins worth, in recent weeks, about $170,000. Anyone can try, but to make a business of it can require as much electricity as a small city.

In Texas, the computers kept running until just after midnight. Then the state’s power grid operator ordered them shut off, under an agreement that allowed it to do so if the system was about to fail. In return, it began paying the Bitcoin company, Bitdeer, an average of $175,000 an hour to keep the computers offline. Over the next four days, Bitdeer would make more than $18 million for not operating, from fees ultimately paid by Texans who had endured the storm.

The New York Times has identified 34 such large-scale operations, known as Bitcoin mines, in the United States, all putting immense pressure on the power grid and most finding novel ways to profit from doing so. Their operations can create costs — including higher electricity bills and enormous carbon pollution — for everyone around them, most of whom have nothing to do with Bitcoin.

Until June 2021, most Bitcoin mining was in China. Then it drove out Bitcoin operations, at least for a time, citing their power use among other reasons. The United States quickly became the industry’s global leader.

Since then, precisely how much electricity Bitcoin mines are using in America and their effect on energy markets and the environment have been unclear. The Times, using both public and confidential records as well as the results of studies it commissioned, put the most comprehensive estimates to date on the largest operations’ power use and the ripple effects of their voracious demand.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/09/busi ... ution.html

The halving: Due in late April. When Bitcoin halves, the reward given to the contributors securing the network is reduced by 50%. So the people running the show in the article above will get 50% less for their work, but the electricity bills will go up because they will have hunt more or find less. I think come April we will see a lot of miners retire.

Bitcoin miners will struggle to survive the next ‘halving’ event amid electricity costs, debt payments https://fortune.com/2023/07/08/bitcoin- ... -payments/

What the Bitcoin halving means for the network’s energy consumption concerns https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin- ... onsumption

[careinke]

Is Bitcoin really destroying the planet?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faq2E4L4Dzs

Peace

[theluckycountry]

Brilliant! A metrosexual cis-male telling me BC is going to top $657,000. Just the sort of ramping we have come to expect from pseudo-financial analysts.

Let's look at it as a payment method: Which it's never used as
As a currency: Which it's never used for.
As a store of value: Which is it's only major theme.

The cis-man compares BC to Gold, which is just a marketing ploy and always has been. It could have been marketed as a Black Coin, giving buyers the impression it was as good as oil, and it probably would have if BC had been released in 1970. It could have a Brown coin in the early 2000's, As good as real estate, but Gold was chosen as the marketing pitch as they wanted buyers to think of it in terms of something that lasts forever. Like the Roman gold coins that get dug up from time to time, still as good as they day they were buried and worth a lot more.

In comparing BT to Gold, our youtube influencer points to the current mining cost of Gold, which is high by historical standards. But he makes no mention of the fact that all mining could stop tomorrow and the refined Gold in existence now would carry on being worth a fortune, and even go up in value, with zero energy inputs. Such has been the case many times in gold's "recorded history".

Yes, Gold has a history going back to the dawn of civilization. BT has a history too, going all the way back to the beginning of the manic money printing after the GFC in 2009. Think about that, BC was created toward the end of an era of funny money scams that really began in 1970. It's the child of desperation, when investors all over the world had been screwed on Housing and stock market investments. They were desperate for a hedge, willing to grasp at any flimsy reed in the hope of magic returns, of endless money. They were little people addicted to compounding wealth, they took a gamble, and for some it paid off, for many others it took what little they had destroyed it when the CC payments came due.

When someone tells you, "it's different this time. you should throw the rule books in the bin because if you get in on this deal now you will see endless profits", you know it's time to reach for your revolver. It's not different this time, and while the rules of investing can be put aside temporarily they will always reassert themselves. Bitcoins electricity consumption can never be reduced, it's an albatross, just one that hasn't gone the way of Enron yet.

[ralfy]

Fiat currency is something that's declared as legal tender by government.

[careinke]

Fiat currency is something that's declared as legal tender by government.

Yes, your point?

Kennedy is the Remedy

Peace

[careinke]

Lucky, I was just about to reply to your post when the RFK JRs rally/VP unveiling came on and frankly it was way more important to me than you. I watched the whole thing, lots of information in the rally. I got to say RFK Jr nailed it choosing Nicole Shanahan for his VP. Here is her promo vid so you can know a little more about her.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKP0kF88HsE

She will be the youngest ever VP at 38, She is a lawyer, scientist, capitalist, AI expert, Entrepeneur, and rich.

Just so you don't feel too neglected I will reply to below purple

Brilliant! A metrosexual cis-male telling me BC is going to top $657,000. Just the sort of ramping we have come to expect from pseudo-financial analysts. "If you have no reasonable response, attack the messenger to change the subject." Have you been taking Plant lessons?? As I've told you before, I really have no interest in your sexual preferences or phobia's, the poster appears to be an adult, so I don't care about his either. Finally I think he had the required nonfiscal advise disclaimer at the beginning.

Let's look at it as a payment method: Which it's never used as Except virtually all over the world, you could even do it!
As a currency: Which it's never used for.Hmmm El Salvador, the Central African Republic, Bitcoin Maximalist's, people living in countries with hyperinflation, and expats sending money back home to their families who cannot get a bank account. I could go on if you like?
As a store of value: Which is it's only major theme. Plus it is much more environmentally friendly than shiny rocks.

The cis-man compares BC to Gold, Actually Satoshi was the originatorwhich is just a marketing ploy and always has beenMarketing? you're talking about a bunch of Cypher Punks. It could have been marketed as a Black CoinNope, giving buyers the impression it was as good as oil, and it probably would have if BC had been released in 1970.Well, maybe except in 1970 there was not an internet, even the DARPA net was still in it's infancy It could have a Brown coin in the early 2000's,Land is an asset, unfortunately it's value diminishes with those pesky wars, confiscations, squatters, tax leans etc. You also can't move it around the world either. As good as real estate, but Gold was chosen as the marketing pitchSatoshi did the choosing as they wanted buyers to think of it in terms of something that lasts foreverAt least as long as there is an Internet and when/if it goes away we will have other challenges to be prepared for. Self Sovereignty involves a little more discipline than just the block chain. . Like the Roman gold coins that get dug up from time to time, still as good as they day they were buried and worth a lot more.Well, BTC is a deflationary currency.

In comparing BT to Gold, our youtube influencer points to the current mining cost of Gold, which is high by historical standards.Really? It is obviously environmentally expensive, but the miners are still making huge profits. Are you thinking it is more expensive due to not using slaves?? Slaves are still used today to mine gold, they are also expensive to keep. But he makes no mention of the fact that all mining could stop tomorrow and the refined Gold in existence now would carry on being worth a fortune, and even go up in value, with zero energy inputs.True, then it would be closer to Bitcoin with a known quantity. It's still expensive to store and move around. Such has been the case many times in gold's "recorded history".I would appreciate some examples this has actually happened

Yes, Gold has a history going back to the dawn of civilization. BT has a history too, going all the way back to the beginning of the manic money printing after the GFC in 2009.True Think about that, BC was created toward the end of an era of funny money scams that really began in 1970.True when Nixon "temporarily" took us off the Gold Standard. It's the child of desperation, when investors all over the world had been screwed on Housing and stock market investments. They were desperate for a hedge, willing to grasp at any flimsy reed in the hope of magic returns, of endless money.Who is "They?" the handful of Cyber punks? They were little people addicted to compounding wealth, they took a gamble, and for some it paid off, for many others it took what little they had destroyed it when the CC payments came due.They were adults who made thier won decision and probably didn't need some three letter agency protecting them.

When someone tells you, "it's different this time. you should throw the rule books in the bin because if you get in on this deal now you will see endless profits", you know it's time to reach for your revolver. It's not different this time, and while the rules of investing can be put aside temporarily they will always reassert themselves. Bitcoins electricity consumption can never be reduced, it's an albatross, just one that hasn't gone the way of Enron yet.It's different 1. First time ever BTC beat the previous cycles all time high BEFORE the halving. 2. First time ever the U.S. has had spot BTC ETF's (12 so far with IBIT in the lead). 3. First time ever any ETF's have increased in market value in such a short time (less than a month) compared with golds 8 years. 4. Comparing Enron to BTC is a little off the mark Enron did not stop oil production but BTC will help with energy production, it already does in numerous places mentioned in the video.

Thank you for your critique, I found it valuable.

Once again, how could I NOT back the Kennedy/Shanahan ticket, It is a Permaculturists dream ticket, and Permaculture did originate in the Lucky Country

Peace

[careinke]

Moderators,

Is there a reason this thread is in the members only area? Just curious. Perhaps we could combine it with the other Crypto thread?

Thanks and Peace

[ralfy]

Fiat currency is something that's declared as legal tender by government.

Yes, your point?

Kennedy is the Remedy

Peace

Crypto currency becomes fiat only if declared by government.

[careinke]

Fiat currency is something that's declared as legal tender by government.

Yes, your point?

Kennedy is the Remedy

Peace

Crypto currency becomes fiat only if declared by government.

Do you mean like El Salvador and Central Africa did? What about countries that are crypto friendly like the UAE, South Korea, Japan etc who have not declared BTC as an official currency? I'm a little confused on what you are saying.
So where do shiny rocks (Gold) come into it, Fiat or not?

OK I put your declaration into my Copilot AI in question form. Here is what came back. I could live with the answer, except I think CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currencies) would meet the criteria for Fiat. What about you?

No, cryptocurrencies do not become fiat currencies even if declared by a government. Here’s why:

Fiat currency is money that is issued and backed by a government (1234). Its value is based on the trust and confidence in that government (1). Fiat currencies are controlled by central authorities such as central banks and government institutions (1). These authorities have the power to regulate the supply of currency and affect its value through monetary policy (1).

On the other hand, cryptocurrencies are digital and decentralized (134). They are not issued by a government, bank, or other central authority (3). Their value is not determined by a central authority but by supply and demand dynamics in the market (1).

So, even if a government declares a cryptocurrency as legal tender, it does not become a fiat currency because it still operates under a different system (1234).

Cryptocurrencies and fiat currencies are two distinct types of currencies, each with their own characteristics and uses (1).


1
changelly.com

2
beincrypto.com

3
sofi.com

4
nerdwallet.com
+2 more

I look forward to your thoughts. Thanks

Peace

[ralfy]

Just look up "fiat money".

Meanwhile, all of them have value given availability of goods and services.

Hence, a gold nugget will get you sacks of gold in times of peace. In times of war, one kilo.

[theluckycountry]

I'm afraid inke still believes the 2010 meme that BC is peoples money independent of the global financial system. Nothing could be further from the Truth. BitCoin is a debt based asset, It's more like a derivative that a currency. It's like a PUT, or a contract on the Comex, it's a short and has no value outside of it's ability to redeem fiat currency at the end of you "contract" time if the price goes up.

Case in point: MicroStrategy shares up 180% this year after debt sale to buy more bitcoin spurs latest rally

On Monday, the MicroStrategy founder posted on social media platform X that his company had just purchased another 12,000 bitcoins for close to $822 million “using proceeds from convertible notes & excess cash.” That brings MicroStrategy’s total holdings to 205,000 bitcoins, which are now worth more than $15 billion, as the cryptocurrency continues to hit fresh highs.

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/13/microst ... tcoin.html

Now unpack that. Saylor Just bought nearly a billion in BC, not with cash, Mostly Debt. Much of his older BC was purchased with debt too and a lot of that debt has been just rolled over. He has to pay the interest of course but a smart gambler borrows enough to cover the gamble AND the next few interest repayments. He doesn't sell, he Hoards like all good coiners. "Diamond hands"

He buys through microstrategy, a very ordinary company, it doesn't pay a dividend, It's profit last year was ordinary yet it's valued at $30 Billion. In January it was valued at less that $10 Billion. What happened in the past 3 months? A stock market bubble in IT, nothing else. Just 1999 all over again. The coinheads are bidding it up lol. Will it crash from $1700 a share? Of course, the chart looks like a NASA space launch.

So one of the biggest hodlers of BC is simply playing with debt arbitrage. He's gambling that BC will double (or whatever) so he can repay the debt. Not him mind you, but the company. Now how many other people have bought BC on debt? A great many if you read into it. Hence it's a debt based asset and I use the word asset loosely here. Being a debt based asset it's prone to margin calls if the loaner wants their money back, though his convertible notes might hasten that if the share price collapses.

Bitcoin is simply one of the last money scams in a decade and a half of desperate reflation efforts. The Tight oil bubble came and went, the SPAC bubble came and went, the EV bubble has now collapsed and the latest, Tech bubble #2 is on the verge of collapse. BC $356,000 in your dreams, in your wild wild dreams.

[ralfy]

The fact that it's measured in dollars shows that's in only one more financial instrument used for financial gambling.

[careinke]

The fact that it's measured in dollars shows that's in only one more financial instrument used for financial gambling.

So, all stocks, bonds, real-estate, precious metals ect are also gambling? Come to think of it, Life is a gamble, one that you are 100% guaranteed to lose.

As of today 72.5% of my Crypto holdings are in BTC. I proudly carry the label "Whole Coiner," which means I own more than 1.0 BTC. The math I've seen shows there will probably only be 250,000 or less Whole-Coiners. FYI the world has 70,000-80,000 millionaires. I like my odds for the next ten years at least.

19% of my holding are in SOL. I expect it to rise at a faster rate than BTC this cycle but with a little higher risk.

The rest of my crypto, less than 10%, are spread across at least 20 Tokens and growing. These are my "De-Gen" plays, High risk/High rewards. I fully expect at least 75% of these will become worthless. I do a LOT of research on these tokens and my choices are very selective. Some of these Tokens are "air dropped" to my various wallets. They are mostly a form of advertising for various projects. To me they are a pain in the butt tax wise because they are counted as income, and most of them immediately drop in price as they are quickly sold off. Once in a while they appreciate. Two days ago, I had a meme coin "cat in a dog" Air dropped to me (22,222.222) tokens. It was worth about $40.00, today it's $130.00. Crazy.

It's the end of the world as we know it, but I feel fine.

Peace

[theluckycountry]

Someone sees the writing on the wall. Guess who.

https://www.chartmill.com/stock/quote/M ... p?a=221937

The last time I saw an insider selling record like that was the Toll Brothers back in 2005 as they got the hell out of their home building company before the US housing collapse (anyone remember that) I remember all the disasters.

2005-- In case you missed it yesterday, Toll Brothers--a big builder of luxury homes in the Northeast region--warned that there may be a softening of demand for housing. That was enough to knock 12% off its stock (and depress the stocks of other home builders), as Wall Street feared that this was Toll's diplomatic way of saying tough times lay ahead. My BW colleague Peter Coy has a good analysis of Toll Brothers' news, which you may have seen on the front page of BW's web site.

I don't know why Wall Street was shocked by this news. A good early indicator for these kinds of warnings is to look at the "insider sales" of stock by corporate executives. We saw this back in the late 1990s when tech executives began dumping stock by the truckload in 1999 and 2000, just ahead of the tech slump. And a few months ago, the top executives of major builders were also dumping shares of their holdings of their company's stock, as noted at the time in this article on MSN Money. As the MSN article noted, the Toll Brothers themselves--and yes, the company is run by the brothers Toll--were among the heavy sellers:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... ot-dot-dot

The toll chart is here: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TOL?.tsrc=fin-srch
It looks like it's ripe for another collapse too but I don't think those original toll brothers are with it now. Don't know don't care.

[theluckycountry]

Saylor is a small fry, The company he directs might be worth $27B but he only owns 10% or it, or did? Who knows what now with all that selling. He's old and probably just wants to retire so he's unloading all his shares and options before the collapse. He might come out with a hundred mil or so, who knows.

Musk is a big fish, He sold 23 Billion is personal tesla shares near the top of the EV bubble, ostensibly to fund buying twitter, but we don't know how much of that really went in there, it's a private company now so it doesn't have to disclose. The company was bought for around 50 billion, anyone could have been in on that, big banks, that's nothing to them. I look at the big picture, Musk is the swamp regardless of what his fans believe. He's on the inside obviously. So now he's a bastion of free speech and 100 million Americans have sat back in their armchairs because "Musk won't let the evil democrats get away with it now"

What a joke! "Free Tweets Free Tweets, we demand Free Tweets" In a word. controlled opposition, just like that smelly old stooge Burnie Sanders, who now has his nose up bidens A$$. He said all the things the "Radial" element of the party wanted to hear, honest money Blah Blah Blah. But he was always a no-show, he was never going to get into power. And even if he did he would have done what they all do, plod away for 4 years and then complain that "They wouldn't let me change anything"

There is no freedom when you are serf inside the system, just the illusion of freedom. "The Founding Fathers The Founding Fathers" People chant it like a prayer and that's all it is. Those people lived hundreds of years ago, they are dead and so is everything they fought for. They didn't fight the system. They overthrew it in violent murderous action and then instituted their own system. It was a one off, it will never happen again, not with the current stock. Perhaps the Mexican cartels could takeover one day in the distant future, that's far more likely than a bunch of degenerate white people taking over a national government by force. Yes degenerate, look around the aisles of Wallmart. It's not much better here either!

people of Walmart. This is what microsoft bing used to show 4 years ago

https://yandex.com/images/search?text=p ... 20Wallmart

Now it's all sanitized

https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=pe ... IR&first=1

Viva La Revolution

[ralfy]

The fact that it's measured in dollars shows that's in only one more financial instrument used for financial gambling.

So, all stocks, bonds, real-estate, precious metals ect are also gambling? Come to think of it, Life is a gamble, one that you are 100% guaranteed to lose.

As of today 72.5% of my Crypto holdings are in BTC. I proudly carry the label "Whole Coiner," which means I own more than 1.0 BTC. The math I've seen shows there will probably only be 250,000 or less Whole-Coiners. FYI the world has 70,000-80,000 millionaires. I like my odds for the next ten years at least.

19% of my holding are in SOL. I expect it to rise at a faster rate than BTC this cycle but with a little higher risk.

The rest of my crypto, less than 10%, are spread across at least 20 Tokens and growing. These are my "De-Gen" plays, High risk/High rewards. I fully expect at least 75% of these will become worthless. I do a LOT of research on these tokens and my choices are very selective. Some of these Tokens are "air dropped" to my various wallets. They are mostly a form of advertising for various projects. To me they are a pain in the butt tax wise because they are counted as income, and most of them immediately drop in price as they are quickly sold off. Once in a while they appreciate. Two days ago, I had a meme coin "cat in a dog" Air dropped to me (22,222.222) tokens. It was worth about $40.00, today it's $130.00. Crazy.

It's the end of the world as we know it, but I feel fine.

Peace

They're not gambling but financial instruments that may be used for financial speculation, or gambling.

Tokens are no different, e.g., bits of information made using incredible amounts of energy, and with people betting for or against them using money like dollars.

That's why the rest of your posts talking about it being an asset, or a solution to various problems, etc., are derailed by your latest post.

[theluckycountry]

One someone's sure betting against them

In the last 2 days Saylor just unloaded another $24 million in microstrategy shares. Not option exercises but open market sales of his own stock in the company. He must have sold hundreds of millions worth in the past few months, check out the listings https://www.chartmill.com/stock/quote/M ... p?a=221937

So while his company Microstrategy (under his direction) was aggressively buying bitcoin with debt, he was privately selling into the bull market. This is classic Pump and Dump dynamics for you out there that don't understand the process. Now the question begs, who else has been engaging in the same pump and dump with BC? There will be a group of them, what a racket lol lol.

[theluckycountry]

Saylor claims to own 17,000 BT personally and says the $200M from the sale of his shares will go to add to his 'personal' BT holdings. He also claims in this vid, that BC is going into the trillions and will replace all debt globally. He's either totally off his rocker, or a total liar. You guess.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6-N9BIAafA

Warning, the math is sketchy.

[theluckycountry]

Very strange action with BC this week. Just today it collapsed to $61k, a Huge collapse from the 70k level just two days prior. Not what I would call Bull run activity at all? For the last month it's been a YoYo with massive resistance above 70k. I wonder if that's it for this cycle?

[careinke]

Very strange action with BC this week. Just today it collapsed to $61k, a Huge collapse from the 70k level just two days prior. Not what I would call Bull run activity at all? For the last month it's been a YoYo with massive resistance above 70k. I wonder if that's it for this cycle?

It was great! I managed to pick up some more when my limit buy order triggered, same with SOL.

The having is in five days. It will occur early morning on 420 in Australia, and late 4/19 here in Washington State. Daily BTC mining production will decline from 900 BTC to 450 BTC.

I hope your price quote was not in Australian Dollars. I showed a low of $60,822 in USD yesterday, with a high of $69,100. I track my Crypto in Zulu time.

PEACE